6

Lived Religious Emotions

An evangelical convert weeps over her sins. A crusader fights a religious

enemy with intense fury. A pilgrim is joyful at reaching her sacred des-
tination. A synagogue volunteer reaches out with care and empathy to
a newly arrived refugee. The religious practices of conversion, crusade,
pilgrimage, and community service cannot be fully understood without
paying attention to the emotional dimensions of those practices. Nor
can we understand the more ordinary moments of prayer or religious
learning or veneration without knowing about the feelings that bring
those practices to life and the patterns of shared knowledge that provide
religious emotional know-­how. The study of lived religion includes the
study of emotions, and learning to pay attention to emotions is the work
to which we turn in this chapter.
That is not to say that religion is simply an emotion or that there is
any single distinctive religious emotion. The enactment of religious
practice employs the full range of human feeling. It is as much about
anger and jealousy as about love and compassion. As Ole Riis and
Linda Woodhead say, “What makes an emotion religious is . . . the
fact that it occurs within a religious context and is integral to its social
and symbolic relations” (2010, 54). As we have seen in earlier chap-
ters, even the definition of a context as religious is a matter of shared
understanding. Within those contexts, religious traditions offer their
followers distinctive emotional repertoires—­encouraging calm seren-
ity or energetic praise, happiness or contrition. Emotion itself is as
foundational to religious practice as to any other social practice. As
with all the things we do, feeling, expressing, naming, and regulating
emotion is embedded in our bodies and in our social contexts (Scheer
2012). Understanding patterns of shared religious practice requires at-
tention to the emotions they evoke and express, as well as to the social
rules that manage that expression.

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Emotions Are Social

Studying the emotional dimension of religious practice requires rec-
ognizing that emotions are not just a matter of the individual psyche.1
There are social patterns at work. We may experience an emotion as
something that overwhelms us from outside or something that is lodged
in our inner body, mind, and heart, but emotion is not untouched by
outside influence. The situations that evoke feelings and the inter-
pretations for explaining them come from our past experience, our
relationships, and our surroundings. They have become a part of our
shared knowledge. We know, without thinking, when it’s appropriate to
laugh or to cry. When the movie music or the political speaker give us
cues, we know when to be excited or to be afraid. We also know when
to show overt emotion and how to explain it to ourselves. Just as differ-
ent cultures expect different expressions of grief at a graveside, different
religious communities expect different expressions of emotion in a wor-
ship service or at a temple. Sometimes the triggers are very intentionally
built in, but mostly we just know. We may think of individual emotions
as private and uniquely our own, but sharing an emotional moment in a
public ceremony is no less real and authentic.
However, individuals do not always find themselves in emotional har-
mony with the situations around them. The tie between shared emotion
and shared belonging is perhaps most apparent when it is disrupted or
absent. When everyone else is acting joyous but you are unmoved or
when you are feeling great sorrow but no one else seems touched, you
may have the first clue to the possibility that you are out of place. An indi-
vidual’s own past experience or evolving sense of identity may mean that
the emotional expectations of a given religious practice are felt as dis-
sonant or even oppressive. Equally likely, simply being in a new cultural
setting means learning to tune one’s own emotions to the expectations
of others. Because that is true, participant observers should not discount
their own emotional involvement in what they observe. When we think
reflexively about our position within research relationships, our own
feelings and those of others are an important starting point in the task
(Burkitt 2012). How we know others and how we know ourselves requires
emotional awareness no less than any other form of analysis.

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Along with the participants themselves, researchers will experience

the emotional expectations of religious communities. That is true even
if the emotions in question seem “unemotional.” Even the most stiff-­
upper-­lip self-­control is a “feeling rule” no less than the admonition to
praise God with all one’s heart.2 Being an observer in a community that
is not one’s own can reveal both one’s own emotional expectations and
the community’s. That is one of the things Timothy Nelson (2005) dis-
covered by spending a year deeply enmeshed in the life of the Charles-
ton, South Carolina, congregation he calls Eastside Chapel. We saw in
chapter 4 how differing positions of privilege influenced his understand-
ing of their experiences of health and embodiment, but there were more
layers of difference to uncover. This is an African American church, and
Nelson is white, and he writes openly about the degree to which his first
experiences of the congregants’ worship were disconcerting. He slowly
became a part of the community, though, and formed close relation-
ships with several of its members. Eventually he was able to discern the
particular emotional repertoire that characterized their services. Notice
how he is able to describe the emotions and how the actions of the wor-
ship service and the relationships in the congregation structured them.
The words of the pastor, the church mothers leading by example, and the
songs that members sing made clear which emotions were being called
forth and when. This is not something members might have been able to
describe in words, but Nelson’s own presence and participation allowed
him to map out these patterns.

Emotion Worship at Eastside Chapel

Adoration. Love. Hope. Joy. Gratitude. The worship service at Eastside Cha-
pel is an emotionally charged affair. When I say “emotional” here, I don’t
simply mean it in the sense of overt action like shouting, dancing, clapping,
and loud cries. . . . I mean that these five specific emotions are evoked by
and displayed in the service. Putting it sociologically, these emotions are
normative—­people expect other worshippers (and themselves) to not only
display them, but actually feel them. . . . When the Eastside congregation
sings the final stanza of “Amazing Grace,” “When we’ve been there ten thou-
sand years, bright shining as the sun; / There’s no less days to sing God’s
praise / Than when we’d first begun,” each congregant is reminded of his

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or her belief in God’s provision for the future and the eternal life to follow,
evoking hope within. When the choir sings, “A mighty fortress is our God, a
bulwark never failing,” those present are reminded of the power and majesty
of God, an image that evokes feelings of praise and worship. When worship-
pers sing the words of the old spiritual “I know I’ve been changed, the angels
in the heaven have changed my name,” it may call to mind their own spiri-
tual journey out of spiritual darkness and evoke joy and gratitude within.
(Nelson 2005, 134–­138)

Identifying the emotional realities in religious practice is also criti-

cal because we learn about the world through our feelings and those
feelings prompt action. Feeling afraid tells us to act cautiously. Feeling
anxious may tell us to be especially vigilant. Feeling loved may encour-
age us to engage in sexual activity or acts of kindness. Emotions deliver
information to us, and we convey information with them. They can di-
rect our attention toward some things and away from others. People may
engage in some forms of religious practice because it brings them plea-
sure, avoiding other practices because they are accompanied by unpleas-
ant emotions. Studying lived religion means paying attention to that full
range of attraction and repulsion.
It can also work the other way around. Action can motivate feeling. It
may even be hard to tell which came first—­performing a certain action or
feeling a certain way. Religious rituals are often aimed at generating emo-
tional states, and how they do so tells us something about the participants
and the group. Saba Mahmood’s study of Muslim women in Egypt points
to the ability of emotion to lead to religious commitment, rather than the
other way around. She describes weeping during prayer as both an expres-
sion of an interior state of piety and a behavioral means of acquiring that
state. The mosque women she studied adopted an intentional program of
practices intended to bring them to an ideal feeling of “tenderness of heart
appropriate to the state of being in the presence of God” (Mahmood 2005,
123). Emotional expression was chosen and intentionally taught until it
became internalized and spontaneous and desired.
The relationship between visible displays of emotion and inner states
is, then, complex, as the religious studies scholar Pamela Klassen (2009)
discovered at the wedding of a Hindu friend. Feeling sad when a child
leaves the nest to get married may be a common experience, but the

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ritual structure of the flow of emotion was especially apparent to her as

an outsider. She saw how collective action provided a ritual container
for emotion, whether or not individuals spontaneously experienced the
prescribed feelings.

Crying at a Hindu Wedding

After the long Hindu wedding ritual, and before the North American–­
style reception, my friend took me aside to warn me that “the time
for crying” was about to start. Accordingly, many of her female rela-
tives gathered around her in the hotel lobby to weep publicly as a
display of their grief over the loss of their sister/daughter/niece. To my
unaccustomed (though tipped-­off) eyes, the scene appeared to be
entirely ritually provoked—­that is, the women were crying because
the schedule of the ritual called them to do so as they said a ritualized
farewell to their beloved kinswoman whom they would see again at
the reception in an hour. Perhaps due to its diasporic setting within
a downtown Toronto hotel lobby and its timing in the middle of the
wedding celebrations, and because I was warned of it by the bride, the
weeping at first appeared to me as entirely contrived—­as inauthen-
tic tears that, though they might represent authentic feelings, were
called on by ritual and not by the natural course of emotions.
Reflecting on this, of course, it is easy to see how my limited per-
spective of what counted as “natural” in the course of a ritual shaped
my estimation of the authenticity of weeping. The “time for crying”
provided a container to let out the grief of separation that comes with
the maturing of a child in a way that the Christian weddings I was ac-
customed to did not. (Klassen 2009, 151–­152)

Notice that Klassen was an on-­the-­scene observer, and she had an

informant. That combination of direct observation as the event unfolds
and before-­and-­after conversation with an insider is a common method
for exploring the emotional dimension of religious practices. We can
observe activity and behavior and setting, but we may have difficulty
accessing what the participants are feeling. The scene itself may seem
to evoke emotion—­lights dim and music slows—­but just how prayer-
ful is that moment? A bloody Passion play (depicting Jesus’s last hours)
may seem revolting to one observer, while it moves another to feelings

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of gratitude or compassion. Sorting things out means asking directly.

It is important not to make assumptions but to find a participant who
is willing to talk about what they felt and why. It is important, too, to
realize that conversations about emotions are as socially structured as
the feelings themselves. Talking to more than one person is important,
just as reflecting on our own experience is. There is a complex interplay
between individual experiences and social expectations.

What Emotions Do
People who study emotion sometimes talk about it as the aspect of
human experience that indicates and expresses “involvement” (Barbalet
2002). That is, emotion is our point of connection and commitment. A
group’s solidarity is not just about its ideological unity but also about
its ties of affection. Doing things together and having a common focus
combines with shared emotion to create attachment to the group and
commitment to doing things together in the future.3 We don’t just cal-
culate the costs and benefits of belonging, we feel our relationship to
people. We don’t just think about what we should do, we respond based
on our sense of membership and the collective emotions we generate
together. Emotions do important social work.
Feelings and relationships are, in fact, inseparable. Mutual attention
and affection are at the heart of what it means to be part of a group, and
maintaining positive connections requires “emotion work.” Hochschild
was among the earliest and most important writers about the sociology
of emotion. She says that emotions are something we work at, rather
than simply an uncontrolled bodily reaction. “We feel. We try to feel.
We want to try to feel” (Hochschild 1979, 563). That is, we size up the
social situation and figure out the appropriate feelings for that place and
time for people “like us.” If we do not yet feel enthusiastic enough, we
may evoke memories of exciting past moments or engage in physical
displays of feeling to get ourselves in the mood. As Hochschild (1983)
also showed, getting out of the mood is equally important. If everyone
aboard the plane is terrified by the turbulence, the determined calm of
the flight attendant provides reassurance. In each case, people are work-
ing together to achieve and maintain the feelings that will also establish
or reestablish a group’s sense of well-­being. Social psychologist Row-

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land Miller (2004) has studied the importance of embarrassment, for

instance. He points out that realizing one has committed a gaffe, feeling
chagrined (maybe even blushing), and expressing an apology give one’s
compatriots an opportunity to make light of the situation and thereby
maintain good relations. Regulating emotions—­good and bad—­is part
of keeping a group together.
How would we observe such things? Both participation and inter-
views can be important, but other methods can be useful, as well. Social
psychologists study emotion work by using questionnaires and even ex-
periments to identify which emotions are triggered by which kinds of
situations. While that has not been common among students of lived
religion, it is not hard to imagine using surveys to ask about emotional
components of religious practices. The National Congregations Study,
for example, asks a representative (a “key informant”) to report on con-
gregational practices that can have a bearing on participants’ emotional
experience, and the US Congregational Life Survey asks congregants
directly about their experiences during worship. Both surveys can be
accessed through the American Religion Data Archive (www.thearda.
com). Survey data can make it possible to see larger patterns that might
not show up in a single place and time, even as they must be interpreted
cautiously. We should remember that different respondents are likely to
differ in what they mean by “happiness” or “comfort” or any other feel-
ing word that they are asked about on a survey.
When a group’s emotional ties are strong, commitment is strong, but
that very bond may also mean negative feelings about other groups.4 In
fact, the two emotions can feed off each other—­affection for compatriots
can generate antipathy for others, and vice versa. That’s one of the things
Hyun Jeong Ha (2017) discovered when she spent seven months in the
churches, streets, and markets of a mixed-­religion neighborhood in
Cairo. She wanted to know, among other things, how emotions affected
the way Christians interacted with their Muslim neighbors. The over-
all tension in Egypt and widely publicized incidents of violence against
Christian churches made her participants nervous, and they showed it
in what she called “subdued behaviors.” That is, they were likely to talk
“in hushed voices, looking around to make sure their conversations are
not overheard” (Ha 2017, 139). They also got annoyed. In everyday in-
teractions, there were often points of irritation, times when Christians

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felt that they were disadvantaged and put down. Notice all the subtle
cues Ha documents—­how people talked and what they wore, as much
as what they said. Note also that lived religious practice does not stop
at the church door. We might not think about shopping as a religious
practice, but when it is framed by religious identity markers—­a crucifix
necklace and the absence of a head covering—­it becomes a religious
part of everyday life. In a situation where religious life is precarious and
contested, the emotional dimension of everyday practice comes to the
fore. Fear and anger stand opposite affection and solidarity.

Antipathy on the Streets of Cairo

Sarah was shopping at a store when the “Islamist” owner approached her
and ordered her to cover her hair as Muslim women do. She left the store
after telling him, “No, I am a Christian.” As Sarah recalls the situation during
the interview, she frowned and said she was “annoyed.” In her belief, the
Islamist owner knew that she was Christian from her crucifix necklace that
she always wears. Since then, she stopped going to Islamist-­run shops be-
cause she realized that Islamist owners were “very rude” and “not respectful”
to Christians. . . . These microaggressions and the provocation of negative
emotions distance Christians from Muslims in general, while shared, collec-
tive emotions bind Christians and reinforce solidarity. (Ha 2017, 142–­143)

If we want to study religious practices of exclusion and hatred, there

are unfortunately many examples in history and contemporary life—­
Christians and Buddhists against Muslims, Hindus against Sikhs, Mus-
lims against Christians, and more. These conflicts almost always involve
land and ethnicity and politics in equal measure with religious differ-
ence, but the most violent atrocities can build on ground-­level emo-
tional momentum. Religious rituals such as prayers, songs, and chants
encourage people to work themselves up to a state that permits violence,
but that happens in a context where divisions have long been stoked.5
Political scientist and anthropologist Timothy Longman has carefully
documented the role of the Christian churches in Rwanda’s 1993–­1994
genocide and concludes,

It should not be surprising that many Christians believed that the geno-
cide was consistent with Christian belief, that it even had the sanction of

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the churches. The case of Ngoma parish in Butare, where Christians went
to pray before they went out to kill, was not isolated. The fact that people
could desecrate church buildings and kill even at the foot of the altar or
in the sacristy is not evidence of a lack of respect for Christianity or a
shallowness of Christian faith. Instead it reveals the nature of Christianity
in Rwanda as a politicized, conservative, discriminatory faith. (Longman
2009, 197)

Institutions and political power are the backdrop, but emotions of hatred
and fear, all sacralized by religious authority, are necessary components.
Even after the violence has ended, later rituals may commemorate the
group’s struggles and thereby continue to build group solidarity. National
anthems often state (or at least imply) the godly rightness of vanquish-
ing the nation’s enemies, while invoking the blessing of the divine on the
citizen singers. Studying the role of emotion in religious practice, then,
has to include attention to practices that intensify conflict by generating
and remembering sacralized feelings of outrage and hatred.
Undertaking this kind of research may require taking up historical
cases, given the difficulty posed by being present in the midst of vio-
lent confrontations.6 Longman’s research is remarkable for his close ob-
servations and wide-­ranging interviews, both immediately before and
immediately after the 1994 genocide. Even when one is documenting
long-­ago events, however, there are many records to tap—­visual as well
as written—­available for analysis and often accessible soon after the fact
in web-­based formats and social media posts. There are tools for “scrap-
ing data” from social media, as well as tools for digital analysis of mas-
sive volumes of historical texts. Theologians Timothy Snyder and Ashley
Theuring used Twitter posts as a basis for studying the lived religious
practices of thousands of people in the wake of the Sandy Hook school
shooting tragedy in the United States (T. Snyder 2013). Digital tools al-
lowed them to see patterns of religious practice, paying special attention
to both the verbal and visual expression of emotion.

Grieving on Twitter
Our research on Sandy Hook indicates that following a national trag-
edy, social media creates new possibilities for religious practice, allow-
ing us to directly access firsthand accounts and to express our faith

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and solidarity in the face of unimaginable suffering from essentially

anywhere on the globe. We found that Twitter provides us a place
both to offer condolences and compassion to those who have been
directly impacted and to make meaning of such events for ourselves.
For example, in the wake of Sandy Hook, the hashtag #nowords,
which began as a social commentary on the ridiculousness of the In-
ternet, took on a more solemn and profound sensibility. Indeed, many
of us did not have the words to make any sense of it. Social media
offers a solution to this “speechlessness.” Twitter, Instagram and Face-
book allow users to express in images what they might struggle to
express with words. We discovered that these visual articulations offer
a surprisingly powerful tool for prayer.
When we compared tweets about Newtown, we found that
tweets designated as prayer used photos and graphics 50 percent
more than general condolences. These included photo memorializa-
tion of the victims, photos of prayer vigils and other images filled
with religious significance. Twitter and smartphones provided an
unanticipated and soul-­stirring alternative to conventional words of
prayer, inviting us to forgo language altogether and bring the poetry
of silence to our contemporary religious practices. . . . After the New-
town shootings, many Twitter users documented their participation
in a crowd-­sourced memorialization by sharing photos of candles
lit inside white paper bags they’d placed in their driveways, a sym-
bolic gesture to guide “home” the innocent souls of the victims. In
this case, participation via Twitter didn’t replace traditional religious
practice; it improvised it. (T. Snyder 2013)

As we see in Snyder’s example, emotion can build bridges. Ecumenical

and interfaith groups know this and often design gatherings they hope
will promote positive feelings among the participants and thereby coun-
ter tendencies toward conflict. They emphasize what all have in common
and tell stories of kindness and compassion. A rational argument about
ideas and interests might make all the same points, but the shared emo-
tion and shared ritual are likely to build more formidable bonds. One
extensive study of faith-­based community organizing emphasized just
that by analyzing what the authors called “bridging cultural practices”
(Braunstein, Fulton, and Wood 2014). These are practices that define

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inclusive social categories to which everyone can potentially belong and

then enact rituals that allow people to inhabit common emotional space.
Again, being there to observe was critical for these researchers, as was an
imaginative analysis of how words are connected to feelings. Notice how
their observation of an opening ritual benefited from their familiarity
with the diverse religious and racial contours of the audience. They also
paid attention to the multiple dimensions of the religious practice that
a progressive rabbi invited her listeners into. Emotions, evoked by and
embodied in religious ritual practice, do important social work, espe-
cially in establishing—­and transcending—­social boundaries.

