Born-Again on Sundays: Exploring Narratives of Belief and Performances in a Belizean Methodist Church
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University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 5-2020 Born-Again on Sundays: Exploring Narratives of Belief and Performances in a Belizean Methodist Church Katharine Serio University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd Part of the Christian Denominations and Sects Commons, Christianity Commons, Missions and World Christianity Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, and the Sociology of Religion Commons Citation Serio, K. (2020). Born-Again on Sundays: Exploring Narratives of Belief and Performances in a Belizean Methodist Church. Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/3612 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Born-Again on Sundays: Exploring Narratives of Belief and Performances in a Belizean Methodist Church A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology by Katharine Serio University of Arkansas Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, 2011 University of Arkansas Master of Arts in Anthropology, 2013 May 2020 University of Arkansas This dissertation is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council. ______________________________ Kirstin Erickson, Ph.D. Dissertation Director ______________________________ JoAnn D’Alisera, Ph.D. Committee Member ______________________________ Ted Swedenburg, Ph.D. Committee Member Abstract If you are only at church services on Sunday and do not actively practice your religious faith every day, are you “born again” every day? Reverend Rebecca Lewis of Wesley Methodist Church in a small town in Belize preaches active participation in the church and encourages her congregation to attend all religious events, pray rigorously, and read the Bible actively, but how does the congregation listen to her and react to her sermons? “Born-Again on Sundays” is an ethnographic account that draws on anthropological theories of belief and vernacular religion, performance and narrative, and poverty and reflexivity to explore the faith practices in one Belizean Church community. I examine how the pastors of Wesley Methodist Church instruct their congregants to behave via weekly sermon performances. These sermons provide a rich performative, intertextual genre to study, as pastors very practically delineate exactly what congregants should be doing in order to practice their faith effectively. I juxtapose the ministers’ teachings with the behavior of members of the congregation, exploring how pastors often feel the members fall short in practicing their religion and how the members themselves see their behavior and their beliefs. In addition, I situate the dissertation in Belize, investigating how congregants place themselves and their country in the world; as Belizeans and as Methodists, they struggle with the country’s poverty and their desires to help the greater Aüdüan community. From the pastors’ perspectives, their church members might not always live up to their standards or their perspective of God’s standards, only taking their faith seriously once a week on Sunday morning, but from the parishioners’ perspective, they are doing the best they can, dealing with forces outside religion and developing strong, and deeply private, personal relationships with their God. ©2020 by Katharine Serio All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Kirstin Erickson, who has guided me through this process and has endeavored to bring out the best in my fieldwork and in my ethnography. With her extensive breadth of knowledge and positive motivation, she has helped to mold me into the researcher and anthropologist I have become. I may not have been able to navigate the complicated program without her wonderful support and direction. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. JoAnn D’Alisera and Dr. Ted Swedenburg who added their own perspectives to my anthropological education through their courses and in their feedback before and during my dissertation research and writing process. Funding from the University of Arkansas also ensured that I would be able to complete my research. The J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences provided me with the Dissertation Research Award while the Graduate School awarded me with the Dissertation Year Fellowship. These were essential to my ability to complete my dissertation and my academic program. I participated in two invaluable writing groups while writing my dissertation. I would like to thank Dr. Hashi Jayasinghe and Dr. Tri Murniati who commiserated about this grueling process and, as cultural studies scholars, pushed my writing in fresh directions and, as people from non-Christian backgrounds, taught me to thoroughly elucidate certain religious ideas that seemed obvious to me. After they graduated, I worked with biological anthropologist Cheyenne Lewis and cultural anthropologist Steve Moog, future PhDs, who further pushed my anthropological theories in my writing and aided me in writing my ideas more clearly and smoothly. All of these people kept me on task and writing even when I wanted to give up, so I thank them all profusely! Finally, I would like to thank my family. My parents, Cindy and Joe Serio, have always supported my passions and my desire to continue my education to the highest levels. My significant other, Carl Williford, would not let me give up every time I wanted to abandon my writing, helped me stay on task when I needed it, and took me out when I needed a break. My cat, Cricket, was a great source of distraction, whether she was stepping on my keyboard as I typed or sleeping quietly on the bed minding her own business. I would not have been able to produce this work without them and thank them for all they have done for me outside of academia that enabled my dissertation success. Table of Contents Introduction – Born-Again on Sundays 1 Chapter One – “Belize? I don’t think that’s a real place but okay” 21 Chapter Two – “To Be Born-Again Everyday”: How to be a Successful Methodist in One Belizean Community 45 Chapter Three – “The Christ that dwells in me greets the Christ that dwells in you”: Exploring Religious Practice at Wesley Methodist Church 71 Chapter Four – “Okay, bye”: Reflexivity, Poverty, and the Non-Transformative in Short-Term Mission Trips 97 Conclusion 130 Bibliography 139 Appendix 144 List of Figures Figure 1: Wesley Methodist Church on a Sunday Morning 1 Figure 2: View from author's Aüdüan bungalow 21 Figure 3: Rooftop view of Aüdü 44 Figure 4: Author participating in Palm Sunday parade 45 Figure 5: Palm Sunday walk 70 Figure 6: Before the Love Banquet 71 Figure 7: Setting up the Love Banquet 96 Figure 8: Walking into the church 97 Figure 9: New roof on Wesley Methodist Church 129 Figure 10: Sunny path to the beach 138 Introduction – Born-Again on Sundays Figure 1: Wesley Methodist Church on a Sunday morning, used with permission Reverend Rebecca Lewis of Wesley Methodist Church in Aüdü, Belize has had a few close encounters with supernatural creatures in her life.1 She’s now a sixty-year-old woman but she vividly remembers these incidents that happened decades ago. As a child, she went with some friends to pick mangoes, but they saw, as she tells it, “some kind of creature – like a bear, 1 In order to protect the identities of my consultants to the best of my ability, all names, including the name of the town, are pseudonyms. 1 but not a bear – it was tall and black, and it was standing up unnaturally for an animal.” She and her companions ran off, leaving the mangoes behind. A similar encounter happened a couple years later when she went to collect tamale leaves; again, she saw the creature and again, she ran off before she could retrieve her goods. The final encounter was different. She was older and married by that time. She woke up in the middle of the night and she felt the creature, or spirit, on her chest. She lay there paralyzed while her husband slept beside her, unaware. She decided to fight back this time, using her words. She repeated the words, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want” until the spirit left. Thomas, an older gentleman studying to become a licensed local pastor, interrupts her, chuckling. He jokes that there were perfectly reasonable explanations for her so-called “supernatural” encounters. He states that the last experience is especially understandable; there is a common medical explanation for waking up heavy and paralyzed. Reverend Lewis does not directly respond to his assertions as her eyes shoot daggers at him, but she shifts the conversation back to the Holy Spirit and malevolent forces in the world. Because for Reverend Lewis, if the Holy Spirit is alive and working in the world, then so is the devil and his demon spirits like Beelzebub. She discussed malevolent spirits, and how those like Beelzebub get attached to people and places, like crabs do. They must be fed, and we tend to feed these evil manifestations. We tell fables to warn others of the spirits in houses, in woods, and in individuals, and these fables divide us as we feed into the negativity. That is the work of the devil. The way to fight them is to pray and search for Jesus. Rebecca believes that we are so splintered throughout the world because the devil separates us and that is why other churches teach differently. We need to refocus on Jesus and God. We need to trust in God, she says. When we do everything by ourselves without God, we 2 tend to fail. God wants to take care of us, He doesn’t want us to suffer; the suffering in the world can be attributed to a lack of faith and dedication to God.