INTRODUCTION

The topic of religious conflict and change has been a major theme in the sociology of religion. It has also been one of the most hotly debated. Arguments over concepts like “secularization” or “culture wars” have often generated more heat than light. One of the persistent difficulties in the literature has been the slippery nature of the “stuff” of religious conflict. It is not easy to speak of things like ideas, symbols, or meanings with the same clarity and precision that one might use in analyzing demographic characteristics, for example. In Meaning and Moral Order, Robert Wuthnow (1987) offered several programmatic essays charting a way forward in the analysis of culture and religion. As he put it in his conclusion, questions about meaning and moral order “need not remain the domain of subjective analyses or of humanistic exhortations alone. They require careful consideration, including efforts particularly devoted to examining the structure of cultural forms, their relations to the moral order, and the role of social resources in producing and sustaining them” (1987: 348).

Scholars writing about cultural conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s, in an attempt to clarify “the structure of cultural forms,” often described the moral order using spatial metaphors. Several authors, for example, engaged in debate about an alleged “great divide” between liberals and conservatives in the U.S. “religious landscape” (e.g., Roof and McKinney 1987; Wuthnow 1988; Olson and McKinney 1997).