Download 2013 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture Finding Religion

Sociology of Religion 2014, 75:2 189-207
doi:10.1093/socrel/sru013
Advance Access Publication 12 March 2014
2013 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture
Finding Religion in Everyday Life
Nancy T. Ammerman*
Boston University
This address is a contribution to the study of “lived religion,” that is, the embodied and enacted forms
of spirituality that occur in everyday life. Like the children’s books that ask “where’s Waldo,” sociologists are invited to think about the many ways in which we need to refocus our work in order to see the
religion that often appears in unexpected places. As the discipline has broadened its geographical and
cultural vision, it also must broaden its understanding of what religion is. Religion is neither an all-ornothing category nor a phenomenon that is confined to a single institutional sphere. Understanding
the multilayered nature of everyday reality and the permeability of all social boundaries makes a more
nuanced study of religion possible. Using data from the “Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life”
project, it is suggested that religion can be found in the conversational spaces—both in religious organizations and beyond—where sacred and mundane dimensions of life are produced and negotiated.
Key words: lived religion; workplace; symbolic interaction; cultural sociology; secularization;
methodology.
Those of you who have spent any time with a young child in the last 25
years are probably familiar with a certain red-and-white-stripe-wearing lad
named Waldo (Handford 1988). Perhaps you have snuggled up next to a
curious youngster poring over elaborate scenes and asked each other, “Where’s
Waldo?” There are all sorts of reasons that Waldo may be frustratingly invisible, but he is always there. What I want to suggest in this lecture is that our
discipline has often been just about as perplexed in its study of religion as the
five year old looking for Waldo. A variety of things have kept sociologists
from seeing the manifestations of religion in everyday social life, but I hope
*Direct correspondence to Nancy T. Ammerman, Department of Sociology, Boston University, 100
Cummington Mall, Boston, MA 02215, USA. E-mail: [email protected].
# The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for
the Sociology of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
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to provide here at least a few ideas about how we might sharpen our analytical focus and find Waldo1 more easily.
FOCUSING ON LIVED RELIGION
The religion I want to talk about here is of the “lived religion” variety.
While belief and membership—two of our staples for identifying Waldo—are
certainly a part of what lived religion entails, instead of starting from official
organizations and formal membership, I want to begin with everyday practice;
instead of taking the experts and official theology as definitive, I will join the
lived religion scholars in arguing that we need a broader lens that includes but
goes beyond those things.2
The lived religion we will be looking for 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. Students of popular religion have turned our attention to festivals and
shrines, ritual healing practices, and stories of miracles, for instance. Lived religion does often happen on the margins between orthodox prescriptions and
innovative experiences, but religion does not have to be marginal to be “lived.”
What happens inside religious organizations counts, too. Those who wish to
“de-center” congregations and other traditional religious communities will miss a
great deal of where religion is lived if those spaces are excluded from our research
endeavor. Lived religion is not, then, identical to popular religion. Both
approved traditional practices and new innovations may be “lived.” Waldo may
be placing flowers on the spontaneous shrine in the marketplace, but he may also
be at shul.
Looking for lived religion does mean that we look for the material, embodied
aspects of religion as they occur in everyday life, in addition to listening for how
people explain themselves. It includes both the experiences of the body and the
mind. There is now a considerable literature that makes clear the peculiar
Protestant lineage of our sociological preoccupation with belief, and lived religion is a category that attempts to overcome that constraint.3 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,
1
Throughout this paper, I will continue to use “Waldo” as a metaphor for everyday religion. I hope the reader will indulge with me in this imaginative exercise.
2
The roots and exemplars of this tradition will be discussed below.
3
See especially Talal Asad (1993), Vasquez (2010), and Riesebrodt (2010), among
others.
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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, but are treated as such by the people engaged in them. In
other words, the Waldo we should be looking for is wearing a wide variety of
expressions of connection to spiritual life. Finding religion in everyday life
means looking wherever and however we find people invoking a sacred presence.
THE BLINDERS THAT KEEP RELIGION INVISIBLE
So what keeps sociologists from finding Waldo? I suspect many people have
had the experience of reading a fine piece of sociological work on consumer
culture or colonialism or social movements and wondering how the author could
possibly have missed the obvious role of religion in the processes being studied.
