Living Faith Across Generations

Narrative Identity, Moral Cultivation, and Lived Religion in a Family-Based Religious Tradition

Abstract

This study examines how religious faith, moral cultivation, and social responsibility are
transmitted across generations within a Taiwanese family affiliated with a syncretic
religious tradition. Based on oral history interviews with the granddaughter of a senior
religious master, the study analyzes how family memory operates as a mechanism of
ethical formation and spiritual continuity.
Drawing on Halbwachs’ theory of collective memory, Ricoeur’s narrative identity, and
the concept of lived religion proposed by Orsi and McGuire, this article argues that
religious transmission is not primarily doctrinal but embodied, relational, and narratively
constructed. Three interrelated mechanisms are identified: memory as moral framing,
narrative identity as ethical formation, and embodied practice as lived religion.

This study therefore argues that intergenerational religious transmission is fundamentally
sustained through narrative reconstruction and embodied ethical practice within intimate
family contexts, rather than through formal doctrinal instruction alone.
The study contributes to scholarship on religion and memory by demonstrating how
family-based oral histories function as informal yet powerful sites of moral pedagogy,
sustaining religious continuity through everyday life.