Gendering Conceptualizations of Citizenship: How do Men of Faith understand Lived Citizenship? 

Arguing that citizenship is highly gendered and unequal, feminist scholars have suggested that citizenship is not limited to individuals’ status, rights and duties. Instead, they propose a broader understanding of citizenship as lived practice, and foreground aspects such as identity, participation and belonging in empirical studies of women’s lived citizenship. At the same time, feminist and other scholars are increasingly discussing links between religion, gender and citizenship. So far, however, existing literature has mainly focused on women’s inclusion or exclusion from citizenship practices within their own religious communities or from the wider society in which they live. If we accept that men have an important role to play in advancing gender equality, then we also need to study religious men’s views on citizenship, religion and gender equality. This paper addresses the current research gap on men, masculinities, citizenship and religion. It does so by examining how heterosexual Christian men talk about and understand their own faith, masculinities and citizenship practice. The paper discusses how ‘ordinary’ middle-class Anglican men in the United Kingdom live and negotiate their own religious and masculine identities, their thoughts on and experiences of citizenship, and how they view the relationship between their own religion and calls for gender equality.