Conformity and resistance in personalized same-sex prayer rituals in Finland

ABSTRACT This article studies the experiences of same-sex couples in connection with a prayer ritual conducted over their registered partnerships and focuses on the pre-legal context of same-sex marriage in Finland. The aim is to analyze conformity and resistance in the participants’ understanding of personalized ritual through Grimes’s categories of language, space, time, and actors. The findings reveal that most of the rituals had both elements of resistance that were understood as following a same-sex culture and of conformity with heterosexual nuptial traditions. Double affiliation with Christian and gay culture produces complex forms of conformity and resistance. Personalization of the religious rituals was more important to the participants of the study than following heterosexual traditions.