Multiple religious belonging

Multiple religious belonging refers to the idea that individuals can belong to more than one religious tradition. While this is often seen as a common reality in regions such as Asia with its many religions, religious scholars have begun to discuss multiple religion belonging with respect to religious traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In some religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, those who hold to an exclusivist understanding of religion sees multiple religious belonging as problematic. This is in contrast with countries such as China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, whose cultures have a long history of being influenced by different religions. Moreover, in the postmodern period people tend to question their identity, because of the unlimited choices of religions, which leads to the difficulty in defining their identity. Thus, scholars such as Catherine Cornille, Peter C. Phan, Francis Xavier Clooney, Jan Van Bragt, Aloysius Pieris and Devaka Premawardhana, question the possibility of defining oneself into multiple religions. Here, clearly multiple religious belonging is not a subjective sense of a particular religion but rather, in Cornille’s words, “the recognition of one’s religious identity by the tradition itself and the disposition to submit to the conditions for membership as delineated by that tradition.” Therefore, the purpose of a scholarly discussion on multiple religious belonging is to transform one’s religion through the understanding of other religions.

Jan Van Bragt shows that 79% of Japanese self-identify as Shintoists and 75% self-identify as Buddhists. The reason for the extremely high percentage of both religions is that many Japanese consider themselves as both a Shintoist and a Buddhist and do not consider it a problem to belong to more than one religion. This phenomenon, according to Van Bragt, is a “division of labour.” Van Bragt argues that the cause of this phenomenon is that, different from the Western concept of religion, religion in Japan has no moral guidance and only concerns rituals and practices. Thus, the Japanese can belong to several religions that do not conflict with each other in terms of social and ethical issues.

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