Moving Beyond Text: Rethinking Audiovisual Method in the Study of Lived Religion

While there is growing recognition of film’s role in shaping and illustrating beliefs—especially narratively and artistically—there remains limited academic engagement within religious studies practically working with audiovisual content more generally. This article attempts to address this gap by reflecting on the process of our own work on the short documentary film, Wild Swimming: A Liquid Devotion. In particular, we focus on the methodological and epistemological insights garnered from working this way and reflect on the questions it forced us to confront. The short film was made by the authors in 2024 and explores wild swimming as a contemporary implicit lived religious practice—instead of merely a physical activity involving cold-water immersion. The film attempts to show how it can serve asa pathway toward encountering the sacred. Reflecting on the experience of making the film, the paper explores what the medium can contribute to the ‘empirical excess’ of lived religious subjectivities—particularly the dimensions that are physically encountered and observed in practice, and how audiovisual content might be more fully integrated into the academic study of religion. Specifically, drawing from our experience of making the film, it argues for the value of audiovisual research in exploring the embodied experience, sensory encounter and spatial or environmental ritual as essential components of spiritual world-making. Central to this is an argument for the relationship between documentary film and the ethnographic study of lived implicit religion, especially with its focus on praxis Documentary conventions, we argue, align closely with approaches to lived religion that privilege lived subjectivities, embodiment and subtlety. These conventions allow film to show rather than tell and, importantly, to invite multiple and even unexpected readings. The paper argues that this is especially significant for the study of religion, which deals with realms that often exist outside descriptions in words, because audiovisual media expand the dimensions of communication available to us. Our intention is, therefore, not to privilege audiovisual methods over textual ones, but to consider what additional possibilities they may offer for understanding lived forms of religious practice. It allows for an expansion beyond written textual approaches which, despite the shifts in scholarship to focus on the body and material practice, still dominate the field. By highlighting several of the practical choices made in producing the film, the article also offers important points of reflection on how the experience of the sacred might be further conceived in this way and suggests avenues of focus for deepening audiovisual research within religious studies scholarship. It should be made explicit that the primary objective of this article is to advance a theoretical and methodological discussion of camera-based research for religious studies. Rather than offering an exhaustive analysis of the film itself, we use the film as an empirical case through which to interrogate broader methodological and conceptual questions. Given the constraints of the article’s length, a comprehensive film analysis lies beyond its scope. Instead, the film functions as the principal case study that enables us to develop, illustrate, and critically reflect upon the epistemological and methodological framework proposed in this article.