Personal History

In the interviews, the first question was oriented towards eliciting the participant’s positioning of themselves as it related to their personal history and family. The question was worded as something like, ‘If you could start by telling me a little bit about your background, erm so where did you grow up, erm and erm erm where you originally come from … that, the area, that sort of thing’ (interview with Esther) and often reflected a shared nervousness at the start of the interview and my own attempt to simply start the conversation. Sometimes, depending on the participant and my familiarity with their position (if, for example, they were a former Catholic priest), I did on occasion prime a focus on faith in my first question (i.e. ‘Tell me about your experiences growing up Catholic’). The participants chose to respond to this question in different ways, going back in history in different scales. Several examples include:

The question of ‘Where are you from’ and the invitation to ‘tell me a little about yourself’ led people to position themselves first in terms of physical location, with different features of (1) history of religious experience, (2) family history in the place, and (3) racial and ethnic identity. In all three of these interviews, this starting point for the participant proved important for the trajectory of the interview, as in each case here and in the all of the interviews, participants responded to the prompt in slightly different ways that had consequences for how they eventually spoke about themselves or their families going forward. Where participants focused on place in the initial response, place became a significant theme in the first parts of the interview. For those who first spoke about family, the theme of the family was recurring in the initial talk about their religious identity.

For all the participants, the relationship of who they are and where they came from played some part in how they positioned themselves, either in opposition to how they were raised or in explaining who they were. For participants from religious groups that have been historically in the minority in the country, how their family related to the community and were seen by others also played a significant role in positioning themselves as, for example, being the only Muslim in a non-Muslim education setting (Aisha) or a Black Rastafarian family in a context with many Christians (Michaela). These stories highlighted how a participant’s religious identity as a child corresponded to their family’s identity, often being a minority in terms of ethnicity as well, with consequences for how they viewed themselves where they grew up.

Religious histories within family life were closely tied to stories of their own family’s immigration to the country and positioning within storylines of their own community’s experience of coming to the UK.

Immigration played a role in how many positioned themselves. In the first example, Priya talks about how her grandfather came to England from India and describes how the family was established, also providing an account, through analogy to Polish workers, of big families living together in one home. There is no mention of Sikhism or her own family’s Sikh identity, but within this story of her family’s immigration, she notes that her grandfather ‘started a community up’. In Omar’s story of his family coming to England, there is a more explicit place for religion because of his father’s role as an imam, but his subsequent description of his father and the life of the family positions them in a storyline of struggles, where his father has difficulty finding work and speaking English but serves as a community leader. Jonathan’s story of family immigration relates the experience of his father as an Irish Catholic coming to England and his experiences as an outsider even within the institution of the Catholic Church, which in Birmingham has been an important community institution for Irish immigrants. In the story of Jonathan’s father, he is positioned as an outsider, both in his religious identity and in his experiences within religion.

For the Sikh and Muslim participants in the study, all of them included a story of how their families or they themselves came to England, and the location of communities of faiths, in particular the location of mosques and gurdwaras, served as an important element in how communities emerged. In my fieldwork, I visited a Filipino pastor living and serving a church of predominately Filipino immigrants in a deprived estate, with the same storyline of immigration recurring in his talk: mothers and fathers coming over for work and sending for their families later; settling in places that were known to them, often on one or two streets in a community; and establishing a community around a place of worship, with national, ethnic, and religious identities coming together.

In contrast to the stories of immigration, wherein people positioned themselves and their faiths as part of an ethnic and national identity, several participants told stories of conversion to their faith.

In Amy’s story about her faith, she contrasts her identity as a ‘militant atheist’ with her identity as a Christian, drawing a clear distinction between who she was before she was a Christian with who she became afterwards. She positions her previous self as ‘militant’ and as ‘a rotten egg’ before converting, while clarifying that this was specific to her own experience and that she didn’t view other atheists or agnostics in a negative way. Sophie’s story of coming to faith doesn’t include the contrast with a previous life, but rather with her own parents whom she positions as not having particular religious beliefs themselves. Instead, she independently realised that ‘God was real’ and started attending church and becoming involved, saying after recounting her involvement in various other activities as a teenager: ‘So, I had a, a very strong faith.’

Both stories and how they position the teller do important work for not only explaining an individual’s own religious beliefs but also positioning themselves as agents in their own story. The contrasts that emerge, either with a previous life or with one’s own family, position them as having personal ownership of their faith and a confidence in that positioning. That positioning, and the confidence shown in it, has consequences for how they then position themselves throughout the interaction, as having chosen their own belief and, in both cases, dealing with doubt in different ways. Even as Sophie later recounts a shifting in her faith from Evangelical Christianity to Anglo-Catholicism, she says, when prompted to contrast her two positions: ‘Well, I suppose before contrasting, I would say that the similarities is the very strong faith in what we believe.’ This positioning reinforces a consistency in the trajectory of her story about herself, as a confident, committed person of faith.

In all these cases, regardless of how they viewed their experiences in the past and growing up, participants, in reflecting on their own identity, made use of stories of experience from the past to provide context for how they currently viewed themselves. Their own positioning was a part of a life story, which they recounted in a way that provided a rationale for how they developed. Religious identity was something that emerged from their recounting of life experience and with rare exception was not articulated as a clear set of beliefs. At the same time, the individual instantiations of these stories had shared characteristics with other stories and related to ways of talking and thinking about particular groups of people who have been historically minorities in England. Positioning themselves in relation to a religious identity for all the participants was always related to other elements of identity and personal history.

Markers of Religious Identity

Across the interviews, a participant’s religious position often became clear, not usually through an explicit claim to a named religious identity or category, but rather through reference to a place, role, or family member. For example, Naomi first mentions Jewishness in her interview, saying, ‘Um, my mum was Jewish. So, she was Jewish but not particularly practising’ and Charles introduces himself saying, ‘Well, my, my name is Charles. I’m a churchwarden, um, uh, here and I’ve been attending this church since the early 1980s.’ There were also references to faith communities, like when Amrit says, ‘Where we were in West London, we were very close to, um, one of the first, uh, Sikh gurdwaras, so, places of worship.’ In all of these instances, the participant’s religious identity became clear without them explicitly saying they were a member of a particular religious faith.

Aisha, who earlier in the interview identifies as a Muslim in a Catholic school, talks about interactions with others from different faiths, saying, ‘Like, I would never introduce myself being, like, oh, I’m, I’m a, I’m Muslim.’ She shares this while talking about respecting the beliefs of others and the importance of her religious identity in those contexts and her comment suggests that she sees her religious identity as less relevant in some settings: ‘I don’t think it’s that important.’ This feeling is not expressed in precisely the same way by others but does show how positioning oneself in terms of religious belief can and does change depending on the context.

An apparent reticence to identify using a categorical label may relate in some cases to physical appearance. For example, a woman wearing a hijab or vicar’s ‘dog collar’ has little need to claim a religious category. In other cases, face-saving cultural norms (that is, in British culture it may be impolite to explicitly state a religious belief) might have also explained this. Regardless of the reason, the avoidance of categorical labels when positioning oneself appeared to be a way to avoid misunderstanding or a negative judgement that might come from stereotypes about one’s community. By self-positioning in a potentially more agreeable way, for example, as a person who accepts others’ beliefs and happens to be Muslim, Aisha may be anticipating a positioning of herself in a storyline about Muslims that she wishes to pre-empt.

