Социология религии_общее (англ.) / Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

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including the specific institutional context of rules and practices in which it is located (Lewin 1996). And it proceeds from the individual (but socially constructed) autobiographical narratives of the actors. Action takes place in a relational setting, which is composed of institutions (recognized, patterned structural relations), public narratives, and social practices, all of which are both patterned and contested – constructed and constrained.

Somers and other narrative theorists go a long way toward providing the sort of dynamic and layered mode of analysis needed in understanding identities, but at least one more layer remains. While they acknowledge the way in which narratives are situated in particular places and times, they often forget that they are also enacted by actual physical bodies in material environments. The metaphor of narrative runs the risk of allowing us to reduce social action to texts and words, when the habits that guide us, as well as the experiences that disrupt those habits, are often carried by affect more than thought, by deeply sensual memories and impulses as much as by plot lines. I am convinced that embodied practices are crucial. Gestures, postures, music, and movements tell the story and signal our location in it. There has been a good deal of attention to the way social situations define bodily meaning and experience (Collins 1992; Giddens 1991; Young 1989), but less attention to the physical self as agent in defining identity and membership. Here students of ritual may have something to contribute to the analysis of other forms of social interaction (Comaroff 1985; Soeffner 1997).

INGREDIENTS FOR UNDERSTANDING IDENTITY

We may understand identities as emerging, then, at the everyday intersections of autobiographical and public narratives. We tell stories about ourselves (both literally and through our behavior) that signal both our uniqueness and our membership, that exhibit the consistent themes that characterize us and the unfolding improvisation of the given situation. Each situation, in turn, has its own story, a public narrative shaped by the culture and institutions of which it is a part, with powerful persons and prescribed roles establishing the plot, but surprises and dilemmas that may create gaps in the script or cast doubt on the proffered identity narratives of the participants. Both the individual and the collectivity are structured and remade in those everyday interactions.

We are situating the study of identity, then, in the socially structured arenas of interaction present in everyday life.15 Those everyday arenas have two key characteristics we must recognize. First, they are both structured and constructed. Our mutual storytelling is both patterned and improvised. Entrenched habits and powerful actors may maintain existing templates for action, reinforcing the reality of social categories that define us. Nevertheless, stories and characters are constantly being revised. An adequate understanding of both personal and communal identity requires attention to the reality of both agency and structure, both revolution and hegemony.

It also requires attention to the intersectionality of the situations out of which identities are constructed. Actions arise out of the multiplicity of public narratives available to modern actors. Because no situation is rigidly bounded, multiple public narratives

15These are Marx’s “social relations of production,” the occasions for socially constructed actions and ideas that constitute the basis for society (Marx 1844/1964).

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are always present, and no institutional field is defined utterly in its own terms. All situations are characterized by a fluidity of boundaries and the presence of story lines gleaned from the multiple contexts in which modern and postmodern persons live. While some visible signals, such as race, class, or gender, may act as powerful narratives across settings, in our own minds and in the actions of others toward us, no single story and no single context is an adequate account of an identity. All identities are intersectional, oriented toward the multiple stories of which they are a part.

LOCATING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

If we are to understand religious identities, then, we must begin by attending to episodes of social interaction (whether face-to-face or mediated) that are emplotted in a religious narrative – one in which “religious” actors, ideas, institutions, and experiences play a role in the story of who we are and who I am. An interaction takes on a religious character when it directly or indirectly invokes the co-participation of transcendence or Sacred Others, invoking a narrative in which they play a role.16 Action may directly reference the words, actions, or presence of a Sacred Other, but the religious narrative may also be more implicit. Once experiences of transcendence have been institutionalized in rituals, stories, moral prescriptions, and traditions, those practices are then recognized as religious, whether or not the participants experience them as direct encounters with the Sacred (or even believe Sacred Others to exist). Participating in practices that have been handed down through a religious tradition (lighting Sabbath candles, for instance) invokes thereby religious narratives, whether or not the participants understand their action to directly involve a Sacred Other. When I say I am a Baptist, you recognize that as a religious identity (with more or less accurate expectations about how Baptists behave) simply because of the implied connection to religious institutions and traditions I am invoking. Here the distilled and institutionalized symbols of religious experience evoke religious narratives, whether or not particular individuals believe in or experience them. Likewise, within institutionalized religious contexts, given episodes of social interaction will be governed by accepted strategies of action that may or may not directly involve transcendent ideas or experiences, may or may not invite direct participation by Sacred Actors. Religious narratives – the building blocks of individual and collective religious identities – are activated, then, by settings in which they are implied and by actions into which they have been distilled, as well as by overt experiences and direct references.

