-
Title
-
Lived Religion
-
Author
-
Ammerman, Nancy T.
-
Research Area
-
Social Institutions
-
Topic
-
Religious Institutions
-
Abstract
-
Research on “lived religion” focuses on the everyday practices of ordinary people, in contrast to the study of official texts, organizations, and experts. It includes attention to rituals and stories and spiritual experiences that may draw on official religious traditions, but may also extend beyond them. Lived religion is closely related to “popular religion”, but is a more encompassing category. As with the study of popular religion, the focus is on ordinary people and often includes festivals and shrines and healing practices that may happen without the approval of religious authorities. Lived religion research pays special attention to the lives of women, of populations of color, and of people in the Global South. Both approved traditional practices and new innovations may be “lived”.
-
Related Essays
-
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
-
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and Wendy Cadge
-
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin N. Laland and Michael O'Brien
-
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
-
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
-
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
-
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph O. Baker
-
Identifier
-
etrds0207
-
extracted text
-
Lived Religion
NANCY T. AMMERMAN
Abstract
Research on “lived religion” focuses on the everyday practices of ordinary people, in
contrast to the study of official texts, organizations, and experts. It includes attention
to rituals and stories and spiritual experiences that may draw on official religious
traditions, but may also extend beyond them. Lived religion is closely related to
“popular religion”, but is a more encompassing category. As with the study of popular religion, the focus is on ordinary people and often includes festivals and shrines
and healing practices that may happen without the approval of religious authorities.
Lived religion research pays special attention to the lives of women, of populations
of color, and of people in the Global South. Both approved traditional practices and
new innovations may be “lived”.
Being “lived” points especially to the material, embodied aspects of religion as they
occur in everyday life. The study of lived religion includes attention to how and
what people eat, how they dress, how they deal with birth and death and sexuality
and nature, even how they modify hair and body through tattoos or dreadlocks,
for instance. The study of lived religion includes everyday sacralized spaces and
the physical and artistic things people do together, such as singing, dancing, and
other folk or community traditions that enact a spiritual sense of solidarity and
transcendence.
The focus on lived religion has enriched and complicated the efforts of social scientists to understand the place and role of religion in society.
INTRODUCTION
Social scientists studying religion have typically defined their object of
study in terms of major religious traditions, beliefs, and organizations.
What does Buddhism or Christianity teach, and what difference does that
make in the world? Research questions have often been framed in terms
of how beliefs affect behavior or how the membership of one group is
different from the membership of another. Research on “lived religion”
turns the focus from official organizations and membership to everyday
practice and from the experts who decide on official theology and doctrine
to the ordinary people whose everyday lives may include rituals and stories
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
and spiritual experiences that draw on those traditions, but may extend
beyond them.
Lived religion is closely related to “popular religion”, which is usually
taken to mean the religion of the ordinary people that happens beyond the
bounds and often without the approval of religious authorities. Festivals
and shrines, ritual healing practices and stories of miracles, for instance,
may be very common in a society, but may only partially be endorsed by the
religious organizations in that society. Similarly, lived religion happens on
the margins between orthodox prescriptions and innovative experiences, but
lived religion is a more encompassing category. Both approved traditional
practices and new innovations may be “lived”.
Being “lived” points especially to the material, embodied aspects of religion
as they occur in everyday life. The study of lived religion includes attention to how and what people eat, how they dress, how they deal with birth
and death and sexuality and nature, even how they modify hair and body
through tattoos or dreadlocks. Lived religion may include the spaces people
inhabit, as well—the construction of shrines in homes or in public places, for
instance. And it includes the physical and artistic things people do together,
such as singing, dancing, and other folk or community traditions that enact
a spiritual sense of solidarity and transcendence. Some of these rituals and
traditions may be widely recognized as religious and named as such, but
research on lived religion also includes activities that might not immediately
be seen as spiritual or religious by outsiders. All of the expressions of connection to spiritual life are included in the study of lived religion.
This turn toward everyday and material expressions of religion also means
that the study of lived religion often includes populations that are neglected
in many other social science approaches to religion. The lives of women, of
populations of color, and of people in the Global South are more often given
attention when the research frame is lived religion. This work has enriched
and complicated the efforts of social scientists to understand the place and
role of religion in society.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The term “lived religion” began to gain widespread use in the 1990s, with
the publication of a collection of essays by social historians and sociologists,
edited by David Hall, a Harvard historian. While sociologist Meredith
McGuire’s book, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life, was not
published until 2008, she and others in sociology had been contributing,
since the 1980s, important research on healing rituals and devotions to
saints, family life and gender, immigrant religion, and new religious movements. This research, as is typical for research on lived religion, relied on
Lived Religion
3
qualitative methods of interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, producing
rich analytical descriptions of the ways in which religious practice was
organized and experienced in everyday life. It is work that has spanned
disciplines, with some of the most important contributions coming from
religious studies and social historians.
