liminals

Stable nones, that is, people who report in both years that they have no religious affiliation, are, in fact, much less religious in their beliefs and values than liminals, though few of them are self-described atheists or agnostics.

American Grace Robert D. Putnam 2010

Our discovery of liminals is fully consistent with a report from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life that aside from weddings, funerals, and trips 24 percent of all Americans regularly or occasionally attend services of faiths other than their own.6 In the real world, entirely apart from genuine conversion or apostasy, American religious identities are fuzzy around the edges.

American Grace Robert D. Putnam 2010

Nearly 80 percent of parents were assigned to the same religious tradition both times, and the vast majority of exceptions were exactly analogous to the liminals we discovered among our respondents themselves—that is, parents who were described as a “something” in one wave of the panel survey and as a “none” in the other wave.

American Grace Robert D. Putnam 2010

Stable nones are more common in younger cohorts, which is consistent with the hypothesis that they and not the liminals account for most of the post-1990 rise in nones, though more research will be required to confirm this hypothesis.

American Grace Robert D. Putnam 2010

We call them “liminals,” since they seem to stand at the edge of some religious tradition, unsure whether to identify with that tradition or not.

American Grace Robert D. Putnam 2010

These religious liminals are distributed around each of the major religious traditions in roughly the same proportion, so that each tradition and each denomination seems to be surrounded by a penumbra of roughly 10 percent who are liminal members, neither entirely in nor entirely out.

American Grace Robert D. Putnam 2010

Liminals, especially young liminals, should represent an inviting target for religious entrepreneurs.

American Grace Robert D. Putnam 2010

We have come to call these people, who seem to be standing on the threshold of a religious tradition, betwixt and between, “liminals,” from the Latin word for “threshold.”

American Grace Robert D. Putnam 2010

I no longer get very wrought up over the liminals, myself, except to be annoyed by people who seem to assume that feature films are the ultimate stage of novelistic creation, thereby relegating the book to the status of dull gray chrysalis.

Matthew Yglesias » Waiting for the Movie 2007

Don't know whether you saw Paul McKenna demonstrating persistent hints, sub liminals, repetition etc as a way to manipulate?

Manchester Evening News: In Pocket of NO Campaign? 2008