Emotional Bridges in Interfaith Organizing

[The rabbi] spoke of the challenges faced by the [ancient] Jews after
they were sent to wander the desert. Before offering her prayer, she
recounted how the Jews built relationships as free members of a new
society:
“One of the things that really strikes me about this journey is the
instructions for the priests, who are the leaders . . . responsible for
carrying the communal center—­the Tabernacle—­through the desert.
So when the priests are being prepared for their role, they put oil—­
do this with me [she acts out putting oil on her ear and encourages
others to follow along]—­they put oil on their ear. Yeah, put it on. And
on their thumb. And on the toe, the big toe of their foot. [Everyone
laughs as she lifts up her foot and touches her toe.]
“It’s an amazing set of reminders for us, too, as we gather in relation-
ship building. Because it meant that these leaders—­and all of us are
leaders tonight—­had to listen well first. The first thing was the ear. . . .
Second, they had to reach out their hand—­right?—­to connect to
someone, and to use that human connection. What makes us human?
It’s our thumbs. . . . And then to make those connections, they couldn’t
just stand there and reach out their hand. They had to walk over and
connect with somebody—­right?—­which made an active possibility of
connection all over the six hundred thousand and more people. . . .
“Let’s turn our attention to prayer for a minute, and be thinking
about your ear, and your thumb, and your toe. Let’s turn to God. We
ask you, oh God, who creates human beings in your image, and teach-
es us the way to walk through our life, that you give us knowledge,

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knowledge that we need to go back to our communities to create

relationships, to organize there, so that eventually we can reach out
into our entire city and improve the lives of so many. And in that way,
we’ll be listening, and we’ll be reaching out, and we’ll be taking the
steps to make that happen. Amen.” (event transcript)
By engaging participants’ bodies in collective rituals surrounding
spoken prayer or encouraging transgressions of personal space, prac-
tices like these draw the group together into shared embodied experi-
ences. These rituals create opportunities for individuals to enact the
relationships they seek to create or strengthen. (Braunstein, Fulton,
and Wood 2014, 714–­15)

Emotional Boundaries and Differences

If emotions are socially structured, that means that they are also subject
to the dynamics of culture, power, and exclusion that are part of the
social world. We have seen that in the way emotions define membership.
To know one’s “place” in society is to know the emotional repertoire that
accompanies the practices typical of one’s group (Stets and Turner 2014).
Each culture and subgroup values a particular range of emotion—­and
often devalues the way other people act. It is both a matter of simple
difference and a stratified, hierarchical order. If the people at the top
value restrained public affect, the more expressive habits of other groups
may be part and parcel of why those groups are denigrated as lesser
people. Whether the division is ethnic, racial, or class based, it will shape
how the emotional dimensions of religious practice are experienced and
perceived. Just who is seen as “too emotional”? The long history of colo-
nial dominance by the “restrained” and “rational” cultures of the North
Atlantic has, in fact, meant that it is more often lower classes and the
cultures of the Global South that are criticized for being emotionally
out of control (Fanon [1963] 1968). As Nelson (2005) points out in his
study of Eastside Chapel, however, all cultures have emotion rules, and
the job of the observer is to look for those patterns. Inevitably that will
also mean observing how the emotional dimension of religious practice
plays a role in setting up social hierarchies.
We are likely to notice, for example, that gender and age structure the
emotional dimension of religious practice. In many instances, women

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are expected to be the visible bearers of the community’s emotion, while

men are the quiet ones.7 But that can be deceiving. More to the point, we
should pay attention to which emotions are expected of different groups.
How are anger, ecstasy, affection, joy, remorse, courage, and excitement
distributed among the participants?
As with so many things in the study of religious practice, we often
recognize the rules when they are broken. A 2019 concert of Boston’s
Handel and Haydn Society made news for exactly that reason (Annear
2019). A young boy, attending his first classical music concert, loudly
exclaimed “Wow!” at the end of a piece of music, and the audience of
more staid adults had to decide how to respond. They laughed—­often a
sign that a rule has been broken—­and then applauded. They had been
reminded of the emotion rules—­and perhaps of their own suppressed
emotional response.8 Not only does gender dictate who does what, but
youth is often a license for modes of expression that adults have learned
to leave aside for more approved responses such as polite applause.
Discovering divisions and hierarchies can sometimes be hard. Care-
ful direct observation, accompanied by formal and informal interviews,
is the standard tactic for good methodological reasons. But many people
resist talking about divisions in their group and insist that everyone is
equal. Getting past that barrier requires very gentle questioning, often
with concrete “what if ” questions that allow seemingly hypothetical re-
sponses. Paper-­and-­pencil surveys also allow enough distance for peo-
ple to say something about what they really expect and value and what
they don’t. Innovative web-­based experiments can also present scenarios
that show variations on practices that feature different kinds of people
behaving in different ways, allowing participants to assign evaluative
scores based on their responses. Whatever tools we choose, it is impor-
tant to consider the ways lived religious practice follows the emotional
contours of the status hierarchies in which it takes place.

Emotions as Part of the Whole

Lived religious practice has multiple dimensions, and they are experi-
enced as parts of a whole. The perception of being in the presence of
the divine signals the spiritual dimension of practice, but that percep-
tion is sometimes inseparable from the emotion of crying, as among the

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Muslim women whom Mahmood studied. What people understand as a

spiritual experience may be defined by its emotional content. Likewise,
in discovering the power of emotion to set (or transcend) boundar-
ies between groups, we have seen the interaction between emotional
and moral dimensions of practice. What we think is right action is
recognized by its emotional resonance and not just its theological justi-
fication. It feels right. Theological combatants can call for emotionally
charged practices of moral exclusion, but religious leaders can also seek
inclusion through equally emotionally charged practices of unity. The
person or practice that is anathema or blessed is defined as such by the
emotion. That, too, is a lived religious practice.
Note especially that emotions intersect with embodiment and mate-
riality. They are made visible in tears or laughter and are integral with
movement and postures. Lifting hands in praise both expresses an inner
feeling and actually embodies and evokes that feeling. Bowing to the
ground in salat prayer expresses an inner feeling of submission, but it
also reminds the Muslim participants—­arrayed side by side and physi-
cally facing Mecca—­of the community to which they belong. Similarly,
clasped hands and the eye-­to-­eye greeting “The Peace of Christ” ex-
presses the warmth of relationship of shared Christian belonging. All
the questions we asked about the material and embodied dimensions
of practice are at play here. Material surroundings evoke emotion, as do
touch and aroma and movement. They are all intertwined parts of lived
religious practice.
Emotions are, that is, situated. Lived religious practice involves mate-
rial surroundings, and those surroundings are part of what constitutes
the emotional dimension of the practice. Being surrounded by a multi-
tude of other participants intensifies the feelings. Being in a large quiet
space may do the same, but with different feelings. In chapter 7, we will
turn our attention to the aesthetic dimension of practice, which is closely
tied to these physical and material realities, but for now, we will focus
on the observation that spaces and places have a power to evoke feel-
ings (Löw 2008). They have what some theorists call “atmospheres.” The
space itself participates in the experience of the emotions. Geographer
Caitlin Cihak Finlayson (2012) offers an example. She was interested in
how people respond to worship spaces, and she interviewed participants
in two very different religious communities: Saint Paul’s United Method-

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ist Church and the Taoist Tai Chi Society, both in Tallahassee, Florida.
She chose in-­depth interviewing as her method so as to get at the inte-
rior emotions that are not necessarily expressed outwardly. She speaks
of these emotions as highly personal, but she nevertheless found striking
parallels and patterns in the feelings people described. Lived religious
practice—­whether American Protestant worship or tai chi movement—­
was characterized by emotions of serenity that were tied to the physical
spaces in which the practice took place. This student of lived religious
practice was able to discover and assess those patterns in the emotional
dimension of practice by both her own observations of the space and the
interviews she conducted.

Emotions in the Buildings

“Saint Paul’s was described by one of its members as ‘a classic church up
on a hill.’ . . . The Taoist Tai Chi Society’s location, on the other hand, re-
flects a strong Taoist emphasis on harmony with nature” (Finlayson 2012,
1770–­1771). Participants in both groups, Finlayson observed, consistently
talked about feelings of calm and serenity they experienced in these very
different locations. Using initials to denote her interviewees, she reports,
“Participants consistently noted that they felt differently upon entering
these spaces and, at the Taoist Tai Chi Society in particular, these feelings
of serenity began even before walking into the physical building, as YR
noted: ‘Because as you enter from the street, you right away begin to see
the gardens, you see the gazebo, and you see actually the gravel driveway,
and already this is putting you in touch with something different from life
in the city’” (1771). That wasn’t just a matter of Taoist practice and space,
however. Finlayson continues, “‘I think I get a serenity and a peace from
the space’ (interview, RK, United Methodist Church). But what brought
about these feelings of serenity and contentment? . . . Another member,
like many others, was struck by the open and airy design of the sanctuary
as a whole: ‘The openness [of the sanctuary] really is, for me, it’s a combi-
nation of calming [and] it’s actually welcoming. And it really just, it makes
me feel comfortable. It makes me feel more comfortable’ (interview, NH,
United Methodist Church). For another member, the simplicity of Saint
Paul’s cross, which is unadorned and back-­lit, brought about feelings of
peace: ‘You can have something very simple and the austerity of it can
bring forth peace’ (interview, JP, United Methodist Church). Yet another

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member’s emotions were shaped by the windows in the church, which are
clear, leaded glass—­as opposed to the stained glass found in many other
houses of worship” (1772).

Emotions also, of course, take form in words and stories. We tell

people how we feel (or how we think we should feel), and we recount
religious experiences in full emotional detail. Emotions themselves are
powerful triggers of memory and sometimes prompt participants to try
to find words and stories to explain the experience. Emotional memories
thrust themselves on our consciousness and seem to demand explana-
tion (Whitehouse 2009). We may also supplement the religious words
with visual images, as the Twitter users did. We use emoticons and
memes in our emails and tweets, since words on the page sometimes
miss what we hear when the words are spoken or read. The sheer range
of those electronic images is testimony both to the range of emotions
that need to be described and also to the way we often need visual cues
to go along with the words.
However the emotions are communicated, religious communities
bless some of those emotion words with theological importance—­“awe,”
“repentance,” “joy,” “love.” Religious leaders learn to say those words
with special, approving fervor, just as they learn to express religious
disapproval for an equally wide range of other feeling words—­“rage,”
“lust,” “jealousy,” and the like. Each language and community has its
own array of words, reflecting the culture’s expected range of feelings
and the moral and theological significance attached to them.
Religious words, that is, can also narrate what should happen, in-
cluding how one should feel. Observers need to listen to the theologies,
sermons, and other narrative practices of a religious group for what they
say about emotions. Is God angry or loving? Are good disciples stern
or comforting? How does a good religious life feel? Religious narrative
practices of emotion can be observed in the literature being read and
the other cultural products people consume. For example, Jason Biv-
ens (2008) has described the pervasiveness of fear in evangelical comic
books, “Hell Houses” (Halloween creations designed to depict the ter-
rors of sin), and the famous “Left Behind” books that imagine the world
at the end of time. In contrast, it is gratitude that begins the typical wor-
ship service in many African American traditions. The mood in the

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sanctuary shifts as the deacons move to the front of the congregation

and pray, “Thank you, Lord, for waking me up this morning clothed in
my right mind.” Religious words express and elicit feelings. A spiritual
story of inner awakening is also present for Buddhist converts, but for
them, it is one structured around accounts of discovering contentment.
Each community has both cosmic, official stories and everyday ones that
recount the emotions of sacred experiences.
Indeed, theology itself may be deeply focused on emotions. That is
exactly the argument Tanya Luhrmann (2012) makes in her study of
what she calls “renewalist evangelicals,” that is, those like members of
the Vineyard church she studied in Chicago. They are influenced by
Pentecostal practices, but the movement’s shifting theological focus can
be found in what is and isn’t heard in members’ testimonies—­that is, the
particular emotional depths they recall.

Transforming Emotions at The Vineyard

The Vineyard took the basic Christian narrative about the distance between
a limited human and a boundless mighty God and shifted the plotline from
our inadequacy to God’s extraordinary capacity. Gone is the fear of snap-
ping the connection. Gone is the torment of the abyss. The story becomes
the delight in drawing closer. Its protagonists fear lifelessness—­not death. In
this new Christian narrative, the problem is human emotional pain, . . . and
the resolution of that pain is God’s infinite and personal love that can be
had now, today. . . . [These feelings are embodied in practices, from] crying in
the presence of God [to] practicing love, peace, and joy [to] rare, powerful
instants of happy emotional collapse that demonstrate to the congregant
(and to whoever was listening to the testimony) that they had personally
experienced the absolute certainty of God’s love. (Luhrmann 2012, 104, 126)

Not surprisingly, the kinds of churches Luhrmann studied rely heav-

ily on music to set the emotional tone. She notes that the church where
she spent two years observing and interviewing sets aside thirty minutes
at the beginning of each service for what congregants call “worship”—­a
musical space in which individuals commune with God (Luhrmann 2012,
4). Bodies, emotions, settings, and spirituality come together in musical
practice. Mark Jennings (2008) also wanted to understand the religious
experiences of Pentecostals, and his description of their worship makes

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note of all the dimensions of the lived religious practice he observed. The
role of music has been one of the most lively areas of research on lived
religious practice. Recall the account of Sacred Harp singing in chapter 4.
Singing together involves emotions, bodies, material settings, aesthetics,
morality, spirituality, and narrative all at work together. Paying attention
to the emotional dimension sharpens our understanding of all the rest.

Emotion in an Australian Pentecostal Church

Would you believe me,
would you listen if I told you that
There is a love that makes a way and never holds you back
So won’t you break free
Won’t you break free
Get up and dance in this love . . .
(Hillsong United—­Break Free)
It is Sunday morning, and I am standing in the darkened performance hall
of the local high school. It is early on the classic Australian sleep-­in day, but
I am not alone. Standing in front of rows of hard plastic chairs, people all
around me are bouncing, quivering, shouting, singing, raising their hands
and swaying, most with their eyes closed and faces raised upwards. The ex-
pressions of those around me are astonishing. They display intense passion
and perhaps even ecstasy, often with tears or laughter. On a pushed togeth-
er block stage in front of us, a group of musicians and singers pound out a
loud, heavy musical sound that builds and disperses in waves of volume and
rhythm. The white screen, stark in this dim environment, displays the words
of the current song, but most do not seem to need them. They sing from
memory, or do not sing at all, allowing the sound to wash over them as they
stand with arms outstretched to heaven. This is worship time at Breakfree
Church, a Pentecostal congregation in the suburbs of Perth, Western Austra-
lia. (Jennings 2008, 161–­162)

Ideas for Further Study

1. Sociologists of culture pioneered this understanding of emotion. Sara Ahmed’s
(2014) work in feminist theory was especially important in bringing the reality of
power into how we understand the structuring of emotion.

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2. “Feeling rule” is a term borrowed from Arlie Russell Hochschild (1979), whose
work is discussed a little later in this chapter and is well worth exploring further.
As we will see in chapter 9, her account of the Louisiana Tea Party is a powerful
analysis of the way emotions structure members’ view of the world (Hochschild
2016).
3. Recall Emile Durkheim’s ([1912] 1964) ideas about the way ritual creates identity
and solidarity. He described the heightened emotions of ritual as “collective
effervescence” (250). More recently, Randall Collins (2004) has written about
“entrainment”—­emotionally charged mutual attention—­in his work on “inter-
action rituals.” Earlier, Rosabeth Kanter (1972) wrote about the necessity of “af-
fective ties” for group commitment in the communes she studied. She outlined
the social mechanisms they employed for achieving those ties. Each of these
theories puts emotional experience at the center of their understanding of how
society works.
4. Those who have studied group emotions point to the complexity and danger in
how we react to outsiders. Actions by a potential rival can easily evoke anger
(Mackie, Silver, and Smith 2004). Or a fear of losing something beloved can pro-
duce what Ahmed calls a “shared ‘communal’ visceral response of hate. Because
we love, we hate, and this hate is what brings us together” (2014, 43).
5. The link between religion and violence is something we need to study carefully,
without leaping to conclusions. All the world’s religions have employed violence
either symbolically or physically, so we should not assume that any one religion
promotes violence more than another. A nuanced quantitative accounting of the
recent entanglements of religion, politics, and violence can be found in research
done by Jonathan Fox (2004), as well as by Monica Toft and her colleagues (Toft,
Philpott, and Shah 2011). Analysis of the practice of violence is more clearly in
view in qualitative studies closer to the ground. Here, too, there are examples
from around the world. A sampling includes Ian Baird’s (2009) work on Cam-
bodia, Richard Parks’s (2012) work on Jews in Tunisia, and Michael Sells’s (2003)
research on the violence in Bosnia-­Hercegovina.
6. Anthropologists have had long experience navigating research in difficult places.
Ruben Andersson’s (2016) reflection is a helpful reminder of the way definitions
of “the other” (including our own) intersect with fear of danger.
7. The relationship between gender and emotion is not just about women. It also
plays out in how men enact their religiousness. John Bartkowski’s (2000) research
on the evangelical group Promise Keepers noted a move toward emotional inti-
macy among the men he observed in the 1990s. Others have insisted that exagger-
ated displays of “Christian manhood” have been encouraged across evangelical-
ism, especially after World War II (DuMez 2020).
8. The little boy’s status on the autism spectrum added an additional element to his
position as an outsider to the event’s feeling rules. Hierarchies and cultural differ-
ences also affect the intersection of emotion with aesthetics, so we will look at a
similar example, from Tex Sample (1996), in chapter 7.

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 7

Lived Religious Aesthetics

Over and over, when people are asked what they think of when they
think about spirituality, they say they think about beauty. There is some-
thing in the experience of a beautiful sight or sound that seems to uplift
us, take us out of mundane realities. That connection between beauty
and spirituality tells us that there is probably an aesthetic component to
lived religious practice that bears note. The aesthetics we are concerned
with, however, are not the refined, high-­art connoisseurship of the elite.
Nor are we speaking of a philosophical stance that seeks to define essen-
tial qualities of art and beauty. Rather, we are looking for an everyday
dimension of social practice, one that encompasses our shared attempts
to arrange the material world in ways that are satisfying, pleasing, com-
fortable. It is a sensuous dimension of experience that is concerned with
the flavors, sights, sounds, and smells of life and how we perceive them
as either attractive or repulsive, beautiful or alien.
Embodiment, materiality, and emotion are dimensions of experience
that lay the groundwork for an examination of aesthetics. A focus on
the aesthetics of religious practice takes those dimensions and adds at-
tention to how the sensory experience is organized to convey a sense
of the sublime (as religious studies scholar Birgit Meyer [2008] puts it).
Aesthetics is a way of talking about sensual contact with the world—­
through bodies and emotions and perception—­as well as how we judge
what it is we perceive.1 It is a dimension of all social practices, so-­called
high culture and low, sacred and profane. Sociologist Bernice Martin ar-
gues that every religious group has an aesthetic, what she describes as “a
repertoire of appearances, artefacts, representations, self-­presentations
and performances” (2006). We might add that every religious practice
has an aesthetic, as well.
Portions of the material, sensual world are, of course, labeled as “art,”
a category as definitionally fraught as religion or spirituality. Still it
would seem only natural for students of lived religion to examine the

141

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intersection of art and religion, since so much that we recognize as a

culture’s art has been produced by religious practices and institutions.
Whether the art takes the form of simple carved images or elaborate
icons, paintings hanging in a museum, or architecture and landscaping
setting aside sacred spaces, religious communities have long produced
objects that are intended to inspire and to create or facilitate connection
to transcendent, divine realities. The search for moments of beauty can
itself be akin to a religious ritual. A transcendent musical performance
or an awe-­inspiring piece of art can be the vehicle for a shared moment
of touching something beyond ourselves, acting as what Peter Berger
(1970) called “signals of transcendence.” Religious practice and aesthet-
ics are often intentionally intertwined.
Sometimes an artistic object or production is itself the focus of reli-
gious practice. In Eastern Orthodox traditions, gazing on an icon is an
act of worship, for example. In Islam, Qur’anic calligraphy is thought to
reflect the sacred character of the holy book itself. The letters act as a
talisman (Nasr 1987). Music and chants may be religious practices and
artistic productions at the same time. Alvin Ailey dancers perform “Rev-
elations” at the end of each concert, and the beauty and pathos and joy
of the movement is transcendently linked to the prayers voiced in the
spirituals to which it is set. Similarly, an architect might say that de-
signing a church is a spiritual exercise (Brenneman and Miller 2020),
just as Johann Sebastian Bach signed his work “Soli deo gloria.” And
a Zen practitioner may find a well-­designed garden to be a space that
focuses her meditation. When artists create something they hope will
be compelling, masterful, focusing and transcending the senses, they
are also often creating something spiritual, often evoking a recognizably
religious tradition.2
Religious events themselves are marked by the efforts that go into cre-
ating something that participants will experience as a feast of the senses.
All over the world, religious festivals are a riot of color and sound and
smells into which participants pour boundless hours and energy for
the sake of what may be a momentary experience of excited engage-
ment. Most of these festivals are a complicated mix of sacred and secu-
lar practices, but careful study can reveal just what that mix looks like
and the importance of the aesthetic dimension.3 In China, for example,
the newly revived Qingming (“grave sweeping”) festival takes place in

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early April each year. After a century in which both the Republic and
the Communist regimes attempted to suppress such traditional “super-
stitious” rituals, there has been a slow opening in recent decades (Pang
2012). Studying the way Qingming is practiced, especially in these years
of cultural transition, reveals the tentative presence of spiritual elements
alongside the thriving aesthetic dimensions. It also reveals the roles of
status and resources—­who can afford which flowers? As in cemeteries
around the world, grave decorations very much reflect both social status
and local cultural tradition (Kipnis 2017).

