New Occupational Folklife Project Focuses on Religious Workers in Kentuckiana

This is a guest post by Dr. Nancy Groce, Senior Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center. 

There has been an enormous amount of research on the spiritual beliefs, doctrines, ceremonies, and celebrations of religious congregations throughout the United States. Far less information has been compiled about the day-to-day duties and responsibilities it takes to run a religious community. The lack of information on religious workers as workers — rather than their roles as spiritual counselors and guides — is why the American Folklife Center (AFC) is so excited to add folklorist Taylor Dooley Burden’s recently completed collection “Occupational Lives of Religious Workers in Kentuckiana” to our archive.

Supported with funding from the AFC’s Archie Green Fellowship and recently posted to our website, this new Occupational Folklife Project (OFP) collection features interviews with priests, pastors, ministers, and a rabbi about how they support and maintain their congregations.

I recently spoke with Taylor about her innovative project. Here are some excerpts of our conversation:

NG: What an interesting project! What led you to your research?

TDB: I’m glad the AFC team felt it was a successful oral history project because I know that it was it was very meaningful to me. I’ve worked in churches and I’m currently on staff part-time at a church. As a folklorist, I think we bring our “folklore eyes” to every circumstance. All of that played into my thinking, “Okay, what does it look like to be a pastor or a religious leader?” I wanted to look at their lives from an occupational perspective — religious work as an occupation.

A lot of these people would call it their vocation, but it’s oftentimes a small part of their income. Maybe they’re bi-vocational and they work two places, but if you were to ask them what their job is, they would refer to their religious work.

NG: Tell me a bit about your own training.

TDB: I got my undergraduate degree in history at Western Kentucky University and then my master’s degree in folk studies, also at Western. I’m originally from Owensboro, Kentucky, and I live technically in Indiana now, but just 10 minutes from Owensboro. So that’s why a lot of the fieldwork was done in the area, because I’m from here and I know a lot of the people here.

I come from a long line of religious leaders — my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather [were part of the Southern Baptist Convention]. I’m the first woman. I don’t think I’m the black sheep of the family, but I could be!

NG: How did you begin your interviews?

TDB: “What does a day look like?” You know, that was kind of like a simple basic question, but with these religious workers, it’s not just preaching or teaching or praying. It’s visiting someone in a hospital. For example, during COVID, I interviewed Pastor Kamlen Haokip, who is originally from Burma and now leads a congregation at the Bellevue Baptist Church. He would pick up prescriptions and drop them off at people’s doors. Others, like Rabbi Gary Mazo of Temple Adath B’Nai Israel in Evansville, Indiana, spoke of meeting with people at the hospital or tending to people on their deathbed as being a large part of his job.

There’s rarely ever a job description, and even if there is, what a day looks like often goes far outside expectations. Many of these [religious workers] are on call 24-7, and they’re making, in some cases, I don’t know, a couple hundred dollars a week, if that.

NG: So how did you identify the 16 people you interviewed?

TDB: Religion and occupational work have long been of interest to me, and so I keep tabs on what congregations of people in my area are doing. So, when I was applying for AFC’s Archie Green Fellowship, I already had an idea of who I’d be interviewing. A lot of them are people that I’ve worked with in different interfaith spaces or in different city-wide faith events… or people that I either knew personally or had a connection with through a friend.  Like Rabbi Mazo — I’m not Jewish, but I have friends who are Jewish and so they were able to connect me with him. He’s very active in interfaith organizations, but I hadn’t met him personally.

NG: I imagine that a lot of these people are routinely asked for their religious opinions and for religious guidance, but you were asking something different. Were they pleased or amused to be asked what they needed to do in the background to foreground their faith?

TDB: One thing I told everybody before I interviewed them that the interview was based on occupation rather than belief, [but] a lot of those things do go hand-in-hand, and for a lot of them it’s hard to separate the two. How they see their role defined is intrinsically tied to their beliefs and based on the scripture that they follow. So, I think some of those things couldn’t be and wouldn’t be – wouldn’t make sense to be separated. Maybe that’s reflective of the nature of their positions and that they so often are shepherding other people.

NG: Was there anything that surprised you?

TDB: The rabbi that I interviewed. I don’t want to use the word challenging, because it wasn’t challenging, but as I was interviewing him it made me aware of how some of the questions that I had gone into the interview with weren’t necessarily applicable across all faith traditions. You know, some of those easier baseline questions… I kept using the word “church” and he would say, “Oh, well, you know, we don’t call it church.” I thought the rabbi’s formal training was really interesting, too. It was one of my favorite interviews.

NG: What are you working on now? Are you going to do more research on religious workers?

TDB: Currently I’m entrenched in the beautiful world of arts administration — I recently became the Director of Traditional Arts at South Arts in Atlanta, but I think religious work as occupation, as labor, is important and relevant. A lot of these narratives have not been represented in previous collections, especially because so often when people are talking about people in religious spaces, it is about belief. So, I was excited to be able to share it from an occupational perspective.

As a religious worker, even if you’re not getting paid or getting paid well, it is still very much your job and a lot of these people work twelve hours a day for pennies on the dollar. They deserve to be part of the national record.