CURA Colloquium: Religion Without Identity?: The Case of Confucianism and Its Utility for Interpreting Contemporary Religious Disaffiliation

Religion is usually understood as an important dimension of personal and social identity, helping to define the self-understanding of an individual and contributing to the terms by which groups cohere. Confucianism confounds this understanding as it operates primarily in the taken for granted realm of deep cultural influence on behavior and practice rather than the cognitive realm of identity. The main theoretical contribution of the paper is to distinguish identity and nonidentity forms of religion by mining the histories and cosmologies of Confucianism and Protestantism. The second part of the paper examines the contemporary phenomenon of religious disaffiliation, e.g. the “nones,” in Western societies as, in a sense, a Confucianization of religion. *Reading the working paper in advance is required for attendance.* Email cura@bu.edu for your copy. Co-sponsored with the School of Theology