Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives PDF
Preview Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives
Everyday Religion This page intentionally left blank Everyday Religion Observing Modern Religious Lives edited by nancy t. ammerman 1 2007 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishers works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2007 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. 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.
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