Understanding religious commitment: Articulating beliefs and practices

Abstract

Can articulating beliefs and practices help us to understand the extent of religious commitment, while also linking its social and personal dimensions? Durkheim and Weber both raised this question, distinguishing a dual dimension to religious phenomena: beliefs and rites in the former, and subjective experiences and social action in the latter. From the 1930s onwards, Western sociology has elaborated tools to measure religious affiliations, practices and beliefs more precisely. However, contemporary developments have gradually cast doubt on these links, which appear also difficult to dissociate from the cultural context in which they were developed. We must therefore diversify our research methods and approaches – observation (participatory or otherwise), standard or explicitation interviews, questionnaires, statistics, and so on – while remaining vigilant about the presumed correlations between beliefs and practices, given the inevitable complexities involved in defining religion, and the methodological challenges that sociologists face in capturing this sphere of social activity.