Negotiating individual and social religious and worldview identities in consecutive autobiographical interviews on faith development

This paper unfolds the concept of narrative identity with a focus on religion and worldview. Drawing on concepts like “master narratives”, “deep stories” and “cultural containers”, we capture how the social is understood and used in individual autobiographical reconstructions and fed back into social discourse, as people live their lives in changing times and places. Arguing for an interdisciplinary perspective, we take a closer look at how individual biographies are understood and negotiated in changing social and historical contexts. Our approach is demonstrated with examples of such negotiations based on Faith Development Interviews from Germany. We analyse interviews with persons of different generations, interviewed repeatedly and at different points in their lives. Thus, we offer a longitudinal perspective on what they draw on to give their lives meaning when looking back, from different points in their lives, on different historical times and political varieties of “Germany”.