In modern, functionally differentiated societies, religious experiences of any sort have been assumed to be confined either to a recognized religious institution or to the privacy of one’s own ecstasy. Religious institutions have become the sole social repository of mystery, according to this view, keeping it safely domesticated and out of public view. I would argue, however, that this is a very incomplete inventory of the presence of religion in society.17 If we take structured-yet-improvised episodes of social

16Berger (1974) argues for a substantive definition of religion that depends on the presence of a socially recognized Sacred Other. This is basic to his disagreement with Luckmann, who uses a functional definition. However, Luckmann (1991) also recognizes the role of “great transcendences,” the sorts of extra-empirical actors referenced here.

17In what follows I am seeking to expand the modern social territory seen as potentially religious. Berger (1992) makes a similar move in expanding the modern cognitive territory for religion.

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interaction as our basis and recognize the necessary intersectionality of all such episodes, there is no a priori reason to assume that religious episodes will only happen in religious institutions or in private seclusion. If it is true that all social contexts contain multiple narratives, that schemas from one social arena can be transposed onto another, then it must be true that under certain conditions religious narratives may appear in settings outside officially religious bounds. No matter what the presumed functional arena, narratives of transcendence might intervene.

Rather than making assumptions of religious absence based on the meta-narrative of secularization, or assuming that religious narratives can only be plausible if they have no competition, our task as social scientists ought to be the examination of ordinary episodes of social interaction to determine the presence or absence of religious narratives and practices (Ammerman 1994). If we do not begin with a conceptual narrative that assumes a radical functional differentiation between religious and nonreligious (or between “public” and “private”), we may be able to ask important questions, then, about the circumstances under which religious narratives of identity come into play. Once having removed our conceptual blinders we can begin to ask more basic questions about the social organization of religious identities, analyzing them as potentially part and parcel of the multiple narratives that shape all of social life. Situations where religious identities seem to clash with other identities (e.g., gay evangelicals) or where identities are being remade in new contexts (e.g., immigrants) remain theoretically interesting, then, not because they are anomalies, but because they are exemplars. They provide models that can inform the study of religious identities of a more common sort.

RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS AND NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY

That conceptual turn should not, however, lead us to neglect explicitly religious organizations, places where the society has indeed institutionalized an expectation that religious interaction will take place. Religious organizations are important sites for religious experience and for the constructing of religious identities. They are suppliers of “public narratives,” accounts that express the history and purposes of a cultural or institutional entity (Somers 1994: 619). These organizations create widespread social arenas in which religious action can occur, and they supply structured religious biographical narratives – the saved sinner, the pilgrim – within which the actor’s own autobiographical narrative can be experienced.

Religious organizations establish such narratives through elaborate sets of roles, myths, rituals, and behavioral prescriptions that encourage participants to perceive Sacred Others as their coparticipants in life. They establish a “grammar” for the stories people tell about the world (Lindbeck 1984), a grammar that extends to the body, as well as to language (Hervieu-Leger´ 1993). As Warner points out, music, posturing, rhythmic movement, and eating are human experiences that create community, define boundaries and identities, but also sometimes allow the bridging of those boundaries (Warner 1997).18 Simple melodies and the deep resonance of sound, he argues, create an

18Although Bartkowski (2000) focuses primarily on discourse, he also has paid attention to the use of space, physical contact, and gesture, and other ways in which Promise Keepers have remade male identities.

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experience beyond words and ideas that is inherently communal and identity defining. Similarly, rhythmic common movement is a powerful bonding force that creates community and establishes practices that become part of a member’s repertoire of action (see Bellah, Chapter 3, this volume). By supplying and reinforcing habitual gestures and actions, religious organizations orient their participants toward the sacred dimensions of experience.

While religious organizations generate and sustain powerful narratives, the intersectionality of identities and the permeability of modern institutional boundaries guarantee that these narratives will not remain singular or untouched. Even institutional religious participation is not always limited to a single organization or tradition. Nancy Eiesland describes one such multiple-religious family, residents of an Atlanta exurb (Eiesland 2000). While they are members of the local United Methodist Church, the wife attends meetings of a “Grief Relief” support group at the nearby Baptist megachurch. She has siblings who are Presbyterian and Catholic, respectively. Her husband grew up with little attachment to any faith, and neither of them had been part of a Methodist church before joining this one. The religious narratives in which they participate include elements from all these ties at once. It would be a mistake to say that they “are” Methodist. They are constructing religious identities that weave together stories from all these experiences of religious community and faith.