Many of our colleagues can look at pages filled with pictures of family life, work,
politics, the economy, cities, and schools and never see poor Waldo. Truthfully,
many sociologists are unable to find Waldo because they still believe he has disappeared or soon will. In their examination of the society around them, Waldo is
functionally invisible. Religious dimensions of everyday life disappear from sociological view, often because sociologists assume that Waldo was more suited to a
premodern or “primitive” world than to the modern, scientific, cosmopolitan
world academics live in. Secularization theories predicted that religion would
become a remote and forgotten abstraction, and for much of our field, that
remains pragmatically the case (Ecklund and Scheitle 2007).
Some, of course, have noticed the worldwide resurgence (or rediscovery) of
religious vitality that emerged in the 1960s and beyond (Berger 1999). Beginning
with the spate of new religious movements that accompanied the counterculture and continuing through the Islamic revolutions and the rise of the New
Christian Right in the United States, religion again entered social scientific discourse. At the same time, a more global and transnational society introduced
new populations and new religious traditions into the questions being studied,
and the vitality of religious communities and practices challenged existing theories of religion and society. For at least some of our colleagues, the search for
Waldo was on again, if only to figure out a way to contain his disruptive tendencies (Huntington 1996).
In contrast, the first generations of sociologists seemed much more than
capable of finding Waldo. Questions of how religion is lived in our collective
lives were foundational for early sociologists. Max Weber’s early twentiethcentury studies of the great world religions focused on the distinctive ideas of
those religious systems, to be sure, but he was also interested in their social psychology and ethos, that is, the patterns of life they engendered (Weber 1922
[1946]). The “Protestant Ethic” is not just Calvinist beliefs about salvation, it is
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also the everyday habits of discipline and humility those beliefs encouraged
(Weber 1958). Emile Durkheim’s focus was on social solidarity, but he pointed
in vivid detail to the lived experience of ritual participation—what he called
“collective effervescence” (Durkheim 1964). Writing at about the same time,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew a connection between gender and different forms
of religion (Gilman 2003). 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. Similarly, W. E. B. DuBois understood the central role of Black Churches in the formation of African American
communities (Du Bois 1989). Each of these early theorists saw religion as a
central social reality and built their theories of society to include what they
understood about religion.
For much of the twentieth century, however, as sociology built up its methodological and theoretical machinery, religion was reduced to what could easily
be measured on a survey (Smith et al. 2013). Weber said Protestants have distinct
economic behaviors, so surveys asked people if they were Protestant. Durkheim
said religious group membership is linked to social solidarity, so we asked people
about church membership. Perkins Gilman and Du Bois said—well, we mostly
forgot that they said anything. 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. More recently, the measures have been
designed to fit contemporary economic theories of human behavior (Stark 2001;
Stark and Bainbridge 1985; Stark and Finke 2000), so that we only see Waldo
when he is pursuing supernatural compensators. People employing these instruments do sometimes catch a glimpse of Waldo, but even when they do, the
Waldo they describe seems to bear little resemblance to the guy in the red and
white shirt and the jaunty hat.
Of course, one of the other problems we have in recognizing Waldo is that
sometimes we really should be looking for Willamina or Javier or Adankwo. Our
disciplinary lineage has blessed us with a picture of religion probably best suited
to recognizing Waldo’s white male self. If we are to expand the reach of our
understanding of religion’s social dynamics, we will need to continue the
growing and welcome attention to populations that were earlier neglected. The
authors calling for a “re-centering” of the sociological study of religion are right
that a broadened global lens is essential (Cadge et al. 2011). It is also the case
that the lives of women, of populations of color, and of people in the Global
South are more often given meaningful attention when research moves beyond
the standardized survey questions about beliefs and memberships and into the
everyday world of material culture and spiritual practice. 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 religion now
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has contributions from Venezuela to Ghana, from China to South Africa, and in
borderlands and along migration routes on every continent. Work on indigenous
practices and hybrid expressions abounds, as does attention to lived expressions
of the major world religions themselves. Young Chinese finding new ways to be
Buddhist (Denton Jones 2010) and young gang members in Central America
finding their way into evangelicalism (Brenneman 2011) are joined in the
chronicles of lived religion by migrants building makeshift shrines along the
borders they are crossing (Hagan 2008). Happily, sociologists of religion are learning how to adjust the focus so that Javier and Willimina are as visible as Waldo.
We are also learning that Waldo can be something of a shape shifter. 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 (Clark
2007; Corten and Marshall-Fratani 2001; Vasquez and Marquardt 2003).
