They Don’t Believe, They Belong: Religious Identity as Cultural Imposition

Abstract

Prevailing assumptions about religious affiliation overlook a deeper anthropological truth. In most societies, religion functions primarily as a form of inherited cultural belonging rather than conscious belief.

This essay argues that religion is overwhelmingly an ascriptive identity, transmitted through cultural habitus rather than autonomous reflection. Drawing on the works of Bourdieu, Durkheim, Taylor, Asad, Gellner, and supported by recent global surveys, it contends that modern political mobilizations based on religious identity reflect not theological revival but identity anxiety. In this framework, democracies that fail to distinguish between belief and inherited belonging risk empowering unconscious forces hostile to pluralistic deliberation.

Introduction: The Myth of Belief

Public discourse often treats religious affiliation as synonymous with belief. Politicians and commentators refer to "Christian voters," "Muslim communities," or "Hindu nationalists" as if these identities were based on deliberate theological commitment. Yet, as José Casanova insightfully points out in Public Religions in the Modern World, "religious identities are often maintained independently of the actual intensity of belief or practice."

Religious identity today, especially at the political level, functions less as a matter of faith and more as a marker of cultural belonging, a pre-conscious inheritance rather than a rational choice.

Talal Asad similarly argues in Formations of the Secular that religious traditions constitute part of the "naturalized background of the self," shaping subjects before reflection emerges.

Recent surveys corroborate this. According to the Pew Research Center’s Global Religious Futures study, nearly 85% of the world’s population identifies with a religion. Yet, rates of actual practice and theological knowledge remain low across regions.

In Western Europe, for example, the 2018 Pew survey found that over 60% of self-identified Christians seldom attend church and cannot articulate basic theological tenets. People belong to religions they do not consciously believe in.

Religion as Habitus: Bourdieu and the Internalization of Tradition

Pierre Bourdieu, in his foundational work Outline of a Theory of Practice, conceptualized habitus as "a system of durable, transposable dispositions... structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures."

Religion, seen through Bourdieu’s lens, is a system of unconscious social conditioning. Rituals are internalized long before the ability to question them arises. Authority figures (parents, clergy, teachers) transmit religious categories as facts, not debates. Community symbols naturalize religious belonging as part of “who we are.”

Similarly, Mary Douglas, in her classic Purity and Danger, noted: "religion is primarily a matter of social classification... Belief comes later, if at all." Religious membership precedes religious reflection. The self is inscribed into a religious identity before it can consent.

The Imposition of Religious Identity: Durkheim’s Insight

Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, profoundly emphasized that religion is "an eminently collective thing."

He argued that religious affiliation is less about metaphysical truth and more about participation in a communal consciousness. Durkheim warned that "the individual feels bound to religious beliefs and practices not because they have been rationally convinced, but because the society to which they belong imposes them."

This sociological reality is not confined to traditional societies. Even modern, secularized societies impose religious identity. Most census forms require declaring a religion. School holidays structured around religious calendars. Marriage and burial rites governed by inherited religious law. Thus, belonging is compulsory, while belief is secondary or even irrelevant.

The Anxiety of Belonging: Modernity’s Unintended Consequence

Modernization, secularization, and globalization, far from dissolving religious identity, have exacerbated the attachment to inherited religious belonging.

Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, describes secular modernity as "a condition of cross-pressure between believing and unbelieving, between fullness and fragility."

This cross-pressure destabilizes collective identities, leading individuals and groups to cling harder to inherited markers of identity, especially religion.

Ernest Gellner captured this phenomenon succinctly in Postmodernism, Reason and Religion: "the erosion of traditional society by modernity produces not liberal pluralism, but a ferocious reassertion of communal identities."

Examples abound. Political Islam is less about religious piety than about restoring Islamic communal pride after colonial humiliation. Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) in India defends an ethnic conception of Hinduism, not theological doctrine. Christian nationalism in the United States blends patriotism with inherited Christianity, not actual Christological belief.

Supporting this, the World Values Survey (Wave 7, 2020) indicates that religious self-identification remains stable or rising globally, even as institutional trust and knowledge of religious doctrines declines. This is a striking finding.

Thus, modern fundamentalism is identity anxiety dressed as religious fervor.

Democratic Fragility: When Inherited Identities Become Political

Democracies depend on public reason, debate, and rational contestation. Yet, when political actors mobilize unconscious religious belongings (inherited, unexamined, emotionally charged) democracy falters.

As John Rawls noted in Political Liberalism: "the idea of public reason is endangered when comprehensive doctrines become markers of political identity rather than subjects of rational discourse."

When religious belonging is politicized, elections become contests of tribal loyalty, policy debates are framed as existential battles between sacred identities, minorities are treated as intrusions rather than citizens.

The consequence is what Sheri Berman calls in Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe "the transformation of identity from a personal affiliation into a weaponized political resource." Democracy becomes hostage to unconscious ancestries.

Conclusion: Why We Must Distinguish Belief from Belonging

If democracies are to survive the twenty-first century, they must confront a difficult truth: religious affiliation today is primarily an unconscious inheritance, not an expression of reflective belief.

Societies must distinguish between individuals’ freedom to believe and the coercive unconscious belonging imposed by cultural and familial habitus.

If democratic systems continue to treat inherited religious identity as equivalent to reflective belief, they will legitimize the most irrational, emotional, and divisive forces within their own structures.

As Charles Taylor poignantly writes in Modern Social Imaginaries, "the crisis of modernity is not simply a loss of belief, but a loss of stable forms of belonging."

In this light, the contemporary mobilization of religious identity is less about faith and more about fear. Thus, they do not believe, they belong.

Democracy, if it does not see this clearly, will be defeated not by conviction, but by unexamined inheritance.