Lived religion

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Lived religion is the ethnographic and holistic framework in the sociology of religion and religious studies more broadly for understanding the religion as it is practiced by ordinary people in the contexts of everyday life, including domestic, work, commercial, community, and institutional religious settings. The term comes from the French tradition of sociology of religion, or "la religion vécue"^[1] though it has followed its own trajectory among scholars with backgrounds in anthropology, cultural studies, history, and sociology or religion as well as religious studies and theology. It is also referred to as "everyday religion"^[2] and "living religion."^[3]

The concept of lived religion was popularized in the late 20th century by religious study scholars like Nancy T. Ammerman, David D. Hall, Meredith McGuire, and Robert A. Orsi. The study of lived religion has come to include a wide range of subject areas as a means of exploring and emphasizing 1) ordinary people as religious subjects over against the traditional focus in religious studies on élite practitioners of religion; 2) religious practices and material resources, including human bodies, over against a traditional focus on religious doctrine, dogma, and ideologies primarily engaged in written texts; 3) sites of religious practice outside of institutional religious settings; and 4) ways of understanding religion as particular, local, variable, and otherwise shaped by the specific cultural, social, political, material, and other contexts of human experience rather than as a sui generis universal phenomenon focused on beliefs, sacred texts, and notions of the sacred as separate from the ordinary.