This self-awareness about how one might be perceived by others because of one’s physical appearance was discussed by several participants:

The contrast between other and self-positioning is explicit in Amrit’s discussion of the turban, the perceptions of which she struggles to articulate, coming to ‘exotic’. She then contrasts this with the religious and spiritual meaning of the turban to indicate commitment to ideals and the ‘mind and value set’ and ‘governing your mind’. Aisha describes her experience of wearing the hijab, and although she notes that she didn’t feel like people treated her differently, she did feel a responsibility to represent Islam and the Muslim community, saying ‘there’s a lot of pressure’ without making explicit what the cause of that pressure is, whether it is internal to her, from the Muslim community, or from outsiders. Finally, Hajrah says she is aware that the wearing of the hijab results in her getting ‘that look’ or having ‘that feeling’, which she doesn’t further elaborate on, but suggests it is part of a negative positioning of her and one that leads her to be ‘more cautious’.

Appearance could go beyond how people dressed specifically and come to include racial and ethnic markers as well.

These comments reflect the relationships that can occur between ethnicity and religious identity, both from an internal and external perspective. For Paul, being perceived as a Black man from Africa, he feels positioned by others to hold particular views, something he challenges here and elsewhere in the interview, suggesting that there is a misunderstanding among, in particular, white, British Christians about what Black Christians believe and why. Naomi’s comment reflects a tension within some Jewish people about the relationship between being ‘religious’ and ‘feeling’ Jewish, two things that she suggests are not necessarily related, giving different examples in the interview of her family members who engage with ‘Jewishness’ in different ways and see it as an ethnic, religious, and political position, depending on who they are and where they are.

Like the hijab or turban, ethnic identities and how they are perceived to be indications of religious belief had consequences for how participants felt pressure to position themselves in particular ways. These could be negative in the case of racism directed towards them (which I will discuss in more depth in the ‘Living Superdiversity’ section), but in the examples from Amrit and Aisha, the concern isn’t that the turban or hijab will lead to negative judgements, but that they will be misunderstood and they will be positioned in storylines that include misunderstanding of that dress and could lead to, in Aisha’s case at least, a reticence to wearing the hijab because of how it might result in her being viewed in a particular and limited way.

On the other hand, Naomi describes a different experience, in choosing to make her own identity evident to those she meets:

Naomi’s choice to wear the Star of David is not positioned exclusively as an act of religious commitment or practice but a way of identifying herself to others as Jewish, and explicitly in response to antisemitism, which she describes as not something that she generally experiences but something that she is aware to be occurring, noting that when violence has occurred, the victims have been wearing a kippah, or head covering. By choosing to wear the Star of David, she explains it as a way to stop ‘passing’, suggesting that she doesn’t perceive others as positioning her as a Jewish woman. By wearing a Star of David, she both positions herself as a member of the community and in solidarity with that community.

All of these cases suggest that when a person’s religious belief is made evident in their appearance, there is a perception that others will understand the clothing or symbol in a way that may not comport with how the individual wearing the symbol or clothing understands it themselves. The positioning makes clear that a tension is present between how a person views themselves and how others might view them. Given the nature of the questions for the interviews, the participants tended to talk about how this clothing set them apart from others, or made them more visible, but it is also implicitly a marker of shared identity among people wearing the same clothing. Hajrah alludes to this after discussing the potential negative feelings she gets from others, by then talking about the violence done to other women wearing a hijab.

Other less obvious elements came up in discussing markers of religious identity:

Amrit’s description of life in and around the gurdwara includes different parts of cultural life that is connected to religion, as the centre of local cultural life was the gurdwara. The religious setting is positioned as a key location for the immigrants and their children, and, in Amrit’s case, her own children, to connect to their heritage through the Sikh life that is facilitated by the gurdwara as a local meeting place. Amrit goes on to say that the language also serves as a way of connecting people of different religious backgrounds from the same place in India, showing that shared culture and identity can include people of different faith backgrounds when sharing in the immigrant experience.

What makes someone a member of a particular religious group is both something that emerges through their positioning of their own personal history and how they tell the story of their religious identity, but also is presented in how they position themselves with the way they dress and the symbols they choose to wear, and how their dress, symbols, and ethnic identity influence how others position them. The making of religious identity in the daily lived experience is an interaction among these different components, with the participants themselves seeing meaning in how they are treated by others and attempting to make choices in their own self-positioning that can foreground that identity, as in Naomi’s Star of David, background that identity, as in Aisha’s choice to not wear a hijab, or accept it as something that they can’t avoid, as in Paul’s identity as a Black man in a Christian context.

Complications in Religious Identity

Individual histories and personal stories about family belief were a theme in many participant responses when addressing religious identities that weren’t straightforward or included some loss or rejection of their previous religious belief, which compared to stories of conversion did not necessarily include a positioning of themselves as an agent making a choice.

In these two quotes, both Esther and Michaela highlight how their own religious identity is influenced by how they grew up. In Esther’s response, there is a clear delineation between herself and her upbringing, saying that she doesn’t know what she is anymore, but that she now rejects the category of Catholic for herself. Michaela’s response is less clear, in that she indicates that ‘Rasta’ was her biggest influence, and listing it among a series of other movements that are related to ethnic and political identities rather than religious ones. Rastafarianism, here and throughout her talk, is closely related to the political position her father took and how she was raised to be politically active and engaged in Black liberation.

In both Michaela and Esther’s subsequent talk about themselves, how they were raised, and the religious element of that upbringing, plays an important part in how they talk about their own value system and how they engage in the world. Esther goes on to discuss how she remains connected to her Catholic identity despite no longer having that belief, saying that she continues to recognise her connection to Catholicism in day-to-day life and feeling a connection with Catholics, both former and practising, because they ‘share the same language’. Michaela, on the other hand, doesn’t ever explicitly say what her position is on Rastafarianism, but instead talks about cutting off her dreadlocks on two occasions, one recently. These positionings, both explicitly and implicitly, reveal how upbringing and previous religious beliefs are significant in how religious identities are engaged in discourse activity and how the reticence to use a category of belief does not necessarily indicate a rejection of that belief. For Esther, although she is explicitly and decidedly ‘not a practising Catholic’, Catholicism is still an important part of how she positions herself.

Although the nature of the project attracted religious believers for whom religion was a positive experience, not all experiences with religious identity were described in this way.

Here, Catherine recounts her experiences within Evangelical Christianity, having spoken at length about her involvement in a church and before going on to talk about the circumstances of how things ‘ended quite badly’. She positions herself first as a believer, very engaged in the work of the church and committed to the church’s ministry, and contrasts how she felt about something at the time (‘I thought that was God working within me’) with her feelings now (‘I see it more as manipulation’). The positioning of her current self to when she was a person of faith maps on to a story of trauma, wherein her current positioning affects how she positions her past self, with the awareness that her past self-positioning would have been different. Catherine does not, in this extract or in the transcript, label the process she has undergone, but the reflection on her past and the positioning of herself as having changed her views occurs in a storyline of manipulation rather than agency, with her experience of religious life being presented in a negative way. By telling the story of her religious experience, her current positioning is explained and shows that she has come to the position in a logical and understandable way. Like the stories of conversion, immigration, and upbringing, the positioning of herself with the story of lived experience provides an explanation for her positioning as a part of a trajectory, an ongoing story that is meaningful to her.

