“Under what conditions does freedom of speech become freedom to hate?” Judith Butler recently asked. Here I will explore these issues in light of recent developments concerning the freedom of speech in Norway. I will argue that applying a cosmopolitan liberal approach to freedom of speech (i.e., along U. S. First Amendment lines) in a European context in which anti-Muslim and anti-immigration discourses are becoming ever more poisonous and pervasive risks underestimating the power dynamics inherent to the practice of free speech in contemporary Europe as well as overestimating the “mainstream” political and intellectual will to mobilize against the populist right-wing’s instrumentalized Islamophobia.

In an op-ed for The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash recently argued that “for reasons both of free speech principle and political prudence,” Dutch politician Geert Wilders “should not be on trial for what he says about Islam.” Wilders, the leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), is being prosecuted under Dutch hate speech regulations for his comparison of the Qur’an to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and for referring to the former as “a fascist book.” In opting to indict Wilders, Dutch prosecutors, according to Garton Ash, are “guilty of blurring the line between attacking the believers and criticizing [their] beliefs.” He argues for instead moving the struggle against contemporary European populist articulations of xenophobia from “the court of law” to “the court of public opinion,” calling upon “mainstream politicians and intellectuals” to mobilize in defense of the liberal rule of law and equal rights of citizenship for all individuals.

Similarly, Andrew March has argued that in a Europe that is often discriminatory and imbalanced in its approach to Muslims citizens, “Muslim minorities in particular have a strong interest in “securing a more fundamentalist and formalist culture of defense of free speech.” Garton Ash’s and March’s motivations for advocating more free speech in response to hate speech are not identical. Whereas Garton Ash invokes the “slippery slope” argument (by which “a purpose to protect individual human beings” turns into a ban on criticizing “any belief”), March makes the valid point that religiously motivated speech has the same innate capacity to injure as non-religiously motivated speech, and that the religious therefore cannot claim any special privileges in regard to protection against injurious speech. The slippery slope argument, most famously articulated by Ronald Dworkin, holds that since free expression is a necessary condition of political legitimacy in any democratic society, we risk unduly interfering with political legitimacy and ultimately undermining democracy if free expression is curtailed. Dworkin is a strong and articulate defender of what may be characterized as contemporary U.S. First Amendment understandings of freedom of speech in their most absolutist incarnations. Yet the available evidence from liberal and democratic countries with hate speech legislation quite simply does not support the contention that such legislation paves the way for more wide-ranging restrictions on speech.

March and Garton Ash do, however, share certain basic assumptions. The first is that the distinction between speech directed against religion or belief of any sort and speech directed at individuals professing a particular religion or belief is easily identifiable. The second is what can be broadly defined as a desire to universalize, or at least to “Europeanize,” an understanding of the freedom of speech rooted in the U.S. First Amendment. Under U.S. First Amendment principles, as elaborated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the course of the twentieth century, the only legitimate restriction of speech pertains to any utterance functioning as an incitement to “immediate” violence against particular individuals, if and when the listening audience is in fact liable to act upon such speech. This interpretation of the constitutional protection of free speech is an outlier in global and comparative terms. But in light of legal, societal, and political developments in the past decade, on the national as well as the supra-national level, European states, and Scandinavian states in particular, seem more and more to be turning toward contemporary U.S. First Amendment understandings of the freedom of speech. For now, formal legal protections against various forms of racist, hateful, or discriminatory speech instituted as a result of international conventions remain in the statutes of numerous countries. Under these conventions, certain restrictions on free speech are permitted under the condition that they are “prescribed by law” and “necessary in a democratic society.” In Denmark, for instance, The Free Press Society’s Lars Hedegaard was recently prosecuted successfully for racist speech. In France, TV personality Éric Zummour was convicted under similar laws. But in Norway, hate speech legislation is more or less a dead letter. For laws that are merely symbolic and seldom, if ever, applied soon lose both their effectiveness and their legitimacy.

The character of racism in Norway shifted significantly in the course of the 1990s, in line with developments elsewhere in Western Europe. The racism of biological markers was replaced by various forms of cultural racism, and overt anti-Semitism became anathema while more or less subtle forms of Islamophobia became palatable. It is noteworthy in this context that the figure of “the Muslim” as an embodied threat to everything from freedom of speech to gender equality and from gay rights to the sustainability of the welfare state means that Islamophobia in contemporary Norway has wide cross-sectional and cross-political purchase. Even overtly xenophobic and racist organizations in Norway now claim on their websites to be opposed to all forms of racism and xenophobia, and merely to be engaged, rather, in a “critique of Islam” and efforts to ‘stop the “Islamization of Norway.” With the tacit support of Norway’s political, legal, and intellectual elites, racism is narrowly construed as relating only to biological markers of difference.

