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The Word Became Flesh and Blood, and Moved Into the Neighbou Rhood’

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The Word Became Flesh and Blood, and Moved Into the Neighbou Rhood’ London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) ‘The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbou rhood’: Community, enterprise and anti-modernity among refo rming evangelical Christians in a United States city Katharine Cordelia Fletcher A thesis submitted to the Department of Anthropology of the London School of Economics for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy London, September 2016 1 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work, other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. I declare this thesis consists of 99,984 words. 2 Abstract This thesis is an ethnographic study of communities, businesses and individuals in a city in the Pacific Northwest region of the US who participate in a reforming turn within evangelical Christianity that critiques the American evangelical church’s emphasis on programmatic evangelism and church growth, and its association with conservative politics. The thesis begins by introducing the ideas of ‘community’ and ‘intentionality’ as they orient individuals’ ethical self-fashioning within an intentional community that participates in this turn. The thesis goes on to examine this and other groups’ ethos of communitarian localism, in which people imagine the possibilities for social and ethical renewal in explicitly placial terms; largely eschewing verbal evangelism in favour of the material and ritual work of ‘placemaking’, and personal commitments to living as much of one’s life as possible locally. We see an ambiguous posture of industry and disavowal, as people pursue transformative action in the neighbourhood, while holding an ethical presumption against all forms of power, and seeking to resist the capitalist temporalities of ‘development’. The thesis examines how people use enterprise to enact their localism; showing how doctrines of ethical capitalism, understood by some scholars as ‘neoliberal’, but seen locally as potentially ‘radical’, are deployed in service of a petit-bourgeois ideal of a morally embedded small-town economy. The final chapter addresses this subculture’s cosmological and sociological outlooks, notably its anti-modernity. I argue that the turn toward ‘holistic’ community, symbolised in mixed-use urban space, and imagined theologically as the Kingdom of God, represents an aspiration to ethicise the public sphere, and close the gap between private and public by rescaling society to the level of interpersonal interaction. In this sociologically reflexive subculture, we see an ambition of recuperating the morally choosing Protestant individual from the distributed personhood entailed in a functionally differentiated economy and society. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 7 Chapter one 32 ‘Reconciliation is the centre of our work’: self and relationship in intentional Christian community Chapter two 66 ‘The glorious mundane’: life in the neighbourhood Chapter three 102 Neighbourhood community development: recessive activism and ironies of urban renewal Chapter four 135 Sacrifice and consumption in ‘the world’s first charity pub’ Chapter five 161 ‘The right relationship of resources to people’: Social enterprise and localising econ omy Chapter six 192 Christian anti-moderns: sincerity, eschatology and politics in the new-evangelical t ur n Conclusion 222 Bibliography 229 4 Acknowledgements My thanks to everyone in the LSE Department of Anthropology, above all to my exceptionally supportive, stimulating and thoughtful supervisors, Professor Matthew Engelke and Dr Fenella Cannell. Thank you so much, both. And thank you too to Matthew for encouraging me to begin the project in the first place. The patience and encouragements you have both offered have been, as you know, above and beyond. My thanks too to the staff members who convened the writing- up seminars, as well as to the faculty and administrators for making the LSE a stimulating and well-run place to study. Thank you to all my fellow students in the writing-up seminar, I am ever so grateful to everyone for your helpful comments. In particular, thanks to my wonderful cohort, Meadhbh McIvor, Agustin Diz, Susannah Crockford and Juli Huang. I have fond and happy memories. Very many thanks to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for their generous grant: I am very grateful for this opportunity, and many thanks too to the LSE for their generous support in the final year. Thank you to the staff members of the college in the US city where this fieldwork took place – in particular Paul, Courtney and Paul. You were very kind and helpful and I am grateful for your hospitality, and the opportunities you gave me during my stay. Thanks too to the Anthropology of Christianity Reading Group for stimulating chats, in particular to Anna Strhan, Aleksi Knuutila, Steph Berns, Timothy Carroll, and