Beautifying the Ancestors’ Graves

Today, millions in China’s cities journey to the graves of their ancestors (both
locally and in the countryside), bringing food and flowers (Zhou 2017). They
tidy the graves and often do obeisance, perhaps burning incense, paper
money, or pictures of items the ancestors might like to have in their afterlife.
There is the sight of kites with lanterns lighting the night sky, the pleasant
smell of the incense and the less pleasant smells of burning paper money
or firecrackers; but more than anything, the practice is marked by selecting
flowers that are chosen for their beauty. News accounts note that flower
vendors do a booming business as Qingming approaches. “The bouquets
are delicate and beautiful. White roses, yellow and white chrysanthemums,
and white calla lilies, together with forget-­me-­nots and some light-­colored
carnations make for a beautiful token of appreciation for those who left this
world without really leaving us” (Qian 2019).

In the United States, one of the pioneering explorations of lived reli-

gion’s aesthetic dimension comes from historian David Morgan’s writing
about “visual piety.” He is interested in how images express and remind
people of what they believe and the divine powers they are related to, or
“the reassuring harmony of the believer’s disposition toward the sacred
with its visualization” (Morgan 1998, 33). His book traces such visual
piety through a long history of images, but one of the most intriguing
proved to be Walter Sallman’s “Head of Christ.” Along with a collabora-
tive of other religious historians, Morgan explored the many facets of
that image, describing it as “one of the most iconographically distinc-
tive, and certainly the most ubiquitous, bodies of images deployed in
Protestant communities (also widely used among Roman Catholics as

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well, though on a smaller scale)” (1996, 18). By researching the econom-

ics of the image’s production and consumption, he helps us recognize
the mundane practices behind the scenes, and by paying attention to
an entire network of cultural practices, he shows how this aesthetic ob-
ject works. In addition to combing through historical records, Morgan
and his colleagues solicited letters from contemporary believers. They
placed ads in seventy-­three diverse religious periodicals, asking people
to describe their uses of the Sallman images. The 531 responses they got
allowed an even deeper understanding of how this image was used in
practice.

Religious Images and the Experience of Piety

Sallman’s publishers provided an image for every occasion in the
daily lives of the devout: pictures by Sallman adorned bookmarks,
calendars, prayer cards, tracts, Bibles, lamps, clocks, plates, buttons,
stickers, and stationery. . . . [The market for the use of the images was
shaped by] the practice of observing holidays and rites of passage
with commemorative religious gifts. . . . Created in a studio, manu-
factured in a printing factory, sold in stores, installed in homes and
churches, exchanged as gifts, and cherished as mementos, Sallman’s
mass-­produced images belong to a cultural economy in which the
inexpensive image is charged with crucial significance [as an object
of] visual piety. (Morgan 1996, 21–­22)
When a believer judges Sallman’s Head of Christ “beautiful,” my research
suggests that the picture’s beauty consists in the satisfying experience of
perceiving a particular understanding of Jesus adequately visualized. The im-
age, in other words, fits a viewer’s ideal. . . . As one woman put it, “As a Chris-
tian [I think] this picture is a beautiful portrayal of Jesus. . . . The picture is
full of love, compassion, empathy, peace, kindness, gentleness. And it is very
welcoming!! How very lovely—­And isn’t that what Christianity is supposed
to be all about!” (Morgan 1998, 32)

Ordinary religious practices, like all other everyday social practices,

are inherently expressive of the particular way we have arranged the
material and embodied world to make it pleasing. Sometimes we are
aware and deliberate about those aesthetic qualities, but just as often
they register without us consciously thinking about why we do or don’t

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like something, why we are attracted or repulsed. That is, attention to

aesthetic dimensions of religious practice means attention to what so-
ciologist Omar McRoberts calls “intuitive, precognitive aspects of reli-
gion” that nevertheless have the capacity to elicit action, to draw people
toward some things and away from others. Reflecting on his experience
studying Black churches in Dorchester, Massachusetts, McRoberts says,
“I came to understand beauty as a key part of religious experience and
religious communities partly as spaces where people generate and ap-
preciate certain kinds of beauty” (2004, 198).
This chapter explores what it means for a practice to express a group’s
way of presenting itself—­its aesthetic style—­and what the “pleasing”
qualities of a practice tell us about people’s place in the world. Some
practices—­like admiring Sallman’s depiction of Jesus—­put aesthetic
dimensions of practice right at the fore. Other religious practices
foreground other dimensions, with aesthetics only implicit. Whether
aesthetics is obvious or in the background, it is nevertheless part of the
experience and therefore part of what we need to be studying.

Aesthetics Is Social
Matters of aesthetic taste and style, the things that make something
pleasing or compelling, are inevitably defined by the people making
the judgments. Whether food preferences or attractive colors, our cul-
tures have shaped what we find delightful or nasty. Speaking about art,
social theorist John Levi Martin puts it well: “When ‘we get it’—­when we
experience the artistic beauty of a painting, say—­we focus on the ‘it,’ the
object in question, and the beauty as a quality of this object. But, when we
get the ‘it,’ we get the ‘we’ as well, in the sense of establishing a presump-
tion of like-­mindedness with those of similar taste” (2011, 203). Finding
an object or a body or a place beautiful and pleasing is embedded in the
intricacies of our social location, a location that includes our social class
and educational positions, our religious traditions, and the larger culture
of which we are a part.4 Tastes and experiences of beauty identify us.
The very places we identify as “religious” are recognized as such by
our cultural experiences of what religious space should look like. It’s
not a static definition but one that evolves over time as part of what
actually happens in and around a place. Cultural historian Gretchen

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Buggeln has written extensively about church buildings, and her re-
counting of a tragic fire at West Presbyterian Church in Wilmington,
Delaware, can give us a vivid window on how both the church members
and the community articulated ideas about beauty they had previously
taken for granted. She tapped the lived experience of the congregation
and community through church minutes and yearbooks, neighborhood
tour guidebooks, and news reports, as well as her own interviews. She
argues that church buildings, especially large and historic ones, often
“invite a sense of general proprietorship from a community. They . . .
work their way into the cognitive maps of those who are in and around
them” (Buggeln 2001, 88). Note how her description gives attention to
the aesthetic sensibilities of both congregation and community and how
those changed over time.

A Beautiful Church—­Then and Now

West Church’s original building, dedicated in 1871, was “handsome” and
Gothic in style, Buggeln writes. It “revealed the desire to create something
‘substantial’ with vague historical and romantic associations” (Buggeln 2001,
91). After the building burned in 1993, the struggling congregation was faced
with a dilemma. Some wanted to save the historic façade as a part of the
neighborhood’s architectural heritage. Indeed, the city’s historic preservation
agency got involved in the decisions. The neighbors themselves, however,
were simply invested in there being a worshiping community there, even if
they never attended themselves. But they did care what it looked like. “One
interviewee, who had lived in Quaker Hill for nine years and was active in
its neighborhood association, asked specifically that the church be beautiful,
not simply another social service center like the YMCA or the Scout build-
ings. She urged the congregation to ‘remember that it was still a church,’ the
interviewer recorded, ‘and should have the appearance of a church’” (95). In
the final reconstruction, they managed to preserve portions of the original
façade but coupled it with a smaller, more functional interior space, with lots
of light, and various artistic furnishings created by well-­known craftspeople.
Buggeln concludes, “Although the building’s exterior and most of the interior
is far from awe-­inspiring, the new sanctuary arguably has the same numinous
quality of the plain-­style, Protestant meeting houses that have charmed and
even transported generations of admirers” (101).

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If fire was the catalyst for reimagining the aesthetics of one religious
space, the Second Vatican Council (1962–­1965) was no less dramatic a
catalyst for transforming hundreds of Roman Catholic churches. Be-
fore the Council, churches were often ornate and stuffed full of statuary.
There were ranks of candles and a plethora of colors, textures, styles, and
images adorning the space. The altar was elaborately draped, inhabited
by men who were equally elaborately adorned, and separated from the
congregation by a rail. After the Council, the rail came down, and in
some places, so did just about everything else. New churches were en-
couraged to adopt a more austere style. Over time (and often after much
conflict), the renovations tended to reflect the varied lives and desires of
local parishes. Religious practice, theological claims, and aesthetic style
came to reinforce each other (McDannell 2011). Such times and places of
aesthetic transformation are potentially fertile for examination of lived
religious practice by theologians and others. What insight emerges in
this remaking of aesthetics and practice?
That work can build on the research of sociologists and historians
who have spent time observing what happens in religious spaces. Soci-
ologist Mary Ellen Konieczny described a neotraditional parish where
she spent many months doing ethnographic field work.

A dome decorated with 12 stained glass windows picturing the apostles

rises at the intersection of the nave and transepts. Above the main al-
tar, a half-­domed ceiling mural pictures the Blessed Virgin Mary. Murals
and stained-­glass windows throughout depict images of saints. Behind
the marble main altar, a gold baldachino, or sacred canopy, encompasses
the tabernacle, and in the nave l’art Saint-­Sulpice statues of the Blessed
Mother, St. Joseph, and St. Therese of Lisieux are enshrined. A picture of
Our Lady of Perpetual Help hangs near the left side altar, and a portrait of
Saint Josemaria Escriva hangs in the right transept with a prie-­dieu and
candles below it. These accoutrements of worship create an ambiance for
a particular practice of the sacred. (2009, 426)

By keeping but adapting a pre–­Vatican II aesthetic, this parish’s building

facilitated a “neotraditional” theology and style of worship.
Historian Colleen McDannell charted the broad changes in Catholic
style and practice from the 1950s to the present. She begins the story

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with her own First Communion in 1962 and traces the changes through
the life of her mother (Margaret). Her autobiographical approach also
draws on the historical and sociological and news accounts of the times,
and the result is an intimate sense of the spaces and practices she de-
scribes. Again, note how she captures the aesthetic dimension of atten-
dance at Mass and how shifting patterns of participation have existed in
dialogue with the physical changes.

Sights and Sounds in a Changing Catholic Parish

Across the country, parishes have modified the Second Vatican Council’s
preference for noble simplicity with a post-­Council fondness for traditional
Catholic symbols. Now when Margaret and Ken slip into one of the back
pews at Blessed Trinity for Sunday Mass, they experience a “post–­Vatican II”
church. A renovation in 2005 made precious space available in the sanctuary
while erasing the hard edges of Vatican II modernism. The new visual cen-
terpiece was a dramatic life-­size crucifix hanging behind the altar in a blue-­
painted niche that is stenciled with gold relief. Columns and arches in dark
wood draw attention to the white body on the cross. The Risen Christ bronze
has been moved from the center and placed near a new baptistery, where
running water flows from a small basin for babies into a larger one that can be
entered for immersion Baptisms. On each side of the sanctuary are two ranks
of pipes for the new organ and colorful statues of the Virgin Mary and St. Pat-
rick. Along the walls of the church are the fourteen Stations of the Cross with
descriptive plaques. The days of folk masses, vacant white walls, and orange
carpeting are over at Blessed Trinity. (McDannell 2011, 211)

Aesthetic experience and religious experience are intertwined, and

definitions of beauty interact with the theologies and religious practices
of a community. Those practices and their associated aesthetic are part
of what identify the group itself, which is perhaps one reason aesthetic
changes can precipitate such intense internal conflict. Whenever we look
at a particular aesthetic practice, we are also looking at the community
in which it resonates.
Religious practices happen both inside religious communities and in
the everyday world, of course, so attention to their aesthetic dimensions
will allow us to more fully see how religious identities are lived beyond
times of worship. Listen to Bernice Martin’s description of households

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in Latin America: “Methodist Pentecostals whose homes we visited in

Chile in 1990 were especially keen to show us their dining tables covered
with white cloths and to emphasize their ability to feed their children
adequately. Women who said of their homes and tiny gardens, ‘It’s so
pretty!’ were referring primarily to the cleanliness and order that had be-
come possible, once hard-­drinking, hard-­spending husbands had come
into the faith and embraced its disciplines” (2006, 153). Religious iden-
tity was practiced in everyday spaces that were experienced as pretty.
Spreading a white tablecloth on a modest dining table is a lived religious
practice whose aesthetic dimension is at its heart. Even in modest cir-
cumstances, a visual reminder of spiritual connection did its work.
Aesthetic practices, that is, embody and express identities, something
that is true across cultures and eras. Anthropologist Harvey Markowitz’s
(2001) description of Sioux Sun Dance painting is an excellent example.
He draws on early twentieth-­century anthropological accounts that in-
cluded interviews with elders about pre-­reservation life, and he engages
in his own analysis of more recent art. He traces this artistic practice
from its original form within the community to its “representational”
form in the work of professional artists. Markowitz’s account of this
evolving lived religious practice attempts to capture the full sensuous
experience that is integral to it and therefore constitutes a key element
in the group’s identity.

Sun Dance Aesthetics

It was the chief objective of ceremonial painting to present or mani-
fest the wakan. Such painting was always performed as part of the
process of yuwakan that included sacred songs and prayers that
served to activate the tonwan of the specified colors or designs. . . .
[Through steam and sage smoke] the candidates’ bodies [were trans-
formed] into suitably pure canvasses to be painted with the sacred
designs and colors required for the dance. . . .
[Later, Lakota artist Oscar Howe painted] The Sun Dancers . . . at
the peak of his artistic powers. Its bold colors and sharp lines dramati-
cally evoke the carnal force and spiritual ecstasy of the moment when
the dancer breaks free from the ropes that have tethered him to the
sacred pole. (Markowitz 2001, 166–­173)

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Bold colors and designs might also describe the “hijabi fashionistas”
documented in cultural historian Reina Lewis’s study of changing Mus-
lim fashion in the United Kingdom. The 1990s saw both a renewed sense
of religious identification for Muslims there and an Asian-­inspired aes-
thetics in mainstream fashion. But “the advent of hijab wearing redefined
the wearer as Muslim rather than Asian,” she writes (Lewis 2015, 186). A
change in fashion aesthetic and a change in identity went together. The
fashionistas needed to replace the midriff-­baring Asian sari with more
modest clothing. The result was an expanded market for modest fashion,
built on the earlier styles from the diaspora Asian fashion industry. Today
the young cohort of hijabi fashionistas buy clothes that express their style
but also identify them as Muslim. What they find beautiful and stylish has
evolved in a complex mix of ethnic, religious, and economic possibilities.
To the extent that aesthetic experience is also religious, there is im-
portant work for theologians to do. Far from the fashionable streets of
England, Rebecca Spurrier has undertaken a remarkable theological
ethnography of a Christian community in Atlanta. The congregation
she calls Sacred Family has a membership that is largely made up of
people with various forms of disability, primarily psychiatric challenges.
Spending three years worshiping and playing and talking and creating
with them, she describes their community life as sometimes (seemingly)
chaotic but joyful. Their worship involves “a performance art” of creativ-
ity in how differences in perception and ability form a “liturgical chore-
ography” (Spurrier 2020, 22). Using the theological concept of liturgy as
communal work of and for the people of God, she looks for all the ways
that aesthetic work is done around the edges and across the week. She
learns to see the pleasures they create together, including the art they
make and use. She learns to see and name beauty as it shapes the life of
this community, even as the challenges remain. The complex aesthetic of
this church expresses the complex world they inhabit.

Creating Pleasure in an Atlanta “Disabled Church”

A short time into my ethnographic research, I become aware of my own
embodiment as a source of interest for the people I worship with and the
pleasure of shared embodiment as a way to pass time. In a pew a woman
praises the colors of my manicure and invites me to admire her own. Anoth-

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er comments on the color of a dress I am wearing, stroking it, and expresses

curiosity over my choice of shoes. When I discuss haircuts with another
gentleman, he examines my hair. . . . I find that congregants rarely desire
to go in depth about their day or week; instead, we admire together new
items from the clothes closet, or sniff the bottle of lotion won at bingo. . . .
We discuss the color of the sky, the cold air, or the plants in the church
garden. . . . Sensory pleasures, such as the ones I experience [there], occur
around the peripheries of the sanctuary, accumulating as we pass time, wait-
ing for events to begin or end. They occur inside the sanctuary, during the
time of a service, along the peripheries of the official liturgy. . . . Such textures
often distract from the centers of instruction or proclamation. They also ap-
pear inconsequential in light of the suffering some congregants bear. What
difference can any textures of pleasure make when those who gather have
been asked to carry so much? . . . [Sacred Family] is a place where some take
a break from the daily routines of personal care homes and rest for a time.
(Spurrier 2020, 109–­111)

Aesthetic Practices of Difference

If an aesthetic expresses identity, it will also express difference.5 Bernice
Martin’s extensive experience in Latin American Pentecostal communi-
ties introduced her not only to styles of household decor but especially
to the music of Pentecostal worship. By listening to the instruments
used and the degree of pop influence, she could hear how musical styles
served as “markers of identity indicating the boundary between the
group and ‘the world’ and/or the lines of demarcation and distinction
within the movement” (2006, 145). Similarly, reflecting on the Black
churches in Dorchester, Massachusetts, McRoberts (2004) noted that
even when they shared similar doctrinal positions, they might have
very different aesthetic styles in decor and music. Creating identity
often involves seemingly small distinctions that nevertheless loom large
within a community.
Other distinctions cross boundaries of community and permeate so-
cial institutions of all kinds. Wherever people are, they reflect the dif-
ferences that a society has created around race, class, education, and
gender. Resources make it more and less possible for people to have
access to things they desire to produce beauty and pleasure (Swidler

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2010a), even as they improvise with what they have. More basically, it is
important to ask who has the ability to create “art,” to define it as such,
and to get it to the people who will appreciate it. As Colleen McDan-
nell (1995) so provocatively asks, exactly what separates “kitsch” from
art if not the gender and social position of the consumer? Kitsch is not
just different from high art but something to be looked down on and
avoided. Michèle Lamont’s research has also been useful in showing how
a sense of style is linked to moral boundaries (Lamont and Fournier
1992). A sense of style is likely to provoke judgment about the value of
both the art in question and the people who like it. Societies declare
some cultural productions to be worthwhile and others to be trash and
declare some people to be the valued experts who can educate the rest
of us. At the same time, those whose art is being devalued may establish
their own discourse about “elite” art, describing it as worthless splashes
of paint that any child could do.6
Social divisions of style and taste can be seen in all the religious things
people construct and surround themselves with, even the intangible
ones. For example, the intersection of religious practice and aesthetics
can be seen in Black Gospel music as it defines and expresses the experi-
ence of race in the United States. Music historian and performer Pearl
Williams-­Jones opened her influential article about Black Gospel by say-
ing, “If a basic theoretical concept of a black aesthetic can be drawn
from the history of the black experience in America, the crystallization
of this concept is embodied in Afro-­American gospel music” (1975, 373).
The experience of living and worshiping in a segregated society meant
that there was cultural space for the development of a distinctive style,
a style that expressed the deep pain of living with oppression, as well as
joy in visions of liberation.7
As we saw in chapter 4, musical style proves central in the efforts of
some churches to “cross the racial divide.” Gerardo Marti (2012) found
that a favorite strategy of such churches is to feature a gospel choir and
to expect Black singers to model “true worship” by performing an ex-
pressive, embodied style of praying and singing. While the church’s
professed ideal might have been a universal experience of worship that
could transcend race, the reality was that race was being essentialized.
Sociologist Korie Edwards’s (2008) detailed ethnographic study of an
interracial church in the Midwest was even more explicit about the way

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a white aesthetic defined the culture, even if there were Black people
present. She was there for worship and committee meetings and conver-
sations in the halls, so she could observe how people interacted. She also
did formal interviews and found that while Black and white members
were participating in the same events, they brought different aesthetic
sensibilities with them. Whites were far more likely to express satisfac-
tion with the church’s mixing of traditional hymns and praise songs,
for example, since it was consistent with what they knew. “For whites,
worship at Crosstown was upbeat, but for African Americans, that was
far from true” (Edwards 2008, 27). Differences in cultural style were ap-
parent throughout the church, and those differences marked who had
power and who didn’t.
Cultural differences in style were also apparent in the mosque that
John O’Brien (2017) studied. He spent three and a half years interact-
ing with a group of immigrant Muslim teenage boys at a mosque in
a West Coast city in the United States. He was a bit older and not an
immigrant, but he shared their religious identity and practice, which
eased his entry into the community. He saw how they experienced the
cultural expectations that came from urban American teenage life, as
well as the expectations that came from their tight-­knit religious com-
munity. It was important for them to be religious but not too religious,
to be cool but not too cool. They dealt with those tensions in a variety of
ways, not least through their use of hip hop performance. They would
poke fun at performers who created strictly Islamic lyrics that seemed
“cheesy,” but they would also go to elaborate lengths to avoid or alter the
obscene lyrics of the mainstream hip hop they heard. This aesthetic tug-­
of-­war expressed their recognition of the cultural boundaries they were
attempting to navigate.
Clashes of taste and style are nowhere more apparent than in differ-
ences based on social class. Many people have written about this but
perhaps none so vividly as theologian Tex Sample. He wants people to
see how everyday experiences of social-­class positioning often alien-
ate working-­class people from church life. With a deep dive into coun-
try music (“white soul,” in his words), he highlights its critique of the
church’s failures, the tendency of church people to “close off people who
need it, to serve the rich and neglect the poor and needy, and to be high-­
handed and hypocritical” (Sample 1996, 150). But to get to that theologi-

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cal point, he needed to illustrate the divide he is decrying, so his opening

example was designed to get the reader’s attention. Here he is describing
his own working-­class response to something usually thought of as an
elite pastime, namely, opera. In this story, the opera was La bohème,
and he was attending with his wife and a couple he describes as having
come from wealthy families. This is very much a first-­person account,
told with a preacher’s flair, with the intent of teaching church people
something about how differences in taste and expression divide people.

