Individualism as a Discursive Strategy of Action

Disaggregating Individualism

Central to my inductive analysis is a disaggregation of the various meanings associated with individualism. Such a specification of the constitutive meanings of individualism has not, to my knowledge, accompanied previous analyses of individualism. Drawing on a range of sociologists and social theorists, empirical studies, and my own fieldwork and analysis (Beck et al. 1994; Bellah et al. 1985; Csordas 1997; Fischer 2008; Giddens 1990; Hervieu-Leger 2001; Mahmood 2005; Paden 1992; Parsons 1967; Riesman 1950; Roof 1999; Simmel 1972; Taylor 1985; Thomson 2000; Tocqueville [1831] 2003), I disaggregate individualism into the following terms:

Once disaggregated, these meanings associated with individualism are more easily identified and analyzed as components of cultural complexes through which Americans express individualistic accounts of their religious social lives. It is important to clarify that I treat these terms primarily as symbolic meanings through which social actors express and signal an acceptably culturally American self, rather than objective characteristics of actors’ religious lives.

Before proceeding to the analysis, I want to comment briefly on each term. The first three—autonomy, voluntarism, and privatization—are familiar enough from the general canon on issues of American individualism to require no further explanation. With the growing prominence of therapy and therapeutic language over the past half-century, the intention to develop a more fully realized self is now a constitutive part of individualistic cultural trends in U.S. life (Bellah et al. 1985; Wuthnow 1994). I account for this thread of individualist discourse with the term self-actualization. The fifth term, reflexivity, is the modern tendency to “step back” to consider one’s own social position (Paden 1992:3). Reflexivity is not overtly addressed by classic theorists of American individualism, but scholars of contemporary selfhood treat it as a hallmark of modern individual experience (Beck et al. 1994; Giddens 1990). In addition, reflexivity appears regularly as an empirical finding and theoretical consideration within sociological studies on contemporary U.S. religious life and individualism (Besecke 2001; Roof 1999; Wilcox 2002).

Finally, agency continues to be one of the most contested terms in sociology (Emirbayer and Mische 1998); here I use a conservative definition and specify agency as visible “individual effort.” I include agency as a separate term from autonomy, inspired by the work of anthropologist Saba Mahmood. In her 2005 ethnographic work on the female mosque movement in Egypt, Mahmood critiques the tendency of feminist and other liberal scholars to equate agency with a movement against tradition or norms. Instead, she argues, agency must be delinked from “political and moral autonomy” so that social agents, such as her intentionally pious and self-restricting subjects, can be seen as agentive even in their embrace and fulfillment of social constraints (Mahmood 2005:7). Separating agency from autonomy is useful for my analysis, in which many religious subjects actively embrace practices imposed by tradition and community while emphasizing their own efforts in doing so.

Autonomy: Distance from the Influence of Human Religious Authority

Through expressing autonomy and agency in the course of religious involvement, Americans work to produce religious selves sufficiently differentiated from religious authority and routine to resonate with the dominant U.S. cultural expectation of individualistic action (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003; Swidler 2001). In practice, each meaning works in slightly different ways. To express autonomy (freedom from social influence), actors utilize language or interactional strategies to establish distance between themselves and human religious authority. Such expressions are generally associated with issues of belief and spiritual expression and are usually used to signal that one’s belief in and worship of the divine is not controlled by or beholden to an external human authority.

I found the linguistic form of this discursive distancing among respondents who considered themselves religious but were not connected to a religious organization and those who were active members of religious communities. Falling within the latter category, Nan Pfautz, in Bellah and colleagues’ (1985:228–29) work, spoke derisively of “churchy people” and “all those Bible-pounding people,” even as she expressed commitment to her own Presbyterian congregation. Likewise, Roof’s (1999:27) Sara Caughman, a leader in a changing Episcopal church, talked about how “inclusive” the church had become and contrasted the previous hierarchical manifestation as “dry and empty . . . death to the spirit . . . rote religion.” The young members and leaders of an emerging Christian church in California complained about restrictive religious authority and decried “spiritual McCarthyism” (Flory and Miller 2008:30). Young Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims, most of them fully embedded in religious communities, emphasized that they were not the kind of people who push their religion on others, who “go around preaching all the time” (Smith and Denton 2005:141) or, in the case of the Muslim youth I observed, “talk about Allah all the time.” Through linguistic expressions of distance from religious authorities—from those who might tell you what to believe and how to express those beliefs—these actors worked to produce religious yet autonomous selves.