In principle, more free speech and more open access to various media means an increased potential for Muslims to respond to popular stereotypes and stigmatization. And it is, in fact, by no means unusual for young Norwegian Muslims to do so. But to do so under current circumstances requires very thick skin indeed. In interviews with me, young Norwegian Muslims active in the mediated public sphere very often report receiving abusive and threatening letters and emails. At the same time, mainstream liberal editors, who act as gatekeepers to major media outlets, often have their own scripts requiring those who get privileged access to visible positions in the mediascape to play particular roles—specifically the heroic “secular feminist Muslim” and the vilified “conservative Muslim,” or, in other words, the Muslim woman in need of freedom (from “Islam”), and the Muslim man denying her freedom (in the name of “Islam”). “Power speaks only to power,” in J.M. Coetzee’s words, and to be able and permitted to express oneself in public does not entail actually being heard.

Furthermore, many Norwegian mainstream—and supposedly liberal—editors cast themselves as “critics of Islam”—some to the extent of regularly recommending Islamophobic “Eurabia literature” of various kinds to their readers. Their Kulturkampf against the threats to freedom of speech emanating from ‘Islam’ often invoke the 3.0 percent of Norway’s population that is of Muslim background as a stand-in for this generalized other. In these editors’ constant clamor to be at the forefront of the heroic struggle for the freedom of speech, the editorial restraint of mainstream media in the U.S. is often virtually absent. In a reversal of Enlightenment creeds, it is now the powerful rather than the powerless that the freedom of speech is expected to protect. Many of these editors have also expended much energy on attempts to publicly discredit and discourage use of the term Islamophobia in Norway in recent years. It was not entirely coincidental, then, that, in 2009, Norway’s technocratic and influential Foreign Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, described the very concept of Islamophobia as “substanceless rant.”

In early January, 2011, the secular feminist Hege Storhaug, of Human Rights Service (HRS), in an op-ed in the mainstream liberal-conservative newspaper Aftenposten, by far the most influential newspaper in Norway, compared Muslims in prayer during a demonstration at Oslo’s University Square the previous year to “quislings.” Not to be outdone, Kent Andersen, a board member of the Oslo section of the populist-right wing Progress Party (PP), on a personal blog some weeks later, compared Islam to Nazism, and rhetorically asked his readers whether they thought that there could be “moderate Muslims”—as if there were ever “moderate Nazis.” The implication of such analogies, as Ian Buruma suggested in a 2009 New York Times op-ed, is that those who happen to believe in the Qur’an are like Nazis, and that an “all-out war against them” would therefore be legitimate. This is where Garton Ash’s approach would seem to run into some difficulties, for it is hard to see Storhaug and Andersen’s declamations as anything other than speech that deliberately blurs the line between a legitimate critique of Islam and hateful speech targeting individual Muslims. Andersen works in marketing, and, like Storhaug, has close links to some of the Progress Party’s most influential MPs. Once the Progress Party was on the fringes of Norwegian politics, but since 2003 it has governed the capital, Oslo, in a two-party alliance. In the parliamentary elections of 2009, the PP got a record 22.9 percent of the vote. Established in 1973 as an anti-taxation and anti-bureaucratic party, the PP first discovered the popular appeal of anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric in 1987.

Anti-Muslim and anti-immigration discourse has long been part of the political mainstream in Norway—effectuating what the late Tony Judt described as a “social democracy of fear.” Norway’s governing Labor Party has managed to remain in power, in a tripartite alliance of the center-left, by taking ever more stringent measures on immigration and integration, thus echoing the PP’s policies, if not their rhetoric, in recent years.

