Religious Identities and Religious Institutions 217
interaction as our basis and recognize the necessary intersectionality of all such episodes, there
is noa priorireason to assume that religious episodes will only happen in religious institutions
or in private seclusion. If it is true that all social contexts contain multiple narratives,
that schemas from one social arena can be transposed onto another, then it must be
true that under certain conditions religious narratives may appear in settings outside
officially religious bounds. No matter what the presumed functional arena, narratives
of transcendence might intervene.
Rather than making assumptions of religious absence based on the meta-narrative
of secularization, or assuming that religious narratives can only be plausible if they have
no competition, our task as social scientists ought to be the examination of ordinary
episodes of social interaction to determine the presence or absence of religious narra-
tives and practices (Ammerman 1994). If we do not begin with a conceptual narrative
that assumes a radical functional differentiation between religious and nonreligious
(or between “public” and “private”), we may be able to ask important questions, then,
about the circumstances under which religious narratives of identity come into play.
Once having removed our conceptual blinders we can begin to ask more basic ques-
tions about the social organization of religious identities, analyzing them as potentially
part and parcel of the multiple narratives that shape all of social life. Situations where
religious identities seem to clash with other identities (e.g., gay evangelicals) or where
identities are being remade in new contexts (e.g., immigrants) remain theoretically
interesting, then, not because they are anomalies, but because they are exemplars. They
provide models that can inform the study of religious identities of a more common sort.
RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS AND NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY
That conceptual turn should not, however, lead us to neglect explicitly religious or-
ganizations, places where the society has indeed institutionalized an expectation that
religious interaction will take place. Religious organizationsareimportant sites for re-
ligious experience and for the constructing of religious identities. They are suppliers
of “public narratives,” accounts that express the history and purposes of a cultural or
institutional entity (Somers 1994: 619). These organizations create widespread social
arenas in which religious action can occur, and they supply structured religious bio-
graphical narratives – the saved sinner, the pilgrim – within which the actor’s own
autobiographical narrative can be experienced.
Religious organizations establish such narratives through elaborate sets of roles,
myths, rituals, and behavioral prescriptions that encourage participants to perceive
Sacred Others as their coparticipants in life. They establish a “grammar” for the sto-
ries people tell about the world (Lindbeck 1984), a grammar that extends to the body,
as well as to language (Hervieu-L ́eger 1993). As Warner points out, music, posturing,
rhythmic movement, and eating are human experiences that create community, define
boundaries and identities, but also sometimes allow the bridging of those boundaries
(Warner 1997).^18 Simple melodies and the deep resonance of sound, he argues, create an
(^18) Although Bartkowski (2000) focuses primarily on discourse, he also has paid attention to the
use of space, physical contact, and gesture, and other ways in which Promise Keepers have
remade male identities.