Adapting my religion: How young believers negotiate religious belonging

Abstract

Scholarship on religious belonging has overwhelmingly labelled believers’ religion in very broad and superficial terms, presuming that individual practices and beliefs are congruent with religious doctrines and official discourses. By splitting up religious socialisation into two crucial phases, the adoption and the adaption of religion, this article offers a more procedural understanding to investigating how young believers develop their own sense of religious belonging. Based on biographical narrative interviews with Viennese believers (aged 16–25) from 7 religious groups, we observe that the adoption of a certain religion is primarily bound to family ties. The adaption phase serves to develop personal approaches towards religion based on two major rationales: adapting one’s own religiosity by engaging with religious doctrine and community itself, and negotiating religion within society. We argue that adaption is closely tied to social relations within and across religions and to (secular) society at large.