Given that members participate in multiple public narratives, from both religious and secular institutional sources, we can ask which religious institutions supply the most robust and portable plot lines. The narratives supplied by religious organizations may be more or less richly nuanced, allowing them to address wider or narrower ranges of human existence. They may also be more or less able to incorporate counter-narratives, making sense of the very events that would seem to challenge their plausibility.19 Part of the analyst’s job is to assess the degree to which any given religious organization is generating, nurturing, and extending the language, grammar, gestures, and stories that are capable of surviving in the everyday practical competition among modern identity narratives.

Over the last forty years, for instance, liberal Protestant traditions have notoriously neglected their unique narratives, creating a time of “vanishing boundaries” (Hoge, Johnson, and Luidens 1994). Higher education has led to increasing knowledge about multiple religious traditions and to increasing contact (including intermarriage) with persons from those traditions (Wuthnow 1988). The typical period of youthful exploration has extended well into adulthood, and increasing numbers of liberal Protestant youth have simply never returned. Whatever religious accounts they may have learned as children are now buried beneath layers of new experience that may or may not extend those childhood stories. Even their parents are hard-pressed to give an account of their religious identity that extends beyond an attempt to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Ammerman 1997b).

Our recent research found, for instance, that barely one-third of the members of the Episcopal and United Church of Christ congregations we surveyed had grown up as Episcopalians or Congregationalists (or in the other denominations out of which the merged UCC was formed), respectively. Not surprisingly, persons who are

19Christian Smith (1998) argues that it is precisely this ability to explain its enemies that has rendered American evangelicalism so robust.

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not maintaining a lifelong religious tradition are less likely to describe their current denominational identification as important to how they think about themselves. All the church attenders we surveyed – from the Church of God members to the Presbyterians and Lutherans – chose, on average, “spiritual person” and “devout Christian” as more important to them than their particular denominational identity. But for noncradle members the margin was much wider than for cradle members, and “spiritual person” was a more popular self-designation than “devout Christian.” Having been exposed to numerous religious narratives, they have developed a less particular way to describe themselves. While “religious seeker” is not the term they most often chose, their journey has nevertheless been incorporated into an autobiographical narrative more “spiritual” than “religious” (Roof 1999a; Wuthnow 1998). In turn, congregations in which “switchers” dominate are less likely to describe themselves as strongly attached to their denomination’s traditions. Congregations full of “switchers” often report that they have given up on maintaining the narratives of the denominational tradition, emphasizing a more generic Christian story (Sikkink 1999).

Some switcher congregations, however, have adopted a different narrative strategy. They emphasize practices intended to introduce new adherents to the stories and traditions of the denomination. They teach newcomers their distinctive modes of worship, introduce children and adults to denominational ideas and stories through Christian education programs, and tell tales of the great deeds done through the cooperative efforts of the churches that share their denominational identity. As a result, in these churches the tie between the congregation’s identity and that of the denomination remains strong in spite of the mixture of religious stories represented by those in the pews (Ammerman 2000). Theirs is an active process of narrative construction, of bringing individual stories into a new communal context at the same time that a tradition is being passed on and thus modified (Bass 1994). Within some religious organizational contexts, then, religious identities are being constructed in rather intentional ways out of longstanding narratives. Tradition becomes more a verb than a noun (Calhoun 1991), supplying and introducing accounts and characters to new cohorts of religious actors. By telling the stories, practicing the rituals, and celebrating the heroes, these congregations consciously keep a genre of denominational public narratives alive.20

It is important to note that the narratives derived from religious tradition are not static. Sacred stories, no less than any others, are both structured and improvised, determined by tradition and created out of human appropriation of that tradition. Indeed, primal religious narratives that involve episodes of transcendence are inherently unstable, disrupting existing scripts.21 “Sacred Others” are notoriously unpredictable. If we recognize religious identities as both structured and emergent, then one of the most interesting questions we may ask is about the conditions under which religious episodes emerge in surprising ways, redefining the expectations of the actors in them. To use

20Hervieu-Leger´ (2000) argues that posttraditional religious institutions must mobilize a combination of emotional belonging and rational appeals to an “ethicocultural heritage.” For example, pilgrimages involve the experience of a long journey, the exhilaration of being part of a large throng, recognition by international media, rituals in which potent symbols (like the Pope) are mobilized, exposure to sites in which traditional stories are embedded, and participation in didactic efforts to pass on those stories.

