The Bloomsbury Handbook to Studying Christians 9781350043411, 9781350043381, 9781350043398

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In memory of my mother, Elizabeth Chryssides, to whom I owe my interest in Christians and their faith. G.D.C. In loving memory of Rhoda Jones, Churchwoman and Grandmother. S.E.G.

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Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch is Professor and Department Chair of Biblical Studies, Eastern University, USA. She is the editor of the two-volume The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible’s Reception in Film (De Gruyter 2016), co-editor of Noah as Antihero: Darren Aronofsky’s Cinematic Deluge (Routledge 2017), and the author of numerous articles and chapters on biblical reception. She also is the managing editor of the SBL book series Bible and Reception and the film editor for The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception. George D. Chryssides is an Honorary Research Fellow at York St John University and the University of Birmingham (UK). He studied philosophy and theology at the University of Glasgow and completed his doctorate at Oriel College, Oxford. He was Head of Religious Studies at the University of Wolverhampton until 2008, having held posts at various British universities. He is currently president of the International Society for the Study of New Religions and vice-chair of Inform (Information Network on Religious Movements), based in King’s College London. He has authored numerous books, book chapters, and articles on Christianity and on new religious movements, including Christianity Today (Bloomsbury 2010) and Christians in the Twenty-first Century (Equinox 2012, with Margaret Z. Wilkins). His other books include Jehovah’s Witnesses: Continuity and Change (Routledge 2016), Historical Dictionary of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Rowman and Littlefield, 2nd ed. 2019), and The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements, co-edited with Benjamin E. Zeller (2014). Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, and current President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. His research interests include Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity, pilgrimage, cathedrals, and hospital chaplaincies. With colleagues in England, he is currently carrying out research on the links between religious organizations and the development of urban infrastructures in Lagos. Simon has carried out fieldwork in Sweden, the UK, and Nigeria. Recent books include The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism (New York University Press 2015), edited with Rosalind Hackett, and Pilgrimage and Political Economy (Berghahn 2018), edited with John Eade. Dyron Daughrity is Professor of Religion at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. He has written nine books and many articles on the history of Christianity and world religions. He does editorial work for several presses including Fortress, De Gruyter, and Bloomsbury. At present, he is engaged in a major, multi-year research project in India sponsored by the John Templeton Foundations and is writing a full biography of Bishop Stephen Neill. Daniel Nilsson DeHanas is Senior Lecturer of Political Science and Religion at King’s College London. His research on religion and politics includes work on religious identity, political participation, and London as a global city of migration. His book London Youth,

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Religion, and Politics (Oxford University Press 2016) brings these interests together in a comparative study of young Christians and Muslims. DeHanas is co-editor of the journal Religion, State and Society (Taylor & Francis) and recently published a special issue of that journal on religion and the rise of populism. His current research (with Peter Mandaville) is on the ‘Muslim Atlantic’, exploring the connections between American and British Muslims and the prospective development of an Atlantic Islam. Stephen E. Gregg is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. He studied at the University of Wales, Lampeter, receiving a top-of-class degree in Theology before completing his PhD in Religious Studies. He has previously taught at the University of Wales and Liverpool Hope University and is currently Honorary Secretary of the British Association for the Study of Religions. His recent books include Swami Vivekananda and Non-Hindu Traditions (Routledge 2019), The Insider-Outsider Debate: New Approaches in the Study of Religion (Equinox 2019 with George D. Chryssides), Engaging with Living Religion (Routledge 2015 with Lynne Scholefield), and Jesus Beyond Christianity (Oxford University Press 2010 with Gregory A. Barker). Crawford Gribben is Professor of Early Modern British History at Queen’s University Belfast, having previously taught at the University of Manchester and Trinity College Dublin. His research interests focus on the literary cultures of puritanism and evangelicalism. He is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (2016) as well as studies of the literary cultures of evangelicalism, including Writing the Rapture: Prophecy Fiction in Evangelical America (2009). He is currently writing a general history of the rise and fall of Christian Ireland, while also completing a book project on J.N. Darby and the birth of dispensationalism. Ted Grimsrud is Senior Professor of Peace Theology at Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA, USA. He received his PhD in Christian Ethics from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. He served for ten years as a pastor in the Mennonite Church before teaching for twenty years at Eastern Mennonite University. Among his books are The Good War That Wasn’t – And Why It Matters: The Moral Legacy of World War II; Instead of Atonement: The Bible’s Salvation Story and Our Hope for Wholeness; and A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder’s Nonviolent Epistemology. He grew up in rural Oregon and currently lives in Virginia with his wife, Kathleen Temple. Andrew Hambler is Associate Professor in Employment Law and Human Resources at Birmingham City University. He teaches employment law to business students and is the academic subject group leader for Human Resources within the Business School. His research interests are in the field of religion and the workplace with a focus on the role of discrimination law. He is the author of a number of published articles in journals such as Industrial Law Journal, Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, and Employee Relations. He wrote a monograph, Religious Expression in the Workplace and the Contested Role of Law, which was published by Routledge in 2015. He has also acted as an adviser to religious ethos organizations. Elizabeth J. Harris is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow within the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Birmingham. Previous to this she was an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University.

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Her research specialisms include Buddhist Studies, Buddhist-Christian Studies and InterReligious Studies. From 2009–2019, she was President of the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies. Her publications include Theravāda Buddhism and the British Encounter: religious, missionary and colonial experience in nineteenth century Sri Lanka (2006), Religion, Space and Conflict in Sri Lanka: colonial and postcolonial contexts (2018) and as co-editor and contributer Meditation in Buddhist-Christian Encounter: A Critical Analysis (2019). Eleanor Tiplady Higgs is postdoctoral research fellow, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town, having completed her PhD in Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London, in 2017. Her research interests lie in the study of gender, Christianities, ethics, and narrative, guided by insights from postcolonial, decolonial, and African feminist theories and practice. Tim Hutchings is Assistant Professor in Religious Ethics at the University of Nottingham, UK, where he teaches classes in religious media ethics, interfaith relations, and the study of religion. He is a digital sociologist, working in the field of media, religion, and culture, and his research explores the role of digital media in changing patterns of Christian ritual, community, and authority. He is the author of Creating Church Online: Ritual, Community and New Media (Routledge 2017), co-editor of Materiality and the Study of Religion (Routledge 2017), co-editor of Christianity and the Digital Humanities (De Gruyter, forthcoming), and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Religion, Media and Digital Culture (published by Brill in collaboration with the International Society for Media, Religion and Culture). Tim Jensen is Senior Lecturer and Director of Teaching at the Study of Religions, University of Southern Denmark, Honorarprofessor, Institut für Religionswissenschaft, Leibniz Universität, Hannover, Germany; and Senior Research Fellow Ural Federal University, Ekatarinburg, Russia. He is currently President of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), the preeminent international forum for the critical, analytical, and cross-cultural study of religion past and present. He previously served the Society’s Secretary General and was General Secretary of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR). Though trained in ancient Greek religion, he has undertaken research and published widely on methodology relating to the study of religion, on religion, law, and human rights, on applied religious ethics, on religious environmental activism, on public discourses on religion, and on state religious education. Camille K. Lewis is Lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. She holds a PhD from Indiana University in Rhetorical Studies with a minor in American Studies. Her book, Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism, was a scholarly attempt to stretch the boundaries of both Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory on tragedy and comedy as well as stretch conservative evangelical’s separatist frames. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Klandamentalism: Dysfunction and Violence in America’s Most Romantic Religious Movements and an anthology called White Nationalism and Faith: Statements and Counter-Statements. Dawn Llewellyn is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Chester, UK. She is the author of Reading, Feminism, and Spirituality:

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Troubling the Waves (Palgrave 2015) and co-edited with Sonya Sharma, Religion, Equalities and Inequalities (Routledge 2016), and with Deborah F. Sawyer, Reading Spiritualities (Ashgate 2008). She has published on women’s religious reading practices, the relationship between feminism and religion, and women’s experiences of reproductive choice, motherhood, and voluntary childlessness in Christianity (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). She is also series editor (with Sian Hawthorne and Sonya Sharma) of the Bloomsbury Series in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality. Louise Müller is Lecturer in African Religion, Philosophy and Literature at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She is interested and academically trained in the Netherlands (Erasmus University of Rotterdam, Leiden University) and Scotland (University of Edinburgh) in African Religious Studies, World History and Comparative (African) Philosophy. She conducted fieldwork in Ghana (Kumasi) and Zambia (Lusaka) on African Indigenous Religions, and her monograph is entitled Religion and Chieftaincy in Ghana (Lit Verlag 2013). In Amsterdam she studied the reception of African films (Nollywood/ Ghallywood). She has published articles in various journals, including Fieldwork in Religion, Research in African Literatures, Quest and Journal of World Philosophies. At Leiden University, she currently combines doing fieldwork with teaching African literature, philosophy, and film. Brian W. Nail is a professor of English at Florida State College at Jacksonville. He completed his PhD in Literature, Theology, and the Arts at the University of Glasgow, UK. His research interests include religion and literature, literary theory, theory of sacrifice, and the reception of the Bible in popular culture. Alex Norman is Senior Lecturer at Western Sydney University, where he leads the Master of Research programme. His primary research interests are the intersection of tourism and religion, contemplative practices, and new religious movements. His book, Spiritual Tourism (Bloomsbury 2011), examines the motivations of tourists who engage with religious practices that are not their own. He has also published on pilgrimage traditions, new religious movements and meditation practices. He hopes to develop our understanding of the effects of contemplative vacations, and how they might be used to help people in their everyday lives. Stefania Palmisano is Associate Professor in the Sociology of Religion at the University of Turin, Italy, where she teaches Sociology of Religion. She is a member of the editorial board of Social Compass, Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review, and Fieldwork in Religion. In addition, she is co-ordinator of the research centre CRAFT (Contemporary Religion and Faiths in Transition) based in the Department of Culture, Politics and Society of Turin University. Her research takes the form of ethnographic study of contemporary religious experience in mainstream religions and alternative spiritualities. She is the author of Exploring New Monastic Communities: The Re-invention of Tradition (Ashgate 2015); (with Isabelle Jonveaux), Monasticism in Modern Times (Routledge 2016); and (with Nicola Pannofino), Invention of Tradition and Syncretism in Contemporary Religions: Sacred Creativity (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). Stella Rock is an associate lecturer for the Open University, UK. She has an MA and DPhil in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Sussex, Brighton (UK). Her doctoral research was published by Routledge as Popular Religion in Russia: ‘Double-belief’

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and the Making of an Academic Myth (2007), and her broad research area continues to be Russian Orthodox Christianity as Lived Religion. She currently explores pilgrimage in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia and has contributed chapters on this to five edited volumes. Her next monograph is contracted in the Routledge Studies in Religion, Travel and Tourism series. She is co-convenor of the BASEES (British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies) Study of Religion and Spirituality in Russia and Eastern Europe Study Group and managing editor of the journal Religion, State and Society. Chris Shannahan is Assistant Professor of Faith and Peaceful Relations at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University. His work as a political theologian focuses on the intersection between theology and poverty, Christianity and ‘race’, and faith-based political activism. His first monograph, Voices from the Borderland (2010), offered a critical analysis of contemporary urban theology and his second book, A Theology of Community Organizing (2014), provided the first systematic theological analysis of broad-based community organizing. He is currently leading a major three-year urban theology project ‘Life on the Breadline – Christianity, Politics and Poverty in the 21st Century City’ which explores the nature, scope, and impact of Christian engagement with urban poverty in the UK since the 2008 financial crash. Lisa H. Sideris is a professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University with research interests in environmental ethics at the intersection of science and religion. She is author of Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection (Columbia University Press 2003), which examines the neglect of Darwinian perspectives in ecological theology, and co-editor of a collection of essays on Rachel Carson’s life and work: Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge (SUNY 2008). Her 2017 monograph, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (University of California Press), is a critical appraisal of science-based ecospiritual narratives of the evolution of life and the universe (aka the Universe Story). Currently she is working on a book about the intersection of religion, technology, and environmentalism, tentatively titled Religion and World-Making. Andrew Village is Professor of Practical and Empirical Theology at York St John University, UK. He was ordained as an Anglian priest in 1993, and before that he was a research ornithologist. He has taught biblical studies at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. His research covers a wide range of subjects related to the psychology of religion and congregational studies. He is interested in the attitudes and beliefs of churchgoers generally, and particularly in how they interpret the Bible. His books include The Bible and Lay People (Ashgate 2007), Encountering the Bible (SCM 2016), and The Church of England in the First Decade of the 21st Century (Palgrave MacMillan 2018). Christina Welch is a Religious Studies and Death Studies scholar at the University of Winchester where she is a senior fellow: Knowledge Exchange. She obtained her PhD from the University of Southampton in 2005. She has research interests in the connections between religion and visual and material culture. She programme-leads a distance-learning masters degree in death, religion, and culture and is currently co-writing a book on the Materials of Caribbean Religion (Routledge). Amy Whitehead is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Massey University in New Zealand and the Managing Series Editor for Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion.

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Broadly, her research is concerned with the material and performance cultures of religion(s), religion and the senses, and relational approaches to place, space and objects. Amy has edited and co-edited volumes on these subjects, and she has authored several journal articles and chapters. Her book, Religious Statues and Personhood: Testing the Role of Materiality, was published by Bloomsbury in 2013. She currently resides in Auckland, New Zealand, where she continues to think and write about how and why ‘things’ matter in the lives of religionists. Melissa M. Wilcox is Professor and Holstein Family and Community Chair of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author or editor of several books and journal issues, and numerous articles, on gender, sexuality and religion. Her books include Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity, and Community; Sexuality and the World’s Religions; Queer Women and Religious Individualism; Religion in Today’s World: Global Issues, Sociological Perspectives; and Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody. She has two textbooks due out soon in the areas of sexuality studies in religion and queer and transgender studies in religion, and she is working on new book projects on theory and leather spirituality. Margaret Z. Wilkins is a freelance scholar and writer. A graduate in Classics at the University of Bristol, she co-edited A Reader in New Religious Movements (Continuum, 2006) with George D. Chryssides and co-authored Christians in the Twenty-first Century, also with George D. Chryssides (Equinox 2011). Sue Yore is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at York St John University and Associate Director of The Centre for Religion in Society, having previously gained her first degree in Theology and Women’s Studies and her MA in Theology and Religious Studies at York St John University. She completed her doctorate at the University of Durham. Her publications include The Mystic Way in Postmodernity: Transcending Theological Boundaries in the Writings of Iris Murdoch, Denise Levertov and Annie Dillard (Peter Lang 2009), ‘“Seeing Paradise in the Dust of the Streets”: A Reflection on Student Art Projects,’ in Kim, S., Kollontai, P. and Yore, S. (eds) Mediating Peace: Reconciliation through Visual Art, Music and Film (Cambridge Scholars 2015), and ‘Utopian Visions of Harmonious Existence in Ursula K, Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness’ in Kollontai, P., Yore, S. and Kim, S. (eds) The Role of Religion in Peacebuilding: Crossing Boundaries of Prejudice and Distrust (Jessica Kingsley 2018). Benjamin E. Zeller is Associate Professor and Chair of Religion at Lake Forest College (Chicago, USA). He researches religious currents that are new or alternative, including new religions, the religious engagement with science, and the quasi-religious relationship people have with food. He is author of Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion (New York University Press), Prophets and Protons: New Religious Movements and Science in Late Twentieth-Century America (New York University Press), and co-editor of Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (Columbia University Press) and The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements (Bloomsbury). He holds a PhD from the University of North Carolina and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University. He is co-general editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Particular thanks are due to Dyron Daughrity for reviewing a number of articles, amidst a very busy schedule, and to Alison McKee for editorial work on part of the text. We are also indebted to Margaret Wilkins for compiling the index. Many thanks are due to the Bloomsbury editorial staff, who have always worked with us in a friendly and professional way. Special thanks are due to Lalle Pursglove, Camilla Erskine, and Lucy Carroll for keeping the project on the move. Biblical quotations in the text are from the New International Version (UK), unless otherwise stated. Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 Biblica. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, an Hachette UK company.

ABBREVIATIONS

AIC AIR BBC BCC bce BFBS BME CAFOD CBMS CBS CDF ce CIM CRPOF DVD ESV FGM FXs GSS HBO HIV ICS IMDb INC KJV LGBTQ MSE NGO NHS NORC NSM OCTP PBCC RE RSST SBC SPCK SRM Tearfund TM

African Indigenous Churches Africa’s Indigenous Religions British Broadcasting Corporation British Council of Churches Before Common Era British and Foreign Bible Society Black and Minority Ethnic Catholic Agency For Overseas Development Conference of British Missionary Societies Contextual Bible Study Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith Common Era China Inland Mission Committee for Relations with People of Other Faiths Digital Video Disc English Standard Version Female Genital Mutilation Fresh Expressions General Social Survey Home Box Office Human Immunodeficiency Virus International Cremation Statistics Internet Movie Database Independent Networked Charismatic King James Version Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Minister in Secular Employment Non-Governmental Organization National Health Service National Opinion Research Center Non-Stipendiary Minister Orthodox Customs, Traditions and Practices Plymouth Brethren Christian Church Religious Education Religious Social Shaping of Technology Southern Baptist Convention Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge Solar Radiation Management The Evangelical Alliance Relief Fund Transcendental Meditation

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UK URC USA VHS WCC WHO WWJD YMCA YWCA

ABBREVIATIONS

United Kingdom United Reformed Church United States of America Video Home System World Council of Churches World Health Organization What Would Jesus Do Young Men’s Christian Association Young Women’s Christian Association

Introduction Most academic textbooks introduce Christianity through Christian history, Christian theology or biblical exegesis. At a popular level, there are many books on how to practise Christianity – how to pray, read the Bible, or cope with suffering. In this Handbook, the editors have deliberately avoided all these approaches, preferring to examine the question of what Christians actually do in practice – a Living Religion approach, which preferences practices above beliefs, people above texts. While many practise their Christianity in ways taught by hierarchal institutions, Churches, and communities, the majority of Christians deviate from their religion’s ‘official’ versions. Although, for example, the Roman Catholic Church officially prohibits contraception, a 2008 survey revealed that 69 per cent of Massgoing Catholics in England and Wales stated that they had either used contraceptives, or would consider doing so, and a mere 15 per cent expressed agreement with the Pope’s teaching on the subject (Von Hügel Institute 2008: 14–15). Statistics such as these are at the heart of our approach to this volume and have even influenced the title. Other volumes in this series have been titled ‘Jewish Studies’ and ‘Islamic Studies’. We certainly did not want to call this ‘Christian studies’ as that had a clear confessional sound, which is not the approach we are taking at all, framed as we are in a Religious Studies approach. We therefore settled on ‘to Studying Christians’, rather than the alternative ‘Christianity’ as we hope this highlights our central argument, which is that Christianity is diverse and needs to be understood through the lives of everyday Christians. Christians practise their religion in different ways and for different reasons. Some Christians seek salvation, others find solace for disappointment and suffering, others find guidance for life, and others use the Church as a means for socializing, enjoying the music, making business contacts, and drawing on it for rites of passage such as baptism, marriage and funerals. There are also ‘cultural Christians’ – those who draw on Christian traditions in various ways but seldom attend Church services. Such Christians have sometimes been described as ‘spiritual but not religious’ or ‘believing but not belonging’. Both expressions are problematic as descriptors, however, since spirituality and religion are nebulous concepts, and cultural Christians will clearly represent a wide variety of beliefs and practices in relation to the teachings of the Churches whose services they use. However, people who send Christmas cards or buy Easter eggs are drawing on events in the traditional Christmas calendar while celebrating them in a secular way, relational to the religious lives of their fellow citizens. Within the global community of Christians, there exists a variety of manifestations, ranging from Pentecostals to the Eastern Orthodox, and, being a worldwide religion, there are different cultural expressions of Christianity, even within one single tradition. Christians include men and women; gay, straight, and transgendered people; adults and children; clergy and laity – all of whom can be included or excluded by ways in which Christian lives are expressed. Christianity affects most, if not all, areas of everyday life for Christians, spanning reading the Bible, work, participation in politics, illness and healing, music and literature, the internet, and much more. In this volume, we have attempted to acknowledge the range of traditions, practices, issues, and ways of being Christian,

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but to claim anything approaching comprehensiveness would be quite unrealistic. An anthology of this kind inevitably has to be selective, and we offer it as an example of ways of approaching the study of Christianity and Christians that have been neglected until recently. Readers will no doubt observe that there is not a chapter specifically on women – a topic that is frequently cited as a topical issue. This decision was deliberate since we did not wish to treat women as a kind of addendum to Christian communities, especially since they often constitute the majority of worshippers in today’s churches. The authors of each chapter were invited specifically to make mention of women, as well as nonWestern expressions of Christianity. Where certain topics have not been substantially covered by a chapter, readers may find them in the A–Z, towards the end of the volume. This Handbook is aimed primarily at students, many of whom may be unfamiliar with Christianity. Having taught at the University of Wolverhampton in England – the heart of multicultural Britain – both of the editors have had substantial experience of teaching students who subscribe to other faiths, usually Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu, and also practising Christians, as well as those who have no faith and minimal acquaintance with Christians. There is a saying among ethnographers that their role is ‘making the strange familiar and the familiar strange’. By this they mean that those who are unfamiliar with their subject matter will be enabled to understand it better, but those who already claim familiarity may be brought to see it with different eyes, as if they were looking at it afresh. In this volume, we hope that those to whom Christianity is unfamiliar will come to feel better acquainted with it, and those who are already immersed in a Christian tradition will be introduced to new or unfamiliar aspects of living as a Christian.

CHAPTER ONE

Vernacular Christianity GEORGE D. CHRYSSIDES AND STEPHEN E. GREGG

One of the authors used to begin his Christianity classes by inviting students to consider two statements and to decide which provided a more appropriate description of the Christian faith. The two statements were: (1)  Christians believe that Jesus Christ is of one substance with the Father. (2)  Christians in Britain eat Christmas puddings on 25 December. By far the majority of students voted for the first statement. It is an important doctrine, defining the Incarnation, which is a central tenet of Christian theology, and it is part of the Nicene Creed, which many Christians recite weekly during congregational worship. By contrast, the second seems frivolous. Christianity purports to offer salvation, teaching that it is brought about through God becoming human, and dying on the cross to redeem humankind from sin; this is certainly not achieved by eating a Christmas pudding. One might also point out that, historically, the Church has excommunicated those who have denied the full deity or the full humanity of Jesus Christ, whereas there is no compulsion for any Christian to observe popular Christmas customs. However, it remains true that there are more Christians who erect Christmas trees and hang up stockings than understand what it means for Jesus Christ to be of one substance with the Father, or indeed most of the other doctrines defined in the traditional creeds. In 2016, Ligonier Ministries carried out a survey of religious belief in the United States, in which a sample of 3,000 American adults were asked to evaluate a number of key statements relating to the Christian faith. These are some of the responses.

The State of American Theology. Statistics derived from Ligioner Ministries, 2016. Agree strongly/ Disagree strongly/ Somewhat (%) Somewhat (%)

Not sure (%)

‘God is a perfect being and cannot make a mistake.’

66

25

10

‘There is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.’

69

20

11

‘Biblical accounts of the physical (bodily) resurrection of Jesus are completely accurate. This event actually occurred.’

64

22

13

‘Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God.’

57

34

13

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO STUDYING CHRISTIANS

Agree strongly/ Disagree strongly/ Somewhat (%) Somewhat (%)

Not sure (%)

‘Jesus is truly God and has a divine nature, and Jesus is truly man and has a human nature.’

62

25

14

‘The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being.’

56

27

17

‘The Holy Spirit is a divine being but is not equal with God the Father and Jesus.’

28

51

21

‘The Bible, like all sacred writings, contains helpful accounts of ancient myths but is not literally true.’

44

45

11

‘The Bible was written for each person to interpret as he or she chooses.’

51

40

9

‘The Bible is 100% accurate in all that it teaches.’

47

43

10

‘Heaven is a place where all people will ultimately be reunited with their loved ones.’

60

26

14

‘There will be a time when Jesus Christ returns to judge all the people who have lived.’

59

26

15

‘The church should be silent on issues of politics.’

54

35

12

‘There is little value in studying or reciting historical Christian creeds and confessions.’

26

58

16

Of course, it must be noted that not all the respondents were self-declared Christians, but a ‘demographically balanced online panel’. The estimated Christian proportion of the United States population is reckoned to be between 67.2 per cent and 75 per cent according to different surveys, which somewhat mitigates the results. Some of the statements too are matters for debate, on which disagreement is permissible – for example, the inerrancy of scripture. What has disturbed some theologians, however, is the response to the statement ‘Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God’, a statement to which some 75 per cent of Christian evangelicals assented (Weber 2018). From a theological standpoint, of course, this is a heresy which aroused bitter controversy, notably between Athanasius and Arius in the fourth century ce, and which was resolved in favour of Athanasius. The Council of Nicaea, in which the dispute was resolved in 325 ce, pronounced that Jesus Christ was ‘eternally begotten of the Father’, and not created, as Arius contended. The orthodox camp felt strongly enough to state that ‘those who say … “he came to be from nothing” … the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes’ (Stevenson 1974: 366). To anathematize is literally to ‘pronounce accursed’, but the pronouncement was more than a mere insult: it was a statement about Arius and his supporters were to be regarded as outside the Christian fold, and that the mainstream Orthodox Church would

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7

not recognize their sacraments, and that anyone seeking readmission to the mainstream Christian faith would have to undergo baptism again. Respondents should have been familiar with the statement in the Nicene Creed, which many of them would recite on a weekly basis; if they were unfamiliar with the Creed, they might at least have recalled the famous Christmas hymn (‘O come, all ye faithful’), which has a pair of lines which describe Jesus Christ as ‘Very God, Begotten, not created’. The point is not simply that the average Christian is not a theologian, but rather that there is a sharp contrast between Christianity’s fundamental teachings and what the average believer believes and practises. Most Roman Catholics and Anglicans are content to recite the ancient creeds ritualistically, but if they were asked to explain the contents, it seems likely that they could only do so in a very rudimentary way. The average Christian, who attends church only infrequently, may recite the Creed as a ritual activity, but little more. This is not to say that there is one model of being a Christian from which these people are somehow falling short, but rather that they practise it in other ways, for example by occasionally attending weddings and funerals within a Christian context and by celebrating the major Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter, but not necessarily within the context of a Christian congregation. Those Christians, who are in fact the majority, buy Easter eggs, and eat Christmas puddings. In what follows in this anthology, we are not concerned with the theological issues of whether Jesus Christ is of one substance with the Father, or whether he is eternally begotten and not created, and what such statements mean. There is an important sense in which the academic study of religion is not concerned about religious truth. It is not that religious truth is unimportant, but rather that truth is the province of the philosopher of religion and of the theologian. What concerns those who embark on the study of religion is what believers do, and how they implement their beliefs and traditions, which is often very different from the expressions found in its history or in its official statements. Traditionally, the study of Christianity has encompassed three broad areas: systematic theology, ecclesiastical history, and biblical exegesis. To these three, some might add a fourth, namely pastoral theology, which addresses areas such as homiletics, counselling, and other practical areas of professional ministry. Although all these disciplines are vast, the scope of the subject matter is clear, and they have formed the basis of seminarial training for centuries, and focused on key doctrines, texts, and events in the Christian Church’s history. Accounting for the activities of the rank-and-file laypeople who count themselves as Christian or engage in activities that derive from the Christian faith is a much vaster enterprise and has a much more nebulous subject matter. In what follows, we are concerned not merely with what self-defined Christian laity believe and practise but with a range of practices that in some ways relate to the Christianity. As we have mentioned above, there are many Christian-related activities that are popular not only with those who would define as Christian, but also with those who would not. As Margaret Wilkins points out in her chapter on ‘Calendar’ (Chapter 9), there is a kind of liturgical year which parallels the Christian calendar, which is observed by people who would regard themselves as secular rather than religious. Although only 4.7 per cent of the British population attend church on any given Sunday (Faith Survey 2015), the popularity of Christmas, Valentine’s Day, ‘Pancake Day’, Easter, and Halloween is highly visible. Whatever people’s reasons for celebrating these festivals, they are plainly related to the Christian faith, and hence ought to be of interest in studying Christians. The focus of this anthology is therefore on how ordinary people draw on the ideas and customs derived from Christian traditions. Inevitably, the question arises as to the

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scope and limits of the subject matter since it is not always clear whether one is dealing with a phenomenon that is Christian-derived, whether it should be regarded as a secular folk custom, or whether it is a custom that derives from a synthesis of both. Shrines dedicated to Christian saints are in many cases pagan shrines, which Christians have appropriated, either as an attempt to supersede the previous forms of devotion or as syncretism. To return momentarily to the theme of Christmas puddings, traditional recipes contain thirteen ingredients, signifying Jesus Christ and the twelve apostles (Leach and Inglis 2003). There is a tradition that preparation of the pudding should commence on the twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity since the collect (a particular type of prayer in the liturgy) for that day begins, ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people: that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded.’ (Book of Common Prayer 1662/1968: 143). Another tradition suggests that each member of the family should stir the pudding in an east–west direction, reminiscent of the travels of the three Magi. When Thomas Cranmer compiled the Book of Common Prayer, he was unlikely to have been thinking of Christmas puddings when he penned this collect (which, incidentally, has given that particular Sunday the nickname of ‘Stir Up Sunday’), and we cannot be certain at what point such association was made. A further question also arises as to what the boundaries of the category of ‘Christianity’ are. In this collection of essays, we have confined our attention to mainstream Christians. However, one might legitimately ask what mainstream Christianity is. Certainly, those Christians who belong to a member Church of the World Council of Churches (WCC) are unarguably mainstream Christians, albeit of different varieties. However, not all denominations have chosen to affiliate with the WCC, and others affirm their commonality as Christians by joining other ecumenical bodies, such as the Evangelical Alliance. The situation of small independent churches is less clear: where a congregation is independent and not accountable to any supervisory body, then effectively it can believe and practise as it sees fit. The term ‘Christian’ and traditional symbols such as the cross are not patented, and anyone can use them. In what follows, we have avoided adjudicating on which bodies should or should not be labelled as Christian; however, we have chosen not to include numerous organizations that are sometimes labelled as ‘New Christian’, such as Christadelphians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, the Unification Church, or other organizations whose Christian identity is often questioned. This is not to say that they are uninteresting, but rather that boundaries have to be defined. In general, mainstream Christians have reacted badly to movements that have added to their scriptures, or who have suggested that Jesus’s salvific work was incomplete, and that some further messiah is needed. As a general rule, those denominations that accept the authority of JewishChristian scripture and affirm the traditional creeds, together with the doctrine of the Trinity, can be regarded as mainstream.

DIFFERENT LAYERS OF ALLEGIANCE: ‘GREAT’ AND ‘LITTLE’ TRADITIONS The content of the various chapters acknowledges the importance of studying the popular expressions of Christian traditions. This raises the question of how we characterize these versions and how they relate to the hierarchical and institutional forms of Christianity that have been traditionally studied academically. A number of models have been suggested

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to characterize the differences between the various levels at which religion operates. One such scheme was suggested by the anthropologist Robert Redfield (1897–1958), who distinguished between what he called ‘the great tradition’ and ‘the little tradition’. Redfield writes: The great tradition is cultivated in schools and temples; the little tradition works itself out and keeps itself going in the lives of the unlettered in their village communities. (Redfield 1956: 70) An anthropologist, Redfield made a study in depth of the Tepoztlán people of Mexico, an agrarian community. Redfield’s interest in small self-sufficient communities was not merely that they were under-researched at the time, but that they were manageable groups for research purposes, in contrast with larger industrial communities, or with society in general. They served as part of the building blocks of wider society, thus contributing to a greater understanding of human behaviour by providing a ‘conceptual model’. Redfield referred to a community of this kind as ‘the little community’ – an expression which served as the title for his 1955 study, which was followed by his Peasant Society and Culture (1956). Such groups were characterized by dependence on land, and they tended to be isolated, living apart from urban communities, which were more highly developed economically and technologically. Redfield describes them as ‘peasants’, and as ‘primitive’, often preliterate, and hence without any recorded history or literature. Their customs and traditions, which were often unique to the community, were therefore drawn from oral transmission. They tended to be homogeneous, without diversity of ideas and customs, and they tended to be slow to change, in contrast with urban society, which responded rapidly to developing technology. The role of the anthropologist was to study the ‘lattice’ of relationships which build up within such a society – the relationship between peasant and landlord, relationships within households and neighbourhoods, and the role of markets in defining relationships between individuals. To what extent is Redfield’s analysis applicable to the study of Christians? Redfield is certainly drawing attention to the kind of distinction with which we are concerned, namely a ‘textbook’ version of the Christian faith, in contrast with the versions that are lived out in practice. Although Redfield assumed that there was a contrast between urban and rural practice, the popular expressions of the Christian faith which we shall discuss here are found both in the city and in the country. Popular Christmas customs can be found in both environments. The terms ‘great’ and ‘little’ are also problematic. If the distinction is intended to suggest that one is larger than the other, then this is not necessarily the case. If ‘great’ is intended to denote superiority, then Redfield’s thesis could be construed as a form of elitism. Are the intellectualized scholarly versions of the Christian faith superior to its popular expressions? This could be disputed on a number of grounds: at a popular level, scholarly versions of Christianity are frequently disparaged – it is not uncommon for members of a congregation to criticise a sermon for being ‘too theological’, implying that something more homely and practical is to be preferred. After all, did not Jesus say, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’ (Matthew 18:3)? Paul echoed this sentiment when he wrote, ‘Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?’ (1 Corinthians 1:20). In any case, with increasing standards of literacy and education, it is certainly no longer the case that either country-dwellers or Christian laity are unlettered.