As a direct result of the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) of 1966, Norway introduced a racism paragraph (135 (a)) into its penal code in 1970. In its current formulation, the racism paragraph may be used to penalize public utterances or symbols of a hateful or discriminatory nature based on attributes such as skin color, national or ethnic origin, religion or belief, or homosexual orientation and lifestyle. In spite of numerous racist incidents during the 1970s and ’80s, the paragraph was never much used. As a result of public utterances he made during a march in the small Norwegian town of Askim, in 2000, Terje Sjølie, a Norwegian member of Boot Boys, a neo-Nazi gang, was charged under the racism paragraph. In his speech, Sjølie proclaimed that “every day, immigrants rob, rape and kill Norwegians.” One year later, a gang of Boot Boys brutally stabbed to death Benjamin Hermansen, a fifteen-year old boy of mixed Norwegian-African parentage, in a southeastern suburb of Oslo. Hermansen’s murderer had been present at the march in Askim the previous year. On an extremely cold winter evening 40,000, Norwegians took part in a commemorative anti-racism march dedicated to Hermansen and his family; it was the largest demonstration ever held in the Norwegian capital. Nevertheless, in 2002, a divided Norwegian Supreme Court acquitted Sjølie of the charges brought under the racism paragraph. The Court’s majority argued that the freedom of speech overrode the right to protection from hateful and discriminatory speech. Various Norwegian civil society organizations appealed the Supreme Court’s verdict to the UN’s ICERD Committee. In 2006, the ICERD Committee found the verdict in the Sjølie case to be in violation of ICERD articles 4 and 6. Norwegian state officials have repeatedly asserted to the European Commision against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) that the Sjølie verdict would now be inconceivable. Yet, with the exception of the Norwegian Supreme Court’s 2008 conviction of Norwegian Neo-Nazi Tore Tvedt for having declared in a 2003 tabloid newspaper interview that Jews were “parasites whom we must cleanse,” there have been no successful legal prosecutions under the racism paragraph in Norway in recent years. Charging and prosecuting Norwegian citizens on the basis of hate speech against Muslims—as the Dutch and the Danish have recently done in the Wilders and Hedegaard cases—now seems relatively inconceivable.

Freedom of speech debates are often construed by free speech proponents and opponents as a zero-sum game—that is, it is assumed that one either is, or ought to be, for or against free speech. Here I must make clear that I am inclined neither to support blasphemy laws nor to defend the dubious concept of “defamation of religion.” Exempting the beliefs and practices of people whose beliefs and practices happen to differ from my own is not a way of demonstrating respect or treating others as equals. The public sphere is an impure place, and so it must be. The current “fetishism of law” makes many attribute the most magical of effects to the mere letter of the law. It is an open question, however, whether the law is an appropriate instrument in the regulation of expression. For, in plural and heterogeneous societies, it is doubtful that any Rawlsian “duty of civility” can be instilled through law, and the emergence of various largely unregulated social media on the web makes it even less likely.

When restrictions on racist, discriminatory, and hate speech were introduced in Europe, in the aftermath of World War II, it was because European political and intellectual elites had come to the conclusion that there had to be some such restrictions in place in order to prevent “fighting words” from turning into “fighting actions.” It is hard to see that when Islam is compared to Nazism, and ordinary Muslims to Nazis, it constitutes a mere “critique of religion” rather than hate speech. The last racially motivated murder in Norway took place in 2008, when a Norwegian-Somali Muslim father of six, Mahmed Jamal Shirwac, was killed. There is solid evidence from Germany to India and from Rwanda to Bosnia that fighting actions are usually preceded by fighting words. Even though history does not repeat itself, in the current circumstances, it would be prudent to uphold a modest defense of European restrictions on hate speech.

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

Barack Obama’s swearing-in signaled the inauguration of a new era (for many wishful thinkers, a “post-racial era”). Yet Obama himself cast the event as a day of remembrance. Picking up where Dreams from My Father ends, Obama’s Inaugural Address calls on Americans to “choose our better history.” To confront and overcome the dangers now facing the United States, he argues, we must revivify values that “have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.” From a political leader who has written with such sensitivity and depth about the presence of the past, these comments invite closer attention. What is the past through which “these things”—”honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism”—are constituted? I approach this question indirectly, by reading the Inaugural Address alongside “A More Perfect Union,” Obama’s groundbreaking speech on race. Together, these addresses indicate how Obama negotiates among three senses of the past. The first sense, the one best represented by the Inaugural Address, is the idea of a hallowed past that draws upon American civic and religious traditions. The democratic implications of such an invocation, I contend, depend on the ways in which it intersects two other notions of pastness. Following legal scholar Robert Westley, I call these notions “the past as prologue” and “the past as bygone.”

