Conclusion

The phenomenon of multiple religious belonging, in its diverse understandings of hard, medium, and soft multiple religious belonging, has now become an established fact of social inquiry. ¹ Multiple religious belongings are not limited to dual belongings, nor only a phenomenon of some religious virtuosos. Multiple religious belongings are a ubiquitous expression of religious culture, not just a niche phenomenon. This study has been aimed at questioning how and why multiple religious belonging challenges commonly held understandings regarding religious belonging and religious diversity and how we can imagine new ways of understanding belonging in the multiple. From an emic perspective, from the perspective of a person with a hard multiple religious belonging, it is not really a hermeneutical problem. He or she has found a personal hermeneutical solution: “I do not belong to one religion, I belong to two religions”. This personal solution is, from that moment on, still a challenge for certain forms of theology: can a tradition allow people to belong also to other traditions? Is the decision with regard to the validity of belonging the prerogative of the tradition, or is it the prerogative of the individual? However much these questions are relevant for tradition-based theology, they are not in and of themselves a conceptual problem for lived religion. Even more so: it is the conceptual framework of religions as discrete faith traditions that allows individuals to testify to belonging to more than one of these traditions in the first place. The conceptual order is therefore re-established, not negated.