224 Nancy T. Ammerman
that are themselves the product of ongoing interaction, both among the diverse hu-
man participants in the drama and between them and whatever unpredictable sacred
experience they recognize in their midst.
If we posit that at least some individuals and some social settings can and do gen-
erate experiences of transcendence, then the study of religious identities should take
place at that intersection where individual and social meet the sacred. Given the hu-
man propensity for ordering our world, we may expect such intersections to occur in
patterned and institutionalized ways. But given the equal human propensity for imagi-
nation, invention, and disruption, we can also expect both internalized and externally
structured religious narrative patterns to shift over time. The transcendent referent that
makes an identity narrative a religious one is neither a fixed set of institutional symbols
nor an utterly chaotic experience in which selves and situations are redefined by divine
fiat. It is at once both structured and emergent.
Individuals improvise religious narratives out of past experience and interaction,
the other times and places in which sacred actors and institutions have had a role.
Their culture and its institutions create situations that are more or less open to religious
action. From both the existing themes of an individual autobiography and the available
themes in the situation, episodes emerge and are “emplotted.” Describing religious
identities is not a matter of asking a checklist of categorical questions, but a matter
of analyzing a dynamic process, the boundaries of which cannot be assumed to fall
neatly within private or personal domains. Intersectionality means that no situation
or identity is ever utterly devoid of multiple narratives, both public and private, sacred
and secular. People can signal the presence of religious ideas, symbols, story lines, and
sacred coparticipants within a wide range of social contexts, both to themselves and to
others, invoking religious narratives of widely varying scope and robustness. Wherever
those religious signals are being generated and received, new narratives are being created
and old ones retold. Understanding religious identities will require that we listen for
stories in all their dynamic complexity, situating them in the multiple relational and
institutional contexts in which contemporary people live their lives.