The Concept of Lived Religion in Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty by Susan Crawford Sullivan

This article examines the concept of “lived religion” as developed in Susan Crawford Sullivan’s Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty. The study focuses on how religion is practiced in the everyday lives of low-income mothers in the United States. Drawing on Sullivan’s qualitative-ethnographic study, the article shows that religion for these women does not depend primarily on institutional participation but is sustained instead through personal, flexible, and context-sensitive practice. The article analyzes Sullivan’s principal findings and assesses her contribution to the sociology of religion, arguing that religion functions simultaneously as a coping mechanism, a source of meaning, and a resource for moral negotiation under conditions of structural constraint. The discussion closes by considering the concept’s relevance for contemporary religious studies more broadly, including its potential application to Islam as a discursive tradition.

1. Ammerman, Nancy T. Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
2. Ammerman, Nancy T., ed. Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
3. Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
4. Bender, Courtney. The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
5. Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books, 1967.
6. Bowen, John R. Islam, Law, and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
7. Davie, Grace. Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.
8. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
9. Fadil, Nadia, and Mayanthi L. Fernando. “Rediscovering the ‘Everyday’ Muslim: Notes on an Anthropological Divide.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5, no. 2 (2015): 59–88.
10. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
11. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
12. Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
13. McGuire, Meredith B. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
14. Orsi, Robert A. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
15. Orsi, Robert A. History and Presence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
16. Schielke, Samuli, and Liza Debevec, eds. Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes: An Anthropology of Everyday Religion. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012.
17. Schielke, Samuli. Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.
18. Sullivan, Susan Crawford. Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
19. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969.
20. Woodhead, Linda. “Five Concepts of Religion.” International Review of Sociology 21, no. 1 (2011): 121–143.