21Berger’s (1967) discussion of “exstasis” and “dealienation” is a particularly provocative suggestion of the way in which religious experience can threaten established orders.

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Weber’s (1925/1978) terms, when does “charismatic” authority trump “rational-legal” or “traditional” rules? A variety of students of religious ritual have attempted to assess the ability of ecstatic experiences to alter the narratives participants take with them into the more mundane world.22 Others have noted that religious experience has its own ordered “flow” (Neitz and Spickard 1990). A deeper understanding of religious identities would surely take up the question of these tensions between everyday order and transcendent chaos. How is that everyday order maintained, and when are glimpses of transcendence allowed to intrude?23 While religious organizations are primary sites for locating religious narratives, they are by no means passive repositories.

RELIGIOUS NARRATIVES BEYOND RELIGIOUS BOUNDARIES

A given autobiographical narrative may contain plot lines derived from numerous religious organizational contexts and from both structured traditions and emergent experience. But it is important to look for religiously oriented narratives in other social contexts, as well. There are enormous numbers of opportunities for encounters with transcendence and equally pervasive religious plot lines available in contexts as varied as mass media, small study groups, voluntary social service activity, even corporate retreats.24 Popular music, television programs, and movies often use religious images and stories, both borrowing from existing traditions and inventing new ones. Incorporated into the telling of stories about love and life, writers and artists invoke sacred actors and images.

In addition, myriad religious sources beyond official institutions supply us with signals by which we can recognize religious coparticipants. So-called New Age practices make their way through a loose network of bookstores and conventions, movies and Internet sites. But New Age is only one small stream within the eclectic flow of religious products and experiences present in every corner of late modern culture. Far more pervasive – but also largely outside the bounds of traditional congregations and denominations – are the narratives supplied by conservative Christian preachers, family advisors, clothing manufacturers, event producers, broadcasters, politicians, and missionaries. But, within every religious tradition, entrepreneurs in the cultural marketplace offer prescriptions and exhortation on how to live out a properly religious life.

These extrainstitutional religious producers are often just that – producers of goods and services that create a material world that supports and expresses the narratives of those who inhabit it. Whether it is a New Age t-shirt or a Conservative Christian coffee mug, clothing and props are used to signal religious identities to whatever community or potential community may observe them. In mass culture, jewelry and bumper stickers can tell a story that signals the membership of some and the exclusion of others.25

22See, for example, Alexander (1991), Neitz (2000), McRoberts (Chapter 28, this volume), and Nelson (1997) for recent analyses of the way religious experience constructs reality.

23Berger’s more recent musings on these subjects can be found in A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity (1992).

24On mass media, see Hoover (1997); on small groups, see Wuthnow (1994); on volunteering, Wuthnow (1991); and on religion in business, Nash (1994).

25Maffesoli (1995), Soeffner (1997), and others have paid attention to “punk” bodily displays, but few have noted the way Christian clothing and jewelry functions analogously to create an implied community of evangelicals within public spaces. An exception is McDannell (1995). Read and Bartkowski (2000) pay attention to the role of clothing for Muslim women.

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The interactions of those who thereby recognize each other as coparticipants in a story extends and elaborates that same story.

Religious clothing is one example of the ways in which religious narratives and practices cross institutional lines. Privatized religious identities may, of course, be at work in any setting. Individuals for whom religious narratives play a central role may weave religious accounts together with the experiences of everyday life. Recall Neitz’s study of converts to charismatic Catholicism (Neitz 1987). As they experience the stresses and strains of everyday work and family life, they “try on” the accounts provided by the charismatic community. Those who finally identify with the prayer group are those for whom everyday autobiographical narratives and public religious narratives begin to be consonant. It is not just that they have learned to experience God’s presence in weekly prayer meetings, but that they have learned to see God’s hand at work in the most mundane of everyday events, whether or not other participants in those events see the story in a religious light. While their conversion is obviously encouraged and shaped by a religious organization, the stories it engenders cross institutional boundaries – at least by way of the private experiences of participants.

But sometimes religious narratives and practices cross institutional boundaries in much more publicly accessible ways. Both Mary Pattillo-McCoy (1998) and Richard Wood (1999) have offered persuasive accounts of the ways in which religious idioms can enable social movement activity. Prayer, hymn singing, and biblical storytelling can exist alongside economic and political rhetoric in attempts to mobilize citizens for action. In so doing, the activist identity that is constructed is infused with religious meaning. The symbols and rituals of “civil religion” are less oriented toward change, but they, too, offer a transcendent account of collective identity (Bellah 1967). Similarly, businesses of all sorts may tell religious stories about their founding and purpose, encouraging religious identification among their workers and customers (Bromley 1998b).

