Becoming Religious as an Education of Attention

Abstract

A vast literature in the social scientific study of religion demonstrates that religious people are made not born. More specifically, researchers have shown that becoming religious is something that people must learn how to do. Adding to this well-established focus on the socialization of religious subjects, I argue that becoming religious also involves learning and being taught how to pay attention. Drawing from ethnographic findings on religious conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy as well as other cases, I demonstrate how and to what ends religious embodied practices, material artifacts, and narratives cultivate actors’ attentional habits and capacities. Via this education of attention, aspects of actors’ lived experience become open to the possibility of new religious signification and interpretation. At the same time, what would otherwise be abstract religious meanings are able to take on concrete, perceptible forms, making them more phenomenally realistic and compelling. By paying sociological attention to the education of attention, we gain new insight into how, exactly, religious meanings become implicated in peoples’ lived experiences and self-understandings.