Compare methods

	Lived Religion Ethnography	Congregational Network Analysis
Field	Sociology Of Religion	Sociology Of Religion
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2008	2018
Originator	Meredith B. McGuire (synthesis); Robert Orsi	Sean F. Everton
Type	Ethnographic fieldwork on everyday religious practice	Social network analysis applied to religious communities
Seminal source	McGuire, M. B. (2008). Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780195368338	Everton, S. F. (2018). Networks and Religion: Ties That Bind, Loose, Build-Up and Tear Down. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9781108404075
Aliases	Everyday Religion Ethnography, Lived Religion Fieldwork, Religion-as-Practiced Ethnography, Vernacular Religion Fieldwork	Religious Network Analysis, Faith Community Network Analysis, Congregation Social Network Analysis, Networks-and-Religion Analysis
Related	3	3
Summary	Lived religion ethnography studies religion as people actually practice it in everyday life rather than as official doctrine, institutional membership, or survey-reported belief. Synthesized by Meredith McGuire in Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (2008) and shaped by historians such as Robert Orsi, the approach turns attention from what churches teach and what censuses count to what individuals do - the prayers, objects, rituals, healing practices, and improvised devotions that fill ordinary days and often cut across or ignore official boundaries. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews, the ethnographer documents this embodied, material, and frequently idiosyncratic religion, revealing a far messier and more creative religious life than membership statistics or doctrinal statements suggest.	Congregational network analysis applies social network analysis to religious communities, treating congregations and their members as nodes connected by ties of friendship, kinship, recruitment, and shared participation. Rather than studying individuals in isolation, it asks how the structure of relationships within and between faith communities shapes who joins, who stays, how commitment spreads, and how movements grow or fracture. Sean Everton's Networks and Religion (2018) organizes the field around the idea that ties bind people into communities, loose them from old commitments, build up movements, and tear them down, showing across recruitment, conversion, and decline that relational structure is often a better predictor of religious outcomes than individual attributes alone.