Moral AmbitionMobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches

Elisha, Omri

doi:10.1525/california/9780520267503.001.0001

Cited by 105 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…As many other anthropologists have observed, evangelicals spend a lot of time ruminating over the theological implications, the intersubjective politics, and the interactional grammar of evangelism (cf. Bielo 2011; Bornstein 2003; Brahinsky 2020 a ; Elisha 2011; Engelke 2013; Harding 2000; Howell 2012; Montemaggi 2018; Strhan 2015). Many evangelicals are concerned not just about the effectiveness of their efforts but also about the ethics and politics of facilitating good conversions (see Kravel‐Tovi, this issue).…”

Section: The Moral Epistemology Of Missional Christianitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I propose a specifically moral epistemological perspective on US biblicism in order to explain why so many evangelicals have become uneasy about proselytizing (cf. Bielo 2011; Bornstein 2003; Brahinsky 2020 a ; Elisha 2011; Howell 2012; Montemaggi 2018). Taking a ‘moral epistemological’ perspective on biblicism is not about assessing the goodness or badness of a given interpretive strategy (cf.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Proselytizing is not evangelism: epistemic virtue and religious suasion at a post‐fundamentalist church in Nashville

Victor

2024

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This essay proposes a moral epistemological explanation for many US evangelicals’ growing unease about proselytizing. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at a church in Nashville, Tennessee, it highlights how a particular kind of epistemological certainty became a driving value of evangelical biblicism when early nineteenth‐century evangelicals attempted to apply the precepts of inductive science to textual interpretation. Members of the church I studied routinely express regret about this historical entanglement, which they blame for their denomination's dogmatic and ultimately unsuccessful fixation on persuading other people to believe the exact same things as they do. Against ‘proselytizing’ driven by ‘the desire to be right’, my interlocutors are trying to develop a practical social ethics whose explicitly biblical inspiration, they hope, will motivate others to want to become Christians. I show that as an analytic, religious suasion makes concepts like ‘proselytizing’ and ‘evangelism’ ethnographic again by sending them back to the field where our interlocutors themselves define and critique them. Doing this allows us to better grasp nuances in evangelicals’ own evolving ideologies and practices for making their religion intelligible to themselves and others.

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Section: The Moral Epistemology Of Missional Christianitymentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Proselytizing is not evangelism: epistemic virtue and religious suasion at a post‐fundamentalist church in Nashville

Victor

2024

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…In Marsh's edited volume, lived theology reveals ‘a series of commitments to the world’ (Smith 2017: 34), which, akin to Cone's notion of redemption, signals deeper stakes within the ordinary that ethnography should detect and make intelligible. Lived theology builds on long‐running efforts to examine a ‘lived religion’ (Elisha 2011; Hall 1997; Orsi 2010 [1985]) which have strived to consider everyday parishioner life and its religious tensions ‘between Sundays’ (Frederick 2003). For my analysis of St Kolbe's faith‐dorm obedience, turning to a lived theology reverses a mainline question of (Christian) lived religion – ‘What do church beliefs and practices lived beyond the church's confines reveal about the human phenomenon of religion?’ – to, alternatively, inquiring how non‐church disciplinary practices, institutional spaces, and articulations of power do their own theological concept work, and to what effect.…”

Section: Lived Theology In Black Theological Space: Obedience As ‘Dar...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Compliance and obedience in an Alabama prison faith dorm

Thornton

2022

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This article considers how the Christian obedience of male prisoners inside the ‘faith dorm’ of a maximum‐security prison in the US state of Alabama overlaps with penal compliance. I argue that prisoners’ devotion to faith‐dorm strictures is not straightforward rule‐following but forges social and Christly intimacy. Faith‐dorm obedience foregrounds the theological, and it reveals non‐church institutional domains as theologically dynamic and capable of spiritually infused material work. To explore this, I describe how spiritual governance became a technique of Alabama's prison population management. Then I show how the resulting compliance is transfigured into critical notions of obedience that elicit practices of care and mutual support among prisoners through theological imaginaries of grace and Jesus’ crucifixion. Ultimately, I advance prisoners’ obedience as ‘dark wisdom’, which draws on the paradox of a crucified messiah to derive justice and intimacy from the prison's coerced living conditions.

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“…Nonetheless, ethnographic studies of multiracial and economically diverse churches have shown the importance of ministers in establishing cultural expectations as well as the enduring frame models for how racial and income inequality ought to be understood (Edwards 2013; Elisha 2011). Missing from these discussions are considerations of not just the composition of the church, but also the composition of the community more generally.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Emerson and Smith found their respondents “had difficulty seeing anything other than an individual problem” even when explicitly confronted with “systemic, institutionalized aspects of race problems” (2000:79). Research on White Evangelicals’ opinions on racial and socioeconomic inequality often find a resistance to the ideas of structural solutions to racial inequality (Brown 2009; Cobb, Perry, and Dougherty 2015; Elisha 2011). Evangelicals are not completely unwilling to acknowledge the importance of structures in social life, though they will often describe large organizations (especially the government) as more a source of problems than potential solutions (Franz and Brown 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When to Preach About Poverty: How Location, Race, and Ideology Shape White Evangelical Sermons

Guhin

Holman

Coan

et al. 2023

Scientific Study of Religion

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Social scientists have long been interested in how intergroup contact or elite messaging can reduce or eliminate racial biases. To better understand the role of religious elites in these political questions, we show how a church location's income and racial characteristics interact with racial and economic ideologies to shape the political content of sermons. Testing our theories through both quantitative and qualitative analysis of an original data set of more than 102,000 sermons from more than 5200 pastors, we show that contact is only effective as a means of decreasing prejudice to the extent that actors—in our case, pastors—are ideologically capable of reconciling their potential role in economic inequality. White Evangelical pastors rarely preach about issues of poverty or racial justice overall, but the context of the preaching matters. We find that the greater the share of Black population there is in a church community, the less likely White Evangelical pastors are to mention issues of poverty or racial justice, and when they do mention it, they hold to ideological commitments that avoid blaming systems for racialized economic inequality.

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Moral AmbitionMobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches

Cited by 105 publications

References 0 publications

Proselytizing is not evangelism: epistemic virtue and religious suasion at a post‐fundamentalist church in Nashville

Proselytizing is not evangelism: epistemic virtue and religious suasion at a post‐fundamentalist church in Nashville

Compliance and obedience in an Alabama prison faith dorm

When to Preach About Poverty: How Location, Race, and Ideology Shape White Evangelical Sermons

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