He Made a Way out of No Way: Religious Experience in an African-American Congregation

Abstract

Sociologists have expended little effort to examine the experiential dimension of religion. When social scientists have turned their attention to religious experience, they have used a definition of the concept which has overly restricted its scope. This paper is based upon an ethnographic study of an African Methodist Episcopal congregation made up primarily of the working poor and near-poor. I use the data to study the reported experiences of congregational members concerning the action of spiritual beings in their everyday lives, and I discuss the role of social ties and the cultural devices of metaphor and narrative in shaping these experiences. Finally, I demonstrate the influence of social location - primarily race and class - on attributions to supernatural agency. Religion is more than a set of beliefs and rules of behavior. It is more than an institution and a moral community. It is a way of experiencing the world. Those who believe in the reality of the spiritual realm experience life differently than those who do not. While for the secular person life is experienced within the single dimension of human existence, for the religious, ". . . life is lived on a twofold plane; it takes its course as human existence and, at the same time, shares in a transhuman life, that of the cosmos or the gods" (Eliade, 1959:167). Because of this additional dimension, religion makes available a set of "others" with extraordinary powers (God or gods, Satan, demons, ancestors, animist spirits, etc.) with whom significant interaction is possible. For this reason, Ninian Smart once suggested that "... in principal one should treat the gods and spirits who inhabit the phenomenological environment of a given cultural group as part of the [social] system" (Smart, 1977:52). However, there is another, often overlooked, way in which religious beliefs can generate alternate realities: they not only add a sometimes extensive cast of spiritual characters to the drama of social life, but they often imbue these beings with the capacity (and the inclination) to intervene in the ongoing affairs of the social and physical world. Thus, religion makes it possible for believers not only to "interact" with spiritual beings, but also to interpret everyday events - whether unusual, bizarre, or exceedingly mundane - as the result of their direct intervention. While some might attribute being laid off or breaking the good china simply to "bad luck" or to the operation of impersonal social or natural forces, to the