Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Nancy T. Ammerman*
This address is a contribution to the study of “lived religion,” that is, the embodied and enacted forms
of spirituality that occur in everyday life. Like the children’s books that ask “where’s Waldo,” sociolo-
gists are invited to think about the many ways in which we need to refocus our work in order to see the
religion that often appears in unexpected places. As the discipline has broadened its geographical and
cultural vision, it also must broaden its understanding of what religion is. Religion is neither an all-or-
nothing category nor a phenomenon that is confined to a single institutional sphere. Understanding
the multilayered nature of everyday reality and the permeability of all social boundaries makes a more
nuanced study of religion possible. Using data from the “Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life”
project, it is suggested that religion can be found in the conversational spaces—both in religious organ-
izations and beyond—where sacred and mundane dimensions of life are produced and negotiated.
Key words: lived religion; workplace; symbolic interaction; cultural sociology; secularization;
methodology.
Those of you who have spent any time with a young child in the last 25
years are probably familiar with a certain red-and-white-stripe-wearing lad
named Waldo (Handford 1988). Perhaps you have snuggled up next to a
curious youngster poring over elaborate scenes and asked each other, “Where’s
Waldo?” There are all sorts of reasons that Waldo may be frustratingly invisi-
ble, but he is always there. What I want to suggest in this lecture is that our
discipline has often been just about as perplexed in its study of religion as the
five year old looking for Waldo. A variety of things have kept sociologists
from seeing the manifestations of religion in everyday social life, but I hope
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to provide here at least a few ideas about how we might sharpen our analyti-
cal focus and find Waldo1 more easily.
The religion I want to talk about here is of the “lived religion” variety.
While belief and membership—two of our staples for identifying Waldo—are
certainly a part of what lived religion entails, instead of starting from official
organizations and formal membership, I want to begin with everyday practice;
1
Throughout this paper, I will continue to use “Waldo” as a metaphor for everyday reli-
gion. I hope the reader will indulge with me in this imaginative exercise.
2
The roots and exemplars of this tradition will be discussed below.
3
See especially Talal Asad (1993), Vasquez (2010), and Riesebrodt (2010), among
others.
FINDING RELIGION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 3
such as singing, dancing, and other folk or community traditions that enact a spi-
ritual sense of solidarity and transcendence. Some of these rituals and traditions
may be widely recognized as religious and named as such, but research on lived
religion also includes activities that might not immediately be seen as spiritual or
religious by outsiders, but are treated as such by the people engaged in them. In
other words, the Waldo we should be looking for is wearing a wide variety of
expressions of connection to spiritual life. Finding religion in everyday life
means looking wherever and however we find people invoking a sacred presence.
So what keeps sociologists from finding Waldo? I suspect many people have
had the experience of reading a fine piece of sociological work on consumer
culture or colonialism or social movements and wondering how the author could
possibly have missed the obvious role of religion in the processes being studied.
Many of our colleagues can look at pages filled with pictures of family life, work,
politics, the economy, cities, and schools and never see poor Waldo. Truthfully,
many sociologists are unable to find Waldo because they still believe he has dis-
appeared or soon will. In their examination of the society around them, Waldo is
functionally invisible. Religious dimensions of everyday life disappear from socio-
logical view, often because sociologists assume that Waldo was more suited to a
premodern or “primitive” world than to the modern, scientific, cosmopolitan
world academics live in. Secularization theories predicted that religion would
become a remote and forgotten abstraction, and for much of our field, that
remains pragmatically the case (Ecklund and Scheitle 2007).
Some, of course, have noticed the worldwide resurgence (or rediscovery) of
religious vitality that emerged in the 1960s and beyond (Berger 1999). Beginning
with the spate of new religious movements that accompanied the countercul-
ture and continuing through the Islamic revolutions and the rise of the New
Christian Right in the United States, religion again entered social scientific dis-
course. At the same time, a more global and transnational society introduced
new populations and new religious traditions into the questions being studied,
and the vitality of religious communities and practices challenged existing theo-
ries of religion and society. For at least some of our colleagues, the search for
Waldo was on again, if only to figure out a way to contain his disruptive tenden-
cies (Huntington 1996).
