of sins, reading one’s bible, and following biblical principles. “Healing divi-
sions in the church” involves acceptance of differences, forgiving others of
any wrongs that they may have committed, and involving people outside of
one’s intimate social circle in activities.
Summary
In contemporary social science it has become commonplace to think of prob-
lems of social order in terms of theorized concepts and to think of beliefs and
values as driving social action. Social solidarity is viewed as a matter of con-
sensus about beliefs and values and not a matter of enacting the same prac-
tices cooperatively in a context of mutual commitment and trust. Looked at
in this way social orders become elusive. Individual behavior is supposed to
be unpredictable, and in order to get a sense of some underlying patterns of
order, researchers attempt to model objectives, beliefs, or projects that actors
may be orienting toward that would explain their behavior.
If, however, one begins with the premise that social orders are produced
through practices enacted in common and that solidarity does not require a
consensus of belief – then the object of study becomes very different. What
actors think, believe or want is no longer the issue. Abstractions and gener-
alizations lose their importance. Social actors are engaged in producing orders
for one another. These orders are external and can be studied as orders with-
out reference to abstractions. The empirical recognizeability of practices is
the objective of actors. Their motivation is to communicate with one another.
Like moves in a game, social actions are only intelligible against a background
of finely ordered and witnessably recognizable local practices.
If, in the traditional way of social science, social action is assumed to be
loosely oriented toward beliefs and values, then the actual details of partic-
ular situations are uninformative. What researchers would look for are the
generalizeable underlying orientations toward value and their variable rela-
tionships. Beginning with a focus on beliefs, researchers then focus on
definitions, clarifying concepts and setting out the relationship between the-
ory and method involved in their work. They ask actors what they believe
and why they act the way they do.
With respect to religious scholarship in particular, the focus is not only on
getting a clear conceptualization of the material – but the subject itself is con-
sidered to be primarily conceptual. What, after all, is religion, if it does not
consist of some basic beliefs and concepts?
278 • Bonnie Wright and Anne Warfield Rawls