The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism

Simon Coleman, Rosalind I. J. Hackett, Simon Coleman, Rosalind I. J. Hackett

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780814772607
• eBook ISBN: 9780814772614
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The phenomenal growth of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism around the world in recent decades has forced us to rethink what it means to be religious and what it means to be global. The success of these religious movements has revealed tensions and resonances between the public and the private, the religious and the cultural, and the local and the global. This volume provides a wide ranging and accessible, as well as ethnographically rich, perspective on what has become a truly global religious trend, one that is challenging conventional analytical categories within the social sciences.

This book informs students and seasoned scholars alike about the character of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism not only as they have spread across the globe, but also as they have become global movements. Adopting a broadly anthropological approach, the chapters synthesize the existing literature on Pentecostalism and evangelicalism even as they offer new analyses and critiques. They show how the study of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism provides a fresh way to approach classic anthropological themes; they contest the frequent characterization of these movements as conservative religious, social, and political forces; and they argue that Pentecostalism and evangelicalism are significant not least because they encourage us to reflect on the intersections of politics, materiality, morality and law. Ultimately, the volume leaves us with a clear sense of the cultural and social power, as well as the theoretical significance, of forms of Christianity that we can no longer afford to ignore.

Section 1

Moralizing the World

1

Personhood

Sin, Sociality, and the Unbuffered Self in US Evangelicalism

Omri Elisha

Trevor paused, held his fist to his mouth, and cleared his throat. Standing in front of a dozen men, including some of his closest friends, he struggled to regain a masculine composure but made no effort to conceal his emotion or downplay the poignancy of the moment. “In the week since my diagnosis, I’ve learned a lot about this disease, this diabetes, and how to live with it.” His eyes grew more determined. “I’m also realizing that this disease is my repentance,” he said, “repentance for years of gluttony. When I became a Christian years ago, I gave up most of my sinful ways, but I never gave up overeating, even though I knew that God wanted me to make that sacrifice too.”

The men, all members of an evangelical men’s group, listened quietly as Trevor spoke. His humbling indictment seemed all the more damning with empty pizza boxes and grease-soaked paper plates scattered around the table where we all sat. As he raised a Bible in his hand, the other men instinctively reached for theirs, patiently awaiting chapter and verse.

“Now that I’m repenting,” Trevor continued, “I really appreciate it because, as we learn in Romans 2, repentance is a gift.” His tone shifted, as the emphasis of his discourse changed. Words of confession now assumed the force of instruction. “And if you pray for me, I don’t want you to pray that I’ll be healed from this disease, but pray that I’ll be healed from the sinful lifestyle that made me sick. Pray that I’ll be obedient to God and begin to live a more healthy life, and pray that my wife will support me.” Heads nodded in agreement. “I need you guys to keep me accountable,” Trevor concluded. “I will fail if I go through this alone.”

Trevor’s testimony—introspective and confessional—was clearly about more than a middle-aged family man telling his friends he had type 2 diabetes. By presenting himself as a contrite sinner and beneficiary of God’s grace, Trevor framed a narrative that was at once deeply personal and standard fare in a milieu where themes of repentance, redemption, and regeneration are routinely invoked. At Eternal Vine Church (pseudonym), a megachurch in the suburbs of Knoxville, Tennessee, “fellowship groups” like this one (also known as “small groups”) are valued precisely as zones of intimacy where soul-searching evangelicals come together to nourish and reform their inward selves through Bible study, prayer, and discussion. Intrinsically, such groups attend to the needs, fears, and desires of individual believers, reinforcing Protestant ethics of self-discipline and self-actualization.

Yet the interactions among members of this fellowship group should not be read in purely individualistic terms, as if it were merely the sanctification of atomized selves at stake. Exchanges triggered by moments like the one described are morally and theologically significant in ways beyond privileging the individual as the locus of ethical cultivation. Seen in context, Trevor’s words and the responses that followed were fueled by a relational imperative, a model of sociality (that is, how social connections are formed and maintained) that stresses the virtues of radical interdependence among people of faith. This imperative is crucial when it comes to how evangelicals inhabit the world as Christians, and how they guard themselves from sin and other forces that might cause spiritual harm or impede the mission of the church.