Working-­Class Style at the Opera

In the opera, a duet is sung by Mimi and Rodolfo . . . [that] I believe to be one
of the most rapturous moments in the history of Western music. . . . When it
comes to opera and symphonies, I am a classical music Pentecostal. I could
not sit still. . . . I was twitching and jerking, holding my breath one moment
and bursting out with sighs and glossolalia-­like expressions the next. . . . I
was having an aesthetic conniption, a “hyperventilated” ecstatic orgasm, a
mystical, spiritual apprehension of “the eternal.” Had I put it in a country
music idiom, I might have said that I was so carried away that “my eyes were
all bugged out like a stomped on toad frog.” . . . By the time they came to the
final “Ah!” I was emotionally a line of wrung-­out washed clothes hanging in a
windstorm of musical power. As the audience came to its feet, I was shout-
ing, whistling, and clapping as loudly and as vigorously as I could. I looked
over at Joe. His face was a picture of emotionless calm. . . . “Joe, didn’t you
like it?” I asked, stunned by his absence of cathectic involvement. “I thought
it was extremely well done,” he answered. . . . “Did you really like it?” I asked,
trying again, because his affect had all the repose of death. “Oh, I thought
the voice control and the blend of the soprano and the tenor were exqui-
sitely done. The last progressions were especially effective. It was a superla-
tive performance.” All these things he said without overt feeling, the way
someone might read a phone book. (Sample 1996, 27–­28)

Social-­class markers are carried in every aspect of life, especially in

how we dress, and even that is a site where religious practice and prac-
tices of aesthetic distinction come together, as Lewis’s hijabi fashioni-
stas showed us. In the pages of high-­fashion magazines, readers can
be instructed not only how to dress but also how to be “fashionably”
religious. Lynn Neal (2019) analyzed seventy years of Vogue magazine

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(1944–­2014), plus selected issues of Harper’s Bazaar and W, analyzing

articles, ads, accessories, and apparel. She describes a “haute couture”
vision of US Christianity, one that was increasingly focused on cultivat-
ing individual experiences of transcendence. The religious elites who
wrote articles were liberal and sophisticated, like the assumed audience.
They pictured a religion that was to be personally experienced, with bits
and pieces to be appropriated like accessories—­a stylized angel here, an
ornate cross there. Both fashion and religion were something to be con-
sumed by those who could afford it. Think about how that stands in
contrast to the “Sunday Best” practices in a Black church, where dressing
up for church blurs the class distinctions among the members and also
enacts a visible resistance to the everyday world of uniforms and work
clothes where such sartorial pleasure might be impossible (O’Neal 1999).
Whether it is clothing or food, architecture or music, styles organize
our experiences, including religious ones, and they are likely to identify
religiously inflected cultural boundaries. Throughout the religious land-
scape, the kinds of literature consumed and the kinds of visual art found
to be moving and evocative reflect social and cultural class positions.
That is, religious practice, status position, and aesthetic style are likely to
coincide. Whether one is drawn to the polished choral music and visual
pomp of an Episcopal cathedral or the simple country style of a piano
and guitar leading congregational harmony, class-­based aesthetic style
is a part of the lived religious experience.

Aesthetics as Part of the Whole

To bring all of this together, we can turn to historian Robert Orsi’s (1985)
classic description of the festa of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel in Italian Har-
lem. He wanted to capture the lives and the “theology of the streets” in
that lively neighborhood, so he drew on parish records and contempo-
raneous histories of the neighborhood, as well as his own interviews
with those who still remembered what it was like there before World
War II. The result is a book full of insight about religious and family life
that begins with a description of the day of the festa, July 16 each year.
His observations include attention to the sensuous delights (and pains)
of the day. He notes the sonorous ringing of the church bell just after
midnight that signaled the beginning of the celebration and the lights

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and decorations that adorned the route of the procession. He speaks of

the new outfits purchased so that “the family should make bella figura in
the community and show proper rispetto of the Virgin on her feast day”
(Orsi 1985, 2). The shape of that respect and the promises made to the
Virgin reflect the moral dimensions of this festive practice. Its embodied
reality is full of the pain and hope of families making a way for them-
selves, and the material world of the streets and the church is the canvas
on which the feast’s drama is sketched. Orsi vividly draws the reader’s
attention to the emotions of the day, as well, as worldly burdens are
brought to the Virgin, with whom they feel a spiritual connection. And
as Orsi also tells us, this celebration that brings the Madonna through
the streets to her honored place in the church also narrates the story of
the immigrant community itself.
Orsi ends the description with the figure of the Madonna. Note his
attention to decoration, clothing, hair, and embodiment and how they
reflected the lives and aspirations of the parishioners. His goal is not to
say whether these things are really beautiful or to analyze their artistic
worth. Rather, his goal is to describe the religious practices within which
these scenes were experienced and to attend to the importance of the
aesthetic dimension of the practice for those who were there.

The Beautiful Madonna del Carmine

The statue that still stands high above the main altar is a lifelike representa-
tion of a young Mediterranean woman holding a small child. The Madonna’s
first gown, which she wore until her coronation in 1904, was decorated with
rings, watches, earrings, and chains, all given to her by men and women who
believed she had helped them in a moment of terrible difficulty or pain. . . .
Both mother and child have real hair, long, thick, and very beautiful; la Ma-
donna’s hair flows down over her shoulders. The woman’s figure is full. She
has broad hips and an ample bosom. Her face is round, though not heavy,
and her neck is delicate. She wears pendant earrings. The child she holds
is the Infant Jesus. His hair resembles his mother’s, thick and very long, as
Italian women would often keep their sons’ hair until they were four or five
years old. (Orsi 1985, 12)

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Ideas for Further Study

1. If you would like to learn more about the various scholarly traditions in the study
of aesthetics, you might start with Ben Highmore’s (2010) brief article on “social
aesthetics.”
2. S. Brent Plate (2002) has assembled a thick collection of writings about religion
and visual culture from around the world. This is an excellent place to start if you
are interested in how art figures in the practices of different religious traditions.
The connection between spirituality and the creativity of artists is also docu-
mented by Robert Wuthnow (2001).
3. There are dozens of studies of such festivals, usually treated as “folk” or “popular”
religion. Hispanic studies scholar Frank Graziano (2007), for example studied
practices across Latin America. Jennifer Hughes (2010) focused her study on the
practices surrounding a particular three-­foot-­tall Mexican crucifix (Cristo Apare-
cido). The festival celebrations around Día de los Muertos are no less aesthetically
interesting and are ripe for attention from students of lived religious practice. If
you are particularly interested in the tug-­of-­war between religious and secular
interpretations, recall Genevieve Zubrzycki’s (2016) study of Quebec’s St. John’s
Day festival. Having been in Porto, Portugal, on St. John’s Day, I can report that
the stunning launch of hundreds of lanterns into the night sky capped a day filled
with the pervasive smell of grilled sardines, colorful plastic banners, toy hammers
for bonking passersby, and raucous crowds into the night. I found it only partially
“sublime.”
4. Cultural sociology has given ample attention to the way our aesthetic sensibilities
are shaped and organized by cultural, political, and economic forces. Janet Wolff
summarized the sociological argument this way: “The very products which aes-
thetics and art history posit as ‘works of art’ cannot be uncritically taken as some-
how distinguished by certain intrinsic features, but must be seen as produced in
that history by specific practices in given conditions. The evaluations of works
which form the artistic tradition are performed by people who are themselves
institutionally and structurally located” (1983, 105). A foundational article in this
line of work is Paul DiMaggio and John Mohr’s (1985) study of “cultural capital.”
5. Theoretical discussions of how art embodies difference usually begin with Pierre
Bourdieu (1993) and his notion of distinction in the art world. He argues that a
field of cultural production—­say “Gothic architecture”—­can control and differ-
ently value the styles and manner that will be recognized within that field. An
appreciative critique of Bourdieu’s thinking about aesthetics can be found in the
work of Richard Shusterman (2000), who takes up a pragmatist’s assessment of
how to think about a philosophy of aesthetics. What Bourdieu’s insights miss,
however, is the depth of emotion and spiritual connection present in aesthetic
religious practices. These theoretical debates are not the subject of our work here,
but some students of lived religion may be interested in digging deeper.

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6. This low opinion of modern art—­that any child could do it—­is expressed by
roughly one-­third of Americans when asked by the General Social Survey
(https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org). It is often useful to check general polls and
surveys to put what we see in a larger cultural context.
7. If you are interested in knowing more about the African American gospel music
tradition, James Abbington (2001) and Glenn Hinson (2000) have each written
appreciative accounts. Melva Costen (1999) is a leading liturgical scholar, and
Carolynne Brown’s (2009) dissertation provides a fascinating history. The inter-
section of Black Gospel with “Southern Gospel” is detailed in Douglas Harrison’s
(2012) history, along with the way sexuality has played its own role. There has
always been cultural borrowing, as well as distinction.

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 8

Morality in Religious Practice

The assessments we make about style and beauty are not the only ways
in which social practice involves acts of judging. Even when we are not
consciously aware of it, we make moral judgments, as well. The way we
perceive and react to the everyday world around us is shaped by our
deeply held intuitions about what is right and wrong, good and evil. This
is more than just “following norms” and doing what people expect us to
do. Those are moral practices, too, but some cultural expectations for
behavior carry even more weight because they are situated in emotion-
ally laden stories and practices marking them as good. As sociologist
Christian Smith (2003a) argues, we are “moral, believing animals.” Even
when we aren’t consciously thinking about rules, our behavior is guided
by what we have learned to expect of ourselves and others.
Sociologists Steven Hitlin and Stephen Vaisey have helped to bring
the study of morality back into focus in the social sciences, arguing that
morality “encompasses any way that individuals or social groups under-
stand which behaviors are better than others, which goals are the most
worthy, and what people should believe, feel, and do. . . . [Moral assess-
ments are] thick understandings about what kind of person (or society)
it is good to be” (2013, 55). They go on to say, “Morality is not just about
personal beliefs or intuitions but also involves a combination of psycho-
logical processes, social identities, and institutionalized meanings and
practices” (60). That is, we bring our own ingrained moral sense with
us, but there are also moral meanings embedded in the setting. Both can
be at work shaping our behavior, even if we have difficulty explaining
what those meanings are or why we are doing what we are doing. These
and other writers in the social sciences are increasingly looking at how
our minds, our bodies, our emotions, and our cultures come together to
produce the moral frameworks that guide our action. As we make moral
judgments and evaluations, we are not necessarily engaging in reasoned
deliberation. Rather, we are acting based in the informal theories we

159

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have in our minds (and hearts) about what is to be desired. Every social
practice, that is, includes a moral dimension in its assessment of the situ-
ation as well as in its pattern of expected behaviors.
The same is true for lived religious practices. When people pray, for
example, they presume a moral judgment that endorses some desired
futures and not others, that lauds some actions and asks forgiveness for
others. Prayers may call down divine wrath on evildoers or express grat-
itude for blessings. Their very form may enact compassion and solidarity
through joined hands for the “Our Father” or the shoulder-­to-­shoulder
touch of Muslim Ju’mah prayer. Not all moral practices are religious, but
religious practice, like all human action, has moral dimensions.
Moral judgment combines with the emotional and aesthetic dimen-
sions of religious practice to stir people toward action. Practices are not
just rote, habitual behaviors but “projects” that contain within them move-
ment toward beauty, virtue, happiness, and other states we have learned to
value. Our interactions are animated by a sense of “what is good to strive
for” (J. Martin 2003, 37). This is not to posit that there are a priori val-
ues that consciously and directly lead to actions but that practices contain
values within them. Those same judgments may also lead us to avoid im-
moral things by triggering emotions of shame or disgust. That is, attention
to emotional, moral, and aesthetic qualities of religious practice can pro-
vide a window on both the patterned, taken-­for-­granted reactions and the
emergent energies that motivate action—­both the established structure of
the situation and the struggles of the actors. The emotional, aesthetic, and
moral qualities we have packaged into our cognitive interpretations of the
world pull us toward some practices and away from others.
Sometimes they pull us away out of fear of contamination, of being
soiled or profaned. It is not just that “cleanliness is next to godliness.”
The very notion of contamination has moral implications. As much as
we may think we are avoiding dirt or germs out of purely scientific and
medical necessity, our judgments about where the danger lies are al-
ways tinged with our assessments of the moral character of the people
and places we shun.1 As anthropologist Mary Douglas put it, “certain
moral values are upheld and certain social rules defined by beliefs in
dangerous contagion” (1966, 3). In response, religious rituals of all sorts
symbolically use water to wash away the contamination of sin. Christian
baptism, immersion in the Jewish mikveh or in the river Ganges, the

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Muslim practice of Wudū—­all require a bodily enactment of cleansing

that inevitably also reminds the participants of the moral contamination
being washed away. In countless ways, religious practices remind us of
the ways we are supposed to live and the moral communities to which
we do and do not belong. Turning attention to this moral dimension of
lived religion is the task of this chapter.
But first, because understanding morality is something many disci-
plines have tackled, we should be clear about what this particular explo-
ration will set to the side for others to study. Studying religious practice
is not an exercise in moral philosophy, for example. We are not seeking
a reasoned argument for what is right and wrong and why. It is also not
an exposition of how any particular moral virtue—­altruism, for exam-
ple—­is cultivated or set in motion (as a cognitive psychologist might
wish to explore) or how moral virtues evolved in human beings (as evo-
lutionary biologists would do). Similarly, we will leave aside any attempt
to identify a set of universal human moral emotions (disgust, desire,
and the like), even as we pay attention to how emotion works alongside
moral judgment. We will also not assume a predetermined set of moral
virtues and vices to be studied or a single continuum of more and less
moral behavior (as moral psychologists might do).
The moral dimension of lived religious practice is also not (just) about
the moral precepts taught by religious groups. We are interested in un-
derstanding how the people we are observing employ moral categories,
how morality is lived. So we will not declare in advance which moral
virtues should be studied or which ones are best. While we will pay at-
tention to the larger cultural patterns that are at play, this is also not an
attempt to identify a definitive set of “moral schemas” that are used by
any cultural group to make their judgments. Any of those enterprises
may be worth pursuing, and there are ample resources for doing so.2
The task for students of lived religion, however, is to see the moral
dimensions of religious practice in action, and that requires attention to
the full range of enacted moral practices and the social settings through
which practices take shape. In the end, those observations may very well
lead the student of lived religion to engage in their own moral reflection.
What do these practices suggest about how human life might better be
served? There is good reason to develop recommendations for change,
but that is not where we will start.

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The Social in Religious Moral Practice

As we have noted throughout this book, socially recognized patterns of
activity are most often habitual and do not require participants to stop
and make an explicit explanation. People who share a common culture
can, without a lot of conscious thought, recognize and participate in the
routine practices of their everyday lives; and that is no less true when
we turn our focus to the moral dimension of those practices. The moral
implications are carried in the assumptions and expectations of every-
day practices, whether or not the practice itself is aimed at an explicitly
moral goal. To draw attention to the moral aspects of religious practice
is not, then, about discovering a coherent moral system that provides a
logical justification, but it is about recognizing the social dynamics that
make underlying moral assumptions seem sensible to the participants.
Sometimes we can see the underlying moral assumptions best in times
and places of flux. Contemporary China, for example, offers a dramatic
mix of moral and religious traditions (Yang 2012), so youths growing up
there draw on a wide array of religious and nonreligious possibilities.
They can find, among other things, revivals of ancient traditions that
are embodying and teaching virtues in new ways. Sociologist Anna Sun
(2013) has been observing the evolving Chinese religious scene for over
ten years. She observed and did interviews at a dozen temples on the
mainland and in Taiwan, supplementing that with additional fieldwork
at three temples in Taiwan and four in Japan, where she also collected
material objects such as prayer cards—­all this aimed at understanding re-
ligious practices as they are being adapted to current realities. She found
not only a proliferation of new rituals but also explicit teaching of virtues,
done in an institutional context where those virtues are also modeled in
practice. No longer built in as an assumed way of living, rules have to be
taught, but the way they are taught carries the moral lessons, as well.

Teaching Confucian Ways

[Temple prayers to Confucius are part of] the thousand-­year-­old legacy of
the civil examination system in imperial China, which consisted of a par-
ticular institutional and cultural structure in which ascendant social mo-
bility was gained through Confucian learning and rigorous examination. . . .

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[Today, there are new after-­school courses—­Confucian academies—­where]

there are specific social rituals related to Confucian teacher-­student rela-
tions, which emphasize the utmost respect for the teacher through man-
ners and speech, as well as the veneration of Confucius. The classical text
Rules for Students and Children (dizi gui), written by a seventeenth-­century
scholar as a simple manual for cultivating Confucian virtues such as filial
piety, moderation, and benevolence in children, has been gaining a startling
amount of popularity in China today. (Sun 2013, 167–­170)

There are indeed moral systems that are bigger than any one situation
or any one person, like the elements of Confucian teaching that linger in
the culture. But the link between stated logic and individual action is not
always as straightforward as learning the precepts. Religious communi-
ties and traditions have explicit moral rules, and they do attempt to pass
those principles along to their followers. Studying the moral dimension
of lived religious practice means paying attention to those explicit mor-
ally focused religious practices. But it also requires the hard work of
paying attention to the less explicit everyday routines that carry moral
logics, as well.
The implicit moral logic of everyday routines can sometimes be illumi-
nated by attention to the larger moral narratives—­both the institutional
ideals and the larger cultural goals—­but generalizations can be tricky. It
is probably a mistake to imagine that any society can be characterized
by one or even just a few ways of thinking about morality. Nevertheless,
explorations such as those of Robert Bellah and his associates in Habits of
the Heart (1985) often suggest moral questions to ask as we observe. The
authors listened to a broad sample of Americans, seeking evidence of the
moral projects guiding the culture. They were able to identify “utilitarian
individualism” and “expressive individualism” as the dominant ways peo-
ple justify their actions. Their historical and philosophical reading then
led them to contrast these moral projects with the United States’ earlier
“biblical republicanism.” But that long view sometimes missed impor-
tant realities on the ground. The young nurse they call Sheila Larson, for
example, was their epitome of expressive individualism, but as Meredith
McGuire points out, their preoccupation with the larger cultural narra-
tives led them to pay little attention to any spiritual depth or collective
significance in Larson’s everyday practices of care (2008, 151–­152).

