In this article I examine the status of belief among U.S. evangelicals organizing under the moniker of the “emerging church.” As part of their cultural critique of the conservative Christian subculture, many emerging evangelicals recast their standpoint toward the role of propositional doctrine in their definition of an authentic Christian self. I join with colleagues in the anthropology of religion, in particular the anthropology of Christianity, who are rethinking the nature of belief as a form of relational commitment. I argue that emerging evangelicals seek a faith where human–human relationships are a precondition for human–divine relations to flourish. To achieve their desired sense of community emerging evangelicals create ritual structures that foster a highly relational religiosity. I illustrate this recasting of belief through analyses of narrative and institution making, grounded in three years of ethnographic fieldwork.

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I thank the Society for Urban Anthropology for the Anthony Leeds Book Prize. The award gives me special pleasure because I think of myself primarily as an urban anthropologist. I was trained in "peasant studies" as a student of Eric Wolf's in the late 1970s and early 1980s eager to conduct participant-observation fieldwork on the revolutionary movements taking place in Central America in those decades. It was a hopeful - even inspiring - moment in history at my doctoral fieldwork theme/sites: the agrarian reform in the Amerindian Moskitia territory of Sandinista Nicaragua (1979-80, 1984), guerrilla warfare in an FMLN-controlled territory in El Salvador (1981), and farmworker organizing on a United Fruit Company plantation enclave spanning the Costa Rica/Panama Caribbean border (1982-1984). During these exciting years of fieldwork, however, I found myself longing to return to my hometown to conduct ethnography on the same themes that I was witnessing in the countryside of Central America: the political mobilization/demobilization of class struggle in the context of racialized ethnicity and extreme social inequality. Consequently, while writing up my dissertation (Bourgois 1989), I moved to East Harlem two dozen blocks from where I had grown up in New York City to document what I came to call "US inner-city apartheid." That was in March of 1985 and ever since, my work has been primarily dedicated to understanding urban social inequality.

This article reflects on one potential relationship the anthropological study of religion might enjoy with a critical orientation to religion. To do so, I highlight a burgeoning (but tenuous) dialog between anthropology and theology. Ultimately, I propose that a focus on religion and human flourishing provides one wavelength on which an anthropology–theology collaboration can thrive. I follow the observation that anthropologists and theologians are united by concern with shared problems. If human and social flourishing is one such problem, then what might a collaborative configuration look like? The example I consider is how ethnographic evidence of religion in public life can be mobilized to advance prophetic theological critiques of injustice.

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