CHAPTER NINETEEN
Beyond the Synagogue Walls
Lynn Davidman
For most of the twentieth century, the study of religion in the United States has focused
on institutionally and denominationally based religious groups, behaviors, and beliefs.
By keeping institutional religion at the center of our research, students of religion have
limited the understanding of the various meanings that individuals may attribute to
their religious practices. An institutional focus marginalizes the diverse and syncretic
nature of individual religious behavior. Recently, sociologists and anthropologists of
religion have begun to recognize that religious practices and expression are not limited
to the sanctioned forms and loci provided by the major traditions and denominations.
Nor are they fully encompassed by the studies of “new religious movements” that dom-
inated the sociological study of religion in the 1970s and 1980s. Recent volumes edited
by Robert Orsi (1999) and David Hall (1997), for example, direct attention away from
institutional religion to the study of “lived” religion, and religion outside of institu-
tions, that is, the various and complex ways that people act to create meaning and new
practices within the fabric of their everyday lives. By adapting a radically empiricist
methodology, the study of lived religion focuses on those subtle ways that people “in
particular places and times, live in, with, through and against the religious idioms avail-
able to them in culture – all the idioms, including (often enough) those not explicitly
‘their own’” (Hall 1997: 7).
The practice of religion is not fixed, frozen, and limited, but can be spontaneous,
innovative, and assembled by cultural bricolage (Orsi 1997). To put this otherwise,
prescriptive texts don’t tell the whole story, or even a very accurate story. Learning
about the many imaginative ways individuals create the sacred and construct meaning
in their everyday lives requires us to expand our understanding of what religion is
and what it means to be “religious.” The concept of lived religion is not necessarily
only about practices per se but also about how people understand and live out their
identities as members of a religious/ethnic community on an everyday basis. As David
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support this research received from the Lucius Littauer Foundation,
the Salomon Research Grants at Brown University, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
The chapter has benefitted considerably from careful readings by Shelly Tenenbaum, Larry Greil, and the
religion and culture workshop at Princeton University in the Fall of 2001. I gratefully acknowledge the
superb work of my research assistants, Elaine Farber and Judith Rosenbaum.
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