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While the larger cultural narratives may give us clues about the moral
dimensions of everyday practice, they may also lead us astray. This is
especially apparent in efforts like the “World Values Survey.” Aimed at
broad cultural characterizations, this multinational survey lacks any
base in local conversations. Its generalizations presume a universaliz-
able list of beliefs and values that can be compared across countries,
and researchers use it then to divide up the world into moral categories
(e.g., Norris and Inglehart 2004). Despite its “world values” claim, there
is little for a student of lived religious practice to glean from the results.
A more solidly grounded study, by the sociologists Michèle Lamont
and Laurent Thévenot (2000), used in-­depth interviews to compare the
“repertoires of evaluation” found in France and the United States. They
suggest that each society provides its members with a variety of ways of
thinking about what matters and what is of value. Those repertoires are
by no means uniform across the society, but they are recognizably dif-
ferent from one country to the next.3 Just as a given religious tradition
provides distinct moral repertoires, so does the larger culture in which
it is located. Both will help to set the terms for how a religious social
practice is enacted.
Thus, the moral dimensions of any practice are enmeshed in how
people think about what it means to be a member of a group. Certain
actions and attitudes are simply part of what it means to belong. In dif-
ferent religious traditions and different practices, the moral dimension
may come more and less to the fore, but each will incorporate moral
virtues and taboos that become part of a religious identity. In studying
Christians across a variety of denominations in the 1990s, I was sur-
prised how many answered, “Do unto others as you would have them
do unto you,” when we asked what it means to be a Christian. I dubbed
these people “Golden Rule Christians” because their everyday ethics
seemed to be more definitive of their religious identity than doctrine
or religious observance (Ammerman 1997b). More recently, the Jewish
historian and theologian Jack Wertheimer has argued that “Golden Rule
Judaism” has become similarly prevalent. Jews who are otherwise not
very observant say that “being a good person is the essence of being a
good Jew” (Wertheimer 2018, 64).
Wertheimer’s argument would seem to be borne out in sociologist
Philip Schwadel’s (2006) analysis of the data on Jewish teens from the

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National Study of Youth and Religion (NYSR). Schwadel drew on the

study’s nationally representative telephone survey, along with what was
learned from in-­depth face-­to-­face interviews. Indeed, all of the reports
from the NYSR are excellent evidence for the utility of combining survey
and interview methods.4 Because the survey team asked a wide range
of excellent questions about religious practices, the results provided
a representative baseline. Because they oversampled smaller religious
groups like Jews, they were also able to make interesting comparisons.
Following the survey with interviews then allowed them to capture a
great deal about lived religious practice and how it is infused with moral
expectation.

Golden Rule Judaism among Teens

One Jewish girl explained that she volunteers because she is “a lot more for-
tunate . . . than like the lower class.” She clarified that she does not volun-
teer out of a sense of religious obligation. Nevertheless, her primary form
of community service is to volunteer in her synagogue’s gift shop. . . . Other
Jewish teens were more direct about the connection between volunteerism
and their Jewish identities. For some, helping others clearly takes on religious
significance. Rather than praying or attending synagogue, they focus on
performing mitzvot (acts of loving-­kindness) and tikkun olam (repair of the
world) as an outlet for their religious beliefs and values. One girl asserted that
people have an obligation to volunteer. “I guess it’s what I’ve been taught. . . .
Volunteering and helping people,” she explained, is “one of the main aspects”
of Judaism. She spoke about “acts of loving-­kindness” and described helping
others as “one of the pillars” of Judaism. (Schwadel 2006, 142–­143)

Religious moral practice can also take the form of explicit ethical re-
flection, especially in times of crisis. Anthropologist Jarrett Zigon (2010)
describes what he calls “moral assemblages,” arguing (not unlike Swidler
[1986]) that it is useful to think about “ethical moments” as times when
there is a moral breakdown (an “unsettled time”) and a person or com-
munity is forced to work on what sort of life they should lead. Whether
it is a community forum in the church fellowship hall or a book discus-
sion group at temple or a Confucian after-­school program or an aca-
demic treatise on ethics, there are religiously based practices designed
to do moral work when the situation calls for it.

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The practices of collective moral learning and teaching are one way
religious practitioners acquire practical knowledge about moral expec-
tations and adopt a religious identity. Children and newcomers learn
that to be a member, there are moral rules to follow. People facing an
ethical challenge work out new ways of acting. But, expectations about
a good life are conveyed more implicitly in other religious practices, as
well. From scriptural injunctions to heroic stories to mitzvah challenges
and volunteer service, communal religious life often embodies moral
lessons (Lichterman 2005; Allahyari 2001). People learn their commu-
nity’s “golden rules” by observing and doing.
Students of lived religion can also learn which moral practices are
most central to the community’s identity by looking for boundary work.
That was what sociologist Jeffrey Guhin learned in his ethnographic
study of four high schools—­two conservative Christian and two Mus-
lim. In spite of what seemed like similar beliefs about the importance
of scripture and of conservative gender norms, gender was a key moral
practice for the Muslim schools, while opposition to evolution was the
key defining practice for the conservative Protestants. Guhin heard
much more about evolution at the Christian schools, “because evolu-
tion was dissonant with Christian key practices (reading the Bible liter-
ally) and boundaries (also reading the Bible literally)” (2016, 152). He
continues, “The problem is not only that evolution goes against the Bible
but that if it is true, evolution would render the way Conservative Prot-
estants understand the Bible ridiculous. For an intellectual community
that prides itself on the plain truth of the Bible and the priesthood of all
believers, this threat is particularly grave” (163). His careful listening to
classroom and hallway discussions, along with his interviews, revealed
that Muslim key practices (prayer) and boundaries (gender perfor-
mance) were not challenged by evolution. “Whereas Muslims worried
about being called sexist and violent, Christians feared being deemed
ignorant and intolerant” (167). A community’s moral center is often re-
vealed by the practices that maintain the boundaries.
As Guhin shows us, moral practice can be discerned in ways of talk-
ing, but the moral dimension of practice is also found in embodied re-
ligious disciplines. Saba Mahmood’s study of Egyptian Muslim women
has drawn attention to the way religious practice itself embodies un-
derstandings of morality. Morality as “habitus,” she says, is a product

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“of human endeavor, rather than revelatory experience or natural tem-

perament [and is] acquired through the repeated performance of actions
that entail a particular virtue or vice” (Mahmood 2005, 137). Religious
practice is often aimed at forming persons who will then embody and
exemplify the virtues of the community.
Daniel Winchester’s research has already provided us with rich exam-
ples of the dimensions of lived religious practice. Here, too, he can show
us what we can learn through careful observation. He has written about
how converts to Islam, in Missouri, “created new moral selves through
the regular utilization of embodied religious practices” (Winchester
2008, 1754). He observed their community for seventeen months and
did eleven in-­depth interviews with converts, but he also participated
along with them, even though he is not himself a Muslim. He engaged
in fasting during Ramadan and occasionally did Qur’anic recitation and
ritual prayer. He says, “These participatory methods were extremely
beneficial as they allowed me to be more reflexive in my research, push-
ing me to compare my normal experience of research and everyday life
to the shifts in subjectivity experienced when engaging in particular re-
ligious practices” (1760). Learning the moral habits of a new community
is an embodied experience, and seeing the patterns is aided by this sort
of involved observation.

Converts Embodying Islam in Missouri

Embodied religious practices such as ritual prayer (salat), fasting
(sawm), and covering (hijab) effectively produced within converts
the moral dispositions associated with becoming a “good Muslim”—­
dispositions such as mindfulness, humility, discernment, moderation
and modesty. . . . For these converts, coming to Islam was largely about
the development of a new type of moral subjectivity—­a new set of
dispositions (e.g., thoughts, feelings, desires, sentiments and sensibili-
ties) about what is good and bad, right and wrong, permissible and ta-
boo, sacred and profane, beautiful and unsightly in both one’s self and
the larger world. As a convert named Robert aptly put this change,
“Converting really affected a lot of things for me. As far as my behav-
ior goes, the way I feel and act, it was like developing a new moral
compass” . . . [The] practical reorganization of bodily memory is also
interrelated with cultural schemes of authority. The sense of mindful-

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ness affected in salat is also related to a sense of humility, an embod-

ied disposition toward respecting and responding to God’s time on a
regular basis. To be mindful of daily prayers is to necessarily practice
some form of humility. It is to let a higher authority take precedence
in one’s daily life, to temporarily suspend all other activities for the
expressed purpose of worshipping Allah. . . . [The discipline of fasting]
was thought indispensable for developing the spiritual strength and
moral discipline necessary for resisting that which is sinful or forbid-
den (haram) in daily life. (Winchester 2008, 1755, 1761–­1769)

What the Moral Dimension of Practice Does

There are, then, specific moral practices that can come to identify a per-
son as part of a community. Whether Jewish teens volunteering or adult
Muslim converts fasting, identity and morality are intertwined. But the
moral dimension of everyday practice goes even deeper than that. One
of the insights of sociologists, as far back as Emile Durkheim ([1898]
1975), has been that maintaining the social order is itself a moral impera-
tive. Disrupting everyday expectations and acting “out of place” or being
“disruptive” can be seen as an immoral act. Ethnomethodologists like
Harold Garfinkel (1967) and Erving Goffman (1967) have demonstrated
that keeping things on something of an even keel can be a “sacred” proj-
ect that everyone works hard to maintain. If these theorists are right in
linking a stable moral order with everyday ritualized forms of interac-
tion, then one place to look for the moral dimension of religious practice
is in practices that reinforce the status quo and punish disruption. We
should ask how any given religious practice articulates, embodies, and
exemplifies the moral good of maintaining an existing social order.
Studying religious practice means paying attention to the way connec-
tions to sacred power and authority may amplify the constraining power
of social roles and rules. When people are warned that their god might
get angry, whose interests will be protected by heeding the warning?
Not all religious practice reinforces the status quo, however. Some-
times the moral imperative being enacted is just the opposite of com-
pliant. Religious practices are often aimed at inciting and supporting
resistance to the status quo. Such practices build on a sense of a higher
set of obligations that demand moral action. This can be seen when the

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fervor of a political rally is intermingled with the enthusiasm of a re-

ligious revival, calling for disruptive action in pursuit of moral goals.
From abolition of slavery to civil rights to antipoverty crusades, social
movements in the United States have harnessed religious practices for
disruptive moral ends.5 Observers have pointed to the use of prayer and
song and testimony as practices that can have simultaneous political and
religious import. As sociologist Ziad Munson (2007) writes, a funeral for
a fetus is both a religious ritual and a political rallying cry for those who
oppose abortion. Similarly, lifting voices in “Guide My Feet” or “This
Little Light of Mine,” other groups pursue economic and racial justice,
simultaneously engaging in a religious practice with a moral imperative.
Calls to activism often articulate clear ideologies of religious and
moral values; taking political action means learning new practices that
may follow from or require new explanations. But Munson (2008) dis-
covered that belief was more likely to follow belonging than the other
way around. That is, people were invited to participate in a pro-­life
event, went with people they knew, and only gradually came to accept a
pro-­life ideology. Even when there is a clear moral narrative present in
a collective practice, the links between belief and action can be indirect.
What we observe is the starting point, but it will always be important
to include interviews with participants to hear their own stories about
what it means to be a good person. Whether resisting the status quo or
supporting it, religious moral practices have both embodied and narra-
tive dimensions.
All these ambiguities are even more at play when the social situation
itself is undergoing change and the moral rules are being renegotiated.
As we saw with the Chinese Confucian students, there are times when
explicit moral work and collective moral action are in play. Such was
the situation studied by medical sociologist Tola Olu Pearce in Ibadan
and Lagos, Nigeria. She observed newly formed Charismatic groups
that embrace the spiritual gifts of classical Pentecostalism but are ac-
tively adapting to the modern demands of contemporary urban life. She
spent a ten-­month period, along with two female research assistants,
and drew on taped sermons, seminars, and fellowship meetings from
four churches, as well as semistructured interviews and conversations
with leaders and members of the congregations in two churches, one in
Ibadan and the other in Lagos. What she observed was real-­time delib-

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eration about “which aspects of the culture need to be dropped, which

reinterpreted, and which accepted in light of Christianity and increas-
ing technical/secular knowledge” (T. Pearce 2002, 35). Note the many
ways these congregations create social spaces for this active moral work
around sexuality and reproduction, where questions of how to live are
central to creating a new social order.

Sexuality and Reproduction in Nigerian Cities

Church members receive constant advice from counselors at prayer meet-
ings and at fellowships geared to specific segments of the congregation. For
instance, there are weekly married women’s fellowships, seminars for those
engaged to be married, annual revivals, camp meetings, and so forth. In ad-
dition, congregations invite guest speakers to speak (and pray) on important
topics—­infertility, raising Christian children, being a Christian wife, good
health, etc. The individual is immersed in a supportive group. . . . A pastor
speaking to a women’s fellowship group: . . . “We [parents/adults, etc.] have
cut ourselves from knowledge. We don’t give our children sex education and
we ourselves are ignorant of many things, so we don’t teach our children.
See I Timothy, chapter 4, verses 6 and 1: ‘but refuse profane and old wives’
fables’ . . . Usually when a young lady is about to get married, members of the
family say she should go and see an old woman somewhere to get advice. This
should not be.” . . . [Rather], support for the couple comes from the congrega-
tion, fellowship members, and church leaders. A network is set up and sur-
rogate family ties develop. These are the ideals, and people are improvising as
problems arise. During fellowship meetings there is often an exchange of ideas
about those solutions that work and those that do not. (T. Pearce 2002, 28–­42)

Sometimes, the moral dimension of religious practice is right on the

surface, as in these Nigerian Charismatic fellowship groups thinking
about sexuality and family roles. At other times, the moral dimension is
ambiguous, with both beliefs and relationships providing guidance for
action. Sometimes the pull of moral evaluation keeps the status quo in
place, but it is also possible for religious practice to embody active resis-
tance to that same status quo or to be part of constructing a new social
order. Some kinds of religious practices make these moral dimensions
apparent, but often we have to observe “between the lines” to see what
moral goods are being fostered by the practices we are studying.

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Religious Moral Practices Setting Boundaries

As we saw in the high schools that Jeffrey Guhin studied, the moral
dimension is situationally and communally constructed, with com-
munal boundaries playing a key role. But there are also boundaries
embedded in a society’s structures of power and status that can show
up in religious moral practices. Moral evaluations cannot avoid the
evaluations of worth that are present in a society—­evaluations that
are shaped by gender, race, class, ability, and more. Michèle Lamont’s
work on moral repertoires of evaluation in France and the United
States shows how competition for recognition and respect shape class-­
based judgments about virtues of honesty, hard work, friendliness, and
character. In the United States, she observed, religion played a role,
as well. “Being involved in church activities sends out a signal about
respectability, moral character, and trustworthiness,” especially where
religious participation is relatively pervasive in a community (Lamont
1992, 57).
That precise pattern was noted three-­quarters of a century earlier by
ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr. In his book Social Sources of Denomination-
alism, he wrote about how Christian practices and ethics divided along
lines of social class, nationalism, race, and region. In the middle-­class
churches, he observed, “the sanction of religion is invoked upon the pe-
culiar virtues of the group itself: honesty, industry, sobriety, thrift, and
prudence, on which the economic structure of business as well as the
economic and social status of the individual depend, receive high ven-
eration, while the virtues of solidarity, sympathy, and fraternity [more
prevalent in the churches of “the disinherited”] are correspondingly ig-
nored” (Niebuhr 1929, 86). Students of lived religion should pay close
attention to how practices—­from sermons and prayers to congratulatory
announcements and gestures of honor—­express the moral order, as well
as the social hierarchy, of a group.
Employing religious practice to exclude is something many LGBTQ
people know all too well. Sociologist Bernadette Barton’s study of “Bible
Belt gays” documented how they experienced explicit shunning by fam-
ily and friends who quoted scripture as they disowned those who came
out as gay. They indirectly experienced the same moral judgment in the
“cross rings, fish key chains, Christian T-­shirts, bumper stickers, tote

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bags, and verbal references to one’s Christian identity” that Barton calls
a “Bible Belt panopticon” (2012, 24–­25). Ordinary religious practices of
material display signaled moral evaluations that then shaped social in-
teraction and sometimes exclusion.
Religious studies scholar Lynne Gerber has taken up similar ques-
tions, noting that “the moralization of homosexuality has been a major
stake in symbolic struggles both within religious traditions and between
religion and secular society” (2011, 24). Her book examines the history
of “ex-­gay” ministries like Exodus International and includes observa-
tions at conferences, along with interviews with members, leaders, and
ex-­members. What makes her study stand out, however, is the inclusion
of a strategic comparison—­to the way religious practices (along with
much of US culture) also moralize fat. That comparison allows us to see
the social mechanisms at work beyond the specifics of a given issue. Al-
ready by the turn of the twentieth century, Gerber writes, fat had become
synonymous with gluttony and sin: “Questions of eating, body size, and
weight loss are infused with the gravity of the moral and the power of
the sacred” (25). From her observations and interviews with First Place,
a Christian weight-­loss program, she describes the bodily disciplines
that are part of the lifestyle change they promote—­calorie exchanges,
exercise, bodily measurement, weigh-­ins. But the distinguishing feature
of the program is its disciplines of mind and spirit. Each weekly meeting
includes a Bible study and a verse to memorize. Gerber’s careful atten-
tion to what participants were doing enabled her to show how religious
practice reinforced moral evaluations of body size.

Weight Loss and Religious Practice at First Place

Storing scripture in our minds, the argument goes, puts the most impor-
tant tool of Christian life more readily at hand for situations where it could
prove essential. Jill explained it this way: “I tell them all at the beginning
of every session that you are a success in First Place if you are more like
Christ at the end of thirteen weeks than you were when you walked in.” . . .
Scripture memorization has some pragmatic benefits as well. For Florence,
scripture memorization prevents transgression: “The word says, ‘Thy word I
have hidden in mine heart that I may not sin against thee.’ It is a sin when we
abuse the body that God gave us. It’s a sin. And so as we memorize and learn
God’s word and get it inside us, then we are going to start sinning less all the

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time.” . . . Shaping the Christian mind along scripture’s contours is also be-
hind commitments to Bible reading and Bible study. . . . The assignments . . .
are implicitly or explicitly related to weight loss; some tackle food and eating
head-­on, while others address self-­esteem, sin, and other issues thought to
cause excessive eating or body weight. (Gerber 2011, 130–­131)

Religious practice has long been implicated in exclusions of all sorts,

not just shaming of fat people. Protestants exclude Catholics, Christians
exclude Muslims, secular people exclude visibly religious ones, most
Americans exclude atheists, “respectable” people exclude “lazy unde-
serving bums,” men exclude women, traditionalists exclude heretics—­
the list could go on.6 In every case, the exclusions are both religious
and moral. The “other” is not only wrong or different but deviant, dirty,
and shameful. These exclusions don’t just happen in official edicts; they
happen in everyday practices that signal and reinforce the lines between
worthy and unworthy people. The study of lived religious practice has
to include even these difficult and unwelcome aspects of what people
are doing when they engage in shared religious patterns of interaction.

Morality as Part of the Whole

Everyday experience of connection to a religious community or tradi-
tion may play a critical role in judgments of right and wrong, what is
possible and taboo, to be desired or shunned. Religious practices of all
sorts carry moral judgment within them. That moral dimension can
help to constrain action, reinforce the status quo, or enforce boundaries
between people. Since religious practice is also moral practice, shared
collective religious action can also pursue change and disturb the status
quo. Observing religious action means paying attention to what it says
about how the world ought to be. Sometimes that will be very explicit,
as in moral and ethical teaching, and sometimes it will be implicit in the
community’s stories and hopes—­the narrative dimension of practice to
which we will turn next.
A fascinating place to observe the multiple dimensions of religious
practice is in the “edge places,” the borders where differences come to-
gether. People whose religions are very different may find themselves
nevertheless pursuing common goals, and that can lead to creative new

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practices. Liberal religious advocacy groups often occupy just such lim-
inal social places, and sociologists Grace Yukich and Ruth Braunstein
(2014), both of whom study these groups, combined their research
projects to gain even deeper insight. Braunstein interviewed national
leaders in a variety of liberal advocacy organizations and supplemented
those interviews with ethnographic observations and public records.
Yukich combined in-­depth interviews with New Sanctuary movement
activists and allies with content analysis of movement documents. They
were both interested in how actual interactional settings had an effect
on the practices that developed, so they needed to observe the practices;
but they also needed to talk to the participants about their perceptions.
The result is a fine-­grained analysis of interfaith practices like the rabbi’s
prayer we examined in chapter 6. Both Yukich and Braunstein pay atten-
tion to the material settings and patterns of communication, as well as to
the embodied and emotional expressions of touch and presence. Atten-
tion to these multiple dimensions of religious practice enables them to
understand how new patterns emerged and how new practices worked
in redefining boundaries and identities.

