Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives

259 Pages·2008·2.36 MB·English

by  Nancy T. Ammerman

Everyday Religion
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Everyday Religion
Observing Modern Religious Lives
edited by
nancy t. ammerman
1
2007
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Everyday religion : observing modern
religious lives / edited by Nancy Ammerman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-530540-1
ISBN-10: 0-19-530540-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-530541-8 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-19-530541-8 (pbk.)
1. Religion and sociology.
I. Ammerman, Nancy Tatom, 1950–
BL60.E94 2006
306.6—dc22 2006004902
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Foreword
Peter L. Berger
Anthologies tend to be uneven. This one is not. It opens with pieces
by three international stars of the sociology of religion—Nancy Am-
merman from the United States (who also served as the convener and
editor of the team of contributors), Grace Davie from Britain, and
Enzo Pace from Italy. And each of the chapters following this open-
ing salvo makes an excellent contribution to the topic of the volume:
the way in which contemporary religion, refusing to be confined to
formal religious institutions, penetrates everyday life. This is a book
that should be of interest not only to academic scholars of religion
but also to a much broader public in which there is today a growing
interest in religion.
Much of the sociology of religion has dealt either with the afore-
mentioned institutions—that is, broadly speaking, with the internal
condition and the societal role of churches—or with survey data cov-
ering the beliefs and behavior of large populations. Obviously, both
procedures have yielded important insights. But what both have in
common is remoteness from much of what constitutes the reality of
religion in the lives of many people.
Of course churches, synagogues, and other religious organiza-
tions continue to play an important role in contemporary society. But
much of religious life takes place outside these institutional locales. To
limit the study of religion to these locales would be like, say, studying
politics by only looking at the activities of organized political parties.
As far back as 1967, in his influential book The Invisible Religion,
Thomas Luckmann insisted that sociologists must be attentive to reli-
gious phenomena that are “institutionally diffuse.” Probably this has
vi foreword
always been the case. There is much evidence that even in the heyday of “Chris-
tendom,” when supposedly the Catholic Church reigned supreme in Europe,
there was a turbulent religious life outside the walls of the impressive Gothic
cathedrals (the archives of the Inquisition provide some good evidence). But to-
day this diffuse religiosity is particularly salient. In much of the world one
finds more and more people who explicitly define their religious position as
being at some distance from their background tradition—“I am Catholic,
but . . .”—“I happen to be Jewish”—“I am not religious, but I am spiritual.” Put
differently, there is a lot of religion that cannot be studied by looking under
“churches” in the Yellow Pages of the phone book.
Survey data on religion are also useful, especially if one can compare them
over extended periods of time. But by their very nature surveys force respondents
to make choices between categories designed by researchers who very com-
monly are remote from the social milieus of the respondents and consequently
are prone to misinterpret the responses. For example, scales of “orthodoxy” often
leave respondents baffled as to where they should place themselves. Also, people
who fill out questionnaires have been known to fiddle with the facts. Thus it has
been shown that, in regions of America where churchgoing has a positive status,
people exaggerate their own church attendance. Conversely, in highly secularized
Europe, people may understate their religious beliefs or practices. Survey data
about a phenomenon as complex as religion give a very abstract picture—that is,
a picture remote from the actual reality of people’s lives.
As against these distortions, the present volume provides rich data on how
religion is experienced by living human beings in their actual lives. Perhaps
surprisingly, what emerges is a picture of great vitality and inventiveness. In
addition to this valuable contribution, the volume also helps to develop a num-
ber of other central themes in the sociology of contemporary religion.
The demise of “secularization theory.” Here is yet another nail in the coffin
of the theory, dominant some decades ago, that equated modernity with a de-
cline of religion. Or, in a somewhat more moderate form, it asserted that reli-
gion has become largely “privatized”—that is, has been forced from the public
sphere and has become, so to speak, an activity carried on in private by con-
senting adults. To be sure, both secularization and privatization are empirically
