Sociology of Religion 2010, 71:3 257-279

doi:10.1093/socrel/srq048
Advance Access Publication 27 May 2010

Space for God: Lived Religion at Work,

Home, and Play*

Roman R. Williams
Union University

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Despite modernity’s attempt to structure religion out of many social domains, people still make
space for God—the sacred, spirituality, religion, transcendence, etc.—in their everyday lives.
Religion may be less apparent at times, but it is not altogether absent and continues to show up
beyond its taken-for-granted boundaries. Drawing from photo elicitation interview materials gener-
ated by the Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life project, I explore the ways in which religion and
spirituality intersect with the domains of home, work, and leisure. At first blush, photos of homes,
bedrooms, offices, beaches, pets, and gardens do not appear to be enchanted. But when one looks
to the stories behind the photos, it becomes evident that the meanings these narratives convey and
actions they evoke push back against the social structure as individuals leverage contextual features
of everyday life to construct space for God.
Key words: lived religion; sacred space; ethnography; culture.

“Victorious capitalism,” Weber argued, “no longer needs asceticism as a

supporting pillar” (2002:124). The juggernaut of modernity and the material
pursuits that accompany it proposed to structure religion out of the social
system, paving it over—or caging it up, if you prefer. Durkheim (1995) ima-
gined the role of religion in different terms. He described “the sacred” as a
social force that animates life at certain times and in specific places, infusing
actions and objects with extraordinary meaning. The sacred was thereby distin-
guished from ordinary, profane, everyday life. And a clear boundary was
thought to partition these two “hostile and jealous rivals” (1995:37).
Despite the best attempts to structure religion out of the social system
or to keep religion tightly bounded with in it (in theory or in practice),

*Direct correspondence to Roman R. Williams, Institute for International and Intercultural

Studies, Union University, 1050 Union University Drive, Jackson, TN 38305, USA. Email:
rwilliams@uu.edu. The Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life project is funded by the John
Templeton Foundation and directed by Nancy T. Ammerman of Boston University. The author
thanks Nancy Ammerman for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.
# The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association
for the Sociology of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
257
258 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

people continue to make room for the sacred in their everyday lives.
Religion is less apparent at times, but is by no means absent. It continues
to show up unexpectedly. At first glance, photos taken by ordinary people
of the “important places” in their lives—their offices, beaches, bedrooms,
and gardens, for example—contain few, if any, overt references to the
sacred. These images and the stories they represent, however, provide clues
about how people make space for religion across the many domains of
their daily lives. Likewise they cast doubt on the notion of the sacred
being set apart and on modernity’s “inescapable power over people”
(Weber 2002:124).
Drawing from these photographs and narratives, this article explores how
people “make space for God” in everyday settings that are not overtly religious.

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Specifically, it focuses on work, home, and leisure settings, analyzing how space
is made for the sacred and what the dimensions, power, and meaning of that
space might be. Far from being structured out or set apart, the sacred finds its
way into many corners of everyday life, often extending its power from those
spaces into other activities and relationships.

“THERE’S MORE TO IT THAN THAT”: THE AMBIGUITIES OF

PLACES AND MEANINGS

When I first viewed the photograph of the gazebo at Wellington Cove,1

I immediately wondered what it had to do with religion (cf., Williams 2009).
Perhaps it had something to do with its location. Or was the view from this
place somehow significant? Maybe something extraordinary happened (or
happens) here. Could there be a connection with the architecture, the struc-
ture’s design, or appearance? Does the absence of people suggest that this place
is set apart, its access restricted for certain times or events, or is it simply the
off season and everyone has gone south for the winter? Perhaps it is the inten-
sity of the sun or the mysterious ring of light that gives the picture an other-
worldly appearance—was that effect intentional? My initial viewing of a
photograph rarely apprehended the levels of meaning that would emerge as
participants told their stories. The objects themselves were sometimes identifi-
ably “religious,” but these were pictures of “spaces,” spaces that took on their
meaning in the stories lived in them.
Consider Figure 1. The photographer, Grace Shoemaker, is a retired
healthcare professional who lives in the coastal town of Devon, Massachusetts.
An Episcopalian who rarely attends church, practices Reiki, and belongs to a
group of women who meet periodically to interpret their dreams, she describes
herself as spiritual, but decidedly “not religious.” The gazebo is a place

1
Photographs in this article are not edited. Personal and place names are pseudonyms.
 SPACE FOR GOD 259
FIGURE 1. “I think there’s more to it than that” (Grace Shoemaker)

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Shoemaker experiences beauty, practices her spirituality, watches people, and
spends time with family.

I like to go there and sit when it’s quiet, and when I’m at the water, that’s when I pray and
I talk to God and um, it’s a quiet place usually. In the summer, it’s not that quiet but other
times of year it is, and I’ve been there when [there] were weddings, and it’s just gorgeous to
see the, you know, the families all together and the bride walking down. And I brought the
kids there, my grandkids, and I often wonder who built it and why, and why that shape and
I’m always curious what goes through people’s minds when they do that kind of thing.

