Well I think I know what I want to argue

I have spent quite a bit of the weekend just churning through various bits of literature. Let me say that there are three different sets of literature that are relevant to discussion Believing and Belonging.

The first set is the literature that is relevant to the discussion of what is religiosity in the broadest of terms. Grace Davie has set off a plethora of B alliteration when she coined the phrase "Believing but Not Belonging". There now is: 

• "Neither Believing nor Belonging", 
• "Belonging not Believing", 
• "Belonging and Not Belonging" (no I did not make that one up),

 although no-one seems that interested in Believing and Belonging. However, people are also extending the Bs so we now have "Believing, Belonging and Behaving" or even "Believing, Belonging, Behaving and Bonding" only you will never guess what Bonding is. At this point I say stop as the Bs are too disjointed from their actual concepts to make them memorable. I will therefore use the none alliterative form that is also in the paper and turn it into an acronym to remember it by.

However, there are then problems with the literature on Believing.  Grace Davie deliberately does not define what she means by believing and belonging. There is good reason for this, there is a whole literature about what we mean by believing. Ideas that I had up to now accepted as part of the religious/theological discourse around belief are very clearly present within the sociological discourse. Have the sociologists taken it from the Theologians or visa versa? I do not know. This brings me actually to the reason I had steered away from tackling this whole topic in my thesis. I am no longer sure what it means to believe something. Please do not try sorting this out by giving me definitions. The problem is not lack of definitions, but that I have multiple conflicting ones and they do not give a cohesive middle ground. Any further definitions will only add to the confusion. I think I am getting closer to an idea, but it is not really fully formulated and it certainly does not sit anywhere close to the simple taken from granted presumption that was my starting point. Perhaps what I like most about my "new" formulation is it actually asks hard questions of myself and what I do about belief. Then of course there is the whole faith development literature as well.

So we come at finally at belonging. Well this is where the focus of my thesis is. However, though there is some agreement that identity and identification are important to belonging yet there is not much actual definition. However, here too there is a distinction that needs to be brought. Most questions of belonging are directed at belonging to a particular type of religion. I am really not addressing that. What I am addressing is what does it mean to belong to a specific congregation. To answer that question the talk of many of the sociologists of religion about belonging is not useful. The discussion is that of social psychologists who ask what it means to belong to a group. They have a very different formulation. I also think I am going to have to sit down with Amartya Sen again and see if I can find his levels of belonging. This changes belonging completely in that it is no longer a binary (in/out) but some members are more equal than others, that is they have more power to direct the group. These are a useful theorisation along with the dimensions of that the social psychologists bring. The question then is can this low level belonging be transferred to the larger scale of religion.

Plan from here is to write out more fully my argument in the mornings before going to work this week, then to actually write it up formally with references over the weekend. So far as Acwrimo is on track!