Belonging Without Singularity: Multiple Religious Belonging as Resistance to the Racial

This paper argues that multiple religious belonging (MRB) is not merely a private spiritual choice but a politically charged practice that disrupts the racialized and Christian-supremacist boundary work of modern “religion.” Drawing on Charles Mills’s concept of the racial contract, I show how norms of singular loyalty, purity, and institutional legitimacy police who may “belong” within spiritual communities and the academy. Through the case of Ann Holmes Redding and broader MRB discourse, I frame MRB as belonging as resistance opening space for truth-telling, critique, and solidarities beyond inherited exclusions.