Young people and the cultural performance of belief
Background and rationale for the project
In recent years, academic interest in the religious and secular life-worlds of young people has typically focused on the study of young people’s ‘beliefs’ and ‘spirituality’ (see, e.g., Beaudoin, 1998; Lynch, 2002; Smith & Denton, 2005; Savage et al., 2007; Mason et al., 2007). These studies are typically premised on three assumptions:
* that all people have some form of religious or existential belief-system which forms a central reference point for their lives, and that belief can be universally found in all human cultures
* that religious beliefs exist as cognitive, creedal propositions, in relation to which people orientate their identities and practices in a direct and generally consistent way. (‘Spirituality’ refers to a set of such beliefs and associated practices, which are held to be personally meaningful, and which may range across and beyond a range of religious traditions).
* that a person’s religious beliefs, or spirituality, can be explicitly stated as a set of propositions and are therefore open to the gaze of the researcher through methods such as surveys (which measure degrees of assent to creedal propositions) and the research interview (which allows for a more open-ended explication of an individual’s ‘beliefs’).
This body of research has tended to demonstrate, however, that with the exception of those socialized in particular religious contexts, young people tend to be ‘incredibly inarticulate’ (Smith & Denton, 2005:131) about their beliefs and unable to identify any coherent belief-system through which they live their lives. Rather than reflecting some deficit on the part of the research respondents, it can however be argued that these findings may reflect a lack of salience of these assumed notions of belief and spirituality for the ways in which many young people’s lives are constituted.
Critical attention should therefore be paid to the notion of ‘belief’ that underpins these studies. As the anthropologists Rodney Needham (1973) and Malcolm Ruel (1997) have argued, ‘belief’ as assent to metaphysical propositions is not a universal human phenomenon, but a concept deriving from Judaeo-Christian assumptions with limited applicability to many non-Western cultures. Indeed belief may be more accurately understood to be a cultural performance whose nature and content varies in different times and places, including within Western cultures. In Medieval Europe, for example, belief was constituted on the public display of pious practices, and it was only in the post-Reformation period that belief came to signify the interior metaphysical commitments of the individual which could be demonstrated through various forms of personal confession (Arnold, 2005).
The central aim of this network is therefore to examine whether conceiving of belief and spirituality as cultural performance, learned and practised under specific historical, religious and social conditions, might provide a more nuanced framework for analysing the presence or absence of religion in the life-worlds of young people. This will involve exploring whether belief may be performed in ways that are non-verbal, experiential and embodied, rather than simply verbal and propositional, as well as the social and political contexts within which particular kinds of performance of belief become important. Rather than assuming that all young people have some form of belief or spirituality, this approach will also invite questions about the particular processes and conditions through which particular young people become ‘believing subjects’. It will include reflecting on why particular performances of belief – both verbal and non-verbal, creedal and non-creedal - flourish in specific contexts, the relationship of these performances to contemporaneous religious, social and political processes and structures, and the implications of the cultural resources and practices through which these performances are enacted (which in contemporary contexts typically include forms of media use and consumption). It also invites reflection on the limits of belief as a category of analysis. For example, is it most useful to understand belief as a cultural performance primarily in relation to the ways in which people enact religious traditions, or is it possible to identify secular performances of belief? As the Religion and Youth call acknowledges, these questions are particularly pressing in the content of changing patterns of belief amongst young people in contemporary pluralist, post-Christian societies.
By exploring these questions, the network will generate new insights about how we might theorise belief for the purposes of studying young people’s life-worlds. This will prove valuable not only for developing more nuanced empirical studies of religion and youth, but also for challenging general assumptions about belief in the study of religion as a whole.