Abstract
With reference to two different projects examining North American Christianities, this symposium contribution explores opportunities for critique when conducting fieldwork. Drawing from observations made by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, I suggest that critique is most productive when it uses the perspective and position of one’s interlocutors as its point of departure.
The sun was just setting when I pulled up to the church for its annual Passover Seder. I nodded and said hello to those who were milling about in the foyer and stepped past the armed police officer, hired as security for this special service. A temporary wooden frame, painted red to symbolize lamb’s blood, had been affixed to the entryway of the sanctuary. In the main worship space, approximately twenty-five rectangular tables had been set with all of the necessary accoutrements for a traditional Seder. We were instructed to sit with our families for the meal. Since I was alone, I found a place at the back with an elderly couple, their grandson, and two single women. The Haggadah for the evening was projected onto the screens at the front and back of the church, which normally display the lyrics of worship songs and Bible verses during Sunday services.
Christian Passover Seders recently have grown in popularity among a movement that has been labeled Jewish Affinity Christianity (Dulin, 2015; Kaell, 2016; Lugo et al., 2013). The rituals provide an opportunity for Christians to take on Jewish practices and traditions as a means of growing closer to Jesus. The services incorporate many elements of a Jewish Seder, including candle lighting, Hebrew prayers, the Seder plate, Matzah, four glasses of wine (usually grape juice), questions posed by the youngest child, and the hiding of the Afikoman. Often a church elder will lead the congregation through the service pausing to explain the meaning of different symbols and practices. Among evangelical and charismatic Christians, the service emphasizes atonement, gifts of the spirit, and God’s desire to receive and respond to prayers.
After a brief introduction, the service began with the lighting of the Yom Tov candles. The older man at our table reached for the matches.
“No,” I said in a hushed tone. “It’s supposed to be a woman.”
He paused, took seriously my instructions, and handed the matches to his wife who swiftly lit the candles. The rest of us followed along with the prayers recited first in Hebrew and then in English.
I immediately regretted my interruption of the candle lighting. I had been seized unexpectedly by a sense that it needed to be done correctly, referring to the candle-lighting I have observed at Seders hosted by Jewish friends and colleagues. This was a strange insistence, given my presence at a Christian church in rural Tennessee that was made up entirely of Gentile congregants who have little familiarity with Judaism. In wanting the ritual to be done “right,” I was creating a hierarchy wherein certain practices are seen to be more authentic or pure. I had inserted my own values and expectations into the ceremony. In short, I did the very thing that I regularly instruct my students not to do when looking at novel or unfamiliar religious beliefs and practices.
Critique in critical research on religion
Critical Research on Religion’s larger project responds to recent debates that have gained traction in the academic study of religion as the discipline works to—and continues to need to—separate itself from theological studies. Russell McCutcheon (2001) famously has declared that our task as scholars is to be “critics not caretakers.” This critique emerges This critique emerges in contradistinction to pluralistic assumptions pluralistic assumptions often derived from liberal Christian, interfaith, and ecumenical institutions that understand the study of religion as a tool for building cross-cultural bridges and promoting a common good. Such assumptions have yielded an imposition of ontological claims and moralizing constraints on the discipline, in many cases, directly influencing methods of study and the very categories with which we label something as religion or not (Fitzgerald, 2000). For an earlier generation of academics (and perhaps also today), the aftermath of such thinking had a negative effect on their careers, promoting certain religions as normative and others as outside of the purview of serious scholarly consideration.
The assumed value of religious literacy in service of a public good understandably has its naysayers: those who allege that our task is not to endorse certain practices over others or rework historical materials so that they resonate with a contemporary perspective. One might easily evoke the oft-quoted adage that scholars who seek evidence for the historical Jesus coincidentally uncover a version of Jesus with whom they have much in common (Tyrrell, 1910: 44). While it is not always the case, those who reject the common good approach sanction a presumed neutrality in their own methods. Proponents endorse the adoption of methodological atheism or a form of social scientific objectivity in which data and analysis are supposed to speak for themselves.
In response, Critical Research on Religion argues that the idea that we could be neutral in our research and writing in of itself is a bias or a value statement (Goldstein, King, and Boyarin, 2016). Critical Research on Religion is conducting an experiment wherein it names its values upfront. As a cross-disciplinary journal that draws its lineage from the Frankfurt School, it holds human flourishing to be a primary value. More importantly, it acknowledges that the borders patrolled by the academic study of religion may not be relevant to other disciplines that attend to the topic of religions.