Looking for lived religion means that any notion of an authentic pure tradition is
probably best left to the theologians to discuss. The lived religion we are likely to
find will almost inevitably be a patchwork. People looking for a new meditation
technique or a possible spiritual pilgrimage can Google their way to the latest
religious practices. Even when Waldo looks like Waldo, he may have “sacredtexts.com” bookmarked on his iPhone, alongside his app for official Muslim
prayer times. The mixing and hybridity of religion as it crosses borders means
that pure categories tied to location and tradition are disappearing fast. Haitian
vodou is being practiced in New York (McAlister 2002), Muslim women are
deciding to veil in the context of European cities (Chambers 2007), secular
youth are going on eco-pilgrimages that include Norwegian cathedrals on the
route (Bradley 2009; Kuiper and Bryn 2012), and African Christians are sending
missionaries to North America (Olupona and Gemignani 2007). Research on religion is encompassing a broad array of religious populations and traditions, and not
just when North Americans travel to the Global South. As we search for Waldo,
we should expect to follow a global trail. Waldo with a Kufi is still Waldo.
When is Waldo hard to find, then? For much of our field, it is still true that
the blinders of secularization theory, the constriction of methodological and theoretical misdirection, and our North Atlantic heritage are obstacles. The litany
of obstacles has been articulated well by others (Smith et al. 2013), and our field
has two decades worth of contributions toward a sharper and more fulsome
description of religion. We know to look more broadly and to ask the questions
from the ground up, and we have increasingly good accounts of the breadth and
depth of religious expression. Still, other blinders remain.
RELIGION BEYOND THE CANOPY
About a decade ago, I began to realize just how dissatisfied I was with my discipline’s efforts to “find Waldo.” Happily, I was by no means alone. Lived religion
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as a more dynamic focus of study had begun to gain widespread attention in the
1980s and 1990s. In the early 1990s, David Hall’s collection of essays by social
historians and sociologists brought the term into the academic vernacular (Hall
1997). While Meredith McGuire’s book, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in
Everyday Life (McGuire 2008) was not published until 2008, she and others in
sociology had already been contributing important research on healing rituals
and devotions to saints, family life and gender, immigrant religion, and new religious movements.4 This is work that has spanned disciplines, with some of the
most important contributions coming from religious studies and social historians
(e.g., Griffith 2004; McDannell 1995; Orsi 1985; Ronald 2012). As the sociology
of religion has focused its lens on a broader range of peoples and practices, a
broader range of partner disciplines has contributed, as well.
In 2003, the generosity of my colleague Peter Berger allowed me to invite a
group of these pioneering scholars to Boston to talk about how to move our
research forward. They were North American and European, young and more
senior, and they had already contributed important work that was helping us to
see religion in new forms and new places. The result of that conversation was the
book Everyday Religion (Ammerman 2006), but those ideas were also the seedbed
for the research and writing I have been doing over these last several years. My
own thinking about the nature of religious identities led me to adopt a narrative
methodology (Ammerman 2003), and with a team of researchers and a grant
from the John Templeton Foundation, we launched the “Spiritual Narratives in
Everyday Life” project in 2006. We determined to put these emerging theoretical
and methodological insights to the test by soliciting stories about everyday life
and analyzing the religious and spiritual elements in those stories.5 Having a rich
collection of everyday stories allowed me to listen for the ways in which “nonordinary” sensibilities weave in and out of mundane reality.6
This work was an effort to get around two other kinds of blinders that often
seem to be at work in the sociological study of religion. When we search for
Waldo, we often refuse to imagine that Waldo could just be an ordinary guy in
the midst of other ordinary things. If Waldo is Waldo, we think that surely he
must have a magic wand in his hand that can turn the whole page into one big
red and white striped canvas. Let me say that less metaphorically. It seems to me
that a good deal of theorizing about religion depends on a notion that religion is
inherently a totalizing identity. If a person is really religious, he or she will walk
around in a religious bubble. If they believe in God and an afterlife, then strict
4
Exemplary offerings and creative syntheses of this emerging work can be found in
Religion on the Edge (Bender et al. 2012).
5
The methods and findings discussed in the following section are discussed in much more
detail in Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes (Ammerman 2013b).
6
I am using a term here that is borrowed from Robert Bellah (1963, 2011). What he is
trying to describe—a consciousness of reality as multilayered—draws on the phenomenology
of Alfred Schutz and is similar to what Charles Taylor describes as “fullness” (Taylor 2007).
FINDING RELIGION IN EVERYDAY LIFE
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behavior should follow, and if not they must not really be religious. Like
Durkheim’s sacred/profane dichotomy, religion is imagined as an either/or affair.
