340 Fred Kniss
in the civil rights movement. An interesting recent variation on a similar theme is the
“new evangelical left.” Groups such as the Sojourners in Washington, DC, combine
traditional notions of religious/moral authority with collectivist moral projects aimed
at both establishing their own alternative utopian social order and reforming the larger
secular social order as well. I place the Quakers halfway between the southeast and
southwest points on the map. They tend not only to focus on collective moral projects
but also place more emphasis on an authoritative “divine spark” within individuals.
They stop short of granting complete moral autonomy to individuals, however, since
particular manifestations of the divine spark are to be tested and implemented within
the context of the collective community. Hamm (1988) documents the Quaker move
toward modernist ideas around the turn of the century. Pentecostals, while focusing on
individuals as the moral project, hold a similar midway position on the locus of moral
authority. They give more credence to individual experience than other conservative
Protestants.
American Catholicism and Judaism are especially interesting cases with respect to
the scheme I propose. I would argue that they are also best placed in the southeast
quadrant with other groups that hold collectivist ideas about both moral authority
and moral project. Although individual reason clearly has a prominent role in the
development of Catholic and Jewish theology and philosophy, it has also been subject
to the authority of tradition and the religious hierarchy. Kurtz (1986) and Burns (1990)
document this in their studies of the Catholic controversies over Modernism. However,
there is enough diversity within Catholicism, especially post–Vatican II and especially
in the U.S. context (cf. Seidler and Meyer 1989), that any attempt to place Catholics in a
single location is of necessity a gross generalization. The same is true for Jewish groups.
If, as many argue, the history of U.S. Catholicism (and to a lesser extent, Judaism) is one
of “Protestantization,” it may be that some subgroups (Reform Judaism, for example)
now occupy mainstream locations as well.
Dillon (1999a) examines a diverse set of groups that she calls “pro-change
Catholics.” These include gay and lesbian, pro-choice and pro-women Catholic groups
that may seem to belong in the southwest quadrant along with liberal Protestants. But
Dillon shows that while these groups apply individual reason in their challenge to the
authority of Catholic tradition, they also construct an identity that maintains conti-
nuity and solidarity with that tradition, thus recognizing its authority while promot-
ing change within it. In another study recognizing Catholic internal diversity, Burns
(1992) shows that, by separating political and economic issues from matters of faith
and morals, Catholics are pulled in multiple directions. In my terms, they are pulled
toward the southwest where they find allies on issues such as economic justice (a col-
lective moral project), and they are pulled toward the northeast where they find allies
on moral issues (that highlight the collective moral authority).
I have said little about the northwest quadrant of the map, largely because few
groups tend to locate there. An ideology that is thoroughly individualist will not
easily sustain a coherent group identity. To the extent that groups do cohere around an
ideology, they tend to move toward the collective end of at least one of the dimensions.
So, for example, anarchist ideologies would be located here, but anarchist groups are
notoriously short-lived. Some of the highly individualist therapeutic utopias of the
1960s and 1970s also combined individual moral authority with individualist moral
projects. Many of these did not survive for long, while others moved rightward in