Tom Boylston. Thank you to Christina Fallara for your wonderful photographs. Thank you to Gustaaf Houtman, for being encouraging and kind and open-handed, and for making the introduction that was to start this new chapter in my life. Thank you to the Goldsmiths Master’s course tutor in the anthropology of religion, Dr Mark Lamont, whose course introduced me to this whole new world, and to Dr Emma Tarlo and Professor Rebecca Cassidy. To James Bielo, for being generous with ideas, comments and time. Thank you to everyone in the Living Water Community, and to Greg and Keegan and colleagues at the Cascade Free House, and to all the many, many other individuals and communities who trusted me with their time and stories. My time with you was one of the most enlightening and 5 affecting – and enjoyable – experiences of my life. I am deeply grateful for that experience, and for your trust and deep generosity. Thank you. Thank you to my parents, Ann and Michael Fletcher, for your love and support and late-night lifts home from the library. And: thank you, of course, to Eugene. You have put up with a lot, and I am thankful. 6 Introduction This thesis concerns the moral lives of individuals and communities who participate in a particular American religious subculture: the loose movement within contemporary evangelical Christianity that is variously referred to as ‘new’ (Krattenmaker 2013; Pally 2011; Steensland & Goff 2014), ‘emerging’ (Bielo 2011a; 2009), and ‘post-’ evangelical. The study’s geographical focus is a medium-sized city in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, which I am calling ‘Quimby’. The people I spent time with in the course of 18 months’ participant-observation field research in Quimby from 2012 to 2014 are Christians who, in diverse ways, participate in what anthropologist James Bielo has called a ‘movement of cultural critique’ (Bielo 2009: 219) within contemporary American evangelical Christianity. This critique runs the gamut of church life, taking in matters of ecclesial organisation, mission, economics, politics, sexual ethics, worship style and more besides (Bielo 2011a; 2009; Pally 2011; Steensland & Goff 2014). The movement in its recognisably current form may be traced to conferences and discussions emerging within evangelical pastoral circles in the mid 1990s (Bielo 2009; Gibbs & Bolger 2005), although it sits in several longer streams of critique and reform within the churches in America and beyond (Schmalzbauer 2014; Sine 2008; Steensland & Goff 2014; Swartz 2008; 2012). The object of its critique is, loosely defined, the mainstream of the US evangelical church. Bielo (2011a; 2009), the movement’s first thorough ethnographer, has proposed that its critique centres around four major reference points: theology, evangelism, worship, and what he calls, following John Barbour, a discourse of ‘deconversion’ (Bielo 2011a; 2009). Theologically, Bielo identifies a posture of ‘postfoundationalism’, that is, a turn away from systematic, codified theology in favour of an approach centring on ‘narrative’, which admits of doubts and aporias in relation to the Christian story (2009: 223). Evangelistically, he explains, the turn is to the ‘missional’, that is, a reflective and open posture of engagement with people in the missioner’s own, Euroamerican, culture, in which, as per the observations of influential evangelist Lesslie Newbigin and others (Newbigin 1989; 1986; Hauerwas & Willimon 2014), a default Christianity may no longer be assumed. ‘Missional’ Christians approach this culture, of which they are themselves a part, from a ground of common social concern and ‘relationship-building’, rather than didactic proselytism. In the arena of worship, Bielo describes a move toward incorporation of liturgical elements associated with churches in the non-evangelical traditions. Finally, the posture of ‘deconversion’; in which people’s shift away from the practices of the churches of 7 their youth is something akin to conversion; experienced as a dramatic, whole-person turn away from the practices that once held them. Notwithstanding the posture of critique, which, as Bielo notes, is the controlling logic behind all these disparate turns, this remains a movement in and of American evangelicalism. The questions it poses to itself – of how to engage as activist Christians with a plural and often nonbelieving world; of how to position the church in relation to politics, nation and power; of how to define spiritual orthodoxy, and how to carry it in the world – are questions that have animated America’s evangelical subcultures throughout their history. Of the four signal characteristics of evangelicalism identified in David Bebbington’s (1989) much-cited ‘quadrilateral’ definition, as ‘biblicism’, ‘crucicentrism’, ‘conversionism’, and ‘activism’, ‘conversionism’ has traditionally been one of its most prominent standards. The movement discussed here may be seen, at one level at least, to represent a turn away from this classic subcultural sign.
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