Faith, Doubt, and Context: How the Lifecourse Shapes the Space Between Religious and Secular Worldviews

Based on in-depth interviews with middle and older-aged participants, we examine how elements of the life course shape liminal spaces between religious and secular worldviews. Combining traditional qualitative methods with the large language model (LLM) AI program ChatGPT4, we generated a thematic analysis examining the patterns of socialization, stressors, turning points, and other transitions and conditions that shaped participants’ worldviews at critical junctures in their lives. We show how changing beliefs are motivated by social forces, and that, whether they are mostly religious or secular-identified, these participants represent a category of individuals who occupy liminal spaces, negotiating ambiguous values and commitments as they work out who they are and what they believe. In making our argument, we identify and analyze three types of “religio-secular liminals” to capture our observations of how interviewees navigated life course events, arguing that the tensions in their stated beliefs and identities—and the stories they build from them—are themselves an important source of meaning and spirituality.