Mapping the Moral Order 341
authoritarian directions as they grew and institutionalized. The Church of Scientology
is a good example of such an evolution. More recently, “new age” movements and
the expansion of Eastern immigrant religions in the United States, especially Hinduism
and Buddhism, are repopulating this corner of the map. But many of these groups are
also being pulled toward the mainstream. I will discuss this in more detail later.
The presence of so much ideological activity in locations off the mainstream belies
the notion that American religion or culture is best described in bipolar terms. It also
raises significant questions for the thesis that a “culture war” is underway. The presence
of active peripheral ideologies complicates easy coalition building, and mitigates cul-
tural tension within the mainstream by exerting crosscutting pressures. I will say more
about this later.
EMPIRICAL AND THEORETICAL APPLICATIONS
Understanding Intragroup Conflict
The “moral order map” provides a useful heuristic for analyzing many of the specific
cultural or religious conflicts that interest sociologists, especially those involving “sects”
and “cults.” These terms usually refer to groups that lie “off the diagonal” on the
moral order map. The map helps us to be clearer about just how these groups differ
from the mainstream. In my work, I have used the map to analyze ideological conflict
among American Mennonites. I argue that Mennonites are a peripheral group because
they combine the paradigms of traditionalism and communalism, a configuration that
places them outside the mainstream of American ideological discourse. Throughout
their history, they have combined an emphasis on transcendent moral and spiritual
values, biblical and communal authority, and denial of individual interests in favor of
the collectivity (i.e., traditionalism), with a concern for egalitarianism, social justice,
pacifism, environmental conservation, mutual aid, and the like (i.e., communalism).
This ideological peripherality has been a source of conflict for Mennonites. Their
combination of traditionalism and communalism has been especially uneasy within
the context of twentieth-century America. Mennonite individuals and groups who are
primarily concerned with traditionalism have often looked to the American right for
external supportive links. Those most concerned with communalism, by contrast, have
looked to the American left. When these external links come to the fore, various social
structural cleavages come into alignment. At particular times in Mennonites’ history,
the internal cleavage between paradigms has aligned with external cleavages between
fundamentalists and modernists in American religion and between the right and the
left in American politics. Increased conflict along external cleavages results in the emer-
gence or intensification of internal conflict.
The dotted-line diagonal in Figure 23.2 represents an imaginary line dividing the
American right from the left. Note that the right-left division becomes an internal cleav-
age for Mennonite ideology. It would be expected that, during times of unusual ideolog-
ical dynamism within the mainstream (“unsettled times” to use the concept suggested
by Swidler [1986]), the internal cleavage between traditionalism and communalism
would become more salient and thus conflict would be more likely to emerge around
these paradigms. The hypothesis would be that if either or both of these paradigms
are objects of contention in the mainstream, then the cleavage between them would