222 Nancy T. Ammerman
but it is often prohibited from escaping their own private musings. As with any other
identity, we cannot understand the nature of religious identities without asking ques-
tions of institutional power and hegemony. We need to know what the existing rules
are and what resources various actors bring to the task of identity construction and
maintenance.
But religious narratives are also often excluded because they violate the meta-
narrative of rationality. Where social institutions depend for their legitimacy on a myth
of reason, events and interaction defined as religious are unlikely and unwelcome. Un-
der that meta-narrative of modern progress and Enlightenment, individuals and in-
stitutions have learned to separate episodes and chapters in their lives into separate
narratives, submerging experiences that seemed to violate the larger narrative’s pre-
scriptions. When relationships with a Sacred Other threatened to intrude in contexts
not deemed appropriate, those relationships were stuffed back into the closet. Indeed,
as this metaphor suggests, the analysis of religious identities could learn a good deal
from analysis of the ways in which gay identities have been suppressed (Butler 1990;
Rahman 2000). Whether the mechanisms are psychological denial or subcultural seclu-
sion, dominant cultures can suppress identity narratives that violate the basic rules by
which power is distributed or orderly meaning maintained. Attention to all the ways
in which cultural elites shape the available narratives is a critical project for those who
wish to understand the formation of religious identities.
One of those elite sectors, of course, is located in the modern nation-state. Here we
find that religious identities have been excluded (except as expressions of individual
preference) because bitter experience has taught us the dangers of linking God to tem-
poral powers that tax and kill (Casanova 1994). The particular history of negotiation
between “church” and “state” in the Western world has framed a story that casts reli-
gion as a dangerous character to be avoided at all cost. Throughout the middle of the
twentieth century, courts in the United States struggled with the ways in which reli-
gious identities could and could not be recognized in various public settings, ranging
from schools and hospitals to zoning decisions and presidential politics. In the midst
of the arguments, many in U.S. society came to perceive that all public shared spaces
must be kept free of religious events, actors, ideas, and symbols. More recent arguments
have begun to question and criticize those assumptions (Carter 1993). It is simply not
clear when the power of the state can and should be brought to bear on the ability of
persons and organizations to invoke religious narratives and rationales for their public
behavior. Nor is it clear when or if public religious behavior violates necessary norms of
civility. The meta-narratives of modern civility are being challenged and remade, and
these meta-narratives play a powerful role in the ability to bring religious narratives to
bear outside religious institutions.
CONSTRUCTING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES
Every social interaction, then, provides an opportunity for the expression and elabora-
tion of narratives that come from the variety of settings and memberships represented
by the participants. The construction of religious identities is a multilayered exercise
that takes place in specialized religious settings, but also in every other institutional
context. Autobiographical narratives are constructed in a world where episodes of tran-
scendence can occur anywhere; no interaction is utterly secular or utterly sacred. The