Critique in ethnographic context
The aforementioned point that the boundaries of religious studies are not inherent to other disciplines, which take religion as an object of study, should be obvious to anthropologists. Scholars who engage in ethnographic and embedded research are well versed with a methodological imperative to highlight difference and discontinuity. After all, we are tasked with reflexivity and should consider the roles our own values play in our research within, and as a representation of, the communities we study. Proponents of critical ethnography see their work as adding a political dimension to the discipline (Thomas, 1993). While some may raise opposition to this addition of the political, others support it by noting that it is virtually impossible to deny one’s own perspectives and that to do so is a misrepresentation of the ethnographic process. The debate more or less boils down to how we understand the idea that our assessment of the communities and cultures we study is dependent on our capacity to represent “the social reality of others through the analysis of one’s own experience in the world of these others” (Van Maanen, 1988: ix). Both positions appear to hinge on which side of the preposition “in” is emphasized: “one’s own experience” or “the world of these others.” Most anthropologists and ethnographers would no doubt emphasize the latter with attention paid to the potential contaminating impact of the former.
With this point in mind, it seems lucrative to take the social context of our interlocutors as point of departure for discerning the potential for critique. I will use my own experience having undertaken two ethnographic projects examining the ways that North American Christians use the Bible to delineate novel, hybrid religious identities.
My first ethnographic project looks at the development of progressive Christianity, a group of liberal mainline Protestants who read scholarly biblical criticism to better understand the historical context of the Bible. Through that process, they reject the parts of the Christian tradition that cannot be verified historically. They further reject those components of the narrative that are scientifically implausible and those that do not align ethically with their own liberal humanism. The punch line to this research is that they are Christians who do not believe in God because the existence of God relies on premises that are historically, scientifically, and (for them) ethically implausible. When I present research on progressive Christians, I am often met with the following question: how can Christians not believe in God? While I do not think this is a particularly interesting question, I understand its motivation. I see it as representative of a fundamental problem in the ways religious identities continue to be framed vis-à-vis scholarly discourses. The question is problematic because it invites us as scholars to do the work of catechesis and create a hierarchy wherein certain beliefs or practices count and others do not.
Recently, I gave a conference presentation describing progressive Christians’ nostalgia for the days in which they did believe in the basic tenets of Christianity. In response, an audience member half-jokingly reflected, “I feel sad for them; they lost the friend they had in Jesus.” My response was to suggest that perhaps sympathy was unwarranted: “they’re wealthy, middle class baby boomers, they take cruises, drink craft beer, have fulfilling careers, and their families are healthy and happy. They’re good.” To a certain extent, their religious affiliation is not the foundation for their sense of self and a critique levied against their religious identities is not earth-shattering. In retrospect, it seems to me that assigning pity is a passive critique because it plays a similar role in gatekeeping religious membership.
In contrast, my current fieldwork with Jewish Affinity Christians revolves around congregations associated with a Messianic rabbi who evokes his expert knowledge of Jewish practices and his own Jewish identity in order to elicit donations. By focusing on his insider status within Judaism, he creates a hierarchy in which he is closer to Jesus than the regular members of the community. Of course, he is not wrong. Jesus was Jewish and they are not. But the way that he appropriates Jewish traditions, practices, and identities for financial gain is uncomfortable to me as a researcher. My discomfort emerges from the socioeconomic context of this particular congregation: he is receiving money that one might reasonably conclude the congregants cannot spare. Additionally, their reading of the biblical text which interlaces several misconceptions about what it means to be Jewish (as exemplified in my introduction) makes them difficult to study. While this research is new and ongoing, it is safe to say that the stakes are higher.
But higher for whom? Not unlike the example above in which I corrected the candle-lighting, it is easy to assess the ways that my own commitments to delineating class consciousness effect my reading of religious aesthetics and shape my critique. In both cases one might be tempted to point out that claims to religious identities—whether Christian or Jewish—fail to map on to normative categories prescribed in defining affiliation. When thinking in broad categories it has not been difficult to set aside the impulse to classify—as that is a tactic more or less embedded in the assumptions of ethnographic practice. Turning to the larger theme of this symposium, the question I would like to explore concerns the role of criticism from the ethnographer in the midst of ethnographic data collection.
Critique in ethnographic practice
“I always argued with the Azande and criticized their statements” (Evans-Pritchard, 1937: 66). So writes the legendary social anthropologist, Evans-Pritchard, when describing his attempts to offer an alternative theory to a twelve-year-old Zande boy claiming that the infection that set in after he had cut his foot on a stump was a result of witchcraft. Evans-Pritchard suggested that the cause of the boy’s injury was carelessness: the boy had not been paying attention and had tripped on the stump, which had grown there naturally. The boy, however, insisted that he had been paying attention and had overlooked the stump as a result of being bewitched. He backed up this claim by explaining that in this case his gash had festered, whereas in other instances it had not. From the Zande boy’s perspective the festering was empirical proof of bewitchment. In this famous example, Evans-Pritchard describes how confronting this and other competing assumptions provided him with a breakthrough in his understanding of the relationship between causality and witchcraft for the Azande. Had he not pushed the boy by disagreeing with him (i.e. had he silently rejected the boy’s claim without engaging in debate), Evans-Prichard might have missed a fuller understanding of his interlocutors and their worldview.