Questions of how religion is lived were not, of course, alien to the concerns
of early sociologists, although they were more likely to rely on the reports of
historians and anthropologists than to gather data themselves. Max Weber’s
early twentieth century studies of the great world religions focused on the
distinctive ideas of those religious systems, but he was also interested in
their social psychology and ethos, that is, the patterns of life they engendered. The “Protestant Ethic” is not so much Calvinist beliefs about salvation as the everyday habits of discipline and humility those beliefs encouraged. Emile Durkheim’s focus was on social solidarity, and he pointed in
vivid detail to the lived experience of ritual participation—what he called
“collective effervescence”. Writing at about the same time, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman drew a connection between gender and different forms of religion.
The lived religion of women, she argued, was built on experiences of birth
and growth, while the lived religion of men was built on experiences of struggle, conflict, and death. These early theorists saw religion as a central social
reality and built their theories on what they understood about lived experiences.
For much of the twentieth century those lived religious realities largely disappeared from sociological view, often because sociologists assumed that
they were realities more suited to a pre-modern or “primitive” world than
to the modern, scientific, cosmopolitan world academics saw triumphing
around them. Secularization theories predicted that religion would become
a remote and forgotten abstraction. When religion made its way into social
scientific research during this period, it was likely to be the sum total of a few
survey measures. Being Protestant, Catholic, or Jew; how often one attended
services; whether one believed in hell or the literal truth of the Bible—as these
survey numbers went up and down, “religion” was said to be appearing and
disappearing, gaining, and losing influence in society.
It was against that backdrop that a worldwide resurgence (or rediscovery)
of religious vitality emerged in the 1960s and beyond. Beginning with the
spate of new religious movements that accompanied the counterculture and
continuing through the Islamic revolutions and the rise of the American
Christian Right, religion again entered social scientific discourse. A more
global and transnational society introduced new populations and new religious traditions into the questions being studied, and the vitality of religious
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
communities and practices challenged existing theories of religion and society. This was the setting into which research on lived religion began to make
its place in the field, a setting that continues to challenge social scientists.
THE CUTTING EDGES OF RESEARCH
The theoretical frontiers of work on lived religion are largely located in
the domain of cultural sociology. Students of lived religion are utilizing the
tools of cultural studies to ask how religion is produced and used in the
social world. That is, if people interact with each other and with the world
in ways that include sacred language, objects, practices, and stories, how are
those sacred cultural objects created? What places and organizations serve
as arenas for the production and legitimation of different forms of lived
religion? How are cultural objects labeled and recognized as religious? What
do they allow people to do (or prevent them from doing)? If, for example,
there is a cultural category called “gay evangelical”, what ideological work
by whom makes such a category possible? What circles of conversation
and social spaces allow this category to take on a reality that gives people
patterns to live with? What material objects, styles of clothing, or ways of
moving and singing might give this particular lived religion its tangible
form? What imaginations about the self and identity are therefore possible?
And what are the forms of cultural power or suppression that may limit the
expression of this lived religion?
That last question makes clear that explorations of lived religion often take
up the issue of power and empowerment. Students of social movements
have pointed to the power of shared religious symbols and rituals to
mobilize collective action. At the individual level, religious practices of
everyday life may provide comfort and escape, but they may also provide
an alternative view of the world or assurance of supernatural power at
one’s disposal. Studies of conservative religions have noted the ability of
women to transform ideologies of submission into everyday practices of
household leadership. Women in many traditions express their power in
various forms of life-giving. The religion that is lived may be one in which
women wield considerable power to heal or to provide religious guidance,
even if men retain the power of public leadership. The question of power in
lived religion is one fraught with ambiguity.
The empirical frontiers of lived religion research are both geographic
and institutional. It has been clear from the beginning that the study of
lived religion would push social scientists to look beyond congregations
and denominations, temples and shrines. Still shaped by modernization
paradigms, however, much early work on lived religion stayed within
the “private” domains of person and household. Lived religion was what
Lived Religion
5
people did at home or in other private places in their lives. More recently,
that structuralist dichotomy has been challenged. That is, the notion that the
social world is organized into neatly separate functional compartments has
become less tenable; and that signals a challenge to look for lived religion
in workplaces and markets, hospitals and neighborhoods as much as in
congregations and households.
The best of this work examines the complicated social action in such places.
At the same time that ordinary work or consumption is happening, it may be
intertwined with sacred meanings or rituals. People keep religious objects on
their desk, pray with their coworkers, and sometimes chafe at the way they
are made into an outsider by the common religious culture everyone else
seems to share. That is, the public world of work and civic life is a place in
which religion is lived. Religious goods themselves are bought and sold in
the capitalist marketplace, and spiritual therapies may operate in conjunction with apparently secular medical environments. The religion people live
everyday weaves in and out of conversations with friends and family, as well
as with the language and symbols of public rituals.
Innovative work on lived religion is also taking the study of religion well
outside the bounds of the North America and Europe. As the academic
world has become more globally connected, social scientists from around
the world are able to make their work accessible to each other, and the
study of lived religion now has contributions from Venezuela to Ghana,
from China to South Africa, and in borderlands and along migration routes
on every continent. Indigenous practices and hybrid expressions abound,
as does attention to lived expressions of the major world religious. Young
Chinese finding new ways to be Buddhist and young gang members in
Central America finding their way into evangelicalism are joined in the
chronicles of lived religion by migrants building makeshift shrines along the
borders they are crossing. Each society provides its own cultural building
materials for religious expression, but global media increasingly make
religious symbols and practices available to people far from the heartlands
where those traditions may have originated. People looking for a new
meditation technique or possible spiritual pilgrimage can google their way
to new forms of lived religion.
