Post AAR-SBL 2013: Reflections on the Method of Ethnography for the Study of Christian Spirituality

The five essays featured in this special issue of Spiritus are the fruits of a 2013 American Academy of Religion session that was inspired by conversations had a year earlier at the Spiritus editorial board meeting. When we discussed the Call for Papers and potential areas of focus, several of us noted the steady rise of ethnographies on Christian spirituality and a desire to devote a conference session and journal issue to some of these research projects. It has been a pleasure and privilege to organize the conference panel and this volume and to have had the opportunity to work with so many talented people, all of whom have deep commitments to their work. The scholars featured in this issue: Candy Gunther Brown, Pamela Klassen, Brett Hendrickson, Susan Ridgely, and Tone Stangeland Kaufman, demonstrate that studying the spiritual lives of men, women and children through an ethnographic lens can help us more fully understand the nuances of lived spirituality. Each has worked, and continues to work, with living and historic interlocutors and offers important questions and challenges for the field of Christian spirituality studies. In this introductory essay, I will focus on what ethnographic approaches might contribute to the field Christian spirituality studies and how these five essays push the field in new directions. While there might be some challenges in widening the methodological and theoretical framing of Christian spirituality, the rewards of a more robust interdisciplinary Christian Spirituality Studies far outweigh the risks and promise to strengthen it.

Based on the audience response at the 2013 AAR session, a qualitative ethnographic approach to the study of Christian spirituality—not to mention a mixed method of qualitative and quantitative research—is viewed with a bit of suspicion.¹ On further reflection, this suspicion makes sense given the historic and theological roots of the field itself. Christian spirituality studies, as some audience members acknowledged in their comments and questions, and that Stangeland Kaufman notes in her compelling essay, has long focused on theologians who tend to focus on the spiritual “greats,” historic and contemporary alike. The scholarship is primarily generated by theologians who maintain a Christian identity—to invoke and modify one of Ridgely’s descriptors for at least one group of contemporary Christians—many of these scholars are themselves a kind of “connected Christian.” This commitment and connectivity is admirable and has strong vocational overtures. It is also one of great strengths of Christian spirituality studies in that it has deep relevance to Christians outside of the academy.

Ethnography is a lens of inquiry, a methodological approach that is used by scholars to understand contemporary worlds. Ethnographers aim to show the relevance of their interlocutors’ lives and their communities to broader trends and themes, and a growing number of ethnographers are studying the religious and spiritual lives of men, women, and children. Gunther Brown’s work with Complimentary Alternative Medicine (CAM) practitioners, Hendrickson’s work with curanderas/os, Ridgely’s work with second generation post- (and not so post) Focus on the Family evangelicals, and Stangeland Kaufman’s work with Norwegian Lutheran pastors are strong contributions to an ethnographic turn in spirituality studies. Their efforts run parallel to the recent efforts of theologians to delve into people’s everyday spiritual lives.² Pamela Klassen recognizes the shared interests among social scientists and theologians, and her essay in this issue seeks to provide a framework for studying the spiritual lives of historic and living interlocutors.

While the spiritual lives of everyday people—analogous to historians’ and sociologists’ focus on “popular religion” in the 1980s and 90s and more recently in “lived religion”—is receiving increased attention by theologians, the framing of the scholarship and the concerns have been different.³ Qualitative and quantitative ethnographic approaches to spirituality can be viewed as threatening the privileged status afforded theological inquiries because it is a method used by social science researchers who may or may not themselves have stated “religious” or “spiritual” concerns and commitments driving their research. And underlying this concern is the idea, it would seem, that theologically based...