What I want to suggest is that to understand the nature of the evangelical world, we need to listen for the distinct evangelical “public narratives.” I borrow this term from Margaret Somers, who writes about public narratives as the stories that identify all cultures and institutions, the shared tales that are constructed out of collective experience and orient the action of those who recognize and participate in them. These “public” stories aren’t just the civic and political ones, but all the explicit and implicit plots that coordinate the actions and expectations of groups large and small.

That is, each situation has its own story, a public narrative shaped by the culture and institutions of which it is a part. When evangelical political figures are interviewed by broadcast journalists, there is a script, and we are rarely surprised. When evangelical parents encounter recalcitrant school boards, or even when everyday evangelical workers try to witness quietly to their faith, there are mutually shared expectations (by insiders and outsiders alike) about how the story will go.

But like all stories, the public narratives that identify a group are multi-layered and subject to twists of plot. Existing narratives about who we are both constrain action and enable innovation. The strands of the existing story give direction to the future, but the fact that there is never just one theme allows new directions to emerge. There often are surprises, dilemmas that create gaps in the script or cast doubt on the implied storyline. More about those gaps and dilemmas in a moment.

If we are to understand evangelicalism, then, we must begin by attending to the shifting store of narratives within which evangelicals live, looking for the actors, plots, and experiences that are taken to belong there. Sometimes those narratives are distilled and institutionalized into experiences that evoke individual and collective memories and mutual recognition (singing “Just as I am” perhaps). Sometimes they are distilled into objects that suggest to those who see them that there is a shared story to be told (quilted bible covers come to mind). Sometimes it is a turn of phrase that suggests a larger story about the world (“I’m so blessed . . . “).

People who use these symbols signal to those who have ears to hear that they are part of the tribe. And once accepted as part of the tribe, their actions (until proven otherwise) will be read through the script that shapes that tribe’s way of living in the world. No elaborate arguments are necessary, simply a knowing nod and smile that says, “I know that story. I could tell you what comes next and how it is supposed to end.”

For instance, George W. Bush had to say almost nothing about gay marriage during the 2004 election for his supporters (and detractors) to be convinced this was a central issue in the campaign. One part of the story—being a born-again leader who shares personal prayers with fellow believers who visit the Oval Office—led inevitably to the next part of the story: we stand together in defense of the family and against the forces of evil that would destroy it.

People who spend a lot of time together—as evangelicals certainly do—build up a large store of such stories and symbols and phrases. Because they attend church with much more regularity than their liberal counterparts, they simply have many more ways to recognize each other and to talk about the world.

So what sorts of public narratives have identified the evangelical world? The longest and deepest set of stories in fact has to do with being born again. It’s no accident that we call these people “evangelicals.” There is a “metanarrative” of sin and redemption at work shaping much of the rest of the evangelical story. They are unsurprised to find the world a flawed place, and they expect that lives can be transformed when people accept the Jesus story as their own. There is both a fundamental fatalism and a boundless hope in how they talk about life.

It is worth noting that the “sin” part of this story is not uniquely theirs. Where they differ from more liberal Christians is in insisting on the singular path—belief in the saving blood of Jesus—away from that sin. On the other side of the Protestant family, it is both the sin and the salvation parts of the story that bind evangelicals together with the Pentecostals and African American Protestants with whom they otherwise differ enormously.

That metanarrative of sin and salvation has, at least in the last couple of generations, become intertwined with an equally pervasive American public narrative about how we get along in a diverse society. From Christian Smith to Alan Wolfe and Michael Lindsay, researchers in the evangelical world have listened for a strident hellfire message and heard instead the everyday stories of people who want to be liked and don’t want to make waves, who translate their story about eternal destiny into a more visible story about kindness and honesty. They declare with their lives, more than with their words, that people who have been saved from eternal damnation are the sorts of caring, hardworking friends and colleagues who don’t succumb to life’s pervasive temptations to cheat and cut corners.