“These things are old.” In the Inaugural Address, Obama summons shared values as essential resources with which Americans might confront a daunting list of economic, environmental, political, and social challenges. The history from which Obama derives these values is not a whitewashed or exceptionalist history, but one grounded in the collective experience of strife and unfinished overcoming. Thus the inaugural speech conjures memories of immigrants, slaves, sweatshop laborers, pioneers, and soldiers (of both celebrated and uncelebrated wars), not only to demonstrate how far we have come, but also to situate progress within a larger story of incompleteness and commonality against a backdrop of conflict. As Obama notes in his address to the Call to Renewal conference in 2006, Americans “want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives.” The arc and the purpose that he offered on Inauguration Day built on commitments embedded in the Constitution and avowed in the Declaration of Independence and go beyond them. Obama’s multiple references to God hark back to his earlier reflections on religion and his allegiance to a Christianity in which faith is equally defined by a belief in Jesus and a belief in opposing injustice. Keeping the latter dimension of that faith alive prevents Obama’s conception of a hallowed past from becoming a narrative that merely consoles or that uncritically reaffirms an idea of American mission.

If Obama marries the invocation of shared values to a tradition of striving toward justice, the democratic import of this invocation depends on the relative weight of two other conceptions of the past that are on display, and in tension, in “A More Perfect Union.” First: the past as prologue. Obama’s “race speech” wagers his candidacy on a bold claim that racial injustice is not behind us. Although most white Americans believe that racial equality has been achieved and vehemently resist efforts to reckon with entrenched forms of racial hierarchy, Obama dares to note linkages between past and present forms of segregation and discrimination. “We do need to remind ourselves,” he insists, “that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” Here, he aligns himself with the idea that historic injustice is not obsolete; instead, its accumulated effects can be seen in the fates of the most vulnerable Americans. Further, his admonition to African Americans to “bind [their] particular grievances…to the larger aspirations of all Americans” indicates that to “choose our better history” is to perpetuate a tradition of struggle through which black citizens and their allies have realized political, economic, and social benefits enjoyed well beyond black communities. This is the sense of the past that Obama finds at the foot of the cross on Chicago’s South Side.

Even as Obama reveals his consciousness of a present shadowed by an unmastered past, however, the Philadelphia speech also deftly and surely suggests that some aspects of the past are dead or nearly so. This suggestion emerges in his refutation of Jeremiah Wright. It is not necessary to side with either Obama or Wright to observe crucial slippages here, between the recognition that Wright’s criticism of the U.S. is justified and the suggestion that it reflects a bygone reality, between acknowledging that Wright is an important part of his own past and intimating that Wright exists wholly in the past. Wright’s anger, Obama contends, is fueled by his upbringing in the late 1950s and 1960s and “memories of humiliation and doubt and fear” that bespeak another era. Obama recounts this history with sympathy but in the past tense, and he declines to notice that Wright’s anger might equally be fueled by Hurricane Katrina, mass incarceration, the persistence of residential and educational segregation, or the eroding voting rights of African American and Latino citizens. Further, his observation that “Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive” fails to acknowledge a history in which all substantial challenges to racial injustice have been figured as divisive.

Finally, Obama’s comparison of Wright’s grievances with the racial grievances of white Americans is a brilliant—and troubling—rhetorical move. If it accurately reflects the reality of white resentment, this reflection comes at the cost of flattening historical differences and radically understating the scale and effects of racial hierarchy from the colonial era through the present. Without diminishing the obstacles confronted by poor and working-class whites, we should note how Obama’s characterization of their experience as “the immigrant experience” not only resonates with what Ian Haney Lopez calls “reactionary colorblindness”—a perspective in which black Americans are faulted for not approximating other “ethnic” trajectories—but also occludes the situation of the current generation of non-white newcomers who are the subject of so much vitriol. It advances a version of “our better history” that suppresses the story of racial injustice that Obama elsewhere relates with such eloquence.

As Obama recognizes, any effort to call on citizens to address the lingering consequences of past injustices will be particularly difficult “in this winter of our hardship.” In such a context, omitting references to living ghosts of slavery and neo-slavery, to genocidal expansion and practices of internment, may appear to be the most effective way to ensure the success of measures that will do real good for the polity. But the lesson of the past Obama reveres and the warning bequeathed by the past he sometimes wants to transcend, is that many of the challenges we confront today are the living legacies of injustices that have gone unredressed. Whenever that sense of past, the sense of the past as prologue, slips below the horizon, the invocation of old things becomes dangerous to democracy. For when this happens, it becomes easier to sacrifice (again) the claims of the most marginal and worst served Americans in the name of the common good.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame. See also Philip Gorski's discussion of Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech in "Class, nation, covenant".]

