Can you have an identity when everyone claims it?

 Yesterday’s note was about a study led by Daryl R. Van Tongeren, a social psychologist at Hope College. The paper is “Religious Residue: Cross-Cultural Evidence That Religious Psychology and Behavior Persist Following Deidentification.”

In brief: The “nones” — people who do not identify as religious — are not all alike. People who were once religious but no longer are — the “dones” — are cognitively different from people who have never identified as religious.

I’m fascinated by the paper. One thing I want to think through is how religious identities are acquired. The authors mentioned parents and how children are influenced by adults who sacrifice for their beliefs and values.

Those behaviors that cost something are known as CREDs, credibility enhancing displays. When children see adults taking a moral stand even when it hurts, they take note.

My reservation about this account is that religious identity was murky in the environment I grew up in. Almost all the people in that environment claimed to be religious. The Civil Rights Movement, the great moral issue of my childhood, was not fought between those who identified as religious and those who did not. The movement was supported and opposed by people who claimed to be religious.

The biggest acts of courageous moral behavior I witnessed as a child were by religious people. So were the most despicable acts of hypocrisy.

In that day, people who were not religious didn’t advertise that fact in the rural South.

The philosophers in ancient Greece argued about the nature of the primal stuff of the cosmos. If everything is made of “earth,” you have to jiggle that concept of a solid to explain fluids like blood and gases like air. If air is the primal stuff, and everything is made of air, you have to jiggle the concept to explain things like swords and mountains. One philosopher eventually suggested that the fundamental substance be called “the boundless.” Trying to fit all experience into one concept stretches the concept until it’s meaningless.

And so the ancient philosophers blundered into the troublesome Problem of the One and the Many.

A concept of religious identity — at least the version I grew up with — strikes me as that kind of problem. A concept of religious identity that includes both great moral courage and despicable hypocrisy isn’t really a concept at all.

I’m not sure what that says about identity. And I’m not sure what kinds of identity are possible from that kind of environment.