We even ask people how “religious” they are and divide up the population
between the “somewhat/very” half and the “not very/not at all” half. And when
our predicted correlations are absent, we think religion is absent. If Waldo does
not dominate the page, then he is not really being Waldo.
What I can tell you now, after gathering stories from life history interviews,
photo elicitation interviews, and oral diaries from a diverse group of religious and
nonreligious people in Boston and Atlanta is that everyday social life is largely
mundane and secular. If finding religion requires finding places where there is
only religion, then there is little for us to do. Just as Mary Douglas (1983)
reminded us that the medieval world was no “golden age” in which everyone
lived under a religious “canopy,” so today’s daily round of activities is shaped by
rather ordinary concerns. What people do in their households, at work, taking
care of their health, or engaging in politics is largely narrated as a story whose
characters are defined by routine roles and whose actions are aimed at practical
ends. It really is true that much of life is “secular.” Whether that is more dominantly the case now than in the past, I cannot say, but I suspect, it is not unique
to twenty-first-century America. The routine reality lived by most people in
most times and places is simply not suffused with enchantment and probably
never was.
But if the world is not utterly enchanted, does that mean that there is no
Waldo? No. It just means that the “religion Waldo” is not fundamentally different in nature from the “political Waldo” or the “family Waldo” or the “worker
Waldo.” We are never only one thing, even when that thing is religion. One of
the things that narrative theories of identity make clear is that identities are
always multistranded and intersectional (Ammerman 2003; Somers 1994). I am
female-identified, a U.S. citizen but not an American nationalist, daughter in
the care-giving stage of that role, a mother in the adult friendship stage of that
role, a professor, a baseball fan, a Baptist of a very particular sort, and quite a lot
more, and in any given interaction, some combination of the stories of where I
am in my progression over time through any of those identities may govern how I
proceed. What is odd about the way we have often understood religious identities
is that we have assumed that they have an all-or-nothing character that no other
identity is expected to have. We theorize as if one either is or is not religious. An
action either is or is not spiritual. A place is either sacred or profane. And so on.
To say that religion simply exists alongside all the other realities of everyday
life means that we should expect everyday stories from the office or the hospital
to sometimes be both sacred and secular at once. In the research for this project,
we heard stories from people who keep religious objects on their desk at work, or
pray with their co-workers about personnel issues, or find divine inspiration in
science journals. Taking the prayer and the inspiration seriously does not mean
that work has become sacred OR that those practices are not really religious
because of where they happen. Sacred and secular sometimes literally sit next to
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each other. Similarly, when religious goods are bought and sold in the capitalist
marketplace, or spiritual therapies operate in conjunction with apparently
secular medical environments, the goods and therapies do not become secular for
being in a “secular” place any more than the routines of the hospital are sacred
because of the occasional spiritual interaction (Cadge 2013). The religion
people live everyday weaves in and out of the language and symbols and interactions of public spaces and bureaucratized institutions. Waldo really is there—
right alongside all the other things that are happening on that page.
What I am also suggesting, then, is that Waldo just might be anywhere on
that page. Just as we should not expect religion to be everywhere, we should also
not expect it to stay in its predictable corner. Just as our research project found
that most of life is pretty ordinary, we also found that no social domain is always
and utterly devoid of spiritual meaning. Whatever we are going to say about the
lines between sacred and secular, they are not drawn at the churchyard gate or
synagogue door. Under some circumstances, people take their religious sensibilities with them in ways that shape their everyday relationships and behavior.
That is not, of course, especially surprising. One of the dominant strands in
“secularization theory” has argued that religion could survive the modern world as
a certain form of individual consciousness (Berger 1969). This was Luckmann’s
“Invisible Religion” (Luckmann 1967), and it is essentially where Durkheim ends
up in his essay on “Individualism and the Intellectuals” (Durkheim 1898 [1975]).
Luckmann and the functionalists solve the problem of modern religion by positing
“meaning” and “worldview” as quasi-religious human universals carried in individual
consciousness (Parsons 1964). Looked at from one angle, what we found in stories of
everyday life was that individuals were cultivating a religious consciousness and
weaving a layer of spirituality into the fabric of their individual lives, a warp and
woof that extend far beyond the institutional domain designated as “religious.”