The mixing and hybridity of lived religion as it crosses borders is also
producing new angles of vision on the religions found in North America and Europe. Haitian Vodou is being practiced in New York, Muslim
women are deciding to veil in European cities, secular youth are going
on eco-pilgrimages that include Norwegian cathedrals on the route, and
African Christians are sending missionaries to North America. Research on
lived religion is encompassing a broad array of religious populations and
traditions, and not just by traveling to the Global South.
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The wide diversity of locations and traditions being studied is both an important step forward and a major challenge for the future. It would clearly be a
mistake to move too quickly to any sort of general theorizing, but it would
also be a mistake to proceed as if all the individual studies might not inform
each other. In part, this is simply a matter of each researcher doing her or his
homework in reading the existing literature, but with work scattered across
traditions, continents, and disciplines it is all too easy to miss important contributions. Common keywords for lived religion and its components and
dimensions would assist future researchers as they attempt to build a comprehensible body of knowledge.
The vast majority of lived religion research to date has employed ethnographic methods, now often enhanced by methods that allow analysis of
visual and material culture. Shared methods have made possible bridges
among the various disciplines that use them—social history, anthropology,
religious studies, sociology, and even occasional psychologists. Each discipline brings slightly different analytical questions to the data, but each seeks
to ground an understanding of the religious social world in observations of
living persons and communities along with their texts and artifacts. As both
the methods and the disciplines expand, the study of lived religion will be
enriched, but this too poses challenges. Here, too, a common vocabulary that
enables searching relevant literature will alert researchers to both the questions and the research methods that have informed this growing body of
knowledge.
Among the social sciences, political science and economics have rarely
been the home for students of lived religion, and that points to another of
the critical challenges for the future. The lingering effects of secularization
theories and structuralist understandings of society remain. Asking about
the politics or economics of lived religion—or the lived religion of politics
and economics—remains an uncommon proposition. Conceptualizing and
studying the presence of religious practice in these domains of social life
is a task barely begun, as are studies informed by political or economic
perspectives on what people are doing as they live their everyday religious
lives.
Because both political science and economics are so driven by survey
data and quantitative analysis, bridges to research on lived religion may
depend on the eventual development of quantifiable measures; and that, in
turn, is likely to depend on systematic comparative work. As the body of
knowledge grows, along with a body of common keywords and concepts,
it may be possible to develop sensible ways to ask people across societies
about how religion is a part of their everyday life. At this point, the study of
Lived Religion
7
lived religion is probably still too much in its youth to venture that far. It is
also inherently grounded in the detail and diversity only ethnographic work
can fully apprehend. Still, as something that permeates and often structures
social life, lived religion will need to take its place on the standardized
surveys along with politics and consumption and household status. A great
deal has been learned over the past three decades, but there is a great deal yet
to do.
FURTHER READING
Ammerman, N. T. (2013). Sacred stories, spiritual tribes: Finding religion in everyday life.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Bender, C., Cadge, W., Levitt, P., & Smilde, D. A. (Eds.) (2012). Religion on the edge:
De-centering and re-centering the sociology of religion. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Cadge, W. (2013). Paging God: Religion in the halls of medicine. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Hall, D. (Ed.) (1997). Lived religion in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
McGuire, M. B. (2008). Lived religion: Faith and practice in everyday life. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
Vasquez, M. A. (2010). More than belief: A materialist theory of religion. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
LINKS
Rich web resources on religion that give ample attention to various aspects
of lived religion (and include many articles by scholars) are
http://www.patheos.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/religion
http://www.religiondispatches.org/
http://www.nycreligion.info/
NANCY T. AMMERMAN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Nancy T. Ammerman has been on the faculty at Boston University since 2003,
having previously taught at Emory University and at Hartford Seminary. She
has done extensive research on American congregations and on conservative
religious movements, publishing award-winning books that examine each of
those subjects. Her most recent research explores whether and how religious
belief and action are present in the stories people tell about their everyday
lives.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
RELATED ESSAYS
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker
-
Lived Religion
NANCY T. AMMERMAN
Abstract
Research on “lived religion” focuses on the everyday practices of ordinary people, in
contrast to the study of official texts, organizations, and experts. It includes attention
to rituals and stories and spiritual experiences that may draw on official religious
traditions, but may also extend beyond them. Lived religion is closely related to
“popular religion”, but is a more encompassing category. As with the study of popular religion, the focus is on ordinary people and often includes festivals and shrines
and healing practices that may happen without the approval of religious authorities.
Lived religion research pays special attention to the lives of women, of populations
of color, and of people in the Global South. Both approved traditional practices and
new innovations may be “lived”.
Being “lived” points especially to the material, embodied aspects of religion as they
occur in everyday life. The study of lived religion includes attention to how and
what people eat, how they dress, how they deal with birth and death and sexuality
and nature, even how they modify hair and body through tattoos or dreadlocks,
for instance. The study of lived religion includes everyday sacralized spaces and
the physical and artistic things people do together, such as singing, dancing, and
other folk or community traditions that enact a spiritual sense of solidarity and
transcendence.
