Lived religion is the ethnographic and holistic framework in the sociology of religion and religious studies more broadly for understanding the religion as it is practiced by ordinary people in the contexts of everyday life, including domestic, work, commercial, community, and institutional religious settings. The term comes from the French tradition of sociology of religion, or "la religion vécue" though it has followed its own trajectory among scholars with backgrounds in anthropology, cultural studies, history, and sociology or religion as well as religious studies and theology. It is also referred to as "everyday religion" and "living religion." The concept of lived religion was popularized in the late 20th century by religious study scholars like Nancy Ammerman, David D. Hall, Meredith McGuire, and Robert A. Orsi. The study of lived religion has come to include a wide range of subject areas as a means of exploring and emphasizing 1) ordinary people as religious subjects over against the traditional focus in religious studies on élite practitioners of religion; 2) religious practices and material resources, including human bodies, over against a traditional focus on religious doctrine, dogma, and ideologies primarily engaged in written texts; 3) sites of religious practice outside of institutional religious settings; and 4) ways of understanding religion as particular, local, variable, and otherwise shaped by the specific cultural, social, political, material, and other contexts of human experience rather than as a sui generis universal phenomenon focused on beliefs, sacred texts, and notions of the sacred as separate from the ordinary.
Scholars
Nancy T. Ammerman Nancy T. Ammerman is Professor Emerita of Sociology of Religion at Boston University. Her edited anthology Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives was a significant advance in the study of everyday religion—the term she tends to prefer—by bringing together work by scholars such as Courtney Bender and Meredith McGuire who have shaped the study of living religion significantly. Ammerman studies religion as it plays out in the everyday lives of ordinary people and the contexts they inhabit—homes, offices, healthcare facilities, as well as institutional religious settings. Her approach, illustrated in Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life and detailed methodologically in Studying Lived Religion: Contexts and Practices, draws on the narrative and photographic reports of subjects' descriptions of their religious practices and resources in diverse fields of lived experience.
Meredith McGuire Meredith McGuire is Professor Emerita of sociology and anthropology at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She is the former President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Her notable contributions to the study of living religion include Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life, Religion: The Social Context, and Ritual Healing in Suburban America. Her work has been particularly important in highlighting the role of embodied experience in the practice of religion, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of the "lived body" as the locus of human engagement with reality. McGuire's work illustrates the ways in which religion as practiced by ordinary people in the contexts of everyday life is often significantly different from "religion as prescribed"
Robert Orsi Robert A. Orsi is Professor of Religious Studies and History and Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at Northwestern University. He researches, writes, and teaches about religion in the United States, in the past and in contemporary contexts, with a particular focus on American Catholicism. Orsi’s book The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith And Community In Italian Harlem, 1880-1950, won several prizes including the Jesuit National Book Award and is an example study of lived religion. Orsi defines lived religion as including "the work of social agents/actors themselves as narrators and interpreters (and reinterpreters) of their own experiences and histories, recognizing that the stories we tell about others exist alongside the many and varied story they tell of themselves". Orsi understands lived religion to be centered on the actions and interpretations of religious persons. He is less attentive to the uses of religion by people who may not identify as "religious" or who are not affiliated with institutional religious traditions. In "Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion," Orsi identifies four basic elements of living religion: 1) idiomatic expressions of religion, what limits are placed on then and what possibilities are open for their use in specific cultural settings; 2) knowledges of the body cultivated through religious practices; 3) structures of social experience created and reinforced through religious experience; and 4) characteristic tensions in everyday life that emerge within religious contexts. To this basic framework, 5) the role of religion in the cultivation of place as sacred or hold, secular or profane may be added as well as 60 the functions of religious discourse in everyday life can be added.
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