Alongside the narrative of salvation, the narrative of “defending biblical truth” has been the other defining theme in evangelicalism. Yes, this includes knowing a prodigious number of actual bible stories, but more importantly, it means describing what is good and right in the world as “biblical.” That may include being able to cite a verse in scripture that supports the claim, but most of the time, it is the rhetorical use of the word that does the narrative work. It evokes a story of persons and faith communities who spend significant time studying the bible, perhaps stirring up memories of the groups in which that study has been done. It also evokes a longer historical story (a “myth,” if you will) of a world that no longer believes the bible standing against a faithful remnant that knows the bible to be true.

Precisely because “biblical” has come to signal being part of an embattled remnant, the bible itself has been very difficult to use as a tool for undermining the political positions of those who claim to be “biblical.” Liberal evangelicals can muster utterly unassailable scriptural claims about the need to care for the poor or protect the planet, but they do not participate in the “embattled remnant” story that goes with being “biblical.” Disrupting one plot in favor of another is much more complicated than simply engaging in a proof text competition.

But disruptions and complications do happen, and stories do take new directions. In a variety of ways, the ‘60s and ‘70s had begun to undermine the stories evangelicals had been telling about themselves for half a century. They had become everyday participants in a middle-class and culturally diverse world where the “old time religion” of their grandparents sometimes didn’t fit. As they developed everyday strategies for getting along, they also developed an ear for the sorts of stories Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were offering about the threats and opportunities of this new world.

Over the last thirty years, those new stories have taken hold. When the sins of the nation are invoked, people know what list to expect. When the possibilities for redemption are imagined, “taking back” the statehouse or Congress or the courts is part of the story. And the Republican party is routinely cast as an indispensable ally, if not the actual hero. From the grassroots to the federal bureaucracy to the presidency itself, a cohort of politically active evangelicals has signaled to other members of the tribe that God’s work is unfolding in the American public arena.

But there are potential disruptions afoot again. What happens when the Republican nominee is tone deaf to the stories of the tribe, but the Democrat isn’t? What happens when apocalyptic stories about global enemies seem to have done more harm than good? What happens when a critical mass of younger evangelicals starts to make “biblical” and “environmental” stick together in the same story? The stories of the last thirty years are highly entrenched in the lives of the myriad publicly-engaged evangelicals who populate the Bush administration and the courts. No matter what happens at the grassroots level, their positions will give the existing story staying power.

For the disruptions of recent history to result in a new re-telling of what it means to be an evangelical, one or more charismatic figures will likely need to find and re-weave the strands of the story for a new generation. It will have to be convincingly about sin and redemption, about being a biblical people. Within those narrative constraints, however, there are endless possible variations. This is a fascinating moment for watching an old story unfold in new ways.

This conflation of values and sexuality is particularly important because the polls on which the claim was based did not name any values, but just asked people to rate values in relation to other issues like the economy. In addition, the number of voters choosing values in this poll had actually fallen from a high point in 1996, when Bill Clinton was re-elected. But, the Times was willing not only to accept and promote the idea that values voters had swung the election, but also to promote the idea that the values these voters cared about were sexual in nature and conservative in force. Although there was subsequent criticism of the Times’s conclusion that voters in 2004 were more concerned with “values” than were voters in previous elections, there was little to no criticism of the presumption that “values” equals “sexuality,” and conservative sexuality at that.

Here, then, is another echo of the concern Taylor raises. The Reformation makes sexuality a matter of intense ethical concern, standing in for—and sometimes even blocking out—other concerns about the ideal moral life, such as whether it should be lived through a commitment to poverty. This concern with sexual life is refracted through the Counter Reformation, which emphasizes sexual purity such that, as Taylor puts it, “[t]here were mortal sins in…other dimensions as well (for instance, murder), and there were many in the domain of church rules (such as skipping Mass); but you could go quite far in being unjust and hard-hearted in your dealings with subordinates and others without incurring the automatic exclusion you incur by sexual license.”

Thus, for all their differences in what constitutes the ideal of sexual life—marital sexuality or monastic celibacy—both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation produce sex as an overburdened site of moral worry and regulation. And we are not done with this burden; it is carried forward in the secular political life even of the United States, which is supposed to value individual and religious freedom.

