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Religion as an Ethnic Marker
A common way of conceptualizing religious identity is as an ethnic marker.This is religion many
times removed. It is where religion provides the labels of identity, but no content or values. In
contrast, ethnicity, or a sense of peoplehood based on a sense of shared descent and belonging, is
more often emphasized(Horowitz, 1985; Smith, 1986; Connor, 1994; Hastings, 1997). Often,this
is coupled with political national ideals or attachment to a specific territory.In a primordialist
interpretation, ethnicity is seen as based on blood-ties and ancestry. In a more popular
foundationalist interpretation, ethnicity is founded on perceptions of kinship rooted in a
shared history, culture and very often language (see Fishman, 1999). Religion is often added
to this list of resources for imagined kinship (Connor, 1972; Nash, 1989). However, as Coakley
(2002: 206) points out, religion has been given relatively little attention in the literature (notable
exceptions include Jacobson, 1998; Smith, 1999; Hunt, 2002; Coakley, 2002; Collins and
Coleman, 2004). As a result whilst most commentators would agree that ethnicity can be informed
by religion, the general tendency is to assume in modern industrialized societies that it is not. This
has been theorized in different ways. Gans (1979: 9) defines ‘symbolicethnicity’ as characterized
by ‘a nostalgic allegiance … love for and pride in atradition that can be felt without having to be
incorporated in everyday behaviour’. Similarly, he theorizes ‘symbolic religiosity’ as an
attachment to a religious culture that does not involve regular participation in its rituals or
organizations. Whilst some rituals may be participated in irregularly and religious symbols
utilized, this is done in such a way that does not contradict otherwise secular lifestyles (1994: 585–
6). Winter (1996: 233) makes this observation in relation to American Jews for whom ‘feeling
Jewish’ does not necessarily entail ‘doing Jewish’, engaging in or even preferring Jewish religious
or communal activities and affiliations to other activities and affiliations.Very similar to Gans’s
‘symbolic religion’ is Demerath’s (2000, 2001) ‘cultural religion’. This is ‘an identification
with a religious heritage without any religious participation or a sense of personal
involvement per se’ (2001: 59).Cultural religious identities at the individual level are mirrored by
competing civil religions at the societal level (2000: 131–2; 2001: 50). There is a sacralization of
ethnic group. In the final analysis, Demerath (2000: 137) concludes that cultural religion
may represent the penultimate stage of the secularization process. A primordial sense of
cultural continuity, symbolized by religion but devoid of religious content, is all that
remains. However, Demerath himself raises a very important question when he asks whether the
‘culturally religious’might actually need deeper commitments with more compelling
participation,and if so where might these be found (2000: 137)? Surely it is worth asking whether
the remnants of religious ideas, symbols and practices might continue to help constitute these
meanings.
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Ethnicity is often a knotty category that is not always reducible to national identity or kinship.
When ethnic identity is confusing or ambiguous, religious resources sometimes offer a more solid
framework for identity. This point is also made by Jacobson (1998) in relation to young British
Pakistanis, amongst whom ethnic identity is a tricky category and for whom Islam has become a
more meaningful source of social identity. So, if religious identities are dominant signifiers of
identity, often more so than ethnic labels, we are therefore compelled to ask what actually is being
signified. Might it not be that difference is partially constructed from religion, rather than
justrepresented by it?
In these accounts where religion is characterized as an ethnic marker thereis scarcely anything that
could be described as substantive religious content. This is somewhat like civil religion where
feelings of national groupness are of primary importance. The rituals and beliefs that support
groupness rarely relate to the recognizable terrain of religion. However, accounts that neglect to
explore whether aspects of religion help inform a sense of self only provide a certain level of
analysis. Given the universally knotty nature of ethnic identity,the problematic assumptions of the