The focus on lived religion has enriched and complicated the efforts of social scientists to understand the place and role of religion in society.
INTRODUCTION
Social scientists studying religion have typically defined their object of
study in terms of major religious traditions, beliefs, and organizations.
What does Buddhism or Christianity teach, and what difference does that
make in the world? Research questions have often been framed in terms
of how beliefs affect behavior or how the membership of one group is
different from the membership of another. Research on “lived religion”
turns the focus from official organizations and membership to everyday
practice and from the experts who decide on official theology and doctrine
to the ordinary people whose everyday lives may include rituals and stories
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
and spiritual experiences that draw on those traditions, but may extend
beyond them.
Lived religion is closely related to “popular religion”, which is usually
taken to mean the religion of the ordinary people that happens beyond the
bounds and often without the approval of religious authorities. Festivals
and shrines, ritual healing practices and stories of miracles, for instance,
may be very common in a society, but may only partially be endorsed by the
religious organizations in that society. Similarly, lived religion happens on
the margins between orthodox prescriptions and innovative experiences, but
lived religion is a more encompassing category. Both approved traditional
practices and new innovations may be “lived”.
Being “lived” points especially to the material, embodied aspects of religion
as they occur in everyday life. The study of lived religion includes attention to how and what people eat, how they dress, how they deal with birth
and death and sexuality and nature, even how they modify hair and body
through tattoos or dreadlocks. Lived religion may include the spaces people
inhabit, as well—the construction of shrines in homes or in public places, for
instance. And it includes the physical and artistic things people do together,
such as singing, dancing, and other folk or community traditions that enact
a spiritual sense of solidarity and transcendence. Some of these rituals and
traditions may be widely recognized as religious and named as such, but
research on lived religion also includes activities that might not immediately
be seen as spiritual or religious by outsiders. All of the expressions of connection to spiritual life are included in the study of lived religion.
This turn toward everyday and material expressions of religion also means
that the study of lived religion often includes populations that are neglected
in many other social science approaches to religion. The lives of women, of
populations of color, and of people in the Global South are more often given
attention when the research frame is lived religion. This work has enriched
and complicated the efforts of social scientists to understand the place and
role of religion in society.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The term “lived religion” began to gain widespread use in the 1990s, with
the publication of a collection of essays by social historians and sociologists,
edited by David Hall, a Harvard historian. While sociologist Meredith
McGuire’s book, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life, was not
published until 2008, she and others in sociology had been contributing,
since the 1980s, important research on healing rituals and devotions to
saints, family life and gender, immigrant religion, and new religious movements. This research, as is typical for research on lived religion, relied on
Lived Religion
3
qualitative methods of interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, producing
rich analytical descriptions of the ways in which religious practice was
organized and experienced in everyday life. It is work that has spanned
disciplines, with some of the most important contributions coming from
religious studies and social historians.
Questions of how religion is lived were not, of course, alien to the concerns
of early sociologists, although they were more likely to rely on the reports of
historians and anthropologists than to gather data themselves. Max Weber’s
early twentieth century studies of the great world religions focused on the
distinctive ideas of those religious systems, but he was also interested in
their social psychology and ethos, that is, the patterns of life they engendered. The “Protestant Ethic” is not so much Calvinist beliefs about salvation as the everyday habits of discipline and humility those beliefs encouraged. Emile Durkheim’s focus was on social solidarity, and he pointed in
vivid detail to the lived experience of ritual participation—what he called
“collective effervescence”. Writing at about the same time, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman drew a connection between gender and different forms of religion.
The lived religion of women, she argued, was built on experiences of birth
and growth, while the lived religion of men was built on experiences of struggle, conflict, and death. These early theorists saw religion as a central social
reality and built their theories on what they understood about lived experiences.
For much of the twentieth century those lived religious realities largely disappeared from sociological view, often because sociologists assumed that
they were realities more suited to a pre-modern or “primitive” world than
to the modern, scientific, cosmopolitan world academics saw triumphing
around them. Secularization theories predicted that religion would become
a remote and forgotten abstraction. When religion made its way into social
scientific research during this period, it was likely to be the sum total of a few
survey measures. Being Protestant, Catholic, or Jew; how often one attended
services; whether one believed in hell or the literal truth of the Bible—as these
survey numbers went up and down, “religion” was said to be appearing and
disappearing, gaining, and losing influence in society.
It was against that backdrop that a worldwide resurgence (or rediscovery)
of religious vitality emerged in the 1960s and beyond. Beginning with the
spate of new religious movements that accompanied the counterculture and
continuing through the Islamic revolutions and the rise of the American
Christian Right, religion again entered social scientific discourse. A more
global and transnational society introduced new populations and new religious traditions into the questions being studied, and the vitality of religious
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
communities and practices challenged existing theories of religion and society. This was the setting into which research on lived religion began to make
its place in the field, a setting that continues to challenge social scientists.
