Occasional Religious Practice: An Ethnographic Theology of Christian Worship in a Changing Religious Landscape

The North American religious landscape is characterized by declining participation in religious institutions, increasing uncertainty about matters of faith, and a growing population who identify as nonreligious. Nevertheless, people with a range of relationships with religion continue to turn to religious practices occasionally rather than routinely, often in connection with specific occasions such as holidays, life transitions, and personal or communal crises. Integrating method and theory from sociology of religion and liturgical studies, I develop the concept of occasional religiosity through a case study anchored in three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Anglican Church of Canada in Toronto, including analysis of 41 interviews with participants in baptisms and funerals and 20 interviews with clergy.

Sociologically, I argue occasional religious practice is a consistent yet underdeveloped theme in research on religious change in Canada, the United States, and Europe. I draw out this common thread and explore the diversity of religious and nonreligious identities claimed by those who participate occasionally in Christian worship. I also outline different types of occasional practitioners based on their motivations for participation, changes in practice over the life course, and how practitioners assess their occasionality.

Within the field of ritual studies, I examine occasional practice as selective participation in a ritual system some practice routinely. I explore how multiple ritual systems overlap and how participants positioned differently within ritual systems may interpret the same system in different ways as they intuitively negotiate the strategic selection of certain practices.

Theologically, this research unsettles the assumption that liturgical participants are fully believing, actively practicing, morally compliant, and formally affiliated with a tradition. It claims that doing theology with occasional practitioners is not only necessary to access the lived liturgical theology of present-day worshipers, but also an obligation emerging from Jesus’ attention to the marginalized, including those on the liturgical and theological margins. Privileging the perspectives of occasional practitioners centers materiality, emotion, and relationship, although occasional practitioners also speak of God, tradition, and ethics.

This research has broad implications for understanding religion, ritual, and liturgical theology as well as practical implications for clergy and occasional practitioners.