Bonnie Wright and Anne Warfield Rawls
Speaking in Tongues: A Dialectic of Faith
and Practice
We report on a six year ethnographic/ethnome-
thodological study of the local order details of reli-
gious services at two Assemblies of God (Pentecostal)
Churches in Detroit, a major metropolitan area in the
American Mid-West.^1 The research was designed to
explore the relationship between local Interaction
Ordersof practices in details (Rawls 1987; Goffman
1983; Garfinkel 2002) and institutional orders of belief,
narrative and account (Mills 1940; Durkheim 1912).
The difference between an ethnomethodological and
a more traditional ethnographic study is that ethnog-
raphy aims for descriptions that illuminate the mean-
ings, beliefs and values of actors and actions involved
in the situations they study. Ethnomethodology, by
contrast, focuses on those details that constitute the
ways in which participants make their actions rec-
ognizable to one another as actions to which meaning,
belief and value can be assigned in conventional ways.
While beliefs are generally considered to be both the
motivating and the organizing force behind religious
behavior, we argue that local orders of religious prac-
tice are constitutive of beliefs – as they are of any
meaning – and thus ultimately that practices are what
give religion coherence and sustain shared belief.(^1) While extensive field observations were made in the two Assemblies of God
Churches, the Full Bible Baptist Church was given considerably less attention and
used primarily as a point of comparison with regard to practices associated with the
speaking of tongues.