For two of the participants, a lack of religious belief was unproblematic and didn’t obviously relate to previous trauma.

In Kerry’s response to a prompting about her own religious identity, she connects it to learning in university and positions herself as not being ‘drawn to one particular faith path’. Unlike the stories seen elsewhere in this section, she doesn’t position herself within a religious background or a family tradition which she either affirms or rejects. For Margaret, she does indicate that she had some relationship with religion in the past, but then simply says that she ‘stopped’ and has nothing additional to add. In both cases, when I prompted for more information about religious identity, the participants had nothing more to say.

These responses are unique in the dataset but only because the participant selection favoured people with religious beliefs and there was no additional scope to discuss religious identity in non-religious individuals, although this is also a growing demographic in the UK and in Birmingham, with 24 per cent of people responding as having no religion in the 2021 census (Office for National Statistics, 2022). The interaction between people of religious faith and people of no declared religious faith is likely to continue to grow as an important area of interreligious dialogue. At the same time, given the relationship between religious identity and culture seen throughout the whole of this section, separating religion from other parts of one’s identity may prove to be more difficult for some people than others. And while for people like Kerry who, having a lack of background in any particular religious faith, see them all equally and are not drawn to one in particular, for people born into immigrant communities wherein religious identity is a part of how their parents and grandparents position themselves, and how they are positioned in media narratives about them, simply setting aside that identity might be more difficult.

Within religious identities, participants positioned themselves in different ways and several participants distanced themselves from elements of their faith tradition to which they positioned themselves as being opposed. Richard, a retired scientist and Christian, says:

This extract presents a relatively rare moment in the dataset where a person discusses what they personally ‘believe’ in an explicit way, but in this case Richard is distancing himself from a part of Christian theology that he otherwise believes. He does this particularly as it relates to a creed, a statement of faith that Christians in many traditions would recite together during a service or Mass as a statement of shared belief. Richard here positions himself as a ‘physicist’ in addition to a ‘Christian’ and as a result says that he is ‘quiet’ when the creed affirms that Jesus was ‘born of the virgin Mary’, suggesting that he does not share this belief because it doesn’t comport with what he understands about the world as a physicist. Within this story, however, Richard first reasserts his own positioning as a Christian, suggesting that being a Christian for him does not require complete agreement with all parts of Christian theology.

Richard’s discussion of a particular belief is rare in the whole of the dataset, with few people positioning ‘belief’ as a core part of their own religious identity. This certainly could be the result of the interview context wherein the participants were talking about their experiences of living in Birmingham rather than being explicitly asked about what they believed. Whether that was the case, the interview data does show that people can effectively talk about their religious identity without focusing on religious faith or belief, and suggests that while precise articulation of one’s own belief may be important in some particular religious communities, for many people it isn’t a necessary part of talking about religious identity.

Finally, among several of the participants, a reticence to discuss labels and identify faith categories could also be observed. Here, Shabina responds to a question about whether cultural influence is important in how Islam is understood in her community and Michaela talks about her own view of God.

In Shabina’s talk about the role of ‘culture’ and religion, she draws attention to the vastly different perspectives people who are categorised as ‘Muslim’ hold, highlighting the different countries that people of the Muslim faith come from in her community. She then uses this to position issues, which she metaphorises as ‘barriers’, that are positioned as ones relating to ‘religion’ as actually ‘cultural’ differences. Michaela expresses a positioning of all faiths as the same by speaking of God in various forms as being essentially ‘the same energy’ and saying that ‘he’ can be called by many different names, provided that the result of the belief is something ‘beautiful’.

Shabina’s positioning of ‘barriers’ as cultural ones counters an implicit storyline of a conflict between British and Islamic values, which was a recurring theme in our interview. The positioning of ‘barriers’ is then not only a simple explanation for why any individual problem might occur, but a way of thinking about the role of religion and how and why conflicts that appear to be based in religious belief or identity emerge. The storyline provides a heuristic for understanding conflict and for explaining to people outside of the community how they may be misunderstanding ‘Muslims’ and, indeed, so-called Western cultures. Michaela’s articulation of a positive acceptance of all religious perspectives also includes an important storyline, that all good and beautiful things come from the same energy, and also implies a counter-storyline that anything which is not beautiful cannot come from that same energy. This too can serve as a heuristic for judging whether something is from God.

Conclusion

Throughout this section, the role of personal history and lived experience of oneself and one’s community in understanding one’s own religious identity is clearly evident. For all the participants, self-positioning within a religious context involved not only accounting for themselves and what they believed, but describing how interactions with others, their families, and their own personal histories led to those positions. These self-positionings and the stories from which they emerged are both unique and individual and common among particular types of people, providing evidence that ways of talking about one’s belief reflect culturally relevant storylines, ones that can be observed across a range of different participants. The absence of extended discussion of belief and spiritual experience in the interviews in participants’ positioning of their own religious identity challenges a notion that religious identity is primarily about religious belief. Certainly, different questions and different participants could have elicited different responses, but the discourse shows how effectively religious identity can be spoken about without a focus on belief.

Making Community

Throughout the interviews, participants were almost always eager to talk about place: about the city they lived in and the physical spaces that were home to the religious communities of which they were a part. In the previous section, I discussed how storylines about immigration were important for many in understanding their religious and cultural identity. Throughout the stories about immigration, the centrality of places of worship for community life, was a common theme:

In talking about their childhoods, Nadia, Amrit, and Omar, all middle-aged professionals, remember places of worship being central to their experiences as children. For Nadia and Amrit, they both use ‘village’ to describe the community around the mosque and the gurdwara, respectively. For Nadia, the mosque serves as a place where ‘everything you want’ is, with care for children to seniors. In my own site visit to the mosque she attended, I was shown one of the newly constructed buildings at the site that housed the necessary equipment for preparing a dead body for burial, including a large refrigeration unit and room purpose-built for the washing of a dead body, all done by volunteers from the mosque as an act of service to their community. The mosque in this case, and in many other cases throughout the city, also includes schools where students can study both the Qur’an as well as tuition for exams. The storyline is one of complete support for those who are members of the mosque, often only paying a small fee to be a part of the community.

Amrit talks in a similar way about the gurdwara, extending the ‘village’ metaphor to include a ‘quite rich extended family’, rich here referring to the kinds of people who are a part of the community, the diversity of that group, rather than their financial status. The family metaphor becomes literal as she speaks about the community, saying that her actual family, who were also a part of that community, served as a set of role models for her and she could see the possibilities available to her through their experiences. The ‘village’ then comes to represent familial connections and the ‘city’ to represent possibility and progress, and she sees both as having had a positive influence on her.

Omar also sees a close relationship between family and religious life, in part because his father was the local imam and therefore the mosque was also their family home, and when people came to see his father, he would be there. The ‘imam’s surgery’ is used to compare a medical GP surgery where patients access general health advice and care in the UK to spiritual care, and positions his father, the imam, in a storyline of service to the community wherein he cares for the needs of others. In his description of his living situation and his position in his family, his understanding of the connection between religious life and service, and his own personal life and space, become very closely related. The community that he is a part of is not then something that exists outside of the house, but something that he lives within, and a place into which people are regularly coming to meet with his father.