Drawing on field research, including the above anecdote to which I will return, this essay argues two main points. First, being part of a Christian community, for many US evangelicals, means entering into voluntary social networks where one is expected to become closely implicated in the lives of others. It is a relational dynamic that must be nurtured and upheld with commitment and vigilance. Prayer, fasting, and biblical immersion are common methods for bolstering faith, resisting temptation, and overcoming demonic influences, but they are not the only means at evangelicals’ disposal. Relationships built on transparency, and the monitoring of self and other, are enacted as vehicles of spiritual discipline, mediating biblical truth and the power of the Holy Spirit. To borrow the idiom of spiritual warfare—a language more closely tied to Pentecostalism, but increasingly ubiquitous in evangelical circles as well—social relationships help constitute the armor and arsenal of the Christian warrior.

Second, I argue that the corresponding model of sociality challenges the independence and impermeability of what Charles Taylor (2007) calls the “buffered self,” thus destabilizing individualism even while accommodating it in other respects. For evangelicals, sociality is ideally meant to facilitate intersubjectivity, a form of communion among coexisting selves, an alternative reality that nearly approximates the divine. As I will demonstrate, this meaningful nuance suggests that even as evangelical theology reproduces Western hegemonic values and individuating norms, the manner in which such values and norms are expressed in actually existing Christianities is rarely straightforward or unself-conscious.

Like many Americans, US evangelicals champion the virtues of self-reliance and personal responsibility, not least because they reflect the moral fortitude expected of those who have been “saved.” At the same time, evangelicals aspire toward “redemptive relationships,” in which the boundaries of individual moral autonomy are partially broken down. Marked by terms such as “fellowship” and “discipleship,” evangelical sociality is a religious end unto itself, in which familiar conditions of personhood are revised to promote new configurations of self and other. Spiritual and emotional lives are meant to intersect, unhindered, in the confines of religious affinity.

There are limits, of course. Such principles do not nearly amount to a relational social ontology like that found, for example, among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, where identities are determined by patterns of social differentiation and “no one ever appears as an individual outside of relationships” (Robbins 2004, 302). Western evangelicals retain their status as self-determined, impartible individuals, no matter how much personal sovereignty they relinquish to friends and spiritual kin. Yet evangelical indoctrination is a process that features prescribed forms of immersive sociality, seen as correctives against the atomizing pressures of secular society. As James Bielo has shown, while US evangelicals “remain individual adherents of faith,” a growing number are “fed up with their own individualist heritage.” In turn, they “ground their visions of authentic faith in relationality,” in efforts to achieve “a desired moral community in which mutual dependence is lived in the everyday” (2012, 259). This model of mutual dependence, which reinforces the believer’s utter dependence on God, is instrumental in the formation of evangelical subjects. And despite the potential obligations, risks, and entanglements involved, it is important for their sense of how divine as well as satanic forces become manifest in their lives.

That They All May Be One

The liberation of the individual from social, political, and economic constraints is a core paradigm of Western modernity, with deep resonances in American life. In a devotedly democratic and capitalist society that privileges the possessive rights and responsibilities of individuals, evangelicals—especially white conservative evangelicals—embrace these values with noted consistency and zeal. They are, so to speak, individualists par excellence, and are routinely characterized as such by scholars and critics alike. Undeniably, the conservative social attitudes of most American evangelicals are strongly influenced by ethics of modern individualism as well (Smith 1998).

This long-standing ideological affinity stems from the very heart of Reformed theology, in which salvation is linked to notions of individual agency purified of material and social entanglements (Keane 2007). The evangelical concept of being “born again” is itself strongly individuating, as is the expressive culture of evangelical worship and prayer, typically performed in first-person singular terms. Ministries of charity and social outreach tend to rely on personalistic “one-on-one” strategies as well, reinforcing the primacy of the individual as the site of radical transformation.

But what are the limits of this dominant worldview? How do evangelicals imagine or create new interpersonal boundaries when their Christian idealism compels them to relate to others with uncommon devotion? Is there room for extension and nuance in standard evangelical conceptions of the bounded autonomous self, standing alone before God?

