Religion at home: Resources to report on domestic devotion

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It’s that time of year, when many a home is being decorated for the holiday season.

Menorahs are going up on mantelpieces, bobbles on Christmas trees alongside stockings hung with care; midwinter logs are burning in honor of Yule; Nativities are being carefully placed on front lawns; lanterns are flickering to mark the Solstice; green, red and black kinara candleholders are adorning kitchen tables for Kwanzaa, while aluminum poles serve as centerpieces in the Festivus “for the rest of us.”

Beyond December, Orthodox Christians are looking ahead to their own Christmas celebration in early January, Chinese New Year follows later that month, and Muslims across the globe are preparing for Ramadan in late February. Hindus the world over will mark Holi a couple of weeks afterward. 

Each will involve a range of home decor to celebrate their favorite holidays.

While much is made of the public performance of religion in parades and street festivals, dances and other open displays of devotion, religion and spirituality are also often private affairs with attendant observances going on in homes, often out of view. 

These practices are a reminder of the home’s centrality in everyday religious — and nonreligious — observance.

In this edition of ReligionLink, we explore what religion looks like at home, offering perspectives, storylines, background, sources and more to help you cover how Americans are finding a place to practice their religion and spirituality in bedrooms and kitchens, closets and “she-sheds” across the country. 

Background

While shopping for a home outside Austin, Texas, James Yonkers — a self-confessed religion nerd — came across an unexpected find.

“We were looking at this lovely duplex and the real estate agent was showing me everything in the house, except for the downstairs closet next to the kitchen,” said Yonkers, “so, I got curious.”

Left alone to look around the house one more time, Yonkers could not help but open the closet door to look inside. What he found was the last thing he expected. Inside was a lavishly adorned altar to Ganesha, “with candles, a coconut, marigold, mango leaves and all these other elements around it,” said Yonkers.

Readily identified by his elephant head, Ganesha is widely revered in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist traditions as a remover of obstacles and bringer of good fortune.

“Whoever owned the duplex before us, I hoped the good luck from Ganesha would stick,” Yonkers said, “because we bought the place!”

Domestic religious practices — that is, religious conduct within a household setting — provide an outlet for expressing and addressing the concerns of everyday life. An altar to Ganesha, where devotees can regularly perform puja — an act of reverence and worship — in the intimate surrounds of their home, not only beckons good luck but serves as a touchstone of resilience through the ups and downs of day-to-day life. 

Archaeologists have found protective deities, tools for conducting rites of protection and healing and shards of pottery used to hold libations and offerings in the homes of ancient peoples in places as diverse as Egypt to North America, Mesopotamia to Oceania. These practices were not divorced from a wider continuum of religious practice outside the home, but part-and-parcel to them.

In other words, practitioners the world over have long made religion a domestic affair, utilizing religious beliefs, actions and imagery to give shape and substance to hearth and home for millennia.

Beyond temples, synagogues and other places of public and communal devotion, a range of practices, material objects and rituals have provided solace, inspiration and an opportunity for regular devotion for individuals and families in the privacy of their personal space.

Today, the increasing privatization and individualization of spirituality and its associated customs means the home can often be a substitute for, or supplement to, communal houses of worship and the public display of religion.

Story prompts

Stories on this theme could take a variety of forms, including photo galleries, ‘splainers on particular practices and rituals, long-form features on migratory and minority practices or the gendered aspects of domestic religion, analysis pieces that unpack the meaning of religious materialism or commentaries on the persistent ubiquity of religious kitsch.

Peruse the prompts below as you consider how to cover religion at home:

  • Home altars: How do home altars function in the everyday lives of the faithful? And, how might these stories shine a light on relatively underreported or often misunderstood practices?
  • Individualization: How has the individualization of spiritual practices led to a change in how religion is practiced at home?
  • Digital influencers: How do digital influencers who share their prayer nooks, altars or other at-home (and homemade) sacred spaces impact the practice of religion at home? How are other digital practices impacting “religion at home” or altering it to keep pace with the speed of technological change and the changes it brings to everyday life?
  • Pandemic practices: What permanent changes to their religious practice did individuals and families start during the pandemic? Why have they continued post-pandemic? How has that changed their overall religious identity and sense of community?
  • Religious objects: What religious objects do people collect and why do they collect them? How do these collections shape their spiritual outlook?
  • Kitsch and keepsakes: What is the ongoing role of religious kitsch and keepsakes in the 21st-century marketplace? What stories might such items carry?
  • Migration: How do practices move across and between borders and boundaries? How do migrants carry their religion with them to their new home? How does religion help them cross boundaries and make homes in new settings? How do diaspora communities attach homeland practices to new places, condense religious objects or events into smaller places or cross-pollinate practices with other traditions?

Relevant stories

Expert sources

  • A Sacred Home

    A Sacred Home is a company that crafts resources to inspire and encourage families looking to weave faith into their homes and daily lives.

