Talking to God Among a Cloud of Witnesses: Collective Prayer as a Meaningful Performance

Abstract

There has been much work on the effects that individual prayer has on a variety of social-psychological indicators

Praying for Paisley – Fr Gerry Reynolds and the role of prayer in faith-based peacebuilding: a preliminary theoretical framework

“…While these studies emphasised the varied individual effects of prayer, others emphasised prayer's social and political effects. Poloma and Gallup (1991) demonstrated that those who prayed were more supportive of faithbased political action, Genova (2015) drew on Mauss to define prayer as a performative action in which individuals and groups derive meaning not just, or even primarily, from the words spoken in prayer, but also in the embodied action itself, regardless of worldly outcomes; Fuist (2015) argued that collective prayer 'dramatised' religious groups' socio-political beliefs, thereby communicating values and asserting a shared identity; and Butt (2016) described how public prayer meetings were used as platforms for Islamist political mobilisation in Pakistan. In other examples, scholars explored prayer's relation to explicitly political concerns by using people's own characterisation of prayer as 'spiritual warfare' to explain how it functioned to promote everyday militarisation in the United States (McAlister, 2016); and as a 'problematic' form of 'political praxis' among Pentecostals in Nigeria and the United States (Marshall, 2016, p. 92).…”

Everyday Ritual and Ethnographic Practice: Two Cases Showing the Importance of Embodiment and Reflexivity

“…Scripts are often clearly defined and actions have a known sequence with meanings that transcend the immediate action (Edgell 2012). The imagery of the ritual can refer to transitions and liminality, especially in terms of communicating with a higher power and aligning one’s self with the collective (Draper 2019; Fuist 2015). Members participate in rituals not as nameless actors, but as individuals conveying their own emotions and needs (Tavory 2013).…”

“…In terms of the ethnographic studies, researchers rarely discuss details of their decisions about whether to participate, how to engage, and what to report in publications. Many published journal articles describe observations of ritual in a detached way without reflection on the researchers’ own experiences (see, for example, Fuist 2015; Gabriel et al 2020), while others mention that they participated but do not analyze their own reactions to these experiences within the published articles (see, for example: Barnes 2019; Plancke 2019; Smith 2017; Tavory 2013). It is quite possible that most ethnographers have generated field notes that include their own reflections on these experiences, but it is rare for these to appear in published article form.…”

Studying Religiosity and Spirituality: A Review of Macro, Micro, and Meso-Level Approaches

“…Additionally, one reason that the behaviors studied within micro-level approaches may matter, in terms of affecting social outcomes, is through group-level dynamics. For example, Fuist (2015) studied the effect of collective prayer, specifically talking to God within a group of witnesses. The results indicated that this group ritual was distinct from, and not simply an aggregate of, individual prayer.…”