Abstract

Linguistic capital is what is at issue when we ask who can speak for a religion. But asking who has the linguistic capital to speak for a religious community in public policy forums is different from asking who has linguistic capital within the religious community. The first question forces us to examine the acquisition of linguistic capital in three separate — yet overlapping — fields of social discourse: academia, religion, and government. Each of these requires distinctive ways of earning the necessary social capital to be authorized to speak. The issue of who has the status to speak for a religion in a political forum is essentially a question of what types of linguistic capital gained in one field are deemed legal tender within another field.