Who Relates to the Divine as Feminine? Transnational Consensus and Outliers Among Young Adults

A Q-analysis generally favors large inter-group differences, whereas consensual statements that are shared by most participants tend to receive less attention, as do unusual views, which characterize small groups of participants. In this chapter, we start by exploring consensus statements and offer some thoughts on their meaning. We then consider views that are outside of the individual horizons of most participants. We identified these views through statements towards which most of the samples tended to be indifferent or neutral. Against the backdrop of these transnational statement preferences, we proceed to discuss irrelevant statements through the lens of “religious outliers”; individuals for whom the statements in question were, in fact, highly relevant and important. We then attempt to characterize these “types” through sets of statements, which were not part of any national prototype, and analyze the subjectivities of those who endorse them, by presenting holistic analyses of their interview narratives. Jointly, these analyses help us assess to what extent we can set aside the idea of national-cultural boundaries in favor of other levels of FQS statement analysis-the transnational and the idiosyncratic.