The Power Team: Muscular Christianity and the Spectacle of Conversion (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Hell House Divided: Performing Identity Politics through Christian Mediums of Proselytization
2011
Every year, during the month of October, hundreds of Christian churches throughout the United States open the doors of their Hell House to surrounding communities. Hell Houses are Christian haunted houses designed to literally scare the Hell out of visitors so they will accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. In the place of vampires or zombies, Hell Houses portray the sins Satan is mostly likely to tempt teenagers to commit. Scenes include young girls receiving abortions, young men believing lies that they were born gay, and careless individuals drinking and driving. As para-theatrical performances, Hell Houses lead guests from one vignette to the next until they reach Heaven and Hell to show the eternal consequences of one’s behavior. A Hell House is a medium of proselytization. Believers within the larger USAmerican Evangelical Christian community organize these events to facilitate the conversion of others. In this thesis, I explore how the use of Hell Houses and other mediums of proselytization are justified within religious-based communities through the implementation of what I refer to as a discourse of neutrality. According to religious-based communities because mediums of proselytization simply convey spiritual truth and reality to those outside of the community, they depict “how things really are.” However, I argue that the use of each medium both reflects a perception of reality and contributes to the creation of that reality. Describing and discussing the mediums as “neutral” to the processes of creating reality and meaning generates an authoritative power to legitimately define the politics and boundaries of the religious community’s identity. Furthermore, it masks the role each medium plays in the creation of reality as well as the tensions within the community to authoritatively define the “Evangelical Christian” identity. In this thesis, I explore Hell Houses as mediums of proselytization where Evangelical Christians perform their identity politics. To conduct this analysis, I examine how other mediums of proselytization associated with Hell Houses (i.e., the physical body, conversation-based evangelism, and the Internet) each depend upon their own discourse of neutrality to thrive in the community. Because each medium is seen as neutral, those who champion its usage garner an authoritative legitimacy to define the community’s identity and Christianity along the lines of reality as informed by the supposedly neutral medium. Here, I detail the dynamics of the tensions within a significant and complex religious group in contemporary America and how performative practices within the community inform its identity politics.
The magic of science and the science of magic in evangelical publicity
Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 2022
This essay reflects on two cases of evangelical publicity; that is, on situations where an evangelical cultural form operates in spaces that are open to diverse audiences and not wholly or strictly definable as religious. The first was a traveling science-themed ministry active between the 1930s and 1990s. The second is a biblically-themed museum that opened in Washington, D.C. in 2017. I take up these two cases in this forum because together they offer a valuable reflection on the entanglement of magic, technology, spectacle, and religious publicity. Both examples are defined by their use of sensory play through technology in order to arrest the attention of audiences. They surprise, confound, disorient, and otherwise upend sensory expectation in service of broader evangelical ambitions.
The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America, 2017
This chapter explores the phenomenon of performing the Bible; that is, transforming the written words of scriptures into materialized, experiential environments. Throughout the United States, the Bible is performed as replicas and re-creations of particular and general biblical scenes, characters, and stories through registers of museum, theme park, and garden. Distinctive insights into key dynamics of religious materiality and American religious history can be gained by closely analyzing the cultural production of sites that perform the Bible. Ultimately, the chapter argues that performing the Bible is a strategy for actualizing a problem that animates any and every lived expression of Christianity.