by: James N. Gilmore, Malaysia Barr, Eliza Moore, Marie Quaranta
Throughout this series, we have been using self-reflective approaches to describe different experiences with religious practice. Rather than offering broader analyses of young adults, we’ve focused on the particulars of our individual experiences. Our inspiration here was, in part, Raymond Williams’s essay “Culture is Ordinary,” which thinks about the concept of culture as much from Williams’s own adolescence as it does from the more abstract vantage point of Marxism’s development
Our goal was to explore the value of individuality and experience in writing about cultural practice, drawing from our own histories, anecdotes, and moments of revelation to “make sense of” difficult ideas about how people negotiate their religious identities in early adulthood through different institutions. Through writing these posts and sharing them with one another, we have affirmed for ourselves the value of using our own lives as the basis of critical engagement with the institutions we live through.
In developing these posts, we also landed on a triad of culture-subculture-counterculture to help distinguish how these cultural practices related to each other. We positioned institutional churches as a dominant “culture,” recognizing the power many of them still hold and the their important place in the lives of many religious people. Our subcultural and countercultural practices exist, then, in relation to the institutional church, which becomes positioned at the center of how religious practice is represented and understood. This triangle of terms is interrelated; each depends on the other and helps demonstrate something of the complexity of cultural practices.
Finally, we realized the through line across the three posts was community, and the ways human relationships—for better or for worse—were crucial factors in shaping what kind of religious practices and communities people wanted to belong to. Regardless of where one is located in this triad—and, indeed, there are certainly many other subcultures and countercultures, not to mention other sorts of cultures we simply didn’t have the opportunity to consider—it seems that these efforts at creating community were, for us, primary drivers in what sustained religious belonging.
We started this series with a discussion about how religion helps people make sense of life and helps create a structure of meaning to the world. While it certainly does these things in many ways, a common thread we’ve identified is that the communal bonds formed through cultural practice are key for young adults looking for belonging. This series was extremely rewarding to produce, as it allowed us a unique opportunity to see what we could do with reflecting on very meaningful elements of our lives and stitch them together into a broader understanding of how people navigate religious communities as a form of culture.