Religious Practices and Moral Argument in Interfaith Organizing

[Interfaith activists develop] practices that publicly draw on the rec-
ognizable symbols, language, and practices of their varied faith tradi-
tions in order to express the claims they make as part of interfaith
coalitions. For religious advocates, the most common form this takes
involves signing onto joint public statements or letters. . . . This com-
plicated negotiation occurs around meeting tables (or on conference
calls or email chains), where representatives of each faith community
offer their own scriptural or historical justifications for the policy po-
sition shared by the group. One lobbyist from a Jewish organization
explains this process, referencing a recent statement on international
human rights: “We’re speaking with a moral voice on this. . . . It’s that
moral part of it that’s the real key. So how do you best demonstrate
the moral? Do we take something from the Torah? Well that’s fine for
Judeo-­Christians maybe, with the caveat that most of the Christian
groups would maybe prefer something from the New Testament. But
it’s certainly not going to work for the Muslim community. And what
about Hindus or other religions? So in this case, we pulled one quote

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from the Old Testament, which we referred to as the Hebrew Bible

in this case. We pulled one quote from the New Testament and we
pulled one quote from the Qur’an. . . .
[Other activists developed] more integrative practices. In the New
Sanctuary Movement, activists developed practices that went beyond
aggregating distinct, existing religious rituals and language, instead
merging their symbols to create something new that was shared by all
groups and belonged exclusively to none. One way they did this was
through the use of inclusive prayers that tied the oneness of God to the
oneness of humanity. For example, at the end of a private New Sanctu-
ary steering committee meeting where there had been some interfaith
tension, the mainline Protestant pastor leading the meeting closed with
a prayer. The pastor asks everyone to stand in a circle, to hold hands,
and to pray with their eyes open, looking at everyone. In a calm, clear
voice, he prays using images of birthing: God giving birth to us, God
giving birth to justice through this movement. . . . “We are all children
of God, brother and sister.” As he concludes, an enthusiastic “Amen”
echoes around the room. (Yukich and Braunstein 2014, 802–­803)

Ideas for Further Study

1. As I write this, the US president is persistently and intentionally calling COVID-­19
the “Chinese” virus—­a vivid example of using a fear of contamination for purposes
of moral exclusion. There is an extensive literature that builds on the concept of
“stigma” first fully developed in sociology by Erving Goffman (1963). As Gabriel
Ignatow (2010) points out, morality is always tied to bodily experience. Mind and
body can’t be disentangled in how we perceive and evaluate the social world.
2. The sociology and psychology of morality are now rapidly growing fields, after
having fallen largely out of favor in the mid-­twentieth century. Steven Hitlin and
Stephen Vaisey’s (2010) edited Handbook of Sociology of Morality is a good place
to start. A comprehensive overview of work in social psychology of morality
can be found in the article by Naomi Ellemers and associates (2019). One of the
people attempting to define the psychological contours of personal moral identity
is Jan Stets (2010). Among the most popular writers on moral psychology is
Jonathan Haidt (2012; Graham et al. 2011), who also seeks to identify consistent
personal styles that shape moral intuitions. For cognitive linguistics, the work of
George Lakoff (1996) has been foundational. Bringing those things together are
Jason Turowitz and Douglas Maynard (2010), who build on ethnomethodology
and conversation analysis to look at the interactional processes involved in forms

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of “moral work,” that is, how we assign blame or make a credible complaint in the
course of a simple conversation.
3. The question of cultural moral repertoires has been especially important to
researchers exploring the intersection of religion and politics. Here, it is impor-
tant to listen for the ways religious ideas can be adapted to secularized, “public”
ways of talking. Jack Delahanty, Penny Edgell, and Evan Stewart (2018) have
identified what they call “secularized evangelical discourse,” and they argue that
one does not have to be a member of an evangelical community to engage in
ways of talking about politics that draw on evangelical presumptions. This is
another reminder that the moral dimensions of social practice may not be defined
exclusively by a given religious community, but those communities can be highly
influential nevertheless.
4. The initial book from the first wave of the NYSR (when the teens were fourteen
to seventeen) is Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton’s Soul Searching
(2005). Smith and Patricia Snell Herzog (2009) followed with Souls in Transition,
based on follow-­up interviews as their subjects became “emerging adults.” There
are many other publications based on the data from this study, all drawing on a
rich combination of survey and interview methods.
5. We have already encountered the religious practices of social movements, but
here we might add sociologist Richard Wood’s (2002) analysis of faith-­based
community organizing. The collection edited by Ruth Braunstein, Todd Fuist, and
Rhys Williams (2017) is a fascinating introduction to a range of good research that
takes everyday movement practices seriously.
6. If you are interested in following up on these various modes of exclusion, there
are many, many studies to draw on across multiple disciplines. Here are a few
places to start: Ruth Braunstein’s (2019) analysis of US politics provides an excel-
lent overview of how various religious groups have challenged white Protestant
views of “good citizens” and thereby been painted as outsiders to be excluded.
On the American propensity to define atheists as “other,” see the study by Penny
Edgell, Joseph Gerteis and Douglas Hartmann (2006). The opposite dynamic—­
religious expression itself as “other”—­is at work in Quebec, in France, and else-
where, where religious clothing is banned in public (Elver 2012). On the way ideas
about “the deserving poor” shape welfare policy, Brian Steensland’s (2006) work
is insightful. Practices of religious exclusion are almost always intertwined with
political and ethnic histories, which is clear in John Brewer and Gareth Higgins’s
(1999) study of the history of anti-­Catholicism in Ireland. A fascinating case study
of tradition, heresy, and political change analyzes a post-­Soviet community where
the traditional “priestless” Old Believers confronted the willingness of some of
their members to adapt to new realities by having priests and a nice new building.
Each group had different ideas about how people should relate to each other and
what virtues define a proper community (Rogers 2008).

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 9

Narratives in Religious Practice

We have so far explored the way lived religious practice is spiritual but
also embodied, material, emotional, aesthetic, and moral. Each of those
qualities of social practice takes us beyond the usual focus on religious
words and ideas, but that does not mean that words are unimportant. A
study of religious practice needs to include attention to the way people
communicate with each other. While there are many ways to approach
communicative action, we will use the metaphor of narrative to think
about this shared activity—­with two meanings of “narrative” at play. The
more obvious meaning is that there are religious practices of storytell-
ing, both specific stories to be told and shared ways of telling them. That
is the primary focus of this chapter.
The other meaning is more subtle but no less important. Practices
themselves have a shared narrative dimension that is as much a part of
the experience as the other dimensions we have studied. That is, prac-
tices are shaped by implicit stories about what is happening and why,
and those temporal and relational narrative structures are as important
as the more overt practices of religious storytelling. Every time a person
engages in assessing a situation and deciding how to act, they are work-
ing with a kind of structured story in their heads, even as they may be
called on to improvise. There may not be a clear plotline from start to
finish (in fact, there probably isn’t), but our perceptions of what is hap-
pening draw on the “characters” we recognize (including the role into
which we ourselves are cast) and the “events” we can recall or imagine.
How we then take up our role plays out in an ensemble effort of inter-
action that happens in a particular place on a particular stage.1 We are
never acting alone or without context and script.
Margaret Somers (1994) is a political theorist who argues that narra-
tives make events understandable by connecting them to a set of rela-
tionships and practices. We act in terms of our place in the social world
(relationships) and the habits we have formed (practices). Those actions

177

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sit within a temporal arc; they are layered with expectations that come
from the past and imaginations of possible futures.
Narratives also have multiple social layers that both constrain and
enable our action. One kind of narrative, Somers argues, is a kind of
internal story we tell ourselves about “who I am.” While this autobi-
ographical narrative may seem like a psychological and idiosyncratic
creation, it is very much a collaborative effort, since we have looked to
others throughout life for feedback and reinforcement.2 It is also con-
stantly being disrupted and rewritten when new situations and relation-
ships appear. Nevertheless, the identities and personal stories we claim
for ourselves are ever present in our practices. Those identities are also
lodged in the second kind of story—­what Somers calls “public narra-
tives.” These are part of the institutions and contexts themselves. They
are about “who we are,” the memberships and identifications that we
claim and that are thrust on us. And the “we” is, in turn, lodged in big-
ger cultural stories, ways of talking about the world that we share with
others far beyond our immediate situation.
Throughout this chapter, we will look for both the temporal and the
social layers in the narrative religious practices we study. As through-
out this book, the focus is on everyday action and the shared practical
understanding that guides it. In turning to this narrative dimension, we
continue to look at the religious practices that happen among ordinary
laypeople, as well as the practices of specialists and elites. We continue
to remind ourselves that practices are both structured and habitual, that
they often reinforce inequality and division but are also open to disrup-
tion and improvisation. And we continue to keep the full multidimen-
sional nature of lived religious practice in view. Even when a narrative
religious practice takes the form of a written text, there are questions to
be asked about materiality (its form), embodiment (its accessibility and
use), emotion (its desired attitude), aesthetics (its fit and pleasingness),
morality (what it teaches), and the spiritual character of the world it
describes.
There are a variety of disciplinary partners who have taken up work
like this and on which many students of lived religion may want to draw.
While communication certainly goes beyond mere words, it is good to
pay attention to the words themselves, to vocabulary and jargon. That
can help to identify the boundaries of the group we are observing. Hear-

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ing specialized words can also invite us to ask about the experiences
that called for new language. Drawing on other disciplinary partners,
we might pay attention to style and genre in what we read and hear.
Linguistic analyses can fill in important historical context, for example,
just as semiotics alerts us to the work done by signs and symbols in the
social world. In addition, when we ask about the use of language in the
exercise of power, critical discourse analysis is a useful way of think-
ing. By looking for the way language is used, by whom, and in which
contexts, we can ask questions about the relationships and structures of
power that are revealed.3 Scholars have studied language and communi-
cation in a variety of ways, but as always, our work will start with people
using words rather than the words themselves. Using the metaphor of
narrative, we will look for what is communicated about past and future,
about relationships and boundaries, as they are present in everyday lived
religious practices.
In this book about studying lived religion, you may have been sur-
prised to see so little so far about beliefs and meaning systems. Schol-
ars and ordinary people alike often think of belief as central to what
it means to be religious, and they turn to definitive texts (scriptures,
sermons, treatises—­words) as a way of studying such beliefs. Survey re-
searchers, in turn, ask people if they believe in God or if they think the
Bible is literally true. Social theorists echo that theme in their own way
by talking about religion as a “meaning system” or a “sacred canopy.”4 As
we look at the narrative dimension of lived religious practice, the role of
beliefs and meanings will come more directly into view. We will see that
people use words and stories to construct the meanings that guide their
actions. We will see that they talk about beliefs, and in doing so, they
are saying something about who they are and where they belong. But
the beliefs and meanings that show up in everyday narratives are usu-
ally more modest than world-­defining interpretations of life, death, and
tragedy. Nor are they usually formed into a coherent system. There may
be many different stories about life in a person’s cognitive library, with
vignettes sometimes jumbled and discarded in any given interaction.
Analyzing the narrative dimension of practice takes us beyond dogmatic
formulae, but without leaving belief aside.
Instead, we will train our attention on the way divine beings and spir-
itual moments and religious institutions populate the stories people tell

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about everyday life and the way their lived religious practices tell stories
about what is right and true and possible. That does not mean theology
is irrelevant to this task. Not only will we listen for how people use exist-
ing theological language and categories, but we can also ask how theo-
logians themselves are working with the stories of everyday life to think
about what they can learn. Religious studies scholar Charles Marsh has
pioneered a turn toward “lived theology.” He argues that “crafting a more
direct and communicative rendering of the divine-­human encounter re-
quires us to place new demands on [theology]. . . . Restoring the power
of the individual encounter with God in the concrete situation and in
its community to words, into language—­this is the task and responsi-
bility given to each generation of theologians” (Marsh 2017, 10–­11). If
that divine-­human encounter can happen anywhere, the theologian’s
task may include asking people to tell a story about what happened after
church on Sunday or what they are praying about or what makes them
angry about the world as it is. These stories may even be more revealing
than asking them directly about life’s meaning or about their beliefs.

Narratives Are Social: Audiences and Cultural Resources

Understanding the social layers of a story means recognizing that nar-
ratives are coconstructed by narrator and audience, and when the
researcher herself is the audience, that is an important part of what we
need to analyze. Interviews are probably the most common method for
hearing stories, but firsthand observation is extremely useful, as well. In
each case, it is important to keep in mind that process of co-construction.
Stories told to you are told to you, in all your particularity. Likewise, the
history of relationship between “people like you” and the people you
are interviewing becomes part of the story. Sociologist Lynn David-
man, herself a formerly Orthodox Jew, describes this reflexivity well:
“Respondents did not simply ‘have’ a narrative that I, as a researcher,
could ‘get.’ Rather . . . my informants interacted with me as a woman,
and as a co-­defector” (2015, 8).
As students of lived religion, we bring to an event our own individ-
ual stock of stories that interact with and shape the stories we hear. In
addition, there are collective stories (what Somers calls “public narra-
tives”) that have the power to tell us how things should go in “this kind

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of event.” That is, the immediate social rules, material places, and insti-
tutions matter. Places we observe have rituals and histories. The stories
people tell and the way they tell them are situated, both in social spaces
and in relation to the legends and plots available to us in our cultural
and religious traditions. Studying lived religion means paying attention
to the social patterning in all three levels—­interacting individuals, struc-
turing institutions, and overarching cultural resources.
Think about the narratives that structure an individual life as it is
lived in the cultural and legal contexts we have called institutional. There
are separate public narratives that describe life’s progression through
educational institutions (up through the grades) and occupational ones
(entry level to the top), through citizen involvement, through families
and relationships, through stages of health, illness, and aging. Each
person’s story will be different, but each will be structured by familiar
markers that place us in recognizable roles and at recognizable places
along the way. There are also religious ways of telling the story. A child
may be marked at birth by sacred words whispered in their ear or holy
oil and water on their head. Those rituals define that child’s place in a
family and a community. The story continues with key markers such as
bar mitzvahs or quinceñeras and marriage rituals. Similarly, at death,
stories are told by the families and communities who wish to keep the
ancestor alive in memory. The telling and the doing are intertwined,
each shaped by the community that is the audience and the institution
in which it is told.
Because there are multiple institutions offering public narratives in
this kind of context, creating a spiritually defined version of a life story
requires work. Anthropologist Michael Brown’s ethnography of New
Age human “channels” (spirit mediums) can give us a window on how
that work happens. The wide range of practices that are clustered under
the “New Age” umbrella share a common emphasis on self-­exploration
and improvement. Brown says, “The New Age seems largely consti-
tuted by narratives: life histories, tales of spiritual adventure and ‘self-­
empowerment,’ moments of ‘personal sharing,’ and accounts of affliction
and recovery. The movement’s networks and collective gatherings are
designed to provide opportunities for storytelling” (2002, 103). That is,
there is a social context in which this individualized spirituality takes
shape. New Age practice often involves workshops that bring together a

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spiritual counselor and an interested audience in conference centers and

meditation rooms and organic gardens. There is a great deal of emphasis
on finding one’s own path, free of external constraints, but this is a par-
ticular kind of biographical narrative that exists in a cultural context and
with the support of communities where it can emerge and be affirmed.5
Religious communities and traditions of all kinds contribute pat-
terned stories that can shape how people enact a practice or narrate a
life. Religious organizations establish narrative templates that encourage
participants to tell the stories of their lives in sacred terms. As children
grow up, they learn the important stories about the gods, about the com-
munity’s history, and about how spiritual dimensions of life are expe-
rienced. Those stories depend, however, on the communities that tell
them, and they exist alongside all the other stories children are learning
outside the community. The stories and practices may, in fact, be for-
gotten in later life as other commitments and relationships take cen-
ter stage. Professor of education Khyati Joshi (2006) studied the ethnic
and religious identities of the children of immigrants to see how those
identities were constructed and sustained and when they were forgot-
ten. She interviewed forty-­one second-­generation Indian Americans—­
the majority Hindu but the rest representing the broad range of India’s
other religious traditions. They all grew up somewhat distant from any
of the Indian enclaves in the United States that would have strengthened
the ethnic and religious influences of their childhood. Still, many, from
all the traditions, reported going to “Sunday schools,” where they were
taught the stories and how to do the rituals. That laid a foundation, but
later in life, unless they lived near their parents and their home com-
munity, these young adults were unlikely to continue participating in
religious communal practices. Stories told at one time in life may be
a kind of reservoir, but they require an ongoing set of relationships to
remain alive. It is worth asking our participants, then, about the stories
they have heard and the celebrations they have had, but those earlier
stories may be distant memories rather than living narrative frames for
their lives.
Religious organizations themselves want to see such storytelling suc-
ceed, of course. Birthright Israel tours, for example, are designed to
connect communal religious stories to individual lives, instilling Jew-

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ish identity and love of Israel in their young participants. Shaul Kelner
(2010) studied these tours for several years, first as a program evaluator
and then as an independent researcher. His original role meant that he
was predisposed to seeing how the programs succeeded, a critical rec-
ognition for anyone who is doing research from within an organization.
To check what he had learned, he returned later with the specific goal of
looking for things he had missed. His primary method in all instances
was simply being there—­on the bus, in the discussion circles, and listen-
ing to the presentations. His interviewing of participants seems mostly
to have been informal, although his book provides less specific informa-
tion about his methods than ethnographies usually do. What he was able
to document was the intentional linking of Jewish stories to individual
life stories, and he was able to show how the context of the liminal, in-­
between space provided by a group tour made this possible. The set-
ting and the relationships prove central to understanding how narrative
practices do their work, and both watching and listening are the tools
we need.

Jewish Stories and Jewish Identity on Birthright Israel Tours

What the social context of the group homeland tour makes possible, tour
organizers’ efforts make common. One of the primary ways trip sponsors
encourage and impose structure on public exchanges about private Jewish
lives is by instituting group discussion circles as a regular feature of the Israel
experience curriculum. These institutionalize a process in which tourists ex-
plicitly link their own stories to the collective Jewish and Zionist stories that
are being used to frame Israel. . . . Irrespective of their content, the discus-
sions are structured to encourage tourists to look to their own pasts. . . . In
speaking to their personal histories, tourists also discuss aspects of family
history that predate their birth. It is common in the discussions surround-
ing the visit to Yad Vashem, for instance, for grandchildren of survivors to
talk about their grandparents’ experiences in and after the Shoah. . . . [The
students] find themselves in a separate social environment whose structure
and discourse work hand in hand to both enable and encourage them to
overlook the complexities of identity and, instead, construct radically sim-
plified conceptions of self. The travelers are in their very essence and more
than anything else, the tours suggest, Jews. (Kelner 2010, 173, 179)

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Practices of religious narration happen both in intentional religious

activities and in everyday conversation, in individual life stories and in
the spaces where collective stories are generated and retold. The stories
people tell about their everyday lives may be told as blessings or curses,
as times of divine presence or absence. Listening for narrative practices
that include religious and spiritual elements means recognizing that not
everything we hear comes from authoritative religious sources. In entan-
gled social contexts, relationships of all sorts convey spiritual knowledge.
Where there are officially established or widely institutionalized religious
organizations, there are theological authorities and programs that con-
vey religious ideas. But in interstitial contexts, the stories may come
from many sources, and the elements of explanatory stories must be
pieced together. As media studies scholar Lynn Schofield Clark (2007b)
puts it, this can be “religion, twice removed.” Popular music, television
programs, and movies can borrow religious images and stories from ex-
isting traditions, and those images then find their way back into the way
people describe their lives.6
The range of such media is now vast. Writers and artists, bloggers,
vloggers, and tweeters tell stories about love and life that sometimes
invoke sacred actors and images, as well as seeking to define often-­
contested religious identities. Their audience is cultivated through com-
ment spaces, and their authority is authenticated by the way their stories
resonate with followers and establish the popularity of their “brand”
(Lövheim and Lundmark 2019). These sites of online religious practice
allow new dispersed communities to form and new pastiche practices to
emerge, but they often intersect with and borrow from offline religious
practice. The study of religion and media has blossomed in recent de-
cades so that the student of lived religious practice has abundant sources
at hand. There are practices to observe online and practices portrayed in
film and television (which are often consumed online, as well). All are
worth studying on their own, but we can also study how those media
images and practices make their way into life stories.7
Clark’s (2003) research is pioneering in this regard. She writes about
the media producers and their products but also how they are con-
sumed. She analyzed the popular 1990s TV shows Touched by an Angel
and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, including how images from the programs
showed up in teens’ talk about their lives. She analyzed interviews with

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one hundred teens who were part of a larger, multimethod project called
“Symbolism, Meaning, and the Lifecourse,” begun in the late 1990s. Her
book includes a detailed and helpful discussion of the methods the team
used. The team followed up initial individual interviews with conversa-
tions that involved whole families and circles of friends. The broad so-
cioeconomic and ethnic diversity of the sample, along with its religious
diversity, makes for a rich picture of the spiritual and religious lives of
teens in the United States and especially the way they weave together
their own stories and those available in popular media.
For example, Clark describes Jake, a teen with little knowledge of re-
ligion, who nevertheless told a story about a miraculous appearance of
an angel. “When I asked Jake to further describe what he thought an-
gels were like, he noted, ‘Well, there’s a lot of movies that have angels in
them, so that’s always what I thought they were like’” (Clark 2003, 101).
In fact, she continues, in teens’ stories “an angel could be a ghost and
vice versa, or a ghost could be an ancestor. Stories and symbols might
be drawn from religious sources or from places like family stories of
good fortune, ‘legend trips,’ the entertainment media, or popularized
African traditions of ancestors” (112). The cultures we live in have always
been repositories for a pastiche of stories. As we listen to people narrate
their lives, we may find that occupational lore, neighborhood myths,
congregational histories, and family legends are woven together with
whatever religious stories to which they have had access, even through
mass media.
Some of those stories can rise to widely shared myths and aphorisms,
but as they do, competing voices may be silenced. The “civil religion”
that presumably tells the moral story of a nation, for example, is likely
to ignore its conquest of Indigenous people or the subjugation of ra-
cial minorities.8 As we hear religious words and stories, it is worth pay-
ing attention to their sources. Whose symbols are mass produced and
widely heard, and whose are forbidden? While individuals may seem to
be stitching together a personal narrative, there are both audiences and
producers at work. Some cultural sources are more readily available to
them than others, some symbols and roles more respected than others,
some voices louder than others.
Stories about everyday life take place in complex social layers, but
they also have real material and embodied settings and evoke moral and

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aesthetic judgments, as well as complex emotions. All the dimensions

of experience and all the social layers, from personal to institutional to
cultural, are present in the telling, as are the listeners (including inter-
viewers) whose response keeps the story alive.

