Blog article Categorical Liminality: Managing Religious Ambiguity Online

This blog post examines why social media users discussing practices such as meditation retreats or incense burning avoid committing to fixed categories like ‘religion’. Rather than fully embracing or rejecting the term, they cultivate ambiguity, moving between labels such as ‘spirituality’, ‘culture’, and ‘metaphysics’. This article introduces the concept of categorical liminality to describe how users position themselves in the blurry and overlapping spaces between established identity categories, and map the user behaviours along a spectrum of reflexivity (from strategic cultivation to habitual reproduction).

Why do social media users discussing meditation retreats, fengshui, or incense burning in front of ancestral tablets resist categorical fixity? Not settling into ‘religious’ or rejecting it outright, they cultivate strategic ambiguity instead. We see Europeans alternating between ‘spiritual’, ‘wellness’ and ‘personal growth’, and Chinese users layering ‘metaphysics’, ‘cultural heritage’, and ‘national knowledge’ in ways that keep multiple categorical resources available. This isn’t semantic confusion; something more complex is at work.

Scholarship on digital religion examines how online platforms reshape religious expression (Campbell and Tsuria, 2022) and how individuals negotiate contested categories like ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ (Heelas & Woodhead, 2005). Trysnes and Synnes (2022) identify ‘secular frontstage’ behaviour, where young Muslims and Christians deliberately avoid religious self-presentation online to evade stigma. Research on boundary work in religious contexts shows how groups construct distinctive identities through symbolic distinctions (Yukich, 2010). However, these frameworks focus on category selection or avoidance instead of the nuanced boundary-work of murky spaces between categories.

I introduce the concept of categorical liminality to capture this phenomenon in which users position themselves at the ambiguous edges where identity categories blur and overlap. Rather than passively accepting imposed classifications or clearly aligning with fixed positions, users navigate unstable in-between spaces, such as those between ‘religion’ and adjacent domains like ‘spirituality’, ‘superstition’, or ‘science’. Categorical liminality refers to these unstable zones between established categories, which often carry conflicting ideological and cultural baggage.

To analyse how users maintain this positioning, I propose a spectrum of practices that vary in their degree of reflexivity, ranging from strategic cultivation to habitual reproduction. Strategic cultivation involves intentional discursive decisions to manage liminal positioning in response to specific contexts, audiences, and perceived risks. It enables users to control perception, avoid stigma, or enhance legitimacy. In contrast, habitual reproduction refers to unconscious, internalised practices shaped by cultural norms, platform feedback, and repeated interaction. These practices often involve distancing or affiliative gestures enacted without active reflection. Most categorical boundary work falls somewhere along this spectrum, combining elements of both strategic and habituated action.

Case Study: Daoist content and the variable use of ‘religion’ on Chinese social media

Posts involving Daoist content show complex categorical patterns, avoiding explicit zongjiao (religion) and daojiao(Daoist religion) terminology while layering ‘Daoist culture’, ‘youth metaphysics’, and ‘be a Daoist for 15 minutes’ in ways that maintain spiritual resonance. These posts often include forestalling tags like ‘believe in science, not superstition’ that pre-emptively deflect criticism while ironically functioning as search markers for the very content they disavow. In the comment sections, some joke about the contradictions and coded language knowingly, while others who encounter the content through algorithmic feeds express genuine confusion about the mixed messaging. Meanwhile, licensed religious organizations almost exclusively use zongjiao and daojiao in their materials, occasionally incorporating ‘traditional culture’ language. This pattern demonstrates categorical liminality management across three constraint levels:

• Institutional framework: China’s five-religion administrative framework, developed during 20^th-century modernisation, creates fixed categorical boundaries that poorly accommodate indigenous practices resistant to institutional religious models. The March 2022 regulation requiring an ‘Internet Religious Information Service License’ for online content concerning ‘religious doctrines, religious knowledge, religious culture, and religious activities’ intensifies this dilemma.
• Cultural associations: for many Chinese, ‘zongjiao’ connotes preaching (intrusive), irrationality (anti-scientific), and sectarianism (dangerous or outdated). These associations stem from the anti-superstition campaigns throughout 20^th century and the scientific rationalist education that cast zongjiao as backward and irrational. Indigenous practices like bamboo slips divination and bazi fate calculation thus find cultural refuge as wisdom traditions and ancestral knowledge.
• Digital governance: platform algorithms and online community standards create additional layers where users must navigate opaque and shifting boundaries, working across diverse, algorithmically-assembled audiences. Users complained about reduced visibility for content containing certain terminology or facing account reports for ‘publishing religious content without licensing’. Inconsistent platform standards make it necessary yet difficult to produce algorithmically legible content whilst avoiding moderation triggers. 

Faced with institutional, cultural, and digital constraints that offer no clean categorical solutions, users navigate these tensions through practices that exist on a spectrum of reflexivity. Comment section interactions reveal how these constraint levels operate dynamically, as creators must craft content that satisfies regulatory requirements, navigates cultural stigma, and functions across the diverse audiences that platform algorithms assemble.

Strategic cultivation represents the more reflexive end of this spectrum, manifesting through conscious exploitation of categorical tensions. Users deliberately invoke ‘cultural heritage protection’ to access institutional legitimacy while sidestepping licensing requirements. Phrases like ‘believe in science not superstition’ simultaneously claim rationalist credibility and function as coded signals for seekers of ‘possibly superstitious’ content. Digitally, hashtag layering (#TraditionalCulture #Metaphysics #DaoistStyle) and contradictory framings within single posts create content that appeals to a wibroader range of audience without potentially triggering filters. Platform search mechanisms transform defensive language into discovery tools, while algorithmic feeds bring together users at different stages of understanding these categorical games.

Habitual reproduction operates at the less reflexive end of the spectrum through social learning and algorithmic reinforcement. Comment sections become spaces where newcomers learn categorical strategies through joking, questioning, and gradual adoptionly ofadopting initially confusing patterns. Users develop automatic hashtag combinations (#TraditionalCulture #DaoistStyleYouth) rewarded by platform mechanisms and unconsciously adapt vocabulary to algorithmic preferences. What begins as strategic mimicry of successful posts becomes reflexive practice: users internalise these categorical patterns as natural linguistic habits, perpetuating the liminal positioning strategies across expanding networks of participants.

By introducing categorical liminality, I reorient analysis toward the dynamic work of users navigating unstable boundaries to access multiple symbolic and practical advantages. Liminality is not a mark of confusion but a mode of positioning with a spectrum of reflexivity, shaped by institutional, cultural, and algorithmic pressures. Treating liminality as a resource enables us to see the continuous effort involved in making meaning legible across fragmented digital publics, as well as how strategic behaviours gradually become embedded in everyday online practice.