These same symbolic distancing processes are found among religious “seekers” or “mystics,” individuals who look for spirituality and religion outside traditional religious organizations. While it may not seem surprising to hear such language from people who have actually removed themselves from the social structures of “official” religion, this has not been the dominant interpretation of what makes these subjects religious individualists. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, this style of religious engagement has been characterized primarily as evidence of an underlying American voluntarism, privatization, and self-actualization. A second look at the data on which this conception is based, though, reveals that these subjects, like their organizationally ensconced counterparts, actively use language to express symbolic autonomy from a religious authority that might tell you what or how to believe. In the same paragraph of speech where Bellah et al.’s (1985:221) Sheila Larson famously describes her own self-named religion (“Sheilaism”), she also says the following: “I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church.” Another of Bellah et al.’s respondents made a similar effort to distinguish his individual faith from a connection to human religious authority, saying, “It’s not the religion or the church you go to that’s going to save you, [but your] personal relationship [with God]” (p. 234). I also found this effort to establish distance between one’s own beliefs and human sources of religious authority among Wuthnow’s (1998) “seeker” respondents. Nancy Nystrom, for instance, told Wuthnow that she experienced organized religion as patriarchal and constraining and it did not help her develop her own spiritual life. Instead, she “needed to find it on her own,” and now “[t]here’s just something inside my soul that says that God is good” (Wuthnow 1998:56). Wuthnow reports that Wilma Nichols wanted to “benefit from churches without having them become stifling” and looked for an emphasis on “faith alone.” While most scholars interpret these statements as factual reports about noninvolvement in religious organizations or reflections of a deep-seated individualism, it should be noted that they are also, and more immediately, evidence of strategic use of language aimed at distancing oneself from sources of human religious authority—from people and institutions that try to tell you what and how to believe—in the presentation of a still-religious self. The presence of such language among both highly communal and highly individualized believers demonstrates the robustness of autonomy as a meaning through which religious individualism is expressed in the United States.

In addition to linguistic accounts, actors’ expressions of autonomy from religious authority also took the form of more interactional strategies. One common approach was to declare to co-religionists that one would follow the word of God rather than the expectations of a religious leader. In a conversation with fellow African American Baptists about the religious propriety of marrying a second time, Marla Frederick’s (2003:192) respondent Yvette said, “I don’t have to ask the pastor. I have to ask the Lord. That’s the only one I have to get it right with.” I found this approach of directly appealing to God’s authority in cases such as Evangelical churches in Kentucky and California (Chen 2008; Lytch 2004), small groups of African American Muslim converts in Los Angeles (Rouse 2004), and a mosque in Southern California. Another more interactional strategy of expressing autonomy involved engaging in expressions of worship in ways that subtly circumvented the authority of local religious leaders. According to Bob Tomski, an enthusiastic member of a liberal Catholic church, when the priest was late for morning mass one day, “We just started without him!” (Madsen 2009:1289). In a strikingly similar example from my own fieldwork, when religious leader Omar was late one afternoon to begin the congregational afternoon prayer at the City Mosque, a group of young Muslim men decided to go upstairs to the youth room and have their own prayer. After praying, as the boys ran back downstairs, one boy, Muhammad, called out to his friends, “I felt like a rebel!” In both cases, as with symbolic autonomy throughout my sample, actors of widely varying social backgrounds worked to present selves distanced from human religious authority, even as they participated in expressions of belief and commitment considered externally authoritative.

