Religious Identity

Religious holidays, celebrations, community commemorations, rites of passage, foodways, artistic and musical styles, types of dress, and modes of speech are all aspects of culture that can become enmeshed within the makeup of a religious identity. Religious identity correlates to a number of social factors: age, gender, economic status, national and ethnic identities, educational background, social standing, sexual orientation, and personal identifiers. Religious identity is also molded by a set of carried beliefs: dogmatic principles, moral standings, coded mythologies, highly esteemed parables, social taboos, and understandings of God or divinity, the supernatural, and the cosmological universe. As adopted ideas transform patterns of thought, ways of identifying self become linked to external actions shaped by internal, belief-based realities: Within this meaning-making process, religious identity becomes individuated as practices become solidified. As local access to global traditions and spiritual world-views exponentially increases with technological [Page 1080]access, the boundaries between religious identities must be individually and communally redefined.

Idiosyncratic personality factors can greatly affect not only how one thinks about religion but in what ways one enacts one's religious identity through religious experiences, practices, and ceremonies. As a person's thinking capacity, personality, and emotional maturity develop, his or her religious identity will generally become more integrated. Times of transition, traumatic events, and highly charged conversion experiences can dramatically alter a person's religious identifiers as questions of doubt, certainty, and confusion arise within the individual's mind. Likewise, hot-button social issues such as war, abortion, interreligious marriage, homosexuality, divine law, and social justice can raise questions about or alter one's religious identity, at either the individual or the communal level.

Religious identity is often linked to ethnolinguistic, geographic, and national affiliations as well as the social expectations tied to these: vocational and spousal selection, gender roles, migrational patterns, models of community service, and normative emotive behaviors and interpersonal interactions. While more individually centered, pluralist societies promote a greater focus on personal stories of divine connection or disbelief, based on self-reliance and independent decision making, societies with a higher percentage of singlereligion practitioners have a greater expectation for community members to uphold civic duties through respecting family and ethnic religious affiliations, the bedrock of most close-knit communal identities. Indigenous traditions, for example, may not distinguish between a religious identity and a communal identity because religious practices are so embedded within social realities that the two are virtually inseparable: religion is life, and life is religion.

While some practitioners externalize their religious identities to be recognized within a public social milieu, other practitioners, due to fearful circumstances, social ostacization, or personal preference, may keep religious identities more private. Religious minorities may hide identity markers, often externally formulated and defined by the nonpracticing majority, as a protective community measure.