It is easy to envision a bridal party processing down the boardwalk, to imagine

children fearlessly leaning over the banister with string in hand to lure unsus-
pecting sea creatures into their traps, or to picture someone meditating,
remembering, or “talking to God” in this place. Not only is the gazebo a
special place for Grace, countless wedding albums mark it as a place of
memory, ritual, and perhaps even sacred commitments (or at least well-
intentioned promises), uttered under the watchful eye of a pastor, priest, rabbi,
or civil servant. Indeed, this place is a brackish juxtaposition of nature and
architecture, of the sacred and the ordinary, of family and strangers, of self and
society, of God and woman. But there is more to it than that.
Underpinning Grace’s stories about this place is an understanding of how
the world works. During our conversation, the light that surrounds the gazebo
captured Grace’s attention. “I like this,” she said pointing to the ring of light,
“the way this picture came out with the light around it.” The aura showed up
in photos taken in two other locations, so it seemed natural for me to ask
Grace about it. She explained, “Oh, oh, [it’s] a bunch of guardian angels or
God or I don’t [know], just that spirit that’s there. There’s a spirit that’s there.”
“So it wasn’t just the camera?” I probed. “No, I don’t think so,” she continued,
260 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

No, I think there’s more to it than that. It’s so pretty. I mean and maybe it was just the
camera, but I think things happen for a reason. I really do, I just, I mean so many times in
my life something, you know, like that where you can give it a good reason why, but there’s
more to it than that. It makes it special.

Indeed, something special is happening. Behind the photo, beyond the

gazebo, beneath her experiences and practices, underpinning her narrative is
a set of interpretive guidelines or notions about how the world works, what
is real, and what is plausible; they offer Grace a means for making sense of
her everyday life. She allows for the possibility that the ordinary may also be
extraordinary. These understandings travel with her; and at certain times and
places, they can enchant an ordinary act, place, object, or conversation. Not

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only did her spirituality manifest itself when she was physically at the
gazebo. It was captured in the photo and the narrative behind it and then
reappeared in her living room as she offered a spiritual explanation of a
photographic aberration for which someone else might attribute a material (a
cheap camera), scientific (the angle at which the sunlight was refracted), or
accidental cause. Her world is neither disenchanted, as Weber (2002) might
have expected, nor has the sacred been reduced to an isolated compartment
as Berger (1967) once anticipated.
This interaction with Grace suggests that religion and spirituality may
appear in expected and unexpected places in everyday life. It might be antici-
pated that many people experience a sense of the transcendent when encoun-
tering the beauty, scale, or power of the natural world. Likewise it is no
surprise that a mundane gazebo might take on ritual significance at a personal
level for Grace or on a community level as a place for wedding ceremonies.
More interesting is that Grace’s notions of the enchanted way the world works
travel with her and govern countless other social interactions that lie beyond
any taken-for-granted institutional boundaries that might be expected to sur-
round religion and spirituality.
While Grace’s experience is unique, the pattern it suggests is not. Religion
and spirituality operate across the domains of daily life. Although the presence
or absence of the sacred is not always visible to the naked eye, there are often
features of the social world at work that introduce a spiritual dimension in
unexpected places. To explore the ways in which people make room for reli-
gion and spirituality in their everyday lives, this article draws from photo elici-
tation interviews (PEIs) conducted as part of the Spiritual Narratives in
Everyday Life project.

SPIRITUAL NARRATIVES IN EVERYDAY LIFE

The Spiritual Narratives project, a John Templeton Foundation funded

study directed by Nancy T. Ammerman, explores the ways in which “religious
and spiritual understandings operate across the many domains of daily lived
 SPACE FOR GOD 261
TABLE 1 Subjects by Tradition and Frequency of Religious Participation

Tradition Religious participationa Total

Never Rarely Average Often

Mainline 0 3 7 4 14
Protestant
Conservative 0 6 4 9 19
Protestant
African 0 3 5 2 10
American
Protestant

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Catholic 0 8 2 8 18
Jewish 0 5 3 2 10
LDS 0 1 0 4 5
Wiccan 0 0 5 0 5
Internet 1 0 1 2 4
Participants
None 10 0 0 0 10

Total 11 26 27 31 95

a
Subjects were asked if they attended religious services “once or twice a year” (Rarely),
“once or twice a month” (Average), “more than twice a month” (Often), or not at all
(Never).

experience” and utilizes innovative methods to collect narrative accounts of

American religious life (Ammerman 2006b:1). The research collected the
stories of 95 people in Boston and Atlanta. Participants were selected accord-
ing to a quota sample devised to approximate a representative distribution
across Christian and Jewish traditions and with regard to gender, age, and
degree of religious participation (Table 1). The study also included a Wiccan
group, individuals who log onto the internet to find their connection with reli-
gion, and people without any religious affiliations.
Among the methods used in this study, which include participant obser-
vation, life history interviews, and digitally recorded oral diaries, one was par-
ticularly helpful in generating valuable insights into the role of religion in
everyday life: PEIs (cf., Clark-Ibáñez 2007; Harper 2002). In this method, sub-
jects collaborate in the research process by making decisions about what to
photograph from within the broad guidelines provided by the researcher.
Along with a 27-exposure, disposable camera, subjects received the following
written instructions:

Think about the places that are most important to you. They may be special because of what
you do there, how you feel there, what you experience or remember there, or who you are
262 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

with or think of when you are in that place. This might be your kitchen table, a favorite park
or forest, a memorial or statue, your back porch, your church or synagogue, your desk or easy
chair, the golf course where you play, almost anywhere. Often places are important because
of the people in them, so feel free to include people in your pictures.

