Religio‐Racial Lines, Intimate Ties: Christian–Muslim Couples, Birth Rituals, and the Bounds of Belonging

ABSTRACT Building on scholarship that conceptualizes race and religion as co‐constitutive forces within a “race‐religion constellation,” this article explores how this entanglement—profoundly infused and structured by secularity—is lived and negotiated in everyday life. It addresses this vital area of inquiry by turning to the intimate sphere, exploring how (secular) Christian–Muslim couples in the Netherlands navigate birth rituals, specifically baptism and circumcision, as key sites where broader negotiations of social boundaries and normativity unfold within the intersecting frameworks of religion, race, and secularity. Through an analysis of couples’ discursive reflections on these birth rituals, the study shows how a Protestant‐secular logic operates as a powerful normative framework, shaping what is deemed “proper” religion and thereby constituting racialized practices as its “other.” Ultimately, the article demonstrates how couples’ deliberations over birth rituals constitute a crucial domain of micro‐political contestation, where the terms of belonging and the hegemonic social orders they uphold are simultaneously enacted and unsettled.