Agency: Individual Effort in the Course of Normative Religious Behavior

Whereas expressions of autonomy establish distance between oneself and a human religious authority, expressions of agency involve the presentation of an effortful and separable self in relation to normative religious behavior. In expressing agency, which like autonomy takes linguistic as well as interactional forms, religious actors emphasize their own effort in realizing religious behavior, deemphasizing the influence of leadership, community, or even God on one’s engagement with religious custom. In so doing, religious Americans place an agentive self at the center of religiously normative behavior, presenting a more acceptably American, culturally individualistic religious personhood. I use a specific definition of agency in my analysis, inspired by Mahmood’s (2005) work on pious women in Egypt. From Mahmood’s work, in which she convincingly delinks “autonomy” from “agency,” I borrow the notion that actors can exercise their own agency—or effort—in the direction of and in keeping with normative social, cultural, or religious expectations and not necessarily in opposition to them. As Mahmood convincingly argues, traditions of liberal thought have made it difficult for Western scholars to imagine “agency” apart from “resistance” to social norms and structure. In her ethnography of women in Egypt’s mosque movement, however, Mahmood demonstrates how her subjects are in fact agentive, and exercise their own effort, as they align their actions with dominant tradition and custom. Mahmood’s intervention is particularly helpful in recognizing alternative forms of religious individualism because it opens up the possibility, reflected in my empirical analysis, that subjects can express agency in the course of—rather than only in opposition to—normative religious action.

The difference in my case is that not only do religious actors exercise and experience agency, they also symbolically highlight and emphasize this agency in interactions, calling attention to their own efforts at realizing religious action and therefore downplaying the role or effect of social pressure or religious authority on their engagement with religiously normative behaviors. Examples from my own fieldwork with Muslim American young men illustrate the point. One evening, I accompanied the boys to a youth dance at the high school of one of their friends. Young men and women danced together at this event, but the boys I accompanied stood off to the side and watched. After the dance ended, we walked out into the parking lot with a mixed-gender group of their Muslim friends. In the course of saying goodbyes, a female friend gave Yusef a hug. Although I did not ask for an explanation, directly afterward Yusef said to me in a low voice, “I don’t trip [worry] about that because it’s OK if your mind’s in the right place. . . . And my mind was in the right place.” Only a week earlier, religious leader Omar had spoken to the youth group about exchanging hugs with non-Muslim people in public, saying it was acceptable to do this, as it is a common practice in the United States, as long as you have the religiously right intention. Although he had just recently received this advice from a religious authority figure, Yusef placed dramatic emphasis on his own action in realizing this Islamically right act (“My mind was in the right place”), thereby obscuring the role of communal pressure or guidance and framing religiously right action as an individual achievement. The youth at the City Mosque regularly talked about their fulfillment of locally normative Islamic behaviors in language that emphasized their own central role, including resisting offers of drugs or alcohol from neighborhood youth (“I stay true to myself!”), giving advice on how to fast on a hot day (“You just have to know how to do it!”), and taking soda to a teenage party (“We brought our own drinks homey!”).

I found this emphasis on the self’s role in realizing religiously normative action among members of other religious groups. Ayala Fader’s (2009:38) adult female Hasidic respondent Rifky also emphasized her own centrality in enacting customary behavior, in this case describing the community-derived practice of how to approach food in a sacred manner:

I’ll concentrate on how I eat, and what I eat, and why I eat, and what I say before and after I eat [i.e., appropriate blessings]. And if you apply all those things thoughtfully . . . all these physical actions get uplifted and are on the same road, the same path as your neshume [soul].

Along the same lines, Chen’s (2008:171) Evangelical respondent Deacon Chu explained how he and a few friends worked to “overcome” the temptation to engage in the sin of thievery through their own active and focused prayer. This language of personal religious agency, while present across a variety of settings, was particularly prominent in contexts with a tradition of religious obligations promoted by external religious authority, including Hasidic Jewish, American Muslim, and Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian communities. In these settings, expressions of religious agency take the form of narratives that emphasize subjects’ active role in meeting religious obligation. Subjects use terms like work, struggle, commitment, conviction, and self-discipline to highlight the centrality of the individual’s role in fulfilling what are, in large part, socially enforced religious expectations.