How Narrative Practices Unite and Divide

The stories that frame a social practice are shared practical knowledge,
and as such, they draw lines between those who know the practice and
those who don’t. As we have seen, spiritual narratives create and sus-
tain memories of events in one’s own life, linking them with the history
of one’s community and one’s people. In other words, they reinforce
identity and membership. Stories create—­and negotiate—­boundaries.
Telling stories reminds hearers of where they belong, but it also cre-
ates moments when belonging can be redefined. People on the margins
can sometimes renegotiate the boundaries by playing with the stories.
Recall the Muslim teenage boys whom John O’Brien (2017) studied—­
boys struggling to establish a place for themselves somewhere between
US teen culture and halal religious expectations. One expression of this
struggle was their humorous invocation of the “extreme Muslim,” a
character whose “forceful, harsh, and loud manner,” O’Brien notes, sig-
nals that his strict admonitions are “not our way.” To illustrate, O’Brien
relates an incident at the mosque. Walking through one day, he heard a
high-­pitched voice lecturing on the Qur’an and mistakenly assumed it
was a woman:

When I reach Muhammad at the front desk, I tell him, “I thought that was
a woman speaking.” Muhammad puts on a heavy “Arab” accent and an
expression of mock horror, and says, “Astaghfirullah [God forgive you],
bruzzer! A woman addressing the masjid [mosque]? Zis is not right!
What do you want to have next? A stripper in ze mosque? Would you
want to put a stripper over zere instead of the bookstore? [he points to the
bookstore]. Maybe you think zis would be a good way to raise money, be-
cause no one is buying ze books? Maybe you are right.” (O’Brien 2017, 66)

Humorous stories are often the medium for just this sort of bound-
ary setting and negotiation. Peter Berger’s delightful book about humor

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 Narratives in Religious Practice | 187

outlines the many uses to which it is put—­rebelling against authority

(as these Muslim boys were doing), expressing fears or resentments,
or diffusing uncomfortable situations. He goes on to argue that comic
moments are often like sacred ones in their “non-­ordinary” quality,
breaking through routine expectations to open up other possibilities.
But ordinary in-­group jokes, he points out, are also effective boundary
markers. Berger quips, “What happens if you cross a Unitarian with a
Jehovah’s Witness? A person who goes from house to house, and doesn’t
know why. Try telling [that] joke to someone with no knowledge of
American religion” (1997, 57). A funny story may do a great deal of work
in marking or challenging who belongs.
Timothy Longman, on the other hand, writes about very unfunny
stories. Physical memorials always invite narratives, often heroic or poi-
gnant but also sometimes horrific. Over the past half century, it has be-
come common to construct spaces that challenge viewers to remember
genocides and other tragedies, hopefully vowing “never again.” These
spaces are material artifacts intended to provoke emotional and moral
responses by implicitly telling a story.9 Sometimes private and religious
groups construct memorials and shape the message; sometimes it is gov-
ernments or just random passersby. Longman (2009) has written ex-
tensively about the role of the churches in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, as
well as the way the story of that genocide is now being told, especially
through physical memorials. He and coauthor Théoneste Rutagengwa
visited dozens of such memorials, conducted a survey of over two thou-
sand residents in three differing communities, and convened focus
groups to learn how memorials were telling the story of what happened.

Honoring a Painful Past in Rwanda

In nearly every province . . . at least one church building—­sometimes a
school, sometimes a monastery, often a church sanctuary—­was set aside as
a memorial. The form these memorials take varies substantially. In only a few
places were bodies left where they fell. In a number of churches, bodies were
arranged carefully, with the bones of children in one room, intact skeletons
in another, skulls and bone fragments in another. . . . In Nyamata, a Catholic
parish south of Kigali, a large complex of open catacombs has been built
behind the church, where bodies are buried yet still visible and the parish

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building itself is cleared but still bears stains of blood and fire. A guide takes
visitors through the church, telling the story of the genocide. (Longman and
Rutagengwa 2006, 141)

While guides tell official stories, the people in the communities tell
their own. Some echo the story of necessary remembrance (“never
again”), while others reject this focus on the past, and still others incorpo-
rate these places into long-­standing ways of remembering ancestors. Like
all stories, memorial stories are dynamic, being shaped by the moment,
the tellers, and the audience. Outside observers who did not experience
the event need to listen carefully. Who is being constructed as victim and
who as perpetrator? What about the event is to be remembered and what
forgotten? Who now belongs, and who must therefore be excluded? Pay-
ing attention to the places themselves, to embodied responses to them, to
the emotions they generate, and to the moral message can help students
of lived religious practice to hear the story more clearly.
Stories, that is, can perpetuate differences within a society or a com-
munity. Some stories explain why one group deserves to be privileged
and another not. Karl Marx famously posited that a religious life nar-
rative with a “sweet by and by” was a convenient salve for this life’s
economic wounds and might therefore serve the interests of people in
charge ([1844] 1963). Similarly, every patriarchal tradition has stories
to explain the inferiority of women and the legitimacy of male power.
Such institutionalized patterns of inequality also impose constraints on
who can tell which story (Barr 2021). Conservative Christian organiza-
tions may, for example, establish a familiar story about how a person
is “called” to be a leader, but that story can only be told about a male
member of the group. In many traditions, stories that combine being a
faithful person and being LGBTQ are illegitimate (or just impossible). In
many places in the world, telling a story about one’s conversion to a new
religion is a practice discouraged by law or custom (Hackett 2008; Yang
2012). Spiritual narratives, that is, are situated in particular legal and
cultural contexts and can be part of the repertoire that is used to mark
distinctions of status, privilege, and exclusion. The constrained condi-
tions that make some stories hard to tell pose particular challenges for
an observer of lived religious practice. Sometimes the narratives of a

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group hide as much as they reveal so that seeking out marginal members
and moments of disruption becomes especially critical.

The Work Narratives Do

Narrative work, like all social action, is both situationally emergent and
institutionally patterned, constrained by shared convention and ame-
nable to the creativity and agency of the narrators. That mix of openness
and structure is at least partly a function of the fact that narratives, by
their very nature, contain a temporal dimension. They begin at one time
and end at another. Prayers themselves are often framed as narratives
about what the divine has done in the past and what is hoped for in the
future. In the moment, new things might happen, in part because the
story of the past is being retold. There are practices reframing the past,
practices that reinterpret the present, and practices that suggest a new
future.
In thinking about observing such practices, Daniel Winchester’s work
is once again helpful. With Kyle Green, he has given us a study that
shows how stories of the past are reframed in the present. Winchester
and Green’s collaboration is another example of taking advantage of two
separate ethnographic studies to draw out larger lessons. They combine
Winchester’s study of converts to Eastern Orthodoxy with Green’s study
of people who take up mixed martial arts. As we have seen in earlier
examples from Winchester’s study, he is attuned to the embodied, ma-
terial, and moral dimensions of religious practice, but here we turn to
the evolution of converts’ narrative accounts of their growing attach-
ment to new practices. “Although initially post hoc justifications, over
time, these accounts became reworked and internalized by actors as part
of their own self-­interpretations” (Winchester and Green 2019, 262).
Winchester and Green show that in each of these very different com-
munities, narrative “hooks” are proffered by community members and
take hold precisely when new people are feeling ambivalent and unsure.
Once the hooks do take hold, accounts of what happened in the past can
motivate action in the present and future. “Practices undertaken in the
here and now were ultimately leading them to some version of a more
enlightened and desirable self ” (273).

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Becoming an Eastern Orthodox Self

Before becoming an Eastern Orthodox Christian at the age of 48, Danielle
had spent most of her adult years involved in New Age Spirituality and then
later as a committed Buddhist. In her early 40s, however, Danielle became
what she described as “burned out” on Buddhism and religion altogether.
Only after discovering the Orthodox Church . . . did Danielle “find my spiri-
tual home, where I really belonged” and “who God was leading me to be all
this time.” Danielle’s explanation of her conversion as a moment of profound
self-­discovery, of finding out where she really belonged and who she was al-
ways meant to be, was an extremely common theme within the conversion
narratives of Eastern Orthodox Christian converts. . . . [In the beginning,
she was curious, but not comfortable, definitely ambivalent. A conversation
with the priest helped. Then,] Father Peter and others drew a plotline be-
tween Danielle’s religious past as a Buddhist and her current quasi-­interest
in the Orthodox Church. This narrative alignment between past experience
and present action effectively hooked Danielle’s interest and seemed to mo-
tivate her to return—­“I had to come back and learn more,” as she put it. . . .
[Gradually the story became her own. Danielle] explained how she had been
practicing the Jesus Prayer and that it had “opened up something in me
that I haven’t experienced in years, . . . a very transcendent, spiritual feeling.”
Danielle told [me] she used to get this type of feeling with Buddhist medita-
tion but now “also with this strong feeling of great love and acceptance.” At
this point, Danielle said, “there is a reason that I found the Church; I think
this is where God has been leading me all along.” (Winchester and Green
2019, 266–­270)

Like others who have studied conversion,10 Winchester and Green

show how past events are reframed as prelude to the present. Lynn Da-
vidman describes a similar gradual process of trying on new life ac-
counts when one leaves a significant relationship or community. Her
book Becoming Un-­Orthodox highlights the multiple dimensions of
practice involved in leaving behind an ultra-­Orthodox way of life. She
especially notes the way bodies participate in telling the story of who
we are and are not. Those who leave the Hasidic community have to
“disinscribe their internalized routines of the body” (Davidman 2015,
20). They often began the process in private, experimenting with leaving
certain bodily rituals aside. They broke a commandment and discovered

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that they didn’t incite divine punishment, so that the story they had in-
ternalized began to fall apart. At some point, they began a phase of “pass-
ing,” in which they were presenting themselves as Orthodox when they
were inside the community but freely breaking Orthodox norms when
they were not. Finally, they “stepped out,” risking loss of family, com-
munity, and way of life. They became “scriptless,” in Davidman’s words
(142). Relationships, habits, and their very bodies were changed, but in
the end, she notes, “You can’t turn off your past” (181). This research is a
good reminder that narratives are not just words. The religious practices
of constructing and reconstructing a life story are just as embodied and
material and emotional as every other religious practice is.
The negotiated character of that reframing is even more apparent
when the effort fails. Among evangelicals, a central religious practice is
witnessing to one’s faith and attempting to win new converts. Not nearly
all evangelicals actively engage in this practice (Pew Research Center
2015, 84), but we can see a vivid example in an encounter recorded by
sociologist David Smilde. He was taking a break from an event at one
of the Pentecostal churches he was studying in Caracas, Venezuela,
chatting in the parking lot with one of the church leaders. Enrique (the
leader) spotted a kid nearby smoking crack and took the opportunity to
confront him. As Smilde records the conversation, we hear an unsuc-
cessful attempt to reframe the present and the future for this young man.
Ultimately, Juan Carlos walks away, smoking his crack. The evangelical
life is not a story he can imagine, in spite of the intervention of Enrique.
For Enrique, on the other hand, engaging in this kind of evangelizing
conversation is part of the narrative religious practice of his life.

Is This the Future You Want? Witnessing in a Caracas Parking Lot

Enrique: Why are you smoking rock? You have to quit. You’re going to
destroy your life, man. [pause] That’s bread for today, hunger for tomor-
row. Right now you’re going to feel good. But tomorrow you’re going to
be in bad shape.
Juan Carlos: It’s a curse, hermano.
Enrique: It’s a curse and you know it. So why don’t you look to Jesus
Christ then? [Juan Carlos finishes packing his pipe and puts it up to his
mouth.] . . .
Juan Carlos: What’s the question?

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Enrique: Whether you want to continue this lifestyle destroying yourself

little by little.
Juan Carlos: I haven’t destroyed my life yet.
Enrique: Whatta ya mean you haven’t destroyed your life yet? . . . You
can’t keep on like this, man! You’re going to destroy yourself. Satan
wants to destroy you. And there’s a way to escape it. You don’t think
there is a way to escape it?
Juan Carlos: [pause] Escape . . . yeah, I think so.
Enrique: Why don’t you come to the church and toss that [the crack] . . .
[After an interruption, the conversation continues.]
Enrique: Christ loves you, man. [pause] Christ loves you. [pause] Christ
wants to free you from your vice. You’re a young man, good looking.
Satan wants to possess you.
Juan Carlos: I hadn’t consumed rock for four months until today.
Enrique: Look what the Bible says [pages through the Bible until he finds
a verse]: “The Devil came to kill you, steal your life and your peace, and
destroy you” [John 10:10]. That’s what Satan came for. But Jesus Christ
came to destroy the work of the Devil. Get up from the stupor you’re in,
man. You’re causing your mom and kids problems. Your brothers and
sisters are seeing your example. Do you want them to be tomorrow like
you are today? You’re not a good example for society, son. And Christ
knows it, he’s putting his hand out to you and saying, “Hey, my son, I
love you. Stop that foolishness, man.” You’re desperate to do drugs and
Christ doesn’t want to see you that way. (Smilde 2003, 317–­319)

Other religious traditions put no such premium on dramatic life

changes; past and present are already contained within the stories of
the community and the storytelling habits community members have
learned. They may have learned to talk about everyday events as visita-
tions from the gods or to see life challenges as times of spiritual trial.
Where shared religious assumptions are present in a situation, spiritual
stories may simply evolve in routine conversation. We can also hear the
story in requests for prayer, for example. In one of Kwabena Asamoah-­
Gyadu’s many visits to Ghanaian Christian communities in various
parts of the world, he heard accounts that linked present difficulty with
hoped-­for future.

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During a visit to one Ghanaian congregation in Amsterdam in Decem-

ber 2008, a middle-­aged female member walked up to me and asked for
prayer. . . . Literally she was saying in Twi, “Pastor, I am getting stuck
abroad [meaning she cannot visit Ghana] because I have lived here for
ten years, and I still do not have proper documentation or papers. Please
pray for me.” In the religious life of African immigrants, prayers for
nkrataa, “papers” (that is, proper resident documents), rank next only to
healing in requests made at prayer services. (2010, 90)

These immigrants, gathered at a regular prayer service, tell the story of

their migration as a matter for prayer. Studying such lived religious prac-
tice may best be done by being there to listen, but attention to published
and online sources may be fruitful, as well. Thousands, if not millions,
of tweets and Facebook posts are daily repositories of stories about what
divine powers are believed to be doing in the world.
Theologians and ethicists and other religious leaders also invoke the
power of stories as they do their work. Traci West is a womanist ethicist
who has taken seriously the everyday stories of African-­descent women
as sources for her ethical reflection. She has traveled to Ghana, Brazil,
and South Africa to listen to the stories of women working for change,
women who told her about their own use of stories as ways to link past,
present, and future. Like other students of lived religious practice, these
religion scholars and activists are digging into what stories reveal about
the lives and religious understandings of ordinary people. In turn, like
the South African woman whom West describes, they are using narra-
tive methods of teaching and writing.

Stories of Rape: Doing Ethics in South Africa

When we met for a one-­on-­one discussion Sarojini spoke about the chal-
lenge she found in the fact that South Africa had one of the most progres-
sive constitutions in the world “and we still can’t overcome gender violence.
Because legislation alone will never achieve it, you must engage the world-
views of people in the villages and their cultures. And the Bible does this.”
Sarojini described her work on Bible study methods. . . . She stressed how
“the communities with which I work, with which I want to work, take the
Bible very seriously, which means that we have to take it seriously.” Saro-

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jini and the other leaders of Ujamaa Centre (faculty and local community
partners) nurtured an approach to interpretation that invited analysis of
community consciousness, starting with the community in the biblical text.
In their study sessions she would ask the members of the women’s groups if
any of them knew a woman who had been raped like the woman in Judges
[who was given up by her husband to be gang-­raped by strangers]. “And
then the stories begin,” Sarojini said. “Oh, my goodness. You never have
enough time” to get through all of the stories the women have to tell or to
explore all of the insights that emerge. (West 2019, 173)

By speaking across time, stories are also intended to call forth imagi-
nation about how the world might be.11 Stories are constructed to evoke
possible futures, to speak of dreams and visions. The story of the Exo-
dus, from the Hebrew scriptures, inspired African American slaves to
dream of freedom, and that same story is claimed by Zionists in Israel,
as well as by immigrants elsewhere who are seeking a better life. Martin
Luther King Jr. famously proclaimed, “I have a dream” and “I’ve been
to the mountaintop.” He invited listeners to imagine a future when the
content of character matters more than the color of skin. It is precisely
that imaginative function that has made storytelling, including religious
storytelling, so central to social movement activism.12 We have already
benefited from Ruth Braunstein’s research on faith-­based liberal advo-
cacy, and her attention to stories is as astute as her analysis of other
dimensions of religious practice. She recalls Rev. James Forbes speaking
to a health-­care-­focused Interfaith Service of Witness and Prayer. He
conjured this narrative scene for the crowd: “The Lord has asked me,
‘How do you have the nerve to pray to me for yourself with respect to
your health needs, and you show no concern for the other 46 million of
your brothers and sisters who have no coverage’” (quoted in Braunstein
2012, 119). Rather than presenting a theological treatise justifying move-
ment activism, leaders draw on grassroots stories, including their own,
and frame them symbolically as stories of faith that carry within them
the promise of change.
Studying religious practices that put forward a narrative of change
can be done with a wide variety of methods. Seeing a narrative on the
page or on the screen may fall short in capturing the emotional impact of
the words or the response of the audience, but from internet archives to

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the old-­fashioned kind stored in boxes, the practice of storytelling leaves

traces that can be studied. Sociologist Michael Young was interested in
the earliest national social movements in the United States, namely, the
nineteenth-­century temperance and antislavery movements. How did
they manage to strike a chord and spread throughout the country? He
utilized archival data on Protestant benevolent societies along with a wide
range of historical newspapers and other publications to create a state-­by-­
state picture of the link between the presence of religious institutions and
social movement activity. The institutions were providing the network of
resources necessary for leadership and mobilization. But more important
for our purposes is Young’s exploration of what leaders were saying and
doing. All his digging through boxes paid off in both the storytelling he
captured and the geographic patterns that reveal its spread. Note his astute
ear for the difference between an argument based on health and one that
utilizes an entirely different, religious, mode of narrating.

