When One Religion Isn’t Enough

In this book, Duane Bidwell provides a thoughtful exploration of folks he terms “spiritually fluid” and examines the various ways that people arrive at this stance and how they make sense of it. Religious multiplicity is “the experience of being shaped by, or maintaining bonds to, more than one spiritual or religious community at the same time” (1–2). The book is grounded in Bidwell’s own experiences as both Christian and Buddhist, and he incorporates stories from practitioners along the spectrum of religious multiplicity. Although he orients his argument around three key ways of being spirituality fluid—through choice, inheritance, or collaboration—Bidwell recognizes that these categories are more of a helpful heuristic than clear, natural domains. The book aims to analyze how people whose identities include more than one religious element challenge the tendency to think of religious traditions as distinct. Scholars of religion are familiar with the example of the “JuBu” (Jewish-Buddhist), or the common trope that Haiti is 100% Catholic and 100% Vodouist. Bidwell opens up this spectrum of multiplicity to include religious nones, “Spiritual but not Religious,” folks who identify strongly with one religion but incorporate the practices of another (e.g., a Christian who uses Zen meditation), and more. In so doing, he asks readers to be conscious of the ways in which the formation and practice of identities defy simple definition. He is largely successful in achieving this goal, but the book is less successful as a piece of ethnographic scholarship.

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