The linguistic emphasis on one’s own effort in achieving religious behavior is the most common form of presenting a religiously agentive self within my sample, but two other tactics bear mentioning because they are regularly highlighted by scholars of American religion, although not necessarily in terms of religious individualism. The first is to prefer and partake in worship services that require active, often embodied, participation. These services bring about a physical and sometimes emotional experience of the self by the self. Sociologists of religion note the predominance of these kinds of worship services within otherwise restrictive religious settings, as an outlet for what Bellah et al. (1985:237) call “expressive freedom” (see also Warner 1993). Yet this kind of worship is also a means of presenting and producing a religiously agentive self in relation to religiously normative behavior. One of Ammerman’s (1987:76) Fundamentalist respondents told her, “When we have our services we look at the Bible. We’re like participating. I don’t think most other churches are like that. It’s a routine in other churches.” Flory and Miller’s (2008:141) college-age respondent Heather described her attraction to an Episcopal church service this way: “The incense, the spoken and sung liturgy, the kneeling, the Eucharist itself, all demanded participation in the beauty of the worship. It was like being in the orchestra instead of watching a performance.” As these examples indicate, it is not only the participatory nature of the worship service itself but local understanding of the service as participatory and active that serves as a symbolic resource congregation members can draw on to present religiously agentive selves.

Another interactional means by which actors express religious agency is through emphasizing their own control over their specific level of participation in religious ritual and practice. In some ways, this is the converse of the previous two approaches. In emphasizing effort through language and labeling oneself as a participating agent in ritual, actors draw attention to agentive selves in the course of fulfilling religious obligations. In emphasizing control, actors demonstrate agency in relation to religion by exhibiting their ability to momentarily pull away from religious obligations. Davidman’s (1991:10, 12) secular Jews, who were considering embracing Orthodoxy, were reassured by those already in the community that you can “really go at your own pace” and they were advised to “get involved slowly.” Similarly, Amanda Tomski told Madsen (2009:1272) that an attraction of the liberal Catholic Transfiguration parish for her was that in the course of services, “[w]e could move in and out.” Modulating one’s own participation, labeling and understanding oneself as an active participant, and emphasizing one’s own effort in bringing about religiously right action are all strategies by which actors work to differentiate themselves from religiously normative behavior and demonstrate an agentive self in the midst of religious participation.

To summarize, through reframing religious individualism’s form and analyzing its content, I reconceptualize American religious individualism as a strategy of action through which religious actors address the cultural dilemma of participating in an externally authoritative cultural system (religion) within a culturally individualistic context (the United States). I find that American religious and spiritual actors manage this dilemma by producing themselves as autonomous and agentive actors in relation to human religious authority and normative religious behavior. Following the logic of Swidler’s (1986, 2001) theory of strategies of action, when religious individualism appears the same across settings, it is not because we are seeing evidence of the same deep, underlying cultural power but because actors are responding to the same cultural dilemma, namely, the tension between the American social expectation of individualistic selfhood and the religious expectation of deferring to an external or communal cultural authority. As I demonstrated, the most common way religious Americans do this is by using linguistic and interactional strategies to produce themselves as agentive and autonomous selves in relation to human religious authority and normative religious behavior.

Communal Self-actualization

My analysis yielded eight cases of American religious lives that exhibit a style of religious individualism I call communal self-actualization. The religious actors who utilized this style—including American Orthodox “born-again” Jews, Hasidic Jews, tightly communal liberal Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and Buddhist converts—expressed agency (personal effort in realizing religious life) and self-actualization (the development of a fully realized selfhood) in their demonstrations of religious individualism. Therefore, the core complex of individualist meanings within this style category, the elements most commonly shared among and most frequently expressed within all cases, is agency–self-actualization.

The prominence of agency as a discursive strategy of individualism among these actors can be explained by its usefulness in symbolically counterbalancing the locally dominant understanding of religion as a highly demanding system of practices and intense personal commitment. Although the cases within this style category vary in terms of their specific denomination and conservative versus liberal approaches to religion, they share an understanding of religion as an endeavor that carries externally imposed expectations for rigorous participation. For Fader’s (2009:35, 63) Jewish young women, growing up Hasidic meant “conforming to a religiously communitarian society” through learned practices of behavioral “self-discipline.” As they applied practices learned at the Dharma Light Temple, salvation became an “all-consuming project” for Chen’s (2008:159) Buddhist converts, as they “under[took] a ceaseless discipline to control the unruly heart and mind.” Even Madsen’s (2009:1269) liberal Catholics were part of a congregation that placed “strong demands on their members, intellectually, emotionally, and morally” and made “heavy demands on their members’ time.” In response to this understanding of their religion (by insiders and outsiders) as a highly demanding system of practice and personal commitment, communal self-actualizers discursively emphasized their own role in enacting religious behavior through expressions of individualist agency. Two other styles of religious individualism, reflexive traditionalism and agentive orthodoxy, also utilize agency as part of their core discursive strategy and for the same reason: Local actors consider religion primarily as a system of externally imposed demanding behaviors. In these cases, agency symbolically counterbalances this particular understanding of religion by presenting an active individual self rather than a religious authority or community, at the center of this intensive effort. ⁶