THE CUTTING EDGES OF RESEARCH
The theoretical frontiers of work on lived religion are largely located in
the domain of cultural sociology. Students of lived religion are utilizing the
tools of cultural studies to ask how religion is produced and used in the
social world. That is, if people interact with each other and with the world
in ways that include sacred language, objects, practices, and stories, how are
those sacred cultural objects created? What places and organizations serve
as arenas for the production and legitimation of different forms of lived
religion? How are cultural objects labeled and recognized as religious? What
do they allow people to do (or prevent them from doing)? If, for example,
there is a cultural category called “gay evangelical”, what ideological work
by whom makes such a category possible? What circles of conversation
and social spaces allow this category to take on a reality that gives people
patterns to live with? What material objects, styles of clothing, or ways of
moving and singing might give this particular lived religion its tangible
form? What imaginations about the self and identity are therefore possible?
And what are the forms of cultural power or suppression that may limit the
expression of this lived religion?
That last question makes clear that explorations of lived religion often take
up the issue of power and empowerment. Students of social movements
have pointed to the power of shared religious symbols and rituals to
mobilize collective action. At the individual level, religious practices of
everyday life may provide comfort and escape, but they may also provide
an alternative view of the world or assurance of supernatural power at
one’s disposal. Studies of conservative religions have noted the ability of
women to transform ideologies of submission into everyday practices of
household leadership. Women in many traditions express their power in
various forms of life-giving. The religion that is lived may be one in which
women wield considerable power to heal or to provide religious guidance,
even if men retain the power of public leadership. The question of power in
lived religion is one fraught with ambiguity.
The empirical frontiers of lived religion research are both geographic
and institutional. It has been clear from the beginning that the study of
lived religion would push social scientists to look beyond congregations
and denominations, temples and shrines. Still shaped by modernization
paradigms, however, much early work on lived religion stayed within
the “private” domains of person and household. Lived religion was what
Lived Religion
5
people did at home or in other private places in their lives. More recently,
that structuralist dichotomy has been challenged. That is, the notion that the
social world is organized into neatly separate functional compartments has
become less tenable; and that signals a challenge to look for lived religion
in workplaces and markets, hospitals and neighborhoods as much as in
congregations and households.
The best of this work examines the complicated social action in such places.
At the same time that ordinary work or consumption is happening, it may be
intertwined with sacred meanings or rituals. People keep religious objects on
their desk, pray with their coworkers, and sometimes chafe at the way they
are made into an outsider by the common religious culture everyone else
seems to share. That is, the public world of work and civic life is a place in
which religion is lived. Religious goods themselves are bought and sold in
the capitalist marketplace, and spiritual therapies may operate in conjunction with apparently secular medical environments. The religion people live
everyday weaves in and out of conversations with friends and family, as well
as with the language and symbols of public rituals.
Innovative work on lived religion is also taking the study of religion well
outside the bounds of the North America and Europe. As the academic
world has become more globally connected, social scientists from around
the world are able to make their work accessible to each other, and the
study of lived religion now has contributions from Venezuela to Ghana,
from China to South Africa, and in borderlands and along migration routes
on every continent. Indigenous practices and hybrid expressions abound,
as does attention to lived expressions of the major world religious. Young
Chinese finding new ways to be Buddhist and young gang members in
Central America finding their way into evangelicalism are joined in the
chronicles of lived religion by migrants building makeshift shrines along the
borders they are crossing. Each society provides its own cultural building
materials for religious expression, but global media increasingly make
religious symbols and practices available to people far from the heartlands
where those traditions may have originated. People looking for a new
meditation technique or possible spiritual pilgrimage can google their way
to new forms of lived religion.
The mixing and hybridity of lived religion as it crosses borders is also
producing new angles of vision on the religions found in North America and Europe. Haitian Vodou is being practiced in New York, Muslim
women are deciding to veil in European cities, secular youth are going
on eco-pilgrimages that include Norwegian cathedrals on the route, and
African Christians are sending missionaries to North America. Research on
lived religion is encompassing a broad array of religious populations and
traditions, and not just by traveling to the Global South.
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The wide diversity of locations and traditions being studied is both an important step forward and a major challenge for the future. It would clearly be a
mistake to move too quickly to any sort of general theorizing, but it would
also be a mistake to proceed as if all the individual studies might not inform
each other. In part, this is simply a matter of each researcher doing her or his
homework in reading the existing literature, but with work scattered across
traditions, continents, and disciplines it is all too easy to miss important contributions. Common keywords for lived religion and its components and
dimensions would assist future researchers as they attempt to build a comprehensible body of knowledge.
The vast majority of lived religion research to date has employed ethnographic methods, now often enhanced by methods that allow analysis of
visual and material culture. Shared methods have made possible bridges
among the various disciplines that use them—social history, anthropology,
religious studies, sociology, and even occasional psychologists. Each discipline brings slightly different analytical questions to the data, but each seeks
to ground an understanding of the religious social world in observations of
living persons and communities along with their texts and artifacts. As both
the methods and the disciplines expand, the study of lived religion will be
enriched, but this too poses challenges. Here, too, a common vocabulary that
enables searching relevant literature will alert researchers to both the questions and the research methods that have informed this growing body of
knowledge.
Among the social sciences, political science and economics have rarely
been the home for students of lived religion, and that points to another of
the critical challenges for the future. The lingering effects of secularization
theories and structuralist understandings of society remain. Asking about
the politics or economics of lived religion—or the lived religion of politics
and economics—remains an uncommon proposition. Conceptualizing and
studying the presence of religious practice in these domains of social life
is a task barely begun, as are studies informed by political or economic
perspectives on what people are doing as they live their everyday religious
lives.