In all three of these stories about religious places of worship, the participants spoke proudly and fondly of the role of the mosque and the gurdwara at the centre of the life of the community. In several of the interviews about family histories, participants spoke of their families moving to different places within England because of the location of a place of worship where they were moving and the importance of being near particularly a mosque or gurdwara appeared central in how they represented the thinking of the generation that first came to the country, when they could make decisions about where they might live. Among the participants for whom immigration was less key to their own story, the locations of places of worship in these same ways (particularly this metaphor of a ‘village’) was not a common theme but not entirely absent, as Charles, an Anglo-Catholic man who was a long-time attendee of a particular church, also spoke about the importance of a church building in how he decided where to settle and worship after completing his studies.

The connection to communities extended beyond physical locations to connections based on shared values, language, or shared emotional experiences. Esther spoke about these different connections in describing a Catholic community.

The connection that Esther describes is not an easily articulated relationship between a religious belief and an ongoing religious identity, but rather sees connections emerge from having grown up in the same contexts or having had similar strong emotional experiences. For Esther, these connections with her past religious identity continue to play a role in her life, as she sees connections with other former Catholics and recognises the relationships that exist between how she sees the world now and how she grew up. As she says, being Catholic is not something you could ‘quit’ because there is a community of people who have had similar experiences and see the world in a similar way, regardless of whether they are practising.

Throughout the interviews, people did speak about the importance of spiritual leaders within their faith communities in building and maintaining those communities, including their own parents (Omar, Michaela, Esther), gurus (Amrit, Priya), and elders (Abdul). These leaders, however, were not foregrounded in any of the stories that were told and none of the participants spoke at length about the influence of specific leaders on their own religious beliefs. Leaders could also be explicitly absent but still play important roles in how people positioned themselves when they described their experiences, as in Catherine’s reflection in the previous section that she now sees her experience in the evangelical church she attended as ‘manipulation’, making the action a noun without identifying an actor when she describes that manipulation.

Instead, particularly in the interviews with participants who also told stories of family immigration, religious identity and belief was positioned as simply a part of who they are, and a constant in their lives. This may be an effect of the interview questions, however, which focused on participants’ experiences and did not explicitly ask them to identify people who had been influential in their lives. At the same time, a focus on religious experience did not more frequently elicit stories about the influence of individuals in their lives and tended more towards memories of community. Physical, local communities of people who shared similarities beyond only religious belief and practice, time and again was the thing that participants in the study referred to in discussing their own experiences and how they came to be the person they are.

Changing Community

With all the focus on community in the lives of the participants, another consistent theme was that the communities changed over time, and that different circumstances, often outside of the control of the community and in places far away from Birmingham, could influence the day-to-day lives of individuals and the possible positions available to them and how they came to understand their own identity. The most obvious, and the one often at the forefront of negative media narratives about immigrants, is assimilation and how participants whose families had migrated to Britain in the recent past understood themselves as ‘British’ and felt they were accepted in this country.

These three quotes show how religious and national identity within immigrant communities and for the children of immigrants is not necessarily straightforward, both because of their own feelings about themselves and the positions they can take within their contexts. Importantly, the discussion is not about nationality as an empirical marker of citizenship – all the participants in the study were presumably British, and none gave indications in the interviews that they did not have British citizenship. Instead, the conversations included language about ‘feeling’, as in extract (5) where Hajrah reports that her daughter ‘feels’ British and the ‘feeling’ of being British is contrasted with experiencing racism, positioning Britishness and one’s ability to be perceived as British as being intrinsically related to one’s ethnic or racial identity. Being ‘Muslim’ is also relevant in Hajrah’s description of herself and her daughter in relation to nationality, as she positions both herself and her daughter as first Muslim and then British.

For Shabina, language plays an important role in how national identity is felt and the fact that her children speak English as a first language makes them British-Bangladeshi, something that she contrasts with her identity, where her first language is Bengali. The relationship between national identity and religious identity is also made relevant in Shabina’s interview because, in addition to the discussion about national identity, like Hajrah, being Muslim is also relevant to the discussion. Comparing herself, her children, and her parents, Shabina notes that her mother would not have seen her Muslim identity as relevant in the same way that Shabina and her children do. The quote shows that generational shifts can move in different directions, and the identity of ‘Muslim’ is not something that her parents would have necessarily used themselves. Being immigrants to the UK, national identity could be seen as more relevant in some contexts than one’s religious identity. Shabina also draws in an additional identity marker, being ‘Brummie’ (i.e. from Birmingham) rather than being ‘British’. In this case, the local identity of Birmingham better positions Shabina in terms of her ‘Britishness’ because throughout the interview, Birmingham has been established as a diverse place where she grew up and feels the most connection.

Historical circumstances were also important in participant stories about their identity and how it shifted over their lives. For several of the Muslim participants, both in the interviews and in my site visits, terrorism and particularly the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September 2001, was an important point in their lives when they came to feel they were positioned differently in British society and subsequently felt their own self-positioning change. Three examples of this follow:

In these three interviews, 9/11 was mentioned without any description of the particulars of the attacks, where they occurred, or how exactly the event itself was experienced and talked about within the community. Instead, the date becomes a metonymy for not only the events themselves, but a point where collective and individual experiences of the society changed. Omar refers to ‘Muslim-hood’ and Abdul says ‘Muslim-ness’ to describe the part of their identity that was highlighted, encompassing a larger concept than simply a religious belief or practice. Shabina speaks more directly about being ‘more conscious of her religion’ in the post-9/11 world. She also refers to ‘conversations’, particularly as a ‘visible Muslim’, suggesting that she has had some specific engagement about her Muslim identity because of what she wears, and other parts of the conversation have included a discussion of the hijab and how she felt she and other women wearing the hijab have been targeted for harassment or made to feel uncomfortable in public, although in this case there doesn’t appear to be a particularly negative valence when talking about these conversations.

Shabina’s mention of ‘having that conversation’ is similar in a way to Abdul’s story of being asked to be interviewed in various different places following 9/11 because he was ‘a young British Muslim’. There is little detail given to what these interviews covered, but there is an implied link between the attacks and Muslim identity. Abdul goes on to describe this as bringing Muslim identity to the ‘forefront’, first describing himself as being a British Indian person with a Muslim background, where his national and ethnic identity was the primary way he was identified before 9/11, something that was also mentioned by Shabina, and saying that both ‘Muslim-ness’ and ‘Islamophobia’ were in the background prior to 9/11.

Although Abdul’s description of both ‘Muslim-ness’ and ‘Islamaphobia’ coming to the forefront as the result of 9/11 suggests that the awareness of Islam included racism and discrimination, positive descriptions of a shift in personal and community awareness of religious identity are also present. These are not always described as the result of 9/11 – Shabina describes a generational shift in awareness of religious identity and Nadia also describes as shifting in her lifetime, highlighted in her own daughter’s increased confidence in asserting her religious commitments when, in her example, asked to change how she dressed while serving in a medical context. In all of these cases, the participants described a change in the way they viewed their own religious identity in the British context and how engagement with that belief by those outside of the community had increased.