Communal self-actualization is distinguished from the other styles by the presence of expressions of self-actualization (the intentional development of a fully realized self) along with the usual expressions of agency. These actors use expressions of self-actualization to pull against the local understanding of religion as a rigorous and intensive personal commitment by discursively reframing communal commitment to religious obligations as individually oriented projects of self-improvement. Madsen (2009:1272) respondent David Levy, who embraced Orthodox Judaism after years away from the faith, described his observance of Jewish law as a “tool for personal growth.” Amanda Tomski, a member of Transfiguration Parish—a congregation that required rigorous devotion of time and energy—talked about her religious life primarily in terms of experiencing her true self: “For me, being here, it’s just delightful. Just being who I am, my spiritual self” (Madsen 2009:1273). Although Chen’s (2008:141) Mr. Huang spent countless hours learning and refining the practices required of Buddhists from teachers at the Dharma Light temple, he described Buddhism as about “really get[ting] to know your true self.”

The inclusion of self-actualization within the core meanings of communal self-actualization cannot adequately be explained by the local understanding of religion alone. After all, reflexive traditionalism, agentive orthodoxy, and voluntaristic commitment also involve an understanding of religion as a set of demanding practices, but none of these styles utilize self-actualization as a core meaning to express religious individualism. The robust presence of self-actualization within these cases can be better explained by the salience of the social identity of mainstream “middle-class American” across these settings and the fact that development of a fully realized self is a conventionally expected expression of individualism among middle-class—and especially white—Americans (Giddens 1991; Wuthnow 1994). The two cases in this style drawn from non-white communities—the Taiwanese-immigrant Buddhist and Christian converts from Chen’s work—also valued the performance of a mainstream “middle-class American” identity within their religious lives, but they expressed self-actualization in a slightly different way from their white counterparts. While the white individuals within this style tended to refit religious resources in response to an externally American expectation of therapeutic selfhood, Chen’s (2008) immigrant converts emphasized practices of self-development existing within their adopted religious traditions and, in so doing, expressed and identified with a focus on the self resonant with broader American culture. This in turn allowed them to feel more like culturally mainstream Americans.

Reflexive Self-actualization

The core complex of individualizing discourses shared and expressed most frequently by members of this category is self-actualization–reflexivity. This style shares with communal self-actualization a central emphasis on the development of the self through religious pursuits. This element seems to be present across these cases for the same reason: the prevalence of actors with a mainstream “American middle-class” social identity in each setting and the fact that development of the self is a culturally expected means of expressing individualism among people sharing this social identity. A Chinese Christian convert falls within this style, but in contrast to the Taiwanese immigrants discussed earlier, he was a second-generation convert to Evangelical Christianity. He was also a participant in a multiethnic rather than Chinese-immigrant church, and this suggests a greater presence of American-style religious individualism within the congregational culture (Ecklund 2006). In this case, the availability of self-actualization as an individualizing discourse was not due to development of a more American selfhood but to a church culture diverse enough to defer to a broadly “American” evangelical culture, which often includes Christian versions of self-actualizing discourses (Roof 1999).

What distinguishes this style from communal self-actualization is that self-actualization–reflexivity augments an emphasis on development of the self with reflexivity, a “stepping back” to consider and comment on one’s own social position. Actors who used this style—two midlife embracers of Evangelical Christianity, one recent joiner of a small group of dissenting Catholics, and one defector from congregational life for a feminist spiritual collective—consistently demonstrated their ability to critically consider the beliefs and doctrines associated with their religion. Roof’s (1999:25) Sam Wong said of a class at his church, “A lot of us don’t know about all the teachings. But it’s OK that you don’t know, or maybe even don’t always agree with some things, as long as you believe in Jesus Christ.” Evangelical Todd Brentwood, one of Wuthnow’s (1998:82) respondents, relayed how he kept a “critical, questioning attitude toward what he heard” at the Evangelical church he had recently joined, unlike those who were “just programmed.” Similarly, John McRae said upfront that he did not “even know what I believe anymore,” and Karen Potter found it important to be part of a “theologically moderate” congregation (Roof 1999:20).

