Additive Religious Habitus Misrecognized: A Critique of Multiple Religious Belonging, Believing, and Behavior

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship proposes multiple religious belonging, believing, and behaving (MRB) as a framework for understanding religious complexity in East Asia and beyond. This article argues that MRB fails to capture additive religious habitus, the predominant form of hybrid religiosity in the Han Chinese culture, because the two represent different categorical practices in the Bourdieusian sense. MRB describes a recent and minority pattern among monotheistic believers who hold orthodox belief in God while also engaging non‐monotheistic faiths, and it presupposes that bounded identity is constitutive of being a believer. Additive religious habitus, by contrast, neither monopolizes deities nor prioritizes identity among lay believers. The same deity, such as Guanyin, is worshipped as Buddhist, Daoist, and folk simultaneously without contradiction. Using Han Chinese subsamples from Pew's 2023 East Asian Societies Survey in Taiwan and Hong Kong, latent class analysis reveals a striking asymmetry: most self‐identified Christians cluster into exclusive classes aligned with orthodox belief and practice, with only a small group crossing identity boundaries, whereas non‐Christians distribute across multiple classes regardless of self‐label. The article cautions against the Christocentric tendency of importing identity‐based religious categories into non‐Western contexts where they were never normative.