The instructions also encouraged subjects to take one or two pictures in at

least five locations.
The developed photographs were used in an interview to tease out the
ways subjects find meaning in their lives, probing for the ways religion and
spirituality operate (or not) in each context. At the beginning of the interview,
interviewers handed participants their photos and invited them to tell the
story behind each picture. As they responded, we followed up with probes that

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guided the interview away from generalizations toward specific, narrative
responses. Through this process, subjects introduced new, valuable layers of
detail into the study by taking the conversation in directions we may not have
anticipated. At the conclusion of the interview, each participant received a
copy of the printed photographs; negatives and electronic copies of the photos
were retained for analysis.
While not all of our subjects participated, 80 snapped over 1,300 photo-
graphs;2 and 57 participants included material that was coded as “space for
God” (Table 2). Each batch of photos was, to borrow a phrase, like a box of
chocolates: we never knew what we were going to get. Interviewees intro-
duced us to a variety of people, places, and objects: pets, family members
and friends, computers, cars, workplaces, knickknacks, pictures of pictures,
homes (inside and out), and the outdoors (gardens, yards, beaches, moun-
tains, etc.). These photos “took” our research team to places we could not
have gone otherwise. Likewise, the stories behind these images often led our
research in directions we may not have anticipated. Some photos, such as
those of houses of worship, congregational events, or religious accoutrements
(crosses, Bibles, etc.) clearly signaled religious meaning even before the inter-
view. In other images, like the photo of the gazebo above, religion and spiri-
tuality were only visible in the narrative elicited during the interview. And
in some cases, no trace of the transcendent was found in the image or the
story behind it.
The photographs we received may be grouped into several broad categories
(Harper 2002:13). They document inventories of everyday life including homes
(inside and out), prized possessions (books, knickknacks, guitars, etc.), neigh-
borhoods, workplaces, beaches, woods, parks, cityscapes, pets, people, and
houses of worship (inside and out). Participants also took photographs that rep-
resent events and activities such as church potlucks, holiday celebrations, family
meals, worship services, personal religious practices, exercise, and commuting

2
Participants were instructed to take one or two photos (e.g., one with flash, one
without) in at least five places. This total (cf., Table 1) includes duplicate photographs.
 SPACE FOR GOD 263
TABLE 2 Photo Elicitation Interviews and Space for God (SFG) by Tradition

Tradition Total Subjects Photos Subjects with

subjects with PEI at least one
photo coded SFG
Mainline Protestant 14 11 195 8
Conservative Protestant 19 18 239 14
African American Protestant 10 6 118 5
Catholic 18 17 296 10
Jewish 10 7 98 5
LDS 5 5 79 5
Wiccan 5 5 91 5

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Internet participants 4 3 58 1
None 10 8 137 4

Total 95 80 1311 57

to work. Likewise, the pictures hint at social institutions such as marriage,

family, education, leisure, work, and religion.

MAKING SPACE

Fortunately, as Grace Shoemaker reminds us (above), “there is more to it”

than inventories, events and activities, and social institutions. Most of the
photographs do not depict symbols, practices, or objects associated with a par-
ticular religious tradition. What is significant about the photos are the narra-
tives they elicited. By asking people to photograph “important” places, we
evoked a process of meaning-making. The stories they told us were a second
level of meaning-making that existed in interaction with the meaning they
had already made in the places themselves. And the “more to it than that”
factor helped in identifying what constituted religion and spirituality. When
participants attributed supernatural forces to be at work or when they intro-
duced beliefs, practices, or objects from a religious tradition into their expla-
nations, these attributions were coded as “space for God” to signal that sacred
content. The intersection of these meanings with the places ( physical and
social) became the basis for parsing out how, if, and when (or not) the sacred
showed up in the midst of their everyday lives (cf., Nelson 2005:46 ff.). In
what follows, I explore the ways people make space for God in everyday life by
“seeing” what our subjects say through their photos and interviews about
religion and spirituality across the domains of work, home, and leisure.
The choice of the phrase “space for God” is a deliberate attempt to
shape and structure the conversation about the incidence of the sacred in
264 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

everyday life. It is an invitation to reconsider the components and constructs

of the sacred from a lived religion perspective (Ammerman 2006a, 2006b;
McGuire 2008). Space for God is shorthand for locations, occasions, and
actions to which people attribute spiritual or religious significance (meanings).
While the literature may advance thoughtful criticisms of the word “space”
(e.g., Gieryn 2000), the alternative term “place” overlooks the value of the
multiple meanings space enjoys in the vernacular.
In common speech, space is a cognate for place or location and it is used
metaphorically in reference to time (I don’t have space in my life for that right
now) and to talk about doing something (I’ll make space for that later).
Location, time, and action are important dimensions of a more nuanced under-
standing of the spaces in which we find the sacred in everyday life (cf.,

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Chidester and Linethal 1995). By considering several examples, across the
domains of work, home, and play (i.e., leisure), we can see how people from a
variety of religious backgrounds have made “space for God.”

Space for God at Work, Home, and Play

Traditionally, work is not a place known to welcome religion.
Nevertheless, as people enter the workplace their beliefs, values, and practices
accompany them. For some people like Charles Curlew, a conservative
Christian who works as a statistician in a large government agency, religious
practices are an important feature of the workday.3

Oh, that’s my office . . . . That’s where I spend a lot of my time. . . . [As] I’ve said on the
oral diaries . . . prayer is very much a part of my day. . . . Often I, as a [statistician] I’m a lot
of times trying to solve problems or . . . [find] better ways to do things, and a lot of times I’m,
I just think I really don’t [know] where to go with [a particular problem]. And I will pray and
I really feel like God gives me, you know, a thought that I hadn’t, hadn’t even thought about
and it helps me get on with what I was doing.