The strong presence of reflexivity across these cases can be explained by its usefulness in symbolically counterbalancing the dominant understanding of religion within these settings—as a commitment requiring statements of belief and professions of faith. The expectation of repeatedly and openly agreeing with the religious community’s beliefs is so prevalent within these settings that belief here takes the form of a central and normative religious practice. Despite their membership in different religious traditions, actors within this style category all talked about religion in terms of stated “beliefs,” learned “teachings,” and accepted “faith,” in contrast to actors in most other styles who tended to focus on more enacted commitments and obligations (Roof 1999; Wuthnow 1998). This treatment of belief as a practice rather than a system of spiritual expression led actors in these settings to call on elements of individualism normally associated with agency, the anchor meaning linked with distancing the self from religious practices. These actors used reflexivity and self-actualization to express religious individualism. Faced with a religious life characterized (by both insiders and outsiders) as an integrated and potentially all-encompassing system of belief (Ammerman 2003; Lichterman 2012), reflexive self-actualizers presented themselves as self-reflexive and thinking people, existing with some symbolic distance from a set of religious beliefs.

What explains the surprising absence of the discourse of agency from the core complexes of the cases within this style? Whereas religious actors in the communal self-actualization, reflexive traditionalist, and agentive orthodox categories consistently use expressions of agency to present a self separable from normative religious behaviors, reflexive self-actualizers do not seem to use this anchoring meaning of individualism to signal distance from normative religious practices. Why not? I believe this exception can be explained by two characteristics unique to the reflexive self-actualizer category: their social position vis-a-vis their faith community and their concern with distancing themselves from belief as a religious practice. To the first point, agency is most effective as an individualizing discourse for those already fully ensconced within religious communities. In the styles where agency is an anchoring meaning, almost all participants were fully immersed and practicing religious actors. In these cases, agency worked more effectively than autonomy as an anchor because agency allows communally ensconced religious actors to signal individualism without directly distancing themselves from religious authority and general commitment. Actors in the reflexive self-actualizer group, in contrast, are all located at the periphery of their religious communities and are fairly new to their faith groups. These actors do not use agency as a means of expressing individualism from within an intensively immersed religious life because this is not their situation. But neither do they need what the autonomy anchor provides—a way to express belief distinct from following religious authority. Their specific concern is distancing themselves from the practice of accepting and stating normative beliefs, but they do so from the periphery of a religious community. To do this, they draw on discourses that signal difference from practices but are better suited to an outside, pragmatic skeptic (reflexivity and self-actualization) rather than a fully immersed believer (agency).

Reflexive Traditionalism

For actors who demonstrate the style of religious individualism I call reflexive traditionalism, the most commonly shared and consistently used complex of individualizing discourses is reflexivity-agency. In my analysis, this style includes Muslim American youth and young adults, highly practicing Evangelical youth, young-adult Evangelical leaders who emphasize an “authentic” church, and a leader in an Episcopal church attempting to maintain “tradition.” As with communal self-actualization, agentive orthodoxy, and voluntaristic commitment, the presence of agency in this style can be explained by its usefulness in counterbalancing the local understanding of religion as a set of externally imposed demanding obligations. What distinguishes this style from these others is that it augments agency with an emphasis on reflexivity. This central use of reflexivity among reflexive traditionalists is reminiscent of reflexive self-actualization and appears here for a similar reason. In both categories, actors view religion as a potentially all-encompassing system and therefore use reflexivity as a means of positioning themselves somewhat outside this arrangement. The slight difference here is that whereas reflexive self-actualizers focus on positioning themselves outside of a fully accepted set of religious beliefs, reflexive traditionalists portray themselves as outside of a total inherited system of belief and behavior, what we can call a tradition.