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‘OFFICIAL’ AND ‘POPULAR’ EXPRESSIONS? An alternative way of distinguishing different expressions of the Christian faith is to suggest a contrast between ‘official’ and ‘popular’ religion. Both terms need some clarification. ‘Official religion’ frequently denotes the form of religion, or a denomination, that is formally recognized by the state, often given special rights and privileges, and used for state ceremonial occasions. This form of religion is sometimes referred to as civil or civic religion, meaning the expression of religion for state purposes. This sense of ‘official’ contrasts with another important sense of the word, which denotes those beliefs and practices that are sanctioned by the relevant religious authorities, and which may or may not be heeded by the laity. Official religion in the sense of state religion can be both popular and ecclesiastically official; for example, the laying of wreaths at cenotaphs on Remembrance Day (11 November) in Britain is a ritual that involves both lay people and clergy, and which continues to grow in popular observance. The other sense of ‘official’ that is used to contrast with ‘popular’ marks a distinction between those expressions of (in this case) Christianity which are defined and sanctioned by Church authorities. Thus, the Nicene Creed is an official expression of Christian doctrine which, as we have noted, is formally recited during worship but is little understood. The Roman Catholic Church’s prohibition on abortion is part of its official teaching, but yet, of the total number of legally recorded pregnancy terminations carried out in the United States in 2014, 24 per cent of the women defined themselves as Roman Catholic (Jerman, Jones and Onda 2016). What one means by ‘popular’ needs clarification. Some scholars have regarded popular religion as, in the words of Harvey Cox, the ‘faith of those groups which have been least integrated into the premises of modern society’ (Cox 1984: 240). A fair amount of literature has been written on ‘the religion of the oppressed’ and encompasses a variety of approaches. Some of these have been explicitly theological, for example, those liberation theologians in Latin America, such as Leonardo Boff, who have combined Marxist ideas with Christian doctrine, highlighting those parts of the Christian faith and its scriptures that advocate release from oppression. Others have developed practical ways of alleviating suffering, such as relief organizations like Christian Aid, Catholic Agency For Overseas Development (CAFOD), and the Fair Trade movement, which seeks to ensure that workers in economically underdeveloped countries are paid a fair wage for their labour and produce. Christians, too, have actively campaigned against oppression and injustice, and one does not have to look hard to find examples such as Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights movement, which gained prominence in the 1960s to empower black people and secure equal rights for them. Much Christian social action is aimed at combating evils such as slavery, human trafficking, poverty, famine, debt, and a host of other conditions that can be construed as oppression. All these issues are highly important, but some comments are needed on how they relate to the methodological issue of comparing and contrasting the concepts of official and popular religion. First, as we have noted, the focus of the present volume is not theological, and it is not our purpose to analyse the theology of the liberation theologians. Second, popular religion as we have construed it goes wider than an examination of the plight of the oppressed and how they use their religion to cope with it. Some Christians may use a saint’s shrine to pray for betterment, and this is certainly of interest to our present study, but this is only part of what the world’s Christian populace do in the

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name of their religion. As Paul Vanderwood (2000) points out, the oppressed often turn to the Church’s official amenities for practical help. Praying to the Virgin Mary, receiving the sacrament and seeking counsel from a priest are all activities in which the poor and the oppressed engage, and they are all endorsed – indeed provided – by the Church’s hierarchy. Also, if the oppressed resort to unofficial practices, they are not alone in doing so: as Vanderwood notes, those who are well integrated into society can also engage in actions that might be regarded as popular religious expressions. Placing a Saint Christopher medallion on the dashboard of one’s car, for example, is not uncommon among Roman Catholics. Further, any distinction between official and popular has to acknowledge that there is an interchange between the Church’s officially sanctioned beliefs and practices and popular devotion, as well as areas where any such distinction is blurred. Take, for example, Catholic shrines that have originated from apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The most famous of these is Lourdes, where Bernadette Soubirous (1844–1879) received visions in 1858 of a young woman who claimed to be the Immaculate Conception, and who requested the building of a chapel at nearby Massabielle. As is well known, some 5,000,000 pilgrims now visit the shrine each year. The phenomenon of apparitions, as they are called, shows considerable blurring of boundaries between ‘official’ and ‘popular’ Catholicism. The Catholic Church requires careful investigation to be conducted before acknowledging the authenticity of such apparitions and building such shrines. Marian shrines are typically associated with healing, which is frequently the reason for pilgrims journeying to them, and miraculous cures have been claimed. In 1905, Pope Pius X required proper investigation of the alleged miracles, resulting in the establishment of the Lourdes Medical Bureau, which has formally authenticated sixty-nine remarkable cures. Here, private revelation and popular devotion, which gave rise to the shrine’s creation, have interacted with the official Roman Catholic hierarchy, who have pronounced on issues relating to authenticity, as well as funded the establishment of the shrine, which is owned by the Church and has now a £23 million annual budget. Bernadette was formally beatified by the Church in 1925 and canonized as a saint in 1933; hence, Bernadette is officially part of Roman Catholicism. However, despite the official recognition given to Bernadette and Lourdes, it is not a requirement that a faithful practising Catholic must believe in the authenticity of Bernadette’s vision, or that the shrine genuinely offers miraculous cures.

‘FOLK RELIGION’ Comment should also be made of the concept of ‘folk religion’, which may be thought to characterize the subject matter of this volume. The term ‘folk religion’ is contested, and at least one scholar – Leonard Primiano (1995: 38) – contends that the term is pejorative and should not be used. The term originated in 1901, when a German Lutheran pastor by the name of Paul Drews (1858–1912) coined the expression to signal to his ordinands that they were likely to encounter at local level variations to the set liturgy of the Church. However, the term was later appropriated by folklorists, although with no agreed meaning. Folklorist Don Yoder defines folk religion as ‘the totality of all those views and practices of religion that exist among the people apart from and alongside the strictly theological and liturgical forms of the official religion’ (Yoder 1974: 14) and distinguishes five different senses in which the term has come to be used:

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(1) It alludes to the survival of earlier stages of religious and spiritual development to the establishment of the dominant religion. For example, a popular Christian shrine may have previously belonged to a pagan goddess: shrines dedicated to Saint Bridget are characteristic of this phenomenon. (2) The expression may signify the ways in which the ‘official’ religion has mixed with ethnic practices. In Haitian Vodou, for example, the Virgin Mary features prominently in their shrines, mingled with various indigenous spirits – Ioa – which are typically identified with Christian saints. (3) ‘Folk religion’ can sometimes be taken to denote the practice of rituals and customs, sometimes associated with mythology, which may be regarded as superstitions. Practices like crossing one’s fingers or touching wood in wishing for luck – practices in which Christians frequently engage – are such examples. (4) There are interpretations and uses of religious concepts which are given by the people, but which are not endorsed by the religious hierarchy or by the scholar. A baseball player who uses the verse, ‘I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me’ (Philippians 4:13, KJV) as an affirmation to bring success employs the Bible as a set of sound bytes for personal encouragement, regardless of the original meaning and context. (5) Yoder’s final definition incorporates all of the above, making up ‘the totality of all those views and practices of religion that exist among the people apart from and alongside the strictly theological and liturgical forms of the official religion’ (Yoder 1974: 14). In this anthology we are not primarily concerned with examples of syncretism, where other religions and cultures have appropriated parts of the Christian faith, for example, the spiritist religions of Santeria, Candomblé, and Vodou. Such developments and innovations fall within the sub-discipline of the study of new religious movements. We are also not concerned with folk practices that are unrelated to Christian practice, such as popular superstitions and good luck charms. Our focus is in one sense narrower than that of Yoder, but in another sense wider: it is narrower in that we have excluded discussions of popular practices that are plainly unrelated to Christian traditions, but it is wider in the sense that our interest is also on how rank-and-file Christians practise their religion, both inside and outside the theological and liturgical context.

VERNACULAR RELIGION A concept favoured by folklorists in place of ‘folk religion’ is ‘vernacular religion’. Folklorists Leonard Primiano and Marion Bowman object to the former term on the grounds that it suggests a contrast between a religion of the people and ‘official’ or ‘institutional’ religion. As both authors point out, so-called institutional religion is not monolithic; hence, some religious activities may be ‘official’ from one standpoint and ‘unofficial’ from another. (Primiano 2012: 384; Bowman 2014: 102). With this in mind, what are we to make of Christians – of whom there are quite a few – who worship with more than one denomination? There are some individuals known to the authors who are happy to attend public worship on some Sundays at an Anglican cathedral, but to intersperse this with attendance at Pentecostal services. Whether or not the office-bearers of either tradition are happy with such dual allegiance, it is not part of the expectations

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of either. Yet, from the standpoint of the student of religion, it ought to be worthy of interest that there are Christians who adopt such practices. Another example may be what a Christian does during Lent. It is not an institutional expectation that the rank-and-file Christian gives up luxuries, although it is not uncommon for clergy to recommend such a practice. What if a group of Christians decides of their own accord to organize their own group for prayer and Bible study during that period? Is this institutional or not? There is no clear answer. Primiano advocates the study of ‘religion as it is lived: as human beings encounter, understand, interpret, and practice it’ (Primiano 1995: 44). What Primiano and Bowman, and also Yoder, are urging – whether or not we retain the term ‘folk religion’ – is that any religious activity is worthy of note, and not merely the theological, historical, and liturgical. Marion Bowman cites the example of a Roman Catholic woman in Newfoundland who habitually chewed gum, and one night parked it on her bureau. The following day it appeared to have the shape of a statue of the Virgin Mary. She was surprised, but attributed this apparition (if one may describe the phenomenon as such) as a divine reward for her life’s hard work (Bowman 2003: 285). However, if we are to be encouraged to study ‘the totality of all those views and practices of religion that exist among the people’, this is of course an impossible task. Selection is needed, together with some kind of contextualizing; otherwise, we simply end up with an assortment of pleasant (or maybe not so pleasant) anecdotes. Indeed, contextualizing is essential if such stories are to have any significance, or indeed any meaning. The fact that the gum resembled the Virgin Mary, rather than looking vaguely like some other human being, makes a story worth noting, and her recognition of the shape as Mary relies on a familiarity with a religious tradition. To attach significance to the phenomenon, the woman must have had at least some rudimentary knowledge of who the Virgin Mary is, and the role she plays in the Christian story, that she is the mother of Jesus, and the ‘Mother of God’ in the Catholic tradition – otherwise her experience would have been unremarkable. Further, if such a phenomenon is of interest, it needs to be discussed within the context of some wider question. For example, it might be asked to what extent there are popular ‘apparitions’ of Mary (or other notable religious figures), what significance is attached to them, or in what circumstances they typically arise. These observations raise the question of the framework that we have adopted in this volume. The overall question that we raise is: How does the ‘ordinary’ Christian understand and practise his or her faith? The ordinary Christian is typically not a theologian, historian, or Bible scholar, so our focus is on the ordinary Christian experience. However, as with the owner of the gum image of Mary, one cannot separate ordinary experience from these more scholarly aspects, and one cannot make sense of ordinary experiences without some reference to doctrine, tradition, scripture, or liturgy. In response to this quandary, Chryssides and Wilkins have previously suggested a tripartite model for the ways in which one may follow a Christian path, based upon previous models of Weightman and Spiro, which they define as salvific, ethical, and pragmatic (Spiro 1971: 140–1; Weightman 1987: 43–46; Chryssides and Wilkins 2011: 5–7). Some Christians seek to attain salvation – a state which Christianity offers to all. Reaching the kingdom of heaven is something that all Christians are invited to aspire to, and, particularly in the Protestant tradition, it can be done by a mere act of faith. Other Christians – or indeed those same Christians – may use Christian teachings and practices as guidance for life. Christians, as well as their Jewish counterparts, draw on the Ten Commandments to govern the lives, but the Bible offers more than a set of rules

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and regulations: Jesus was renowned for illustrating points of the Jewish law in parables, giving concrete illustration to how one should live. It would be surprising to meet a Christian who was not familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example. The third layer at which Christian’s practise is at a pragmatic level. For some, it offers personal empowerment. One of our former students, a Christian, once said ‘I go to church every Sunday to psych myself up for the week.’ (This did not preclude him from practising Christianity at other levels; after graduation he gained employment doing Christian social work.) Christians may use their faith for comfort and solace, to cope with life’s difficulties, to seek guidance and courage to face life’s demands, or at times for material benefits. Indeed, one book devoted to prayer states, ‘To pray for money or for a car, if you are in real need of them, is just as spiritual as to pray for consolation in bereavement, or for courage to face danger’ (Winward 1961: 65). Many churches also serve as a home for service to the community or for encouraging recreational activities: a cursory glance at many churches’ notice boards or newsletters will indicate a range of activities whose purpose is not overtly spiritual – parents’ and toddlers’ groups, badminton clubs, ‘knit and natter’ meetings, quilting, photography, and many more. There are churches that have reinvented themselves as community centres partly to make churches more userfriendly as a form of evangelism, but more importantly to recognize that communities have pragmatic needs that they can help meet by upgrading their premises and ensuring that they are utilized throughout the week and not merely on Sundays.

THE SCOPE OF THE HANDBOOK Our aim of ‘studying Christians’ needs explanation. To claim to study 2.3 billion people is, of course, an impossible task, and each individual has his or her own ways of expressing his or her Christianity. What we seek to explain is what Christians of the various traditions are likely to experience and practise in the name of their religion. Different members of the same congregation may attend worship at different times and with different frequencies, and we have sought to include the so-called ‘cultural Christians’, who may attend a church very infrequently, but yet draw on ideas that have their roots in Christian traditions. Christians, too, will notice different things about their faith and will have different levels of understanding. Clearly, it would be inappropriate simply to relate what the average Christian, if asked, would tell about his or her experience of Christianity – otherwise we would simply end up with descriptions of what was visually and audibly obvious. Students of religion are invariably encouraged to go beyond the descriptive and to offer analysis and explanation. Clifford Geertz (1973) is credited for introducing into the study of religion the distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ description. A thin description describes no more than the basic sounds, sights, and physical movements that could be apprehended by anyone who was not familiar with the relevant activity. If we did not know how to play the game of chess, we could only report seeing two people sitting at a board with black and white squares, moving different wooden objects around, whereas once we understand the game we can offer informative comment, such as ‘White moved the knight to c6, putting the black king in check.’ By similar logic, understanding what Christians do demands probing behind what we see and hear and using background knowledge to explain what is happening. Suppose we attend a church service and observe that it concludes with the woman minister raising her hand and saying, ‘The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.’ Thus far this is thin

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description, since it reports no more than the visually and audibly obvious. To understand what is happening, we need to understand something of the background to this service. We might note, for example, that the officiant is a woman, which demonstrates the denominational attitude to women’s ordination. Noting the denomination is vital to understanding the action. Was it done from the pulpit, rather than the chancel? If so, this reflects the Presbyterian emphasis on preaching, and their lack of regard for employing the rest of the church furniture. She pronounced a benediction and used the word ‘you’ rather than ‘us’: this indicates that she is an ordained minister, rather than a student in training, who would not have the authority to pronounce a blessing. What was the hand movement like? If we are observing a form of worship in the Protestant tradition, she probably did not make the sign of the cross, but perhaps the hand movement consisted of raising the thumb and the adjacent two fingers, which can signify the three persons of the Trinity. There is much that can be added to the description of a simple movement which yields understanding of what is taking place. There still remains, however, the further question of the extent to which the average attendee at this service understands what is happening, and the significance of the words and liturgical movements. In all probability, we would find differences in what members of the congregation could explain, or even in what they noticed. Put simply, the experiences of individual Christians will be diverse, even when experienced in a shared time, place, or space.

‘BAD’ CHRISTIANS We have noted that both theology and the academic study of religion have traditionally included the ‘authorised’ expressions of Christianity, to the exclusion of the beliefs and practices of ordinary believers. It is also the case that scholars have tended to focus on the ideal, rather than the real. Many of Christianity’s exponents (academic and lay) have highlighted its role in Western civilization, its ethic of love, its role in education, its music, literature, and art, its theology and philosophy, its humanitarian work, and so on. However, not all Christians are so public-spirited. The violent conflict in Northern Ireland is firmly grounded in centuries of animosity between Catholics and Protestants. Many Christian leaders – not merely their followers – have been convicted of crimes spanning murder, robbery, embezzlement, tax evasion, and polygamy, to name but a few. The recent prominence that has been given to sexual abuse by clergy, and the ways in which such crimes have been covered up by Church leaders, both in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Church of England, indicates the inappropriateness of uncritically portraying Christians as people who act out Christ’s ethic of love. Some commentators have now devised the term ‘spiritual abuse’ (Hilborn 2018) to describe inappropriate behaviour, often by clergy, that is specifically related to religious people and contexts, although the differentiation of this from ‘mainstream’ understandings of abuse is being challenged (Oakley 2018). A sizeable number of members of congregations have recently come forward to mention ways in which clergy’s behaviour has been coercive, controlling, or manipulative, and how they sanction it by invoking scripture or the will of God. Such actions are explicitly religious and should not be separated away from Christians’ lives and identities. Unfortunately, much public discourse does precisely this. One section of a BBC website, aimed at explaining the Christianity for schoolchildren, has headings such as ‘How do Christians respond to crime in society and those who commit crime?’, as if Christians and criminals are two separate categories (BBC 2018). Clearly, this is not the case, and prison chaplains will acknowledge

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that they minister to many self-defined Christians, among others. (Christians comprised 48 per cent of the UK prison population in 2018.) Contemporary scholarship therefore needs to meet the challenge of this public discourse which creates a false binary between being Christian and committing harmful acts. Certainly, to perpetuate this dichotomy would be inappropriate; indeed, the Bible teaches that ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3:23), and that Jesus Christ offers forgiveness to sinners, however heinous they may be. ‘Bad’ Christianity does not consist merely of Christians who commit crimes. Numerous Christian organizations have been identified as ‘hate groups’: notable examples include the Westboro Baptist Church, noted for its strong opposition to homosexuals; Kingdom Identity Ministries, who state that ‘the White, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and kindred people to be God’s true, literal Children of Israel’ (Kingdom Identity Ministries 2018); and the Irish Republican Army, who conducted a campaign of violence in Northern Ireland, and whose public discourse and identity were framed largely within a Catholic world view, albeit with a complicated relationship with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Ireland (Berman, Lalor and Terode 1983). Instead of defining such organizations and individuals away as ‘not real Christians’, scholarship needs to engage with the lived realities of Christians’ lives – which are often played out in complex, troubled, and divisive social and political contexts – to understand the light and dark, the mainstream and the undercurrent, the compassionate and the combative. Indeed, ‘bad’ Christians may act as a reminder as to how we should approach the study of all Christians. We must not engage with Christians expecting to find a textbook essentialism of a character-type. Not all Christians believe the same things (even regarding key concepts such as Jesus, God, Trinity and salvation), and these beliefs are embodied and performed in the lives of Christians in diverse ways which can be contradictory and confusing. This is not a modern phenomenon – Christianity has been made up of dynamic and diverse groups of people from its inception. It is these people who have shaped institutions, hierarchies, teachings, and doctrines, as much as they have shaped everyday practices, localized traditions, and popular forms of practice. In his definition of vernacular religion, Primiano is careful to note that vernacular is not to be understood as in opposition to official; all religion is vernacular religion. This is crucial for our current study. When we study everyday Christians, we must be aware that that this is representative of all Christians – from Popes to playgroup leaders, Civil Rights champions to church cleaners. By engaging with the lived realities and expressions of individual Christians’ lives, we may begin to understand the diversity of the complex category of ‘Christianity’.

CHAPTER TWO

Who owns Christianity? Changes in demographical trends DYRON DAUGHRITY

Mega-churches in South Korea, massive growth of Christians in China, unpredicted resurgence of Christianity in Russia, mushrooming Pentecostal denominations in subSahara, robust growth of global Catholicism, remote tribes turning to Christ in Northeast India and ubiquitous evangelical revivals in Latin America. Christianity is booming, especially outside the United States and Western Europe. Even in the West, there is ample evidence that the death of Christianity there has been greatly exaggerated. Christianity is today the largest religion in the world, with around 33 per cent of the world’s inhabitants professing themselves to be members of the faith. That’s around 2.5 billion Christians in a world of 7.5 billion souls. With frequent news about Christianity’s decline, notably in Western Europe, it may be counterintuitive to realize that Christianity is not only the largest religion on earth, but also the most diverse in a geographical sense. Of the world’s eight cultural blocks, Christianity is the largest religion in six of them: ●●

Latin America and the Caribbean (93 per cent Christian)

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North America (81 per cent Christian)

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Eastern Europe (80 per cent Christian)

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Oceania (80 per cent Christian)

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Western Europe (78 per cent Christian)

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Africa (47 per cent Christian, 41 per cent Muslim)

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Asia (9 per cent Christian)

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Middle East (2 per cent Christian)1

We are living in Christianity’s heyday. Indeed, there are some predictions that Christianity will give way to Islam as the world’s largest religion in the decade of the 2060s, due largely to higher fertility rates for Muslims worldwide. However, there is no guarantee that Muslim fertility rates will remain the same, and projections of a halfcentury into the future are shaky. What is not shaky is the well-established history of Christianity’s rise over the last two centuries. Its global spread was in many ways linked to the era of European colonialism. Western missionaries were able to travel rather freely under the protective banner of

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European and American flags. Western cultural norms, languages and approaches to education were transported globally due to the powerful, intercontinental empires established by Britain, France, Spain, the United States and others. Tremendous advances in communication, technology and travel by Western nations were also at the heart of Christianity’s ascendancy to become the world’s largest and most widespread faith. The result of all of that firepower, global circumnavigation and economic power was a vast church planting movement from the West to the rest. Missionaries sailed to all corners of the earth in search of good soil for bringing up a Christian harvest. Among the most important missionary movements was the Jesuits, especially their zenith in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Perhaps the most important missionary movement of the nineteenth century was the China Inland Mission, a Protestant organization founded by Hudson Taylor in 1865. These two movements were very different from one another. Jesuits were highly educated and politically powerful, while the CIM missionaries tended to be working class. Jesuits were single men. The CIM routinely recruited single women. However, both Jesuits and the CIM focused on planting churches, converting souls to Christ and establishing schools that would reach younger people for the faith.

NEW TRENDS IN CHRISTIAN EXPANSION Today, models for Christian mission are being adapted for a globalizing context. The new catch phrase is that missionary work today takes place ‘from everywhere to everywhere’, rather than ‘from the West to the rest’. For example, South Korea is often cited as the number two ‘sending’ nation after the United States in terms of sending out missionaries (Moon 2003).2 The whole idea of centralized missionary societies is being rendered obsolete in favour of the new form of missions: immigration. Scholars now point out that when people immigrate to new lands, they usually bring their faith with them. And eventually these individual migrants come together to form communities, whether Korean, Hmong, Mexican or Persian. These newly created communities become bridgeheads for transplanting faith in a foreign context. Human migration has become a great boon for the global dissemination of religion – and in particular, the Christian faith. It is estimated that there are nearly 250 million migrants in the world, and around half of them are Christians. That means there are 125 million Christians ‘on the move’. The nations that send out the most migrants are Mexico, India and Russia. The nations that receive the most migrants are the United States, Russia and Germany (Walls 2002; Pew Forum 2012; Connor 2016). Old stereotypes abound such as European missionaries with hats on and Bibles in hand. But the more accurate depiction of a missionary today is someone without much social power, seeking a better life, or perhaps a longer life. The stark reality of life in Africa is that the life expectancy there is the lowest in the world – around fifty years. Contrast that with Western Europeans who live to the age of eighty on average (Daughrity 2010). Today’s migrants are students, domestic workers, lottery green card winners, field workers and refugees. They bring their faith with them as ‘hand baggage’ (Adogame 2013: 86). This relocation to new lands, however, is often fraught with chaos, as migrants are often very vulnerable people. A twenty-first-century migrant will encounter mountains of paperwork, punishing fees, random searches, endless interrogation, insensitive jokes

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levelled at them and dehumanizing stereotypes applied towards them that can create widespread suspicion (Adogame 2013: 23). But this is where churches come to the rescue. Christianity was mandated to treat foreigners with dignity, for example, when Jesus described those who would be saved: ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ (Matthew 25:35–40) In a world where migration plays an increasingly critical role, Christianity’s approach to the vulnerable foreigner will likely come into play, and the results are already being felt. For example, while only around 10 per cent of Asians are Christian, a full 44 per cent of Asian-Americans are Christians. That is a remarkable statistic, considering the fact that religious conversion – from one religion to a completely different religion – is relatively uncommon. When Asians immigrate to the United States, they often convert to Christianity. And there is little doubt that local churches have something to do with that trend. Who would have thought that one of the great missionary strategies today would be to welcome the immigrant, just as Jesus commanded? The United States is home to 44 million legal immigrants and 11 million unauthorized immigrants (see Cohn 2017; Zong 2018). Similar statistics apply to the European Union, where there are nearly 40 million immigrants living today, and where over 2 million immigrants arrive annually (Eurostat 2018). These changes are impacting religion, and over the long haul they could prove to have profound effects on the religious composition of the Western world.

WHO OWNS CHRISTIANITY? Researchers today often point out that Christianity has become a religion of the Global South. For centuries the Christian faith was rooted in the Western world, but today it is much more concentrated in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Take the Anglican Communion as an example here. More than half of the world’s Anglicans now live in Africa, with around 20 million in Nigeria alone (Pew Forum 2008). Similarly, the Roman Catholic Church is now strongly anchored in Latin America, where around 40 per cent of its membership resides. This statistic helps to explain why an Argentine was elected Pope in 2013. Brazil and Mexico have the two largest Roman Catholic national populations in the world. Africa is home to 16 per cent of the world’s Catholics. Europe is still home to about a quarter of the world’s Catholics, but that number is declining annually. The future of both the Anglican and Catholic churches is in the same place – in the Global South. Our Western-influenced models of how we understand Christianity are today obsolete. No longer can we understand Christianity as a chiefly Western religion. Certainly there was a time when it was strongest in the Western world, but those days have passed. Those who engage in the academic study of Christianity must take into account what major transformations have occurred within the demography and geography – and even theology – of the Christian faith over the last few decades. It is a fascinating story, and one that will continue to gain traction as people realize the enormous changes. Here we cite but a few examples that illustrate Christianity’s changing centre of gravity:3

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In 1970, around 41 per cent of the world’s Christians were from the Global South. Today, around two-thirds of them are from the Global South. Pentecostal and charismatic forms of Christianity – those that emphasize the gifts of the Holy Spirit – are growing much more rapidly than other forms of the faith. In 1970, only around 5 per cent of the world’s Christians were Pentecostal/ charismatic. Today, that number is around 30 per cent.4 Christianity’s growth in Africa has surged spectacularly over the last several decades. In 1970, Africa was home to around 143 million Christians. Today there are over 600 million Christians on the African continent. Christianity is the fastest growing religion in Asia today, especially East Asia. In 1970, only around 1 per cent of East Asians were Christians. Today, around 10 per cent of East Asians are Christians. China and Mongolia are leading the way here. Latin American Christianity has been energized by the election of Francis. But the lesser known story is that Catholicism in the region is being challenged by the vast growth of Pentecostalism. Sociologists such as Rodney Stark have argued for years that competition is good for the health and growth of religion. (Bellofatto and Johnson 2013).

These statistics would have been unfathomable a century ago, when the Western world was known as Christendom. Philip Jenkins is one well-known scholar who argues that the next Christendom is in the Global South, particularly in Africa (see Jenkins 2011). If someone were to make an argument for what region of the world owns Christianity today, they could do no better than to point to sub-Saharan Africa. Christians today make up around half of the African population. As a comparison, around 42 per cent of Africans are Muslim (Bellofatto and Johnson 2013). Again, a century ago it would have been unimaginable to think that Christianity would surpass Islam as the largest religion on the African continent. One of the big stories in Christianity today is how Africans are now evangelizing the West, largely through immigration. African churches are popping up all over the Western world. London – long thought to be a secularizing city – has seen a steady rise of African churches. Christianity Today (2016: 15) recently noted, ‘For every Anglican church that closed in London since 2010, more than three Pentecostal churches opened.’ Some of these churches are large, for instance the Kingsway International Christian Centre in northeast London has 12,000 members, with church planting initiatives happening in many countries. This church has been called ‘the single largest Christian community in Western Europe’, and its membership is mainly African and Caribbean. Its pastor, Matthew Ashimolowo, is Nigerian. The largest church in Eastern Europe is also pastored by a Nigerian – Sunday Adelaja. His Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations church claims over 25,000 members, with a membership that is overwhelmingly white (see Asamoah-Gyadu et al. 2017).

THE ECCLESIAL CONTEXT OF GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY About half of the world’s Christians are Roman Catholic. Protestantism – in all of its various forms – accounts for around 40 per cent of the world’s Christians. The remainder, about 10 per cent, are from the ancient Orthodox Churches.

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It is difficult to overstate the significance of the global Roman Catholic community. Right around 17 per cent of the world’s inhabitants are members of the Roman Catholic Church. That’s well over a billion people. There are fifteen nations in the world that have a population that includes over 20 million Roman Catholic members, including Brazil (165 million Catholics), Mexico (100 million), the Philippines (79 million) and the United States (71 million) (Roman Catholic Statistical Updates 2014). Historically having its base in Western Europe, the Roman Catholic Church’s membership today is firmly situated in the Global South. Over 70 per cent of the church’s members are in Asia, Africa and Latin America. And that number is sure to rise due to fertility rates. Fertility rates give us a tremendous amount of information about the future of religion, and one thing is clear: Christianity’s future is well-endowed due to relatively high fertility rates in Africa (4.72 children per woman), Latin America (2.42) and Asia (2.35). With a fertility rate of 2.05, North Americans barely replace themselves. Western (1.56) and Eastern (1.38) European fertility rates fall far short of what is needed for a stable population, or a stable economy.5 These are the key reasons for immigration’s ongoing necessity. Economies typically stagnate or decline when human populations contract. The Catholic Church is growing at a healthy rate. In only five years—between 2006 and 2011—the church grew 22 per cent in Africa. In Asia it grew 11.6 per cent, and in both Latin America and North America the church grew around 5–6 per cent. Those are very positive numbers for the church, and they demonstrate just how magnificently the church is growing outside the Western world (Roman Catholic Statistical Updates 2014). The Catholic Church is strongest in Latin America, where around 300 million of its members live. That is around 40 per cent of the world’s Catholic population. For now, and for the foreseeable future, Latin America should be considered the heartland of modern Roman Catholicism. But Asia and Africa’s Catholic populations are impressive, too. There are nearly 200 million Catholics in Africa, and 130 million in Asia. The centre of the Catholic Church in Asia can be found in the Philippines, where there are around 75 million Catholics. In fact, the Philippines is the third largest national Catholic population in the world, after Brazil and Mexico. The Catholic Church deserves profound respect for all of the good it does in the world. Of course there are scandals and problems, but the sheer scale of the church’s benevolence is truly impressive. The church has around 4.2 million people who are engaged in either full- or part-time pastoral work as priests, monks, nuns, teachers and missionaries. More than 70 per cent of the NGOs at the United Nations are Christian, and no Christian group is more active than the Roman Catholic Church (O’Brien and Palmer 2007: 36, 109; Pew Forum 2013). The Protestant churches account for around 40 per cent of the world’s Christians. That’s around 800 million Christians worldwide. While that may not be as impressive as Catholic numbers, it should be remembered that Protestantism has only existed for around 500 years. Protestant churches are growing dramatically in Asia and Africa. Indeed, 65 per cent of Asian Christians and 58 per cent of African Christians are associated with some form of Protestantism. It is difficult to define Protestantism, but in the most basic sense, Protestants are those Christians who are neither Roman Catholic nor Orthodox. Thus there is a huge spectrum of what constitutes a Protestant church. Over 40,000 Protestant denominations and movements exist, ranging dramatically in style and teaching, from Anglicanism to the

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various forms of Pentecostalism that are expanding prolifically (Center for the Study of Global Christianity 2017). The largest Protestant family in the world is the Pentecostal movement, which will be discussed in the next section (Pew Forum 2011). Some of the other major Protestant families are the following: ●●

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Methodist: around 80 million members.6 The Methodist movement is rooted in the life and legacy of John Wesley, an eighteenth-century clergyman in the Anglican church. Reformed/Presbyterian: around 100 million members.7 The Reformed churches are rooted in the life and work of John Calvin, the famous sixteenth-century reformer from Geneva. Anglican: around 85 million members.8 The Anglican churches are rooted in the Church of England. Due to the historic vastness of the British empire, the church was planted all over the world. Lutheran: 74 million members.9 Lutheranism is rooted in the life and work of Protestantism’s founder, Martin Luther, in the sixteenth century. Baptist: 50 million members.10 Rooted in English Puritanism and Anabaptism, Baptists are known best for their approach to baptism: water immersion for believers (rather than sprinkling or pouring water on infants).

