Religious Individualism as Everyday Practice: Rethinking American Religion at the City Mosque

• In Event: 339 - Regular Session. Everyday Religion

Abstract

Utilizing ethnographic data culled from three and half years of fieldwork at an American mosque, this paper critically revisits the core sociological concept of “religious individualism.” A close analysis of previous empirical works on the subject reveals a puzzle: while certain components of religious individualism as theorists understand it – its emphasis on religion as a means to self-fulfillment, and its association with a personal connection to the divine – seem to spread evenly across diverse religious populations in the US, the specific form that religious individualism takes in practice seems to differ depending on whether the person or group in question considers religious obligation to be internally originating or externally imposed. This paper draws ethnographic and analytical attention to the latter of these types, by outlining three concrete ways that a group of Muslim teens work to balance a sense of modern American individualism with externally imposed religious obligation in everyday situated interaction. In making small changes to how they approach obligatory ritual practices, employing tonal shifts in articulating traditional religiously authoritative communication, and emphasizing their own control over Islamic behavior, the young men work to infuse an inherited religious tradition with a culturally American sense of autonomy and reflexivity.

Author

• John O'Brien, New York University-Abu Dhabi