Because both political science and economics are so driven by survey
data and quantitative analysis, bridges to research on lived religion may
depend on the eventual development of quantifiable measures; and that, in
turn, is likely to depend on systematic comparative work. As the body of
knowledge grows, along with a body of common keywords and concepts,
it may be possible to develop sensible ways to ask people across societies
about how religion is a part of their everyday life. At this point, the study of
Lived Religion
7
lived religion is probably still too much in its youth to venture that far. It is
also inherently grounded in the detail and diversity only ethnographic work
can fully apprehend. Still, as something that permeates and often structures
social life, lived religion will need to take its place on the standardized
surveys along with politics and consumption and household status. A great
deal has been learned over the past three decades, but there is a great deal yet
to do.
FURTHER READING
Ammerman, N. T. (2013). Sacred stories, spiritual tribes: Finding religion in everyday life.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Bender, C., Cadge, W., Levitt, P., & Smilde, D. A. (Eds.) (2012). Religion on the edge:
De-centering and re-centering the sociology of religion. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Cadge, W. (2013). Paging God: Religion in the halls of medicine. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Hall, D. (Ed.) (1997). Lived religion in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
McGuire, M. B. (2008). Lived religion: Faith and practice in everyday life. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
Vasquez, M. A. (2010). More than belief: A materialist theory of religion. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
LINKS
Rich web resources on religion that give ample attention to various aspects
of lived religion (and include many articles by scholars) are
http://www.patheos.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/religion
http://www.religiondispatches.org/
http://www.nycreligion.info/
NANCY T. AMMERMAN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Nancy T. Ammerman has been on the faculty at Boston University since 2003,
having previously taught at Emory University and at Hartford Seminary. She
has done extensive research on American congregations and on conservative
religious movements, publishing award-winning books that examine each of
those subjects. Her most recent research explores whether and how religious
belief and action are present in the stories people tell about their everyday
lives.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
RELATED ESSAYS
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker
Lived Religion
NANCY T. AMMERMAN
Abstract
Research on “lived religion” focuses on the everyday practices of ordinary people, in
contrast to the study of official texts, organizations, and experts. It includes attention
to rituals and stories and spiritual experiences that may draw on official religious
traditions, but may also extend beyond them. Lived religion is closely related to
“popular religion”, but is a more encompassing category. As with the study of popular religion, the focus is on ordinary people and often includes festivals and shrines
and healing practices that may happen without the approval of religious authorities.
Lived religion research pays special attention to the lives of women, of populations
of color, and of people in the Global South. Both approved traditional practices and
new innovations may be “lived”.
Being “lived” points especially to the material, embodied aspects of religion as they
occur in everyday life. The study of lived religion includes attention to how and
what people eat, how they dress, how they deal with birth and death and sexuality
and nature, even how they modify hair and body through tattoos or dreadlocks,
for instance. The study of lived religion includes everyday sacralized spaces and
the physical and artistic things people do together, such as singing, dancing, and
other folk or community traditions that enact a spiritual sense of solidarity and
transcendence.
The focus on lived religion has enriched and complicated the efforts of social scientists to understand the place and role of religion in society.
INTRODUCTION
Social scientists studying religion have typically defined their object of
study in terms of major religious traditions, beliefs, and organizations.
What does Buddhism or Christianity teach, and what difference does that
make in the world? Research questions have often been framed in terms
of how beliefs affect behavior or how the membership of one group is
different from the membership of another. Research on “lived religion”
turns the focus from official organizations and membership to everyday
practice and from the experts who decide on official theology and doctrine
to the ordinary people whose everyday lives may include rituals and stories
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
and spiritual experiences that draw on those traditions, but may extend
beyond them.
Lived religion is closely related to “popular religion”, which is usually
taken to mean the religion of the ordinary people that happens beyond the
bounds and often without the approval of religious authorities. Festivals
and shrines, ritual healing practices and stories of miracles, for instance,
may be very common in a society, but may only partially be endorsed by the
religious organizations in that society. Similarly, lived religion happens on
the margins between orthodox prescriptions and innovative experiences, but
lived religion is a more encompassing category. Both approved traditional
practices and new innovations may be “lived”.
Being “lived” points especially to the material, embodied aspects of religion
as they occur in everyday life. The study of lived religion includes attention to how and what people eat, how they dress, how they deal with birth
and death and sexuality and nature, even how they modify hair and body
through tattoos or dreadlocks. Lived religion may include the spaces people
inhabit, as well—the construction of shrines in homes or in public places, for
instance. And it includes the physical and artistic things people do together,
such as singing, dancing, and other folk or community traditions that enact
a spiritual sense of solidarity and transcendence. Some of these rituals and
traditions may be widely recognized as religious and named as such, but
research on lived religion also includes activities that might not immediately
be seen as spiritual or religious by outsiders. All of the expressions of connection to spiritual life are included in the study of lived religion.