It is not possible to define Protestantism with any kind of specificity. Historically, Protestantism was a movement rooted in the life and work of Martin Luther, but within a few years the protest expanded well beyond Luther’s orbit in Germany. And while it was originally a ‘protest’ movement (the word ‘Protestantism’ contains the word ‘protest’) against the Roman Catholic Church, today that reactionary posture is far less common. Still, however, there are tendencies within the vast array of Protestant movements that surface time and again. If we were to narrow Protestantism down to its key ideas, we would probably need to include the following: sola scriptura (scripture alone), priesthood of all believers, sola fide (faith alone), direct access to God and a suspicion of centralized authority. These are not watertight ideas. For example, many Protestant denominations do, in fact, have a centralized authority. However, there is a tendency to push against the hierarchy in a way unlike what goes on in the Roman Catholic Church. Protestantism was founded in protest, thus protesting is in its DNA. It is entirely normal for Protestant movements to split over the years. There is not one Baptist denomination, for example. There are many. It really gets complicated when we start talking about Pentecostalism – a movement that focuses less on institutionalization and more on the free activity of the Holy Spirit in believers’ lives. More on that later. Orthodox Christianity is the third major ecclesial fellowship in Christianity, and it should probably be considered the oldest. Orthodoxy has its origins in Jerusalem, as discussed in the book of Acts. Historically, it was always associated with the cities that were home to the great patriarchates of Christianity: Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, Alexandria and, later, Constantinople. Over time, the Western side of the Empire began to develop its own distinct culture, rooted heavily in the Latin language. The Eastern side of the Roman Empire began to develop more along Greek lines, both linguistically and culturally. Over time, this Greek East came to be known as the Byzantine Empire, which lasted from the 300s to the 1400s.

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While anchored in Greece, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the Orthodox family of churches is now often identified with the Slavic world of influence. This is due to the powerful Russian Orthodox Church – easily the largest national Orthodox population in the world – with a membership of over 100 million people. Typically, Orthodoxy is organized along national lines; thus, there are several nations with substantial Orthodox populations: Russia, Ethiopia, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Egypt and Serbia, to name a few. Some nations have decidedly Orthodox populations, such as Greece, Russia, Serbia, Georgia, Romania and Armenia. The Orthodox world is undergoing a powerful revival right now, especially in the old Soviet sphere of influence.11 The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991 was a boon for the Church, especially in Russia. Churches are being built, people are coming back to the Christian faith and the government has aligned itself with the Church in a way that is quite rare for Westerners to witness today. Orthodoxy’s growth, however, is somewhat precarious due to the extremely low fertility rates found in Eastern Europe. Until those fertility rates can rise significantly, the Orthodox Churches will struggle to maintain their present numbers.

THE RISE OF PENTECOSTALISM The big story in Christianity today is just how quickly the Pentecostal movement has grown over the last century. It is difficult to fathom just how effectively this movement has adapted itself to cultures all over the world and impacted various global civilizations. The best scholarly resource we have for documenting religious affiliation in the world today is a joint project of Brill Publishers and the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, based at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. The project is called the World Religion Database and has roots in the World Christian Encyclopedia first published by Oxford University Press in 1982.12 The 2018 version of that resource estimates there are 682 million Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians in the world, which would mean that over a third of the world’s Christians are associated with the movement (Center for the Study of Global Christianity 2018). What is even more impressive is that the Pentecostal movement began relatively recently, in 1906, with the famous Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles. Scholars debate whether that revival was preceded by others, for example, an important charismatic revival in India or the one in Wales a few years earlier (see Anderson 2006). But the fact remains that the Azusa Street Revival put Pentecostalism on the map, as it morphed into a hugely successful global movement that has been called ‘the fastest growing phenomenon in world religious history’ (Weigel 2015). Pentecostalism tends to be frightening to people who know little about it. They think of exorcisms, speaking in tongues, wild worship services with pastors blowing into the microphone in order to symbolize the Holy Spirit. These things do go on, for sure, but there is so much more to it than that. Pentecostalism is a movement that emphasizes faith as an experience rather than mainly as a collection of rituals and doctrines. Pentecostal Christians take the Bible very seriously, often literally. Thus, when we read of Christians raising the dead, healing the blind and casting out unclean spirits, they believe Jesus promised these things to us as well. Indeed, one of the passages frequently cited by Pentecostal Christians is when Jesus promised his disciples the following in John 14:12–14. Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will

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do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it. There is no ambiguity in that passage, and Pentecostal Christians take it seriously. Why would Christians in the twentieth century – with our scientific understanding – believe in such things? First, it has to do with biblical interpretation. Many Pentecostals take the Bible at face value. What is read there is completely true and applicable to us today as it was to Jesus’s primary audience. Second, Pentecostalism’s epistemology is different from the typical Westerner’s epistemology. Pentecostals tend to attach a primacy to the biblical documents that is unparalleled in Christianity today. Virtually all Christians respect the Bible, but many traditions – such as the Catholic and Orthodox – prefer to emphasize the primacy of the Church’s entire body of teaching, also known as the magisterium. Catholics emphasize the infallible teaching of the office holder of the See of Saint Peter – the Pope. Other Christians put primacy in Western approaches to thought – such as logic and rationalism. Thus, the Bible is true and purposeful as long as it conforms to rational inquiry and modern standards of truth and morals. Put another way, Jesus walked on water, but we can’t do that today. Thus, either the Bible was wrong (for example, Jesus did not actually walk on water), or perhaps those kinds of miracles ceased in the early years of Christianity – a perspective known as cessationism. Pentecostals, however, have no such cessationist arguments. Thus, combined with a very high view of the primacy of scripture, they argue that the Bible is as true today as it was two millennia ago. Harvey Cox, an American theologian who has devoted considerable energy to understanding Pentecostalism, argues that Pentecostalism has been fantastically successful because of a series of sociological phenomena (see Cox 1995). For example, he connects the world’s rapid urbanization to a kind of social homelessness that Pentecostalism has successfully engaged. Humans are often ‘uprooted and spiritually homeless’ (see Cox 1995: 107). And as they move to the city, they need social support. And in the twentieth century, Pentecostal Christians stepped into this gap all over the world, focusing their energies on the poor and disenfranchized, primarily in the world’s great cities. Statistically, this was a brilliant move, as today around 55 per cent of humans live in major cities. And this number is projected to reach 66 per cent by 2050 (Center for the Study of Global Christianity 2018). A second sociological phenomenon that seems to be at the heart of Pentecostalism’s success is what Cox terms ‘primal spirituality’. Humans have a deep, human need (what he terms ‘primal’) for all that religion can offer: meaning, community, personal testimonies, hope for healing, belief in angelic protectors and all the rest. Pentecostals speak in tongues, perform miracles, prophecy, cry out to God, dance in the spirit, proclaim victory over darkness and decry the evil world around us – which they believe remains under the control of Satan. Some Christians might find these ideas archaic at best or perhaps even downright absurd in the light of modern science. But the Pentecostal movement is not ashamed of these beliefs; they bask in them. To deny or to be ashamed of the biblical worldview would be anathema to Pentecostal Christians. They believe in the Bible, and all that comes with believing in the Bible. And, further, they are quite convinced that if they receive a fair hearing from a truly open mind, they will succeed in their evangelistic efforts. And this leads to a third idea that Cox believes works to the advantage of Pentecostals: experientialism (see Cox 1995: 306ff.). To the Pentecostal, religion’s proof is in the

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pudding. Results matter. He writes, ‘Truths are not accepted because someone says they are true … but because people find that they connect, they “click” with their own quotidian existence.’ It would be pointless to try to argue with a Pentecostal Christian about why their church is misguided, especially if one appeals to heady arguments from history or philosophy or theology. Pentecostalism is an experience, not a collection of doctrines. When Pentecostals gather, they are far more likely to cry out to the Lord than they are to follow some theologian’s inductive reasoning about what a passage from the Bible may actually mean. To the Pentecostal and the charismatic, Christianity comes with gifts of the Holy Spirit. God literally works within the life of the believer to accomplish wonders in the lives of other believers. And this is not a concept that needs to be logically argued. Rather, it is a reality that they experience. Cox argues that experientialism is a double-edged sword for Pentecostals. On the one hand, they have obviously touched a nerve, especially in the Global South, as religion moves out of the realm of ivory tower theology and into the streets and favelas of people who have little or no hope in their current conditions. On the other hand, the emphasis on experience could eventually backfire on the movement, leading to a ‘vacuous cult of experience too much in keeping with the contemporary celebration of “feelings” and the endless search for new sources of arousal and exhilaration’ (Cox 1995: 313). Pentecostalism’s most stupendous success has been in Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa. It is believed that fully 600 million Christians live in Africa today, more than any cultural block in the world.13 And a key reason for Africa’s surge to become the world’s Christian heartland is the incredible growth of Pentecostal and charismatic forms of the faith, in addition to Africa’s high fertility rate, which is far higher than anywhere else. While virtually all African churches are more charismatic than their Western counterparts – including Anglican, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant denominations – this is particularly the case with Pentecostalism. The Pentecostal churches of Africa tend to be home grown. In the scholarly literature, these African indigenous churches are known by the acronym AIC. The AICs are churches that have little to no connection with the Western world. They are truly African churches planted by African leaders. Westerners know very little about them unless they just happen to visit one in Africa or perhaps encounter a church that has been planted in the West (which is occurring regularly due to migration). The concept of the AIC is often linked to two early-twentieth-century African prophets: William Wade Harris (1860–1929) and Simon Kimbangu (1887–1951). Harris was from Liberia, but evangelized all over West Africa. He was converted to Christianity while studying at a Methodist school in Liberia. He later worked as a seaman but eventually became a teacher in an American Episcopal mission, where he worked for ten years. It was around that time that the Archangel Gabriel appeared to him and urged him to abandon his European approach to Christianity. Thus he began to take on the role of an Old Testament prophet, calling people to repentance. Armed with a Bible, a walking stick, a cross, a bowl for baptizing and a gourd rattle, he trekked around West Africa healing people and prophesying. He visited places that were entirely off European maps. At the time, there was a ‘mysterious ripeness for conversion’ in West Africa as tens of thousands of people responded to his message (Kalu 2008: 37).14 Harris had no problem with polygamy and appears to have had multiple wives himself – a legacy in African Christianity that has confounded Westerners, but does not arouse nearly as much disapproval in the African context. Westerners came to know Harris as an anticolonial agitator, although he did appreciate many Western practices such as an

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emphasis on education and careful attention to hygiene. In the end, he was arrested and placed under house arrest, although he continued his ministry by advising his visitors. A series of Harris churches emerged, including the Church of the Twelve Apostles. Leaders in these churches drew inspiration from Harris and even claimed their authority was from him. They continued his practice of pioneering missions into remote and unevangelized areas, where they achieved great success. Harris’s preaching was quite orthodox, albeit explicitly charismatic and Pentecostal in nature, but what made Westerners uncomfortable was that he refused to operate under their control. Today, however, one of the Harris churches is a respected denomination and even holds membership in the World Council of Churches.15 Simon Kimbangu was another African prophet who made a massive impact on Africa in the twentieth century with his charismatic and Pentecostal tendencies. Simon Kimbangu (1887–1951) was born in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As a young man he became involved in a Baptist mission. In his thirties, he began to perform miracles and eventually started his own ministry in his hometown of Nkamba, which he called New Jerusalem. He acquired the reputation of a miracle worker and gained a swiftgrowing following. His teachings had a tinge of puritanism: no dancing, no polygamy, no alcohol, complete integrity. However, many elements of traditional African spirituality remained, such as the invoking of ancestors.16 Belgian authorities were suspicious of Kimbangu, and brutal in their punishment of him. He was initially condemned to death, but Baptist missionaries intervened and had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. He and some of his followers were whipped 120 times, and Kimbangu was imprisoned for thirty years. While imprisoned, his wife emerged as a capable leader of the mushrooming movement. However, in reality, his teachings and his courageous conduct during the colonial trial inspired many, and soon there were other groups popping up with claims that they were connected to Kimbangu’s ministry. In time, Kimbangu came to be seen as a messiah figure, and often he is identified as the Holy Spirit – the third person of the Trinity. Some Kimbanguists have claimed he was Jesus reincarnated. These teachings have caused turbulence for the Kimbanguist movements, particularly since they were accepted into the World Council of Churches in 1969, the first African Indigenous Church to do so. The membership of the church now exceeds 5 million, and there is no reason to think they are declining. There is a major debate among scholars of African Christianity about whether the AICs should be distinguished from the Pentecostal movement. And while there are scholars on all sides of this complicated issue, the similarities are undeniable. One big problem is in definitions. How does one define Pentecostalism with any measure of precision? Similarly, the AICs are extremely diverse and defy any watertight typologies. Historically, AICs and Pentecostalism are all connected at a deep level. In Africa, the AICs are often known as ‘Aladura’ (Yoruba for ‘praying people’) Christians. It is in the West that the moniker AIC has won a consensus of usage. Respected African scholar Ogbu Kalu (1943–2009) meticulously worked out the various viewpoints within African church historiography regarding the relationship between AICs and Pentecostals (Kalu 2008: 65ff.). Some scholars prefer to think of AICs as early forms of Pentecostalism in Africa since the AICs have roots in the 1800s. That precedes Pentecostalism’s arrival to the continent through the ministry of John Graham Lake in South Africa during the years 1908–1913. However, it is now clear from the historical scholarship that the reason Lake’s ministry had so

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much success was because of previous revivals in South Africa that had ‘softened the ground’ (Kalu 2008: 56). Whatever the case, it is clear that in both AICs and in explicitly Pentecostal churches in Africa, there is a decisively ‘pneumatic dimension’, or a ‘pneumatic emphasis’, which emphasizes the importance of the Holy Spirit (Kalu 2008: 67–69). What we have today are hundreds of African churches, movements and fellowships, led entirely by Africans, and usually with no connection to Western churches, except in cases where they are evangelizing and sending missionaries to the West. The Zion Christian Church in South Africa and the Kimbanguists in the D. R. Congo boast memberships in the millions, but they are churches that are more insular in nature. There are many other African churches that have their eyes set on reaching beyond the confines of their own nations or even their own continents. David Oyedepo’s Winner’s Chapel is a huge congregation in Nigeria which continues to expand by planting churches in the Western world. The Redeemed Christian Church of God, based in Nigeria, has received coverage in the New York Times for its expansion into the Western World (see Rice 2009). In 2013 this church dedicated a $15.5 million North American headquarters near Dallas (see Hanlon 2013). William Kumuyi’s Deeper Life Bible Church in Nigeria has a membership of around 800,000. The International Central Gospel Church in Ghana has many thousands of members, but is best known for its highly respected Central University. T.B. Joshua’s Synagogue of All Nations congregation in Nigeria has a membership of around 50,000 (see Daughrity 2018: 142ff.). It should be kept in mind that many of these churches with explosive growth were established only in the 1980s or 1990s. There is no telling how large they will become in the future, especially those that emphasize missionary efforts. In recent years, much has been made of the African Pentecostal churches’ ambition to evangelize the Global North, thereby rescuing it from secularization and bringing Westerners back into the Christian fold. Judging by how quickly Christianity grew on the African continent in the twentieth century, African missionaries do have reasons for optimism. In 1900 there were only 8 million Christians on the entire African continent, or around 2 per cent of the world’s Christian population (Center for the Study of Global Christianity 2018). Today, around 20 per cent of the world’s Christians live in Africa. Africa, a continent with over a billion people, is half Christian today. And nobody can predict when this extraordinary – even unprecedented – growth will slow down. African Pentecostalism has energized world Christianity in palpable ways. It is a style of Christianity that seems perfectly designed for the crossing of borders, for indigenization and for meeting the needs of people in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pentecostalism’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit and its indwelling in the individual Christian empower people. Instead of needing a hierarchy to instil authority into believers, as with most top-down church frameworks, Pentecostalism freely admits that there are numerous gifts of the Holy Spirit, and each conveys authority in a bottom-up manner. Christians who are gifted in healing are set free to heal. Those who are able to lead can lead, and usually without the cumbersome ordination process that is required in more established denominations. Pentecostalism is also far less prone to require high levels of education for its leaders. It is very typical that a pastor will mentor a new generation of leaders as Jesus did – they simply accompany him for a few years, learning directly from him, rather than taking years of classes and passing academic exams.

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THE UNRAVELLING OF CONSTANTINIAN CHRISTIANITY For all of these reasons, Pentecostalism has indigenized rapidly and has encouraged localization within Christianity. Pentecostal Christians do not have to look to Rome or Canterbury or the United States for their religious authority. There is an autonomy in Pentecostalism that defies rigid social or hierarchical structures. This is precisely the reason we find Pentecostal movements popping up with such frequency across the world of Christianity. Whether it is Bethel Chapel or Victory Life Church or Winner’s Chapel, Pentecostalism is able to indigenize and localize in a way we have not seen since the earliest days of Christianity, when new Christian sects emerged with great rapidity. Those who tend to favour the top-down, denominational approach to Christianity will find Pentecostalism off-putting. New churches, new leaders and new theologies arise daily. All of this variety threatens to make Christianity more like its pre-Nicene days – think of Origen’s denial of hell, Marcion’s differentiation of the Old Testament God from Jesus Christ, the Christian enthusiasts who gladly offered themselves up for martyrdom or the pacifist tradition arising out of the teachings of Jesus, not to mention the unbounded pre-Nicene textual tradition in Christianity that had no fixed canon. Christianity without established hierarchy is risky. It is unconventional and uncontrolled. But that is where we are headed with global Christianity. As the state churches break down, as the big denominations break up and diversify, as the faith globalizes and therefore loses its coherent and centralized nature, we are beginning to glimpse the future of Christianity. It will be impossible to pin it down. There will be no ‘centre’ for the faith. We will, instead, have endless fellowships that are profoundly local. Some of these churches will cross borders, but as common within Protestantism itself, schism will inevitably follow. For now, we are told there are 40,000 Protestant denominations, but that figure will skyrocket as Christianity finds its way into remote areas, big cities and new frontiers. And Pentecostalism’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit – with its unwillingness to be defined or controlled – will probably prevail in this context. Thus, not only is Pentecostalism the fastest growing form of Christianity today, it is the form of Christianity that will continue to prosper most. And it will impact – already is impacting – the nature of Christianity itself, much like what happened in the NiceneConstantinian era of the fourth century. Except Pentecostalism’s impact will be quite the opposite of Constantine’s impact. Constantine was able to consolidate Christianity, bringing leaders together under the authority of the empire, so that they could create something singular out of something diffuse. Many different forms of Christianity were funnelled into something stable, coherent and, most of all, hierarchical. Pentecostalism is doing precisely the opposite of that. But this is not all Pentecostalism’s doing. Much of it is simply a by-product of living in the twenty-first century. The internet, cheaper world travel, massive migration and dazzling technologies have empowered human beings like never before. Christians are able to evangelize from their personal computers, offer counselling through Facebook Messenger, raise money through PayPal or Venmo accounts, reach thousands through podcasts or televised services and network with each other through online interfaces. This is all a breeding ground for Christianity’s era of great diversification. Constantine’s vision of a united Christendom is unravelling at breakneck speed. Jesus famously promised his disciples that they would do ‘greater things than these’. Who would have thought that his little group of twelve would go on to do the things they did? And when the empire turned against them, they seemed to dig in their heels

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and prosper in spite of official policies of resistance. And in that truly epochal moment in history, when Constantine began privileging the Christian faith, its fortunes changed dramatically for about a millennium and a half. After the major changes in the fourth century, the Christian faith became a powerful religion that brought empires together. But today that has all changed. Christianity’s link with the state is on life support. The power that Constantine invested into Christianity has receded dramatically. And we are returning to an early Church kind of Christianity. Rather, we should call it what it is – Christianities. The Christian religion – if we can even call it one religion anymore – has diversified like few institutions have throughout history. Of the world’s eight cultural blocks, Christianity is the largest faith in six of them. Christians are found all over this planet. And the diffusion continues. The one X-factor here is the Roman Catholic Church, home to half the world’s Christians. It has exhibited an amazing ability to resist diversification, even in a context where the majority of the church is no longer in the Western world. Somehow, the Roman Catholic Church has maintained tight controls on its constituency in spite of all these changing patterns we have discussed. We cannot rule out established Christian institutions just yet. Anglicanism, Orthodoxy, Catholicism. They are certainly not finished. But these two impulses – a centralized, hierarchical, controlled church versus a pneumatic, free-wheeling, unrestricted approach – are being tested in the human laboratory of world Christianity today. On the surface, it would appear that the historic denominations are the past, and the freer charismatic churches are the future. But history has a way of throwing curveballs, never repeating itself, but often surprising us with what seem to be patterns. There is no telling how this will all play out, other than the fact that just when we think one thing is happening, we are surprised by how what we think about something turns out not to be so true.

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CHAPTER THREE

Denominations GEORGE D. CHRYSSIDES

The Christian faith is complex, and even those who belong to it are unlikely to claim familiarity with more than a part of their own denomination. There are said to be some 44,000 Christian denominations, and the World Council of Churches (WCC) includes around 350 members (Lee 2019; WCC 2019). Denominations differ theologically, organizationally and liturgically, and there are differences in church architecture, clerical dress and – to some extent – behavioural expectations. In addition to the identifiable denominations, Christians use terms like ‘evangelical’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘charismatic’, ‘conservative’, ‘liberal’, ‘high church’, ‘low church’ and numerous other descriptors, which they apply within denominations. To attempt to make sense of all this in a single chapter can therefore involve little more than scratching the surface. Although this volume’s focus is on people rather than history or doctrines, some incursion into the history of the Christian faith is needed in order to understand its denominations. There are three main Christian traditions: Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. The Orthodox tradition claims to uphold the teachings of the ancient church and emerged as a separate tradition in 1054, in what became known as the ‘Great Schism’, when the Roman Church and the Byzantine Church came apart. There were two sources of contention. The Eastern churches could not accept the authority of the Bishop of Rome, who was a rising power in the eleventh century, and hence the Orthodox Churches do not consider the Pope as the supreme authority, but form a federation of autocephalous churches, organized by geographical area, each with their own Patriarch. Second, Orthodox leaders accused the Western churches of adding to the Nicene Creed. In the Western churches, it is normal to affirm that the Holy Spirit ‘proceeds from the Father and the Son’, but Orthodoxy insists – with some justification – that the phrase ‘and the Son’ (filioque in Latin) was a later interpolation, and that there must be only one fount of deity, not two. Rank-and-file Christians of both traditions, of course, would be totally bewildered if they were asked to explain these differences. However, they are certainly aware that a different hierarchy exists within the churches, and when the Nicene Creed is recited, Orthodox Christians will omit the offending phrase, while those belonging to the other traditions will continue to include it. The origins of Protestantism are usually traced to the German Reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546). Luther objected to the amount of wealth that was accumulating in the Vatican and the notion that salvation could be gained by works rather than faith in Christ. Like a number of Reformers of that period, he advocated a return to the Bible, which he regarded as the supreme source of authority, rather than tradition, which the

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Roman Catholic Church continues to regard as authoritative, together with scripture, as interpreted by the Church (Daughrity 2017). As a consequence of the Reformation, the Protestant churches do not accept the authority of the Pope and the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. According to Catholic teaching, the Magisterium – its teaching authority – has incontrovertible authority on matters of doctrine and ethics (Catechism 85–100; Chryssides and Wilkins 2011: 197). Although the Pope is held to be infallible, this is only the case when he makes a pronouncement ex cathedra – that is to say, when he claims to speak on behalf of the whole Church. The doctrine of papal infallibility does not mean that the Pope can never be mistaken about anything. Pope Benedict XVI wrote a number of scholarly books, the best-known of which are his writings about Jesus and, notwithstanding his status, the ideas expressed in them are matters for debate, just like any other scholarly writing. There can be disagreement among scholars and clergy about when a papal pronouncement is ex cathedra and, perhaps surprisingly, there are only two occasions where papal pronouncements have incontrovertibly fallen into this category (Chryssides and Wilkins 2011: 193–95). The first was in 1870, when the First Vatican Council pronounced the doctrine of papal infallibility, and the other occasion was in 1950, when Pius XII declared that the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary should be accepted as an article of faith. (The Doctrine of the Assumption is the belief, widely held by Catholics before the pronouncement, that the body of Mary, the mother of Jesus, was taken up directly into heaven.) The notion of papal infallibility entails that a direct and unbroken line of succession can be traced from the apostle Peter, to whom Jesus reportedly gave the keys of the kingdom and declared him to be the rock on which his Church would be built (Matthew 16:18–19). According to tradition, Peter went to Rome, where he preached the emergent Christian message, and led the early Christian congregation there, becoming the first of a line of Christian leaders who were given the title Bishop of Rome. Following Martin Luther’s declaration that he could no longer accept the authority of the Pope, Protestant churches have a different ecclesiastical structure. Roman Catholicism is episcopal – that is to say, it has a hierarchy in which those in more senior positions have authority over those of lower rank, with the Pope and his cardinals presiding over archbishops and bishops, to whom in turn the rank-and-file priests are accountable. The priests have oversight over their congregations. Protestant churches, by contrast, either are congregationally autonomous or are arranged by a hierarchy of church courts. Thus, the Church of Scotland is arranged into parishes – small geographical areas for which one church is responsible – and the church is governed by a body of elders (the Kirk Session), who are responsible for the spiritual life of the congregation, and another body – variously known as the Deacons’ Court or the Management Committee – attends to the congregation’s material maintenance. Each congregation is subject to the presbytery – a church court which governs a cluster of congregations and which meets at regular intervals. Above the presbytery are synods, with responsibility for wider areas, and annually there is a General Assembly, which decides matters of policy which are binding on these lower courts. In the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, clergy are referred to as priests. This implies that there are special intermediaries between God and humanity, with the responsibility to enact appropriate sacrificial rites, and having the power to hear confessions of sins and to pronounce absolution on God’s behalf. As a consequence, the liturgies of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches tend to be quite elaborate.

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CHURCH BUILDINGS An Orthodox church will usually have walls surrounded with icons, portraying saints or important incidents from the Bible. The main door, by which worshippers enter, is situated at the west end of the church, giving access to the narthex – a vestibule that is separated from the main worshippers’ area, the nave. In previous times, catechumens (those seeking baptism) and non-baptized attendees were not allowed to proceed beyond the narthex, but this convention has now died out. On entry into the nave through the ‘royal doors’, the worshipper will find receptacles for lighting candles, and the congregation faces east, where there is the screen – known as the iconostastis – usually with doors, from which the priests enter and leave and through which the sacrament is brought during the service (Ware 1983: 276–78). The word ‘nave’ derives from the Latin word navis, meaning ‘ship’, thus portraying the Church as the ‘ark of salvation’, harking back to the story of Noah, who saved those who took refuge in the ark from destruction. The portrayal of the church as the Ark is reflected in the usual floor design of an Orthodox church, which is rectangular, but other shapes can be found: most obviously the cruciform design which one sometimes encounters reminds the worshipper of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Above the congregation there is usually a large dome, from which a chandelier hangs, and where there is an icon of Christ pantocrator – the Judge of all – who looks down on the congregation. The design of the church building depicts a microcosm: it is intended to portray humanity’s relationship with the divine. One enters, obviously, at ground level, which indicates humanity’s lowly status before God; Christ, being the incarnation of God, occupies the highest point of the building, and between God and humanity are the saints who mediate on one’s behalf (Doak 1978: 7–12). Normally the congregation stands throughout during the service, although in some Western churches – particularly if they are not purpose-built and have been acquired from another denomination – there is seating, and attendees stand, sit, or kneel as directed, at appropriate points. Roman Catholic and Anglican churches tend to be cruciform in design – a reminder of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. It is common to see a baptismal font right at the main entrance of a Catholic or Anglican church, signifying that baptism is the means of entry to the Christian faith. Usually the rear of the church is at the west end, and the congregation sits facing the east, the focal point of which is the high altar, from which the sacrament of the Mass or Eucharist (the name varies) is distributed. The area surrounding the altar is the chancel, which accommodates the officiants and often a choir, with a pulpit usually (but not always) on the north side and a lectern on the opposite side. There is no uniform position for the organ, which may be found in the chancel area or sometimes in the west gallery: the only proviso is that it should not be positioned behind the altar or obstructing one’s view of this central focus of worship. Very small buildings do not necessarily have this design, and the congregation may be content with a simple rectangular shape so long as it contains the main items that are needed for public worship (Taylor 2003: 28–33). Protestant churches, in contrast to Orthodox and Roman Catholic buildings, are much simpler than the more elaborate Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. No significance is attached to the direction they face, which is determined by convenience rather than liturgical considerations, and they are less likely to be named after a saint, but more frequently use a geographical location for the name, such as North Kelvinside Parish Church or East Park Church. Names of Celtic saints are favoured: Saint Columba and Saint Ninian are regarded as acceptable, and Saint Andrew, being Scotland’s patron saint, has been used in naming churches in that country. Although some Protestant churches

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were built in cruciform shape, the interior is often rectangular and purely functional, with little ornamentation. The focal point is frequently the pulpit, at the furthest point from the congregation, often with stairs leading up to it, sometimes on both sides. The organ console is often situated directly underneath, with the organ pipes behind the pulpit. This arrangement would not be considered appropriate in Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, where nothing should be situated behind the high altar. Stained glass is considered acceptable in Protestant churches, but not statues, which are construed as ‘graven images’, which the second of the Ten Commandments forbids (Exodus 20:4–6). Elaborate decoration is considered to be a distraction rather than an enhancement of worship, which should come from the heart rather than from external stimuli (Chryssides and Wilkins 2011: 235).

SACRAMENTS One main difference among the three main traditions lies in the sacraments. A sacrament is defined as a rite which particularly bestows divine grace or merit on behalf of the participant. In the Roman Catholic tradition, there are seven such rites: baptism, confirmation, holy Communion, confession, marriage, holy orders, and anointing the sick (previously called extreme unction). Infant baptism acknowledges that children are part of the Christian community as well as adults, even though their understanding may be limited. As the child gets older, he or she can take instruction and be admitted to full membership by means of confirmation: the term implies that the candidate is confirming the baptismal vows that the parents made on his or her behalf. In Roman Catholic churches the principal Sunday service is the Mass. The origin of this term is uncertain: it is often explained as deriving from the final words of the rite, Ite, missa est (literally, ‘Go, it is the dismissal’). (Before the Second Vatican Council, which met between 1962 and 1965, the Mass was conducted in Latin, but now it is conducted in the language of the people.) Others have suggested that the word derives from the Hebrew matzah, meaning unleavened bread. The service is divided into three parts: the Mass begins with the clergy and other officiants entering in procession while the congregation sings an opening hymn. This is followed by a general confession of sin, and the pronouncement of absolution (forgiveness) by the priest: one must be in a right relationship with God before receiving the sacrament. The service proceeds with the singing of the Gloria (‘Gloria to God in the highest’), which leads into the second part (the liturgy of the Word), consisting of readings from scripture (normally Old Testament, a responsorial psalm, epistle, and a Gospel reading). The sermon (or homily) follows, expounding the Bible readings, after which the Nicene Creed is recited, and prayers of intercession are made. After this, the third and final part of the service is the receiving of the sacrament. Before the Second Vatican Council, the congregation only received the host (or communion wafer), not the wine, but it is common practice now for all to receive the communion elements in both kinds. There are, of course, slight variations in the Mass, as I have described here: for example, during Advent and Lent the Gloria is not sung, and a Mass can be said rather than sung; however, no Mass would be valid without a priest as the celebrant, without the reading of the Gospel, or without bread and wine. It is held that in some real mystical sense the bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood. The Mass is viewed as a sacrifice, in which the priest offers Christ again to the Father, and he elevates the host, by way of demonstrating this (Catechism 1362–1372).