Actors in the reflexive traditionalism category engage in a strategy of reflexive objectification (Eickelman 1992), in which they use language or interactional practices to momentarily treat their religious tradition as separate from themselves. My American Muslim youth and young adult subjects used two strategies to express this reflexive relationship to an objectified religious tradition. First, they repeatedly performed caricatures of an overly orthodox Islamic elder figure and jokingly scolded each other in an exaggerated accent: “Zere is no dancing in zee mosque bruzzer!” Or, after witnessing someone doing something questionably appropriate, “Astagfirullah!” (“Allah forgive me!”). Through demonstrating this kind of reflexivity, young Muslims, as well as adult leaders in the mosque, worked to demonstrate their own existence separate from “traditional Islam,” even as they generally promoted an acceptance of the tradition’s practices. Other times, the youth would objectify Islam using an outsider irony: In heavy American (stereotypically Southern) accents they would sarcastically warn each other, “We’ve got to be careful of those Mos-lems [sic].” This same kind of reflexive objectification of highly observant religious identities by their practitioners is seen among Amy C. Wilkins’s (2008) Evangelical youth at Unity University. Members of a Christian organization on a liberal arts campus told her with a laugh, “people think we’re in a cult,” and another respondent said, “sometimes Christians are boring” (Wilkins 2008:90, 91). These actors used reflexivity to symbolically distance themselves from the anti-individualist notion of a powerful, all-encompassing coherent system of practice and belief.

The common identity among most individuals in this category as youth or young adults, along with the ironic and humorous tone they used, suggests that identity-linked expectations of individualistic expression may reinforce the use of reflexivity within this style. Reflexive irony is associated with a modern mode of growing up and establishing one’s social differentiation from parents and other members of the previous generation (Denzin 1975; Fine 1979, 1987). In the case of the young reflexive traditionalists, a self-reflexive irony is a useful core component of their style of religious individualism, not only because it symbolically plays against the notion of their religion as a powerfully socializing tradition but also because it is an individualist discourse associated with, and even expected of, their age-group peers (O’Brien 2013).

Agentive Orthodoxy

For members of religious communities who use the style of religious individualism I call agentive orthodoxy, the central meaning that defines their religious individualism is agency, or individual effort. As with communal self-actualization, reflexive traditionalism, and voluntarist commitment, the central use of agency by the agentive orthodox is powerfully shaped by the local understanding of religion as a highly demanding set of social obligations. These actors work to counterbalance this local understanding of religion by emphasizing their own active effort in bringing about what is often, in fact, communally prescribed behavior. This emphasis on agency is seen when Ammerman’s (1987:173) Fundamentalists told their teenage children to “take a stand” when resisting peer pressure to engage in irreligious behavior or when Lytch’s (2004:99) respondent Rebecca said, “Some people think it’s just a set of rules. . . . It’s not a religion, it’s a relationship.” Similarly, Becca, who had recently become an Orthodox Christian, said, “It can feel a little repetitive sometimes, but if you really engage in the worship, you realize that you’re being led by millions of people before you who have said these things and who have done these things” (Flory and Miller 2008:144, italics added). By injecting momentary overt demonstrations of personal effort, actors within tightly constricted religious communities signal an agentive self in the course of their fulfillment of religious obligation.

Agentive orthodoxy is distinguished from other styles that use agency to counterbalance a notion of religion as socially demanding in that agency is usually (in all but one case) the only element constituting the core complex of meanings that defines this style. Within this style, agency counterbalances the local notion of religion as socially demanding, but its position as the sole defining expression of individualism is due to the salient social identity of the religious subculture and the particular expressions of individualism associated with (and seen as anathema to) that identity. Cases within agentive orthodoxy vary widely in terms of race/ethnicity, religious denomination, gender, economic class, and region, but these actors all share the effort to segregate and differentiate themselves from mainstream America through cultivating a subcultural religious identity (Ammerman 1987; Smith 1998). In such cases, where leaders and members work to maintain a self-enclosed “sacred canopy,” expressions of individualism that directly emphasize one’s self-development or extra-religious critical faculties, such as self-actualization and reflexivity, may be considered threatening to the coherence of this fragilely constructed social world and therefore treated as highly deviant (Hunter 1983). In such settings, agency is the sole means of expressing individualism available within religious and communal practices.