The positioning of 9/11 as a turning point and discussions of changing views of religious identity were part of a storyline wherein both Muslims and non-Muslims in the country have become more aware of Islam in British life. While the stories of participants like Hajrah and Shabina may suggest a storyline that they had been implicitly treated as non-British, this was never explicitly stated in any of the interviews. Moreover, none of the white participants positioned themselves either in terms of their ethnicity or religious beliefs, as it related to Britishness. Discussing the relationship between Christianity and British identity, Margaret, who doesn’t claim any particular religious affiliation, says:

For Margaret, describing the United Kingdom, or ‘Britain’ or ‘England’ as a ‘Christian country’ is not accurate, and she positions ‘England’ as a ‘diverse’ place with ‘different ethnicities, faith paths, and traditions’ while still recognising that ‘elements’ of the Christian past are ‘woven’ into it. This description of Britain most explicitly reveals what is unsaid in much of the talk about Britain and British identity that emerged in the interviews: that the country is diverse and full of people of many different backgrounds, but that Christianity and Christian belief, and ‘whiteness’, to the extent that it is associated with that Christian belief historically, could remain part of how Britishness is understood by the population, even if people don’t necessarily accept or want it to be.

Reflecting on the shift in demographics in the country and what it means to be British, Michaela talks about how the attitudes of the Black community have shifted and how new positionings have emerged since she was a child in the 1980s:

Michaela’s response shows how demographic changes over time can lead to changes in storylines about identity and how groups who previously understood the other as different have come to see each other as closely related because of their shared experiences, in this case growing up in the same neighbourhood and attending the same school. Michaela refers to this new positioning as being ‘politically aligned’, particularly with new immigrants arriving from Afghanistan and a realisation that ‘forty years later’ they have ‘an entitlement to a British identity’. She also notes that part of the alignment has resulted from having ‘other enemies’, which she suggests comes from new ways of seeing ‘who’s an insider and who is an outsider’.

New immigrant communities, even those with shared beliefs, can lead to changes to how people view their own Britishness and their approach to their own religious belief. For Asian Muslim communities, the increase in Somalian Muslim immigrants could challenge how they understand Muslim identity and the importance of ‘culture’ in how people talk about their own religious beliefs: Shabina says:

Shabina’s response here shows the limitations of the understanding of ‘Muslim-ness’ that Abdul had noted in extract (9), because different communities come to the country with different understandings of who they are. To view ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ Muslims as essentially the same is problematic because of the cultural influence on the expression of religious identity. For the Muslim communities who have lived in Birmingham for many years, and several generations being ‘Brummie’, this asserts an identity that is not only British, but a particular regional British identity. As Aisha asserts by recounting the amount of time her family has spent in Birmingham, new immigrant communities, Muslim or not, come with a different set of values and understandings of what it means to be Muslim and how that identity interacts with a national identity. This contrast reinforces how families like Aisha’s are a part of a British story, one that, despite the presence of Islamophobia that Abdul highlights, is and has always been present in daily life, largely accepted as British. Aisha’s need to assert her identity as a Brummie, however, suggests that counter-narratives and the persistence of white supremacy in British society is still felt by those from minority religions and people of colour.

Serving Community

Despite demographic changes that suggest the United Kingdom continues to grow more secular, the participants in the Superdivercity project often made links between the work of religious organisations, both from their own communities and from other communities, and healthy civic life in the city. For the participants in the study, and particularly the links that were made through community organising, almost all of the participants told stories that in one way or another positioned their own religious communities in a storyline of serving the greater good. This included religious communities as serving those who were a part of their organisations and also members of the local community, the use of religious organisation resources and spaces to serve the community, and emerging new roles for religious organisations that had changed over time.

Throughout the project, making clear distinctions between a religious and local community proved difficult because churches, mosques, synagogues, and gurdwaras were positioned as local community institutions often before they were positioned as religious establishments. The services provided in terms of religious belief and practice were often backgrounded, and religiosity and community engagement were positioned as different things, which could be aligned, but not necessarily, as evidenced in Naomi discussing a family member’s engagement with a religious community: ‘She’s more engaged with the community. Whether she’s more religious … ’, leaving the rest of the sentence uncompleted. The ellipsis at the end of the statement suggests that religious commitment and community involvement were not necessarily the same thing, and with many participants community work done in and with religious organisations was not necessarily an indication of strongly held beliefs.

Instead, participants often positioned the religious organisations as deeply integrated in the work of the community, in some cases with difficulty distinguishing between the two as in the following example.

Here, Hajrah describes the role of a mosque as serving more than simply a religious purpose, and operating instead as a kind of ‘community centre’. Hajrah’s story includes talking about the role her father played in the community as an elder (a story that both Shabina and Omar told as well), providing support for many people in a variety of ways, and serving as an example in the local community by providing for the physical needs of recent immigrants, from immigration advice to help applying for bank accounts to renting and buying homes in the local area. This was also integrated with spiritual and ethical advice, with the elders meeting the physical and spiritual needs of the community and, at first, their homes, and later their mosques, serving as the location for those services. In their positioning, religious service and practical service were deeply integrated as a part of the immigrant experience and community leadership. Omar, as we saw in extract (3), talked about his father as an imam hosting a ‘surgery’. Like Shabina and Hajrah’s descriptions of their father’s service, there is no distinction between the local and religious communities, and the help and support provided by imams and elders cannot be easily delineated as spiritual and practical advice.

The role of religious organisations in education and in participants’ memories of growing up in religious communities was a part of many of my site visit conversations, particularly with places of worship which were connected to schools, including churches, mosques, and gurdwaras. The effect of religion in education came up in interviews about people’s religious identities, but not always in straightforward ways. Three responses illustrate the different ways that religion interacted with education in talk about religious identity:

Omar’s response shows how religious education can be a core part of upbringing and play an important role in shaping the way that a religious person might come to understand their faith, through explicit, institutional educational contexts. The other two responses, however, suggest the different ways that religion can be positioned in storylines of development of identity. Catherine recalls the presence of a vicar at school and presumably some experiences of collective worship as a child, where going to church was a part of a primary school experience in the UK, something that is not positioned as being out of the ordinary. Aisha’s brief description of her experience in school, by contrast, positions her as the only Muslim in a Catholic school, something she says was ‘interesting’, and part of a larger positioning in her interview as being out of place as the only Muslim in a predominately white context.

Religious diversity, and how schools of religious character interact with people of different faiths, often through the discussion of shared values, has been a theme in previous research I’ve done with colleagues on Church of England schools which serve predominately Muslim communities (Reference Pihlaja, Whisker and Vickerage-GoddardPihlaja et al., 2022). Stories about regular, positive engagement with people of other faiths also can develop into storylines of shared values and mutual understanding. These interactions can be positioned as helping one understand one’s own faith. Allen, for example, a Quaker, recounted how a Muslim classmate was inspired to engage with his own faith through the practice of silence in a Quaker school. Examples like these show how interactions with people of different faiths can be understood to motivate self-understanding.