THE SOCIAL PROCESSES OF EVERYDAY RELIGION
What I am suggesting here, however, is that the forms of religion we need to
be studying are not just located in individual consciousness. The way we understand the presence of religion in everyday life depends on recognizing it in the
social processes where it is created and deployed. What the functionalist secularization theories never made clear was how individual religious consciousness
could take shape in a social world that is presumed to be increasingly devoid of
religious institutions and of shared religious symbols and cultures. If religion is
social, and not merely an innate human instinct, it must have a plausibility structure (Berger 1969). What I want to suggest is that finding Waldo may mean listening for his distinctive voice in conversation, reclaiming what George Herbert
Mead and the symbolic interactionists first began to teach us about the way the
social world is constructed (Mead 1934). If we want to understand religion, we
should be looking for the sites where conversation produces and is produced by the
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spiritual and religious realities taken to be present by those who are participating in these
conversations. We do not need to assume that an entire society (or even an entire
organization) must be religious to look for the places where religious realities are
present in interaction.
Let me say a bit more about how that happens by offering an illustration of
what we heard in stories about work.7 Workplace accounts were less likely to be
told as spiritual stories than were stories about home or health, for instance, but
the social processes that bring religion into the workplace, when it is there, are
especially revealing. Talking about life in the workplace in spiritual terms is first
of all a product of the degree of religious commitment of the individual herself—
just what all our functionalist models would predict. The more salient spirituality
is for the person, the more active they are in spiritual and religious practices, and
the more often they attend religious services, the more likely they are to talk
about their workplace in stories with spiritual content. One pathway into everyday life depends, that is, on individual religious consciousness that is cultivated
in explicitly spiritual social spaces and carried from there into other institutional
locations.
But there are larger structural factors in this process, as well. The nature of
the work itself makes a difference. Over and above the influence of individual
characteristics, some kinds of work lend themselves to spiritual expression more
readily than others. Work that involves service to others or that explores the
realms of beauty and imagination seems to invite spiritual definition and reflection, for instance.8 Work that deals with the limits of human existence was more
likely to be narrated as a spiritual pursuit, as well. By contrast, work in the world
of business, as well as labor in what is euphemistically called “service work” was
not likely to be spoken of by the people in it as a spiritual enterprise, no matter
how personally religious they were. People who work in menial jobs, as well as
those whose primary work is the accumulation of profits, rarely say that what they
do is done to the glory of God—Weber’s iron cage is still alive and well (Weber
1958). Such jobs can still be spiritual pursuits, but only insofar as exceptionally
dedicated individuals, supported by active participation in a religious community, look hard for the sacred dimension in what they do. Both individual consciousness and social structure are at work in determining whether and when
spirituality enters stories about the workplace.
But there is a third path through which spiritual elements flow into the workplace, and that lies in the interactions of the workers themselves. Listening to
stories about work made very clear that there is a great deal more going on every
day than merely an economic exchange of labor for monetary reward.9 Across
7
For a full discussion of these findings, see Ammerman (2013b), chapter 6.
Wuthnow has written, for instance, about the spiritual dimensions of volunteering
(Wuthnow 1991) and of art (Wuthnow 2001).
9
Studies of the workplace are understandably dominated by questions of power and status
(both macro and micro). A few recent studies have paid attention to the relational dimension,
8
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every occupational sector, nearly one-third of all the workplace stories we heard
were primarily about people and their relationships. Even stories about the work
itself were likely to be told as collective stories—not what I do, but what we do.
Understanding the sociology of the workplace is more than understanding
bureaucratic positions and economic struggles; it is also about how sociality
shapes this domain in which people spend so much of their lives. Over the
course of our interviews, photos, and diaries, we heard well over 200 accounts of
job-related relationships and interactions; and more than any other kind of work
story, these “people” stories were shaped by spiritual sensibilities and religious
dynamics. The woman we call Michelle Winter, for instance, is a social worker
in Boston, and she is very clear that overt religious talk or practice cannot be part
of doing her social work job. But religion has shaped the values she brings to the
job, and she finds support in the times when she can talk at work about those
connections with others who share her faith. Through relationships and conversations, religion is present in what she does and indirectly shapes her job. A substantial minority of the American workers in our study, like Michelle, have
found a religiously like-minded person at work, and having such a relationship
considerably increased the overlap between work and religion.