Voluntaristic Commitment

For religious lives that fall within the style of voluntaristic commitment, the core complex of meanings through which individualism is expressed is autonomy-voluntarism-agency. In my analysis, cases within this style include female converts within an African American Muslim community, Jewish-born women who joined a U.S. Orthodox synagogue, and a female member of a liberal Presbyterian church who was raised as a strict Baptist. Like the communal self-actualizers, reflexive traditionalists, and agentive orthodox, these actors use agency to counterbalance the local understanding of their religion as a demanding set of social obligations. In addition to viewing their religion as socially demanding, these actors also experience the governance of belief and spiritual expression as hierarchical. As a result, these actors use meanings of autonomy (freedom from social influence) to project a self both engaged in religious belief and unconstrained by religious authority. The presence of both agency and autonomy within this style is due to local notions of the religion as a socially demanding and hierarchical structure governing belief, spiritual expression, and practice.

Central to the voluntarist commitment style, and what distinguishes it from all others, is the centrality of voluntarism (freedom of choice) as a meaning through which religious individualism is expressed. Actors within this category consistently stressed that their religious belonging and participation was their own choice and reflected their free will. One of the newly orthodox Jews studied by Davidman (1991:82) said, “I made a decision to go to the Eastern religion center. I made a decision to come to Lincoln Square Synagogue. I made a decision to learn and explore it.” Another respondent said, “I think I know the things that I am choosing to change in my life or to give up” (Davidman 1991:83). Nan Pfautz said she had an obligation to her church because she had “chosen to join it” (Bellah et al. 1985:228). Rouse’s (2004:31) African American female converts to Islam also constantly emphasized personal choice, telling her that how they practice was their decision and repeatedly invoking the saying, well-known within the community, “There is no compulsion in Islam.”

The presence of agency and autonomy within this style is attributable to local understandings of religion as demanding and hierarchical, but the centrality of voluntarism is best explained by its meaningful association with a female identity, the most salient social identity across these sites. All actors in this category were modern American women, faced with the cultural expectation that they demonstrate an individualism that involves making their own decisions and being in control of their own lives (Mahmood 2005). At the same time, the religions they were associated with are regularly considered by outsiders (and some insiders) as particularly restrictive when it comes to the treatment of female members (Davidman 1991; Mahmood 2005; Rouse 2004). Voluntarism (freedom of choice) is thus a particularly useful symbolic resource through which these women can demonstrate a culturally American individualism.

Privatized Belief

For actors who demonstrate the style of religious individualism I call privatized belief, the core complex of meanings through which their individualism is expressed is privatization-autonomy. This style shares an emphasis on autonomy with voluntaristic commitment and for a similar reason. These actors are also working to express a symbolic distance from religious hierarchy, especially as regards the governance of belief and spiritual expression. What clearly distinguishes privatized believers from all other groups is that they emphasize privatization (participation alone or in small circles) in their presentation of religious life. Autonomy in this style is attributable to a shared understanding of religion as hierarchical (regarding the governance of belief and spiritual expression), and privatization is due to a common social identity, that of believing outsider. Although the specifics vary, everyone in this category shares a social location of estrangement from organized religion. This state of estrangement may have resulted from a voluntary exit after finding organized religion too oppressive and constraining (Bellah et al. 1985; Lytch 2004; Wuthnow 1998), a sense of being pushed out by stigmatizing forces within the congregation (Sullivan 2011), practical difficulties of attending congregational worship (Sullivan 2011), or simply a lack of exposure to religious institutions (Roof 1999).

In each case, actors drew on discourses expressing the benefits of privatization to frame their extra-organizational religious lives as aligned with expectations of individualist action present in U.S. culture and society. Lytch’s (2004:113) respondent Kevin, who felt burdened by the social pressures of church, described his religious practice: “If I’m not going to church I still feel fine because I can still pray with God . . . and I know it doesn’t mean less to him in my beliefs than if I would go to church.” Wuthnow’s (1998:55) Nancy Nystrom and Roof’s (1999:33) Vicki Feinstein both emphasized the sense of personal liberation that accompanies privatized religion: Nancy said that believing outside of church made her “feel freer” and “released from the shackles,” and Vicki appreciated the ability to believe in God “in her own way.” Even Sullivan’s (2011:65) poor, socially isolated women, who in her analysis missed out on multiple tangible social and spiritual benefits that would come from greater church access, “seem[ed] content with their reliance on personal religious practices and cultural religious knowledge in confronting the challenges of their daily lives.” In adapting to an identity of outsider believer, these actors utilized the American discourse of privatization to express their social location as consistent with broader U.S. culture.