218 Nancy T. Ammerman
experience beyond words and ideas that is inherently communal and identity defining.
Similarly, rhythmic common movement is a powerful bonding force that creates com-
munity and establishes practices that become part of a member’s repertoire of action
(see Bellah, Chapter 3, this volume). By supplying and reinforcing habitual gestures and
actions, religious organizations orient their participants toward the sacred dimensions
of experience.
While religious organizations generate and sustain powerful narratives, the inter-
sectionality of identities and the permeability of modern institutional boundaries guar-
antee that these narratives will not remain singular or untouched. Even institutional
religious participation is not always limited to a single organization or tradition. Nancy
Eiesland describes one such multiple-religious family, residents of an Atlanta exurb
(Eiesland 2000). While they are members of the local United Methodist Church, the wife
attends meetings of a “Grief Relief” support group at the nearby Baptist megachurch.
She has siblings who are Presbyterian and Catholic, respectively. Her husband grew up
with little attachment to any faith, and neither of them had been part of a Methodist
church before joining this one. The religious narratives in which they participate in-
clude elements from all these ties at once. It would be a mistake to say that they “are”
Methodist. They are constructing religious identities that weave together stories from
all these experiences of religious community and faith.
Given that members participate in multiple public narratives, from both religious
and secular institutional sources, we can ask which religious institutions supply the
most robust and portable plot lines. The narratives supplied by religious organiza-
tions may be more or less richly nuanced, allowing them to address wider or nar-
rower ranges of human existence. They may also be more or less able to incorporate
counter-narratives, making sense of the very events that would seem to challenge their
plausibility.^19 Part of the analyst’s job is to assess the degree to which any given religious
organization is generating, nurturing, and extending the language, grammar, gestures,
and stories that are capable of surviving in the everyday practical competition among
modern identity narratives.
Over the last forty years, for instance, liberal Protestant traditions have notoriously
neglected their unique narratives, creating a time of “vanishing boundaries” (Hoge,
Johnson, and Luidens 1994). Higher education has led to increasing knowledge about
multiple religious traditions and to increasing contact (including intermarriage) with
persons from those traditions (Wuthnow 1988). The typical period of youthful explo-
ration has extended well into adulthood, and increasing numbers of liberal Protestant
youth have simply never returned. Whatever religious accounts they may have learned
as children are now buried beneath layers of new experience that may or may not ex-
tend those childhood stories. Even their parents are hard-pressed to give an account
of their religious identity that extends beyond an attempt to “do unto others as you
would have them do unto you” (Ammerman 1997b).
Our recent research found, for instance, that barely one-third of the members of
the Episcopal and United Church of Christ congregations we surveyed had grown
up as Episcopalians or Congregationalists (or in the other denominations out of
which the merged UCC was formed), respectively. Not surprisingly, persons who are
(^19) Christian Smith (1998) argues that it is precisely this ability to explain its enemies that has
rendered American evangelicalism so robust.