As a way to ameliorate this burden, we propose a broad re-envisioning of sexual ethics. This new vision imagines a world in which sexual ethics has meaning for sexual practice, but is not burdened by having to account for the health of the nation, the status of a civilization, or the state of the world (all things which American politicians are happy to connect to sex). We also imagine a sexual ethic in which the question of sex is not one of whether we go “way beyond” or stay within certain “limits,” as Taylor suggests. Rather, we would suggest that we could think more capaciously (even more catholically?) about sex as a site for the production of values. Such a view of things—the possibility that sexual relations are practices through which values emerge and communities are made—is in sharp contrast to the current commonsense: to wit, sex is a moral problem, and conservative religion is the solution, for the sake of the individual and the community. We beg to differ.

Contemporary activists and critical theorists of many stripes—queer, feminist, womanist, gay and lesbian, for example have understood that sex, precisely because it is embedded in interpersonal relations, can help constitute new forms of social life. Paradoxically, then, the extraordinary moral pressure placed on sex—up to and including the fact that these pressures bear down especially hard on those whose sexual practices fall outside what anthropologist Gayle Rubin calls the “charmed circle” of a monogamous and reproductive heterosexuality—may also offer opportunities for reimagining the good life. This paradox helps to explain why some of the same people who are leery of moralizing (because they have so often been on the receiving end of conservative sexual moralism) also want to articulate sex’s values. Crucially, we cannot decide in advance what new forms of social life and ethical relation alternative sexual praxes might give rise to. (These “alternative sexual praxes” include homosexuality; in a culture that values marriage above all, they also include celibacy). What we can decide is that we are committed to freedom and that this commitment includes the realm of the sexual.

Such a project well may appeal to Charles Taylor, not because it is in any way Catholic (the capital “C” kind) or because he would particularly agree with most of the goods and values that such a project might produce. Nonetheless, this project could provide for an opening in secular imaginaries so as to admit into view the value of Catholic sexual ethics, a recognition Taylor currently sees as missing. However, such recognition does not require agreement. If the recognition Taylor seeks is currently “so hard to grasp” (at least for secular public life—we cannot speak for “the Vatican rulemakers”), this may be because we do not have a public life that values either religious or sexual freedom. Ironically, there might be more religious freedom if there were more sexual freedom. One of the ways in which Protestant dominance is maintained in American political life is through the constant invocation of rhetorics based on Protestant sexual ethics.

To accomplish this vision of a broader sexual ethic grounded in a broader notion of freedom, the secular state would need to step back from the business of policing sex (both in public bathrooms and in the courthouses of marriage certifications). And all of us—religionists and secularists—would need to break the stranglehold on our imagination currently exercised by a sexual ethic in which one is either committed to marriage or has no sexual ethic at all (or, at least no recognizable or worthwhile sexual ethic).

The sexual ethic we call for values not just freedom, but multiple forms of freedom— including religious and sexual freedoms. In so doing, it opens the door not just to different ideas about sexual practice, but also to a different vision of the practice of democracy.

To Charles Taylor’s great credit, the sexual dilemma of modernity does not pivot on the problem of quantity—too much sexuality or too little—but on what sexuality has been called on to mean and to do in modern social life. And to understand this—what, how, and why sexuality has become not merely a problem of modern social life, but the defining problem—Taylor writes a genealogy of the social imaginaries of sexuality in Western Christianity. And it is a genealogy, of sorts, methodologically and rhetorically, that Taylor writes. He attempts to uncover the disparate, often incommensurate, conditions of the emergence of modern sexuality and to understand the ethical consequences of this emergence. The erudition and insight Taylor shows throughout A Secular Age are evident in his discussion of the modern sources of contemporary sexuality, as are the same potential limitations—the collapse of modern sexuality and secularism into Christian histories, the massive telescoping of social history, the writing of the past and the other from the perspective of the present.

Taylor starts with what seems to be an ethical conflict between the ethical principles of the 1960s sexual revolution and Christian (especially Catholic) doctrine in order to slowly unravel the mutual conditions and secret agreements that tie them together behind the scenes. It would seem that the modern subject’s rejection of sexual expression’s spiritual limits and of stable marriage as a necessary condition for social order opposes mainstream Christian doctrine, but this rejection betrays a deeper agreement.