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Because of the major changes that occurred at the Protestant Reformation, much of the vocabulary used by Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians is rejected by Protestants. It would be highly offensive to most Protestants to refer to a member of their clergy as a priest, to the sacrament as a Mass, or to the central table as an altar. Martin Luther taught the doctrine of ‘the priesthood of all believers’. By this he did not mean that there should be no distinction between clergy and laity, but rather that the laity could approach God without the intervention of a priesthood, saints, or the Virgin Mary. Prayer is therefore addressed directly to God, and the invocation of Mary or the Saints is firmly rejected. Clergy are referred to as ministers: the word ‘minister’ means servant, and the minister is therefore the servant both to God and to the people. The minister has probably undergone formal training in preparation for this role, but he or she is trained with a view to preaching God’s Word, which is usually reckoned to have greater importance than the sacrament of holy communion – the preferred term for the distribution of bread and wine. The most obvious function of the minister is that of the preacher, and hence the focal point in Protestant churches has traditionally been the pulpit, which is often a high edifice situated at the front of the chancel, in the middle. In many churches the service is conducted entirely from the pulpit. Instead of donning an elaborate chasuble, the minister is normally clad in a cassock, a black preaching gown, and wears an academic hood, if he or she is a graduate (Chryssides and Wilkins 2011: 240). Protestant churches are much less rule-governed in their liturgy. Although some denominations have their service books, the order of service that they outline is exemplary rather than prescriptive. The pattern of worship tends to be determined by local practice, and it can be varied from one Sunday to the next. There is not normally a fixed lectionary, the choice of readings being at the discretion of the officiant. A fairly typical pattern is sometimes – somewhat pejoratively – referred to as the ‘hymn sandwich’, meaning that the components of readings, prayers, and sermon are broken up by congregational singing, lest the service becomes too wordy. On average, one can expect a somewhat longer sermon than one would listen to in the other traditions. As one minister once declared in my student days in Scotland, ‘Sermonettes produce Christianettes!’ I once listened to one that lasted 55 minutes, but this is exceptional: 20 minutes or so is about the norm. Holy Communion is celebrated less frequently than in Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism. The Roman Catholic Church encourages frequent participation in Eucharistic celebration, preferably weekly. Protestants tend to take the view that frequent celebration could diminish the importance of holy communion and make participation perfunctory. Many Protestant churches celebrate communion monthly or once every three months. In Scotland the practice is to highlight the importance of the service by laying a white cloth on the communion table, as one might do if setting a dinner table for guests. Protestant churches normally use leavened baker’s bread rather than unleavened communion wafers and tend to favour individual small glasses rather than a common chalice. This is partly for hygienic reasons, particularly since some of their members are strict teetotallers; nonalcoholic unfermented wine would be more likely to carry germs, if shared. Unlike the practice of Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Methodists, the communion elements are brought by the elders to the congregation, who remain in the pews. In some churches in the Congregational tradition, it is the practice for every member to wait until everyone is served before consuming each of the two elements (Chryssides and Wilkins 2011: 175–78).

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THE BAPTISTS In the United States, the largest Protestant denomination is the Baptists, the best-known being the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), with 15,000,000 members. There are some 40,000,000 Baptists worldwide (Day 2005: 451). The origins of the Baptist movement lie in seventeenth-century England, where they were part of the Puritan Reformation, and from the Anabaptist movement in Europe. The prefix ‘ana-’ in ‘Anabaptist’ is the Greek word meaning ‘again’, and the Anabaptists held that infant baptism was insufficient and had to be complemented with a further adult baptism, which was a true expression of commitment to the Christian faith, and which infants were unable to make. John Smyth (c.1554–1612) is usually acknowledged as the founder-leader of the Baptist movement: in 1609 he baptized himself – a most unusual action, and one which would not today be regarded as acceptable – together with a number of supporters, and the movement spread to America, where the first Baptist Church was founded in Providence in 1639. There are two major strands within the Baptist movement: General Baptists and Particular Baptists. The division is based on a theological issue. General Baptists hold that Christ died for all humankind, while Particular Baptists believe that Christ died only for the elect. The dispute arises from the teachings of the Protestant Reformer John Calvin, who taught the doctrine of predestination: God, being omniscient and omnipotent, must have decided at (or even before) the world’s Creation which people were destined for heaven and which for hell. While the Bible states that Christ died for all (2 Corinthians 5:15), Paul also talks about ‘objects of [God’s] wrath, prepared for destruction’ (Romans 9:22), and thus it can be argued that Christ cannot have died to save someone who is predetermined to spend eternity in hell. Whether the members of either congregation would be able to defend their denomination’s theological position is doubtful, but schisms often arise from disputes amongst the leaders rather than the followers. In 1905 the Baptist General Association was founded in the United States, while the Northern Baptist Convention (now known as the American Baptist Convention), representing the Particular Baptist tradition, was established in 1907. Meanwhile, in 1834, J. G. Oncken brought Baptist Christianity to Scandinavia, and subsequently to Australia and New Zealand. The General Union of Particular Baptists in England was founded in 1813, subsequently becoming the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Baptist Union of Great Britain in 1988. Baptists do not baptize infants, but only ‘believers’ – those who are judged to be able to understand what the Christian life entails. Baptists believe that believers’ baptism, which is administered by immersion, was the practice of the earliest Christians. John the Baptist is recorded as baptizing Jesus by immersion in the River Jordan (Matthew 3:16), and the Book of Acts only explicitly mentions adults undergoing baptism, describing the practice as immersion (e.g. Acts 8:38). Those outside the Baptist tradition will sometimes point out that the Bible records households being baptized (Acts 16:15; 16:33), and argue that households probably included children, but Baptists contend that this is at best unproven, preferring to adopt the practice that is clearly and explicitly described in the Bible. Baptists regard the Bible as the prime source of authority. While some denominations have formulated confessions of faith, these are regarded as subordinate to scripture, and each congregation is entitled to have its own statement of doctrine. Historically, Baptists have championed freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and the separation of Church and State. The American Baptist minister John Leland (1754–1841) was instrumental in the introduction of the First Amendment into the US Constitution, which

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affirmed the state’s non-interference in matters of religion. Leland was commissioned by the people of Cheshire, Massachusetts, to deliver a mammoth block of cheese to President Thomas Jefferson, which he presented in 1802. He used the journey to preach to large congregations on his way, and on arrival, Jefferson invited him to preach to the Congress, where he delivered a sermon on religious liberty. Leland was opposed to the emergent missionary societies of his time, believing as he did in religious freedom, although back in England the Baptists had formed the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792. Leland was also known for his opposition to slavery, an issue which proved extremely divisive at the time. In its origins, the SBC, founded in 1845 in Augusta, Georgia, supported slavery. The SBC has attracted a reputation for its very conservative views, being opposed to homosexuality and abortion, and subordinating women, regarding the husband as the head of the household, and denying women any teaching role in their congregations. However, in 1995 the SBC denounced racism. The denomination is opposed to ecumenism, and is not a member of the National Council of Christian Churches, and hence does not belong to the WCC. It does, however, acknowledge a wider identity by belonging to the Baptist Alliance. In common with other Protestant denominations, Baptists acknowledge two ‘ordinances’ – their preferred term for sacraments, since these are believed to have been ordained by Jesus Christ. The first, of course, is baptism, as described above, and the second is holy communion, also known as the Lord’s Supper, where, in common with Protestant tradition, the elements of bread and wine are brought to the congregation in the pews, rather than administered at an altar. Baptists typically hold that holy communion is not a means of grace and has no mystical properties or supernatural powers, but is simply a memorial of the last meal out that Jesus had with his disciples. Baptist churches have no set practice regarding the frequency with which holy communion is celebrated: a survey conducted in 2012 reported that 57 per cent of Southern Baptist congregations celebrated holy communion quarterly, 15 per cent serving it between five and ten times a year, and a mere 1 per cent offering it weekly. There also appeared to be regional variations, with greater frequency in the northeast and the west, compared with the midwest and south (Longren 2017). Despite the Baptists’ affirmation of the authority of the Bible, not all Baptists by any means are fundamentalists. The Declaration of Principle of the Baptist Union in Britain states that it is Jesus Christ who ‘is the sole authority in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures, and that each Church has liberty, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to interpret and administer His laws’ (Baptists Together 2019). This enables freedom of conscience to take precedence over any belief in scriptural infallibility. Baptists can even be liberal to the extent of not requiring those who transfer from another denomination to undergo baptism by immersion. Other Christian denominations resulting from the ‘Radical Reformation’, as it is sometimes called, are the Mennonites, the Hutterites, the Bruderhof, and the Amish. Space does not permit detailed discussion, but it can be noted that they are characterized by nonconformity to the customs and standards of the world, a relative absence of hierarchy, acknowledging the ‘priesthood of all believers’, freedom from state intervention, and admission to membership by public confession of faith. All these groups are also pacifist by conviction. The Amish are popularly known for their rejection of modern technology, their wearing of plain clothes, and their travel in horse-drawn buggies. They are noted for their activity of barn raising – the construction of barns, which can be accomplished in a single day – an activity which is called a ‘frolic’, meaning a cooperative project in which

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all take part as an act of mutual aid. When a barn raising is needed, this is announced at the Sunday service, and the men typically undertake the labour, while the women prepare and supply the food. In recent times, however, farming, and hence barn raising, has declined, largely due to increased land prices. The image of the Amish as rejecting modern technology is not strictly accurate: many now use electricity, which powers devices such as churns and refrigerators – making ice cream by traditional methods is a popular way of diversifying in Pennsylvania. Some of the Amish use solar power, and some even have cell phones. Travelling by car is permissible, but not owning one, and some forms of technology are totally prohibited, such as television sets: care is taken to avoid undue influence by worldly standards. Guidance for life is given by ordnung (the German word meaning ‘order’), which can vary from one congregation to another. At times, temporary permission may be given to use a form of technology in order to assess its impact on the lives of members. At all times, the Amish do not use public electricity, they do not gamble, they do not resort to law courts to settle disputes, they do not run for political office, and they may not divorce. Violation of a congregation’s ordnung can result in excommunication – known as the Bann, which entails Meidung, meaning shunning by other members until such time as the offender shows genuine repentance. Also well-known are the Quakers – more correctly known as The Society of Friends. Their more popular name relates to an incident in the life of founder-leader George Fox (1624–1691): he and some of his supporters were arrested for their religious beliefs and were told by the judge that they should ‘quake in the presence of the Lord’, contemptuously calling them Quakers. Quakers believe that religion should come from the heart rather than from any external manifestations; hence the buildings are simple, and meeting rooms typically consist of ordinary chairs arranged around a small table, which may have a small vase of flowers on it, and a couple of books relating to Quaker worship (Society of Friends 2005). (Some older Quaker chapels have pews.) There are no clergy, no hymns, and no set liturgy; they do not celebrate the sacraments of baptism or holy communion. The congregation sits in silence for about an hour, and the silence is only interrupted by a member who feels moved by the Spirit to ‘give ministry’. Such ministry can be on any matter which the worshipper feels constrained to share with the rest of the congregation (Gorman 1983: 8–10). However, political comment tends not to be favoured, and those giving ministry should not contradict anything that has previously been said: a Quaker meeting is certainly not a debate. If one does not feel inspired by a ministry, one should bear in mind that there may be someone else in the congregation who is helped by the words. Quakers are committed to equality, and also to peace. At business meetings, every opinion is important, and matters of policy are not settled by majority votes, which are often divisive: the entire meeting must be agreed on any decision, even if this slows down decision-making. Quakers have typically refused to undertake military service, although they are willing to offer medical assistance to those wounded in combat.

ADVENTISTS Another strand that has emerged within the Protestant tradition is Adventism. Adventists began as a movement, initially within Methodist churches in America, and its supporters expected Christ’s imminent return. Its inception is generally traced to William Miller (1782–1849), a Baptist preacher living in Vermont, who engaged in intricate calculations involving biblical chronology, reaching the conclusion that Jesus Christ would appear in 1843. When this event failed to occur, some of his supporters recalculated, concluding

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that 1844 was the correct date. Christ’s failure to appear in that year became known as the ‘Great Disappointment’; however, although some of his followers abandoned his expectation, others reinterpreted the meaning of these dates and concluded that Christ had invisibly returned in 1844 and had entered his heavenly sanctuary in order to prepare it for the faithful. Adventist beliefs proved unpopular within mainstream Protestant circles, and consequently the Adventists set up their own communities, the best-known of which are the Seventh-day Adventists, founded in 1863 by Ellen G. White (1827–1915) (Chryssides 2016: 35–41). Adventists believe in the inerrancy of scripture. Although they believe in Christianity’s key doctrines as set out in the traditional creeds, these are not used as official statements of doctrine. In 1872, the denomination set out twenty-five statements of ‘Fundamental Beliefs’, subsequently expanded to twenty-eight in 2005 (Seventh-day Adventist Church 2005). These statements are not unchangeable, but merely exist to inform members and enquirers; only the Bible contains unchangeable truth. Central to the Adventists’ understanding of scripture is the notion that the world is ruled by Satan, whom Christ will shortly defeat in the imminent Battle of Armageddon. Christ has taken his place in heaven, having cast out Satan, and is currently engaged in his ‘investigative judgement’, considering the deeds of humankind and their appropriate destinies, prior to his final judgement of the world. After the defeat of Satan, there will be a new world, free of sin and evil. Adventists typically do not believe in eternal punishment in a hell; instead, the wicked can simply expect everlasting unconsciousness. As their name intimates, Seventh-day Adventists hold that the sabbath should be celebrated on the seventh day – Saturday – rather than Sunday, which they view as a later deviation by mainstream churches, and which they perceive as unwarranted by scripture. Christ, being the world’s co-creator, set apart the seventh day as the day of rest, and Adventists see no evidence of Sunday being the primordial practice of the early Church. Other festivals described in the Old Testament, however, are regarded as being superseded by Christ’s sacrifice: ‘These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ’ (Colossians 2:17). Instead, the two rites practised by Adventists are baptism and the Lord’s Supper (their preferred name for holy communion). In common with the Baptists, Adventists hold that baptism should not be administered to infants, but to those who are of sufficient age to understand their commitment. The Lord’s Supper is usually celebrated four times a year, although the frequency of celebration is not absolutely prescribed. Unleavened bread is used, since Jesus’ final meal with his disciples was in the Passover period, and unfermented wine is used, since fermentation is held to be a mark of impurity. The Lord’s Supper is viewed as somewhat more than a memorial; since it is a fulfilment of the Jewish Passover, it is seen as a revitalization of life, just as the ancient Jews’ exodus from Egypt brought new life in the promised land. The rite anticipates Christ’s second Advent: as Jesus said, ‘For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.’ (1 Corinthians 11:26). One noteworthy aspect of the Adventists’ celebration of the Lord’s Supper is that the distribution of the elements is preceded by a ritual of foot washing. The Bible records that, before their final meal, Jesus took a bowl and towel and washed his disciples’ feet, with the instruction, ‘Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.’ (John 13:14). The practice of foot washing can also be found among Pentecostals, and some major denominations, such as the Anglicans, nominate twelve attendees to come forward, representing the twelve disciples, to have their feet washed as part of the Maundy Thursday Eucharist.

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Observing Saturday as the sabbath precludes Adventists from celebrating Easter. Sunday is the day of Christ’s resurrection, and in fact Adventists have never celebrated Easter, believing that its origins are pagan rather than Christian. Likewise, they regard the celebration of Christmas as inauthentic, there being no evidence that Jesus was born on 25 December. However, they have no objection to remembering Jesus’ birth at that time of the year, and do not object to exchanging presents, if they feel so inclined.

PENTECOSTALS A further important recent expression of the Christian faith is the Pentecostal movement, which is spreading rapidly worldwide. The movement seeks to recreate the experience of the first Christian Day of Pentecost, when the early disciples were assembled in the upper room, in which Jesus had celebrated the Last Supper, and experienced the descent of the Holy Spirit, which enabled them to ‘speak in tongues’ (Bowden 2005: 909–12). John the Baptist had declared that, unlike himself, Jesus would not baptize with water but ‘with the Holy Spirit and with fire’ (Matthew 3:11). What ‘fire baptism’ is is far from clear, and the account given in the Book of Acts is somewhat ambiguous: when the disciples speak to an assembled crowd in Jerusalem, some claim that they can hear their words in their own mother tongue, while others regard their utterances as drunken ravings (Acts 2:6, 13). Few, if any, Pentecostals would claim the powers of xenoglossia; when members of the congregation speak in tongues at a Pentecostalist service, their speech is not in any human language, and is not intelligible to most people at a human level. The origin of the modern Pentecostal movement can be traced to an event in Los Angeles in 1906, known as the Azusa Street Revival. William J. Seymour (1870–1922), a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, led a congregation which, unusually, was composed of black and white members, who began to have ecstatic experiences, which caused them to speak in unknown languages – a phenomenon now known as glossolalia. (The term derives from two Greek words – glōssa, meaning tongue, and lalein, to speak.) The mixture of black and white members created a blend of Wesleyan Holiness and more exuberant African-style worship. The Azusa Street phenomenon proved not to be an isolated event, but continued, and spread worldwide, to Europe, Scandinavia, Latin America, and Africa. At first, glossolalia was experienced within mainstream churches – something which still continues to a degree – but many Protestants took exception to the practice, and hence Pentecostals began to form their own distinctive congregations. Despite the multi-ethnic mix of the Azusa Street congregation, Pentecostal churches have tended to become either black or white. The Pentecostal movement has several important features. It is ‘restorationist’  – meaning that it seeks to return to and revive its primordial expression by the early Christian communities. It regards exuberant worship as important, including speaking in tongues, in contrast to more traditional church services, which are frequently formal and rule-governed. Pentecostal worship is often spontaneous, with members of the congregation contributing Bible readings and prayers that they feel prompted to share on the spur of the moment, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Prayers are always extempore, and even a sermon will not be scripted, but is often delivered impulsively, through conviction or inspiration, in contrast with traditional preaching, for which the speaker may spend hours of preparation in his or her study. The Bible has a central role in worship, and in the movement’s theology. It is not only regarded as infallible, but also continuously inspired, as new insights are constantly expected and found in its teachings.

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The Bible teaches that humanity is in its last days, and Pentecostals believe that there has been a great falling away from the Christian faith, which heralds Christ’s imminent return. The phenomenon of glossolalia is sometimes called the ‘latter rain’ to which the Bible refers (Joel 2:23; Hosea 6:3, KJV). The enthusiasm of the Pentecostals results in a concern for missionizing, with the aim of enabling others to receive ‘Spirit baptism’ – an experience that follows water baptism, and which fills the believer with conviction, power, and strength, and which glossolalia frequently (although not always) follows. Pentecostals are often regarded as forming three main groups: Wesleyan Holiness churches; ‘finished work’ Pentecostals; and Oneness Pentecostals (also known as JesusOnly Pentecostals). The division between the first two of these groups stems from  a theological distinction between ‘justification’ and ‘sanctification’. ‘Justification’ is a  concept used by Paul, literally meaning ‘making straight’ (as in justifying a margin in a document); this is what was accomplished by Christ’s death on the cross, which has made the believer ‘straight’ – or right – with God. Christians have sometimes regarded this as merely the first step in the salvation process, and the justification has to be completed by ‘sanctification’ – a purification process which is the work of the Holy Spirit. Sanctification was regarded by the Holiness Movement as this second work of divine grace, and those stemming from the Wesleyan Holiness Movement regard the quest for entire sanctification as necessary for one’s spiritual life. By contrast, the ‘finished work’ Pentecostalists argued that Christ’s death on the cross brought full salvation, and could point out that Paul uses the word ‘sanctified’ in the past tense, when he tells the Corinthians, ‘[y]ou were sanctified’ (1 Corinthians 6:11). To claim that further saving work was needed after justification was therefore to suggest that Christ’s redeeming work on the cross was incomplete. The dispute remains unresolved. The third strand, ‘Oneness Pentecostals’, emphasizing the primordial nature of scripture, noted that there is no explicit acknowledgement that God is a Trinity of persons, holding that God is a single unified divine spirit, who manifests himself in three ways, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and baptismal candidates are baptized solely in the name of Jesus Christ, rather than with a Trinitarian formula. The denial of the Trinity puts Oneness Pentecostals outside the mainstream, and they have frequently been accused of the heresy of ‘modalism’ – the view that God is not three discrete persons, but merely has three manifestations. Three waves of Pentecostalism’s spread are typically identified. The first is the Azusa Street revival, to which I have referred. The second was in 1994, with what is known as the Toronto Blessing. This occurred at the Airport Vineyard Church in Toronto, which was part of Vineyard Ministries International, headed by the charismatic leader John Wimber (1934–1997). Some of the congregation had an experience which has come to be called being ‘slain in the Spirit’. This had various manifestations: some members engaged in exuberant dance, falling to the ground as if unconscious, while others experienced compulsive limb and muscle spasms. Some would laugh uncontrollably, while others engaged in copious weeping. Some – although not all – claim to receive prophecies, to see visions, and, occasionally, have angelic visitations. The phenomenon spread through the United States and Canada, and subsequently to Europe. The movement was not confined to Protestants; some Roman Catholic congregations were also affected by the phenomenon. It should not be thought, however, that everyone who attends a Pentecostal service engages in such practices: one recent report suggests that only four in ten Pentecostals either speak or pray in tongues (Hackett et al. 2011: 67). The third wave of Pentecostalism’s spread was in the 1980s, when it proved highly popular in Africa and in East Asia. This particular brand of Pentecostalism tended to reject

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Western missionary activity, developing its own indigenous features, and incorporating pre-Christian spirituality, notably an emphasis on healing and on prophecy. Many of these Pentecostal churches are independent, and those in Africa are collectively known as African Initiated Churches, or African Independent Churches – designated by the acronym AIC. As Dyron Daughrity points out (chapter 2), the growth of Pentecostals has been substantial, rising from 5 per cent of Christian adherents in 1972 to a projected figure of 30 per cent for 2020. In several African countries, Pentecostals make up around half of all Protestants, and in Brazil they constitute 72 per cent. Estimates of the precise number of Pentecostal Christians vary, but it is certainly at least 250 million and – depending on how one counts them – possibly 500 million. There are said to be over 740 Pentecostal denominations, not including the innumerable independent congregations. The best-known denominations are the Apostolic Church Assemblies of God, the Church of God in Christ, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, and the United Pentecostal Church International. The expression ‘Foursquare Gospel’ refers to the four offices of Jesus Christ: saviour, baptizer in the Holy Spirit, healer, and coming King (Day 2005: 369; Kay and Dyer 2011: 2).

THE MEGA-CHURCHES One phenomenon which has grown predominantly within Protestantism is the megachurch, which commenced in the 1970s in the United States, and which can now be found in Australia and South Korea. A mega-church is defined as a congregation which typically draws 2,000 or more attendees each weekend. The largest of these, Lakewood, attracts some 43,000 worshippers weekly, while the average attendance at the mega-church approaches 3,700. The style of worship is exuberant, normally evangelical, with use of contemporary rather than traditional music, typically accompanied by electric guitars and drum kits, with visual projection featuring in almost all their services. Innovations in worship style are popular: services can incorporate soloists, and pieces of theatre, for example. The message tends to be evangelical and non-political, although most attendees tend to be conservative politically. Since congregations are large, services tend to be more like theatrical performances, with minimal congregational participation; the underlying rationale is that attendees should feel at home and welcomed, rather than made to participate actively in rituals with which they may be unfamiliar, and in which newcomers may feel out of place. Some 40 per cent of the mega-churches are non-denominational – meaning that they are independent, and not accountable to any denominational hierarchy – while 16 per cent are Southern Baptist, 7 per cent are Baptists of other affiliations, and 6 per cent are Assemblies of God (Pentecostal) (Hartford Institute 2018). As they continue to grow in size, methods of accommodating growing congregations include having multiple services, creating overspill areas, and establishing satellite congregations on multiple sites. Although newcomers can achieve anonymity, it is difficult to feel part of a community in a large audience; hence, mega-churches tend to have smaller meetings in the course of the week, where people can get to know each other and worship and work together. With large congregations, one single leader would be inadequate, and hence it is customary to have a team of at least five pastors, and up to twenty-five for the largest mega-churches. Such churches are expensive to run, and some 47 per cent of their income

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on average goes to staff salaries, and 22 per cent to buildings and operations, with only 13 per cent to mission and charitable work. Salaries for pastors are generous: $147,000 is not untypical, and can be as high as $400,000 for a lead pastor of a particularly large congregation (Praise 107.9 Newsletter 2019). Initially, mega-churches tended to emphasize personal spirituality rather than focus on societal issues such as social justice. Recent years have witnessed some change in emphasis, with more emphasis on social service, more use of smaller groups, and less use of radio and television.

ANGLICANS At the beginning of this chapter, it was stated that there are three main Christian traditions. However, the Anglican churches do not fit neatly into this division; in fact, the Church of England defines itself as ‘Catholic and reformed’ (Chryssides 2010: 12). By this, it is meant that the Church of England retains many of the features of Roman Catholicism, and did not experience the full impact of the Protestant Reformation that occurred in other European countries. The Church of England, as we know it today, is a consequence of political rather than religious concerns. When the Pope refused to grant King Henry VIII a divorce, Henry appointed himself as ‘supreme governor’ of the Church in England, and thus the Church of England maintains an episcopal structure, with archbishops, bishops, and priests, unlike other forms of Protestantism in which there is no such hierarchy, with congregations being governed by church courts, or having independence. The Church of England is the country’s ‘established church’. This means that it is part of Britain’s legal system. By law, the reigning monarch must belong to the Church of England. A number of senior bishops have a place in the House of Lords, and hence have a role in the country’s political decision-making, and reciprocally, certain of the Church’s decisions require state approval. The monarch must approve senior church appointments, and certain ecclesiastical matters require Parliament’s approval: for example, although the General Synod – the Church’s principal court – approved the ordination of women to the priesthood, this also required parliamentary approval, and a small number of MPs used their position in an attempt to maintain the status quo. Major civic events take place within the context of the Church of England, for example, coronations, royal weddings, and funerals. The country is divided into parishes – small geographical areas over which the local Church of England has responsibility, with their residents having accompanying rights. For example, any parishioner, irrespective of his or her faith, has the right to be married, have their children baptized, or have funerals conducted in their local parish church. Parishes are grouped together into wider areas known as dioceses, over each of which a bishop presides, and in which a cathedral serves as the major church in which large events take place (Chryssides and Wilkins 2011: 245–51).1 Dioceses are further grouped into two provinces – Canterbury and York – with their respective archbishops having oversight. The Anglican Communion consists of those churches outside England which adopt the doctrines, practices, and liturgy of the Church of England, and was founded in 1867. Anglicans acknowledge the Archbishop of Canterbury as primus inter pares (‘the first among equals’), although he does not have juridical authority over ecclesiastical affairs outside England. As pointed out earlier, an Anglican Eucharist is often barely distinguishable from a Roman Catholic Mass, following, as it does, the same liturgical pattern – the approach, the Ministry of the Word, and the Ministry of the Sacrament – and the celebrant wears

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similar attire to that of a Roman Catholic priest, consisting of a chasuble, worn over an alb. A bishop, in common with his Roman Catholic counterpart, wears a mitre on his head, and carries a staff, the latter being like a shepherd’s crook, thus indicating his pastoral responsibility. However, the Church of England is sometimes described as a ‘broad church’, indicating that there are many preferred varieties of worship and theological stance.

METHODISTS Methodism originated from within the Church of England, with the brothers John and Charles Wesley (1703–1791; 1707–1788). The Wesleys were students at Christchurch in Oxford, where they came into contact with the Moravians and formed the Holy Club, whose emphasis was on personal ‘sanctification’ – a doctrine which runs counter to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and what Calvin called the unconditional perseverance of the elect. In other words, one’s salvation cannot be assured simply because of a single act of conversion; the convert must persevere and strive towards perfection. The Wesleys were part of the so-called Great Awakening in Britain and America: this was a revivalist movement, in which the Wesleys held open air gatherings up and down the country. The place called Gospel Oak in London originally named a tree – now gone – where John Wesley preached. Being a travelling preacher, Wesley attracted congregations that might not normally have been seen in church, particularly the working classes; however, he contravened the Church of England’s protocol that required priests to officiate solely within the confines of their parish. ‘I look upon all the world as my parish’, Wesley wrote in his Journal (Wesley 1951: 42). When he asked the Bishop of London to ordain clergy for work in America, the Bishop declined, whereupon Wesley decided to ordain them himself – again a breach of protocol, since only bishops are allowed to ordain. Thus, Wesley disassociated himself from the Church of England. The government of Methodist churches therefore differs from the Anglican tradition. The central authority is the Connexion, which holds an Annual Conference, and it has oversight of Circuits and Districts. The Circuit is an area, overseen by the Circuit Leadership Team, headed by a Superintendent who is assisted by Circuit Stewards, who are the members. The District is a wider region, convened by chairs. A minister is normally appointed to a congregation for a period of only four years: it is reckoned that congregations need fresh ideas and must not be allowed to stagnate by having ministers stay in the same place for decades, as sometimes happens in other denominations. Methodists regard themselves as firmly Protestant, unlike the Church of England which is ‘catholic and reformed’, and they recognize four sources of authority, sometimes known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. However, some Methodists claim that the term is inaccurate, since the supreme source of authority for Protestants is scripture. The Methodist Discipline of 1972 states that the core of Christian truth is ‘revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason’. Methodist churches follow the same liturgical calendar as other denominations. However, they are distinctive in having an annual Covenant Service, often in the first Sunday of the year (although some prefer September), on which they affirm their commitment to God in a covenant prayer, offering themselves for God’s service. Methodism is renowned for its music, and in larger Methodist churches one often sees a large organ situated behind the altar as the focal point, often with seating for a

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choir. Charles Wesley is famed for his hymn writing: he wrote over 6,000 hymns in all. His son Samuel Wesley (1766–1837) and his grandson Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810– 1876) composed organ works, as well as some hymn tunes. These are used beyond the Methodist tradition, and can be heard in most Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. Some of Wesleys’ organ works will be familiar to listeners, even if they cannot readily identify their composers.

THE SALVATION ARMY One of the offshoots of Methodism is The Salvation Army, founded in 1865 as the East London Christian Mission by William Booth (1829–1912) – a Methodist minister – and his wife Catherine Booth (1829–1890). The name ‘The Salvation Army’ was adopted in 1878, when Booth adopted a military structure for the organization, becoming its first ‘General’. The Salvation Army currently operates in 131 countries, and its officers are readily identifiable by their uniforms, and their brass bands can often be heard in public, particularly around Christmas time. More important to the organization is its social involvement, working relentlessly to tackle homelessness, human slavery, poverty, domestic violence, and drug and alcohol addiction. William Booth claimed to offer ‘three Ss’ – soap, soup, and salvation – the third of these, of course, indicating its commitment to conversion and personal salvation. Its motto ‘Blood and Fire’ refers to Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and the Holy Spirit’s descent at Pentecost to inspire his disciples (Day 2005: 432–33).

THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT Most Christians are aware of denominational differences and some of the problems that they create. The initial impetus for the Ecumenical Movement came from the Protestant churches, who were concerned about cooperating rather than competing with each other in a foreign mission. The usual textbook version defines the Movement’s origin as the World Missionary Conference, held in Edinburgh in 1910, which was followed by several denominational councils, culminating in the formation of the WCC in 1948 (Bowden 2005: 364). Initially 147 different church organizations from 44 different countries came together; in 2019 there are 350 member denominations. Initially, neither the Orthodox Churches nor the Roman Catholic Church affiliated, on the ground that they each represented the one true Church, and that there could be no Churches in the plural. However, a number of national Orthodox Churches now belong, and the Roman Catholic Church, while remaining a non-member, has allowed representation by Roman Catholic leaders in various consultations. In 1965 a Joint Working Group was set up, in which matters of common interest are discussed. Of course, the WCC’s work tends primarily to involve clergy and theologians, and most rank-and-file Christians are relatively unaware of its activities, although they might recognize the WCC’s ‘oikoumene’ logo, consisting of a rudimentary boat with a cross serving as its mast, below the word oikoumene in an arc shape. (The word oikoumene is Greek for the inhabited world, signifying that the Church is the one ark of salvation for all humankind.) Much ecumenical debate has been theological, and of course that leaves most ordinary Christians behind, since the average lay person has relatively little interest in theology. Nonetheless, lack of Christian unity has a plain impact on rank-and-file Christians. Although most denominations accept the validity of each other’s baptism, ordination of

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ministers in the Protestant tradition is not recognized as valid by the Orthodox or Roman Catholic Churches. This entails that, for example, a Roman Catholic may not receive holy communion from a Protestant celebrant; reciprocally, a Protestant may not receive the sacrament from a Roman Catholic or Orthodox priest. Just over half a century ago, Roman Catholics were instructed not to pray with non-Catholics, although they might occasionally attend certain Protestant services, such as weddings and funerals, out of politeness, but they were not supposed to participate. The notion of unity is somewhat unclear: the Ecumenical Movement does not seek uniformity of doctrine or worship, recognizing that there are legitimate differences among Christians. The Movement has made some changes, although problems of ordination and participation in holy communion remain unresolved. Recent changes are partly due to ecumenism, and also due to the liberalization that came through the Second Vatican Council. At a practical level, denominations have come together to cooperate on humanitarian projects such as world hunger and poverty, homelessness, and the quest for world peace. A number of ecumenical youth organizations have been established, the best-known of which are the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA, established in 1844), the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA, founded in 1855), and the World Student Christian Federation (1895). Roman Catholics have now typically abandoned the use of Latin in the liturgy of the Mass, celebrating it in the language of the people. Personal study of the Bible, once strongly discouraged, is now permitted amongst Catholics, and some clusters of churches of different denominations have met ecumenically to pray and study – something that particularly occurs during Lent. In 1908, Father Paul Wattson, a Roman Catholic priest at Graymoor in Garrison, New York, inaugurated what became the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which takes place annually in January, and which is observed by a variety of denominations. This involves prayer for Christian unity, focusing on a theme of common concern to all Christians: the theme for 2019, for example, is justice. In the course of that week, some churches will invite a preacher from a different denomination from their own to deliver the sermon. Half a century ago, the Church of England discouraged members of other denominations from receiving communion; today it is common to find an invitation extended to all attendees who are accustomed to receiving the sacrament in their own church. Although it is normal practice for those joining the Church of England to be confirmed, this is now a personal decision, and anyone who has belonged to any branch of the Christian Church can fully participate in the life of the congregation. Ecumenical progress has not been rapid, and some developments in certain sectors of the Church have actually impeded ecumenical progress – for example, the Roman Catholic doctrine of Mary as co-redemptrix and the ordination of women in many Protestant denominations. There remain opponents of ecumenism, however. Some Catholics believe that the changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council were unduly liberal, to the extent that some have even alleged that Pope John XXIII forfeited his right to the papal see, breaking away to form their own sedavacantist groups. Some of the Orthodox Churches remain opposed to common worship. Within Protestantism, a number of denominations have declined to be involved in the Ecumenical Movement. These are mainly evangelical Christians, often belonging to Adventists, Pentecostal, or sometimes Baptist traditions, who contended that other churches have become unduly liberal, condoning homosexuality, accepting evolution theory, and doubting the complete veracity of the Bible. The SBC passed a resolution in 1996, in which the denomination affirmed that biblical truth

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was the only legitimate way of uniting Christians. In 1951 the Reverend Ian Paisley Sr (1926–2014; aka Lord Bannside) became the co-founder of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, which was staunchly opposed to Roman Catholicism. Paisley reminded his supporters that the Westminster Confession of Faith describes the Pope as ‘that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalts himself, in the Church, against Christ and all that is called God’ (General Assembly of Divines 1647: XXV, vi), and vociferously deplored Roman Catholic veneration of Mary and the Saints and doctrines such as the sacrifice of the Mass and transubstantiation. For some denominations who feel unable to be part of the WCC, there are other umbrella organizations which bring them together, for example, the Evangelical Alliance and the World Communion of Reformed Churches. Such organizations, of course, only bring together certain sectors of Protestantism and do not seek to include Roman Catholic or Orthodox Christians or other Protestants who lie outside evangelical or Calvinist Christianity.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The role of the Bible ANDREW VILLAGE

INTRODUCTION The Bible is a core resource for the Christian faith. It is a collection of sixty-six books divided into the Old Testament (thirty-nine books, mostly written originally in Hebrew) and the New Testament (twenty-seven books written originally in Greek). Christians share the Hebrew scriptures with Jews, but the New Testament contains books specifically related to the faith founded on Jesus of Nazareth. The New Testament consists of four biographies of Jesus (the Gospels), an account of the first Christians (the Acts of the Apostles), and collections of letters (Epistles) from Paul and other leaders of the early Church. These writings were just some of the hundreds produced in the first two centuries after Jesus’ death, and it took many years for the Church to decide which should be included in the ‘canon’, the generally recognized list of scripture. The oldest list which contains the books of the New Testament as we know them was in a letter from Bishop Athanasius of Alexander to the churches in Egypt in 367. From around that time, the contents of the Bible were more or less fixed, though the contents of the Old Testament are more varied because the Latin translation (the Vulgate) used by the Roman Catholic Church included the Apocrypha, which were seven books written originally in Greek. For most of the first millennium, the Latin Bible was the main version read and copied in Europe. Literacy was rare, so few Christians would have read the Bible themselves or been familiar with it. This began to change in the thirteenth century, and it accelerated as a result of the Reformation. Martin Luther and other Reformers wanted to wrest the Bible from the control of the Church and allow what they thought was its original and true message to become the standard of Christian faith. The invention of the printing press occurred around the same time, and as a result more and more people were able to read and hear the Bible in a language they could understand. Five hundred years later, the Bible is available in hundreds of different translations, in printed and digital formats, and is read aloud in millions of churches at least once a week. The Bible has always been studied by scholars, and each year thousands of articles and books are published by people working in universities and theological colleges. This material does sometimes filter through to churches, but most churchgoers are unaware of it and engage with the Bible in ways that are not part of the academic discourse. In recent decades, a few scholars have begun looking beyond their own ways of handling the Bible and taken an interest in what are called ‘ordinary readers’. This chapter looks at ways in which scholars have studied how the Bible is used and interpreted in churches by people for whom it is not simply an interesting historical text, but sacred scripture and part of their lived faith.

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THE BIBLE AND ORDINARY READERS ‘Ordinary reader’ is a technical term used by scholars to refer to people who read the Bible the way that most people do. Scholars read the Bible in extra-ordinary ways because they are a small minority of readers who apply methods such as historical, literary, or ideological criticism to texts and who are mainly interested in persuading other scholars to their point of view. Most people who read the Bible, or listen to it being read, have a different goal that is more closely related to their faith. They may want guidance on how to live, teaching on what to believe, assurance of salvation, encouragement to serve, and so on. The distinction between ordinary and scholarly reading is not always easy to make. Some scholars see their academic engagement with the Bible as part of what it means to live out their faith. Some churchgoers who are not professional academics might nonetheless have studied theology or the Bible, and some may be highly qualified in other subject areas. Clergy might be considered ordinary readers, because they work in church contexts, but many will have had at least some exposure to academic biblical studies. Researchers need to be aware of these complexities and try and allow for the different backgrounds of ordinary readers when studying what they do with the Bible and why they do it. When we study ordinary readers, our subjects are usually people who read the Bible themselves. This might sound obvious, but a lot of people in churches never do that, though they might be familiar with the Bible because they were taught it as a child or because they hear it read aloud and preached in sermons. When scholars interview people or invite them to complete questionnaires, it can be difficult to engage the interest of those who never read the Bible; after all, why spend time answering questions about something that you rarely if ever do? It is inevitable that studies of ordinary readers will tend to select those people for whom the Bible is important and who read it as part of their religious life. This does not mean that others are never included in such studies; it is rather the case that we need to be cautious in generalizing because it is likely there is a large pool of Christians who rarely engage with the Bible and who tend not to volunteer for studies related to it, so they can be underrepresented in surveys. The availability of Bibles varies across the globe and sometimes over time within particular societies. The rise of the missionary movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began the era of translating the Bible into local languages, and at least parts of it are now available in over 3,000 languages, though the number for complete Bible translations is less than 700 (Wycliffe 2017). Communist countries have sometimes restricted access to Bibles, and importing Bibles can lead to severe punishment (Kuhn 2002). In Western societies Bibles are freely available in a range of different translations and literacy rates are high, so most people who want to read the Bible for themselves will be able to do so.

Studying ordinary readers Most studies of ordinary readers have employed methods used more widely in the social sciences, such as ethnography, interviews, and questionnaires. Ethnographic surveys can involve researchers joining congregations or Bible study groups and observing and/ or participating in what goes on. For example, Brian Malley (2004) studied Creekside Baptist Church (a pseudonym) in the United States as a participant observer and also carried out interviews and distributed a questionnaire. He was interested in how the Bible worked to maintain the beliefs of that particular Christian tradition. In the UK, Andrew Rogers (2016) examined two evangelical congregations using a mixture of participant

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observation and interviews in order to identify how congregations shape, and are shaped by, their engagement with the Bible. James Bielo (2009) observed, mainly as a ‘fly on the wall’, a number of Bible study groups in six Protestant congregations in Michigan in an attempt to understand how such groups function in the lives of their members. In these three cases, the groups did whatever they would normally do, but some studies ask groups to engage with particular material so that the researchers can look at specific issues or compare the same material in different groups. Andrew Todd (2005) gave a Bible study group preselected passages to explore over a number of weeks so that he could see how the language they used to talk about passages pointed to the way they understood and interpreted the Bible. Other studies have given the same passage to many different groups and asked them to report their findings (Wit, Jonker, Kool, and Schipani 2004). Quantitative methods usually rely on questionnaires to assess aspects of Bible use such as ownership, frequency of reading, biblical literacy, beliefs about the Bible, and how it is interpreted. Unlike qualitative ethnography, questionnaires tend to be completed by individuals, and therefore reach people who do not belong to Bible study groups. Different sorts of questions (multiple-choice, forced-choice, Likert items, semantic differential, etc.) can be used as necessary to quantify these various aspects, and open questions allow respondents to give information not covered by other means. Village (2007) used different types of questions in a study of lay people from the Church of England that explored how people read the Bible and how they interpreted it. A test passage (Mark 9:14–29) was used in order to ground responses in a particular case. Asking ‘How do you interpret the Bible?’ invites the response ‘It depends on which bit you mean.’ Using a test passage helps participants demonstrate their interpretation in a particular instance and, even though that limits the scope of a study, it can make it more useful. Questionnaires on the Bible are usually distributed to particular congregations or denominations, but Bible-related questions occasionally appear in national surveys. A good example is the General Social Survey (GSS), which has been run every two years in the United States since 1972 (NORC 2017). This usually contains the ‘Bible question’, which has had the same format each year. The question comes alongside others related to religion, but this is not a specific survey about the Bible, so the question is inevitably rather general. In Europe, where Christian affiliation is much lower than in the United States, questions about the Bible rarely appear in national social surveys, though some Christian organizations commission polling organizations to run surveys that may or may not be nationally representative. Examples of surveys run by Christian organizations include those run by the American Bible Society (Barna Group 2016), the Bible Society in the UK (Bible Society 2016), and the Pew Research Center (Pew Research Center 2017). These different methods of studying ordinary readers have their own advantages and disadvantages. Participant observation can help gain the confidence of what are sometimes rather closed Bible study groups, but participation raises the real possibility that groups can be unwittingly moved in directions dictated by the researcher, which may not reflect what would normally happen. Non-participant observation might lessen the chance of this, but group members might still be unwilling to say what they really think when someone is watching. Interviews generate rich and varied material, which can give insights into what individuals do, but seeing wider patterns is difficult, and there is a danger of researchers selecting material in ways that create bias. Quantifying always involves simplification and therefore some artificiality, but it can help pinpoint the key issues and crucially allows researchers to isolate the effects of particular variables on reading in ways that are all but impossible otherwise.

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WHO READS THE BIBLE? When we talk of people ‘reading’ the Bible, we need to be aware that this is only one of several ways in which people engage with it. On 9 January 2011, the BBC celebrated the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version of the Bible by broadcasting seven hours of readings by well-known celebrities. The dedication of national broadcasting to such a venture was condemned by secularists, but says something about the continuing role of the Bible for people who may not consider themselves Christians. The Bible is a cultural object and is deeply embedded in Western societies through the ideas it contains and language and sayings that many have learnt from childhood. While this may be changing with the drift away from organized religion, the figures from surveys (if they are to be believed) suggest a surprisingly high level of engagement. In the United States, over 90 per cent of households own a Bible, though figures in Europe are lower, with a 2010 UK survey reporting 52 per cent (Field 2014). Surveys of whole populations are unusual outside North America, and may be biased if those who are disinterested in religion tend to refuse to take part. Owners of Bibles may not necessarily read them, and in the United States only around a third of people claim to read the Bible at least once a week, a figure that is declining among younger generations (Barna Group 2016). Figures in Europe are even lower, and a survey of people who identified themselves as Christians in the UK found 14 per cent read or listened to the Bible at least once a week (ComRes 2017). There was considerable variation between denominations, with reading being the highest among Pentecostals (75 per cent), Evangelicals (64 per cent), and Baptists (49 per cent) and the lowest among Methodists (15 per cent), Roman Catholics (11 per cent), and Anglicans (8 per cent). Much of the denominational difference relates to what proportion of those who claim to belong to a particular denomination actually practise their faith. In England, many people will claim to belong to the Church of England without ever attending services, and they are unlikely to ever read the Bible. Smaller-scale surveys of churchgoers give a better idea of how many actually read the Bible for themselves, rather than just hear it on Sundays. This varies between different Christian traditions, reflecting the importance of the Bible in Protestant denominations as a result of the Reformation. The Anglican Church is a Protestant denomination, but it has Anglo-Catholic and evangelical wings, especially in the Church of England, where a study of lay people found 79 per cent of evangelicals read the Bible at least once a week, compared with 47 per cent in other traditions (Village 2007). Among evangelicals, 69 per cent said they read the Bible more than once a week, and this reflects the long-standing practice of a daily ‘quiet time’ where Christians spend time praying and reading the Bible alone, often using study notes. Daily Bible reading is common among evangelicals elsewhere in the UK and in the United States. Those in more Catholic traditions do sometimes report reading the Bible every day, and this probably reflects its use in daily offices such as Morning Prayer in the Anglican Church. Overall, the survey data suggests that casual and infrequent contact with the Bible is relatively high in Western societies, but declining among more recent generations. In some church traditions adherents rarely, if ever, read the Bible themselves, but they do hear it often in the context of worship. The most frequent rates of engagement are among Protestants, and especially Pentecostals. Such people represent a large and growing proportion of Christianity, and as literacy rates rise in parts of Africa and Asia, it is likely that the Bible will continue to be read by a significant proportion of the global population.

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BELIEFS ABOUT THE BIBLE Theologians and biblical scholars have long argued about the nature of the Bible, how it should be interpreted, and its status for believers. Is this a rather ad hoc collection of texts produced over many centuries that reflects evolving beliefs about God among the Israelites? Or is it a carefully selected collection of documents that represent the foundational testimonies of a faith community (or two faith communities, Jewish and Christian)? Or is it the Word of God, delivered and received exactly as intended by the divine Author? What we believe the Bible to be is the main factor that determines how we are likely to interpret it and what status it holds in our lives. Scholars who view the Bible primarily as historical evidence of past beliefs are likely to use the text alongside external evidence from archaeology or other writings to try and understand what the original authors or editors intended to say and why they needed to say it. Those who see in the biblical text carefully crafted stories or rhetorical argumentation will examine it using literary techniques to expose the voices of the authors that are implied from the text, and the way in which meaning might be delivered and unfolded to readers who are competent to decode the signals present in the narrative. Those who see the biblical text as reflecting or concealing the power of those who produced it will try and reread familiar passages in ways that expose the abuse of power and that speak liberation to marginalized or oppressed groups in our society today. These various approaches need not necessarily undermine the authority of the text, but they can raise issues of whether material that is historically contingent or produced by flawed humans can carry the authority of God for believers today. The advent of scholarly (or ‘critical’) approaches to the Bible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe has inevitably impacted ordinary readers. Some churches that were originally hostile towards modern scholarship have become more positive about it over the last century or so: a good example is the Roman Catholic Church, which rejected historical criticism in the nineteenth century, but which had come to see its value by the end of the twentieth century (Pontifical Biblical Commission 1993). This has not been the case for all Christians, and it was the threat of biblical scholarship, and its implications for believers, that drove some evangelicals in the United States to assert what they saw as the ‘fundamentals’ of faith at the start of the twentieth century (Ammerman 1991). For fundamentalists in the Protestant tradition the Bible is considered to be ‘verbally inspired’: that is, the very words of the original documents (‘autographs’) were written exactly as God intended, and they are the ‘Word of God’. This implies that the Bible is without error, so that when it narrates stories they should be assumed to be historically accurate accounts of what actually happened, unless there is a clear indication to the contrary. This way of understanding scripture has led to creationist beliefs, which challenge the scientific community’s acceptance of Darwinian evolution primarily because it seems to challenge the veracity of the creation accounts in Genesis. Such conservative Protestant beliefs about the Bible are the most clearly articulated in the Chicago Statement, produced by leading evangelicals (International Council on Biblical Inerrancy 1978). Conservative biblical belief is one end of a spectrum. At the other end lies liberal belief, which is more diverse and difficult to define, but which generally sees the Bible as work produced by humans who were inspired by God. Being a largely human creation, it might be flawed and might contain some errors of historical fact or insights about God that may be historically conditional and inappropriate today. Liberal belief is not ‘unbelief’,

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and it can include the idea that the Bible is the inspired word of God. It may, however, also accept that truth can be better expressed in symbolic rather than literal form, so literal interpretation is not always the best option. This extends to miracles, including sometimes the core miracles of the Christian faith, such as the incarnation, virgin birth, and bodily resurrection of Jesus. Whereas conservatives consider the Bible to be the only reliable revelation of God, liberals are often open to truths about God that might come from other faiths or even non-faith sources. Conservative and liberal beliefs are related to views on the status of the Bible: conservatives talk of the Bible as the ‘final authority in all matters of faith and conduct’, whereas liberals will tend to see that authority as set alongside others such as tradition or human reason. Most Christians will fall somewhere along the spectrum between these two positions, but deciding where is not easy. Although some will have given the matter a lot of thought, most will not, so they may not know what they believe, or may not have any opinion on the matter. Others will not want to identify with either an extreme conservative or extreme liberal position. They may uphold the historicity of key events such as the virgin birth or resurrection, but be more willing to see other events as mythological or symbolic stories. They may see the Bible as the main source of authority in their lives, but still be open to other sources that might seem to contradict it. The complexity of beliefs about the Bible makes it difficult to encapsulate them in simple survey questions, though this has not stopped sociologists from trying to do so. In the United States, the rise of the ‘religious right wing’ became a major political issue in the 1981 presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan. Sociologists wanted to identify who these people were, and whether it was possible to distinguish fundamentalists from other conservative Protestants, who might not necessarily share their political affiliation. Belief about the Bible was clearly a possible key, and there was a spate of studies (ultimately unsuccessful) that tried to address this issue (Smidt 1989). It was around this time that the GSS introduced the ‘Bible question’ in an attempt to categorize Bible belief across the whole population. It has remained much the same over the last 30 years: Which of these statements comes closest to describing your feelings about the Bible? The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word; the Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything should be taken literally, word for word; the Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man. (GSS 2014) This is not an ideal question because it conflates literalism with ‘word of God’, but it has served as a useful barometer of beliefs among the US population. In 1984, the first year it was used, 37 per cent chose ‘actual word’, 46 per cent chose ‘inspired word’, and 14 per cent chose ‘Ancient book’. By 2014 the numbers had changed a little (31, 44, and 22 per cent, respectively) but generally they have been remarkably stable (Association of Religion Data Archives 2014). Similar results have been found in other studies in the United States, suggesting that an overwhelming majority consider the Bible to be the ‘word of God’, and a sizeable minority think that it should be interpreted literally. Conservative Bible belief remains a central part of the faith of millions of Americans. There is precious little equivalent data from elsewhere, perhaps because in Europe religion is less tied to politics so there is less general interest in what people believe about the Bible. The main source of information comes from surveys within churches, especially the Church of England. The ‘Bible scale’ was developed for use among Church of England lay people, and has been used among lay and ordained Anglicans in England

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(Village 2007, 2016) and elsewhere (Anglican Consultative Council 2012). It consists of twelve statements with a five-point response scale ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’. The statements relate to beliefs about the Bible such as: ‘The Bible contains some human errors’, ‘If the Bible says something happened then I believe that it did’, and ‘The Bible is the final authority in all matters of faith and conduct’. Responses are coded so that a high score indicates conservative belief and a low score indicates liberal belief about the Bible. In the Church of England, evangelicals score the highest, Anglo-Catholics the lowest, and ‘broad church’ the middle, which is what you would expect (Village 2007). What makes the scale more interesting is that it can be used to see how beliefs about the Bible vary between different groups. In 2013 this scale was part of a survey that ran in the Church Times, the main newspaper of the Church of England, and it was completed by over 3,000 people. Biblical conservatism was higher for men than women, for those under 60 than those over 60, for those with school-level than those with university-level qualifications, for laity than clergy, and higher among evangelicals and charismatics than among those in Anglo-Catholic or broad-church traditions (Village 2016). Some of these trends are again what we might expect, suggesting that beliefs about the Bible are partly an indication of what sort of church people belong to, partly about their educational experience, and partly about personal factors. Men are generally more conservative than women, and this might explain the sex difference in biblical conservatism. The greater conservatism among young people is interesting and suggests that as people get older they may take a more liberal stance to the Bible, perhaps as a consequence of the experience of using it through life.

READING IN CONTEXT One important way in which academic and ordinary readers of the Bible have come together in recent years is under the umbrella of ‘Contextual Bible Study’ (CBS). The roots of this date back to the work of liberation theologians in South and Latin America in the 1960s, when Catholic priests who worked in universities, such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, spent parts of their time in local ‘base communities’, working with the poor and marginalized (Aguilar 2007). Part of the work was to encourage people to read the Bible in ways that were relevant to their lives, rather than to simply receive interpretations handed down from the church hierarchy. Stories such as the Exodus became powerful texts that spoke directly to their struggle for political freedom and economic security (Mesters 1980, 1991). This way of reading spawned ‘liberation hermeneutics’, which has spread to many different communities around the world and which has influenced those who feel oppressed by virtue of their race, gender, class, sexuality, or political beliefs (Mosala 1989; Rowland and Corner 1990; George 2001; Schroer and Bietenhard 2003; Guest 2006). This way of reading, which pays close attention to what has been termed ‘social location’ (Segovia and Tolbert 1995a, 1995b), has not always successfully engaged ordinary readers, and sometimes tends to result in rather rarefied academic writing that they would find inaccessible and incomprehensible. Some scholars have made deliberate attempts to overcome the barriers between academic and church communities. Gerald West created the Institute for the Study of the Bible in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, during the apartheid era. The intention was for academics to ‘read with’ local church communities with the intention that both academic and ordinary readers would learn from each other on how to promote community change (West and Dube 1996; West 2007). A good example of such an engagement is a study

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among women in an African Independent Church in KwaZulu-Natal of Mark 5:21–6:1, the stories of Jairus’ daughter and the woman with a haemorrhage (Sibeko and Haddad 1997). Laying on hands and prayer for healing were an integral part of church life for these women, but menstruating women were considered taboo and denied this ministry because ministers would not touch them and they were not allowed to attend services. When the women read the passage, they identified solely with the unnamed woman who broke Jewish taboo and touched Jesus’ cloak. In this context, a story that might seem strange in Western contexts became a powerful inspiration to challenge the status quo. One of the most significant recent attempts to explore the effect of cultural contexts on Bible reading has been a project in the Netherlands called Through the Eyes of Another (Wit et al. 2004). In the initial study, researchers took a test passage, the woman at the well in John 4, and asked Bible study groups to read and discuss it, and then report their findings. There were over 120 groups from twenty-five countries, and the co-ordinators arranged for groups in different parts of the world to read and respond to the reflections of others from different cultures to their own. Reports and reflections were digitized and coded, and then analysed using a ‘grounded theory’ approach (Bryant and Charmaz 2007), whereby analysis and interpretation go hand in hand, allowing ideas to emerge from the data, rather than being imposed upon it beforehand. The results have indicated the importance of social and cultural factors in shaping the way in which the Bible is interpreted and used by ordinary readers. In the case of this passage, Western readers found the story harder to apply to their lives than those from the southern hemisphere. Intercultural reading of the Bible is proving to be a growing way in which ordinary readers can appreciate both their own way of using the Bible and that of people from very different backgrounds to their own (Wit, West, and Snoek 2008; Wit 2012; Schipani, Brinkman, and Snoek 2015; Snoek 2015).

INTERPRETING THE BIBLE How do ordinary readers interpret the Bible? This simple question is extremely difficult to answer. First, because the Bible is a complex collection of books written over many centuries and containing different literary genres. How someone interprets a psalm might be very different from how they interpret a gospel story or one of St Paul’s letters. Second, because readers are even more complex and varied than the Bible. They belong to different faith traditions, they have different views of what the Bible is, they belong to different cultures and to different generations in those cultures, they have different educational experiences, and they are distinguished by a host of other individual differences such as race, gender, sexuality, and personality. Hardly surprising, then, that the simplest and truest answer to the question ‘How do ordinary readers interpret the Bible?’ is ‘Differently.’ That said, we might still want to find out what those differences look like and, more importantly, whether interpretations are related to some of the myriad variations we see in the Bible and readers. We have noted earlier some of the different ways of studying ordinary readers, and their advantages and disadvantages. When it comes to studying interpretation, the issue of method is even more crucial. We might study interpretations by ethnography: observing what Bible study groups do and what they say about the passages they are reading. What often emerges from this approach is information about group dynamics and the symbolic importance of the Bible, but it is sometimes more difficult to identify particular interpretations or ways of interpreting. Using a test passage to try and reduce

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the variability caused by using different parts of the Bible can help, and this was the tactic in the Through the Eyes of Another studies mentioned earlier. This certainly produced different interpretations, but trying to sort through the thousands of statements to categorize them was a huge task. Even if successful, the next task would be to explain why some groups produced the interpretations they did: was it because of their cultural location, or the gender balance, or presence (or absence) of clergy, or the educational experience of members, and so on? Ethnographic methods are said to produce ‘thick’ descriptions of human activity that are full of detail, nuance, and complexity. They are close to reality and can produce rich accounts, but sometimes lack power to explain why readers do what they do. Quantitative methods require researchers to simplify in order to measure. They usually require some prior theory to help narrow the focus and create the instruments to be used to gather data. Questionnaires or other methods that numerically quantify observations are said to produce ‘thin’ descriptions of human activity that are selective of particular aspects of the phenomenon and which may be totally blind to others. They are often artificial and tend to reduce complex descriptions to more straightforward numerical quantities. Where they win out is the power of those quantities to explain what factors might be shaping different sorts of interpretations. For example, we might find in a large survey of churchgoers that, on average, women interpret more literally than men. We might theorize that this is because women are innately more likely to do so because of their sex, or because they have been socialized into doing so by gender roles acquired through life. If we look closer, however, we might find that our sample of churchgoers is mainly people aged over 70, who belong to a generation where women were much less likely to go to university than were men. If we can allow for educational differences through statistical analysis, we might find that the difference between men and women disappears and they are equally likely to interpret literally. This is about education, not sex or gender, and we are led to a very different understanding of the causes of literalism. In this section, we will look at quantitative methods that have been used to explore two main sorts of interpretative strategy: literalism and choice of horizon. These are considered to be general interpretative strategies, rather than interpretations applied to specific passages, though understanding general strategies is sometimes best done through using specific passages. The aim in these studies is to simplify the questions asked so that participants can more easily indicate their beliefs and attitudes and then build complexity by using statistical methods to test associations within the data set.

Literalism To interpret the Bible literally is to take the text at face value: events are assumed to have happened as described, and oracles, speeches, and letters are assumed to be recorded verbatim. Before I embarked on my first questionnaire study in the Church of England, I went around a number of different churches in my local area and interviewed lay people. I wanted to find out how they engaged with the Bible, and what things about it mattered to them. In theological college I had studied what mattered to biblical scholars, and literalism was not really an issue for them: they had long relegated most events to mythological sagas or fictional stories, and moved on to more ‘interesting’ aspects such as the origins of the text or its literary structure. But it was an issue for my interviewees. Over and again I heard people speaking of worries over passages that they found hard to take at face value, or asserting the importance of believing that certain events in the Bible must have happened.

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Literalism remains an important aspect of biblical interpretation, and one that shapes the way that people understand and practise their faith. We have seen earlier how in the United States the issue of literalism is part of the ‘Bible question’ in the GSS, and that around a third of Americans think the Bible should be interpreted literally, word for word. A lot of people might not want to go that far, but they would nonetheless want to assert that some parts of the Bible should be interpreted literally. Where do people draw the line between fictional story and events that really happened, and what criteria do they use to decide? To answer this, I created a ‘literalism scale’ using ten items mentioning events from the Bible drawn from both Testaments. I also included five items that referred to parables of Jesus and introduced by the phrase ‘The story of … ’. For each item, participants were asked if this was something they thought definitely happened or was a fictional story. They could rate answers on a five-point scale, with one representing ‘definitely a story’ and five representing ‘definitely happened’. The literalism and parable scales were included in a questionnaire distributed to eleven Church of England congregations, and the results of 404 replies are shown in Table 1 as the proportion of participants who indicated that an event definitely or probably happened. The table is arranged with the highest scoring items (that is, those taken most literally) at the top and the lowest scoring at the bottom.

TABLE 1  Responses to items in the literalism and parable scales among Church of England lay people All N = 404

AC

BC

EV

94

109

201

Item

%

%

%

%

Jesus’ mother was a virgin when she conceived Jesus.

81

68

73

93

Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.

83

72

76

93

Jesus turned water into wine.

80

65

72

92

David killed a giant called Goliath.

83

73

76

92

Moses went to Pharaoh and threatened terrible plagues.

79

62

67

93

Jesus fed 5,000 people with two fish and five loaves.

74

52

62

90

Joshua destroyed the walls of Jericho.

73

58

66

83

Noah built an ark and filled it with animals.

57

32

49

74

Adam and Eve lived in a garden called Eden.

47

21

45

61

Jonah was in the belly of a fish (or whale) for three days.

41

16

34

57

The story of the Samaritan who helped a man attacked by robbers.

46

46

62

38

The story of the prodigal son who left home and later returned.

45

51

56

37

The story of the farmer who scattered seed as he sowed.

35

43

44

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All

AC

BC

EV

94

109

201

The story of the unforgiving servant who was released from his 30 debt.

36

38

23

The story of the enemies who sowed weeds in a farmer’s field.

24

28

32

18

The story of the ten virgins who waited for the bridegroom.

21

21

28

17

N = 404

Source: after A. Village, The Bible and lay people (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007).