This turn toward everyday and material expressions of religion also means
that the study of lived religion often includes populations that are neglected
in many other social science approaches to religion. The lives of women, of
populations of color, and of people in the Global South are more often given
attention when the research frame is lived religion. This work has enriched
and complicated the efforts of social scientists to understand the place and
role of religion in society.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The term “lived religion” began to gain widespread use in the 1990s, with
the publication of a collection of essays by social historians and sociologists,
edited by David Hall, a Harvard historian. While sociologist Meredith
McGuire’s book, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life, was not
published until 2008, she and others in sociology had been contributing,
since the 1980s, important research on healing rituals and devotions to
saints, family life and gender, immigrant religion, and new religious movements. This research, as is typical for research on lived religion, relied on
Lived Religion
3
qualitative methods of interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, producing
rich analytical descriptions of the ways in which religious practice was
organized and experienced in everyday life. It is work that has spanned
disciplines, with some of the most important contributions coming from
religious studies and social historians.
Questions of how religion is lived were not, of course, alien to the concerns
of early sociologists, although they were more likely to rely on the reports of
historians and anthropologists than to gather data themselves. Max Weber’s
early twentieth century studies of the great world religions focused on the
distinctive ideas of those religious systems, but he was also interested in
their social psychology and ethos, that is, the patterns of life they engendered. The “Protestant Ethic” is not so much Calvinist beliefs about salvation as the everyday habits of discipline and humility those beliefs encouraged. Emile Durkheim’s focus was on social solidarity, and he pointed in
vivid detail to the lived experience of ritual participation—what he called
“collective effervescence”. Writing at about the same time, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman drew a connection between gender and different forms of religion.
The lived religion of women, she argued, was built on experiences of birth
and growth, while the lived religion of men was built on experiences of struggle, conflict, and death. These early theorists saw religion as a central social
reality and built their theories on what they understood about lived experiences.
For much of the twentieth century those lived religious realities largely disappeared from sociological view, often because sociologists assumed that
they were realities more suited to a pre-modern or “primitive” world than
to the modern, scientific, cosmopolitan world academics saw triumphing
around them. Secularization theories predicted that religion would become
a remote and forgotten abstraction. When religion made its way into social
scientific research during this period, it was likely to be the sum total of a few
survey measures. Being Protestant, Catholic, or Jew; how often one attended
services; whether one believed in hell or the literal truth of the Bible—as these
survey numbers went up and down, “religion” was said to be appearing and
disappearing, gaining, and losing influence in society.
It was against that backdrop that a worldwide resurgence (or rediscovery)
of religious vitality emerged in the 1960s and beyond. Beginning with the
spate of new religious movements that accompanied the counterculture and
continuing through the Islamic revolutions and the rise of the American
Christian Right, religion again entered social scientific discourse. A more
global and transnational society introduced new populations and new religious traditions into the questions being studied, and the vitality of religious
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
communities and practices challenged existing theories of religion and society. This was the setting into which research on lived religion began to make
its place in the field, a setting that continues to challenge social scientists.
THE CUTTING EDGES OF RESEARCH
The theoretical frontiers of work on lived religion are largely located in
the domain of cultural sociology. Students of lived religion are utilizing the
tools of cultural studies to ask how religion is produced and used in the
social world. That is, if people interact with each other and with the world
in ways that include sacred language, objects, practices, and stories, how are
those sacred cultural objects created? What places and organizations serve
as arenas for the production and legitimation of different forms of lived
religion? How are cultural objects labeled and recognized as religious? What
do they allow people to do (or prevent them from doing)? If, for example,
there is a cultural category called “gay evangelical”, what ideological work
by whom makes such a category possible? What circles of conversation
and social spaces allow this category to take on a reality that gives people
patterns to live with? What material objects, styles of clothing, or ways of
moving and singing might give this particular lived religion its tangible
form? What imaginations about the self and identity are therefore possible?
And what are the forms of cultural power or suppression that may limit the
expression of this lived religion?
That last question makes clear that explorations of lived religion often take
up the issue of power and empowerment. Students of social movements
have pointed to the power of shared religious symbols and rituals to
mobilize collective action. At the individual level, religious practices of
everyday life may provide comfort and escape, but they may also provide
an alternative view of the world or assurance of supernatural power at
one’s disposal. Studies of conservative religions have noted the ability of
women to transform ideologies of submission into everyday practices of
household leadership. Women in many traditions express their power in
various forms of life-giving. The religion that is lived may be one in which
women wield considerable power to heal or to provide religious guidance,
even if men retain the power of public leadership. The question of power in
lived religion is one fraught with ambiguity.
The empirical frontiers of lived religion research are both geographic
and institutional. It has been clear from the beginning that the study of
lived religion would push social scientists to look beyond congregations
and denominations, temples and shrines. Still shaped by modernization
paradigms, however, much early work on lived religion stayed within
the “private” domains of person and household. Lived religion was what
Lived Religion
5
people did at home or in other private places in their lives. More recently,
that structuralist dichotomy has been challenged. That is, the notion that the
social world is organized into neatly separate functional compartments has
become less tenable; and that signals a challenge to look for lived religion
in workplaces and markets, hospitals and neighborhoods as much as in
congregations and households.
The best of this work examines the complicated social action in such places.
