Lived religion is often presented as though it arrived without precedent, but a closely related term was already established in folklore studies when it did. Leonard Primiano's 1995 essay proposed "vernacular religion" for religious belief and practice as actually experienced and enacted by an individual, developed independently within folkloristics rather than the sociology and history that produced lived religion. The two fields converged on the same basic move, redirecting attention from official doctrine to what practitioners do, within a few years of one another.
Scholars who use both terms distinguish them by emphasis rather than by subject matter. Vernacular religion, coming from folklore studies, keeps a stronger interest in belief and narrative as artefacts of individual creativity; lived religion, coming from history and sociology, leans harder on practice, materiality and the body. In much current writing the terms are used almost interchangeably, and which one an author reaches for often signals which discipline trained them rather than a substantive disagreement about the object of study.
A separate and ongoing criticism comes from constructive theologians rather than from within religious studies. Their objection is not methodological but normative: an approach that treats every lay improvisation as equally "religion" can make it harder to say that a tradition's authorities are right to correct a practice, a question lived religion's descriptive method is built not to answer.