Believing in Belonging draws on empirical research exploring mainstream religious belief and identity in Euro-American countries. Starting from a qualitative study based in northern England, and then broadening the data to include other parts of Europe and North America, Abby Day explores how people "believe in belonging," choosing religious identifications to complement other social and emotional experiences of "belongings." The concept of "performative belief" helps explain how otherwise non-religious people can bring into being a Christian identity related to social belongings....

Focusing on the important relationship between the 'sacred' and the 'secular', this book demonstrates that it is not paradoxical to think in terms of both secular and sacred or neither, in different times and places. International experts from a range of disciplinary perspectives draw on local, national, and international contexts to provide a fresh analytical approach to understanding these two contested poles. Exploring such phenomena at an individual, institutional, or theoretical level, each chapter contributes to the central message of the book - that the a in betweena is real, embodied...

Grace Davie, one of the world s most influential scholars in contemporary sociology of religion, has furthered a tradition developed by David Martin and others in comparative sociology of religion and modernity in European and international perspective. Davie s writings on belief and belonging, particularly in a context outside active Church participation, have contributed important understandings of the cultural role of religion as memory and practice in contemporary European societies. Through her most recent work on new roles of religion in relation to the political, legal and welfare...