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that could provide a forum to facilitate regular contact for such a wide spectrum of populations.
Other social activities that are rooted in churches may enhance community organization and
political mobilization. Faith-based voluntary organizations provide much of the social care work
in European societies. Even when people use churches instrumentally,simply to provide a meeting
place or foster cultural identity, this can have unintended religious consequences as people are
continually brought into contact with religious norms, symbols and messages.Religion has many
specific features that can provide substantive content to social boundaries. Of course not all
societies or identities have a religious basis,but in societies where there has been a significant
religious presence or history,religion can form a cultural reservoir from which categorizations of
self and other may be derived. Religious traditions provide a wealth of cultural data from different
sorts of values, lifestyles, expected behaviour and decorum to memorials and rituals (Ruane and
Todd, forthcoming). For the most devout,religion may be important in all of these ways. However
even if one does not practise religion or believe in God, it is possible that religion still reaches into
many areas of everyday life. Very often, where it appears on the surface that religion simply marks
out a deeper ethnic difference, it is actually playing some of these extra roles.It is also important to
conceptualize religion as providing substantive ethnic content in order to capture the dynamics of
ethnic identity change over time.The ethnic category may be reconfigured by religious changes
and this may change its meaning and function. Descent and kinship may become less important in
a given ethnic identity and its religious dimensions may be elevated, or vice versa. In other words
religion may influence ethnicity, just as ethnicity influences religion. The relation between them
may be multidirectional rather than linear, where religion simply props up ethnicity. This is
important in helping explain religious as well as ethnic changes.There are compelling examples
that help throw light on how the religious dimensions of identity can rise and fall over time.
In his discussion of Serbian nationalism Sells (2003: 312–13) describes the 1989 re-enactment
of the‘Serbian Golgotha’ as injecting a newly zealous religious mythical content to this story
of the nation, and the emergence of a new religious language concerningt he ‘Serb
Jerusalem’. Similar dynamics of religious revival during the conflict were seen amongst
Croat Catholics. The institutions and symbols of Catholicism not only justified bloodshed,
but also provided a framework of understanding redemption and sacrifice in the conflict.
Sells underlines that religious mythology was instrumentalized by nationalist actors – it did not
actualize itself. He speaks of the ‘complicity’ of religious figures, the ‘deployment’ of symbols,
the ‘project’ to create religiously pure regions. He argues that these are attempts to construct
internal religious community and spirituality through rejection of the other. However, he also
argues(2003: 315) that ‘[o]nce militants had spilled blood in the name of that mythology they
became dependent on it …[o]nce the power of symbols, rituals and myths was instrumentalised,
that power took on a life of its own; those who began by manipulating it found themselves its
slaves’. So Sells’ analysis also stresses how religion itself constitutes ethnicity, how, once
reawakened, religion itself becomes substantively salient. Religion became what was signified.
This provides an excellent insight into how social and political conflicts can rehabilitate religion
and cause a revival of spirituality.
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The revival of religious identity components happens at an individual as well as a group level,
without ethnic entrepreneurs necessarily catalysing the transition. Chong (1998: 266–8), for
example, found that although her respondents initially began to attend Korean American
evangelical churches for social and cultural reasons (such as to maintain social networks and ‘keep
up’ the culture and language), their newfound participation led to genuine religious conversions
and religious renewals. The religious content of ethnicity was reactivated in a time of personal
struggle with issues of ethnic identity. After this, religious identity took on a logic of its own and
Chong’s respondents’actions became simultaneously informed by their evangelicalism and their
Korean cultural identity. The meaning of the ethnic category changed.These examples