A few trends emerged from this study: (1) There was a surprising level of literalism among this sample. Overall, the literalism scale items were said to have happened by 83 to 41 per cent of the participants, depending on the item. Even the story of Adam and Eve was taken literally by 47 per cent. (2) The most literal events were those related to the miracles associated with Jesus, including his virgin birth. The events least likely to be taken literally were those associated with Old Testament stories and sagas such as Jonah, Adam and Eve, and Noah. Items in the middle were ones that more people might consider to be historical, such as Joshua and the walls of Jericho, Moses and the plagues of Egypt, and David killing Goliath. (3) The parable items were all much less likely to be taken literally, and the majority rated them as fictional stories. There was still considerable variation between parables, with ones that might be more familiar to contemporary readers (like the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan) being more likely to be rated literally than others that are less familiar. (4) Evangelicals were more likely to interpret literally than people from other traditions in the Church of England. However, they were less likely to score the parables as literal. It seemed that most evangelicals distinguish story from event and generally believed events happened and parables did not. Others were less discerning of the difference between parable and event. These results show how ordinary readers make careful decisions about literalism that depend on what the event is and whether it is described as a story (or parable) in the Bible or just related without a label. Events that are equally implausible are rated differently depending on whether they relate Jesus or not. On rational judgement, raising someone from the dead is as unlikely to have happened as someone surviving in the belly of a fish for three days, but whereas 83 per cent took the Lazarus story literally, only 41 per cent did so for Jonah. The advantage of quantifying literalism in this way is that each individual can be given a score, and these scores can be examined statistically in relation to other factors. In the study just described, education was found to be related to literalism, so that on average those with higher levels of education tended to interpret less literally. What was interesting, and revealed only through more complex statistical analysis, is that this trend was not apparent among evangelicals, where there was little or no effect of education on

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FIGURE 1  Relationship of literalism to education level: clergy (dashed line) and laity (solid line) from evangelical (squares) or other traditions (circles) in the Church of England.

literalism, as shown in Figure 1. The literalism scale has been used on Church of England clergy, and the results were surprisingly similar to those for lay people. Although clergy were less literal, on average, than laity, this was partly due to the fact that they had greater exposure to university-level education: allowing for this statistically suggested that when it came to literalism, clergy were similar to lay people in the same church tradition. Literalism varies with gender, but in complex and interesting ways. In the 2014 GSS surveys, the literalism option was chosen by 34 per cent of women but only 27 per cent of men, a small difference but one repeated across many surveys. When results are broken down by denomination, the sex difference remains only in those denominations where biblical literalism is most prevalent. John Hoffman and John Bartkowski (2008) suggested that was because in patriarchal congregations, where women are denied leadership roles, they may compensate for their status by promoting more rigorously the beliefs and practices (schema) that are central to denominational identity – in this case literalism. I tested this ‘compensatory schema’ hypothesis on data from the Church of England, and found that while there was some support for this idea, other explanations seemed possible for this particular denomination (Village 2012b). These kinds of analyses show the power of quantitative methods to explore biblical interpretation across large samples of churchgoers.

Horizons The notion of ‘interpretive horizons’ is well known to biblical scholars, who use it to distinguish between the cultures that produced the Bible and those who subsequently read it. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur is often credited with the idea of different ‘worlds’

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related to the text: the world ‘behind’ the text (the world of the author who wrote it), the world ‘in’ the text (the ideas created by the text), and the world ‘in front of’ the text (the world of the contemporary reader). Scholars may be used to thinking about these different aspects of a text, but are ordinary readers aware of them? When they read the Bible, do they notice the gap between their world and the world of the author? Do they stick with the world created by the text, or do they try and relate that world to their own? Studying this with ordinary readers is not easy, and requires similar methods to those used with literalism: simplification, quantification, and analysis. The Bible and Lay People study (Village 2007) examined two aspects related to horizons: first, whether readers were aware of the gap between their world and the world of the author or the text and, second, which of the three horizons (author, text, or reader) they preferred when interpreting. The issue was addressed using the test passage from Mark 9:14–29, and horizon separation was measured by responses to seven items such as ‘I find this story hard to relate to my life’ or ‘This story shows how differently people thought in those days’. For horizon preference, statements were given in triplets as forced-choice questions, with one item related to each horizon, and readers were asked to choose just one. For example: This story shows … (a)  The writer encouraged his readers to have faith in Jesus (author) (b)  Jesus encouraged the father’s weak faith (text) (c)  God encourages us today when our faith is weak (reader) The horizon labels were not part of the original questions. There were eight such items, so this was the maximum anyone could score for a particular horizon. In practice, most people chose each horizon at least once, but often chose one more than others. The study with laity was repeated with clergy, which allowed each group to be compared (Village 2013). With horizon separation there was no difference between clergy or lay people, between men and women, or between those with different levels of education. A few people in the sample had not read the test passage before, and they were more likely to report higher horizon separation than those for whom this was a familiar passage. This suggests that familiarity with the Bible may lessen the extent to which stories can startle or intrigue us because they lose their strangeness. The main factor predicting horizon separation was church tradition, with evangelicals being more likely to ‘fuse’ horizons than were readers from other traditions. This was explained by their high Bible scale scores: their conservative stance to the Bible generally made it more likely they would accept this passage as something familiar and related to their own world. When it came to horizon preference, most readers preferred the text or reader horizon over the author horizon. The world of the author is not usually accessible to readers unless they have done some advanced biblical study, and most had not. Clergy (who would have done some historical biblical studies) were more likely than laity to choose author horizon options, but even they did so rarely. Education seemed to be a key factor shaping horizon preference: those with higher education experience were more likely to choose the author horizon, and less likely to choose the reader horizon, than those with lower educational qualifications. Horizon is an important aspect of interpretation for Christians because it may determine how likely they are to find the Bible useful for living out their faith. If the gap between our world and the biblical world seems large, it may be more difficult to

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bridge. Reading the Bible to understand the world of the authors may be intellectually interesting, but if interpretation stops there, it may be difficult to apply a text to daily life.

THE BIBLE AND PSYCHOLOGY The ways in which Christians interpret the Bible is partly dependent on their personality. Biblical scholars have for some time used the psychological theories of people like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to analyse the Bible and suggest ways in which it reflects the conscious or unconscious minds of authors and readers (Rollins 1999). Until relatively recently there has been little empirical study of ordinary readers. This began to change when Leslie Francis produced a book that applied psychological type theory to readings from the Gospel of Mark (Francis 1997). Since then there has been a growing number of studies that have tested whether the theory can explain what readers do when they hear or read the Bible, and this has led to suggestions about how to preach (Francis and Village 2008). The idea of psychological ‘types’ was first put forward by Carl Jung (1923). He suggested that our minds are required to perform functions related to acquiring, processing, and evaluating information, and that we can do that in different sorts of ways. Most people, he argued, tend to prefer to function mentally in particular ways, and this partly explains why people have different personalities. His genius was to divide the functions into three independent dimensions, and to suggest that in each dimension there were two options. The first dimension is ‘orientation’, which refers to whether we process information internally or externally. Introverts prefer to process internally by thinking about things on their own, whereas extroverts prefer to process externally in conversation with others. The second dimension is ‘perceiving’, which refers to the process by which we acquire information. Perceiving through sensing involves getting information through sight, sound, touch, and smell, and paying attention to what is actually there, whereas perceiving through intuition involves using our imaginations to bring together ideas and to speculate on possibilities that might happen in the future. The third dimension is ‘judging’, which refers to the process by which we evaluate information and make decisions. Judging by feeling means paying attention to others in order to decide what is best according to commonly held values and likely outcomes, whereas judging by thinking means applying logic objectively to decide what is right according to rational principles. Jung’s three-dimensional model was expanded to four dimensions by Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers. The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator has been widely used in business and industry to explain why people are different and why they prefer to do things in particular ways (Myers and Myers 1980; Myers 1993). A key point to note is that although people often prefer to use a particular function (sensing or intuition to perceive; thinking or feeling to judge), they can use the other function if they need to. The analogy often used is left and right handedness: we can write with our non-preferred hand but for many people that feels awkward and requires a lot of concentration. When we use our preferred functions, it has profound consequences on how we behave and relate to others. Sensing tends to make us prefer the concrete rather than the abstract. We look for details and we value repetition and familiarity. Intuition tends to make us prefer the abstract rather than the concrete. We like to speculate and imagine; we are happy to question the status quo and to look for new ways of doing things. Feeling tends to make us prefer the subjective to the objective. We empathize with others and will try and make sure our decisions are acceptable to others, even if sometimes this means fudging on

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principles. Thinking tends to make us prefer the objective rather than the subjective. We use evidence and logic to decide what to do, and we will apply our principles even when this might sometimes upset others. It seems likely that some of the differences in religion that we observe might be related not just to the content of beliefs but also to the way they are expressed. This is where psychological type might have a role (Goldsmith and Wharton 1993). Leslie Francis’ idea was that when Christians hear the Bible being preached, they will attend to it according to their preferred functions. Sensing types will attend to the details of the text, and especially any references to the senses. They may like familiar passages and to have sermons delivered in traditional fashion. Intuitive types will see a text as a springboard to other ideas. They may want to link it to other passages, to use symbolic interpretations, and to ask questions rather than accept what they are told. Feeling types will attend to characters in a text and try and ‘stand in their shoes’. They will look for material that expresses values and which will create harmony. Thinking types will attend to the theological principles in a text to try and see how they should be applied and what they imply about how we should live. The SIFT method of preaching is derived from these four functions (Sensing, Intuition, Feeling, and Thinking) and suggests that preachers should attend to these four different ways of approaching texts when they expound the Bible. That way they will offer something that most people will be naturally drawn to, as well as challenging them to use their non-preferred functions. Does this theory work in practice? One way to test it is to develop interpretations of a passage that are deliberately designed to appeal to the four different functions, and then see if people prefer some over others. We can test their psychological type preferences using instruments designed to be used in questionnaires such as the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (Keirsey and Bates 1978) or the Francis Psychological Type Scales (Francis 2005). I included these instruments in my Church of England lay and clergy studies, and in both cases there was evidence to show that readers who generally in life preferred sensing over intuition tended to prefer sensing-type interpretations to intuitive-type interpretations, and vice versa. The same was true for feeling versus thinking interpretations (Village and Francis 2005; Village 2010). Another method for testing this idea has been used on training courses for clergy or lay preachers. Participants are first sorted into groups according to their psychological type preferences. They are then asked to work as a group to prepare sermons based on a particular passage. When researchers have examined the sermon outlines produced by different ‘type’ groups, they have been able to show links between the preferred psychological type and the material we would expect based on type theory (Francis, Robbins, and Village 2009; Francis, Stone, and Robbins 2015). Psychological type preferences are also linked to more general interpretative strategies such as literalism and horizon preference. Type theory predicts that literalism will be more likely among those who prefer sensing over intuition, and this has been shown using the literalism scale in Anglican clergy (Village 2012a) and a measure of literalism related to interpreting Genesis among lay people from a range of churches in England (Village 2014). Preference of intuition should also be linked to being able to ‘imagine oneself into a story’ as encouraged in the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius (Ganss 1998) or the contemplative method of Lectio Divina (Robertson 2011). Results from both clergy and laity in the Church of England have supported this idea (Village 2009, 2012c), showing that psychology is one factor that helps explain differences in Bible reading among ordinary Christians.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Jesus STEPHEN E. GREGG

It should come as no surprise that a volume on Christians requires a chapter on Jesus, called the Christ by his earliest followers in the movement that would later be labelled Christianity, and upon whom much of Christian scholarship and identity rests. However, in keeping with the Lived-Religion approach of this work, I shall be exploring the diversity of interpretations of Jesus that have impacted upon everyday Christians’ lives, rather than the grand historical or theological narratives that have been preferenced in previous generations of scholarship. Jesus matters to Christians. Interpretations of his life, teachings, death and resurrection sit at the heart of many individual Christians’ daily lives, and their relationship with God and each other. It is not for nothing that many Christians ask, ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ when making decisions in their everyday lives. But to which Jesus are we referring? Whilst this volume moves beyond the theological paradigms of previous approaches to Christianity, we may still learn from this body of scholarship. In his seminal chapter, originally published in 1972, Don Cupitt outlined the diversity of Christian responses to Jesus using the famous title ‘One Jesus, Many Christs?’ Intriguingly formulated as a question, Cupitt was arguing for a liberalization of theological approaches, not to the historical figure, but to the myriad interpretations of that figure through a diversity of social, political and religious contexts. In this chapter, I wish to continue in the spirit of Cupitt, not to write theology as he was doing, but to unpack the Lived Religion-in-action of numerous Christian individuals and communities that represent this broad spectrum of interpretations of Jesus – indeed, Jesuses – so as to understand the lived realities of relationships with Jesus for everyday Christians.

HISTORICAL JESUS(ES) Jesus of Nazareth, a peripatetic religious teacher, described in the Gospels as a rabbi, lived 2,000 years ago in modern Israel and Palestine. Details of his life are scant, with the biblical record focusing upon his ministry and mission, rather than biographical details. What details are given are often contradictory, for example, when events in his ministry occurred, such as Luke 4:16–30, where the Rejection at Nazareth is placed early in Jesus’ ministry, a story which both Matthew and Luke place at the end of Jesus’ life. Similarly, some events are recorded in some gospels, but not in others – the most famous examples being the nativity stories, which are completely absent in Mark and John, and differ in detail in Matthew and Luke. We have no physical descriptions of Jesus, beyond poetic theological images in Revelation; his marital status is not discussed; and details of large chunks of his life are completely absent in the gospel stories. And yet, despite

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the limited information on Jesus’ life, the fact that he can be firmly placed within the written historical human record is of huge importance to Christianity and the identities of individual Christians. Throughout the centuries, claims to the historicity of Jesus have underpinned the beliefs and actions of Christians. This continues to this day. For many Christians, their declarations of faith, or Creeds (from the Latin credo – I believe), are not simplistic listings of ‘thou shalts’ and ‘thou shalt nots’, but a declarative and performative public projection of identity. One of the most common creeds is the Nicene Creed, which includes major sections relating Jesus to a time, place and even political system and historical leader (‘he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, he suffered and was buried’), which locate him in a particular historical setting. When Christians publicly declare their faith through the Creed, communally and aloud during services, they are linking back to a person in history to better understand their present. This performative and embodied ritual reaches its denouement for many Christians in the taking of the Eucharist, normally close after the reciting of the Creed, which Christians are instructed to ‘do … in remembrance of me’ (Luke 22:19). In living Christian ritual, the historical Jesus and contemporary Christian identities are inextricably linked, and this can be seen throughout history. The expansion of Christian churches and communities has often been conducted through links to the life of the historic person Jesus as well as the theological persona of the risen Christ. Throughout the history of Christian mission, interaction with other traditions has often been predicated upon discourse of religious and political imbalance. Often, this has taken the form of education and evangelism. Throughout the colonial project, Christian missionaries were careful to place Western European history in the direct lineage of the Classical world. In so doing, they were writing a history of justification for the spread of Christian ideas and powers. Often, these ideas were based on the promotion of Christian ideals to the detriment, and often denigration, of colonized peoples. For Christian missionaries, the historicity of Jesus enabled a combative form of dialogue with non-Christian communities, wherein the Christian stories were seen as historical and factual, and the stories of other religions were dismissed as myths or folktales. This had a direct influence on the ways in which missionaries lived and performed their Christian lives and duties. In colonial India, for example, narratives of denigration of the Hindu Puranas and tales of local deities were commonplace. Indeed, such criticisms were offered in formal settings as well. In a session on the eighth day of the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, the Right Reverend John J. Keane, of Washington, gave a speech entitled, ‘The Incarnation Idea in History and in Jesus Christ’, which specifically separated human religious experience into that based on error, which for Keane was Eastern traditions, and that based on history, which for Keane was the Christian narrative, centred as it was on his historical understanding of the incarnation (Barrows 1893: 882). Of course, not all examples lead to negative discourse or dialogue; when Christians remember the historical Jesus, they link to a specific moral authority who lived his life in accordance with a social code which preferenced the underdog or the outcast. For many Christians, replicating Jesus’ life does not just include calls to moral action, which we shall explore below, but also include the physical replication or remembrance of the physical life and landscape of the historical Jesus. Across the lands of Jesus’ life, from Capernaum in Galilee to the streets of Jerusalem, Christians purposefully try to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. Indeed, pilgrims can even hire large eight-foot crosses from vendors in Jerusalem to re-enact Jesus’ last steps prior to his passion. Scenes of pilgrim-tourists in jeans and

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sports shoes tracing the steps of the historical Jesus are a common sight. However jarring such scenes may feel to some onlookers, who perhaps have knowledge that Jerusalem’s street system has changed radically since Jesus’ time, the factual historical links to Jesus are of secondary importance here; for the participant pilgrim, walking in the manner and spirit of Jesus, however closely or distantly, is a performative attempt to link to the Jesus of history in the present. For those seeking a more intimate experience of sharing space with the historical Jesus, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the baptism site in the River Jordan offer opportunities for connection between individual Christians and the Jesus of the first century. However, Christians do not need to remove themselves from their locality of everyday routines to feel links to the life of Jesus. The Christian calendar is intimately linked with claims surrounding the life events of the historical Jesus. Indeed, the calendar of the United Nations, and that of the vast majority of countries on earth, is predicated upon the traditional date of Jesus’ birth. On the macroscale, the recent (in historical terms) Millennium celebrations were a crucial event for many Christian celebrations and social action campaigns across the world. The traditional date of Jesus’ birth was used as a conduit for political pressure to be applied to governments to drop the debt of African nations in the Jubilee 2000 campaign. To this end, millions of Christians took to the streets of major capitals demanding an end to debt payments by developing ex-colonial nations. Similarly, on the microscale, events within each calendar year are explicitly linked to the life events of Jesus. Whilst dates may be contested, both for Jesus’ birth, which was unlikely to have occurred in December, and with Easter, where not only do the Eastern and Western forms of Christianity still differ in their calculation, but which still operates under a lunar calendar to which differs in Eastern and Western traditions due to lunar calculations, key events in the liturgical year remind Christians, and often impel Christians, to think and act in remembrance of the actions of Jesus. It is perhaps noteworthy that, whilst the theological narratives about Jesus (e.g. his transfiguration and ascension) are major liturgical festivals in many modern Christian churches, it is the life events of the human Jesus (his birth, baptism and death) that are most popularly remembered, replicated and celebrated in wider Christian societies. Intriguingly, exploring how Christians choose to relate to the historical Jesus is a fine way of encountering and engaging with the diversity of living Christianity. Indeed, the creedal statements, with which we began this section, were formulated in the early Church in direct response to ‘heresies’, where arguments over Jesus’ incarnation in history took centre-place. This diversity of views continues to this day; for example, the fact that Jesus lived (incarnated) as a male sits at the heart of Vatican opposition to women priests, wherein it is argued that females cannot stand in persona Christi. This position may be understood within a theological framework of incarnation, but the central point is that the physical, historical, male, human form of the Jesus of history is required for any understanding of a hypostatic union: the central argument for much of Christianity that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. This focus on the physical body of Jesus – a body which lived in time and place in history – informs much worship and art in Christian traditions. Sometimes, even, this focus on the historical, human, Jesus has taken precedence over claims for his divine nature. In Unitarian Christian traditions, Jesus is seen as unequivocally human – a moral exemplar and social and religious saviour, but not a cosmological or divine figure. Similarly, interpretations of Christianity framed within the Deist philosophy of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers, including many of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, led to a focus on the

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historical, human Jesus in preference to the cosmological or theological claims for his divinity. Most famously espoused in the Jefferson Bible of 1820 (never actually called a ‘Bible’ by its author, but popularly known thus ever since), this view saw Jesus as a moral guide, but removed all references to miracles or claims to divinity. Whilst, of course, this remains a minority view within Christian communities, it helpfully highlights a common theme across most Christian traditions, from the mainstream to the edges, which is the importance of the historical Jesus in the interpretation and projection of religious identities of everyday Christians throughout history.

GLOBAL JESUS(ES) A section on a ‘Global Jesus’ must be carefully negotiated to avoid assumptions of social, political or geographical dominance in groups of Christians around the world. The term has limitations, but I am using it in this instance to describe the diversity of settings and contexts in which Jesus has been interpreted, reinterpreted and related to by everyday Christians. The historical Jesus, outlined in our preceding section, was a man who lived in a specific time, in a specific place and who, we must presume as biographical details do not exist to tell us, looked a specific way. As I regularly remind my first-year undergraduate students, Jesus was Jewish – ethnically, culturally, linguistically, politically and geographically. Bringing us back to our theme of ‘One Jesus, Many Christs’, however, it is clear that for many Christians, their interpretation of Jesus is not limited to any of these facets of his identity, and it is to this diversity of interpretations that I refer when I use the term ‘Global Jesus’. Historical narratives are dominated by certain power groups, and it is clear that the global spread of Christianity, away from its Judean and Galilean heartland, has been driven by the imbalance of colonial power. From the Roman Empire to Dutch and Portuguese expansionism in the seventeenth century to the might of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, colonialism and Christianity have often gone hand in hand. Unsurprisingly, this has caused depictions of Jesus, the most significant religious symbol and persona of these colonizing powers, to take on attributes of the dominant groups. From the Roman Statesman depicted in full ceremonial toga in the Hinton St Mary mosaic of early fourth-century Roman Britain to Cranach the Younger’s The Crucifixion (Allegory of Redemption) of 1555, Jesus is clearly depicted as ‘Western’, with pale skin, and either wearing or surrounded by people wearing ‘Western’ styles of clothing. This Western Christ – the Caucasian Jesus of so much Christian art and imagery – is perhaps the clearest example of the Globalised Jesus. Whilst, on the one hand, this can be explained by the power of colonial rulers and patrons to shape the world in their image, a more everyday explanation is also required. Quite simply, Christians relate to Jesus through a lens of their own making. It is to be expected that artists, film-makers and religious leaders will imagine and describe Jesus in terms that are relatable for their given society. As much of the ‘story’ of Christianity has been dominated by Western Europe, from the Celtic saints of the early middle ages, through the Reformation, to the height of the colonial model in the nineteenth century, it is to be expected that many of these stories of Jesus will be ‘Western’. Of course, it is also the case that interpretations of a ‘Western’ Jesus have often led to ‘White Jesus’ imagery being used to perpetuate a colonial, nationalistic or outright racist view of ‘others’, wherein salvation came to be seen as being linked to notions of ethnicity and nationality. Indeed, some recent scholarship suggests this

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underpins recent political forms of Christian Nationalism in the United States (Jun et al. 2018). Normally, however, such understandings of Jesus have more benign origins, in the appropriation of the historical Semitic Jesus into contexts more relatable for worshippers. Examples of this from Central America include the Christo Negro and Black Nazarene statues of Jesus. From Panama and Mexico, respectively, although with the latter having moved to the Philippines in the seventeenth century, the statues are depictions of dark-skinned Jesus figures, far removed from the Semitic historical Jesus. Reflecting the populations in which they were created, the statues have both become major centres of pilgrimage and veneration for Christians, and the Black Nazarene has received approval from both Innocent X and Pius VII. Diverse interpretations of Jesus go far beyond physical appearance, however. In his sculpture Tortured Christ, Brazilian artist Guido Rocha has created a work which almost literally cries out for our attention: a black-skinned Jesus with a large Afro hairstyle. It is the tension of the body and pain of the face which is the centre of the viewer’s attention. Leaning out from the cross, Jesus is here depicted screaming in agony, straining his body to escape the trauma of the crucifixion, a figure who you genuinely believe will be screaming in panicked fear, ‘Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?’ (‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Mark 15:34). This is a human Christ, a Brazilian Christ. He brings together history, theology and the lived religio-political experience of Christians in South America for Rocha, who himself was tortured by the secret police in Chile and subsequently fled to Switzerland (Weber 1979). Sometimes, such localized depictions of Jesus are the result of segregation, oppression or disenfranchisement of groups of people who formulate their own depictions of and paths to Jesus through social and political necessity. This phenomenon can be seen in the development of black-led churches. In the West Midlands of England, the New Testament Church of God was founded in 1962 by migrants from the Caribbean, many of whom had arrived in the famous ‘Windrush’ generation, named after the first ship to dock in London carrying Commonwealth migrants who had been invited to help rebuild post-War Britain and who were memorably celebrated in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. It is ironic, therefore, that the New Testament Church of God was opened ‘for West Indians’ (Express and Star 1962) when they did not find a welcome in the Churches attended by the majority-white population. In other contexts, Jesus has been reformulated and related to as direct responses to colonialism – this is a central argument of Rastafari views of Dread Jesus (Spencer 1999) – and such responses not just lead to new church structures, movements and organizations but deeply affect public projections of Christian faith. As Barack Obama gave a eulogy on 26 June 2015 for nine black Christians murdered in their church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist nine days earlier, he broke into hesitant and understated song when he read the words of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’. It is hard to imagine George W. Bush or Bill Clinton having projected their religious beliefs in the same way. A further note to consider on Global Jesus(es) is that it is not just Christians who tell stories of Jesus. Now, this is a volume on studying Christians, so it is not the place to consider non-Christian interpretations of Jesus for their own sake. This is a wide area of scholarship, and it is of course noteworthy that Jesus is considered a prophet within Muslim traditions, hence the focus of much work in this area (Khalidi 2003; Barker and Gregg 2010; Leirvik 2010). However, this area of research is still important for Christians because, even if it is not Christian voices telling stories about Jesus, those stories impact upon how Jesus is understood, and Christians have, in many periods of history, responded to these stories with their own narratives, which in turn inform their

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own communal and individual identities. In India, Rammohun Roy wrote The Precepts of Jesus, coincidently in the same year (1820) as Jefferson’s similar text, which understood Jesus within an ethical framework, without recourse to his divinity. This controversial act not only highlighted Hindu views of Jesus in opposition to the narratives of the colonial powers but also informed, indeed dominated, Christian responses for many years to come, particularly with regard to the writings of the Serampore Trio of Missionaries, William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward, who would fall out with Roy, having previously worked with him on social campaigns for women’s rights in India. Similarly, later in the century, Swami Vivekananda would subsume his understanding of Jesus into his own Hindu worldview, most famously at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, which drew ire from attending Christian missionaries, and culminating in his noting in a January 1900 lecture in Los Angeles that ‘the Nazarene himself was an Oriental … with all your attempts to paint him with blue eyes and yellow hair, the Nazarene was still an Oriental’ (Vivekananda 1900). Such a standpoint not only emboldened Hindu voices but also strengthened the cultural capital of Christians seeking universal understandings of their religion, such as George Candlin and Emile Hirsch (Gregg 2019). Sugirtharajah similarly argues that, in Japan, India and China in the last few hundred years, Jesus needed to be understood by local Christians ‘in relation to [their own] region’s spiritual sages’ for local Christians to write their own culturally relevant stories of Jesus (Sugirtharajah 2018: 249). Indeed, right up to the modern day, Muslim scholars and leaders have sought to use Jesus as a bridge between Muslims and Christians in interfaith dialogue; the ‘Common Word’ project, based upon a document with over 100 signatories from Muslim communities, uses the teachings of Jesus and the words of the Qur’an as a basis for shared experience between Christians and Muslims. Instead of focusing on the many differences, which it does acknowledge, it preferences the teachings and role of Jesus as a significant figure for both Christians and Muslims in an effort to garner closer cooperative dialogue between communities (see Barker and Gregg 2010: 130–35 and also www.acommonword.com). Such discussions over the person and persona of Jesus, which remind us that there are many stories of Jesus, ensure that Christians’ own stories of Jesus need to be remembered as fluid and relational renegotiations, often in discourse and dialogue with non-Christian voices, from first-century Jewish and Roman authorities to modern-day Muslim interfaith practitioners, to better frame their own understandings of Jesus.

PERSONAL JESUS(ES) However a Christian interprets and identifies Jesus in his or her cultural and social context, it is the case that relationships with Jesus are particular and personal. Theological understandings of Jesus are predicated upon personal theism; Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, within which the first person is the Father in Heaven – Jesus’ ‘abba’, or Father, with whom he spoke in Gethsemane (Mark 14:36). This understanding of God is relational, interactive and personal. For Christians, interaction with Jesus on this personal level is a key facet of worship and religious identity. Crucially, however, just because a relationship is intensely personal does not mean that it is enacted in solitude – for the vast majority of Christians, their personal relationship with Jesus is embodied and performed in public and communal settings.

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One way in which Christians relate to Jesus is through prayer. The fundamental prayer of much Christian liturgy and worship – the Lord’s Prayer – was taught by Jesus to his followers (Matthew 6:9–13) and is spoken by Christians, often together in churches, in remembrance of that teaching to reaffirm their relationship with God. Similarly, Jesus is often the focal point of prayer for Christians. The ancient Celtic prayer – traditionally attributed to Saint Patrick of Ireland, and therefore sometimes called Saint Patrick’s Breastplate, but more properly called a Lorica – petitions for the protection and presence of Jesus in a Christian’s life when it invokes, ‘Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me’ (Trans. C. F. Alexander). Other prayers are directed specifically at the understanding of Jesus as not only bodily protector but salvific redeemer – for example, with the Anima Christi, a medieval prayer popularized by Ignatius of Loyola in his 1548 Spiritual Exercises, which relates specifically to Jesus’ body and its role in our salvation: ‘Soul of Christ, be my sanctification, Body of Christ, be my salvation, Blood of Christ, fill my veins, Water from the side of Christ, wash out my stains. May Christ’s Passion strengthen me’ (English translation by John Henry Newman, popularly used in contemporary Catholic prayer). Such prayers, for Christians, bring the physical, historical, Jesus and the cosmological Christ into their everyday lives to assert and affirm their place in the world: their creation as children of God, their lives in communion with the body of Christ (understood theologically and socially) and their future salvation in the hope of eternal life. Very often, such prayers and declarations of the importance of the relationship with Jesus are declared in public and in communion with other Christians. Relationships with Jesus are often cited as markers of success with gratitude and devotion expressed to those listening. Recent examples of this phenomenon are the 2012 victory speech of US Masters Golf Champion Bubba Watson, who thanked ‘my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’, and the actor Chris Pratt, who used the same phrasing when acknowledging his relationship with Jesus upon accepting a Teen Choice Award on behalf of his 2017 film Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Such public declarations of relationships with Jesus are not limited to entertainment, but are also common in political discourse. At the time of writing, the current presidents of the United States (Donald J. Trump) and Brazil (Jair Bolsonaro) have made public declarations of their Christianity central planks of their outreach to sections of the electorate, and cross-country voting groups within the European Parliament are often convened along socio-religious lines, with the most notable example being the European People’s Party, more commonly known as Christian Democrats, which is based upon a Roman Catholic-influenced social and economic worldview emergent in the mid-twentieth century. Examples are often much more personal (but affecting the public) as well – in Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair famously spoke of praying when making his decision to invade Iraq in the second Gulf War. Whilst public declarations of relationships with Jesus are found throughout Christian traditions, it is perhaps most common for evangelical Christians to make these public proclamations. Such Christians often use the phrase of being ‘born again’, when they enter into a new relationship with Jesus as their personal saviour, causing often dramatic changes in their lives and conduct. In so doing, the two themes that are most commonly referred to by born-again Christians are ethical living and salvation. Whilst all Christians ask questions about how to live a good life, and how to live morally, one particular movement has become popular within evangelical forms of Christianity in particular, which is the WWJD movement. Standing for ‘What Would Jesus Do?’,

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the term originates in an 1896 text by Charles M. Sheldon, fully titled In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? It is this subtitle, posed as a question, which forces Christians to confront a key moral and ethical dilemma: If Jesus were in my shoes, how would he respond to this situation? Of course, this reminds us again of how important not just the theological Christ but the historical Jesus is for modern Christian identities. In the Gospels, there are numerous stories of Jesus’ compassion, kindness and help. From the healing of the bleeding woman (Mark 5:25–34) to the eating with sinners (Mark 2:13–17), Jesus often gives the example of care for the outcast. Importantly, Jesus was also angry at times (Matthew 7:5; Mark 3:5) and each occasion led to action. Many Christians have taken up this challenge to action, including Jim Wallis and his Sojourners movement, which seeks to create a world based on social justice, as understood by Jesus’ example. Named after the sojourners of the Old Testament – ‘You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 22:21, ESV) – they seek to work on behalf of the oppressed, marginalized or under-represented in campaigns such as anti-racism programmes, action on violence against women and climate change lobbying for future generations. Large-scale movements such as Wallis’ have also operated spontaneously in recent years, as Christians have called for social action responses to global crises. One particular event was the Occupy movement, which took over large parts of Wall Street in New York in 2011 in direct response to the fallout from the 2007–8 financial crisis, which affected so many people on low incomes, and where the blame was popularly laid at the door of rich workers in the finance sector. Also targeted in 2011 until early 2012 was the City of London, the square-mile centre of the capital famous for its banking quarter, where protests centred upon St Paul’s Cathedral after an injunction banned protestors’ tents from the London Stock Exchange. Clearly visible in the huge crowds were banners asking, ‘WWJD?’ and the Rev. Jesse Jackson told the crowd in a speech, ‘You represent Jesus standing outside the temple’ (Walker 2011). Often, however, Christians act independently when using their own consciences to make moral actions. Indeed, in Sheldon’s original novel, the story follows individuals attempting to ask, ‘WWJD?’ throughout their everyday lives, a theme echoed when the stories were turned into films (Makowski 2010; Sabloff 2015). From voting preferences, career routes, to sexual activity and celibacy, Christians often remind themselves to ask WWJD through popular cultural material items such as badges (pins) and wristbands adorned with WWJD, which have been popular since the 1990s in particular. Personal relationships with Jesus are, of course, also understood within a soteriological framework as well as a moral one. For Christians, Jesus died a salvific death, was resurrected and reigns eternal with the Father in the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus matters, not just for this life but for the future life to come for Christians. This link between Jesus and an individual’s personal salvation is clear in many forms of Christianity. From the Vatican’s teaching of ‘extra ecclesiam nulla salus’ (no salvation outside the Church), wherein we must remember that the Church is considered the Body of Christ, and the Pope as the Vicar (meaning representative) of Christ, to advertisements on London buses which quoted Matthew 25:41, warning that anyone who turned against Jesus would face punishment after death. This latter so perturbed the journalist Ariane Sherine that she wrote a newspaper column which gave rise to the global phenomenon of the Atheist Bus Campaign, which paid for counter-adverts attacking belief in God (Sherine 2008). The links between Jesus and individual salvation were a central point of discussion in the early Church, and teachings predicated upon this are focal to modern Christian expressions of worship and festivity. Whilst Christmas may be the highest-profile annual event in the

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secular-Christian calendar, it is Easter which is the most important celebration in the Christian story. The eternal importance of Jesus’ role in salvation should be considered much like Pascal’s famous wager, wherein he argued that either God does or does not exist, and so therefore the sensible option is to wager that he does, for the payoff is eternal happiness or eternal damnation, compared to time-limited stricture in this life on earth. Similarly, the expectation of eternal reward or punishment (whilst not taught literally by the mainstream churches since the Victorian period) compels many Christians and Christian groups to proactively evangelize. Often, examples which reach the public consciousness, and that appear in the media, are combative forms of evangelism. Whilst not representing the views of majority Christians, the Westboro Baptist Church, from Topeka, Kansas, has successfully managed a media profile based upon their unapologetic damnation of ‘fags’ and ‘fag-enablers’. Such actions are aimed at not just shaming their targets (who have included Swedish vacuum cleaner manufacturers, Elton John and Princess Diana) but in causing repentance for worldviews or actions that, the Westboro community believe, anger God. Examples need not be so extreme – across Australia, Western Europe and America, schools based on socially conservative forms of Christianity, often self-identifying as evangelical, link their approaches to ethical living and personal conduct in their teaching curricula to the need for a personal relationship with Jesus to gain salvation. Indeed, whilst it is easy to highlight fringe groups such as Westboro in linking views of Jesus and ethical behaviour to salvation, it is important to note that examples also come from the centre of Christian life as well; Karen Pence, wife of current US vice president Mike Pence, works for a school with a clear code of conduct for staff, parents and pupils, which links personal conduct, and relationship with Jesus, with future salvation (Immanuel Christian School 2018). Personal relationships with Jesus, interpreted whether compassionately or combatively (if indeed they are mutually exclusive), sit at the heart of lived Christianity and the performative and public declaration of Christian identity and life for many Christians.

