Young People and Performance Christianity in Scotland

Abstract

Based upon qualitative research in Glasgow, Scotland, this article examines transformations in religious identity and practices of young socially and economically included Christians, aged 16–27. The authors argue that young people's religiosity has been shaped by large-scale social trends in the West, including secularisation and pluralisation. They argue that these influences have promoted a religiosity that de-emphasises propositional belief systems in favour of what they call ‘performance Christianity’, which highlights religious action in the everyday or secular, combined with a discourse of authenticity and a pluralistic approach to institutions and religious spaces. Finally, the authors consider the ways in which young people's performance Christianity destabilises traditional ideas about belief and what it means to be Christian.

Notes

1. NCSR stands for ‘National Centre for Social Research’. Original data creators, depositors or copyright holders, the funders of the Data Collections (if different) and the UK Data Archive bear no responsibility for their further analysis or interpretation.

2. The research was funded jointly by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council within their ‘Religion and Society’ programme.

3. Religious research with children under the age of twelve suggests that this age group may be required to attend church by parents. The sharp drop in attendance around this age may partially reflect the move towards higher degrees of agency in young people's religious choices (Gunnoe and Moore; Cnaan, Gelles and Sinha).

4. Group discussion was structured like a focus group, with one or two of the researchers asking young people to think about where they encountered religion in their everyday lives, but the researchers also used participatory methods so that the young people could shape the discussion and make discussion fairly open-ended.

5. We asked questions such as ‘What does it mean to say that you are a Christian?’ and ‘Is being Christian important to you and why?’.

6. The young people quoted in this paper are representative of the attitudes and practices of the more socially and economically included informants in our study.

7. All the names used in this article are pseudonyms.

8. When young people in our research referred to ‘Sunday Christians’, they generally meant people who attend church on Sunday but do not live out their Christianity in their everyday lives or people who believe that church attendance on Sunday is the primary and most important way of being Christian.

9. How far the self in ‘self-spiritualities’ is idealised and prioritised is debatable. Woodhead, for example, has argued strongly that for women involved in alternative spiritualities, the relational aspect is important.