Perhaps it is not surprising that a religious person would try to tap into the
power of the transcendent when faced with a difficult, perplexing, or otherwise
challenging job. Likewise, the choice of prayer, which can be practiced in ways
that are not necessarily obvious to one’s co-workers, makes sense in a scientific
context where one may be expected to check faith at the door. The sacred
practice he has chosen might be seen as “private,” but the object of his
practice—how he does his work—is very much public.
The practice of prayer becomes more visibly public when it brings him
together with other Christians in the workplace. Every week he meets with a
small group of men in a workplace snack bar for lunch to “have a time of
sharing prayer requests and [to] pray together.” Not only does prayer inspire

3
In some cases, photographs discussed in this article are not displayed in an effort to
protect the identity of study participants.
 SPACE FOR GOD 265
solutions to scientific questions, talk of prayer inspires camaraderie in a work-
place where being a person of faith might be a matter of suspicion.
Religion shows up at work in other ways for Pam Jones, a middle-aged,
African American, mid-level professional who attends her Baptist church a
couple of times a month on average. She also describes God as the reason diffi-
cult situations get resolved and as the source of success.

You know, I do believe that we’re totally not in control of things and because we are so not in
control of things, I don’t really have an explanation. It was God’s will, that was my time to,
wasn’t my time to go the night before driving into the back of the truck [on the way home
from work], and it was time to have everything kind of come together at that point, profession-
ally at that point.

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With God in control, her professional life has greater significance, situations
beyond her control are superintended, and a kind of humility is available in
the midst of success: God is behind it all. With this narrative comes the possi-
bility of seeing one’s life as being part of something larger, mysterious, and
purposeful.
Frequently, however, the realities of a busy life override this narrative,
blunting Pam’s ability to draw upon the ideas it conveys.

Just sometimes I think we, or I, am a gerbil on the wheel all the time, just running, running,
running and you don’t take time to stop, and think, and listen, and I often ask in time of
daily prayer okay Lord, lead me to the right decisions, what, what do you think about such
and such? Help me to make the right decisions and sometimes because I am going, going,
going, going, going all the time, I don’t have that time of clarity and time to listen and think
about what God is leading you to do.

The pressures of everyday work life and the demands of family crowd out the
narrative that God is in control, working things out, giving meaning to life.
Along with the time demands associated with the roles of professional, wife,
and mother, competing notions of what it means to be successful in each role
sometimes win out over religious ones. In order to recalibrate, Pam retreats to
the family beach house.
The beach is a place where Pam turns off her mobile phone, does not take
her computer, and does her best to tune out work. Because her family owns a
home on the coast, she is able to spend numerous weekends and many holidays
in this quiet and beautiful place, which is the antithesis of work.4 Here she
slows down enough to experience God: “I just think it is the beauty and the
peace that just make me think of God when I am at the beach, and listening
to the seagulls and the ocean or kids playing . . . . Such a blessing” (Figure 2).

4
While access to places like this is class-based, a vacation home at the beach is not a
prerequisite to enjoying nature or experiencing the sacred therein. People from many
income levels access the natural world in ways that coincide with their social status.
266 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

FIGURE 2. “. . . a beach to me is an example of just God’s beauty” (Pam Jones)

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The beauty of the natural world is seen as a divine gift; to experience natural
beauty is to experience God. And experiencing this beauty and change of pace
allows a narrative that God is in control, working behind the scenes, to wash
over her afresh.
In an effort not to lose sight of God, she brings reminders of this narrative
with her to work in the form of pictures. When we discussed what her office
looks like,5 she indicated that we would find “beach scenes, there is a like a
ton of pictures of beach . . . [along with] craziness in my office. It might have
captured on any given day the chaos that can go on with all the papers all
around. And it could have in spite of the chaos captured a sense of order in
the background.” When she is not able to be at the beach to experience God,
she brings the beach to work and thereby experiences the peace, beauty, and
order in the background. Beach scenes, then, mediate the experience of God at
work and bring a sacred dimension to an otherwise frenetic professional life.
Not everyone is as subtle as Pam Jones. Andrew Hsu, a young conservative
Christian who sees himself as an “undercover corporate chaplain,” is more provo-
cative in his choice of office décor. In his job as a software engineer, he uses art to
remind himself of his faith and to open opportunities to propagate it: “I had some
verses in Greek and Hebrew, you know, First Thessalonians [5:16–18] and I think
some sections of Psalm 119 [verses 97 and 105]6 that I had on my wall. . . . And

5
The photo elicitation interview ended with the interviewer asking the participant if
there are other places, objects, or events that they would have taken a photo of, but did not
for some reason (e.g., lack of access, ran out of time or film, too far away, forgetfulness). In
this case, Pam Jones noted that she did not take any photos of her office, so she was asked
what we would find there if she had.
6
1 Thessalonians 5:16– 18 (New International Version) says, “Be joyful always; pray
continually; give thanks in all circumstances for it is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”
 SPACE FOR GOD 267
FIGURE 3. “I took the picture because it’s like a sanctuary for me, to be able to get away and be by
myself” (Cynthia Gardner)

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people would come by and just say, oh, what language is that? And what does that
mean? And, of course, giving me the door to talk about faith.”
Where some people use work as an opportunity for their faith, others see
their faith as an opportunity to escape from work. Cynthia Gardner, a
middle-aged single mother who works from home and is active in All Saints’
Episcopal, finds refuge from work and the pressures of life in her bedroom, a
place she calls her “sanctuary” (Figure 3). “It’s just a place where I can go to be
by myself, to be with God. I never work in my room, ever. [It’s] a place to be
alone and just to be quiet, to sit, to read, to relax. So it’s one of the few places
in the house that I never work.”
Cynthia is a night owl who requires little sleep, a reader with a voracious
appetite, and the kind of person who needs time to herself to recharge. As she

Psalm 119:97, 105 states, “O, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long. . . . Your
word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.”
268 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

discussed photos of her bedroom, she inventoried numerous items of symbolic

value: a souvenir given to her during her childhood by her mother, a memento
from her grandmother, an icon of Jesus she painted, and a framed prayer from
the Compline Service “asking God to watch over those who work or weep this
night and those who are sick and suffering,” which she finds “very, very
comforting.” All these items, along with a variety of books including religious
literature and sacred texts, are displayed on furniture that belonged to her
grandmother and became her father’s when he was a child. Even her bed is
covered with sentimental meaning: it belonged to her parents.
Vicki Johnson, a retiree and devoted Catholic, makes space for God at
home in a similar way. Vicki’s living room is a place where she does “a lot of
[her] praying and studying” of the Bible. The décor of this location plays a role

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in shaping her practice and experience.