That third path suggests that Waldo makes his way out from his designated
“religion” corner into any of the spaces where there are social relationships in
which religious and spiritual assumptions enter the conversation. This is not just
a sacred umbrella of individualism, we are seeing, but lots of little sacred “tents”
in which religion is part of the conversation of everyday life. How are such conversational spaces created? Certainly, some social locations are more conducive
than others. In this research project, we saw that household life and health
crises, charitable activities and work in serving professions were some of the
everyday life places where the boundaries between sacred and secular seemed to
be more permeable. These are places we should routinely be looking for Waldo.
Domains that are less often sacralized should not be ignored, though. Asking
about the politics or economics of lived religion—or the lived religion of politics
and economics—remains dominated in our discipline by a correlational approach.
Religious beliefs, presumably imported from outside the secular domain, are
examined for their correlation with economic or political ideas and actions. This
can be useful, but conceptualizing and studying the presence of religious interaction and practice across the domains of social life is more than asking whether
religious belief determines social behavior.
Broadening the institutional scope of our inquiries is essential, but no matter
the social location, it is theoretically and methodologically fruitful to pay attention to the conversations and the relationships that form the social fabric across
however (Hodson 2004; Pettinger 2005; Watson 2009), and it seems to me worth remembering the early lessons from the Hawthorne studies about how everyday life in the workplace is
structured.
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domains. Religion is shaped by membership, but membership is considerably
more complicated than checking a box on a survey. It may be the sort of life-long
organizational participation we have traditionally expected, but it may also be
membership of a much more fluid and less bounded sort. Wherever a spiritually
inclined person finds another person who is at least open to talking about the
world in terms that include religious dimensions, what I call a “spiritual tribe”
has formed.
How does that happen? How do they find each other? Certainly, there are
some Bible-thumping evangelists out there who will start a conversation about
religion whether the other person wants to listen or not, but that does not
explain all the ways in which religious conversations arise. Returning to the data
from our research and beyond, it may not be surprising to find that roughly threequarters of household partners in our study share a common religious affiliation
(compared with not quite half in the American population [Sherkat 2004]) or
that spiritual similarity shows up in match.com pairings (Rudder 2009). We still
expect households to be religiously homogamous, even if only broadly so. We
expect that households will be places where religiously (and nonreligiously)
similar people can talk about religious concerns. It is more surprising, however,
that two-thirds of work-based friendships in our study were described to us as religiously homogamous. Whether or not the people actually identified with the very
same religious tradition, they told us that this friend was “like me” religiously,
and that shared spiritual sensibility had consequences.10 People who perceive
each other as spiritually similar were more likely to report having conversations
about religious and spiritual topics, and people who have such conversations
were more likely to see religious and spiritual dimensions in their working lives.
That is, people find each other, they talk, and out of that conversation religious
realities are created.
This recognition and sorting process is, I think, a critical phenomenon for us
to begin to understand more clearly. Taking inspiration from Michel Maffesoli’s
1995 book, The Time of Tribes, I have come to call these spiritually open conversational partnerships “spiritual tribes.” Maffesoli notes that even in a complex
social world of otherwise strangers, we recognize some others as people with
whom we share a common bond, a set of customs, and shared sentiment. “. . .
[N]eo-tribalism is characterized by fluidity, occasional gatherings and dispersal”
(Maffesoli 1995:76). We use, he suggests, displays of clothing and body, but also
much more subtle cultural signals, to recognize our fellow tribal members. Think,
for instance, about the phenomenon we call “gaydar” (Rieger et al. 2010). What
10
Putnam and Campbell (2010) note the way such everyday relationships actually bridge
religious diversity. It is quite possible that the religious similarity our participants described
reflected a religious common ground that might not have looked very “similar” by outside
standards.
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I am suggesting here is that religious identities are part of the package of cultural
cues that constitute these ever-shifting tribes, that people find conversation
partners in a variety of places, and that those conversations both draw on narratives that have been learned and sustained in larger religious communities, and
that they reshape those same narratives. In the world of everyday life, both
institutionalized spiritual tribes and the shifting situational bonds of more
tenuous gatherings are the social locations in which we should be looking for
religion.