In contrast, the first generations of sociologists seemed much more than
capable of finding Waldo. Questions of how religion is lived in our collective
lives were foundational for early sociologists. Max Weber’s early twentieth-
century studies of the great world religions focused on the distinctive ideas of
those religious systems, to be sure, but he was also interested in their social psy-
chology and ethos, that is, the patterns of life they engendered (Weber 1922
[1946]). The “Protestant Ethic” is not just Calvinist beliefs about salvation, it is
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also the everyday habits of discipline and humility those beliefs encouraged
(Weber 1958). Emile Durkheim’s focus was on social solidarity, but he pointed
in vivid detail to the lived experience of ritual participation—what he called
“collective effervescence” (Durkheim 1964). Writing at about the same time,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew a connection between gender and different forms
of religion (Gilman 2003). The lived religion of women, she argued, was built on
experiences of birth and growth, while the lived religion of men was built on
experiences of struggle, conflict, and death. Similarly, W. E. B. DuBois under-
stood the central role of Black Churches in the formation of African American
communities (Du Bois 1989). Each of these early theorists saw religion as a
About a decade ago, I began to realize just how dissatisfied I was with my dis-
cipline’s efforts to “find Waldo.” Happily, I was by no means alone. Lived religion
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as a more dynamic focus of study had begun to gain widespread attention in the
1980s and 1990s. In the early 1990s, David Hall’s collection of essays by social
historians and sociologists brought the term into the academic vernacular (Hall
1997). While Meredith McGuire’s book, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in
Everyday Life (McGuire 2008) was not published until 2008, she and others in
sociology had already been contributing important research on healing rituals
and devotions to saints, family life and gender, immigrant religion, and new reli-
gious movements.4 This is work that has spanned disciplines, with some of the
most important contributions coming from religious studies and social historians
(e.g., Griffith 2004; McDannell 1995; Orsi 1985; Ronald 2012). As the sociology
4
Exemplary offerings and creative syntheses of this emerging work can be found in
Religion on the Edge (Bender et al. 2012).
5
The methods and findings discussed in the following section are discussed in much more
detail in Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes (Ammerman 2013b).
6
I am using a term here that is borrowed from Robert Bellah (1963, 2011). What he is
trying to describe—a consciousness of reality as multilayered—draws on the phenomenology
of Alfred Schutz and is similar to what Charles Taylor describes as “fullness” (Taylor 2007).
FINDING RELIGION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 7
behavior should follow, and if not they must not really be religious. Like
Durkheim’s sacred/profane dichotomy, religion is imagined as an either/or affair.
We even ask people how “religious” they are and divide up the population
between the “somewhat/very” half and the “not very/not at all” half. And when
our predicted correlations are absent, we think religion is absent. If Waldo does
not dominate the page, then he is not really being Waldo.
What I can tell you now, after gathering stories from life history interviews,
photo elicitation interviews, and oral diaries from a diverse group of religious and
nonreligious people in Boston and Atlanta is that everyday social life is largely
mundane and secular. If finding religion requires finding places where there is
each other. Similarly, when religious goods are bought and sold in the capitalist
marketplace, or spiritual therapies operate in conjunction with apparently
secular medical environments, the goods and therapies do not become secular for
being in a “secular” place any more than the routines of the hospital are sacred
because of the occasional spiritual interaction (Cadge 2013). The religion
people live everyday weaves in and out of the language and symbols and interac-
tions of public spaces and bureaucratized institutions. Waldo really is there—
right alongside all the other things that are happening on that page.
What I am also suggesting, then, is that Waldo just might be anywhere on
that page. Just as we should not expect religion to be everywhere, we should also
7
For a full discussion of these findings, see Ammerman (2013b), chapter 6.
8
Wuthnow has written, for instance, about the spiritual dimensions of volunteering
(Wuthnow 1991) and of art (Wuthnow 2001).
9
Studies of the workplace are understandably dominated by questions of power and status
(both macro and micro). A few recent studies have paid attention to the relational dimension,
10 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
every occupational sector, nearly one-third of all the workplace stories we heard
were primarily about people and their relationships. Even stories about the work
itself were likely to be told as collective stories—not what I do, but what we do.
Understanding the sociology of the workplace is more than understanding
bureaucratic positions and economic struggles; it is also about how sociality
shapes this domain in which people spend so much of their lives. Over the
course of our interviews, photos, and diaries, we heard well over 200 accounts of
job-related relationships and interactions; and more than any other kind of work
story, these “people” stories were shaped by spiritual sensibilities and religious
dynamics. The woman we call Michelle Winter, for instance, is a social worker
however (Hodson 2004; Pettinger 2005; Watson 2009), and it seems to me worth remember-
ing the early lessons from the Hawthorne studies about how everyday life in the workplace is
structured.