Other examples of community involvement included more implicit interactions between religious organisations and their local communities. Shabina, as an organiser working with women, predominantly with a Muslim user population, positioned the work of the organisation as teaching skills that don’t necessarily explicitly engage with religious belief. Shabina says:

In Shabina’s description, the focus is on building community, with the practical skills that are developed being ‘almost … secondary’. Here, religious identity is backgrounded in a storyline of helping people ‘reach their full potential as an individual’. Religious organisations also offer material support in terms of housing community organisations, as Margaret, a community organiser with no religious affiliation, works for the Methodist Church in a building owned and operated by a non-denominational international church. In both of these contexts, the presence of support from religious individuals and organisations, even in serving people of the same religious belief, does not position religious belief and practice as the focus of the work but rather foregrounds community and personal development.

These storylines of service and the positioning of the mosques, churches, and gurdwaras as central locations presented an understanding of religious and community life as deeply integrated, with little separation between the spiritual and physical needs of those in the community. Instead, the communities and the religious institutions within them were a part of a single understanding of life in the city. Speaking about belief and religious practices was not separate from the life of the community, and even in talk about separation from religious belief, as in Esther’s talk about her Catholic upbringing and her own adult identity apart from that upbringing, the church and Catholic community still remained a part of her life that she recognised.

The positioning of participants in a close relationship between religious and community life was in many ways the result of the participants who were interviewed. They were often civically engaged and religious, with a clear interest in their religious communities being seen as actively committed to making the local community a better place. How this positioning represents all or most or a majority of any individual community might be difficult to discern, but it plays a crucial role in how communities understand themselves and how they are positioned by those around them, particularly in contexts where discrimination continues to persist. This positioning, as a public representation of what is important to them, leads to real relationships between people of different faiths and organisations. They create storylines of engagement in civic life that benefit those religious communities in perpetuating a perception of religious believers as tolerant and willing to work with others.

Conclusion

Community was at the heart of participants’ positioning and storylines about religious identity. As people positioned themselves in relation to religious belief and practice, the life of the community in which they were often also raised, with long histories of involvement in religious organisations that were central to local life, was important in talking about what their religious identity meant to them. Stories about the religious communities and their own involvement in those communities were used to explain what it meant to be a member of a religious faith. The histories of those communities, particularly in the case of immigrants, was important in shaping how they saw themselves, but participants also recognised the importance of changing social dynamics and history, whether it be in global events like the terrorist attacks on 9/11 or shifting demographics in a particular area, on how they were able to position themselves, often seeing those shifts in complicated ways. Religious identity and community life were deeply integrated elements in individual storytelling and because of the close relationships among people of different faiths in the community, the two positionings as a Brummie and a religious person were often closely related.

The Superdiverse City

Throughout the interviews and site visits, diversity in Birmingham was almost always presented in a positive light and one of the main strengths of the city. The storylines around diversity, particularly when participants talked about their engagement with people of different faiths, were positive. When there was discussion of tensions or racism, participants told stories wherein negative experiences were the exception, and even these stories were often parts of larger storylines of acceptance and peace. For example, in a site visit to a Shi’a mosque, I was told about an incident of sectarian vandalism and graffiti in the prayer hall. However, this incident was positioned as leading to increased cooperation between the mosque and other Sunni mosques in the area, condemning sectarian violence, and followed up quickly with a story of different mosques supporting one another to open Covid-19 vaccination centres. In all of these stories, a storyline of faith leaders working together to tackle different obstacles emerged: there could be difficulties, but they were often overcome.

Rather than interfaith dialogue about theological issues, participants in this project often talked about examples of taking part in religious ceremonies and events hosted by people of other faiths. Christian participants reported taking part in Ramadan celebrations, and during the project local universities hosted different community iftars for people of all faiths, including the progressive synagogue in Birmingham hosting a multi-faith Iftar and inviting Muslim participants to use their sanctuary for prayers before breaking their fast. At these events, people of different faiths, ethnicities, ages, genders, sexual orientations, citizenship statuses, and other markers of diversity spoke in positive ways about the benefits of the diversity and acceptance on them as individuals and their communities more generally.

These were practical examples of how stories of acceptance and the benefits of diversity could be paired with events that then would bring together communities in a spirit of peace and shared values. The same examples of positive positioning of communities in diverse areas and their positive effect on people of faith could also be seen in the interviews, for example, where Alexandra spoke of moving to Birmingham:

Alexandra makes the distinction between diversity in which people live in segregated spaces and Birmingham where she sees people more ‘mixed’, although she does note that some segregation still occurs. Importantly, she notes that this ‘rubs off on the churches’, without making explicit what this influence specifically entails. She then goes on to recount how the changes in demographics and specifically the increase in immigrant populations from Muslim and ‘Asian’ backgrounds have led to situations where some churches have adapted and engaged, and others have not. She describes her response as being unsure whether ‘to laugh or cry’, to find their lack of engagement with their communities so absurd that it’s comical or to despair at their lack of willingness to work with those around them.

Like Alexandra noted in describing how shifts in demographics led to ‘white’ churches in predominately ‘Asian’ communities, in several site visits and interviews I spoke with religious community members who had seen a significant drop off in engagement with their local community and for whom the role of the religious had shifted over time and necessitated a shift in thinking about the purpose of religious organisations. For example, one Anglo-Catholic participant who served in a leadership position in his church describes witnessing great demographic change: ‘The most recent census says that over 70 per cent of the population in the parish boundaries are … identify as either Muslim or other world faiths other than Christianity.’ This shift has led to only one parishioner who lives in the parish boundaries, and reflecting on the size of their community over the years, he says:

The discussion of the church’s position in this case relates to both the demographic changes in the area and the specific position of Anglo-Catholicism in modern Britain and ongoing disagreements about the role of women in the church. The church’s physical and theological position led to a situation wherein the numbers of parishioners have waned, in part because of fewer people in the local community, but also in part because new immigrant communities have not replaced the white congregation as immigrants have in other contexts in the city, including in Evangelical Christian and Catholic communities. Charles notes that demographic change can ‘go both ways’ and although they have seen a decline in participation in recent years, this does not necessarily mean it will continue and, as he notes, the team’s job is to ‘keep it going for the moment’.

In light of these reflections, Charles goes on to discuss the role of the church and its position as serving those in the parish, and he gives two examples. The first is telling the story of the church’s clock tower:

The second example is the use of the church’s hall by people of all different faiths for various events, including for a boxing club and which, Charles notes, provides the opportunity for young women, including young Muslim women, to develop self-discipline and train together with young men. The positioning of the church in this role, offering training and unique experiences for young women, fits into a storyline of the church offering opportunity and transformation to the community, but not in an explicitly religious way.

Charles’ stories about the church’s interaction with Muslims, and these two examples, underscore how changes in demographics lead to new positions for religious communities, and how seemingly small interactions between people of different faiths can emerge as meaningful in storylines about living together and cooperating. Although both examples represent seemingly small series of interactions, their importance in the church community’s understanding of themselves and their value suggests that changes in demographics and religious attendance are also opportunities for organisations to see new roles for themselves and rethink how resources are allocated to serve those around them.

Charles’ discussion of the experience of their church shows how community understandings of one another are not necessarily straightforwardly positive, and can involve two communities living in the same space without necessarily engaging with one another. How Charles sees the value of the church is then informed by his own understanding of the culture of those living in the parish. At the same time, with the exception of the use of the church hall, Charles did not have any stories of people from the Muslim community coming and seeking to build a relationship with the church. Charles, then, understands how the church is viewed by others not through interaction with local Muslims, but through imagining the perspective of those Muslims.