That’s the chair I sit in (Figure 4). That’s a seashell from the coast. That’s . . . a little bowl
from Ireland, a very small bowl, and these beads, these beads, these rosary [beads belonged
to] . . . . Someone who was very close to me, she called me her granddaughter, I wasn’t, she
didn’t have any children, she had no children. But I was as close to her as anybody’s ever
been, and I had a lot of joy from her and I wish she was still here. . . . I loved her dearly, and
she loved [me] and I pray for her [laughter] a lot [laughter]. And this table was another, this
was a real aunt, and it was grain and she and Uncle Bob both died and I got that and I
painted it black and it works great. But this is—that’s a good space for me.

Where the four walls of Cynthia Gardner’s bedroom confined her space for
God, objects mark out the boundary for Vicki. For both of these women, the
location for connecting with God also connects them with their personal and
family histories.
Sam Levitt, an observant Jew, describes his home office (Figure 5) as a
place where home, work, and spirituality are “totally integrated . . . it’s a place
where I feel comfortable to do work, to pray, and to put my life together. It’s
sort of just a home space for me.” For people like Cynthia, space for God at
home is a refuge from other aspects of daily life, but for those like Sam, home,
religious practices, and work comfortably comingle. Not only are the interior
space and the ritual of prayer important to Sam, so is the view of the outdoors
from his home office. Between the houses he can see the ocean and when he
davens in the morning he is

very conscious of the sky and the sun and whether the sun has risen or not and typically,
while I’m there, [for] several months during the year, while I’m davening in the morning,
I can see the sun rising at the same time. So its very connected to me with the seasons, the
tides that I can see in the ocean, and the rising of the sun. . . . Being aware of the natural
cycles and it’s an important part of the Jewish ritual life. So there are different prayers that
are said at the beginning of the new moon, which is a lunar moon. . . . And because of the
prayers, I would actually say the prayers make me more aware of the lunar cycles. So I know
that we’re half way now between the new moon and the full moon. . . . So, yes, there is an
interplay between the prayers and the natural cycles.
 SPACE FOR GOD 269
FIGURE 4. “This is where I do a lot of my praying and studying” (Vicki Johnson)

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FIGURE 5. “I daven in that area” (Sam Levitt)
270 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

FIGURE 6. “. . . I’ve always thought that whatever God is . . . can be found more out in nature than
necessarily in a church or a synagogue” (Tom Miller)

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Sam is not alone in connecting his faith with nature, study participants con-
sistently identified the natural world as a context in which they construct
space for God. For Tom Miller, a middle-aged legal professional who attends
synagogue monthly, a photo of the beach near his home in Edgewater,
Massachusetts, evokes memories of friends and family (Figure 6). It is also a
place where he goes when he needs “time to either make important decisions
or to relate to, you know, a higher power, to pray or to just meditate on things
and think about them, that’s one of the places that I would, I would go to.” It
is almost as if, when faced with uncertainty he returns to a place of familiarity
to get his bearings, to dial in his spiritual compass, if you will.
But it is not only when he needs to meditate or think that he creates
sacred space outdoors. As someone who lives an active lifestyle, has teenage
children, and resides in a place known for its natural beauty, outdoor activities
are a significant part of Tom’s everyday life. And so is his practice of making
space for God in the midst of it:
I mean I just, you just go to places like that or out at sea, and you watch, you know, a beau-
tiful sunrise or something and you, you know, be struck by how gorgeous, you know, life is
and how, how, you know, how could this all be just a mistake, you know, or a random occur-
rence. So yeah, I look at, at the intricacies of nature and the universe, and you know, think-
ing I guess if you want to call it a spiritual way all the time. . . . I think that there is something
more and so that I think about it the most strongly when I’m out in places like that.

Whether he is at the beach, hiking in the woods with his family or dog, fishing
in the ocean, or driving to work, Tom is emphatic that “God . . . can be found
more out in nature than necessarily in a church or a synagogue.”
Theresa Collins, a retirement-age writer and committed member of All
Saints’ Episcopal, also finds God outdoors. Like several other project
 SPACE FOR GOD 271
participants, Theresa enjoys gardening as a leisure activity; likewise, it is a way
for her to experience God.

God is the one who put us all here. God’s the one who created us. God certainly, of course,
created the Garden of Eden and all gardens, and I don’t understand how things grow, but uh,
I know that it’s part of the miracle of life that you put a little teensy thing in the ground or in
this case in a pot and it grows. So I, it makes me feel the awe of God’s creativity and power
and it’s, it’s also just, I mean I feel closer to God because he’s up there helping all these
things grow that I don’t understand. And, and the other thing about the garden is, as you
well know, I mean there’s always surprises every year in a garden. Good surprises and bad
surprises. Things that don’t come up or things that come up you weren’t expecting or
whatever, and I just think it’s all part of the miracle of life and the world that God has
created. I just, it makes it easy to understand.

