“The Impress of the Impression”: An Affective Approach to Lived Religion

how does lived religion feel? This essay begins with that question to examine how religious authority and theological meaning take shape through affective, embodied responses to moments of care, crisis, and uncertainty. Rather than treating religion as a static system of beliefs or institutional practices, it approaches religious life as something emergent—cultivated in gestures, sensations, and the improvisational use of what lies within reach. In these charged encounters, the boundaries between doctrine and experience, ritual and instinct, blur and shift. Lived religion, in this sense, is not only something people think or do; it is something they navigate with their whole bodies—an unfolding process shaped by memory, mood, and material context. What follows is an exploration of these dynamics, tracing how affect and assemblage make religious life legible in unexpected ways.I am sitting in an adult Sunday School class at the local congregation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The lesson is called “In Remembrance” and draws from the church's correlated global New Testament curriculum, a manual called Come, Follow Me, which is being used all over the world this Sunday. During the week, many class members prepared for the discussion by reading particular chapters from the New Testament narrative accounts in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John. The class discusses some of the themes from the stories of a woman anointing Jesus at Bethany, the last supper, and Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. The lessons in Come, Follow Me center a paradigmatic Latter-day Saint hermeneutic known as “likening the scriptures.” Likening scripture is a mode of interpretation and performance that encourages Latter-day Saints to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22–25; 1 Nephi 19:23). In the final minutes of the class, the teacher poses a challenge to the group taken from the manual: “In your culture, washing others’ feet may not be a customary way to serve. But consider what you can do to follow the Savior's example of humble service.”1Sharon raises her hand. She is in her early sixties and converted to Mormonism with her husband nearly forty years ago. A mother of five, she has served in leadership callings within the church's women-led auxiliary organizations and as a temple worker (officiant), administering ordinances to other women. She begins to tell the class about the death of her nineteen-year-old son, who passed away in 2007. John, who had just moved into his own apartment, was discovered unconscious in a diabetic coma resulting in significant cerebral swelling that caused irreversible brain damage. The family eventually made the difficult choice to remove him from life support. Sharon describes the experience of seeing her son enter the stage of active death, saying: “I didn't know why but I needed to wash his feet. I couldn't explain why I had the feeling but I just felt impressed to do it” (my emphasis). Sharon describes how she found a blue plastic hospital basin and washed John's feet. For her, it was a final act of service, a moment of consecration where she could emulate the love of Jesus that also echoes the unspoken ordinary embodied moments of motherhood—the tenderness of bathing, comforting, and caring for a child.2This story echoes another told by Sarah Rich, an early Mormon convert who joined the LDS Church one hundred and fifty years before Sharon. Rich describes how a teenaged boy, George Patten, who had been placed in her family's care in the spring of 1847, became seriously ill during their journey to Salt Lake Valley. While Sarah watched over him during the night, she prayed for God “to impress it upon me what to do for poor George.” Following this petition, Rich wrote: I was led by my feelings to put a teaspoonful of consecrated oil in his mouth; his tongue was drawn far back in his mouth and was very black, and his breathing rattling and heavy, and his eyes to all appearance set in his head. I did not see that he swallowed the oil, so I annointed his face and head with the oil, asking the Lord to bless the same; then, in a little while gave him another teaspoonful of oil, asking the Lord at the same time with a humble heart to spare the boy and accept my feeble efforts in his behalf.3After these ministrations, Sarah rubbed George's tongue and mouth, gave him brandy and water, made him tea from a Thomsonian remedy, better known today as the herb “bee balm,” and washed the boy's face in water and soda.4 Unlike John, George lived for several more decades.Both Sharon's and Sarah's accounts bring the work of feminist affect theorist Sarah Ahmed to mind. Ahmed describes how bodies are not only impressed by the shaping currents of the world but also exert their own influence to pattern that reception. Claiming that bodies never “arrive in neutral,” Ahmed argues that “what we will receive as an impression will depend on our affective situation,” and reminds the reader, “We need to remember the ‘press’ in an impression.”5 Containing a lifeworld of religious, medical, and childrearing texts, images, and practice within an embodied history of accumulated affects, both Sharon and Sarah encounter the visceral sensorium of the deathbed—the agonal respirations and other physical signs that the end of life is near.Shaped by years of reading Latter-day Saint scriptures, observing and participating in care work and Mormon rituals, both women experience a felt-sense of how to respond to these crises. Sarah and Sharon were both moved by an affective tide that led them to take the familiar components required for the care of bodies and Mormon ritual life to cleanse and anoint the young men. In the gathering of olive oil, bee balm, water, and a hospital basin, these stories demonstrate “the importance of lived experience . . . the significance of nearness or what is ready-to-hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds.”6Attending to “the press of the impression” draws scholarly attention to what is “urgent and pressing, . . . what doctrines, rituals, or signs that men and women have picked up in their hands and are using to engage their immediate world.”7 This orientation moves us beyond static claims about what religion means or what religious people believe, directing us toward the dynamic ways religious actors respond to their worlds.8 Illness, birth, and death are often chaotic and fluid events, unfolding moment by moment. Such volatility places pressure on existing power relations and frequently facilitates the combinatory processes of assemblage—where what is at hand, either materially or conceptually, is brought to bear on moments of crisis.Following Paula Arai's assertion that “if the study of religion is a cornerstone of the study of healing . . . one could argue the reverse holds true as well,”9 I contend that health crises amplify the mechanisms of assemblage, making them legible as sites of lived religion—where beliefs, practices, and forms of authority emerge not as abstract doctrines but as embodied responses to immediate needs. These intensified moments render the dynamics of assemblage more visible, offering insight into how affect and assemblage theory can deepen our understanding of religious authority, specifically, the authority to interpret scripture, the authority to heal and consecrate and to display one's medical and religious ritual expertise—an authority that is inextricably thought and felt. Such authority is not merely institutional or theological; it is experienced and enacted—it is fundamentally lived.These moments of crisis clarify a wider pattern: Religious authority and practice take shape through embodied, experiential, and affectively charged interactions, emerging in the rhythms of life rather than abstract principles alone. These processes make lived religion visible, not as a fixed set of beliefs but as an ongoing, relational mode of being-in-the-world. This perspective invites scholars to study religion as it unfolds in real time—improvised, negotiated, and deeply embedded in context, embodiment, and social life. Crucially, this approach does not position institutional hierarchy or formal theology against lived experience; rather, it shows how doctrines, offices, and revelatory authority are themselves enacted and sustained through embodied and affective practices.This dynamic becomes particularly vivid in the interpretive practice of “likening scripture,” a hallmark of Mormon lived religion. While the phrase comes from the Book of Mormon, the impulse to apply scripture to contemporary experience predates the book's publication and has remained central to Latter-day Saint modes of interpretation and authority. Mormonism offers a particularly generative case for affect and assemblage theory in the study of lived religion, precisely because affective and synthetic processes are embedded in its earliest moments. These frameworks reveal how religious meaning and authority in Mormonism are continually negotiated through relationships, emotions, material environments, and embodied acts—whether in ritual, caregiving, scriptural interpretation, or spatial organization. The earliest written account of Joseph Smith's first vision illustrates this well. In 1832, Smith described how his mind became “seriously imprest” with concern for the “welfare of his immortal soul,” prompting a search of the scriptures. He later emphasized the power of James 1:5, writing that “never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine.” Here, scriptural engagement, emotional intensity, and physical cognition are entangled in the production of insight and authority.For Latter-day Saints, to liken scripture is to draw connections between sacred narratives and everyday experience, using scriptural stories as a lens for interpreting and responding to present-day challenges. The church's flagship magazine for adults explains that even though the scriptures reflect ancient ideas, “they provide inspiration for our modern-day dilemmas.” The article continues: “The scriptures are alive. Though they were written long ago, they have application today. That makes them powerful.”10 The recognition of power in this temporal estrangement points not only to the influence that pondering scripture can have in the lives of individuals but also to how it is central to claiming, maintaining, and recognizing diverse forms of authority.Building on Seth Perry's work on scripturalization and biblical performance as modes of claiming religious authority, I focus on the interpretive tensions that arise when communities seek to modulate the scriptural past with the exigencies of the present.11 It is this dynamic—of negotiating temporal distance from a foundational past—that animates living religious traditions and gives rise to new texts, practices, and institutions. In Latter-day Saint contexts, the practice of “likening scripture” functions not only as a hermeneutical method but as a mode of authority-making. It cultivates communities that serve as social fields for transmitting and enacting foundational teachings. Within these spaces, individuals perceived as having credible connections to a founding era are granted varying forms of religious authority.In dialogue with anthropologist Ismail Alatas, I understand this process as a form of cultivation: the assembling of actors, texts, objects, and institutions onto a shared field shaped by historical, social, and affective connections.12 Alatas describes cultivation as a project that gathers disparate elements—human and nonhuman—into an ordered tract that is always conditioned by environmental variables. In religious terms, this process produces assemblages oriented around shared concerns, in which a foundational past, like a long-vanished botanical ancestor, can only be apprehended through its cultivated descendants. The Bible, the Book of Mormon, and other Latter-day Saint sacred texts function as such ancestors: simultaneously stable points of reference and dynamic sites of rearticulation. Religious authority, then, is always a local, contingent, and uneven living process. It is forged through