Believing and Belonging:
We saw someone who is not one of us…” (Mk 9:38, also Num 11:27)
There are two words that have featured very strongly in the study of religion since the 1990’s: ‘Believing’ and ‘Belonging’. In 1994, a British sociologist of religion (Grace Davie) published a book on the rise of secularism in Britain since 1945. She called her book, Believing without Belonging. In the book, she suggests that most people who do not belong to institutional religions have some form of belief about God. It is only that they don’t want to be part of a specific religion – either because they are tired of the atrocities committed in the name of religion or that they simply don’t have the time for it. There have been other books and articles on […]