Like Charles, many of the participants in the project were members of minority religious groups, or minorities within larger groups such as Shi’a Muslims in a predominately Sunni Muslim population, or Quakers or Catholics in a context where the Church of England is still the dominant Christian denomination. For Christians like David, who attends a Congregationalist church and is a physicist, living with people of different beliefs involves accepting that there are complexities to what individuals believe and, as discussed in the section on self-identity, ‘staying quiet’ when disagreeing about specific parts of the creed. A similar statement about how interreligious relationships can be managed with care taken to what one says and when it is said comes from Priya, a Sikh woman of Indian descent. She speaks about her relationship with her white British husband and how she deals with the complications of having different faiths and how to raise the children in light of their differences:

Then speaking of her children she says:

In this portion of the interview, there is an increase in hedging and a carefully worded discussion of the relationship with her husband and, in particular, how to deal with differences in religious belief between the two. She describes her own belief but also the need to not ‘alienate’ her husband. She describes her efforts to relate to Christian faith through reading the bible, but notes the limits of that engagement when it comes to the core difference in the faiths: ‘we believe in a master who is the son of God’ and notes that this is ‘difficult’ for people who don’t believe. The ‘we’ in the sentence is ambiguous, but seems to imply that she and her children hold the same belief, whereas her husband does not, and her response to this difference is ‘not to focus on that’.

Priya’s discussion of her interreligious relationship highlights a kind of difficult topic of conversation that may have been absent from the data in part because of the positive focus of the research and the public positioning of interfaith relationships in positive storylines of peace and acceptance. However, these stories of living and working together, and testimonies about acceptance at interfaith events, are told in balance with negative storylines that are prominent not only in media but also in the communities themselves. While leaders, and many of the participants were in leadership positions in various civic and religious organisations, are regularly telling stories of acceptance and shared values, these storylines implicitly oppose dominant negative storylines of interaction between different faiths which have long histories of violence, prejudice, and hate. They are also subject to storylines about the secularisation of British society and the waning influence of religion in the public square. The public positioning of different people of faith living together in peace is situated in this context, where changes in how religion more generally is positioned in society may necessitate a rethinking of how religious believers understand themselves no longer only as members of individual faiths but people of faith more generally, for whom there is more in common in having a shared religious belief compared to a growing population for whom religious belief is no longer important.

Racism and Tension

In the previous section, I touched on the discussion of changes to how Muslim communities were perceived following 9/11, leading to a growing awareness of Islam in British society. The effects of terrorism included both a spike in explicit Islamophobia but also an increased awareness among Muslims about their religious identity. The link between religious and national or ethnic identity did come up in other places in the interviews when, for example, Jonathan spoke of his Irish parents and the treatment of Catholics when he was a boy in the 1960s. The same suspicion of Irish immigrants was echoed in a site visit and discussion with a Catholic priest recounting the history of discrimination, and how perceptions of Irish immigrant communities shifted over the last 100 years, with the assimilation of Irish people in Birmingham.

For many participants, experiences of racism, both explicit and implicit, were reported regularly in the interviews. The following extracts come from interviews with an Asian woman and a Black woman, both telling stories related to racist behaviour they either experienced themselves or which they observed or were subsequently told about.

A historical understanding of racism and its effect on the community is clear in both Hajrah and Michaela’s comments here. Hajrah reports experiences of racist language which have been ongoing for her whole life, and in a storyline about the regular use of slurs she discusses how the use of racist slurs became so normalised that it was viewed as something to be simply endured, ‘to take it on your chin’. At the same time, she notes that little has changed in racist behaviour over her lifetime. Michaela’s description of racism and its effects on a particular generation is punctuated by the use of a racial slur and descriptions of violence to explain the conditions experienced by her parents’ generation. The racist violence they experienced, Michaela then suggests, explains how a group of men came to understand themselves and their position in society, saying they became ‘heavily politicised’. Michaela goes on to talk about how her upbringing in a Rastafarian household was heavily influenced by Black consciousness thinking and the need to be politically and socially aware. For her, the experience of racism is not something to endure but motivates political action to oppose larger systems of oppression.

When experiencing racism, the participants also reported their own attempts to understand the mindset of those who were acting in racist ways, often reasoning on their behalf about their actions. Two extracts here from Muslim women reflect this reasoning, with Shabina first reflecting on the importance of talking about the Superdivercity project.

The reasoning behind racist behaviour is disregarded in both of these extracts with characterisations of individuals who have acted in racist ways or said racist things. In the first quote, Shabina mentions the ‘Yorkshire Cricket Club’, referring to a news report about racist bullying and using the place as a metonymy for racist words and actions, and then relates this example to another recurring story of her friends being referred to with a racist slur. Shabina concludes this positioning of people who use racist language by saying racists ‘are not able to … differentiate’ between Black and brown people of different religious backgrounds and ethnicities, saying that ‘outsiders’ don’t differentiate between different religions of ‘brown people’. Hajrah, reflecting on how things have changed over time, similarly positions ‘them’, the people who have treated Muslims in a negative way over the years and used racist slurs, as ‘probably’ understanding all Muslims as ‘terrorists’ or ‘ISIS’. She concludes that these people ‘judge me’, even though they ‘don’t know me, so they can’t assume what I am’.

The extracts so far have included instances of historical violence and prejudice leading to verbal abuse, but imminent physical violence was also a concern for some. For Naomi, a Jewish participant, threats of violence were a very real part of her experience:

Naomi here is talking about the place of the synagogue and positions the Jewish community in Birmingham as ‘a well-established, thriving part of a community’. At the same time, she mentions ‘the whole antisemitism debate that’s going on’ and ‘the whole, Jews run the world’, presumably referring to how antisemitism remained in the news in a variety of different ways, including in the UK Labour Party (Reference Staples-ButlerStaples-Butler, 2020) and the resurgence of antisemitic conspiracy theories (Reference Allington and JoshiAllington & Joshi, 2020). She describes the feeling as something ‘deep within’ her that the Jewish community remains under threats of violence, linked in her story of her family and others in the synagogue of fleeing the Holocaust and coming to the UK. She then notes that the synagogue requires security, something that I experienced when attending the synagogue’s multifaith iftar and notably the only time I attended an event in Birmingham where this was the case. Naomi’s positioning of herself and the community as the potential object of a threat, with the historical storylines of violence against Jewish people, shows how storylines can become embedded in understandings of religious groups, and how those storylines affect the communities themselves. The practical consequences of these storylines can be real acts of violence.

In discussions of racism in communities, how leaders and religious practitioners can address racism in religious contexts appears to also be a difficult topic to handle. Here, a church leader and a community leader both reflect on how racism can be confronted.

In discussing how institutional and implicit racism affects her church, Sophie begins by positioning her congregation as not being racist, but suggests instead that racism can appear in implicit ways, for instance in who could be chosen to speak or read in front of the congregation. She positions people as ‘fragile’ when it comes to these discussions, particularly when they may feel they are being positioned as a racist. Hajrah, in a different vein, also describes confronting racist behaviour by speaking directly to a person saying ‘go back home’ and asserting her right to be in the UK, even saying ‘I’m probably more British than you’. It’s not clear from her description of this sort of exchange if it has actually transpired, particularly with her use of the simple present tense ‘say’ and her ending the description of this encounter with ‘I’ve heard that so many times’. The rejoinder instead suggests that the basis for the racist attack is without merit and Hajrah’s response is to reassert her own identity.

