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 Ammerman 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 opening 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 aforementioned institutions—that is, broadly speaking, with the internal condition and the societal role of churches—or with survey data covering 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 organizations 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 religious phenomena that are “institutionally diffuse.” Probably this has vi foreword always been the case. There is much evidence that even in the heyday of “Christendom,” 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 today 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 tr