It is important to pause here to note that the institutionalized spiritual tribes
matter.11 To urge that we look for Waldo in every corner of the page is not to
minimize the importance of looking in the most obvious places. One of the most
striking results of a research project that was looking for everyday religion was the
degree to which participation in organized religion shapes those everyday practices and conversations. The everyday spiritual differences I saw among the participants in our research were far more likely to be related to how often they attend
services than to gender or ethnicity or residence in Boston (when compared with
Atlanta) or even to differences based on the type of religious tradition or the
individual’s personal level of spiritual practice. All of those things may help to
determine whether and how often a person participates, but it is the participation
itself that plays the most dominant role in shaping everyday religion. So when we
ask about the sites in which spiritual culture is produced, congregations and
other organized spiritual groups are both obvious places to look and surprisingly
downplayed in a culture and a discipline that have glorified the life of the spiritual seeker. When people do not have regular sites of interaction where spiritual
discourse is the primary lingua franca, they are simply unlikely to adopt elements
of spirituality into their accounts of who they are and what they do with themselves. If they do not learn the language, it does not shape their way of being in
the world. Conversely, the more deeply embedded people are in these organized
sites of spiritually infused conversation, the more likely they are to carry strands
of that conversation with them. It is not that they have learned a set of doctrines
or subscribed to a set of behavioral prescriptions. It is that they have learned to
“speak religion” as one of their dialects.
Within the interactions of a religious community, people develop a way of
talking about life that carries within it expectations about the presence of divine
actors and the realities of spiritual mysteries and the normative goodness of “doing
unto others as you would have them do unto you.” There is no theoretical reason to
believe that morality or spiritual sensitivity are only cultivated in organized religious
communities, and our field does well to look for all the places where that happens;
but we would be extraordinarily short-sighted to cease studying the organizations
that take religious culture production as their primary task. As people chat over a
11
I have argued elsewhere (Ammerman 2013a) that the binary view of “religion” and
“spirituality” is misguided. Portions of this talk draw in part on that argument.
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201
potluck dinner or pray during a meeting of a women’s group or share stories along a
pilgrimage route, the stories they tell are likely to foreground and negotiate spiritual
interpretations. What happens in these religious gatherings is not just a matter of
otherworldly ritual and doctrinal teaching. What happens is the creation of a particular kind of conversational space. In some sense this is what Berger (1969)
meant when he described modern religion as existing in “sheltering enclaves.”
But it is more. These are not enclaves with high walls, where the sacred
world is kept pure and well defended. We would misunderstand religious culture
production if we looked only for producers who seem to us to be purely religious
in character. Just as sacred and secular intertwine in homes and workplaces, they
form a complicated mixture in religious gatherings, as well. The conversations
inside the religious community are full of the stuff of everyday life, with
mundane and sacred realities intermingling here no less than they do everywhere
else. People talk about going to the doctor and pray for healing, exchange babysitting services and thank God for their families, pray over the injustices in the
world and mobilize petition drives. That mixture is part of what makes those conversations portable and powerful. It is not just that people take religion into
everyday life; they also take everyday life into religion.
This picture of the “plausibility structure” for everyday religion is one where
relationships are being formed, conversations are being had, and social institutions are sometimes encouraging and sometimes simply tolerating the introduction of spiritual dimensions into the social reality being created by those
conversations. There are many complicating questions about these processes, of
course, many of them having to do with power. What are the forms of power or
suppression that may either limit or compel the expression of any lived religion? I
have already suggested that some workplaces seem more faith-friendly than
others—we need to ask how and why that is so. We certainly know that the force
of law and of violent repression can make religious talk and religious association
dangerous. Active suppression can diminish the number of religion-friendly
social spaces, just as, in other circumstances, a variety of social and cultural processes can make life difficult for nonbelievers. Finding Waldo means paying attention to the legal and cultural forces that may make him more and less visible.
Our search for Waldo, then, means looking for him in all the corners of
everyday life scenes. It means looking for the scenes where spiritual conversations happen and listening for the shape of the stories that emerge, expecting
those stories to be both sacred and profane at the same time. The study of lived
religion has always pushed social scientists to look beyond congregations and
denominations, temples and shrines, but lived religion also goes beyond the
“private” world of what people do at home or by themselves. We need to look
for lived religion in workplaces and markets, hospitals and neighborhoods, as
well as in congregations and households. When we understand membership to
include all kinds of spiritual tribes and when we understand religious interaction to be inherently hybrid, we more easily catch glimpses of Waldo from page
to page.
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BUILDING SOCIOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE FOR THE FUTURE12
All of this may seem like preaching to the choir. Sociologists of religion,
after all, are the ones who specialize in “finding Waldo.” Even if we subscribe to
some version of secularization theory, we are still looking for the places where
religion persists and the explanations for its presence and absence. I have suggested here some ways that we may nevertheless need to think differently about
what we are studying, and I want to close by suggesting some additional challenges that lie ahead in the study of everyday religion. In order to build from one
study to the next and to create necessary conceptual bridges, we have both theoretical and methodological work to do. Thinking about everyday religion will
not require, it seems to me, that we all agree on a theoretical explanation for
what Waldo is doing and why, but it may require us to draw more self-consciously
on a broader range of theoretical tools from our larger discipline.
