Social science research in religion seems to be losing sight of the middle ground where institutions and individuals interact and thus struggles to offer a constructive response to the dilemmas facing scholars of religion more generally. In response, this dissertation aims to bolster the efforts of those calling for an examination of the connections between lived religion and institutional fields. Viewing religion as a field or network visible through the interaction of individuals and institutions within it makes clear the object of social research and indicates a reflexive method for ethnographic research.

Specifically, it is proposed that: (a) religion in general is a discursive field or network of communication and communicative action, definable only within its specific situation; (b) a "religion" in particular is a set of cohesive segmentary social networks characterized by discourse and communicative action in service of whatever is situationally defined as religious (most typically involving motivations and purposes commonly apprehended as related to the ultimate conditions of human existence); (c) lived religion, therefore, is empirically visible to the scholar solely through language and behavior by agents acting within those social networks; and (d) because of his or her active role in perceiving and interacting with and within the social networks that structure religious fields, the empirical scholar inherently and inevitably is a part of the field itself, which simply cannot exist without the relationship between the researcher and the object of study.

These claims are illustrated with case studies using a variety of empirical methods; many underlying concerns remain the same regardless of how a particular situation is examined. Two cases (Japanese mizuko kuyo rituals and the True Love Waits chastity campaign) are based on analysis of primary and secondary sources, three others in ethnographic field research (Jews in postsocialist Slovakia, a "Generation X" church, and a Jewish seeker service), and one case (the Jewish emergent phenomenon) in a combination. The cases illustrate how to define and study religion empirically when it seems to be visible primarily in the interstitial middle ground where people articulate their sense of self and negotiate their relationships with one another.