In Hajrah’s descriptions of ‘racists’ in extract (9) and in this extract, ‘racists’ are positioned as ignorant and lacking basic understandings about the people they are treating negatively. Hajrah’s statement that they ‘don’t know me’ suggests that the lack of understanding comes from a lack of connection with the communities that they are treating badly. Michaela, on the other hand, suggests that racism is part of a larger political project of oppression. These extracts and the larger conversation about the need for mutual understanding suggest that racism can be overcome with education and through interaction among people of different faiths; that dialogue and experiences with others can be used to combat racism because being with people you may otherwise be prejudiced against allows you to better understand who they are and why they do what they do. Presumably, then, in this understanding of interaction with diverse groups of people, seeing someone as a ‘terrorist’ would be much more difficult.

The discussions of racism, both considering the historical contexts and individual experiences, show how abuse and prejudice can challenge storylines of progress in relationships between groups. Although superdiversity was generally positioned as a positive thing, the challenge of racism remained a substantial concern. The examples of addressing racism by either ignoring or enduring it, challenging it on a personal level, or working to effect institutional change, all positioned racists as acting ignorantly, either because they didn’t understand the culture of the people they attacked or because they were a part of a system which was inherently racist. In these storylines, racists could be stopped when people challenged them and worked to make minority communities better understood.

A Positive Presence

Throughout this Element, the positive influence of religious belief and the shared values of different faiths has been positioned as a positive force in storylines of cooperation and peace. The specifics of different beliefs and where disagreements emerged were largely absent from the talk and participants focused instead on finding the shared position that religious believers had in the city. This seemed to be, in part, due to an ability among participants to talk about their own faith in comparison to others in a way that focused on shared values rather than shared beliefs, something which my previous research with colleagues looking at Church of England primary education had found (Reference Whisker, Pihlaja and Vickerage-GoddardWhisker et al., 2020). Amrit, for example, spoke about the importance of the turban in Sikh religion because it represents values that ‘connect us as human beings’, and is therefore something more than ‘to preserve heritage’.

Shared religious belief and ethnicity could also be positioned in different ways in talk about interaction with people who might share one characteristic with you but not another, potentially leading to both connections and conflict, depending on how those differences or similarities came up in the interaction.

In the first extract, Amrit discusses interactions among Asians who have come to the UK via East Africa and talks about how switching between languages was common among people from that area and the relationship of shared languages made interaction among the people of different faiths ‘easy’ in a way. By contrast, Abdul talks about how religion can be seen as a useful lens for looking at the ‘Muslim community’ and how Muslims should be viewed in the UK. Abdul suggests the need to think about the positioning of immigrants and how they come to understand themselves in the UK, rather than thinking that Muslims act in one way or another, with a need to recognise the ‘different voices’ that are a part of the community.

Both of these comments show how communities can be envisioned in different ways, and how commonalities can emerge across different groups who, for example, share the same language, while at the same time not overgeneralising about how groups see and understand themselves from an outsider’s perspective. Abdul warns against the ‘stifling’ effect of overgeneralising about a group, Muslims in his example, and having expectations about how they are. The challenge of diversity is navigated in part by the ability to position oneself and others in different storylines at different times, thinking about oneself in terms of religious identity at some points and thinking about oneself in terms of ethnic, national, or another identity at other points. Taking on different positions in different storylines, and the ability to position others in different storylines, allows for a dynamic understanding of how people think and act in the way they do, seeing others as individuals with a variety of different identities and interests.

Storylines of coming together were not limited to shared features of identity, and shared concerns about the future and the necessity of working together to address structural issues was also a theme when it came to talking about how people of different faiths could work together because of a shared future in a world where diversity is now the norm:

Allen in this extract talks about the relationship between Quakers and people of other faiths. Prompted initially for any examples of ‘interreligious dialogue’, he gives an example of people speaking and working together on the issues of the climate crisis and climate justice. He refers to this as a ‘shared action’ and contrasts that with having ‘an interaction where we seek to understand each other’s faiths’, although the group doesn’t explicitly focus on issues of faith but instead sees faith as motivating action. This story positions the two faith groups as working together on common goals rather than trying to understand one another’s theological positions. Working together for climate action is, therefore, a way to ‘understand each other’s faiths’.

Although there were few examples of people bringing up explicit interfaith discussions about theology and belief in the interviews, my site visits and conversations with leaders did highlight some initiatives, particularly one called ‘The Feast’ wherein interreligious dialogue is facilitated among young people while sharing meals together and differences in faiths are explicitly addressed in discussions. For the community and religious leaders that were interviewed in the project, however, examples of interreligious engagement were more often like the one Allen describes here, where people of different faiths work together on a common goal like opening Covid-19 vaccination centres, addressing poverty, or working together on the climate crisis.

These shared interests in the wellbeing of the community and the need to make positive change can be linked together in charity work and working together for the greater good of the community, particularly through care that is motivated from the values of different religious backgrounds. Two examples of this work and the shared values that underpin them can be seen in these extracts.

Omar, as a Muslim, recounts something he heard from a talk at a local gurdwara and how faith should be shown in public spaces. In thinking about worship and community empowerment, the leader had said that actions must be oriented towards the core needs of a person as roti (food), kapda (clothes), and makaan (shelter), linking acts of faith and worship with care for the individual. Shabina, in discussing the role of religious and other community organisations in helping support the community, talks about community organising charities, like Citizens UK, having an important role in supporting civil society apart from the local city authority. The implication in both comments is that faith and religious belief and practice have an important role to play in how society works and that religious people in the community can and should be involved in the care and support of those around them.

Seeing the relationship between civil society organisations and individuals (both religious and non-religious), the power of the superdiverse city is the ability for people to draw on any number of different positions and storylines to better understand others, themselves, and their religious beliefs and values in relation to others. Shabina reflects on this, saying:

The benefit of the superdiverse context is that individuals are not limited by one way of doing things or seeing the world. Superdiversity creates a space where different ways of being can be understood as legitimate, and no one needs to be limited by a narrow understanding of themselves or their culture. Shabina takes the position that multiculturalism is not only about understanding and appreciating the cultures of others but seeing in others your own potential to be different. She positions the ‘next generations’ in particular as benefitting from the proximity of people living close together. The possibility is not only tolerance and peace between people with different identities but personal transformation and development.

Conclusion

Religious diversity in Birmingham and the demographic changes that the city has experienced have become an important part of the identity of people from the city. To be Brummie, as the participants said from different perspectives, is about embracing the differences among people and seeing the community around you as a part of your own identity. Certainly, racism, discrimination, and violence are a part of life in the city, and negative experiences, particularly for communities that have been historically marginalised, were a core part of the stories that people told. The storylines about the city, however, and about the experiences of living with people who are different from you, were largely positive, and people positioned themselves in storylines of working with others to bring about positive change. Moreover, the interactions with others, particularly with people who were perceived as not sharing the same beliefs as them, could be told in storylines of learning, empathy, and personal growth, not simply tolerance. The lives and experiences of others were resources that anyone could benefit from to better understand themselves and to grow as people, with new possibilities for new stories and identities to emerge in and around them.