Two theoretical streams, in particular, may provide us with ways to make
Waldo more visible to the rest of our colleagues and allow them to be more
helpful to us. I have already suggested that retrieving our symbolic interactionist
heritage may be useful and allow us to join sociological conversations about how
a variety of symbols and stories, not just religious ones, are shaped. Having spent
time asking about the particular shape and content of different kinds of spiritual
stories and the language used to capture shared religious experiences, we may be
able to contribute methodological tools and conceptual lenses that can focus
inquiries around other ways conversations create and carry social realities. We
can ask about the sites in which these conversations happen, the ways conversants recognize each other as potential conversation partners, and the ways in
which narratives provide shape to the actions envisioned as expected and possible. Our work in finding religion in everyday life must inform and be informed by
conversations about the nature of everyday life.
Second, as we listen for religion in everyday interaction, we can also join our
colleagues in cultural sociology to think about what we are seeing and hearing.
They can help us discern 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 produced (e.g., Wuthnow 1994)? 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
those cultural objects 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 (cf. Gray and Thumma 1997;
Thumma 1991)? What circles of conversation and social spaces allow this
12
In this section, I am drawing on arguments I have made in an article on lived religion
as an “emerging trend” (Ammerman forthcoming).
FINDING RELIGION IN EVERYDAY LIFE
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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 give this particular
lived religion its tangible form? What imaginations about the self and identity
are therefore possible?
Those are some of the theoretical challenges, but we also have methodological ones. We face a formidable challenge created by the wide diversity of locations and lived traditions we are trying to understand. This breadth is an
important step forward, but it is also a major challenge for the future. If we are
trying to understand people, places, things, actions, ideas, and more—coming
from and blending together hundreds of cultural traditions—how on earth are we
to proceed in building up any general knowledge. It would clearly be a mistake to
move too quickly to grand theory, but it would also be a mistake to proceed as if
all the individual studies might not inform each other. Might we simply begin to
move toward enough of a common lexicon to be able to build on each other’s
work?
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, its components, and its characteristics
would assist future researchers as they attempt to build a comprehensible body of
knowledge. My own work used a narrative analytical framework that looked for
the “who, did what, with whom, where, and when” of each story unit. One might
imagine a rich conversation among scholars brought together to construct an
analytical lexicon of kinds of religious actors, kinds of religious action, kinds of
religious relationships, types of space and materiality, and relevant concepts of
time and calendar. Today’s digital searching technology means that we do not
need the list of terms to be short, but we do need it to have some order and some
rubrics for cross-matching. This is the kind of foundational work, I think, that will
allow us to build on the wonderful array of religious research we already have.
The vast majority of this lived religion research has employed ethnographic
methods, now often enhanced by methods that allow analysis of visual and material culture. Shared methods have made possible bridges among 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 lexicon that enables searching relevant literature will alert researchers to both the questions and the
research methods that have informed this growing interdisciplinary body of
knowledge.
Because so much social science is driven by survey data and quantitative
analysis, research on lived religion may eventually need to develop quantifiable
measures; but that, too, is likely to depend on systematic comparative work and
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common terminology. 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 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.
Finally, I will conclude by noting that the kind of theoretical and methodological work I am calling for will depend on our own attention to the scholarly
tribes we inhabit. We cannot always find Waldo alone. We need the focused and
deep conversation we have in ASR and active co-mingling with the Religion
Section, ASA as a whole, and the many other societies where social scientists
are studying religion as it is lived by ordinary people. The full organizational
ecology is critical. On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Association
for the Sociology of Religion, we can report that the range and depth of our
understanding of religion’s role in societies has increased exponentially. We can
also celebrate that even while many of our sociology colleagues are amazingly
blind to the presence of religion in society, we have many sociological colleagues
who are active partners with us in the search. The task of continuing to find
Waldo is one we can happily share.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a slightly revised version of the talk presented to the Association for
the Sociology of Religion, meeting in New York, in August 2013. Thanks to
ASR President Fred Kniss for the invitation to give this lecture.
FUNDING
The “Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life Project” was funded by a grant
from the John Templeton Foundation. Support for the writing of Sacred Stories,
Spiritual Tribes was provided by the Louisville Institute.
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