Everyday Religion

In the early nineteenth century, antebellum America witnessed a Second Great Awakening led by evangelical Protestants who gathered in revivals and contributed to the blossoming of social movements throughout the country. Preachers and reformers promoted a Christian lifestyle, and evangelical fervor overtook entire communities. One such community in Smithfield, New York, led by activist Gerrit Smith, is the focus of Hadley Kruczek-Aaron’s study.

Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.

Attempting to let 'everyday religion' raise critical questions about how we understand the role of religion in society, this book examines the social circumstances of religion's presence and absence.

Nancy Tatom Ammerman examines the stories Americans tell of their everyday lives, from dinner table to office and shopping mall to doctor's office, about the things that matter most to them and the routines they take for granted, and the times and places where the everyday and ordinary meet the spiritual. In addition to interviews and observation, Ammerman bases her findings on a photo elicitation exercise and oral diaries, offering a window into the presence and absence of religion and spirituality in ordinary lives and in ordinary physical and social spaces. The stories come from a diverse array of ninety-five Americans — both conservative and liberal Protestants, African American Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Wiccans, and people who claim no religious or spiritual proclivities — across a range that stretches from committed religious believers to the spiritually neutral. Ammerman surveys how these people talk about what spirituality is, how they seek and find experiences they deem spiritual, and whether and how religious traditions and institutions are part of their spiritual lives.

Vernacular religion is religion as people experience, understand, and practice it. It shapes everyday culture and disrupts the traditional boundaries between 'official' and 'folk' religion. The book analyses vernacular religion in a range of Christian denominations as well as in indigenous and New Age religion from the nineteenth century to today. How these differing expressions of belief are shaped by their individual, communal and national contexts is also explored. What is revealed is the consistency of genres, the persistence of certain key issues, and how globalization in all its cultural and technological forms is shaping contemporary faith practice. The book will be valuable to students of ethnology, folklore, religious studies, and anthropology.

Social scientists sometimes seem not to know what to do with religion. In the first century of sociology's history as a discipline, the reigning concern was explaining the emergence of the modern world, and that brought with it an expectation that religion would simply fade from the scene as societies became diverse, complex, and enlightened. As the century approached its end, however, a variety of global phenomena remained dramatically unexplained by these theories. Among the leading contenders for explanatory power to emerge at this time were rational choice theories of religious behavior. Researchers who have spent time in the field observing religious groups and interviewing practitioners, however, have questioned the sufficiency of these market models. Studies abound that describe thriving religious phenomena that fit neither the old secularization paradigm nor the equations predicting vitality only among organizational entrepreneurs with strict orthodoxies. In this collection of previously unpublished essays, scholars who have been immersed in field research in a wide variety of settings draw on those observations from the field to begin to develop more helpful ways to study religion in modern lives. The authors examine how religion functions on the ground in a pluralistic society, how it is experienced by individuals, and how it is expressed in social institutions. Taken as a whole, these essays point to a new approach to the study of religion, one that emphasizes individual experience and social context over strict categorization and data collection.

Starting from an ethnographic appraisal of the place of religious practices, and thereby returning to an approach more recently neglected, this book offers a detailed understanding of English everyday life. Three contemporary case studies - the life of a country church, an annual procession by the churches in a Bristol suburb, a range of linked "spiritualist" beliefs - disclose the complex patterns and compulsion of ordinary lives, including both moral and historical dimensions: the distribution of reputation and conflict, and the continuities of place and identity. At the same time, the approach revises previous accounts of English social life by giving a nuanced description of the construction of local lives in interaction with their wider setting. It demonstrates the creation of local particularity under an outside gaze, showing how actors create and cope with the forces of "modernity." In addition to the original ethnographic descriptions, the book also contributes to the history and theory of the study of complex societies.

Distinguished contributors focus on the relationship between politics and religion, and on ordinary people’s religious life. These topics are approached through empirical studies and theoretical discussions, and editor Pål Repstad demonstrates the need for a closer relationship between the two topics.