Material Religion in Modern Britain

The Spirit of Things

Timothy Willem Jones, Lucinda Matthews-Jones, Timothy Willem Jones, Lucinda Matthews-Jones

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137540553
• eBook ISBN: 9781137540638
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

This volume contributes towards to developments in the study of religion that illuminate the plural nature of religious change in modern Britain. It makes a critical intervention in British studies of religion by bringing the analytical insights of material culture, to bear on religion in the British World.

PART I

Material Sectarianism

CHAPTER 1

Objects of Transcendence: Scots Protestantism and an Anthropology of Things

Joseph Webster

Introduction

How are objects used differently within different types of Protestantism? Proceeding from this question, this short anthropological essay takes as its ethnographic point of departure two apparently contrasting deployments of the Bible within contemporary Scotland, one as observed among Brethren and Presbyterian fisher-families in Gamrie, coastal Aberdeenshire, and the other as observed among the Orange Order, a Protestant marching fraternity, in Airdrie and Glasgow. By examining how and with what effects the Bible (as text and object) enters into and extends beyond the everyday practices of fishermen and Orangemen, I sketch some aspects of the material life of Scottish Protestantism that have hitherto been overlooked. The tendency to downplay the role of objects within Protestantism seems, in part, to be the result of an ideal-typical insistence that this religion—especially in Scotland and the Global North—remains transfixed by a thoroughly anti-material asceticism.¹ This tacit assumption, which emerged within anthropology as the result of an overly hasty reading of Max Weber, continues to haunt ethnographic and theoretical framings of both Protestantism and modernity, either through their relative silence on the subject, or by treating (modern, Protestant) objects as somehow exceptional and novel.

Yet it cannot be denied that an important aspect of Weber’s sociology of religion claims that the “mysticism” of pre-Reformation Christianity was, with the arrival of Calvinism, capitalism, and modernity, thoroughly replaced by the rationalism of book-religion.² Thus, the “material life” of the Bible as the foundation on which to build an argument about the “transcendence of objects” is taken as a deliberately difficult case in point. If a central archetype of modernism and Protestantism—mass produced Bibles printed in the vulgar tongue—can nonetheless be shown ethnographically to have an “enchanted” material life (that is, to be “objects of transcendence”), then we will have come a good deal of the way toward correcting what has been, up to now, a rather stubborn misconception about Protestantism’s supposed allergy to things.

My argument is that the transcendence of religious “beliefs” and the immanence of material “things” co-constitute each other, with the result that life becomes enchanted, or “alive with a kind of magic.” In order to widen the scope of my argument, I also profile other objects that act as material bearers of enchantment. In Gamrie, among my Brethren and Presbyterian informants, I take up the materiality of “gospel tracts” and “Sunday clothes.” Among the Orange Order in Airdrie and Glasgow, I consider the material culture of parading garb and regalia. By profiling these various objects—bibles, tracts, suits, head coverings, collarette “jewels”—this chapter makes two contributions to recent conversations about the materiality of religion.

First, my ethnographic argument considers how different forms of Scots Protestantism actively grapple with “the spirit of things.” While the anthropology of Christianity has been booming over the last decade, there have been few ethnographic studies of Protestantism in Northern Europe, and fewer still that focus on Britain. This chapter adds to this body of literature by attending to two cases of “material religion,” as found within Brethrenism and Orangeism in Scotland. Second, my theoretical analysis attempts to highlight why these two cases may be of interest to scholars of religion more generally. Why, in Gamrie, was walking to church, Bible in hand, considered to be a powerful act of “testimony”? Why do Scottish Orangemen always parade behind an open Bible, wrapped in cling film and topped with a plastic crown? Why are both groups so particular about dress code when engaging in these ritual acts of walking? And what, if anything, do these ethnographic observations tell us about the (material) relationship between human and non-human agency, or about the (material) co-constitution of modernity and enchantment?

I answer these questions through a re-reading of Alfred Gell’s work on distributed personhood.³ I show how the “material world” of contemporary Protestantism is no less enchanted than the “spirit world” of the pre-Reformation, pre-Enlightenment era. Thus, my broadest theoretical conclusion is not that “we” (ostensibly rational social scientists) or “they” (ostensibly irrational “believers”) have never been modern. Nor is it that “we” (and “they”) exist in some “a-modern” or “non-modern” world of “hybrids,” “chimeras,” and “quasi-objects” suspended within “a single proliferation of transcendence.”⁴ Rather, my argument is that, because immanence and transcendence are materially inseparable, we have never been disenchanted, while nonetheless remaining thoroughly modern.