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  • James S. Bielo

    James S. Bielo is associate professor in the department of religious studies at Northwestern University. He specializes in the anthropological study of religion, Christianity, American religion and the study of material religion.

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    Gerry Bowler teaches at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of Santa Claus: A Biography and The World Encyclopedia of Christmas, and the co-author of Europe in the Sixteenth Century. He has published works on topics ranging from Renaissance monarchy and Bloody Mary to the Simpsons, the Spice Girls and the history of professional hockey.

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  • Patricia Cecil

    Patricia Cecil is a specialist curator at the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. Her work focuses on enhancing insight into the ways faith and religion shaped and were shaped by World War I and its aftermath. 

  • Gwendolyn Gillson

    Gwendolyn Gillson researches at the intersection of anthropology of religion, East Asian studies and gender studies. Her work at Illinois College broadly examines how women craft their experiences of Buddhism to deal with the loneliness endemic to the dissolution of traditional Japanese social structures brought about by urbanization and globalization.

  • Hannah Gould

    Hannah Gould is a cultural anthropologist in Australia interested in death, Buddhism and material culture in Australia and Northeast Asia. Gould’s research spans new traditions and technologies of Buddhist death rites, the life cycle of religious materials and modern lifestyle movements.

  • Matthew Hayes

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  • Jessica Hughes

    Jessica Hughes is senior lecturer in classical studies at The Open University in the United Kingdom. Her research specialisms include votive offerings, classical reception and the changing religious landscape of Campania, Southern Italy.

  • Paul Christopher Johnson

    Paul Christopher Johnson is professor of history at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on religious practices, diaspora religions and the practice of secrecy in the Americas, especially in Brazil and the Caribbean.

  • Sam Kestenbaum

    Sam Kestenbaum is a journalist covering religion in America. He has written about religious life during and in response to the pandemic, including a profile of Clay Clark, the frontman of a prophecy-and-politics roadshow; New Age author Christiane Northrup’s conspiracy makeover; a faith-healing TikToker whose fandom grew during lockdown months; and a Pentecostal church that tripled in size after flouting health orders. He also has a robust collection of obscure religious records you should check out.

  • Alina Kokoschka

    Alina Kokoschka is a researcher in Islamic studies, specializing in the aesthetics of Islamization, with a focus on the material worlds of Islam and Arabic script in the digital space. She also has interest in the relationship between people and things as well as criticism of representations of Islam and “Islamic art.”

  • Cindy S. Lee

    Cindy S. Lee is a Taiwanese-American spiritual director and aspiring mystic. She leads retreats in the areas of Christian mysticism and BIPOC centered spirituality. She also mentors and trains spiritual directors, and is particularly interested in supporting BIPOC spiritual directors.

  • Sarah Luginbill

    Sarah Luginbill is a visiting assistant professor in history and the humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio. Luginbill is interested in the intersection of museums and objects, especially religious or spiritual items. She currently researches portable Mass kits used by Catholic chaplains in the U.S. military during World Wars I and II.

  • Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada

    Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada is associate professor of religion at Kalamazoo College, where she teaches classes on religion and masculinity, Catholics in the Americas, urban religion and religions of Latin America. She is an ethnographer, and her research focuses on material culture, contemporary Catholicism, and gender and embodiment.

  • Susan Katz Miller

    Susan Katz Miller is an author and journalist who has written widely about multiple religious belonging. In 2013, she published Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family. Her book The Interfaith Family Journal was published in 2019.

  • David Morgan

    David Morgan is a professor of religious studies with a secondary appointment in art history and visual studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He is an expert in the history of religious visual culture, art history, and religion and media. He is the author of The Forge of Vision: A Visual History of Modern Christianity and The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in America.

  • Regina Sandler-Phillips

    Regina Sandler-Phillips is a rabbi, chaplain and educator. She is the founder of the Hevra Kadisha (sacred Jewish burial fellowship) at Park Slope Jewish Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. She has kept the vigil over Jewish dead in hospitals, private homes and funeral parlors, and is an acknowledged authority on Jewish funeral issues.

  • Noam Sienna

    Noam Sienna is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. He is a scholar of Jewish culture and history, a Jewish educator and a Hebrew calligrapher and book artist. His academic work has focused on Jewish communities in the Islamic world, from the Middle Ages to the present, including their domestic practices.

  • Lauren Turek

    Lauren Turek is associate professor of history at Trinity University in San Antonio. Turek is a specialist in U.S. diplomatic history and American religious history and is the author of To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations, which examines the growth and influence of Christian foreign policy lobbying groups in the United States beginning in the 1970s.

  • Kaitlyn Ugoretz

    Kaitlyn Ugoretz is an anthropologist of religion and the associate editor of publications at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, including the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. Ugoretz specializes in contemporary Japanese religion, globalization, technology and media. Her digital ethnographic research focuses on the globalization of Shinto and the development of transnational online Shinto communities.

  • “Visiting Sacred Spaces”

    Etiquette guide to visiting houses of worship and sacred spaces for various religions.

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