Non-religious Christians

Authors

• Abby Day University of Kent

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67407

Keywords:

Postsecularism, Christianity, Implicit religion, Secularization (Sociology), Secularism, Belief and doubt, Christians -- Great Britain, Pluralism, Religious, Performative (Philosophy), Religious change

Abstract

Scholars who recently rejected secularisation theses on the grounds that they were insufficiently defined or contextualised now seem to be accepting with unseemly, uncritical haste, the new, in vogue notion of the post-secular. Scholars seem tempted to drop the term ‘post-secular’ into their papers and presentations as if it is a generally accepted and understood term. It is not and nor, as this paper will argue, is it plausible unless applied to a limited and specific range of phenomena. Far from disappearing, religion is often used publicly as a marker of group identity. This is not a return to religion, or a resurgence in spirituality, but a fluctuating form of contextualised religious identity. Christian nominalists may not believe in God or Jesus, at least if belief is understood as ‘faith’. It would be incorrect, however, to dismiss them as ‘unbelievers’, or their nominalist beliefs as not having essential or substantive reality. They believe in many things, usually related to ‘belonging’. By closely examining people’s sense of Christian ‘belonging’, we find other more subtle, interwoven ‘belongings’ related to, for example, history, nation, morality, gender, and ‘culture’.