Context

For 15 months between 2008 and 2010, I lived in Gamrie, a small Aberdeenshire fishing village that is home to seven hundred people and six “fundamentalist” Protestant churches (four Brethren, two Presbyterian). During this time I conducted ethnographic fieldwork, primarily focusing on the two aspects of life that most occupied Gamrie society, namely religion and fishing. While Gamrie’s fishermen included those in their teens to those in their seventies, those most committed to the village’s Brethren “meeting halls” and Presbyterian “kirks” were predominately elderly. These older Christians, as well as being self-proclaimed “fundamentalists” (who organized their lives around the dual principles of biblical literalism and social separatism), were also strongly millenarian, having been influenced by John Nelson Darby’s nineteenth-century dispensationalist eschatology and by its popular reworking within American Protestant fundamentalism.⁵ As such, they eagerly anticipated the imminent apocalypse, and did so by actively identifying many different divine and demonic “signs of the times”—in social, political, economic and everyday life—that continually (and communally) frame the present as the “last of the last days.” While these signs were multifarious, my informants’ theological commitments to Christian Zionism and their financial commitments to the fishing industry often meant that the activities of Israel and the European Union were held to be (respectively, divine and demonic) indexes of the unfolding eschaton.

Yet, in Gamrie the material and eschatological nearness of both God and the devil did not nullify my informants’ sense of being modern persons. This is because, as Christian “believers,” they were strongly committed to a (foundationally modernist) version of Reformed Protestantism that emphasized the interiority of personal salvation, the inalienability of freedom of conscience, and the imperative of individual Biblical interpretation. Equally, as deep sea fishermen, Gamrie’s Christians operated within a (again, foundationally modernist) capitalistic mode of production that engaged in intensive, industrial-scale natural-resource exploitation, as held within a highly complex and (ostensibly) rationalistic and scientific EU bureaucracy. On board Gamrie’s trawlers, this “harvesting of the seas” occurred through a mechanization of human labor that was itself founded upon the “calling” to productively engage in the competitive zero-sum game of personal wealth accumulation.

And accumulate wealth they did. With standard-size trawlers costing around £2 million, and much bigger pelagic vessels costing upwards of £25 million, Gamrie was reputed to have the highest number of millionaires per head of population in Scotland. When the fishing was good, deckhands, being paid a share of the catch, could earn over a thousand pounds a week; more experienced crew and those with additional roles on the boat (such as the engineer) were paid more. Skippers, who were also generally boat owners, received a far larger proportion of catch profits, with most said to be millionaires—and this despite the enormous mortgages they took out to start (and grow) their businesses.

My second ethnographic investigation into Scots Protestantism emerges from a very different fieldwork experience among members and supporters of the Loyal Orange Institution, known as the Orange Order, (founded in Ireland in 1796; Scotland c1800), a Protestant parading organization with an established public presence in much of Lowland Scotland, particularly in the post-industrial West. The Order is ultra-British and ultra-Unionist, and its public pronouncements are fiercely anti-nationalist and anti-independence. The Order views itself as a staunch defender of British values, understood to encompass not only Protestantism and Unionism, but also fraternalism, patriotism, conservatism, royalism, loyalism, militarism, and colonialism. Many of the Order’s critics would also seek to add anti-Catholicism and thus, sectarianism, to this list.

Importantly, the Orange Order publicly embodies the positionality of these multiple “isms” (in different combinations, and to different degrees) through the established rhythms of the “Marching Season,” culminating in annual “Boyne demonstrations” on July 12th. Intriguingly, the Order reputedly has more parades annually in Glasgow than in Belfast and London/Derry combined, granting the Institution an unparalleled position as the literal standard-bearers of the Union Flag on Scotland’s urban streets. The distribution of the Institution’s membership and activities meant that, while I was in the field for a similar period of time, (14 months, from June 2012 to August 2013), this project differed from earlier fieldwork insofar as it was distinctly “multi-sited.” Thus, as well as spending considerable amounts of time each week in “loyalist” Bridgeton (in Glasgow’s East End) and Airdrie, I also spent time in different communities across Scotland’s Central Belt. I also took shorter trips to Northern Ireland to conduct interviews and comparative fieldwork. My most sustained engagements with Scottish Orangemen came from spending time with volunteers at the “Orange Archive” at Olympia House (headquarters of the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland) in Bridgeton, and with those who came to drink and socialize in the Airdrie Orange Social Club. With few exceptions, these key informants were generally retired, working-class men in their mid-sixties to their early eighties.

As well as attending many other official Orange events,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Materiality and Religious History
• Part I: Material Sectarianism
• Part II: Material Religion, Sex, and Gender
• Part III: Material Religion in Postsecular Britain
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index