When One Religion Isn't Enough: The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People by Duane R. Bidwell (review)

One of my favorite stories, among the myriad engaging vignettes in Duane Bidwell's book about "how a person can claim or be claimed by two religions simultaneously," is about the first meeting with his Presbyterian ordination committee. Bidwell is describing his faith journey to the committee and writes, "I naively presented the Buddhist training and practice I had experienced as a gift for ministry, something to be welcomed by the church" (24). But to these guardians of the denomination, Bidwell's Buddhist training is received more as a threat than as a gift. Bidwell learns to "keep religious multiplicity in the background of the ordination process," relegating his Buddhist-Christian identity to intellectual curiosity. In light of this formative experience, I read Bidwell's earnest and pastorally sensitive text as a powerful coming out story.

A central and important claim is that multiple religious belonging is both a gift and a resource for individuals, communities, and traditions. Bidwell critiques denominational blind-spots and gate-keeping boundaries that try to erase or silence the presence of those with multiple religious belongings and invites his fellow spiritually fluid kinfolk to claim their place and lend their voice to the vital work of fostering greater mutual understanding.

"The experience of being shaped by, or maintaining bonds to, more than one spiritual or religious community at the same time," is a phenomenon that goes by many names (2). Dual belonging, spiritual hybridity, multiple religious belonging, multiple religious bonds, braided identities, and complex religious bonds are all used somewhat interchangeably in the book. Adding to this lexicon, Bidwell introduces the term, "spiritually fluid people," and writes in a footnote, "The term spiritually fluid grew from my engagement with gender theory, queer theory, and postmodern philosophy" (n. 4, 161).

Bidwell argues that being spiritually fluid is a neither a fad nor a small movement but a prevalent and persistent way of being religious. He goes so far as to assert, "From my perspective, most people of faith are spiritually fluid to one degree or another" (33). By the end of the book one gets the impression that being "religiously monogamous" is the anomaly. More pointedly, Bidwell writes, the increasing visibility of the spiritually fluid, "challenges the illusion of singular religious identities and the expectation of lifelong fidelity to one spiritual tradition" (33). While this is perhaps an intensification to make a wider point, as a life-long Christian who teaches both the history of Christian spirituality and interfaith studies I think it perhaps pushes the point a little too far.

Bidwell is at his best when he hones in on the dynamics of Christian-Buddhist dual belonging, territory he knows first-hand. Both his personal experiences (as an ordained Presbyterian minister and a practitioner of Theravada Buddhism) and his scholarly interests (he draws heavily on academics who are involved in or would be comfortable in the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies) reinforce this as his area of specialty.

Bidwell organizes the book to help readers think about the dynamics of what might lead one to become spiritually fluid. In three central chapters titled, "Choosing," "Receiving," and "Collaborating," Bidwell traces examples of multiple religious identities that are chosen through a conscious process of exploration, received through family inheritance, or that have emerged in response to a sense of invitation from the divine (which Bidwell calls Mystery).

A question that lingered as I was reading was how to characterize the distinctions and challenges of combining traditions with varied degrees of compatibility. In the US today, being Jewish-Christian or Muslim-Christian invokes a different set of historical, political, and theological questions than being Christian-Buddhist for example. Beyond these differences, being Protestant or Catholic, Reformed or Conservative, Sunni or Shia all introduce added layers of complexity. In addition, the implications of these differences depend greatly on whose theological vantage point is being assumed.

While these questions are beyond...