Religious Identities and Religious Institutions 209
of testing faith claims against their everyday experience to see what makes practical
sense. She notes that conversion can take many forms, given that we all live with
varying degrees of complexity in our worlds and begin from different degrees of reli-
gious salience. To move from a high-salience Catholic to a low-salience Catholic is a
process to be explained no less than the move from a low-salience Catholic to a high-
salience charismatic. And her insistence that we take practical reason into account
moves us helpfully into questions of the social conditions under which religious ac-
tors, ideas, and relationships become salient within the complicated lives of modern
persons.
Two things are striking to me about this literature. First, much of it proceeds with
little attention to a definition or theory of identity. The assumption seems often to
be that “we know it when we see it.” Even careful ethnographers charting the process
by which identities are under siege or being remade, write a text between the lines
that asserts identity (especially an authentically religious one) to be a singular guiding
“core” that shapes how others respond to us and how we guide our own behavior. We
either have it or we don’t. Other identities may be partial, but “real” religious ones
surely must be total. The task in transitional and contradictory situations, this subtext
reads, is to get the core back together again. In what follows I want to question and
nuance that basic assumption.
The second thing that strikes me is that so little of our thinking about religious
identity has taken the everyday world of ordinary people into account. In looking –
understandably – at the places where identity work was obvious, we have perhaps
avoided the basic questions about social life that ought to inform any attempt to un-
derstand the place of religion in it. How and why do people act as they do? What
guides and constrains that action? Under what conditions do people orient themselves
toward religious institutions and realities? By beginning with a look at recent thinking
about social identity – both personal and collective – I hope to move our discussion of
religious identity to include such questions.
CONSTRUCTING AND DECONSTRUCTING SOCIAL IDENTITY
Zygmunt Bauman (1996) posits that the very notion of identity is a modern preoc-
cupation. Only when human beings begin to be disembedded from traditional spaces
and relationships, long-accepted rhythms of time and well-established activities of sur-
vival, do we begin to ask such questions as “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?” The
notion of constructing a self makes sense, he argues, only when the materials for such
construction have had to be gathered from far and wide, piled up out of the deconstruc-
tion of existing social worlds. Only then do we begin to worry – either existentially or
theoretically – about the coherence of our biographical narratives or the bases for our
group memberships (Giddens 1991).
John Hewitt (1989), by contrast, points out that the tenuousness of personal iden-
tity is simply part of the human condition. All identities include elements of continuity
(being the same person over time), integration (being a whole person, not fragments),
identification (being like others), and differentiation (being unique and bounded). And
every human situation, not just modern ones, places identity in jeopardy. Most basi-
cally, no situation is every fully routine; there are always surprises. Every situation
gives others the opportunity to evaluate whether we are who we have been believed