Defending Dignity with/As God: Homeless Religious Practices When Interacting with Religious Groups

Homeless individuals have been described as having no “true” religion whether or not they experience high-intensity religious encounters. To “rediscover” their faiths, the author proposes a believer-centered perspective that emphasizes religious practices and is based on the critiques of Durkheimian and Weberian definition of religion. Two ethnographic examples are considered: Protestant worship gatherings and folk-belief parades participated by Taiwan's homeless individuals. A discussion is offered on ways that religious authorities use diverse strategies within these activities to create “ideal” homeless participants, imposing symbolic violence involving discriminatory practices based on the perceived personal capabilities and morality of the homeless. Furthermore, I illustrate how the homeless respond via “co-operation without consensus,” in religious practices imbued with their own meanings, thereby transforming a give-and-take relationship into one of reciprocity that subverts the status of the poor. Homeless individuals may use a combination of Chinese wuxia novels, glove puppetry, and religious traditions to create a detailed identity for a charismatic “hidden dragon” that descends to this world to deliver salvation. More than just resistance against symbolic violence, what they’ve done display an agency in which the homeless pursue equal status by/as gods.