POPULAR JESUS(ES) Several chapters in this volume cover aspects of popular culture and Christianity. In this short section, I want to highlight how these contexts often centre upon the person of Jesus in particular, rather than Christianity in general. Examples must be necessarily limited, so I will restrict myself to reference to film, theatre and sport, but my intention is to show personal Christian responses to Jesus in popular cultural events within society. Since the dawn of cinema, visual depictions of Jesus have been common, from GuyBlaché’s La Vie Du Christ (1906), through Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ (1988) to Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). Furthermore, there has been much scholarship on Christ motifs in films, from Scorsese dramas to Star Wars, and Alien to Rocky (Martin 1995; Deacy 2001). My focus, however, is not on these theological redemption or salvific motifs that filmmakers may have used, which were inspired or influenced by Christian thought, but on how Christians have used these films as ways of relating to Jesus in their lived expression of Christianity in their personal lives. Much of the time, this presents itself in the collective response of Christian communities to these depictions of Jesus. After the release of Gibson’s film, research has shown that many Christians were visiting theatres to see the film multiple times (Brown et al. 2007). It was also not uncommon for church groups to organize outings to see the film – but they were not going to be entertained, but to enhance their

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relationship with Jesus. In their research, Brown et al. interviewed 1,800 moviegoers and found that respondents who identified as Christians (91.8 per cent of the respondents) found that watching the film enhanced their faith; 46.2 per cent stated they watched the film for ‘personal spiritual growth’ and ‘the majority of respondents believed that their “knowledge of Jesus Christ was increased” through their viewing of the film’ (Brown et al. 2007: 102). For Christians, therefore, watching the film was not a passive act, but an active participation in their relationship with Jesus; an on-going, dynamic relationship which could be enhanced by a film as well as participation in formal rituals and community activities. Such interactions have been common throughout history for Christians; from the Middle Ages onwards across Europe, Mystery plays were common public events on high days and holidays – none perhaps more famous than those of the city of York in northern England, where a whole host of plays (with early records suggesting as many as fifty-one) were performed by local Guilds on the Feast of Corpus Christi, enacting events in the life of Jesus. At these events, Guild members would undertake roles relevant to their profession: vintners for the Wedding at Cana, carpenters for the Crucifixion and so on. Such was the emotion engendered by this participation in, and remembrance of, the life of Jesus, that in 1419, members of the public rioted against members of the carpenter’s Guild for their part in the death of Jesus (York Museums Trust 2019). Whilst such events are clearly extreme, they remind us of the embodied participation that Christians perform when they engage with the person and persona of Jesus in popular cultural events. Indeed, these traditions have been kept alive within modern societies, including in 2006, when the Manchester Passion was performed as a live-broadcast event using actors, musicians and songs from local Manchester bands (including The Smiths, Oasis, James and Joy Division). As a part of the event, local people participated in crowd scenes, including the trial and judgement of Jesus, processions with crosses and even direct-to-camera interviews with actors discussing their understanding of their faith, including a Scottish punk character and born-again Christian, who argued that were Jesus to be around today, ‘he would be a punk … as he hung around with the freaks and the weirdos’ (King-Dabbs and Powell 2006). The rise of organized team sports in the Victorian era has clear links to Christianity. Rugby developed as a unique code of football in the English public schools as a direct response to calls for a muscular form of Christianity, where pupils were expected to be healthy in body and healthy of soul. Similarly, some of the oldest football clubs in the world were founded specifically by church communities. These include famous English teams such as Everton, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur. Although these are largely related to the social work of Christian groups in general, rather than explicit links to the Jesus person and persona in particular, when we explore the lives and actions of individual athletes, we often find performative and very public links to the importance of Jesus in the lives of everyday Christians. Whilst there are innumerable Christian athletes and sports persons in different sports across the world, two of the highest-profile examples in recent years have been the Brazilian footballer Kaká and the British triple jumper Jonathan Edwards. Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite, better known as Kaká, was FIFA World Footballer of the Year in 2007 and has won every major club honour, in addition to the FIFA World Cup, with his native Brazil, in 2002. As one of the highestprofile sportsmen in the world, he had unique access to millions of devoted fans and followers and was the first major star from any sport to amass 10 million twitter followers (Sporting Intelligence 2012). Like many footballers of his privileged generation, he could have chosen to follow the cult of personality so prevalent in many major sports stars. For

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Kaká, however, his relationship with Jesus over-rode this. The off-spring of middle-class parents from Gama, in Western Brazil, Kaká was raised in an evangelical Christian family, but his life changed forever when, at the age of 18, and with his promising football career burgeoning, he had an accident jumping into a swimming pool, which broke vertebrae in his back. His subsequent recovery to full fitness and to a career at the highest echelons of his sport was attributed by Kaká not to medical science, but to his relationship with Jesus. Kaká saw a miracle in his recovery and has afterwards dedicated his life to public worship of, and subjugation to, Jesus. In addition to numerous interviews telling his story, Kaká consistently celebrated goals by pointing to heaven and had his personalized (and expensively sponsored) boots hand-stitched with the phrase ‘Jesus in First Place’. Perhaps most famously of all, he often wore a T-shirt underneath his team jersey, which he would remove at the end of high-profile matches, to reveal the slogan ‘I Belong to Jesus’. Similarly, the British Triple Jumper Jonathan Edwards, a former European, Commonwealth, World and Olympic Champion, and still world record holder for his event, had a career dominated by his personal relationship with Jesus. The son of a Church of England vicar, Edwards famously refused to jump on Sundays during the early part of his career – a decision which cost him the chance to compete at the 1991 World Championships. Changing his mind in 1993, following conversation with his father, Edwards went on to compete on Sundays and become the most decorated jumper in athletics history. Interestingly, Edwards renounced his Christian faith in 2007, exampling the fluid and complex nature of negotiated religious identities both within and without religious communities. In both Kaká and Edwards, therefore, we can see examples of performative and publicly declarative forms of embodied worship – quite literally, where their relationship with Jesus influenced how they used their bodies, in the same way as Christians performing Eucharist in formal settings. Christians have relationships with Jesus at all times of their lives, at work and at play, in formal and informal worship settings.

ALTERNATIVE JESUS(ES) Lastly, but certainly not least, I wish to briefly address ‘alternative’ Jesus(es). By alternative, I mean that which is not a part of the mainstream teachings of most Christian churches. Importantly, this does not make them any less relevant for the lives of individual Christians. If, as scholars, we explore Christianity as a living religion, preferencing embodied and performative lives of everyday Christians, we must engage with diversity to understand the full spectrum of Christian experience. The first alternative Jesus I wish to highlight is the female Christ, or Christa as she is sometimes known. Popularized by feminist theologians in the last few decades, the term ‘Christa’ comes from a sculpture made by the British artist Edwina Sandys in 1974, and which was hung briefly in St John the Divine in New York in 1984 before being removed due to controversy. The sculpture is a simple, and very traditional, crucifixion scene with Jesus on a cross and little else, with the exception being that Jesus is depicted as having a female body, including breasts. Sandys, who is not religious, has previously noted that the sculpture was designed to highlight the suffering of women around the world – much like our earlier example of Rocha’s Tortured Christ, it is designed to highlight suffering of those relating to Jesus in the body and form of Jesus himself (Ballen 2011). In her recent work Seeking the Risen Christa, Slee notes that ‘[whilst] some see any attempt to image Christ in female form as outrageous, even blasphemous … Christa is not some

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minority, off-beam idiosyncratic preoccupation of a group of specialist academics or extreme feminists … the Christa is one among many symbols of a re-emergence of the (divine) feminine’ (Slee 2011: 3, 6). In Slee’s approach, Christa can act in the same way as queer, black and post-colonial approaches, which each, in their own way, undermine the traditional narratives of Jesus, Christ and Christianity without doing damage – they refocus on the experiences of everyday Christians in ways relevant to them, and from which we may all learn, whatever our gender or sexuality. Similarly, depictions of Jesus as queer have acted in recent years as counter-points to dominant heteronormative narratives within Christian imagery and practice. These have ranged from characters in protest and Pride marches (Farrell 2017) to subjects of poetry or literature. Indeed, so controversial have depictions of queer Jesus been that the last ever successful prosecution under English blasphemy laws (now rescinded) was for a poem by James Kirkup titled ‘The Love that Dares to Speak Its Name’, printed in Gay News in 1979, and for which the editor received a jail sentence (suspended) and fine, which described a physical homosexual relationship between Jesus on the cross and the centurion at his feet (Pink News 2008). Yet it is important to note that depictions of Jesus as queer or gay are not usually intended to shock; they may well be juxtaposed against heteronormative depictions, but they should not be reduced to simple protests or reactions; queering Jesus, for many Christians, represents a loving and spiritual way of connecting with their saviour, in ways that traditional forms of Christian imagery or theology have not always allowed. In his article ‘How to Be Fashionably Queer: Reminding the Church of the Importance of Sexual Stories’, Hamilton Simpson notes that ‘A valuable starting point for reclaiming the importance of sexual stories can be found in recognizing that the biblical texts, including the story of Jesus, are themselves sexual stories. By identifying sexual possibilities in Scripture and by relating to Jesus as a sexual being people will be liberated to connect their own sexual stories with God’s story’ (Hamilton Simpson 2005: 102). Indeed, in his work, Hamilton Simpson compares the acceptance that queer Christians received in fashion boutiques, where conversations on sexuality and sexual relations were commonplace, with the unwillingness of churches to engage in the sexual stories of their congregants, ironically noting that the former has often provided a more pastoral, spiritual space for queer Christians. Linking conceptions of Queer Jesus to our earlier comments on the importance of individual Christians’ relationships with Jesus as an influence on their life choices and public expressions of their faith, Hamilton Simpson helpfully notes, ‘Opening the closet and discovering that Jesus can be dressed in a sexual outfit different from the naked and bloodied body that has become his characteristic fashion label enables an understanding of his life that is connected with sexual liberation and justice’ (Hamilton Simpson 2003: 107). Much of this chapter has purposefully linked to the human, historical and embodied Jesus with whom Christians relate in their lived expressions of Christianity. This is also true for transgender and intersex Christians. In ‘Sex Otherwise: Intersex, Theology and the Maleness of Jesus’, Susannah Cornwall argues that ‘sex is a human rather than a divine attribute and that maleness is not a necessary carrier of Jesus’ soteriological capacity. Human sex does not in itself image God, but is a channel for other divine characteristics, such as generativity and relationality, imaged in humans’ (Cornwall 2014). Such a viewpoint does not argue against the male body of the historical Jesus, but instead urges Christians to engage with the Christ-nature of Jesus, to replicate his divine characteristics beyond physical, gendered identities. One performer who has undertaken this task is Jo Clifford. A playwright born in England and raised as a boy (John), Jo transitioned

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in the late 2000s and is most famous for her self-acted performances of her character ‘Jesus, Queen of Heaven’. Jo’s relationship with Christianity is fluid, and she returned to a reading of the Gospels after receiving threats and abuse on the street. Inspired by the ‘wisdom and love’ of the narrative, Clifford performs an embodied and relational understanding of Jesus relevant to her life experience (Clifford 2018). Whilst such voices are often muted in Christian dialogue, it is a certainty that they will become a larger part of the Christian conversation in years and decades to come. Finally in this section, and indeed chapter, I wish to raise the issue of ‘alternative Jesus(es)’ in a more general way. Every interpretation of Jesus is an alternative. There is no one story of Jesus. Throughout this chapter, I have linked to events in the life of Jesus by using references to the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And yet, these are not the only stories of Jesus, even from the early Church. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, probably dating from the early- to mid-second century, shows us a very different story of Jesus – one in which he even kills children he is playing with as a youngster, before raising some back to life (Ehrman 1999: 256–57). This document, along with others such as The Wisdom of Jesus Christ, The Gospel of Philip and The Gospel of Peter, tells alternative stories of Jesus which did not enter the Canon but were produced by writers negotiating and projecting their own understandings of Jesus, relevant to their own worldview, time and place. Christians have always done this, and they will continue to do so. Christianity’s stories of Jesus, and the impact of these on the lived realities of individual Christians, are ongoing narratives.

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CHAPTER SIX

Fieldwork in studying Christians SIMON COLEMAN

In the course of carrying out fieldwork on Christians, I have stood in a hall full of thousands of Swedish Pentecostalists speaking in tongues; I have watched devout pilgrims prostrate themselves before an image of the Virgin Mary in a tiny, dark, enclosed space in the English countryside; and I have participated in a Sunday morning service in a giant Nigerian prayer camp that contains an auditorium a kilometre in length. But fieldwork has also involved engaging in other, very different activities in each of these places: tobogganing in the snow with the rowdy children of Pentecostal congregation members (one of my more terrifying fieldwork experiences); sitting in a Norfolk pub, discussing the merits of the local beer with pilgrims; and hanging out with students at the prayer camp’s university as we watched a satellite broadcast of an English football match. My point in juxtaposing these activities is to illustrate one of my main arguments in this chapter: the fact that studying Christians – as opposed to the rather more abstract Christianity – often means observing and taking part in activities with people when they are not being overtly ‘religious’. Fieldwork is about observing the entirety of people’s lives, as much as is possible and ethical. By doing so, one comes to understand that what people do – and believe – is not necessarily coherent, consciously understood or easily stated in words. Christian experience is expressed through different media, with different levels of intensity, across very different contexts. It may even permeate such activities as drinking beer, watching a sports match or tobogganing.1 Fieldwork tends to be a time-consuming, often puzzling, business. It involves quite a bit of ‘hanging out’ when nothing much seems to be happening, as well as engaging in more focused events. It often entails the fieldworker leaving home in order to inhabit an unfamiliar place where he or she must not only observe but also interact with and befriend informants. While such a movement might operate at a largely metaphorical level (such as when one simply goes down the street to study a local congregation), it might involve travelling to a distant part of the world and learning a different language. Whether or not the field is physically and culturally remote from one’s normal life, the work is quite distinctive: the researcher takes extensive notes and typically interacts with people whom he or she would never regularly meet. Fieldwork also often involves developing modes of heightened attention, when one is attempting to observe, but also to absorb, the sense of a particular place or an event. I retain quite vivid memories of certain fieldwork encounters, not only because of my notes but also because of the strength of my original engagement in the situation.

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However hard he or she tries, the fieldworker will inevitably at some points feel puzzled, disoriented and unclear about what is going on. But such disorientation is often precisely the point of the whole exercise. Doing fieldwork means observing and participating but also imagining the world anew, trying to take nothing for granted and asking: Why do people do things this way, when so many other options might be available to them? In the following, I draw on specific case studies, referring either to my own or to others’ experiences. I focus mostly on Anglophone literatures and suggest some useful texts to read without attempting a comprehensive survey of relevant works. I intend to illustrate the virtues of fieldwork – its capacity to highlight the subtlety, the multiplicity, the shifting character of all human action and interaction, including that which we choose to label Christian. I want to convey a sense of how fieldwork is actually done – its interventions and non-interventions in social life, its ethical as well as epistemological dilemmas, its particular physical, emotional and intellectual demands on the fieldworker. I also suggest that, precisely through the methodological virtue of getting as close as possible to people’s lives, fieldwork reveals informants’ doubts as well as their convictions, their consistencies and inconsistencies. Such research may therefore challenge the assumption we often make that being a Christian is fundamentally about holding a particular set of ‘beliefs’, and it may even begin to trouble the firm boundary sometimes assumed to exist between ‘believing’ informant and ‘non-believing’ fieldworker. I explore these themes through looking at the politics and the practicalities of carrying out fieldwork on Christians, before going on to ask whether and how such a methodology has the capacity to shift our initial assumptions about what it might mean to be a Christian. I then consider the character of the ‘knowledge’ one derives from fieldwork on Christian groups. This latter question raises the issue of how ethnographic approaches to practising Christianity relate to more obviously theological frames of analysis and understanding. My chapter, then, has practical, methodological and theoretical aims. I attempt as a non-religious anthropologist, albeit one raised with both Jewish and Protestant traces in his family background, to convey the dilemmas and excitement of carrying out fieldwork among Christians. In so doing, I deploy the word ‘arts’ in a double sense. Most obviously, I illustrate and explore some of the techniques, strategies and attitudes of the fieldworker. In addition, however, I emphasize that fieldwork involves engagement with people but also material forms – buildings, images, landscapes – that have significant aesthetic dimensions, and which form an essential part of what we observe and experience as fieldworkers of Christian styles of life.

THE POLITICS OF FIELDWORK My own discipline, anthropology, has – possibly above all others – been constituted through the practice of fieldwork. While there are some specific dimensions to this disciplinary history, it also highlights more general issues relating to the politics of identifying, and engaging with, Christians as our field of study. Anthropology emerged out of Euro-American universities in the first decades of the twentieth century and soon spread its fieldworkers throughout the world – particularly in Africa, the South Pacific and Central and South America. The work of people such as Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) in the Trobriand Islands or E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1956) in Africa became well-known as a result of their apparent immersion in particular places and detailed documentation of the cultural and social rationales behind such activities as sacrifice, ritual exchange and witchcraft. While these earlier anthropologists focused on ‘tribal’ religious practices,

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important studies also emerged of members of so-called ‘world religions’ – Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism – though ethnographic approaches barely acknowledged elite or textually based forms of practice and focused much more on how religious engagement was deeply embedded in local ways of life, often inseparable from politics, economic, kinship and so on. A notable feature of these ethnographic case studies of religious practices around the world was their relative lack of focus on one religion in particular: Christianity. The point should not be overstressed, since important work was carried out in southern Europe and parts of Africa (e.g. Sundkler 1948; Peristiany 1966; Peel 1968). Nonetheless, for many decades fieldwork that focused specifically on Christians remained sparse, for political as well as epistemological reasons. Early anthropologists – and to some degree other social sciences – wished to develop a scientific approach that could not be confused with the assumptions and methods of theology (see e.g. Cannell 2006). This stance is still evident in much ethnographic fieldwork. In a well-known piece, the anthropologist Alfred Gell (1992) commends the ‘methodological atheism’ of ethnographers of religion. According to Gell, the bracketing off of personal convictions and theistic beliefs is the epistemological move necessary for social scientists to be able to highlight links between religious ideas and the structure of corporate groups, social hierarchies and so on (1992: 41). One consequence of anthropologists’ desire to avoid theological entanglements was that extensive mention of Christianity became almost taboo for fieldworkers, who were also anxious to present the viability of expressions of religion remote from Western institutions. For much of the twentieth century, anthropological fieldworkers might have been very aware of the presence of missions in the places where they carried out research, but they often saw these proselytizing Christians as hindrances in their attempts to examine what they regarded as more ‘authentic’, local expressions of religion (Coleman and Hackett 2015). Arguably, however, beyond the academic politics of such a stance, there were deeper epistemological issues that any fieldworker must still face today, especially if they are based in an academic and cultural context influenced by the history of Western Christianity. As Chris Hann (2007: 383) has noted, Christianity was the dominant religion of the countries in which anthropological – and, we might add, social scientific – approaches were first established. Such approaches continue to provide powerful religious idioms, whether acknowledged or not, in the countries where many practitioners live and work. Thus the problem here becomes not so much the conscious bracketing out of Christianity from ethnography, but rather the fact that researchers simply do not notice the implicit assumptions they make about religion in general or Christianity in particular. This is a point that Talal Asad (1993), the scholar of Islam, has made in his argument that a focus on trying to find ‘meaning’ in religion is a clear example of Christian (indeed, theological) bias, since other religions do not attach the same importance to the internalization of ideas. Earlier, Rodney Needham (1972) had noted his difficulties in locating any concept of Christian ‘belief’ in his fieldwork among a people, the Penan of Borneo, who had no formal creed and no word corresponding to such an idea. It may be that the permeation of much social scientific discourse relating to all religions by Christian assumptions is what is most distinctive about fieldwork among such groups, given the peculiar challenges for scholars trained in the Western tradition to transcend the limitations of their background. Such problems do not of course disappear when researchers turn to studying ‘Christianity’ itself – a religion spread

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throughout the world, with billions of adherents and divided up into denominations associated with a huge variety of ideological and ritual orientations. Fenella Cannell (2005), an ethnographer of Mormonism, has noted how social scientific assumptions about the character of ‘mainstream Christianity’ that have been derived from more ascetic models of Protestantism have left researchers ill-equipped to study or even take seriously contemporary faiths such as Mormonism, which maintains very different views towards materiality and worldliness. I have experienced similar issues in my own work on so-called Prosperity Christians in Sweden (Coleman 2000; see also Harding 1991). Often dismissed by critics as adherents of an inauthentic or even fraudulent ‘Health and Wealth Christianity’, the members of the Word of Life ministry in Uppsala looked (especially in the 1980s and 1990s) very different from their Lutheran counterparts, given their unabashed celebration of material success and bodily well-being as signs of God’s blessing. I remember one conference in the UK where I presented work on the Word of Life and was asked by my discussant (in this case an American scholar of religious studies): ‘Yes, but are they really Christian?’ (Coleman 2002). Such a question perhaps made sense from a theological perspective, but fieldworkers usually try, as far as possible, to avoid such normative stances. The initial aim must be to attempt to see the world through the eyes of informants, and then to link such perspectives to the social, economic and cultural contexts in which they appear to resonate or to make sense. Such a stance of seeming neutrality is not easy to maintain; nor is it possible for the fieldworkers simply to expunge all of their cultural assumptions when they enter the field. Nonetheless, it is important to develop a certain stance of openness when one does fieldwork: not necessarily agreeing with what one is observing, but being prepared to try to understand why it is being expressed. This orientation refers to what Michael Carrithers (2005: 433) has called the ‘moral aesthetic standards’ of ethnographic practice: ‘the ability to enter into another person’s situation imaginatively without necessarily sharing the other’s values or cosmology’ (ibid.: 438). It is precisely such a stance that illustrates one of the virtues of the arts of fieldwork: rather than simply dismissing Mormons or Prosperity Christians as unworthy of attention  – even as heretical – the researcher can reveal the limitations of prevailing academic or wider cultural assumptions about what might constitute Christianity. The aim of such work is to understand Mormonism and the Prosperity Gospel – both of which are hugely successful if assessed in terms of numbers of followers – as important cultural phenomena that need to be addressed, using close-up methods of observation. In fact, only through carrying fieldwork did I discover that some adherents of the Word of Life were also, at the same time, active members of the Lutheran Church. Such are the seeming contradictions of everyday life as a Christian, and it is precisely these surprises and counter-intuitive situations that fieldwork can reveal. In recent years, many more anthropologists have turned their attention to carrying out fieldwork that focuses directly on Christians, and in so doing, they have tended to be guided by changing patterns of religious expression across the globe. Lamin Sanneh tells us that in 1950 some 80 per cent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and North America; however, by 2005, the vast majority of Christians lived in Asia, Africa and Latin America (2013: xiv). The long-standing assumption that resources, prestige and decisionmaking would mostly emanate from liberal Euro-American contexts has been replaced by the recognition that powerful centres of religion have increasingly been ‘Southernized’, rooted more and more in places such as Brazil or West Africa. Furthermore, migration

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processes have meant that increasing numbers of Christians from such countries have been found in Euro-American centres (Coleman and Maier 2013). A feature of such novel ethnographic attention has been its initial focus on Pentecostal and charismatic Christians – the most visible and markedly active Christians, but also arguably those who have appeared most ‘different’ to many researchers raised in EuroAmerican cultural and intellectual contexts. Once again, a politically loaded set of assumptions can be discerned in these trends. As Chris Hann (2007: 384) has pointed out, we generally lack an extensive number of truly ethnographic studies of Anglican, Episcopalian, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic congregations.2 These congregations have perhaps seemed too close to the day-to-day worlds of many fieldworkers to be noticeable, belonging in Cannell’s words (2006: 5), to ‘a religion whose very proximity has hitherto rendered it only imperfectly perceptible’. This criticism does not apply to anthropology alone. Such emphases and gaps have also been evident in studies carried out within sociology and religious studies. There is a strong tradition, for instance, of carrying out qualitative studies of ‘migrant’ churches in northern Europe: two powerful examples from the UK are Malcolm Calley’s God’s People: West Indian Pentecostal Sects in England (1965) and Ken Pryce’s Endless Pressure: A Study of West Indian Lifestyles in Bristol (1979). While such works have been deservedly influential and are of great value, their focus – on groups looked at with suspicion by what Hann calls ‘dominant institutionalized Christian denominations’ (2007: 384) – again raises the question as to why more ethnographic fieldwork examining the ‘culture’ of such dominant denominations does not exist. Happily, this situation is also slowly changing. One of my favourite studies of Christians who might easily be ‘taken for granted’ is Peter Stromberg’s Symbols of Community (1986), where he examines what he calls the ‘cultural system’ of a Swedish free church congregation, based in Stockholm, and asks classic questions about social bonding: What keeps the congregation together? And how does it both reflect and respond to basic themes in Swedish life as a whole, such as difficulties of communication in maintaining relations with others? Another illuminating text is Martin Stringer’s On the Perception of Worship (1999), written by a scholar trained in both social anthropology and theology and providing an ethnography of worship in four congregations (Baptist, Roman Catholic, Independent and Anglican) in the English city of Manchester. Stringer notes that he looked around for specifically ethnographic studies of ‘worship in practice’ (ibid.: 4) on these types of congregations but could find very little. A book that deploys fieldwork to highlight the lives of Christians often unnoticed by fellow parishioners or scholars is Abby Day’s vivid study of ‘the deeply embodied, habituated, routine experience’ of being an older Anglican laywoman in England (2017: 16). These works all take us closer to building up suitable ethnographic coverage of the type of Christian activity that has been ignored by many Euro-American fieldworkers, given that it has seemed almost too commonplace to study. However, many gaps still exist. I have, for instance, been involved in a project examining the range of activities taking place in contemporary English cathedrals (e.g. Coleman 2018) and have been struck by the almost complete absence of any previous fieldwork in such spaces. It is also worth noting a limitation of even the studies I have just mentioned: their tendency to focus study on congregations per se – in other words, on institutions where more active Christians are likely to come together on a regular basis. As suggested by my initial remarks in this chapter, part of the challenge for any fieldworker must be to try to understand what it means to be a Christian both in and out of church (and indeed to

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study Christians who never go to church at all). This strategy presents a special challenge for fieldwork in complex, urban situations, where what is sometimes called ‘ethnography by appointment’ (i.e. at set times) is much easier to achieve than obtaining an all-round overview of people’s lives. Gaining such a wider perspective is an element of the ‘Lived Religion’ approach adopted by this volume as a whole, but it was also anticipated by what the English priest and professor Edward Bailey called ‘implicit religion’ (1998), which he saw as the inherent religiosity contained even in supposedly secular situations, and which led him to carry out fieldwork in, among other places, a pub in the English city of Bristol. Other exemplary works might be mentioned. The historian Robert Orsi (2006) has extended our understanding of everyday Roman Catholicism in North America by rooting his work in the intimate details of homes, streets and families. Tim Jenkins’s Religion in English Everyday Life (1999) locates religious practices in churches but also in the broader settings of country life and city suburbs. Anna Strhan’s Aliens and Strangers? (2015) takes on the challenge of tracing the lives of evangelicals in London, not only through worship in church but also as they try to make sense – and coherence – out of their lives while at work and while travelling around other parts of the city.3 In this section, I have explored some of the virtues of a fieldworking approach – its ability to challenge assumptions, to present an all-round view of religion, to uncover ways of life that are otherwise overlooked. I have also mentioned a few of the arts of ethnography, including the detailed taking of notes but also the development of a heightened awareness of one’s social and physical surroundings, combined with the attempt to see everything anew. In addition, however, I have suggested some of the limitations of work carried out on Christians, such as the tendency (for understandable practical reasons) to focus on religious institutions such as churches, and especially on what from a certain Western cultural and intellectual perspective have appeared to be non-mainstream examples. We are now ready to move on to a key question in the carrying out of fieldwork among Christians: How should the researcher present himself or herself in approaching and inhabiting the religious lives of others?

