Practice

Participating in any religion entails not only holding specific beliefs but also engaging in characteristic ways of engaging in certain activities, such as singing, receiving strangers, sharing meals, and mourning the dead. Such activities are known as "practices."

Ordinary language points to some of the basic features of practices. Like playing a sport or a musical instrument, practices are learned from others over time, and those who do them have to practice them again and again. Accordingly, practices are social: They are learned and shared within social groups through explicit instruction or during the taken-forgranted course of everyday life, and they have duration beyond the life of an individual, sometimes extending across generations or centuries.

Another phrase evokes an interpretive problem regarding the importance and meaning of practices, however. "Practice what you preach" implies that it is possible to separate ideas from behavior, and indeed that ideas are more powerful than behavior, since they are presumed to guide it. This separation is also implicit when we speak of "putting an idea into practice." Thought or theory is one thing; action is something else.

During the 1970s and 1980s, theorists suspicious of neat divisions between thought and action offered more rigorous conceptions of practice that sought to explicate the close relationship between what people do and what and how people think. Thought and action, they noted, are intimately related. For example, various sorts of knowledge are available only within social spaces shaped by practices, including practices such as philosophy and science as well as cooking, carpentry, and prayer. One cannot separate the characteristic acts of practitioners from the thinking inherent in a practice. Moreover, practices are intrinsically full of meaning, not simply as the application of previously held thoughts but as activities that make sense within the life worlds of practitioners.

By the 1990s, the term "practices" appeared frequently in discourse about religion. In spite of significant overlap, however, specific uses of the term signal divergent emphases in how scholars and others understand religious life. Three basic uses are widely influential.

The oldest and most specific meaning of "practices" refers to disciplined activities deliberately undertaken to become attuned to the sacred, such as prayer, meditation, spiritual direction, and the study of sacred texts. In the West this understanding of practices is derived from ascetical and spiritual theology, which arose within monastic communities convinced that certain exercises would cultivate the human capacity to know and to love God. This tradition of practice, which also developed in distinctive ways among Protestants over the centuries, appears in numerous contemporary American works on Christian spirituality. By extension, the term also refers to devotional activities from Eastern religious traditions, and increasingly to exercises within New Age and other emergent spiritualities as well. Robert Wuthnow, in After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (1998), argues that "practices-oriented spirituality" is well adapted to the fluid, pluralistic context of contemporary America, since it draws individuals into serious, long-term spiritual commitments without requiring them to join stationary religious institutions.

A second sense of practices refers to a much wider range of activities—potentially, indeed, to anything people do. Arising from cultural anthropology, this approach interprets the meaning of the activities of everyday life, especially as they are done by ordinary people. By their nature down-to-earth, diverse, and open to change, practices embody religion as it is actually lived rather than religion as it is officially proclaimed (though sometimes these overlap). For example, the essays in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (edited by David D. Hall, 1997) closely examine ten particular historical contexts, showing how ordinary people negotiated meaning amid social change by selectively sustaining and adapting such practices as gift exchange, hymn singing, and burial of the dead, mingling the heritage of their religious traditions with other material and cultural elements in creative yet ambiguous fashion. This overall approach to practices is influenced by the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, and Raymond Williams and is characteristically alert to how practices reinforce and/or resist structures of power.

A third understanding of practices flows from moral philosophy, and especially from Alasdair MacIntyre's concept of "social practices" (After Virtue, 2nd ed., 1984, pp. 187–188). Social practices are complex and coherent forms of cooperative activity; each pursues a good and involves practitioners in standards of excellence intrinsic to itself (e.g., chess, portrait painting, and inquiry in physics). Doing a social practice rightly requires specific virtues, posits a relationship with past practitioners, and extends the practice, fresh, into the future. Although MacIntyre did not develop the idea that a religion, or an activity within a religion, could be a social practice, his thought has attracted considerable attention from theologians intrigued by this idea. His normative sense of practices encourages reflection on the history, ends, and excellent performance of complex human activities; his insistence that practices are social challenges religious individualism, including the individualism that assigns ministry to ordained leaders rather than to the whole church; and his idea that practices both foster and require knowledge and skill situates theology within the common life of the church.

In all three of these approaches, contemporary interest in practices addresses concerns that are important to both scholars of religion and religious seekers. Practices resist individualism, since they are socially shared and have origins and horizons beyond the life span or comprehension of individuals, and yet they allow for individual agency because they are never completely subordinated to institutions. Practices are messy, changing shape boldly or subtly as circumstances change and as people negotiate, resist, or adapt to change. Practices belong to ordinary people and not simply to elites. Practices cut across the boundaries of the sacred and the profane. Practices bring thinking and doing, believing and living, together.

See alsoAnthropology of Religion; Belonging, Religious; Lived Religion; Names and Naming; Psychology of Religion; Religious Communities; Religious Studies; Rites of Passage; Ritual; Sociology of Religion.

Bibliography

Bass, Dorothy C., ed. Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Lifefor a Searching People. 1997.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. 1977.

Hall, David D., ed. Lived Religion in America: Toward aHistory of Practice. 1997.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue, 2nd ed., 1984.

Murphy, Nancey, Brad J. Kallenberg, and Mark Thiessen Nation, eds. Virtues and Practices in the ChristianTradition: Christian Ethics after MacIntyre. 1997.

Ortner, Sherry B. "Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties." Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1984):126–166.

Wuthnow, Robert. After Heaven: Spirituality in AmericaSince the 1950s. 1998.

Dorothy C. Bass