ABSTRACT
Scholars from a variety of disciplines have long recognized that the keystone of social order-whether that order is manifest in table manners, traffic laws, or the often turbulent nature of the sacred-is agreement between social participants. Different cultures have come to different states of agreement, for example, on the propriety of belching after a satisfying meal. Traffic laws have force in society because we agree to submit ourselves to them-both for our own good and for the larger good of the traveling public. And the nature of the sacred-including its objects, the myths and narratives in which it is embedded, and the taboos and rituals by which it is surrounded and approached-is culturally specified according to similar processes of agreement. Whatever technologies are used to facilitate their emergence and evolution, as social and cultural products, religious beliefs, practices, and traditions exhibit their durability because of the agreement between participants that those things in which they participate are sacred as opposed to profane, meaningful as opposed to
trivial, and efficacious as opposed to impotent. This is not to say, of course, that agreement in these matters is never coerced; that there are never contesting domains of agreement between different groups of social actors; that, following Berger and Luckmann (1966), those who are in agreement do not lose sight of the constructed nature of the constituents of their agreement; nor, finally, that the objects of agreement in one social setting do not change as they move through time and across space. It is merely to say that in the social construction of religious belief and practice, agreement plays a crucial role, and to suggest the contours of agreement within particular religious communities is a useful place to begin to understand the complexities of those communities.
