Lived religion

Lived religion is an approach in the study of religion that takes as its object what ordinary practitioners actually do, say and experience, rather than what a tradition's official texts, doctrines and authorities say they should. The term became current in the 1990s, with David Hall's edited volume Lived Religion in America (1997), Robert Orsi's work on Italian Harlem and on devotion to Saint Jude, and Meredith McGuire's Lived Religion (2008), and it draws on an earlier French sociology of religion vecue.

Its central move is a shift in who decides what counts as religion. Studying a tradition through its official theology yields a coherent system. Studying it through what its adherents do yields something considerably messier: devotions the hierarchy discourages, practices borrowed from neighbours of other faiths, beliefs held comfortably alongside others that formally contradict them, and a great deal of activity concerning health, luck, the dead, the home and the body that doctrine barely addresses. The approach treats all this not as ignorance or as a corrupted version of the real thing but as religion itself, on the ground that it is what religion has consisted of for most people who have ever practised one.

It corrects several biases at once. It attends to women, whose religious lives were frequently domestic and therefore invisible to text-based study. It attends to the laity rather than the clergy. It attends to material culture, objects, images, food, shrines, gestures, the body, which text-focused scholarship neglected almost entirely. And it treats the mixing that the older category of "syncretism" marked as deviation as simply how religion works.

Methodologically it favours ethnography, interviews, material culture and the study of practice over the analysis of doctrine, and it is closely allied to the anthropology of religion and to work on vernacular or popular religion. It also declines the older distinction between "great" and "little" traditions, which assumed that the elite version was the real one and that local practice was a dilution of it.

Its critics make two points worth taking seriously. Attending to practice can under-describe the genuine force of doctrine in people's lives, since many practitioners do care what their tradition teaches and organise themselves by it. And the approach can flatten the real authority structures within a tradition by treating all practice as equally representative of it. Practitioners of the approach generally accept both cautions while maintaining that the corrective was overdue, and that the older picture, assembled almost entirely from texts written by a small, literate, male elite, was by a considerable margin the more distorted one.

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.