FINDING RELIGION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 11
domains. Religion is shaped by membership, but membership is considerably
more complicated than checking a box on a survey. It may be the sort of life-long
organizational participation we have traditionally expected, but it may also be
membership of a much more fluid and less bounded sort. Wherever a spiritually
inclined person finds another person who is at least open to talking about the
world in terms that include religious dimensions, what I call a “spiritual tribe”
has formed.
How does that happen? How do they find each other? Certainly, there are
some Bible-thumping evangelists out there who will start a conversation about
religion whether the other person wants to listen or not, but that does not
10
Putnam and Campbell (2010) note the way such everyday relationships actually bridge
religious diversity. It is quite possible that the religious similarity our participants described
reflected a religious common ground that might not have looked very “similar” by outside
standards.
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I am suggesting here is that religious identities are part of the package of cultural
cues that constitute these ever-shifting tribes, that people find conversation
partners in a variety of places, and that those conversations both draw on narra-
tives that have been learned and sustained in larger religious communities, and
that they reshape those same narratives. In the world of everyday life, both
institutionalized spiritual tribes and the shifting situational bonds of more
tenuous gatherings are the social locations in which we should be looking for
religion.
It is important to pause here to note that the institutionalized spiritual tribes
matter.11 To urge that we look for Waldo in every corner of the page is not to
11
I have argued elsewhere (Ammerman 2013a) that the binary view of “religion” and
“spirituality” is misguided. Portions of this talk draw in part on that argument.
FINDING RELIGION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 13
potluck dinner or pray during a meeting of a women’s group or share stories along a
pilgrimage route, the stories they tell are likely to foreground and negotiate spiritual
interpretations. What happens in these religious gatherings is not just a matter of
otherworldly ritual and doctrinal teaching. What happens is the creation of a par-
ticular kind of conversational space. In some sense this is what Berger (1969)
meant when he described modern religion as existing in “sheltering enclaves.”
But it is more. These are not enclaves with high walls, where the sacred
world is kept pure and well defended. We would misunderstand religious culture
production if we looked only for producers who seem to us to be purely religious
in character. Just as sacred and secular intertwine in homes and workplaces, they
All of this may seem like preaching to the choir. Sociologists of religion,
after all, are the ones who specialize in “finding Waldo.” Even if we subscribe to
some version of secularization theory, we are still looking for the places where
religion persists and the explanations for its presence and absence. I have sug-
gested here some ways that we may nevertheless need to think differently about
what we are studying, and I want to close by suggesting some additional chal-
lenges that lie ahead in the study of everyday religion. In order to build from one
study to the next and to create necessary conceptual bridges, we have both theo-
12
In this section, I am drawing on arguments I have made in an article on lived religion
as an “emerging trend” (Ammerman forthcoming).
FINDING RELIGION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 15
category to take on a reality that gives people patterns to live with? What mate-
rial objects, styles of clothing, or ways of moving and singing give this particular
lived religion its tangible form? What imaginations about the self and identity
are therefore possible?
Those are some of the theoretical challenges, but we also have methodologi-
cal ones. We face a formidable challenge created by the wide diversity of loca-
tions and lived traditions we are trying to understand. This breadth is an
important step forward, but it is also a major challenge for the future. If we are
trying to understand people, places, things, actions, ideas, and more—coming
from and blending together hundreds of cultural traditions—how on earth are we
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a slightly revised version of the talk presented to the Association for
the Sociology of Religion, meeting in New York, in August 2013. Thanks to
ASR President Fred Kniss for the invitation to give this lecture.
FUNDING
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Hall, David, ed. 1997. Lived Religion in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Handford, Martin. 1988. Where‘s Waldo Now? Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.
Hodson, Randy. 2004. “Work Life and Social Fulfillment: Does Social Affiliation at Work
Reflect a Carrot or a Stick.” Social Science Quarterly 85:221 –39.
Huntington, Samuel. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
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Kuiper, Esgo, and Anders Bryn. 2012. “Forest Regrowth and Cultural Heritage Sites in
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