I am not asking whether or not evangelicals practice what they preach. I simply want to propose that there is more to the everyday meaning of evangelicalism than theological beliefs. In a recent post at The Immanent Frame, James K. A. Smith asks us not to fear using sociology rather than theology alone to define evangelicalism. He asks us to understand evangelicalism as a set of social practices and institutions, rather than trying to divine a specific set of beliefs that reliably and cleanly mark off evangelicals from other Christians. Appreciating Smith’s appeal to a sociological definition, I want to take the next, practical step. If we understand evangelicals’ social practices as realities themselves, and not simply as predictable derivatives of first-moving beliefs, we can better understand what it means to be evangelical in local public life and perhaps beyond. We can, for instance, get a better handle on inter-religious conflicts that we sometimes over-simplify as a clash of beliefs. The point is not that beliefs don’t matter in everyday life, but that we should understand how evangelicals themselves relate beliefs to acts in everyday contexts, rather than assuming from a safe distance that theologies on paper tell us everything we need to know. To begin what I intend as just a bit of a cantankerous contribution to The Immanent Frame’s ongoing discussion of evangelicalism, please indulge a quick scenario from my larger study of religious community service groups in a Midwestern city.

The Religious Anti-Racism Coalition, made up mostly of evangelical and mainline Protestant pastors, decided to hold a celebration of diversity during the time a Ku Klux Klan group from a distant town was going to be marching in their city. The celebration needed a statement of purpose, so a subcommittee that included an evangelical pastor with a Charismatic bent, a lesbian Unitarian minister, and an administrator from a regional synod of the mainline Lutheran (ELCA) church took just twenty minutes to write one. “We want to unite as people of religious faith,” they affirmed, “united in believing that all people are created in the image of God.” Evangelical and mainline Protestant members alike agreed that they, and everyone in town, ought to confess the personal sin of racism in their own lives, and they agreed too that “structural,” institutional racism is itself a sin—in addition to the racism of interpersonal prejudice. Now, the coalition had only to decide whether to identify as Christian or interfaith. The group compiled a list of activities that they agreed not to carry out together if the coalition was to be officially an interfaith group. After that agreement, however, most of the evangelical pastors still said their congregations could not participate in an officially interfaith coalition against racism. Two mainline Protestant pastors said in turn that they could not participate in a coalition that was officially ecumenical Christian but not interfaith.

Agreement on the group’s religious and anti-racist principles took literally just minutes, while arguments over how if at all to include non-Christians in a counter-Klan event took months, and nearly dissolved the coalition. A precarious compromise allowed the counter-Klan event to take place in a cinderblock-walled meeting room attached to the local sports arena. Some observers might suppose the issue was that evangelicals really weren’t strongly committed to anti-racism. Rather than look for hidden racist beliefs or weak religious rationales in evangelicals’ credos, however, we can find a more immediate reason for tensions between the pastors.

When we try to understand what any religious people do in public—from voting and volunteering to acrid debating, protesting and even committing acts of terrorism—we often assume it is deeply held beliefs and sacred texts that “make them do what they do.” Social studies of interaction add something very basic but counterintuitive to this understanding of how religion works, and I think Smith’s earlier post opens to just that point: in social life, we don’t just “apply” religious beliefs as if the beliefs existed in some pure, pre-social world separate from us, telling us what to do.

In sociological terms, applying beliefs always means taking on a religious identity in relation to other people. In any modern, complex society we construct religious identities in relation to other identities near to or far from us. People of different faiths perceive “near” and “far” identities, and draw sharper or fuzzier lines between themselves and other identities in different ways, depending on the context and the religions involved. Pastors in the Religious Anti-Racism Coalition had assumed they simply needed to agree on their beliefs about racism. As a result, they could not understand why the work continued to be so frustrating. My close-up study shows that it was this subtle but very powerful social process of self-identification and boundary drawing that made it so difficult for pastors of seemingly like minds on this issue to work together. I call this social process “mapping.” I contend that by examining the distinctive way that evangelicals do mapping, we can gain insight into conflicts that we may easily and misguidedly attribute to clashing beliefs alone.

