Popular Religion

Folk Religion

Popular religion includes forms of beliefs, actions, and material objects adapted, transformed, or created by lay people and sometimes seen as survival of more traditional customs. Examples of such forms in Western contexts include traditional cults, such as the veneration of saints and thanksgiving; marginal beliefs, such as water spirits or astrology; marginal practices, such as water divining or magical healing rituals; and material culture, for example, healing waters, religious decoration in private rooms, or advent wreaths.

The reason for the marginality, and often dismissal of popular religion is that it differs from and presupposes the official religion of religious experts, be they priests, preachers, prophets, or monks. “Official” religion refers to those forms of religion represented by religious experts legitimated by political, economic, cultural, and other societal institutions. Popular religion can be taken to designate the heterodox elements of religious beliefs, actions, and objects, whereas the “official” religion of religious experts and organizations constitutes the orthodox pole of the religious field.

Despite its marginality, popular religion ranges from private or individual rites, such as private spells and charms, to religious mass phenomena, such as pilgrimages, popular religious feasts, and global ceremonies such as St. Nicholas Day or Christmas. Popular religion varies with the social groups and their culture. Thus, different social classes (e.g., peasants and the petite bourgeoisie), regions, language areas, ethnicities, races, and communities (e.g., rural or urban) are linked to different types of popular religion.

Mass Culture

As popular religion depends on the societal form of popular culture, it is also subject to its historical changes. Particularly, the rise of mass communication, the dissemination of mass culture, and the widening relevance of market mechanisms had serious effects on popular culture in general and contributed to the development of a modern popular religion with its specific religious goods and services. At the beginning of the 19th century, industrialization led to the mass production of religious material culture (such as l'art Saint-Sulpice, the industrial mass production of Catholic devotional objects) and to the increasing use of mass media for the transmission of religious goods and services. The increased use of means of mass communication (books, newspapers, radio, and television) required new forms and genres of communication, which have been diffused globally. To the degree that the modern popular culture became a “mass culture,” popular religion developed its own modern forms. While the electronic mass media (radio and television) led to the creation of an “electronic church” with its concomitant media formats (Bible shows), marginal contents (e.g., as Spiritism, astrology, and witchcraft) also became “reinvented” traditions distributed widely by television, radio, newspapers, and so on.

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