available phenomena, albeit very differently so in different countries and pop-
ulations. But they are far less pervasive and progressive than previously as-
sumed. Much of the contemporary world is full of powerful explosions of reli-
gious fervor, and much of this fervor has important social and political
repercussions. The present volume provides evidence of both.
The importance of religious “pluralism”—that is, the coexistence of differ-
ent forms of religious expression in the same social space under conditions of
(more or less) civic peace. Again, this is something that has existed in earlier
periods of history—for example, in the late Hellenistic era, along the Silk Road
of central Asia, in Mogul India, in Hohenstaufen Sicily. But some basic features
foreword vii
of modernity have made pluralism a much more widespread, indeed global,
phenomenon—urbanization and mass migration (making more and more
people rub elbows with others holding different beliefs and practicing different
lifestyles), the spread of literacy and higher education, the media of mass com-
munication (from radio to television to the Internet)—all of these have made
knowledge of alternate religious possibilities more generally available than
ever before. This means, quite simply, that religion has increasingly become a
matter of individual choice—what Robert Wuthnow has aptly called “patch-
work religion.” Individuals may indeed make “orthodox” or “fundamentalist”
choices—many do—but these too are choices, lacking the taken-for-granted
quality prevalent in much of earlier history and thus susceptible to later revi-
sions. Again, the present volume contains rich data about the reality of reli-
gious pluralism.
Both secularization and pluralism have been unduly exaggerated by theo-
ries of modern religion. Often the exaggeration has to do with the social loca-
tion of the theorists. Thus the theory of secularization referred to earlier has
been a projection of the European situation to other parts of the world where it
turns out to be inappropriate. Conversely, a recently formulated “new para-
digm” in the sociology of religion, which centers on pluralism, inappropriately
generalizes from the American experience, which is not replicated elsewhere
in the same way. The comparison between Europe and America (more pre-
cisely, between Western and central Europe on one hand, and the United States
on the other)—both containing societies in the vanguard of modernity—is of
particular importance for the sociology of contemporary religion. This is yet
another theme to which this volume contributes significantly.
The majority of the contributions deal with America. But there are very in-
teresting discussions of religion in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Italy, and
Spain, and of the place of religion in what Peggy Levitt calls “transnationalism”
(the increasingly widespread phenomenon of migrants moving back and forth
between countries). Both the differences and the similarities of religion on the
two sides of the Atlantic are important, and both contain secularity and plural-
ism, though in different mixes. Europe is more secularized, both in terms of
the condition of its churches (Catholic as well as Protestant) and in terms of in-
dividual beliefs and practices. American churches are generally in better shape,
and religious belief and practice is more robust (especially in the burgeoning
community of evangelical Protestantism, which has no European analogue).
But there are also important similarities, especially in the availability of plural-
istic options—the French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger (who is not repre-
sented in the volume, but who has been a close collaborator with Grace Davie
and Enzo Pace) has written about what she calls religious “bricolage”—loosely
translatable as “tinkering,” as when a child puts together and takes apart a Lego
construction. This refers precisely to the phenomenon that Robert Wuthnow
has called “patchwork religion.”
viii foreword
Put simply, America is more religious, Europe more secularized. But both
continents are confronted with the social and individual challenges of plural-
ism. Thus, indirectly, the comparison is very relevant to what the Israeli sociol-
ogist Shmuel Eisenstadt has called “alternate modernities.” There is indeed a
modern reality of secularity. But the United States provides a vibrant case of a
society that is both thoroughly modern and strongly religious. This has inter-
esting implications far beyond the Western world.
The chapters collected in this volume were originally presented at a con-
ference convened by Nancy Ammerman and sponsored by the Institute on
Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University, supported by a grant
from the Pew Charitable Trusts. As director of the Institute, I take great plea-
sure that the institute could be instrumental in helping to produce this volume.
As Ammerman discusses in her concluding chapter, the volume also opens up
a fascinating agenda of further research.