Religious Identities and Religious Institutions 223
permeability of boundaries and the intersectionality of identity require more subtle
tools of analysis than the categorical checklists of old. It requires tools that will let us
move beyond either/or assumptions about religious identity.
We might begin with a not-so-simple catalogue of religious narratives, looking for
the chapters and themes that are most common in different social locations. To what
extent does a person use various religious stories as organizing frames for the episodes
of a life? Do those stories come from and resonate with specific religious traditions?
What narratives occur most commonly as markers of membership in various religious
collectivities? And how are religious narratives and social action implicated in each
other across institutional boundaries? Both the cataloguing and the organizing are basic
tasks mandated by the multiple arenas and permeable boundaries of the late modern
world.
As with any other identity, however, we cannot understand the nature of religious
identities without also asking questions of institutional power and hegemony. We need
to know what the existing plot rules are and what resources various actors bring to the
scene. Under what conditions, for instance, are glimpses of transcendence allowed to
intrude on everyday, ordered, reality? How and where does the meta-narrative of ra-
tionality, progress, and Enlightenment, exclude accounts that reference sacred actors
and experiences? How is the idea of a secular state being renegotiated to include (per-
haps) new public arenas in which religious narratives can be voiced (Casanova 1994;
Carter 1993)? Attention to all the ways in which cultural (and religious) elites shape the
available narratives is a critical project for those who wish to understand the formation
of religious identities. We need attention to the various ways in which mechanisms
of culture and state make some narratives more available and permissible than oth-
ers. Questions of power and domination are central to the construction of religious
identities no less than to any other sort.
It is important to note that the structures that shape religious identity formation
are not only those imposed by powerful secular authorities. They are also the very re-
ligious institutions that claim legitimate authority to determine who may give voice
to their narratives. By the stories they tell and the people they valorize, religious insti-
tutions highlight some life plans and ignore or denigrate others (Nason-Clark 1997).
Mostly these messages are carried by the routine activities and habits of the participants,
but overt sacred authorities can step in, as well. Whether silencing a Southern Baptist
woman who entertains the possibility of a clergy identity or excluding a Methodist man
who constructs a story in which he and a partner live in a religiously blessed union,
religious institutions intervene to control the stock of identity narratives available to
their participants.
But even religious authority is not unchangeable. All narratives of identity – both
individual and collective – are both constructed and constrained. We listen for the
public narratives we recognize and tell the personal stories that have shaped us. And
in the midst of those intersecting narratives, we continually recreate an autobiogra-
phy that is “coherent, but constantly revised” (to return to Giddens’s [1991] words).
While powerful authorities keep existing stories in place, new narratives are constantly
emerging. Ongoing stories are disrupted by unexpected events and deliberate innova-
tion. Accounts from one arena are imported into another, as new participants carry
plots from place to place. The study of religious identity is not the study of external
assaults on an unchanging religious core. Rather, it is the study of religious narratives