Talking About Religion and Culture
The Stories We Tell
Like Botticini, Nancy Ammerman understands that a religion's influence on its followers' lives is not limited to certain spheres. But Ammerman, a professor and the director of graduate programs for the Department of Sociology, as well as a professor of the sociology of religion at the School of Theology, says that her field has lost sight of the degree to which religion is intertwined with family, work, and other areas of our lives. “Over time I've become less and less convinced by the secularization paradigm, which posits that religion is confined to a specifically religious institutional domain—that the logic of religion is not applicable to action in other parts of people's lives,” says Ammerman. “If I know, for instance, that who I am as a family person influences how I think about work, why should I believe that who I am as a religious person doesn't bleed over and influence other aspects of my life?”
The result of her questions is a project called “Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life,” funded by a grant from the Templeton Foundation. For the project, Ammerman and her team of researchers have asked people from different spiritual traditions—Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and atheists, among others—to participate in interviews, record audio diaries, and take photographs of places they find spiritually meaningful. Ammerman and her researchers also attended services and other events at their subjects' places of worship. By May, midway through their research, the team had already made some eye-opening discoveries.
“We were a little bit surprised by the degree to which the people who are involved in standard, 'name-brand' religious organizations don't necessarily talk about their lives in ways that are, shall we say, orthodox,” Ammerman says. She's found that while her subjects do use stories and symbols from their religious traditions to talk about their lives, they also talk about finding meaning in spending time in nature or setting aside quiet, personal time to reflect. “They're not necessarily talking about praying or doing standard religious practices,” she continues, “but they're nevertheless doing things that are spiritual.”
The narratives of the project's title—the stories people tell—are key. By asking open-ended questions, Ammerman allows her subjects to describe religion's place in their lives in their own words, rather than trying to fit their experiences into any predetermined framework. This, she says, has made all the difference. “If people had been asked a battery of standard survey questions about what they believe about heaven and hell, they might look fairly orthodox,” she says. “But that might not tell you anything really about what's going on in their lives.”
For more information, see www.bu.edu/sth/faculty/staff/nammerman.html.
