Abstract
This article explores the place and meaning of religion within families during the post-World War II years. It draws selected examples from two completed oral history projects, one that focused on the nature of church life in Victoria, British Columbia, and another which examined the discourses and practices of secularism in the Pacific Northwest. Although they were conducted for different projects, both sets of interviews reveal the centrality of family to religious (and irreligious) practice and identity in postwar North America. Such moments also suggest that family religion often involved contestation and uncertainty, and that it was lived in ways that cannot be easily fit into discrete, either/or categories such as sacred/secular, elite/popular, or clergy/lay. The analytic concept of lived religion, which seeks to break down entrenched dualisms, offers a useful framework for understanding the complexity of family religion. This article argues that, despite the challenges it presents, oral history is especially useful for at least partly illuminating the complicated, disorderly way that religion was lived within families in the past.