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This God-as-creator narrative accompanies Theresa on her daily walk with her
collie Yankee, a time at which she prays as she exercises and enjoys the beauty
of the seaside town in which she lives. Taking the same path everyday, she
follows a structured routine of prayer that includes “introductory prayers,”
creeds, and extemporaneous prayer for friends, family, and neighbors.

I’ve gotten to the point where I really sort of pray for almost everybody I know by name, so
that it makes me feel close to them as well as talking to God and having, asking God to help
them in their lives and I was told by my niece that I prayed too hard, because she’s, I guess
she’s 37 years old. She’s a “doctor – doctor,” MD/PhD, and she got married a couple years
ago and I started praying on . . . these walks and during my prayers for her that she would
have a baby. Well, she told me I prayed too hard because she’s having twins.

It seems that God listens to Theresa; and Theresa listens to the idea that God
answers prayer and acts in the world on her behalf.
Like many of the interviewees, nature plays a significant role in Theresa’s
religious practices. Likewise, scripture is part of her prayer walk.

So, um, but by the time I get around here (Figure 7), I’m sort of winding up and this is
about the point where I recite the 100th Psalm every day, which I really love, um, “making a
joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands.” It’s a wonderful happy Psalm, and it sort of winds
up my formal chat with God in the morning, and that’s usually what happens when I’m just
coming around this bend here. . . . I just can’t thank God enough for this wonderful place to
live.

Also important on Theresa’s walks are the landmarks that represent memories
and help to time her prayer. For example, a blue spruce along her route, which
she photographed for the study, reminds Theresa of her parents’ love every
time she passes it because her father used to call her mother his “little blue
spruce.” Likewise, when she gets to certain points along her route, she knows
where she should be in her routinized conversation with God. Just as her daily
exercise is structured, religious, and informed by her environment, Theresa’s
day is structured by her walk and the strong spiritual narratives it reinforces.
272 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

FIGURE 7. “. . . this is about the point where I recite the 100th Psalm every day . . .”
(Theresa Collins)

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Not everyone pictured life in these ways. But a significant number of
photos we collected depicted the role of religion at home, work, and play from
a range of religious perspectives and levels of participation (Table 3). Likewise,
the images and narratives above are representative of the kinds and content of
images generated through PEIs. In these contexts, location, action, and time
are important components in the construction of meaning and suggest the
effects the sacred may have in the social worlds of ordinary people.

Location: Behavioral Residue, Identity Claims, and Feeling Regulators

Locations tell stories. In order to understand the role of place in construct-
ing space for God, it is important to read the physical clues found in work-
places, homes, and the outdoors. Over time people make their mark on
everyday environments, leaving evidence of their behaviors, identities, and
feelings. “Behavioral residue” such as Vicki Johnson’s well-worn Bible or the
tallises, tefillin, prayer books, and Jewish calendars that lie atop a file cabinet
in Sam Levitt’s study are “physical traces of activities conducted in the
environment” (Gosling et al. 2002:381). Traces of practice (or intended prac-
tice) serve as cues that help structure future behavior and they stand as remin-
ders for Vicki and Sam of the kind of people they are.
Not only do locations point to what happens there, places also have much
to say about who a person is or aspires to become. Gosling and his associates
suggest that people remind themselves and others of who they are by making
two kinds of assertions about their identity. Self-directed identity claims are
“symbolic statements made by the occupants [of a location] for their own
benefit, intended to reinforce their self-views. Many of these statements can
make use of widely understood cultural symbols (e.g., a poster of Martin Luther
 SPACE FOR GOD 273
TABLE 3 SFG by Tradition and Domain

Tradition Total subjects with SFG code Number of subjects by

SFG domain

Work Home Leisure

Mainline Protestant 8 2 7 5
Conservative Protestant 14 5 12 11
African American Protestant 5 4 3 4
Catholic 10 1 5 6
Jewish 5 3 3 2
LDS 5 0 5 3

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Wiccan 5 2 4 4
Internet participants 1 0 0 1
None 4 0 4 1

Total 57 17 43 37

King, university memorabilia), whereas other artifacts may have a more per-
sonal meaning (e.g., a pebble collected from a favorite beach)” (Gosling et al.
2002:380). Along with efforts to reinforce their own sense of self, people
“display symbols that have shared meanings to make statements to others about
how they would like to be regarded . . . . By displaying such symbols . . . [ people]
may be intentionally communicating their attitudes and values to others”
(Gosling et al. 2002:380 – 81). Both types of identity claims are evident in the
ethnographic account above. Cynthia Gardner’s icons, which are located
throughout her home, strengthen her sense of self, and advertise her religious
sensibilities to her children and guests. Pam Jones’ photos of beach scenes are
subtle yet powerful reminders to her that God is at work in the background of
her chaotic work environment. And Andrew Hsu’s Bible verse artwork reminds
him of who he is as an evangelical and selectively presents his identity to his
co-workers.
Not everything, however, that decorates a person’s lived environment is
there to reinforce or project an identity. Other items at home, work, or play
may act as “feeling regulators,” strategically placed there to create a mood,
manage thoughts, or motivate behavior (Gosling 2008:21). The intrinsic senti-
mentality of items such as keepsakes and knickknacks, the history embedded in
furniture and photographs, the cozy feeling of being under a certain blanket or
on a favorite chair, as well as the memories rooted in a garden, beach, gazebo,
or sunset all evoke feelings. And these feelings are often a precondition for
being in a frame of mind conducive to making space for God.
Locations do not necessarily need to be decorated by the person experien-
cing them to play a role in constructing space for God—indeed offices,
beaches, public parks, or forests are less accommodating to a personal touch.
274 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

In environments where personalization is not possible, the sentimental or sym-

bolic value of a location is sometimes sufficient to regulate feelings, evoke
actions, or reinforce identity. For Grace Shoemaker, Pam Jones, and Tom
Miller, for example, being near the water heightens their awareness of the
sacred.