Even when the organization itself does not claim any sort of religious narrative, units within it may be dominated by coreligionists who establish an environment in which they carry on a religious narrative about who they are and what they are doing. At the church I call Southside Gospel Church, several members recounted their successful efforts to get church friends hired at their workplaces (and/or to convert coworkers), resulting in a “Christian” workplace in spite of the secular structures in which it was lodged (Ammerman 1987). Woven throughout the activity of producing and selling commercial products was a narrative of God’s activity in their lives, guiding and reflecting on those transactions, sometimes breaking into their conversations with outsiders, as well. A similar pattern is emerging in our recent research with social service providers. While some aspects of their organizations and interactions are defined by structures of governmental or economic necessity, other signals emerge, as well. Their stories of individual “vocation” and organizational “mission” are full of religious symbols, and their communities of solidarity and support are populated by religious actors.26

It is not, however, always possible to bring religious narratives into play. In many settings, official or unofficial rules prohibit any but the most privatized engagement with religious experiences or ideas. Individuals may bring their faith to work, for instance,

26Ongoing analysis from the “Organizing Religious Work” project, Hartford Institute for Religion Research, Nancy Ammerman, principal investigator.

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but it is often prohibited from escaping their own private musings. As with any other identity, we cannot understand the nature of religious identities without asking questions of institutional power and hegemony. We need to know what the existing rules are and what resources various actors bring to the task of identity construction and maintenance.

But religious narratives are also often excluded because they violate the metanarrative of rationality. Where social institutions depend for their legitimacy on a myth of reason, events and interaction defined as religious are unlikely and unwelcome. Under that meta-narrative of modern progress and Enlightenment, individuals and institutions have learned to separate episodes and chapters in their lives into separate narratives, submerging experiences that seemed to violate the larger narrative’s prescriptions. When relationships with a Sacred Other threatened to intrude in contexts not deemed appropriate, those relationships were stuffed back into the closet. Indeed, as this metaphor suggests, the analysis of religious identities could learn a good deal from analysis of the ways in which gay identities have been suppressed (Butler 1990; Rahman 2000). Whether the mechanisms are psychological denial or subcultural seclusion, dominant cultures can suppress identity narratives that violate the basic rules by which power is distributed or orderly meaning maintained. Attention to all the ways in which cultural elites shape the available narratives is a critical project for those who wish to understand the formation of religious identities.

One of those elite sectors, of course, is located in the modern nation-state. Here we find that religious identities have been excluded (except as expressions of individual preference) because bitter experience has taught us the dangers of linking God to temporal powers that tax and kill (Casanova 1994). The particular history of negotiation between “church” and “state” in the Western world has framed a story that casts religion as a dangerous character to be avoided at all cost. Throughout the middle of the twentieth century, courts in the United States struggled with the ways in which religious identities could and could not be recognized in various public settings, ranging from schools and hospitals to zoning decisions and presidential politics. In the midst of the arguments, many in U.S. society came to perceive that all public shared spaces must be kept free of religious events, actors, ideas, and symbols. More recent arguments have begun to question and criticize those assumptions (Carter 1993). It is simply not clear when the power of the state can and should be brought to bear on the ability of persons and organizations to invoke religious narratives and rationales for their public behavior. Nor is it clear when or if public religious behavior violates necessary norms of civility. The meta-narratives of modern civility are being challenged and remade, and these meta-narratives play a powerful role in the ability to bring religious narratives to bear outside religious institutions.

CONSTRUCTING RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

Every social interaction, then, provides an opportunity for the expression and elaboration of narratives that come from the variety of settings and memberships represented by the participants. The construction of religious identities is a multilayered exercise that takes place in specialized religious settings, but also in every other institutional context. Autobiographical narratives are constructed in a world where episodes of transcendence can occur anywhere; no interaction is utterly secular or utterly sacred. The

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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 rationality, progress, and Enlightenment, exclude accounts that reference sacred actors and experiences? How is the idea of a secular state being renegotiated to include (perhaps) 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 others. 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 religious 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 institutions 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 autobiography 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 innovation. 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

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that are themselves the product of ongoing interaction, both among the diverse human 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 generate experiences of transcendence, then the study of religious identities should take place at that intersection where individual and social meet the sacred. Given the human propensity for ordering our world, we may expect such intersections to occur in patterned and institutionalized ways. But given the equal human propensity for imagination, 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.