ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the author's longitudinal empirical research exploring mainstream religious belief and identity in Euro-American countries. It argues that what is often dismissed as merely marginal or nominalist' religion is far from an empty category, but one loaded with significance and meaning; not all of it benign. Christian nominalism is arguably the largest and fastest-growing form of Christianity in Euro-American countries. The sensuous social supernatural helps provide a deeper insight into identities that are neither wholly sacred nor secular. The author's challenge was to probe beliefs amongst a broad cross-section of informants without skewing selection processes or questions towards religiosity. Aspirational nominalist identities arise from an impulse to identify with a normative Christian moral good it being a taken-for-granted idea that, helping someone is being Christian. The chapter concludes that describing people more in terms of their anthropocentric or theocentric orientations provides more accurate insights into the social identities that lie between the secular and the sacred.