Action: Practices, Consolidation, and Imagination

Constructing environments that have the capacity to reinforce identity and
regulate moods and feelings is an important kind of space making, but it is
only part of the story. When it comes to making space for God, our partici-
pants emphasize practices—what they do in the space they have marked as
sacred. As with the domestic shrines created by the Latinas that McGuire

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(2008:52) describes, the ritual practices associated with them bring spaces to
life. The practices in which people engage at work, home, and in nature are
more important than the location by itself. The physical and intrinsic features
of a place may set the stage for certain actions, but it is the practices them-
selves that enable (or constrain) the person’s attempt to reach toward the
divine.
Perhaps the most common religious practice is prayer. Prayer is practiced
across the spectrum of religious backgrounds represented by the study partici-
pants. In the broader American public, 58 percent of adults claim they pray on
a daily basis and over half of Mormons (82 percent), African American
Protestants (80 percent), evangelicals (78 percent), Catholics (58 percent),
and mainline Protestants (53 percent) pray daily (Pew Forum 2008:44). What
the surveys do not ask, however, is where people pray. How does prayer rep-
resent a literal and metaphorical space for God in everyday life?
What we know from our study participants is that prayer consolidates con-
cerns that intersect many domains of everyday life. It gathers together social
contexts and the individuals who inhabit them into a shared, albeit fictive,
moment in time. As Theresa Collins exercises and prays for “almost everybody
[she] know[s] by name,” it makes her feel close to them. The framed passage
from the Compline service connects Cynthia Gardner to “those who work or
weep this night and those who are sick and suffering.” Pam Jones’ daily prayer
request that God would lead her to the right decisions brings together the con-
cerns of a mother, wife, and professional. And davening in his home office
with an awareness of the seasons and rhythms of nature aligns Sam Levitt’s
calendar, ritual practice, and the natural world. In the practice of prayer, what
were once thought to be separate spheres of social life come together.
Not only does the space created by prayer cross social domains, it also
introduces divine power into those varied social spaces. With desires and
dilemmas gathered through prayer, they are placed within the reach of the
divine, and new actions in the world are perceived to be possible. Theresa
prays ( perhaps a little too hard) for her niece to conceive, and twins are born.
Cynthia asks her God to watch over hurting people. Pam requests wisdom.
 SPACE FOR GOD 275
And although Sam isn’t praying in the same way as these Christians, he
pursues a similar end as he davens. His is a desire to be attuned to the rhythm
and forces of nature (centered) not just in his home office as he prays, but
throughout his day.
As people pray, they imagine outcomes influenced by their understanding
of the way a divine actor (or actors) works in the world. They anticipate sacred
power actually doing something in the context of their world. When a desired
end—whether babies, protection, wisdom, or being centered—comes to pass, it
is attributed to divine power; the sacred transcends taken-for-granted bound-
aries of possibility. But practices such as prayer also allow the sacred to trans-
cend institutional boundaries, introducing enchantment into otherwise
disenchanted places. Moreover, in cases where religious or spiritual actions are

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deemed efficacious, that action may become a pattern for the future (Emirbayer
and Mische 1998), thereby perpetuating and perhaps even increasing the
volume of sacred space making. While this enterprise may not be as ambitious
as what Berger (1967:28) once described as an “audacious attempt to conceive
of the entire universe as being humanly significant,” constructing space for
God through practices such as prayer invites religion and spirituality to be
involved in making the human world more significant.

Time: Discipline, Creativity, and Countervailence

Having time in one’s schedule to do something religious or spiritual is
often in short supply. Pam Jones feels as though she is “a gerbil on the wheel
all the time, just running, running, running . . . going, going, going, going,
going all the time.” Many Americans share her sentiment: time is not on their
side. When work becomes home and home becomes work, little space is left in
schedules for other pursuits (Hochschild 1997). Incorporating time for God in
everyday life, then, becomes a balancing act that requires discipline and
creativity.
Despite time’s power to constrain, some people make room in their sche-
dules for personal practices and participation in religious and spiritual activi-
ties. Many weekly schedules reflect, with varying degrees of regularity,
participation in some form of organized religion or personalized spiritual prac-
tice. Sam Levitt and his wife mark the Sabbath every Friday by lighting a
candle and eating together. For some a weekly prayer meeting, Bible study, or
worship service put demands on their time. And others consider it a religious
obligation to cheer for their children during their Sunday morning basketball
game or to forge family bonds through a day at the beach, boating, hiking, or
exploring nearby communities. Making space for God in the midst of a busy
schedule requires some measure of self-discipline.
Not only do time constraints engender discipline, a packed schedule also
inspires creativity. Theresa prays while she exercises every morning. Charles
prays as he showers. Pam talks with God during her commute to and from
work. Tom experiences the divine in the midst of enjoying the outdoors
276 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

with family. Instead of making choices between competing time constraints,

people resolve schedule conflicts by inviting God to join them as they exercise,
shower, commute, or go for a hike. They accommodate religion and spirituality
in their busy lives by creating situations in which everyday activities and
making space for God may take place simultaneously. In other words, busy
lives seem to require a certain degree of creative scheduling when it comes to
making time for God.
It comes as no surprise that time is not on the side of religion and that the
scarcity of time necessitates discipline and creativity if space for God is to be
constructed in daily life. The process that the competing pressures create,
however, is counterintuitive. As the demands of everyday life encroach upon
times that traditionally were set aside for religious and spiritual practices, the

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sacred is not completely erased from the calendar. Instead, the same social
forces that were once thought to be bringing about the extinction of religion
open up new possibilities for religion beyond its taken-for-granted boundaries.
I call this the countervailent property of time. It acts back on itself. The lack
of time to pursue religious interests within conventional boundaries causes the
sacred to show up beyond them while, as, during, and in the midst of other
activities. While time is not entirely on the side of the sacred, it seems that it
is not completely against it either.

