216 Nancy T. Ammerman
are always present, and no institutional field is defined utterly in its own terms. All
situations are characterized by a fluidity of boundaries and the presence of story lines
gleaned from the multiple contexts in which modern and postmodern persons live.
While some visible signals, such as race, class, or gender, may act as powerful narratives
across settings, in our own minds and in the actions of others toward us, no single
story and no single context is an adequate account of an identity. All identities are
intersectional, oriented toward the multiple stories of which they are a part.
LOCATING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES
If we are to understand religious identities, then, we must begin by attending to episodes
of social interaction (whether face-to-face or mediated) that are emplotted in areligious
narrative – one in which “religious” actors, ideas, institutions, and experiences play a
role in the story of who we are and who I am. An interaction takes on a religious charac-
ter when it directly or indirectly invokes the co-participation of transcendence or Sacred
Others, invoking a narrative in which they play a role.^16 Action may directly reference
the words, actions, or presence of a Sacred Other, but the religious narrative may also
be more implicit. Once experiences of transcendence have been institutionalized in
rituals, stories, moral prescriptions, and traditions, those practices are then recognized
as religious, whether or not the participants experience them as direct encounters with
the Sacred (or even believe Sacred Others to exist). Participating in practices that have
been handed down through a religious tradition (lighting Sabbath candles, for instance)
invokes thereby religious narratives, whether or not the participants understand their
action to directly involve a Sacred Other. When I say I am a Baptist, you recognize that
as a religious identity (with more or less accurate expectations about how Baptists be-
have) simply because of the implied connection to religious institutions and traditions
I am invoking. Here the distilled and institutionalized symbols of religious experience
evoke religious narratives, whether or not particular individuals believe in or experience
them. Likewise, within institutionalized religious contexts, given episodes of social in-
teraction will be governed by accepted strategies of action that may or may not directly
involve transcendent ideas or experiences, may or may not invite direct participation
by Sacred Actors. Religious narratives – the building blocks of individual and collective
religious identities – are activated, then, by settings in which they are implied and by
actions into which they have been distilled, as well as by overt experiences and direct
references.
In modern, functionally differentiated societies, religious experiences of any sort
have been assumed to be confined either to a recognized religious institution or to
the privacy of one’s own ecstasy. Religious institutions have become the sole social
repository of mystery, according to this view, keeping it safely domesticated and out
of public view. I would argue, however, that this is a very incomplete inventory of
the presence of religion in society.^17 If we take structured-yet-improvised episodes of social
(^16) Berger (1974) argues for a substantive definition of religion that depends on the presence of
a socially recognized Sacred Other. This is basic to his disagreement with Luckmann, who
uses a functional definition. However, Luckmann (1991) also recognizes the role of “great
transcendences,” the sorts of extra-empirical actors referenced here.
(^17) In what follows I am seeking to expand the modern social territory seen as potentially religious.
Berger (1992) makes a similar move in expanding the modern cognitive territory for religion.