CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Mapping the Moral Order
Depicting the Terrain of Religious Conflict and Change
Fred Kniss
INTRODUCTION
The topic of religious conflict and change has been a major theme in the sociology of
religion. It has also been one of the most hotly debated. Arguments over concepts like
“secularization” or “culture wars” have often generated more heat than light. One of
the persistent difficulties in the literature has been the slippery nature of the “stuff” of
religious conflict. It is not easy to speak of things like ideas, symbols, or meanings with
the same clarity and precision that one might use in analyzing demographic character-
istics, for example. InMeaning and Moral Order, Robert Wuthnow (1987) offered several
programmatic essays charting a way forward in the analysis of culture and religion. As
he put it in his conclusion, questions about meaning and moral order “need not remain
the domain of subjective analyses or of humanistic exhortations alone. They require
careful consideration, including efforts particularly devoted to examining the structure
of cultural forms, their relations to the moral order, and the role of social resources in
producing and sustaining them” (1987: 348).
Scholars writing about cultural conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s, in an attempt to
clarify “the structure of cultural forms,” often described the moral order using spatial
metaphors. Several authors, for example, engaged in debate about an alleged “great
divide” between liberals and conservatives in the U.S. “religious landscape” (e.g., Roof
and McKinney 1987; Wuthnow 1988; Olson and McKinney 1997). Most treatments of
conflict and change in the moral order posited some sort of unidimensional bipolar
distinction around which contesting groups gravitated.
The spatial metaphors seemed promising, but what seemed necessary to me was a
more refined mapping of the moral order that would include at least two dimensions.
This would allow the placement of competing cultural or religious ideas, paradigms,
and systems in relation to each other, clarifying where analysts would be likely to find
points of tension or cohesion, distinctions or similarities. Over the course of several
projects, I developed a heuristic “map” of the moral order that seemed descriptive of
the U.S. context at least, and might be applicable more broadly. Thus, much of the
material that follows is a redaction or revision of previously published work (especially
Kniss 1997a, 1997b, 1998). Later in the chapter I suggest some ways that this model
might be useful for new directions in the sociology of religion.
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