Religiosidad bisagra: articulaciones de la religiosidad vivida con la dimensión colectiva en México

Abstract

This article is based on results derived from the collective project “Religion and society in Mexico: recompositions from experience and practiced meaning”. Its purpose is to explore the everyday religions of contemporary Mexico. The methodological proposal is an adaptation of the lived religion approach, but implementing a representative sample of the main trends of religious change in Mexico detected by the Encreer 2016 survey. We propose the concept of hinge religiosity to avoid the individualistic bias of lived religion and include a relational perspective that allows us to focus the analysis on the way individual expectations are negotiated with the system of institutional norms and values, self-identification with respect to a wide range of affiliations and categories of belonging, individual life with socialities and communitarianisms, changes in the continuity of traditions, and the contribution of faith to the solution of social problems in secular environments. Based on the empirical material provided by our interviews, we analyzed two transversal axes in the cases of the interviewees: autonomy in the processes of religious self-identification and action in the world guided by this religious identification. The analysis of the first axis was ordered according to religious affiliation and the second, according to the type of activism developed by the subjects, highlighting the dimensions of gender and sexual diversity. In the conclusions, we assess how the hinge religion approach allows us to link different scales of the analysis of religiousness and to pay attention to the continuities between the practices, experiences, and worldview elaborations of the subjects and their broader spiritual/religious context.

Keywords

• hinge religiosity
• lived religion
• mexico
• qualitative studies
• religion and society
• subjective identifications