ABSTRACT
Religion is arguably a “transportable” identity, knowable by others only insofar as it is displayed in discursive and other social practices. Nevertheless, people often assign religious labels to others, which may or may not align with those individuals’ own sense of—or preferred way of representing—their religious identity. This chapter explores some of the ways in which people discursively construe their own religious identities, including more and less direct self-categorizations and indirect indexation through stance-taking on topics other than religion, such as multiculturalism. It also highlights that the symbiosis between categorization and particularization is a salient resource for religious identity, which is often shot through with varieties of belonging, partial-belonging, and differentiation. The chapter draws on a case study based in rural Canada, whose participants were either religious ‘nones’ or affiliated with one of the town’s various broadly ‘Christian’ communities. Although intentionally hyperlocal, case studies such as this can shed light on how people discursively construe their own religious identities in other settings.