Evangelicals in the counter-Klan coalition imagined a different context, a different map, from the one that mainline Protestants were assuming. Each side defined the coalition’s insiders and outsiders differently, despite their shared, religiously-motivated anti-racism. Evangelicals did not worry seriously that contact with non-Christians would threaten their Christian commitments. As one pastor told me about associating with Hare Krishnas: “Oh, being at the same event—that’s fine, fine. I rub shoulders with them. We’re in the world together.” The issue, rather, was that he and other evangelicals defined non-Christians—more than racists—as the “outsiders.” Evangelicals did not want to be known publicly as associating closely with non-Christians; that would dilute their reputation as sincere Christians. Mainliners for their part defined racists—not non-Christians—as the outsiders. They did not want to be known as working ecumenically only, rather than interfaith, for that would dilute their reputation as inclusive anti-racists. At stake on each side was public identity and the right sense of distance on the map.

Scenes such as these suggest that being an evangelical means drawing fairly strong cognitive boundaries between Christians and non-Christians, even when Christian beliefs lead evangelicals to agree with non-Christians on some issues. That does not necessarily mean evangelicals who say racism is a sin don’t really believe it. It means they believe that statement in a different context—in relation to a different map—from the one that mainline Protestants and perhaps many social scientists take for granted. Mainliners were not “less” Christian and evangelicals were not “less” anti-racist, because “less” would imply a shared starting point. A better interpretation would point out that the two sides really were on different maps altogether. No wonder each side sometimes found the other simply unfathomable.

To understand evangelicalism’s public presence and its public consequences, we need terms of discussion that help us grasp these social dynamics. The “mapping” idea can help. As Christian Smith argues, American evangelicals generally adopt a powerful, sub-cultural identity. That social fact would be hard to glean from an exegesis of the Bible or evangelical texts alone. One might counter that in the case of the Religious Anti-Racism Coalition’s evangelicals, “beliefs about Christ” simply were more important than “beliefs about race.” Yet we can learn more about people by watching closely and looking for patterns in what people say and do together. If we translate what religious people say and do directly into pre-existing beliefs that we then assume must have motivated those people, then we bypass the social, practical process of religious action. By beginning with beliefs, we turn lived religious sensibilities into a silent list of items that we impute to religious people ex post facto. From a social-science point of view, beliefs and texts don’t talk or act; people do. If we want to understand what it means to be an evangelical in practical terms, we need to investigate not only evangelicals’ beliefs, but also their distinctive ways of wearing their beliefs, building groups and ties around beliefs and assigning reputations to other groups. These social facts are not mere add-ons to the “real” evangelical sensibility underneath. In the sociological view, they are inextricably part of what it means to be an evangelical.

It would be easy to assume that evangelicals are even more strongly creatures of their theological beliefs than other Christians are, since evangelicals focus intensely on faith and the Word. Adding to the confusion is a compound of common-sense notions that detract from a fuller, more socially-grounded view of religion in general: first there is the widespread, common-sense understanding that sees religion ultimately as a matter of pre-social, God-given beliefs and values in the head. In this common-sense view, the more authentic religious beliefs are, the freer they are from any social embodiment. It does not help that this common-sense definition quite often has seeped into American social science writing. To add an extra twist, this default approach to religion, with its emphasis on individual beliefs and strictness of adherence to beliefs, ends up mirroring rather than giving us reflective distance from evangelical Protestants’ self-understandings. Listening to evangelicals in local community service groups, I heard people talking to one another about their “faith levels,” and referring—as inscribed on popular bracelets and bumper-stickers—to “what Jesus would do.” In this context, it is especially easy to go on our default assumptions and treat religion as essentially a matter of adherence to beliefs, ignoring the social processes of identification and mapping that are always going on even as people are professing a deeply individual faith. This beliefs-centered, decontextualized approach does not fit all religions equally well, and in any event it risks naturalizing rather than highlighting interesting features of evangelicalism in the U.S. Public debate, as well as research on evangelicals, benefits when we approach religion as a social process of identification and communication, not only an individual process of maintaining and applying beliefs.

Of course, this is hardly to say that evangelicals’ beliefs do not matter. Whether or not the group dynamics I saw in a Midwestern city would hold for evangelicals in national arenas or only local ones is a question for more research. But if my ethnographic work is some indication, evangelical mapping affects how evangelicals ally themselves with or separate from other public entities, apart from what their Christian beliefs tell them about public issues. Surely that should help us piece together a more accurate, if more complicated, picture of what it means to be an American evangelical, and how those meanings intersect with politics and public life.