Charles Taylor considers “the replacement of the porous self by the buffered self” (2007, 539) to be one of the defining features of “the secular age” and its disenchantments. However, one need not look far to see that there is more to the story. As powerful as the force of individualism may be, it is “perpetually and irremediably haunted by its opposite” (Dumont 1986, 17). Evangelical practice aims to reduce the strain of this binary opposition, summoning alternatives that reflect perennial modernist concerns regarding both the privileges and pitfalls of individuality. In this regard it is worth noting that norms of religious sociality, though typically invoking the authority of sacred texts and doctrines, are inevitably shaped by specific social, historical, and institutional conditions (see Chipumuro 2014; Limbert 2010; Zigon 2011).

Since the 1960s, widespread innovations in Protestant revivalism have led to a proliferation of evangelical churches and ministries fostering “spirituality” and personal fulfillment as standards of authentic faith (Miller 1997). Contemporary megachurches, para-church organizations, and Christian media industries exemplify a style of evangelical populism that assigns great value to the virtues of therapeutic individualism and choice, even while advancing a conservative theology. At the same time, as Donald Miller observes, evangelical churches put structures in place to ensure that members become morally accountable to one another, thereby subsuming part of their individuality in the collective Body of Christ: “Typically this accountability occurs in small group Bible study settings where mentored friendships are valued. As a Christian, one does not live for oneself. . . . While considerable emphasis is placed on individual choice and personal interpretation, the committed Christian is held to a purpose beyond self-actualization” (Miller 1997, 21–22).

Such elucidations are useful correctives against the tendency to overgeneralize when describing the social habits of evangelicals. Critics, including evangelicals themselves, are inclined to accuse modern churches and media enterprises of promoting spiritual narcissism and self-help capitalism under the guise of a watered-down gospel, which they suggest has the effect of debasing sacred traditions of piety and selfless altruism (e.g., Hunter 2010). This critique, whatever its merits, overlooks an essential aspect of evangelicalism as a lived religion: it is often oriented toward communities of practice and relational networks that bring individuals into sustained contact with authoritative disciplines, informal social controls, and moral norms that destabilize and reconstitute the modern self.

As churchgoers are frequently reminded in sermons, books, and study groups, the straight and narrow path of salvation is a personal journey, but it is a journey that one best not undertake alone. This is about more than the sentimental value of togetherness, or the church as a moral community. There is, one could say, an almost sacramental quality in how evangelicals idealize relationships founded on Christian virtues, as though social bonding through mutual dependence, selflessness, instruction, sympathy, and affection should not only evoke key aspects of one’s relation to Jesus, but will in effect instantiate and enhance them.

Virtual surrender of one’s moral autonomy and self-reliance to pastors, spouses, and friends, whose very presence in one’s life reflects the will of God, reaffirms complete surrender to God. Seen in this light, the fusion of spirituality and self-help evident in contemporary evangelicalism does not necessarily preclude deep piety and altruism, but is in fact aligned with theological claims that valorize “human relationships as part and parcel of supernatural grace” (Bialecki 2009, 118).

Of course, evangelical relationships are not all the same, depending on the relative status and social positions of those involved. Relations between pastors and congregants, and husbands and wives, or even between seasoned Christians and new converts, are defined less by egalitarian sensibilities than by structures of uneven or “vertical” authority. Individuals are expected to recognize and abide by traditional power dynamics (e.g., wives submitting to their husbands), and to show deference to those whom God has chosen to exercise authority in their lives (see Kelly H. Chong’s chapter in this volume). And yet evangelicals do retain the overall sense, in principle if not practice, that everyone is a sinner and that all godly relationships are basically symbiotic.

So while my discussion of evangelical relationalism and its application in terms of sociality is based here on a discussion of one fairly homogeneous group (all male, all white, but not without their own internal power dynamics), it is fair to say that the imperative with which I am concerned—the emphasis on exemplary relationships and networks, and their potential to make the boundaries of the self more permeable—is relevant in the lives and commitments of evangelicals more broadly. And although the decision to embrace an unbuffered (if not entirely porous) selfhood is largely voluntary, and applies to some social contexts more than others, it remains a critical component of evangelical indoctrination and sanctification, and represents a pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A New Field?
• Section 1. Moralizing the World
• Section 2. Language and Embodiment
• Section 3. Transmission and Mediation
• Section 4. The State and Beyond: New Relations, New Tensions
• About the Contributors
• Index