To a certain extent, studying progressive Christians was easy. They are familiar to me in terms of lifestyle, socioeconomic practices, and the ways that they think about what knowledge is and does. They are well versed in the same scholarly debates about the origins of the Bible that I know as a scholar of religion. In other words, they hold the same fool-hearty assumptions as I do that the historical study of the Bible is among the most fascinating enterprises one might take up—so much so that they have based their theology upon it. Conversations on the topic of historical criticism of the Bible were frequent and familiar. While I may not have always agreed with their assessment of the historical data and did not draw the same theological conclusions from it, their relationship to the text was not dissimilar from my own. I did not have to suspend disbelief, for example, when discussing the different solutions to the synoptic problem. On other occasions, progressive Christians play fast and loose with scripture using it to support their own liberal humanist ideals. One particularly fascinating instance involves replacing the claims about Mary’s virginity with the suggestion that she was a rape victim. This assertion is inserted into the biblical plotline both to reject notions of the divinity attributed to Jesus and more pressingly to promote a feminist agenda wherein women are liberated from the impossible ideal of virgin motherhood. While this idea has historical roots in second century anti-Christian polemics, locating it in the Gospels themselves is a stretch. Its theological reverberations are outside of the realm of historical consideration. For progressive Christians, however, the theological corollaries must be deemed historical because rereading the Bible through an empirical and historical lens supports their contemporary values and allows the text to retain a certain degree of privilege and their movement to preserve a Christian identity.
Comparatively, Jewish Affinity Christians, like many evangelical and charismatic Christians, privilege the Bible, understanding it as enchanted. To offer an example, one of the women in a prayer group I attended had recently enrolled in cosmetology school. As part of the program, she was assigned to do a biography of a famous makeup artist from New York. This makeup artist happened to be Jewish. As she was telling me about this coincidence, her eyes filled with tears. For her this concurrence is a sign of God’s bountiful grace. After church one day, she pulled out the Bible and explained to me that God has left a message for her about this makeup artist in the book of Ephesians. She does not believe that Paul’s letter to the Ephesians was written solely with this message in mind, but rather that the Holy Spirit made use of the scripture in conjunction with her cosmetology studies to reveal special knowledge. This is a point that matters in ways to which I have a hard time relating.
As someone with training in biblical exegesis, I struggle with these types of hermeneutics. But I think that to focus on my own discord does a disservice. Certainly, I could follow Evans-Prichard in either of these ethnographic contexts and suggest that they misunderstand the Bible. I remain hesitant to do so, worrying that disagreement will shut down rather than open up pathways for communication. So, what is the option for critique? In both examples, we are dealing with readings of the Bible that differ from my own understanding as a scholar of how it operates. Here the question of critique is one-sided. It focuses on what I “know” to be the case about biblical hermeneutics in a manner not unlike what Evans-Prichard “knows” about infections and festering feet. It is not my job to tell my interlocutors that they are right or wrong, because to do so is akin to endorsing the missionizing and colonial tropes that anthropology has sought to leave behind. Critique is at the forefront of my own reflexivity and the way I organize data. It also directs the experiences and hermeneutics of my interlocutors. Just as I might be dissatisfied with their reading of the Bible vis-à-vis historical claims, they may experience the same frustration toward me. In the ethnographic context, the more sophisticated form of critique is one that pits us against ourselves.
My conclusion (offered tentatively) is to turn to the ways that my interlocutors themselves interact with, and understand what, religious phenomena does. Both progressive Christians and Jewish Affinity Christians assume that something happens when one reads the Bible. The text does not speak for itself but rather is read through a particular lens possessed by its reader. For many Christians, the Bible does its work when it is read and interpreted in a specific manner. The process of reading has the capacity to change both the original content of the text and the person(s) engaged in reading it.
For progressive Christians, their retelling of Mary’s claim to virginity provides new insights into both the experiences with sexual oppression for women within the progressive Christian movement and the way they think about issues like sex, motherhood, and feminine spirituality throughout Christian history. It even goes so far as to allow for a new way of being Christian—one without belief in God. In the context of Jewish Affinity Christians, their textual cosmology highlights the capacity of God to speak different messages through the same text. The Jewish Affinity Christians are aware that I do not experience the Bible as they do. Yet, they do not place demands on my own interpretation. To do so would contradict their assumptions about God’s control over the situation. I see this approach as a potential model for thinking about critique in the field. Our task is not corrective, but contextual. In both cases, my narrow assumption about the Bible’s historical context limits not just my attempt to understand their readings of the text but the ways they think about the purpose of knowledge and experience. An expansive context that starts with the assumptions held by my interlocutors does not negate disagreement, but forces me to adopt their side of the argument. Scripture, like the Zande boy’s festering foot, is less about how I perceive it and more about its operative potentiality within its particular context.