But, the study of social order and intelligibility are generally approached as
though the beliefs were constitutive of practices. One may understand that
the objective in football is to get into the end zone, but there are ways “in
detail” of attempting to achieve this objective that umpires, players, and fans,
will rule inappropriate.^6 Without constitutive practices in details there is no
game and hence no objective. The same is true in a religious service.
The two Assemblies of God Churches that were the primary focus of the
research constitute an interesting case study in this regard. In all three churches
the pastors, during interviews, carefully tied practices to biblical justifications
and interpretations, which would tend to support the more conventional view
that beliefs are more important than practices. Yet, the forms of appropriate
and recognizable practice accepted during services varied from church to
church, even though the justifications, in terms of beliefs, official religion, and
references to biblical texts, were the same. The interpretations of belief are in
essential ways detached from, and secondary to, the practices. As C. Wright
Mills argued, they function as justifications after the fact, but not as recipes
for performing.
What we found is analogous to the situation within formal institutions, as
described by C. Wright Mills (1940), wherein the rules, in this case biblical
passages and corresponding beliefs, do not supply sufficient information to
tell participants how to perform required religious practices. Since the valid-
ity of practices is not determined by a correspondence with belief, but rather
depends on local orders of practice, that are quite different from one another
in substance, and responsive to different local contingencies, the fact that they
are all justified according to the same biblical passages and beliefs demon-
strates that those beliefs do not organize the practices.
The texts and beliefs, which are demonstrably inadequate as directions for
how to enact the practices, are inadequate because they are a second order
phenomenon. They arise only after, and as a situated explanation for, prac-
256 • Bonnie Wright and Anne Warfield Rawls
(^6) This is the essential flaw with a game theoretic analysis of practice. It leaves the
essential problem of recognizeability unexamined. Unless practices are recognizable
in their details they convey no intelligible (shared) meaning. Rules themselves are no
help in constructing recognizeability. They are only available as a context of account-
ability that is oriented toward the possibility of being held accountable for the play,
and are invoked only after the fact, but then as if they were in fact ordering princi-
ples in the first place. This is a magical sleight of hand – imparting the appearance
of a rule following logic where there is in fact none.