If interspirituality and multiple religious belonging were centered in Interreligious Studies, what might be different about the field?

In the Western world, we are witnessing the emergence of hybrid forms of religiosity: individuals who do not identify or belong to one religious tradition, but identify with or combine elements from multiple religious traditions. In theology, this phenomenon has been identified as “multiple religious belonging”, with a main focus on dual belongings to Christianity and Buddhism, Judaism and Buddhism or Christianity and Hinduism. Many people, however, appear to combine elements from various religious traditions without feeling a desire to identify or belong to any particular tradition. While sometimes being rejected as superficial “shopping”, “syncretists” or “bricolage”, we also see anthropologists who attempt to take this phenomenon seriously as a way of how religion is lived. The idea of clearly bounded religious traditions, with a core message or truth claim, appears to be subverted by individuals “on the ground” or “everyday believers” who do not necessarily care much about issues of religious identity in terms of religious traditions. For many as well, religious belonging remains connected to one primary religious tradition, while combining this primary belonging with elements from various other religious traditions of Western esotericism.

We could divide the phenomenon of multiple religious belonging into three groups: hard multiple religious belonging, of individuals who clearly indicate they identify or belong with two (or sometimes more) religious traditions; soft multiple religious belonging, of individuals who do not identify with any religious tradition per se, but combine elements from many; and medium multiple religious belonging of individuals who identify with a primary religious tradition, but practice “religion” outside of the boundaries of this primary tradition as well.

Recent research by sociologist Joantine Berghuijs has shown that these three categories of multiple religious belonging together amount to as much as 24% of the Dutch population; multiple religious belonging could be seen as one of the largest religious minorities in the Netherlands. Multiple religious belonging is, however, not an emic category. Nobody in the Netherlands would self-identify as having a multiple religious belonging. Furthermore, multiple religious belonging is not a church or religion you can belong to in the “traditions” sense of the word.

Belonging has strong emotional connotations. Religious identity often forms the core of an individual’s being. But belonging in religious belonging is usually reserved for belonging to religious traditions only. The occurrence of people with a multiple religious belonging, a hybrid religious practice or a multi-religious identity invites us, scholars of religion, to reimagine religious belonging beyond a common understanding of “belonging to a religion”. Especially people with a “soft multiple religious belonging” often do not qualify as belonging to any religious tradition, but are often still deeply invested in their religious beliefs and practices. Pejorative indicators such as “spiritual shopping,”, “syncretism” or “floating believers” do not always do justice to their strongly committed religious identities and feelings of religious belonging beyond religious traditions.

The challenge to reimagine belonging is twofold: first, we have to imagine “belonging” beyond religious traditions; if people do not belong to a religion: what do they belong to? Second, this new religious belonging should take into account that individuals connect to beliefs and practices from various religious traditions that do consider each other as different and delineated. One suggestion has been to refer to this kind of religious belonging as transversal belonging; a belonging that cuts through various religious identities. Soft multiple religious belonging does not indicate a simultaneous belonging to two or more religious traditions, but rather a singular religious belonging which is multifaceted. Religious belonging does not disappear with soft multiple religious belonging but takes on a new form.

The idea of religious belonging appears to have two distinct meanings, each giving another interpretation of the “multiple” in multiple religious belonging. The first meaning of multiplicity here refers to multiple religions (to which individuals belong). The second meaning of multiplicity refers to a multiplicity of religious elements, in the words of Hent De Vries, religions’ “words, things, gestures, powers, sounds, silences, smells, sensations, shapes, colors, affects and effects”. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has developed, together with Félix Guattari philosophical concepts to deal with “multiplicity”. In particular, their concepts of the rhizome and assemblage (French: agencement) could function to reimagine religious belonging. The philosophical concept of the rhizome is derived from biology and functions to represent non-hierarchical connections between multiple elements.

Michelle Voss Roberts has argued we should think about hybrid religiosity as an “omnicentered model of divine relationality values difference and connection; it helps us imagine persons as nodes in a rhizomatic generation of religious subjects in which no single center definitively determines identity.” A rhizomatic hermeneutics of religious diversity describes rather a spatial map of religion in which connections cross transversally. No single religious tradition is traceable back to a first origin. Rather, religiosity originates from everywhere and nowhere. What counts is not the unity of the tradition but the diversity of religious elements in the present. Religions are assemblages of a variety of heterogeneous religious elements. Individuals connect with different assemblages and with different elements within those assemblages.

Multiple religious belonging, in its occurrences of hard, multiple and soft multiple religious belonging appears as a challenge for religious self-representation and a subjective feeling of religious belonging. On the one hand, individuals are informed with an idea of “multiple religious traditions” – Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and a belonging to one or several of these traditions. On the other hand, they draw from so many sources that they do not necessarily feel these sources come from distinct traditions. Rather, the multiplicity of religious beliefs and practices creates a new framework in which individuals experience a sense of rhizomatic belonging, which is both beyond religious traditions and radically particular. The particularity of multiple religious belonging, however, is not the same as individuality. Rather, it should be seen as the imagination of religious belonging to a community that is radically diverse but nonetheless interconnected.