The truncated version of Taylor’s argument is this: At a certain moment in Christian Europe’s past, the variety of mortal sins (aggression, violence, injustice, adultery) was reorganized into a hierarchy of bodily abuses that had direct consequences on a person’s ability to participate in the Catholic community. Sexual purity was made an ideal spiritual condition and then a moral precondition for entry into the Catholic sacrament. “There were mortal sins in the other dimensions as well (for instance, murder), and there were many in the domain of church rules (such as skipping Mass); but you could go quite far in being unjust and hard-hearted in your dealings with subordinates and others without incurring the automatic exclusion you incur by sexual license.”

The consequences of the transformation of the field of sin were multiple. The rowdy male peasant, debarred from practicing his customary debauchery on penalty of exclusion from communion, increasingly abandoned the Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformation declared sexuality in marriage a mutual comfort rather than a falling away from a spiritual ideal and, more generally, increasingly understood God to have made the world for human flourishing. Thus, even as Enlightenment Europe turned away from Christian doctrine as explanatory framework for human and natural life, it carried with it two central presuppositions about the world and its people’s place in it: (1) Sexuality was the essential component of modern subjectivity—the truth of the modern subject and of society; (2) Some social agency must assume pastoral duties over sexual flourishing. But the human medical sciences—hygiene, psychoanalysis, and biology—did not merely take over the pastoral functions of the Church in the field of sexual being; they also rearticulated the grounds of sexual flourishing itself, from the supernatural to the natural epistemologies.

The ethical consequences of this conservation of Christian doctrine within the very social revolutions that seemed to overthrow it were, for Taylor, fourfold: (1) Sensuality became an ethical good in and of itself; (2) This sensual good could not be defined or constrained by gender roles; (3) The more transgressive the sex the more liberating, and thus ethically good, it was; and (4) Sexual transgression collapsed into sexual identity (thus the emergence of gay liberation and the emancipation of a whole host of previously condemned forms of sexual life).

So what’s the problem? What’s the ethical crisis? For Taylor it is this: sexuality cannot carry the burden of the enormous demands placed on it by those who would see its flourishing or repression as the foundation of all ethical, social, spiritual, and subjective goods. Thus those who condemn carte blanche the possibility of reaching social-spiritual-subjective fulfillment through sexual purity and those who condemn the possibility of reaching social-spiritual-subjective fulfillment through sexual transgression close the possibility that there are “more ways of being a Catholic Christian than either the Vatican rule-makers or the secularist ideologies have yet imagined.”

Viva la multiplicity: This is a rather tame, dare one say, liberal response to a social dilemma, dare one say constitutive contradiction. And it is an especially surprising response given where Taylor began—a history of the rearticulation of a field of sin into a hierarchy of sins in which a specific form of bodily activity (sex) came to dominate morally all other forms of bodily activity (murder, spitting, economic injustice) and over time to collapse all the sources of the self into one: the self-authorizing, self-fulfilling sexual subject. Why is the alternative to this history an attempt to refashion this hierarchy of corporeal being rather than to multiply the ways we can coordinate spirituality and sexuality—to make sex a minor form of spitting, perhaps? Or to make the extractions of capital that cripple life for so many a mortal sin; a capital offense, a central moral dilemma of the ethical self?

Once we ask these kinds of questions we see a problem with addressing the history of sexuality as an ethical rather than a political issue and as having Christian rather than colonial sources (or Christianity as entwined in various modalities of colonialism and empire). On the one hand, I can sit here, at my writing table, and type, “lets imagine sex as a minor form of spitting,” but to enact this as a way of life, or to already be within such a (perhaps non-Christian) way of life, confronts the risk-laden, dense, reflexive organization of social life (Taylor’s markets, publics, and citizen-state) around what I have been calling the autological subject (discourses, practices, and fantasies about self-making, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with the Enlightenment project of contractual constitutional democracies). On the other hand, persons attempting to make sex a minor form of spitting, or for whom sex is disseminated in some other way, are already apprehended by the nightmare of the liberal autological subject—what I have been calling the nightmare of the genealogical society (discourses, practices, and fantasies about various social constraints and psychic assaults on the autological subject by various kinds of inheritances).

The question I am left with is how to create the conditions in which multiple forms of the body and communities thrive, not merely multiple forms of sexuality. This question understands ethics to be already entwined in power and its political formations, and it understands sexuality as no more or less central a corporeal, moral, or ethical position than any other practice of embodied communities.