The Dialectics of Belief and Practice: Religious Process as Praxis

Abstract

Contrary to the view that beliefs drive religious behavior, we argue that enacted practices in their details are essential to the faith experience. In keeping with C. Wright Mills (1940) argument that rules cannot be followed, and Emile Durkheim's much neglected argument (1912) that beliefs provide only retrospective accounts of social action, not recipes for its enactment, we find that religious process, as a prospective matter, must be carefully orchestrated in empirically recognizable ways in order to create and sustain belief. They must prospectively exhibit expected local order details, as practices, in order to be accepted in a particular religious context. This paper describes general beliefs and the local order details of several practices involved in Assemblies of God religious services. Cases sanctioned as inappropriate are also analyzed as evidence that practices must be recognizable in their details in order to work as expressions of belief in particular religious contexts.