La (re)construction des identités religieuses / spirituelles anglicanes

Abstract

Ongoing developments in the Anglican Communion, most notably the unfolding controversy over “homosexuality,” serve as an excellent case study for the application of Peter L. Berger’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s distinctive sociological approaches to the study of religious/spiritual identity construction/reconstruction. As this case study demonstrates, Berger’s dialectically ordered “holy trinity” of externalization, objectivization, and internalization focuses primarily on social interactions, but largely ignores both power inequalities between individuals as well as the multi-layered context of social reality production/coproduction. Bourdieu’s dialectically ordered “holy trinity” of habitus, field, and capital also examines the process of social reality production/coproduction. By contrast, however, it does address sources of (unequally distributed) power between individuals and groups, and is adaptable to a more highly complexified multi-level social interactional scenario, but it tends to “crystallize” power, thereby obfuscating its socially mediated conditionality. A fuller analysis of religious pluralism requires a dialectically ordered theoretical approach which encompasses both dynamic social interactions, as well as the formation (and dissolution) of power sources within these interactions.