6 - Religious Practices

Summary

In this chapter, I turn from religious experience to religious practice. Some religious practices are collective and institutional; others are private. I will first examine that distinction and then look in detail at a sample of specific religious practices.

Public and Private Religious Practices

Most religious people engage in private religious practices such as individual prayer; they also attend public places of prayer or worship. The social science literature has often made this distinction between public and private religion. Grace Davie (2015) distinguished between religious “belonging” and “believing,” with believing a more private matter than belonging to the structures of institutional religion.

Of course, some people practice religion just privately, and others just publicly. However, the norm is probably for people to do both, and for each to influence the other. A slight cultural shift may have taken place in recent decades toward private spiritual practices such as meditation, as well as a shift in the balance between public and private religion over the life-span. Impairments may affect some aspects of religion more than others. For example, if elderly people begin to suffer cognitive impairment, engagement in public religion might be sustained better than private spirituality.

I want to resist the idea that either public or private religion is foundational to the other, and take a systemic view. Certainly, private religion occurs in social, cultural, and linguistic contexts, as any sociologist would want to emphasize. However, I suggest the collective manifestations of religion are equally influenced by the personal religion of particular individuals, and that a systemic interrelationship normally occurs between public and private religion.

On the face of things, the distinction between public and private aspects of religious practices seems clear enough. However, the distinction may not actually be as clear-cut as at first appears. Much religious life is neither clearly in public institutions nor completely private. For example, it is an interesting feature of how religious life has developed in recent decades that many more small groups now meet in private houses for religious purposes. Some small groups meet for silent meditation rather than conversation or spoken prayer. Sometimes two religious people meet as prayer partners or soul friends. It is not clear whether such religious activities should be classified as public or private.