At the same time that ordinary work or consumption is happening, it may be
intertwined with sacred meanings or rituals. People keep religious objects on
their desk, pray with their coworkers, and sometimes chafe at the way they
are made into an outsider by the common religious culture everyone else
seems to share. That is, the public world of work and civic life is a place in
which religion is lived. Religious goods themselves are bought and sold in
the capitalist marketplace, and spiritual therapies may operate in conjunction with apparently secular medical environments. The religion people live
everyday weaves in and out of conversations with friends and family, as well
as with the language and symbols of public rituals.
Innovative work on lived religion is also taking the study of religion well
outside the bounds of the North America and Europe. As the academic
world has become more globally connected, social scientists from around
the world are able to make their work accessible to each other, and the
study of lived religion now has contributions from Venezuela to Ghana,
from China to South Africa, and in borderlands and along migration routes
on every continent. Indigenous practices and hybrid expressions abound,
as does attention to lived expressions of the major world religious. Young
Chinese finding new ways to be Buddhist and young gang members in
Central America finding their way into evangelicalism are joined in the
chronicles of lived religion by migrants building makeshift shrines along the
borders they are crossing. Each society provides its own cultural building
materials for religious expression, but global media increasingly make
religious symbols and practices available to people far from the heartlands
where those traditions may have originated. People looking for a new
meditation technique or possible spiritual pilgrimage can google their way
to new forms of lived religion.
The mixing and hybridity of lived religion as it crosses borders is also
producing new angles of vision on the religions found in North America and Europe. Haitian Vodou is being practiced in New York, Muslim
women are deciding to veil in European cities, secular youth are going
on eco-pilgrimages that include Norwegian cathedrals on the route, and
African Christians are sending missionaries to North America. Research on
lived religion is encompassing a broad array of religious populations and
traditions, and not just by traveling to the Global South.
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
The wide diversity of locations and traditions being studied is both an important step forward and a major challenge for the future. It would clearly be a
mistake to move too quickly to any sort of general theorizing, but it would
also be a mistake to proceed as if all the individual studies might not inform
each other. In part, this is simply a matter of each researcher doing her or his
homework in reading the existing literature, but with work scattered across
traditions, continents, and disciplines it is all too easy to miss important contributions. Common keywords for lived religion and its components and
dimensions would assist future researchers as they attempt to build a comprehensible body of knowledge.
The vast majority of lived religion research to date has employed ethnographic methods, now often enhanced by methods that allow analysis of
visual and material culture. Shared methods have made possible bridges
among the various disciplines that use them—social history, anthropology,
religious studies, sociology, and even occasional psychologists. Each discipline brings slightly different analytical questions to the data, but each seeks
to ground an understanding of the religious social world in observations of
living persons and communities along with their texts and artifacts. As both
the methods and the disciplines expand, the study of lived religion will be
enriched, but this too poses challenges. Here, too, a common vocabulary that
enables searching relevant literature will alert researchers to both the questions and the research methods that have informed this growing body of
knowledge.
Among the social sciences, political science and economics have rarely
been the home for students of lived religion, and that points to another of
the critical challenges for the future. The lingering effects of secularization
theories and structuralist understandings of society remain. Asking about
the politics or economics of lived religion—or the lived religion of politics
and economics—remains an uncommon proposition. Conceptualizing and
studying the presence of religious practice in these domains of social life
is a task barely begun, as are studies informed by political or economic
perspectives on what people are doing as they live their everyday religious
lives.
Because both political science and economics are so driven by survey
data and quantitative analysis, bridges to research on lived religion may
depend on the eventual development of quantifiable measures; and that, in
turn, is likely to depend on systematic comparative work. As the body of
knowledge grows, along with a body of common keywords and concepts,
it may be possible to develop sensible ways to ask people across societies
about how religion is a part of their everyday life. At this point, the study of
Lived Religion
7
lived religion is probably still too much in its youth to venture that far. It is
also inherently grounded in the detail and diversity only ethnographic work
can fully apprehend. Still, as something that permeates and often structures
social life, lived religion will need to take its place on the standardized
surveys along with politics and consumption and household status. A great
deal has been learned over the past three decades, but there is a great deal yet
to do.
FURTHER READING
Ammerman, N. T. (2013). Sacred stories, spiritual tribes: Finding religion in everyday life.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Bender, C., Cadge, W., Levitt, P., & Smilde, D. A. (Eds.) (2012). Religion on the edge:
De-centering and re-centering the sociology of religion. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Cadge, W. (2013). Paging God: Religion in the halls of medicine. Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Hall, D. (Ed.) (1997). Lived religion in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
McGuire, M. B. (2008). Lived religion: Faith and practice in everyday life. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
Vasquez, M. A. (2010). More than belief: A materialist theory of religion. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
LINKS
Rich web resources on religion that give ample attention to various aspects
of lived religion (and include many articles by scholars) are
http://www.patheos.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/religion
http://www.religiondispatches.org/
http://www.nycreligion.info/
NANCY T. AMMERMAN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Nancy T. Ammerman has been on the faculty at Boston University since 2003,
having previously taught at Emory University and at Hartford Seminary. She
has done extensive research on American congregations and on conservative
religious movements, publishing award-winning books that examine each of
those subjects. Her most recent research explores whether and how religious
belief and action are present in the stories people tell about their everyday
lives.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
RELATED ESSAYS
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
The Sociology of Religious Experience (Sociology), Douglas Porpora
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker
Lived Religion