CONSTRUCTION, CONSTRAINT, AND CONCEALMENT

Space for God in everyday life is constructed, in part, by combining

elements of location, action, and time. Features of location may stimulate a
feeling, remind of past behaviors, or animate a particular sense of self. In turn,
certain feelings, habits, and identities invite people to do something religious
or spiritual. Practices lay down new layers of behavioral residue, renew and gen-
erate feelings, and reinforce identities. Through practices such as prayer, con-
texts are brought together in ways that open times and places to the possibility
of divine actors or forces to be present in a social setting. As practices are per-
ceived to achieve their desired ends, their effectiveness invites them to be uti-
lized more frequently and in more situations. In the event God shows up, so to
speak, at home, work, or play, traces of feelings, behaviors, and/or identities
may be preserved in the physical features of the context and/or the meaning
that is ascribed to the location because of what happened in that place.
Thick layers of behavioral residue, compelling feelings, and strong signals
about identity, however, do not oblige one to make space for God. Even rela-
tively disciplined and creative people are not consistent in their religious pur-
suits. Locations and times have their own logics, which have a tendency to
constrain the range of religious possibilities available in a given context.
Likewise, the people with whom work, home, and leisure are shared often have
 SPACE FOR GOD 277
competing ideas about the what, when, and where of religion and spirituality.
What happens, then, when the sacred is constrained?
Grace Shoemaker, with whom this article began, offers a way to consider
how people respond when their capacity for constructing space for God is
diminished by circumstances beyond their control. Toward the end of my inter-
view with Grace, a photo of the coffee table around which we sat took our con-
versation in an interesting direction. This glass-topped coffee table is designed
with a drawer under the glass for displaying Grace’s collection of seashells and
sea glass. About the time her health began to deteriorate due to a debilitating
disease, her collection of seashells and beach glass began. Grace remembers, “I
used to walk the beach and I had to stop doing that . . . so I started saving them
and putting them in jars around and then we got the [coffee] table.” Friends and

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family return from beach vacations with shells to add to Grace’s coffee table.
Sand from Hawaii is displayed in a hallway. Another friend regularly supplies
sea glass to Grace. A large portrait of Grace’s grandchildren playing on the
beach is a focal point in her home. As mobility decreased, beach-related arti-
facts increased. Thus, when her circumstances inhibited making sacred space in
her usual way (walking, praying, talking to God) at her usual place (near the
ocean), she improvised. By adapting to changing circumstances, she put the
sacred within reach. Proximity does not mean, however, that the sacred is conti-
nually mediated. Sometimes her coffee table is just that, a coffee table; at other
times, however, it is part of what creates space for God in Grace’s daily life.
Improvisations and adaptations are integral to making space for God in
everyday life. When religious people enter a situation or setting that in some way
precludes religion, they leverage the features of their environment that are under
their control to adjust the way space for God is constructed. Pam Jones decorates
her office with pictures of the beach that mediate God’s presence at work. To
the casual observer, however, her artwork merely indicates a love of the seashore.
Charles Curlew meets like-minded co-workers on the neutral ground of a work-
place café during his lunch break, a time while he is off the clock and thereby
avoids some of the constraints of his workplace. Andrew Hsu camouflages his
Christianity in artistic renderings of Greek and Hebrew scripture verses that
hang on his office wall. He cleverly employs his artwork as a legitimate means to
introduce his faith to unsuspecting co-workers. And as far as her community
knows, Theresa Collins enjoys walking her dog and, other than talking to herself
while she walks, she seems relatively normal; what they don’t know is that she’s
not talking to herself. Religion may be concealed from view in these and many
other everyday situations, but it remains at play in the social world.

CONCLUSION

Modernity, it seems, has not barred religion from everyday life. Boundaries
are more permeable than they were once imagined to be. Religious and
278 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

spiritual people carry their understandings of how the world works with them
as they navigate their everyday lives. Those that tap into divine power at work,
home, and play, do so as though it is a natural part of their social world. As
they do, evidence of the sacred is deposited in their surroundings. The nuances
of the physical evidence of the sacred may be overlooked or misread by some,
giving the appearance of a world disenchanted. The sacred is not easy to
discern in photos of the beach, exercise routines, or home offices, for example.
This is not the case, however, for those who endeavor to make space for God
in everyday life. Their practices, orientations toward time, and physical
environments invite—if not expect—the sacred to show up at work, home,
and play. When the sacred transcends personal and institutional boundaries,
the social world becomes more meaningful to the religiously or spiritually

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inclined.
Like the photographs above, this study only allows us to see within the
frame. Our project explored the everyday lives of a relatively small group of
people from Boston and Atlanta. Although participants mirror many of the
contours of religious life in America, they represent a snapshot of a much
more diverse religious landscape. My observations suggest that locations,
actions, and times are important dimensions for thinking about the ways
religion and spirituality show up in everyday life. Our use of photo elicita-
tion interviewing indicates the promise of visual methods for the sociology
of religion.

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