Confessing Sin and Organizing for Change in Nineteenth-­Century

New York
The American Temperance Society promoted a pledge as a ritual for joining
the society. Initially the temperance pledge included a moderate statement
that alcohol consumption was “injurious” and that intemperance promoted
“evils.” . . . It was not a confession. Reports from auxiliaries within New York
reveal that by the early 1830s, the pledge had changed to a confession of sin
and faith. Unlike the temperance publications of the 1820s, these reports
are filled with claims of repentant merchants, reformed tipplers, and re-
claimed sots taking the pledge. . . . In 1833, the magazine of the state society
compared the temperance pledge to “the Sabbath, circumcision, baptism,
the Lord’s supper.” They were “all pledges or covenants.” . . . The society ex-
horted the individual “to deny himself, to abandon his prejudices and error,
and become a firm, active, and a pledged friend of temperance.” (Young
2002, 676, citations to original sources omitted)

Young linked the geographies and resources of the movements to

show how they spread, but the heart of his argument is about how par-
ticular religious practices, drawn from different parts of US religious
culture, proved especially adaptable. He calls these practices “schemas”
to denote the way they organized people’s perceptions and actions:

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[These] social movements emerged as particular variants of the sche-

mas of sin and confession combined. The two schemas came from dif-
ferent and competing religious contexts. Extending from the populist
institutions of upstart sects [Baptists and Methodists] was a schema or
practice of public confession. Extending from the orthodox institutions
of benevolence was a schema of the special sins of the nation. As they
combined in the consciences of many evangelicals, they triggered con-
fessional protests aimed at transforming individuals and national insti-
tutions. (Young 2002, 666)

Alcohol and then slavery were defined not simply as harmful but as sin,
not just individual sin but the sin of a nation. Confessing and repenting
were established practices in revival culture, but now they were tied to
new causes. Narratives can be both pliable and powerful in producing
new futures for individuals and societies.
A new narrative interpretation, linked to a religious practice, can
often have powerful effects on how people act in the moment and into
the future. As we have seen, such adaptations are likely to include themes
and plots drawn from a wide array of sources, taking existing practices
and envisioning a new ending. Because the underlying narratives may
not be right on the surface, it is often useful to engage in an iterative
process of listening, analyzing, and trying out what we think we have
heard. That is what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild (2016b) did as
she listened to the talk of Louisiana Tea Party activists, then constructed
a “deep story” and took it back to them to see if it resonated. It was a
story about being left behind in US political and economic life. Hochs-
child could have said it with stark statistics, but she painted a narrative
picture instead, a picture of other people unfairly skipping ahead in line;
and that resonated with her participants. But she also heard strands of
a religious story in their conversation, namely, the “left behind” narra-
tive found in the massively popular series of books that fictionalized
biblical accounts of the end-­time (Frykholm 2004). Interwoven with the
political and economic story about the indignities of contemporary life
were stories of the Rapture, featuring a messianic figure who radically
alters history, rewarding the deserving ones and punishing the evildo-
ers. Those stories helped Hochschild explain these activists’ reaction to
Donald Trump, then a candidate for US president. As they saw him de-

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scending a golden escalator or sitting at the head of the table casting out
failed apprentices, they saw a powerful savior punishing those who had
gained unfair advantage. Interlocked stories explained the present and
allowed them to imagine a new future.
The narrative dimension of religious practice includes telling stories
that constitute, motivate, and interpret both everyday and extraordinary
social action. Religious communities and traditions provide vocabular-
ies and genres, but stories and images from throughout the culture can
be adapted to give shape to what people see and experience. Like all
elements of lived religious practice, narrative practice is both struc-
tured and creative. It can unite, and it can divide. For students of lived
religious practice, it is useful to examine the ways in which collective
narratives allow people to explain their behavior and their desires to
themselves and to others.

Putting It All Together

Attention to narrative religious practices brings our multidimensional
exploration to completion, so it is time to recap and put it all together.
What might be the payoff in studying lived religion in the ways laid out
in this book? What new questions arise? What do we see when we take
contexts into better account? How can each of the dimensions of prac-
tice enrich the study of the others? To do that, let’s return to the Chinese
Qingming festival, the “tomb sweeping” rituals that take place in early
April each year. While the Chinese government seeks to define this as
“tradition” and “culture” rather than “religion,” what might we see if we
analyzed contemporary festival practices as lived religious practice?
Taking our cue from an account written by a young Chinese Canadian,
Christopher Cheung, let’s take a close look at the social structures of the
practice, the cultural and legal contexts in which it happens, and the
multiple human dimensions that constitute Qingming practice.

Sweeping Tombs in Vancouver

Cheung’s (2019) blog recounts scenes at the Vancouver cemetery where his
grandfather is buried, full of Chinese families tidying the graves on the ap-
pointed day. He describes the activity itself as relatively easy, but “the physi-
cality of the tasks forces you to be quite intimate with death. If crouching

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in a garden makes you feel close to the earth, crouching to clean a grave
reminds you that you are earth.” His contemporary interpretation is accom-
panied by learning the proper modern practice of bowing (rather than pros-
tration). He notes, “My older uncle went first because the order, by seniority,
is important. When it was my turn, the adults taught me how to do it, ‘Three
times. With good posture.’” He ends his blog this way: “There are times I can’t
help but cry when we talk about happy days they weren’t around to see. But
I also can’t help but laugh at times like when my grandmother shouts to the
dead about the A’s we got on our report cards. Because the tour goes on, I
feel like they’re still with us.” He notes, as well, his feeling of connection to
the larger Chinese community: “It’s hard not to think about other Chinese-­
Canadian families on Qingming when we see them at the cemetery. I love
seeing how they pay their respects.”

Like all practices, Qingming is co-created by the social participants,

using the traditions they know and the habits that just seem natural.
Cheung’s (2019) blog post notes how the sight of Chinese families tidy-
ing the graves heightened his feeling of connection to the larger Chinese
community: “It’s hard not to think about other Chinese-­Canadian fami-
lies on Qingming when we see them at the cemetery. I love seeing how
they pay their respects.” Participating in this practice was collective and
social. The presence of others provided models for action, but there is a
mix of inherited structure and collective agency. Older people may have
some memory of the tradition, but they are all reinventing it in a new
time and place. When new situations challenge habits and traditions,
people improvise. That is as true for religious practice as for any other
social practice.
What is also true is that religious practices are as much shaped by
forces of status, identity, and division as are any other practices. The ca-
pacity to improvise and resist is always there, but so are the tendencies
to reproduce existing lines of class and race and privilege. For the grave
sweepers, the most obvious distinctions are those based on age, but
judgments about social class are embedded in the stories they tell and
the objects they use. Understanding social position enlightens under-
standing of the practice, but observing the practice deepens understand-
ing of how those positions work. Note also that this festival becomes
a marker of Chinese ethnicity in the diaspora. It is Chinese Canadians

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who are at the cemetery on this day. Religious practices are, that is, im-
plicated in social identity.
Studying lived religion means paying attention to the places where
people recognize a layer of nonordinary reality, and that is certainly the
case here. Even though neither the Chinese state nor these “modern”
Canadians might call their practice religious, there is nevertheless a spir-
itual dimension in the way time is collapsed, bringing together past and
present, but also in the way participants interact with ancestors and use
material objects (willow branches) to drive evil spirits (ghosts) away. In
modern Vancouver, our blogger noted that for his family, the older tra-
ditions (as he put it) that were focused on spiritual presence—­bringing
food and gifts for the dead, the willow branches to scare off evil spirits—­
were not part of their ritual. “But we did clean the grave, and we did
bring flowers, and we did bow to my grandfather in respect” (Cheung
2019). Even if the participants are not involved in any organized reli-
gious group and do not identify with a single religious tradition, the
practices themselves—­by invoking awareness of a spiritual reality—­can
be analyzed as religious practices.
In an earlier time, all these practices might have been part of a highly
entangled religious social world, but today they are perhaps best un-
derstood as happening within a fluid but highly regulated set of state-­
sanctioned activities.13 While traditional popular ancestor practices are
not part of the major recognized religions in China, they are generally
tolerated. Where practices are being absorbed into one of the official
religions (Buddhist or Daoist), both state and religious authorities might
attempt to exercise oversight. Indeed, the establishment of Qingming as
one of the four public holidays celebrating Chinese traditional culture
demonstrates its quasi-­establishment status on the mainland. As a rela-
tively newly revived and rapidly evolving set of customs, however, there
are also a variety of interstitial innovations. Wherever religious practices
are being developed and redeveloped in interstitial social circumstances,
we have a window on the social mechanisms through which innovation
happens. The tug between tight state regulation and churning social in-
novation, in fact, mirrors the way much of the rest of Chinese society is
changing.
It is important, that is, to place this and any other religious practice
in its historical and legal context. That leads us to wonder how the ex-

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perience of Canadian Chinese is different from that of Chinese people

in China. In China, the holiday appears on the official national calendar,
while in Canada, Chinese Canadians must create holiday time on their
own. Back in China, one might imagine some older participants telling
stories about the years when they were forbidden to sweep the graves,
while younger Canadians have no such memory. In China, the material
items necessary for the festival are readily available, while Canadians
may have a harder time assembling the right flowers. As for immigrants
everywhere, religious practices are social occasions of both memory
and invention. Even the same religious practice is shaped by its cultural
context.
Then, examining the practices themselves as multidimensional so-
cial interactions both deepens our understanding and opens questions
for comparison. We can begin by observing that this practice involves
human bodies and prescribed movements. Cheung describes the activity
itself as relatively easy but notes that the physicality of it evokes encoun-
ters with mortality. That suggests thinking about where else we might
observe embodied religious practice that brings practitioners into con-
tact with death. Cheung also speaks of learning the “modern” practice
of bowing, rather than prostrating himself in obeisance. Where else are
postures and movements adapting to new expectations? Observing em-
bodied practice might also suggest comparisons to expressions of rev-
erence within Chinese experience toward the Buddha or Mao Zedong
(Tatlow 2016). What might we learn about relations of authority by tak-
ing each of those embodied practices seriously?
The material character of Qingming practices is equally striking. Not
only are people engaged in tending to a material space, but the locations
of those spaces have both ritual and practical significance. We might
wonder about how the places themselves evoke spiritual experience, as
well as ancestral memory. New graves were traditionally situated accord-
ing to rules of feng shui, but that is more possible in rural areas than
in cities. So how do specific places continue to play a part in this and
other practices? That question also suggests asking about other burial
practices, in China and beyond. Other research tells us that cremation is
required in Chinese cities, with most residents then practicing cremains
burial or the more expensive option of a columbarium. What happens
when there are no graves to tidy in the usual ways? How might the fes-

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tival encompass these material changes? The arduous journey to the

ancestral countryside is another challenge, but some younger genera-
tions in China’s cities are now using apps for virtual commemoration
(Kong 2011) instead. Those who do travel can combine the trip with new
tourism opportunities, often advertised as a “spring outing.” But travel
also brings transportation nightmares (and, in a pandemic, travel re-
strictions) as millions leave the cities for the countryside. Noting the
material dimension of this religious practice—­and its intersection with
other parts of society such as tourism and transportation—­can prompt
contrasts and comparisons to other places where religious practices have
practical impacts beyond the religious field itself.
Because we do not yet have extensive data on the personal experi-
ences of Qingming practitioners, questions about emotion are more
speculative. Students of Chinese funeral practices have documented a
range of emotional expression and performance (Kipnis 2017, X. Liu
2000, H.-­M. Liu 2020), but performance of emotion at Qingming does
not necessarily seem to follow the same rules. Our young Vancouver
participant, however, was sufficiently moved to create his blog post and
to end it by describing his feelings of both joy and sadness. His experi-
ence suggests that practices of commemoration may be especially fruit-
ful sites for the study of the emotional dimensions of religious practice.
How do cultural expectations channel individual feelings? And how do
spiritual and emotional forces combine to shape action?
The aesthetic dimensions of Qingming practice are more easily ob-
servable, as we saw in chapter 7. There are kites with lanterns lighting the
night sky, the pleasant smell of incense, and the less pleasant smells of
burning paper money or firecrackers; and especially, there are the flow-
ers that are chosen for their beauty. Again, it is worth remembering that
aesthetic judgments are both cultural and status based. A closer study
of Qingming would surely ask about how beauty was being judged and
by whom.
Moral judgments in these practices are also relatively easy to see. The
grandmother told the deceased grandfather all about how the family
is doing, reinforcing a tacit statement of the moral compass by which
they were living. Not only were they accomplishing important things;
they were fulfilling social obligations (by getting married and having
children, for example), and they were showing proper moral respect for

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those who have gone before. If asked to explain these things, they might
well point to their grounding in Confucian ethics of filial piety (Pang
2012). But in the People’s Republic of China, official state guidelines play
a role, as well. Proper respect and commemoration is codified into sug-
gestions for the virtues to be celebrated in tombstone carvings (Kipnis
2017). The moral dimension of Qingming practice is carried by family
expectation, social striving, and state guidelines, which might lead us to
wonder about how those social forces are at work in less obvious ways
elsewhere. How are spiritually infused acts of commemoration shaping
how we think about what is right and wrong?
The grandmother’s recitation of family accomplishments was accom-
panied, of course, by a rich array of other storytelling. As with any fes-
tival gathering, there are narrative practices, stories of past celebrations
and of what memorable things extended family members did—­which
uncle was drunk at the Hanukah party or the memorable time a long-­
estranged brother came home for Christmas. Cheung (2019) recalled,
“On some of those Qingming visits, as my family reminisced, I’d hear
new snippets of information about my departed relatives.” That suggests
that Qingming narratives might be analyzed alongside other family-­
focused religious practice and other accounts of the filial piety that char-
acterizes the social heritage of Confucianism. One might also wonder
how those stories conveyed expectations about proper practice or what
one does or does not have to believe. Sometimes narrative practices in-
clude official theological writing about how commemoration should
happen, but even more often, the narratives are recorded in something
like Cheung’s blog, recounting, “On Qingming My Family Tidies the
Graves.” Especially when practices are dislodged, challenged, and chang-
ing, there will be many stories—­official and unofficial—­explaining why
and how a lived religious practice matters.
If you wanted to learn more about this practice, then, you might
look for official guides, but you would also want to observe and inter-
view ordinary people. That is especially true where religion is not being
carried primarily by organized institutions, either those established
by a state or those organized into a professionalized religious sector.
In entangled contexts, religious practices are pervasive, and no single
set of experts is in charge. In interstitial contexts, whatever religious
practices exist have been improvised (often in spite of the experts).

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Whether we look primarily to ordinary everyday action or to special-

ized expert action depends in part on the type of context to be studied.
In a Chinese society that still officially establishes atheism, Qingming
is largely being reinvented at the grassroots, but within what the state
makes possible.
Whether at Qingming or an ordinary funeral, whether in China or
elsewhere in the world, finding ways to hear stories—­understood as part
of multidimensional religious practices—­is the goal of studying lived
religion. Thinking about how social practices work and placing them
in cultural context is the foundation for your work, but looking for all
the dimensions of human experience is the rest of the challenge. Lived
religion is more than the improvisation of people who can choose every-
thing about how they live. Wherever people are engaging in interaction
that recognizes a spiritual presence in life, there are questions to ask.
Having more answers about religious practice—­wherever it happens—­
can be valuable for understanding both the larger social world and the
individual actors we encounter. The embodied actions, along with the
words themselves, tell stories about spiritual presence and contempo-
rary life. They may be automatic and habitual, but they may also exhibit
remarkable improvisation. Shared material surroundings both enable
and constrain what people do. The emotional, aesthetic, and moral as-
pects of the action tell us how and why people seek new experiences and
maintain old boundaries. Like all the lived religious practices we have
encountered in this book, each one reminds us how much there still is
to learn.

Ideas for Further Study

1. This dramaturgical way of thinking about social interaction was famously devel-
oped by Erving Goffman, especially in his Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
(1959).
2. Margaret Somers (1994) calls this internal narrative “ontological.” As I have
pointed out elsewhere, I think that gives it more stability than is warranted. I am
building in this chapter both on Somers’s framework and on my earlier thinking
about “narrative identity” (Ammerman 2003).
3. If you are interested in approaching communication from a “critical discourse
analysis” perspective, the work of Norman Fairclough (2003) can be a helpful
guide, and Alexa Hepburn and Jonathan Potter (2004) have written an accessible

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introduction to the methodological options for pursuing a discourse analysis

strategy. Robert Wuthnow’s (2011) call to “take talk seriously” shows why dis-
course is important in the study of religion, and one good example is the study
by Jean-­Pierre Reed and Sarah Pitcher (2015), who show how particular forms of
speaking helped to form a revolutionary identity in the Solentiname community
in 1970s Nicaragua. In sociology, Paul Lichterman (2008, 2012) has been an espe-
cially astute analyst of how ways of talking shape and are shaped by the settings
and groups in which they take place.
4. Many of the standard ways of defining religion emerged in mid-­twentieth-­
century US social science. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz says that “a religion
is: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and
long-­lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a
general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of
factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (1973, 90).
Despite Peter Berger’s devoting an appendix in his classic 1967 book to the variety
of sociological definitions of religion, he largely avoided offering one of his own.
Treating religion as the creation of a “sacred cosmos,” he says that “religion is the
audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant”
(Berger 1967, 28). Robert Bellah, writing at about the same time, took a similar
tack, defining religion as “a set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the
ultimate conditions of his existence” (1963, 21). Note that all of them emphasize
the symbolic, explanatory nature of religion. In contrast, a 2013 issue of the Jour-
nal of Contemporary Religions focused on belief in practice terms, as a “cultural
performance” (e.g., Day 2013).
5. Religious communities can also use digital tools to facilitate collective storytell-
ing. Lynn Schofield Clark and Jill Dierberg (2013) studied a church youth group
that developed a set of identifying themes about who they are and produced a
video account expressing them. Similarly, “photovoice” is a technique for eliciting
storytelling through photographs (Williams 2019).
6. As we have noted, the studies by J. Kwabena Asamoah-­Gyadu (2007, 2010) are an
excellent introduction to what this process looks like outside the West. From his
base in Accra, Ghana, he has examined the role of multiple media in African and
transnational Christian communities.
7. Studies of “media and religion” have expanded enormously in the past genera-
tion. For broad overviews, in addition to Lynn Schofield Clark’s extensive work
(for example, 2007a), Claire Badaracco (2005) has brought together a collection
of articles by both journalists and academics that examine the way religion is
reported in public media. Mia Lövheim’s (2018) overview article outlines many
of the key issues at the intersection of media studies and religion studies, and
she has also brought needed attention to the role of gender in media production
and use (Lövheim 2013; Lövheim and Lundmark 2019). Heidi Campbell’s (2013)
edited book offers a sampling of what people have learned about the relationship
between religion and digital media. Stewart Hoover (2006) was an early pio-

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neer, starting with studies of religion on television and continuing to be a major

contributor to our understanding of what people are doing when they do religion
through mediated platforms. Former religion reporter Diane Winston (2009),
who now teaches at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern Califor-
nia, is especially attuned to how media become part of lived religion.
8. Philip Gorski’s (2017) history of US civil religion traces the early racist and co-
lonialist nature of our founding stories, even as he remains optimistic about the
possibilities of a morally grounded national story. To explore the way the Black
Church tradition has its own civil-­religion role to play, Omar McRoberts’s work
is a good place to start. As he writes, the Black Church’s kind of “bottom-­up” civil
religion articulates “the mythic significance of Black peoplehood” and the way it
challenges US national power (McRoberts 2020, 53).
9. Memorials have been examined by scholars in a number of disciplines, from art
history to semiotics, but there are also good places to look for research that exam-
ines the lived practices of constructing and interacting with such sites. Street-­side
spontaneous memorials are among the most fascinating, and Sylvia Grider’s
(2006) work is a helpful analysis on that score, as is Avril Maddrell’s (2009) analy-
sis of cairns along a pilgrimage route. Janet Jacobs’s (2010) courageous exploration
of Holocaust memorials asks how gender is portrayed. What sorts of women and
men do we see in them? Jacobs’s work is also an excellent example of using visual
methods in analyzing religion. A larger collection of articles on the links between
religion, violence, memory, and place is found in the book edited by Oren Stier
and Shawn Landres (2006).
10. Many studies of conversion come from the religious upheavals of the 1960s and
’70s, when youths were unexpectedly joining new religious movements and
conservative groups were seemingly on the rise. Among the best of those are the
books by Mary Jo Neitz (1987) on the Catholic Charismatic renewal and Lynn
Davidman (1991) on the journey of Jewish women into Orthodox communities.
In addition to David Smilde’s (2007) work in Venezuela, Elizabeth Brusco (1995)
has produced excellent analyses of evangelical conversions in Latin America,
paying special attention to how family life and gender are transformed. Various
Pentecostal groups and offshoots have also grown explosively across Africa and
Asia, and that has meant attention to conversion in those settings. Two interesting
places to start in the African cases are Nicolette Manglos’s (2010) work in Malawi
and Andre Droogers’s (2001) reflection on the phenomenon in its global context.
In China, as Fenggang Yang (2005) has documented, conversion is complicated
by political and economic factors but is a widespread phenomenon there, as well.
The social processes of identity change are also brought into relief when the “con-
version” goes the other way. Both Dianne Vaughn (“uncoupling”; 1986) and Helen
Rose Ebaugh (becoming an “ex”; 1988) have done classic studies of what it looks
like to leave.
11. C. Wright Mills (1976) famously described the “sociological imagination” as the
ability to link personal troubles to historical realities. Biblical studies scholar

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