pattern in their enacted details that participants could work with. Conceptual
reductions lose these patterns – they do not recover them.
What Marx, Durkheim, Mills and Garfinkel all have in common is a recog-
nition that any workable pattern of social practices must lie in the details in
ways that are accessible to participants. They recognize that the conceptual
reductions we are so fond of as “scientists” are not objectiverepresenta-
tions of these relations, but rather, are separate social entities belonging to
society – as end-products. As Mills pointed out, these conceptual reductions
provide for participants convenient excuses and justifications for action – but
turning to them for a scientific explanation of the ongoing order of social
relations is backwards.
This substitution of abstractions for concrete social relations creates a false
consciousness about beliefs and abstractions and about religious belief in
particular – that obscures what is important about religious practice. People
focus on beliefs – and fight one another over them – trying to use them as
transcendent moral values – when in fact it is the underlying practices that
generated those beliefs in the first place. There is a strong tendency also to
overlook the fact that the underlying practices make transcendent moral
requirements of their own: “Trust” and a “Working Consensus” with regard
to practice (Rawls 1987, Garfinkel 1967, Goffman 1959) – treating such inter-
actional arrangements instead as “merely” secular and amoral – and treat-
ing research focused on them as trivial.
But, treating the narrative accounts that result from practices as more moral
and more important than the local moral imperatives and order issues of the
practices on which they depend, and which created them, strips both mod-
ern society and the social science of modernity of their moral center. As beliefs,
religions separate people – but as practices, in-situ, through the ways in which
practices depend on mutual reciprocity and trust, like all practices, they bind
people together: creating solidarities of practice that do not depend on con-
sensus of belief and value. In a pre-modern world conflicting solidarities
based on belief were not a problem. They served to strengthen the bound-
aries between societies and to produce and maintain the solidarity of small
groups. But, as societies become more diverse – and people of differing val-
ues and beliefs are brought into increasing daily contact with one another –
social and moral orders that transcend belief, belonging instead to situated
actions, become essential. A sociology that focuses on local orders of moral-
ity is a critically needed enterprise in a modern global context.
Speaking in Tongues: A Dialectic of Faith and Practice • 283