REVISING THE MAP OF AMERICAN RELIGION

The concept of mapping religion and then acting on the basis of that c oncept necessarily involves discussion of another concept, that of bou ndaries. The notion of discerning neat boundaries serves well for asse ssing the inherited institutions of religion in America; assessments o f trends within them reveal impressive continuities in organization an d structures of meaning. Many of the most important religious developm ents in the last third of the century, however, appear to be less boun ded-or even unbounded-and on the blurry landscape of boundarylessness there are more evident discontinuities, innovations, and evidence of f luidity. An analysis of several trends on the unbounded landscape sugg ests that, in the new century, there will be a great deal of interchan ge and conflict between these two ways of conceiving American religiou s dynamics.