dialogic and competitive interactions between actors who draw on divergent infrastructures and media to assert their legitimacy. As such, religious practices often emerge through associations between heterogeneous activities, inviting us to ask what connections are made, who makes them, and through what means.13This cultivation of authority is not merely conceptual: It is enacted in specific, affectively charged encounters where bodies, rituals, and sacred texts converge. The materialization of religious authority often occurs in moments of crisis or care when the past is summoned through embodied practices to address the needs of the present. One such moment unfolds in Caroline Crosby's account from January 1846, where the affective economy of death and the ritual administration of healing coalesce in a scene that illustrates religious authority's unstable, lived nature. Crosby recounts how she and her sister, Louisa Pratt, visited their cousin's wife, Minerva Stevens, whose daughter, Amelia, had recently been sealed to the Crosbys as a plural wife. Minerva had been ill for a month, and the two sisters planned to care for her and perform healing rites. Caroline noted that she washed and anointed Minerva “from head to foot, with sister P's help. She seemed very anxious to live to receive her endowments in the temple and we also felt very sorry that she could not.”14Caroline's empathy for Minerva's plight swirled with her own ritual knowledge and expertise. Just a month earlier, she and her husband, Jonathan, had received their temple ordinances the month before and had been adopted into Heber C. Kimball's family.15 Moved by a tide of sympathy and anxiety, Caroline experienced an unexpected moment of ritual misfiring that surprised her. “I anointing her, inadvertently told her, that it was for her burial.” Immersed in the charged space where intensities passed between bodies, Crosby was startled by her own use of ceremonial language during the ritual administration, reminding us that “religion, like other forms of power, feels before it thinks, believes or speaks.”16Crosby's account directs our attention to what religious rituals claim to do, how they feel, and the epistemological force they generate. Her extrarational pronouncement underscores the affective power of ritual. Reflecting on the moment, Crosby described the interplay of knowing and feeling: “Notwithstanding my anxiety to have her live. But the words some way pressed themselves out of my mouth.”17 Her technical expertise in sacred touch elicited a world of emotions—comfort, regret, dread. The memory of administering healing rites by the laying on of hands, the imprint of the initiatory and endowment ceremonies, and the embodied power of temple rituals all shaped this moment. Like Sarah Rich, Crosby was an officiant in the Nauvoo temple, a role that deepened her ritual authority and reinforced women's participation in healing practices. The temple rites expanded female religious power and shaped how women understood their capacity to mediate between the physical and spiritual realms. In doing so, they blended ritual expertise with embodied care, revealing how affective knowledge was central to early Mormon women's religious authority.Building on ritual authority's embodied, affective dimensions, it is crucial to recognize how medical and religious ideas intermingle within these lived assemblages, shaping and reshaping one another in ways that transcend neat categorical boundaries. In these assemblages, medical and religious ideas and objects flow into each other, modifying and energizing each other, revealing something that is never just religion and never just medicine. Significantly, cultivating authority requires acts of “curation, description, exploration and innovation” that augment foundational teachings and are inextricable from the community as it requires their consent, revealing its fundamentally dialogic nature.18 What might be perceived as an authoritative teachings in one community might be seen as an unacceptable innovation in another, and these judgments shift over time as they are questioned and contested.Thus, in the twenty-first century, Sharon did not anoint with oil as that is now normatively framed as a priesthood ordinance performed only by men outside the temple—nor did she administer brandy as Latter-day Saint health codes forbid alcohol.19 Those within her community understand her administrations as those of a grieving mother, her foot washing a beautiful likening of scripture, but not a priestly action. By contrast, Sarah Rich's experience would more likely be understood as a religious ritual, foregrounding her performance of priestly rites in the Nauvoo temple, where women had the space and flexibility not only to anoint the sick but to administer consecrated oil internally—a ritual worthy of emulation and circulation by both men and women, and recognized by the institutional church. These assessments are not just the product of rational thought or propositional ideas; they are felt. Ahmed notes, “To be affected by something is to evaluate that thing. Evaluations are expressed in how bodies turn towards things.”20 They are a visceral response where something feels “right”—a type of affective knowledge-making that is pleasurable and resonates with “our tastes, dispositions, and moods.”21 And they can mobilize care and connection, but they can also facilitate neglect, exclusion, and even hate.These dynamics what it means to approach religion as not as a set of abstract doctrines or fixed but as an embodied, affectively charged practice negotiated in the of care, crisis, and In these is enacted through gestures, and boundaries between and religion and the of religious authority come into In this about health and healing the of the of religion and and how embodied forms of knowledge are and through both and affective This is the of lived religion, where meaning is not fixed but and the material of the Within these assemblages, can the of the or a plastic hospital basin becomes a while anointing oil becomes a process of and within the power of living religious