Questions concerning religious conceptions and church customs

The socio-economic changes of the early 19th century were believed to have led to religious conceptions differentiating and customs not being taken for granted any more. The scientists held that only small parts remained of an earlier natural and unitary ecclesiastic culture.

Based on this view the researchers conducted an extensive project to gather information about those remains of this earlier church life that were still to be found, in the same way that general ethnography conducted research on customs in other areas of life. The researchers were of the opinion that earlier research had ignored the spiritual side of folk life and that this was problematic since it missed an important part of the daily life and ways of thinking of the population that were deeply rooted in Christianity.