ACCESS, IDENTITY AND COMMITMENT A particular feature of fieldwork – compared with, say, carrying out experiments in a laboratory or administering a questionnaire – is its lack of ‘control’ over what is being investigated. The researcher generally tries to remain open to the unpredictability and serendipity of human life. In these senses, fieldwork does not possess a finely tuned capacity to test specific hypotheses. However, maintaining such openness does not imply that fieldwork lacks appropriate advanced planning in terms of identifying significant questions that the researcher wishes to answer, considering how to define and demarcate a field of study and – of key importance – determining how to gain access to informants through presenting one’s research aims and identity. These questions of self-representation raise ethical but also practical questions. All fieldworkers must be open about their intentions with informants; however, while such an aim is simple to express, it is not always easy to execute. It would, for instance, be highly disruptive to insist that one declares one’s identity as a researcher on all occasions, such as (to cite a fieldwork situation example I have experienced) at a gathering of tens of thousands of members of the Redeemed Church of God in the Excel Arena, central London. Even when one knows informants closely, misunderstandings

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can occur. The first time I carried out fieldwork within a Pentecostal congregation in Uppsala in the mid-late 1980s, I felt that I had come to know a number of its members quite well within the first six months of my stay and that I had explained to them what I was doing. I was therefore quite taken aback when one of them asked me a question, midway through my initial fieldwork, to the effect of: ‘What did you say you were again? An anthroposophist?’ In retrospect, I think that this question told me two important things about fieldwork. First, that we should not assume that people grasp clearly what it is that we do, even when we have provided forms of explanation that make perfect sense to us: after all, we require university students to spend years reading ethnographic research in order to gain a sense of what it is about. Second, while we may assume that our activities take centre stage within the consciousness of informants, from the perspective of my Swedish friend, the key point was that I was some kind of visitor to the congregation (simply one among many) to whom he had been extending a welcome for some months. A further contextual issue should also be mentioned early on in any discussion of access and identity, and it brings us back to the particular character of studying Christianity ‘close-up’ from the perspective of a researcher coming from a Euro-American background. When Malinowski travelled to the South Seas, he did not have to explain to Trobriand Islanders whether or not he adhered to their ‘religion’; however, in studying a missionary faith such as Christianity, many researchers must address early on the question of where they stand in relation to the religious activities that they are studying. Such a question takes us back into politics – in this case the micro-politics of negotiating who one is and what one is doing. And, in common with much about fieldwork, there is no single or simple answer. A perspective from one end of the spectrum of religious self-identification is provided by Ruy Blanes in a piece whose title is self-explanatory: ‘The atheist anthropologist: Believers and non-believers in anthropological fieldwork’ (2006). Blanes describes the dilemmas and choices available to a fieldworker who cannot in all conscience tell his Pentecostal friends and informants that he shares their faith. He notes (ibid.: 129): ‘I tried to gain people’s confidence through an ethical commitment to the community, in terms of expressing an honest commitment to dialogue.’ Such a strategy quite reasonably seeks to gain some common ground – that of community engagement – between the anthropologist and the Pentecostalist. What is most striking about Blanes’ experience, however, is the way in which it sometimes confounds any fixed expectations that we might have about the drawing of stark behavioural boundaries between believer and non-believer. He notes that it is true that ‘over time I was able to notice surprise, even incomprehension, on the faces of some of my interlocutors, who could not understand how I was able to attend their churches for years and not have converted’ (ibid.). However, this response to Blanes’ presence was only one among many that he encountered. He also notes that on many occasions, his interlocutors did not seem in the slightest bit interested in his personal convictions. A further aspect of fieldwork emerges in Blanes’ reflections: the link between the identity presented by the fieldworker and ways in which he or she can legitimately participate in the Christian lives being studied. Blanes remarks that Pentecostal worship tends to require a high degree of involvement among participants in its rituals, ranging from singing and clapping to, say, speaking in tongues. Thus the practical negotiation the researcher has with himself or herself (and sometimes with informants) regarding ‘how far one should go’ can be very instructive. Blanes states that ‘you would see me

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clapping, tapping my feet according to the rhythms, and standing up and sitting down when summoned, but you wouldn’t see me respond with “hallelujahs” or “amens” to the pastors’ summons, speak in tongues nor kneel down to pray’ (2006: 230). In his case, it seems that giving certain verbal signals of assent to the pastor’s message was going a step too far – a stance that perhaps reflects the power invested in words by Pentecostalists but also by anthropologists. Blanes had few doubts over his relative outsiderhood concerning his religious convictions, but of course we cannot assume that fieldworkers are necessarily self-identified atheists. Brian Howell (2007), a faculty member at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution, reflects on his participation in the religious lives of four congregations of Baptists in the Philippine city of Baguio. Howell’s initial position therefore seems precisely opposite to that of Blanes: ‘As a fellow Christian believer, I had no problem fully participating in their worship, prayers and daily religious life. Indeed, as an educated visitor with some experience working in Christian churches, I was periodically asked to lead Bible studies or speak at retreats’ (ibid.: 376). However, I want to highlight two aspects of Howell’s nuanced and subtle paper that may help us to challenge any simple division between ‘believing’ and ‘non-believing’ fieldworker. The first is that Howell sees the tendency to draw Christian identity narrowly around a notion of belief as ‘an essentializing of Christianity that limits our understanding of Christians as ethnographers and subjects’ (2007: 373). Howell prefers to refer to the significance of a sense of commitment in exploring the character of Christian subjectivity and argues that his primary mode of identification with his interlocutors was through common engagement in such activities as volunteerism, practical activity and personal growth (ibid.: 377). Consider Howell’s following observation: People in the congregations of my research often engaged me in theological discussions where we either disagreed over some particular doctrine or we talked about others in the congregations who expressed theological positions we felt were different from ours, if not in theological error. But in these discussions rarely did they cast the true Christian identity of me or another into question. There were, occasionally, accusations that someone was ‘not really a Christian’, but these tended to be very rare, extremely serious and often clearly conflated with personal or social discord. Instead, even these doctrinal disagreements or discussions between us often served to highlight the common commitments we and others shared to the community of Christians and a Christian identity. Of course, neither Howell nor I would wish to deny the significance of theology to many Christians, but what I am highlighting here is the specific, community-based context and significance of doctrinal debates. It is precisely through carrying out fieldwork that Howell is able to present such discussions as involving a form of lived theology, enmeshed in people’s interrelations and, for the most part, attempts at mutual understanding. Thus, through this fieldwork lens, we might also recast what I earlier called people’s ‘inconsistencies’: what from the perspective of systematic doctrine appears to lack intellectual coherence may make perfect sense in the context of establishing and maintaining human relationships. It is also intriguing that both Blanes and Howell mention the word ‘commitment’ in referring to the establishing of a rapport with interlocutors: they may mean slightly different things in using the term, but in both cases, they are referring to the importance of demonstrating social engagement in and through the practice of fieldwork.

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The second aspect of Howell’s piece that I want to highlight is the way, having discussed his apparently close links with his Christian informants, he goes on to render such links more complex (2007: 374): But my own experience, and I think our common sense, tells us that two people identifying as Christians, one from North America and one from, say, the northern Philippines, do not share as much ‘culturally’ as would the North American Christian and his or her secular neighbor, regardless of how ‘orthodox’ the beliefs of the Filipino and secularized the identity of the non-Christian North American. Thus we should not make the mistake of assuming that, in the multilayered social and cultural situations that fieldworkers explore, a religious identity will somehow take precedence over all others. In most situations, people maintain a variety of commitments to ideologies, practices and social groups that may not always mesh with each other in a seamless way; accordingly, perceived proximity to another person along one axis of identification may be diluted by distance along another axis. Both Howell and Blanes explore situations where the Christians whom they are studying are clearly enmeshed in ramifying social, cultural and economic, as well as religious, relationships. We should acknowledge, however, that there are times when researchers encounter people engaged in self-conscious attempts to separate themselves from the wider ‘world’, often with striking consequences for the practice of fieldwork. Richard Irvine’s (2010) account of his experience of ethnographic fieldwork in an English Benedictine monastery presents an interesting dilemma relating to participation: Irvine cannot easily imitate his informants since he patently cannot adopt their lifestyle. He must remain a semi-distanced monastic guest, always excluded from highly significant dimensions of his interlocutors’ lives – lives that are very heavily focused on explicitly Christian practices. Irvine’s response to this problem is flexible and adaptive. He develops a method of what he calls ‘peripheral participation’ – a stance that ‘is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated’ (ibid.: 221). Such peripherality involves Irvine attempting to participate assiduously in two significant practices at the monastery that are open to him: the experience of silence and the carrying out of certain forms of work, such as carpentry. He thus describes how he ‘fabricated a daily routine which allowed me to imagine that I was following in the footsteps of the monks from chapel, to workshop, to library, to refectory, into the great silence at the end of the day, and so to bed’ (ibid.: 223). In summarizing his fieldwork strategy, Irvine refers to a concept that we have seen recurring in this section: he calls his method a form of ‘imitation without commitment’. He means here that to claim to be committed to the monastic life would itself have been an indulgent and unsustainable stance; however, his ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Irvine 2010: 224; see Lave and Wenger 1991) became a means of developing a disciplined, instructive engagement with fieldwork without intruding inappropriately into the lives of his enclaved informants. At times, resourceful fieldworkers may even be able to take advantage of their initial exclusion from certain aspects of the religious lives of the people whom they are studying. Gwendolyn Heaner (2010) notes that during her work on a Liberian Pentecostal ministry, she was particularly interested in perceptions of the spirit world. As a non-born-again Christian, she was prevented from attending from the ministry’s ‘deliverance’ clinics, when experienced members of the church would engage in spiritual battles with spirits that might be troubling their clients and congregation members: she was told that such

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occasions were too dangerous for someone who was, in effect, a spiritual outsider. However, her continued stance of openness and acceptance eventually paid off: Because I was trusted, liked and respected after working with the ministry for so many months, despite not being born-again, I was not considered to be a threat. There was no physical evidence of it, so therefore, there was no need to assign a metaphor of ‘spiritually dangerous’ to me. Instead, I was a ‘special child of God,’ simply lost about my spirituality. (ibid.: 204) As Heaner points out, this shift in attitude on the part of informants was instructive on a number of levels. Not only did it allow her access to important rituals, it also helped her appreciate the highly flexible, practical, adaptable character of Pentecostal practices relating to spirits. It seems that the creation of the category ‘special child of God’ drew on Pentecostal categories of understanding while acknowledging the social relationship Heaner had developed with her informants. The four cases I have presented in this section have explored an array of fieldwork situations and strategies, and different positionalities on the part of fieldworkers. The variety of stances revealed points to the challenges of attempting to establish firm methodological rules in gaining and maintaining ethical access to field sites. Rather, the fieldworker must remain methodologically resourceful in relation to unpredictable contexts of study. Studying ‘lived’ religion requires methods adapted to the mess of real existence.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE One way of appreciating the difference that an ethnographic approach can make is to see how fieldwork can directly enrich our understanding of theological or doctrinal concepts. For instance, Peter Stromberg’s ethnography of a Swedish church (1986), mentioned above, examines a Christian concept that is considerable important to his informants, the notion of ‘grace’. However, he stresses that he is interested in ‘grace as a cultural phenomenon, not as a religious one’ (ibid.: 2). What emerges throughout the book is Stromberg’s understanding of ‘grace’ as a powerful dimension of the whole Christian life, mediating between personal experience and more collective attachments: What I have called commitment – or grace, in the words of the believer – is a relationship between the believer and the symbol of faith. By ‘symbol of faith’ here I simply mean to refer to an object, word, or idea that believers use in formulating or practicing their faith, an element of their religious language. The peculiar characteristic of the relationship of commitment is that it is an experience; that is, grace the symbol is experienced by the believer. Stromberg’s focus is on the lived reality of ‘commitment’ (that word again) for his informants – a reality that can be explored by the connections he establishes with people whose lives he comes to know over an extended period of time. Such fieldwork tracks the ‘social life’ of the concept of grace, illustrating how it plays out in people’s lives within and beyond formal situations of worship. Again, we see how formal theological or dogmatic positions tend to look more nuanced when viewed from a closer perspective. An obvious further example of what I mean relates to the widely assumed ‘literalism’ of fundamentalist and highly conservative Protestant groups. The

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popular stereotype of such groups is that they assert that the Bible, as holy writ, must be taken as absolutely true, and thus as providing a complete and unambiguous blueprint for the life of the adherent. Most famously, what is called biblical ‘creationism’ is a broad social movement that claims that the Book of Genesis tells us clearly how God created the earth, so that for instance scientific theories of evolution must be false – indeed, secular ‘lies’. This kind of reasoning appears to separate out ‘Christian’ and ‘secular’ worlds of thought very starkly – certainly in the view of a famous scientist like Richard Dawkins. However, the apparently rigid character of creationism once again invites the ethnographer to ask how such ideas look from the perspective of the lives of ordinary Christians, as opposed to public polemicists. Thus, when my colleague Leslie Carlin and I began to talk to British members of creationist organizations, a much more complex and interesting picture emerged (2004). For instance, one informant told us: ‘Well … I think what I’ve realised is that the only reason I believe in creation at all is because of what the Lord’s doing in my life.’ Her argument and those of many others whom we talked to was that they were not terribly interested in the exact details of creationist argument; what was much more important was developing a personal, everyday experience of interaction with the divine Creator. Quite a similar view is expressed by James Bielo (2015) in his ethnography of a creationist theme park in Kentucky, which includes a large model of Noah’s Ark, built in part according to specifications from Genesis 6–9. The park thus seems to echo, even to embody, biblical injunctions. But Bielo’s exploration of how the park was constructed indicates how literalism here is less about a rigid adherence to a single view of the world and more a way of capturing the imagination: ‘Literalism is not reasoned through, justified, explained, or defended. It is used, enacted, and exploited for its storytelling potential’ (ibid.: 32). The story, materialized into an entertaining and memorable experience, makes the literalism come alive, transcending the narrow world of theological scholasticism and moving into a more entertaining – and creative – realm.

THE WHAT, WHEN AND WHERE OF BEING A CHRISTIAN If Christians ‘live’ their faith, in and out of church, the focus, intensity and selfconsciousness of their identity will shift over the course of a day, a week and so on. One of the advantages of fieldwork is that it can convey some sense of the manifestations and implications of such shifts over space and time. An excellent exploration of the significance of the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of being Christian is provided by Andreas Bandak’s (2012) discussion of fieldwork he carried out in Damascus in 2005, when he accompanied some informants in celebrating the Feast of the Holy Cross. Rather than beginning his analysis in a church, Bandak starts by describing what happens in a car, taking him and his friend Nabil out of the city to a holy site. At one point, Bandak asks his friend which church he attends and receives the brief answer: ‘I don’t know, I am not a believer!’ (ibid.: 539). In fact, Nabil is a young man who sings in a church choir, wears a cross around his neck and often describes himself as a Catholic. As Bandak reflects: ‘To be a Christian and to believe does not therefore seem to be a unison category, or even one he is certain of … at different points in time or place’ (ibid.). Indeed, later in the evening Nabil discusses the possibility of a statue of the Virgin Mary talking and ends up praying in a church.

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We might contrast Bandak’s meticulous documentation of Nabil’s different religious stances with the latter’s own apparent inconsistencies. However, as ethnographers, our job is not to render Nabil’s variations of stance artificially coherent but rather to recognize what they tell us about the contextual character of much religious identity and practice. Bandak uses a metaphor of foregrounding and backgrounding to indicate questions of religious saliency at any given ethnographic moment, and notes how religious subjects may take up different positions within a relatively short time span, which may include overt ritual and non-ritual action as well as blends between the two. With such ethnography, we are exploring the very boundaries between so-called belief and non-belief, indicating that they may not be very useful ways of establishing whether or not a person can be called ‘Christian’. One implication of this approach, as I have suggested above, is that the fieldworker’s attention should be directed not only at the markedly pious but also at others – probably the majority in many social and cultural contexts – who may not be entirely sure of their religious stance. This issue has been explored by Abby Day (e.g. 2009) in her attempt to understand what ‘belief’ might imply in a contemporary English context – a country where according to regular censuses well over half of the population self-identify as Christian, but where levels of regular practice are much lower.4 In interviewing some sixty-eight people around towns and villages in northern England, Day decided on an unusual research strategy: not to mention religion per se at all, but rather to see how informants expressed their social and cultural attachments and values. Her questions were thus deliberately open-ended, ‘designed to probe what people believe in, where they sourced those beliefs from and how they practised them’ (2009: 93). What Day uncovered was a complex, ‘confused’ situation not unlike Bandak described for Nabil: ‘My questions provoked discussions to reveal atheists who believe in ghosts, agnostics who despise religion and say they are Christian; humanists who believe in life after death and Christians who would rather pray to their dead relatives than to God or Jesus’ (ibid.: 95). At the background to such narratives were not so much attachments to explicit creeds or religious propositions, but rather the valuing of stories and places that linked people to forms of sociality and reciprocal, emotional relationships, past and present. For instance, after interviewing a young man named Jordan, Day reflected (ibid.: 96): It was only, for example, when Jordan started to tell me lengthy stories about his life that I began to understand what mattered to him and what he valued – such as doing well in school or helping with chores at home, and even in being Christian, so long as ‘Christian’ did not mean ‘religious’. He finally told me that he had said he was a Christian because that was what it said on his passport. He may have confused his birth certificate with his baptismal certificate, but the point he was making was that being Christian was related to values about his home and family, not to a god, a church or a faith community. One of Day’s conclusions is that many people who self-identify as Christian do so in order to mark social differences, to express forms of belonging through articulating examples of socio-cultural exclusion and inclusion. In certain respects, she might be said to be describing what ‘commitment’ means to the people who inhabit a realm that is culturally Christian without being ‘religiously’ so. While it might be said that engaging in interviews is not intense fieldwork in itself, Day’s ‘open’ approach to questioning, allowing informants to express their values without having to fit in with categories predetermined by the researcher, is a very ethnographic strategy.

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Even as they are studying the ‘edges’, or perhaps better-put the complex everyday realities, of religious attachment and non-attachment, Bandak and Day are also revealing the unexpected elements that might go into ‘what’ a Christian is, as well as ‘when’ and ‘where’. Their findings correspond very well with my own work even amongst populations assumed to be enthusiastic ‘believers’, such as the Pentecostal Christians, whom I have mentioned in this chapter (e.g. Coleman 2000). From the outside, the Word of Life adherents and more conventional Pentecostalists whom I encountered all looked like ‘born-agains’ – those who had undergone a life-changing conversion to a form of religious identity denied to the atheist or agnostic ethnographer. Yet, there are many ways to be converted, to be born again, and here I find myself in some sympathy with Jeppe Sinding Jensen in his assertion (2011: 32) that the idea that there is, by definition, ‘a deep qualitative abyss between insiders and outsiders’ is itself something of a mystical postulate. Jensen’s point is worth considering – from a social scientific, rather than a theological perspective – not only because the boundaries of being Christian and not being Christian are more complicated than might first appear but also because even within a self-identified Christian group, the very character of commitment can take very different forms.

CONCLUDING REMARKS My aim in this chapter has not been to claim that the ethnographic knowledge obtained through fieldwork is the only way to understand Christian lifestyles. Rather, it has been to point out the distinctive virtues and arts of this way of approaching the task. While there is much about the full array of potentially Christian activity that is distinctive – speaking in tongues, the Eucharist and/or Mass, the arrangement of churches and so on – in practice all religious and indeed cultural activities, whether Christian or not, have their own idiosyncrasies. On the other hand, from a Euro-American scholarly point of view, Christian categories of thought and classification do seem to have had a particular influence on understandings of religion as whole, not least over the problematic notion of ‘belief’ (see also Ruel 1982). It is to be hoped that, in the future, Christians will increasingly be examined by ethnographers brought up in very different cultural and intellectual surroundings. Some ethnographers are quite firm in their statements about what makes ‘good’ fieldwork, demanding total immersion, a very long time spent in the field, an intense experience of fellowship with informants and so on. In practice, we have seen that what immersion might imply can vary across different sites and even within the same site over time. Certainly, the ethnographer must strive for an ‘experience-near’ approach to understanding whatever field he or she encounters. However, I have also emphasized the characteristically adaptive, nimble, opportunistic character of fieldwork: the necessity to think and react on one’s feet, combined with the recording of all that is happening around one in memory, experience and journal. In so doing it becomes possible to recognize the patterns, the regularities, but also the apparent inconsistencies and shifting trajectories, of myriad Christian lives.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Christians and the visual arts SUE YORE

INTRODUCTION Trying to link Christians to specific art forms is like trying to keep hold of the proverbial slippery fish; the complex ways that art has manifested in different Christian communities defies easy classification. It must also be borne in mind that the relationship between Christians and visual art down the centuries has not been straightforward; Christians across time and space have established a love/hate relationship with images. The human imagination continually seeks to represent matters of faith, whilst the biblical commandment to ‘not make any graven image’ (Exodus 20:4) has ensured constant suspicion around the use of images, which can all too easily slip into idolatry. Alongside this, ideological conflicts between popular devotional practices and theological correctness according to the Church have been a continuous thread running through the history of Christianity. Any attempt to understand the relationship between Christians and visual art is therefore confronted with challenges, not least is the complexity and diversity of the observable iconography across time and place. Further, many of the art objects found in churches, cathedrals and art galleries today are divorced from their original contexts so that contemporary Christians may lack sufficient symbolic understanding to interpret or integrate what they are seeing into their own experience. The fleur-de-lis, for example, that was used in medieval art to represent both Jesus and Mary, and then later, the Trinity, is commonly found as a decorative feature on, for example, floor tiles and organ pipes in European churches. Today, it has become associated with France, various sport brands, the Boy Scouts and also adorns the tops of the metal gates surrounding Buckingham Palace. This dilution of meaning through overuse detracts from the intuitive, spiritual and contextual resonances that original works of art would have communicated. Yet many art works and symbolic motifs have stood the test of time so that fresh meaning is continually evolving for new audiences that were never intended in the original. This is to be expected, as Karen Stone elaborates: ‘All art is expressive of its time and its culture … But art also stands aside from its particular culture’ (2003: 130). Today, where Christians transact with art is just as important as what the art is about; the obvious place to look for clues is in places of worship but increasingly this needs to be extended to galleries, homes, the internet, mass culture and even to the body.

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This chapter will focus on how Christians encounter selected forms of art in their public and private expressions of faith and suggest ways that art relates to communal and individual identities. Thinking of the slippery fish, it is important to bear in mind that there is no specific thing that can definitely be labelled ‘Christian art’; as Stone insists, ‘there is nothing intrinsic within a work of art that forbids us to experience it in the spiritual dimension – or that forbids any interpretation for that matter’ (2003: 12). Frequently, the mere placing of a piece of secular art into a Christian setting infuses it with Christian sentiment. Conversely, secular art that appropriates Christian iconography or ecclesiastical art that finds its way into a museum could be described as desacralized. Attempting to grapple with these questions together with gaining insight into the complex relationship between church authority, artistic intent and personal piety is fundamental to any research into the relationship between art and Christian faith.

CHRISTIANS AND ART: A BRIEF HISTORY The historical evolution of different artistic styles and their contexts in Western art is complex, with many political, cultural and theological objectives coming into play. For the first 300 years of the Christian tradition, artistic representation was minimal due to a desire to separate the teachings of Christ from the surrounding Greco-Roman pagan culture. Probably the earliest image used by early Christians as a marker of identity was the ichthus, or fish symbol (acronym from Greek Iesous Christos, Theou Huios, Sōter meaning ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour’), which had pre-Christian pagan origins as a symbol of the Great Goddess. Later, in period of pre-Constantine Christianity (up to 313 ce), art of the early Church, like that found in the Catacombs in Rome, adopted Roman motifs and gave them Christian meaning. Following the acceptance of Christianity as the religion of state, the primary context for Christian art came above ground and began to proliferate within churches and basilicas. When Constantine relocated the Roman capital to Byzantium in 330 ce, the result was the fusing of Greco-Roman art with Eastern oriental forms, resulting in what is known today as Byzantine art, which mainly focused on frescos and mosaics. Whilst many of the images re-created Christian beliefs in pictorial form, they could also suggest that the Byzantine emperors saw themselves re-creating Christ’s heavenly realm in their own kingdoms (Williamson 2004: 9). So, art no longer expressed the faith of the ordinary believer but was taken over by a powerful ruling institution that had grander aims to formulate ideologies that supported the political and militaristic agendas of the Roman Empire.

ART IN CHURCHES AND CATHEDRALS Churches and cathedrals are the main places to research the relationship between Christians and the visual arts. Many of the great European Gothic cathedrals were built on the sites of pagan shrines so it is not surprising that some of the older pagan symbols found their way into the fabric of the new buildings. One of the most commonly found is that of The Green Man, which appeared from around the eleventh century and can be found in churches across Europe as stone carvings. While these can be traced back to earlier Roman architecture and linked to the gods Dionysus and Bacchus, they have also been connected to the Celtic culture of Western Europe, the spirit of nature and the cycles of the seasons in agriculture and nature. More generally to the medieval Christians, he

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became a symbol of rebirth following death. Neither of these are specific Christian beliefs, but this demonstrates how the old and the new come together in artistic representations. The Gothic period was particularly known for including oddities and the grotesque with the female counterpart to the Green Man, the Sheela-na-gigs depicted as naked women with exaggerated open vulvas being another commonly found example that elicits varied interpretations. Sheela-na-gigs are found usually as stone carvings in Norman churches mostly in Britain and Ireland but also appear in France and Spain. The depiction of an older woman squatting and pulling apart her vagina seems rather a strange image to associate with a Christian church. As they are often found over windows and doorways, they may have been a means to ward off sickness and evil like other grotesques found outside churches and cathedrals. Some scholars suggest they represent lust (Jerman and Weir 1999), while others associate them with vernacular folk deities portraying life and death cycles characteristic of pagan goddesses (McMahon and Roberts 2000). Alternatively, they might have no meaning at all in that the carvers and stonemasons who crafted them were just following inherited symbols and patterns from past generations, or even bringing the vernacular into the space so that ordinary folk felt welcomed. Both examples reinforce the notion of ‘the slippery fish’ in that historical or theological certainty slips away from us. We can conclude that these older archetypes continued to play a role in Christians’ lives, as warnings, as cultural continuations with older beliefs or just for fun. The Green Man and Sheela-na-gigs are being renewed in contemporary spirituality by Christians and non-Christians who find new resonances in these ancient symbols to celebrate the cyclical role of nature and women’s autonomy. What they meant in the past is perhaps not so important as how Christians understand and delight in them today; seeing older symbols afresh injects new life into Christian spaces. A traditional Christian building is laid out in the form of a cross, but churches that have developed more recently in places such as Africa and South America have taken on more indigenous forms: the circular tent shape in Nigeria for example (Asojo and Asojo 2015). Richard Taylor suggests that classical churches are places that can be ‘read’: Churches and cathedrals are packed with meaning. Outside, the spire points heavenwards; carvings around the entrance announce the holiness of the space inside; the aisle draws you to the altar, with its ranks and pews on either side, is the gangway of a ship carrying worshippers to God; the altar, the holy heart of the building, is contained in a separated and sacred space; all around, numbers, colours, the animals and plants in the stonework, and scenes in the stained glass point to aspects of Christian teachings about God. (2003: 2) The main function of art in churches and cathedrals has been to reinforce Christian doctrines and values through visual representation of biblical narratives and the lives of saints. It also helps the faithful fully participate in the experience of worship through the visual senses; worship for many Christians is often an aesthetic experience of awe and beauty. At a basic level we might expect to see Christian symbols such as the cross, dove and sacrificial lamb; images of saints and biblical figures are also very prolific in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Some decorative art found in Christian art forms, such as stained glass windows, architecture, furniture, organ pipes, ecclesiastical garments, chalices, illuminated manuscripts and mosaics, assimilates cultural artistic styles from folk art to embed the church in that geographical context. A well-known example is the Lindisfarne Gospels (698 ce), which incorporated lavish pre-Christian Celtic art forms to

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decorate the pages of the handwritten Gospels. These are often embellishments that add to the overall aesthetic of a church or cathedral but are not specifically Christian in their own right. Similarly, many churches and cathedrals in European countries assimilated elements of Islamic art into their artistic designs: The Five Sister’s Window (thirteenth century) in the North Transept of York Minster is an example of this. It becomes even more complicated when we bring abstract and secular art into the discussion as they cease to have Christian meaning outside of a Christian space. Yet if a piece of art is displayed in a building used for Christian worship, we might assume that the viewer is expected to take elements of the Christian faith from it. Equally, there are questions around how contemporary Christians can engage with art from past centuries; the multifaceted use of symbol that could easily be ‘read’ by a medieval audience are no longer recognizable by a modern audience and need specialist knowledge of art history. Often such an enquiry will reveal that many of the great religious art pieces were commissioned to further power and authority of the Church or local dignitaries; religious art was produced partly for worldly purposes, whilst also functioning to teach the laity about core Christian tenets at a time when most Christians were illiterate. Sometimes, they even performed a practical function like the misericord, which provided an ornately carved wooden seat that folded down, allowing the choristers to perch during long liturgies. Then and now art supports Christian faith by keeping the core teachings of the faith in mind, heightening the spiritual elements of ritual and aiding personal and communal devotion and identity.

STAINED-GLASS WINDOWS Unquestionably, one of the most striking features of Christian churches and cathedrals is the stained-glass windows. Medieval stained glass such as that found in Chartres cathedral in France and York Minster in York is precious and needs constant restoration. Stained-glass windows developed as part of the flowering of the great Gothic cathedrals across Europe. The architectural feature of rib vaulting meant that solid walls could be replaced by windows. The light that these allowed in took on huge symbolic significance, allowing the space to be ‘considered a type of the kingdom to come, a token of heaven on earth’ (Dillenberger 1986: 42). Later, following the Reformation, it was a medium that most Protestants could accept. The iconography took on an educational role in depicting narratives from the Old and New Testaments, where ‘the scenes on the glass were educational in the midst of their attractiveness, serving positive purposes relatively free from veneration, worship, or idolatry’ (ibid.). Modern versions maintain this tradition but are not usually didactic; they still communicate to a contemporary worshipper by incorporating more recent aspects of culture and history into Christian iconography. One interesting modern example that avoids figurative representations is ‘The Baptistry Window’ at Coventry Cathedral. The cathedral was destroyed in the Blitz in 1940 so there was opportunity to do something new and different at a time when abstract art was all the rage. The creator Patrick Reyntiens, who collaborated with the designer, John Piper, said, ‘The window is a rebirth just as baptism is.’ It was after seeing the stained glass in Chartres Cathedral that the architect of the new cathedral came up with the idea for Coventry Cathedral’s renovations. The window features a checkerboard of abstract individual panes that stretch from the floor to the ceiling, with a midsection allowing more light in, giving the impression of transcendence or hope. Abstract art such

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as that used in the Baptistry Window serves spiritual needs rather than educational ones, although the actual concept and colours link to earlier versions. While there may be cultural or legendary influences in the production and interpretation of art from a Christian perspective, the main dialogue partner or influence is predominantly the Bible. The subject content of individual pieces can be a direct illustration of a biblical passage or it may be a more imaginative encounter that offers deeper insights. Iconography, or literally ‘writing with images’, was the original intent of Christian art, with Pope Gregory the Great, understanding the potential of images to educate, stating, ‘Painting can do for the illiterate what writing does for those who can read.’ Jenson contends that the argument of art to educate is actually a form of disparagement as Gregory also tries to limit imaginative engagement; more positively, the visual and the verbal ‘are interactive and interdependent’ so that the viewer can enter into contemplative dialogue with Christian scripture (Jenson 2004: 86). An example of biblical symbolism that commonly features in churches past and present is that of the four winged creatures that appear in Ezekiel in the Hebrew Scriptures and then resurface in the book of Revelation in the New Testament, which have become associated with the four Gospel writers: ‘the winged man, Matthew, the winged lion, Mark; the winged calf, Luke, and the eagle, John. Windows, carvings, and bible covers over the centuries repeat these common symbols’ (Brackney 2010: 95). The eagle is a useful example of Christian symbolism to focus on as it survived the Reformation, is commonly shared across the denominations and seems to maintain a resonance with Christians today. Examples of eagles in art are found in diverse denominational contexts: the West Rose stained-glass window in Chartres Cathedral and the portrait of Mary (as bearer of the Word in the form of Jesus Christ) found in Agios Dimitrios Greek Orthodox Church, where she is borne aloft by an eagle – the golden eagle also being a symbol of the Church in Greece. In the Anglican Church particularly, the lectern from which the Bible is read is traditionally in the shape of an eagle with outstretched wings. The eagle is a powerful bird that the Romans drew on to express the divinity of emperor, and it was later adopted by Christians to symbolize the transformative power of the Logos, or Word of God. Eagles fly much higher than most other birds so can also symbolize the carrying of God’s word beyond the building to the whole world. Quite naturally, other Christian symbolic associations with the eagle have evolved, such as Christ’s resurrection and ascension. It also visually represents the opening of John’s Gospel, ‘In the beginning was the Word’, and the verse from Isaiah that states, ‘But those who hope the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint’ (Isaiah 40:31). The multivocal nature of just this one symbol deriving from the biblical texts demonstrates the complexity of unpacking individual Christian symbols.

CHRISTIAN DISTRUST AND DISGUST IN ART Someone who is described a ‘slippery fish’ is deemed to be elusive: what can or should constitute correct Christian art has proved similarly undefinable. The power of art to influence and mesmerize people has created a continuous trail of iconoclasm throughout Christian history. The various movements that have sought to remove and destroy such images are testament to the power that images have had over Christians as well as the fear they engender. Scholars generally divide Christians into those who are iconic (use art) and those that are aniconic (avoid or prohibit art). This is, however, too simplistic, as art

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forms are rarely absent altogether and attitudes shift over time. For example, the Roman Catholic Church has tended to downplay its use of images post Vatican II, with many of its churches now being more minimalistic. Alternately, traditionally aniconic Protestant churches are increasingly turning to visual imagery to enrich personal spirituality and communal worship. Both the Eastern and Western churches have experienced iconoclastic upheavals. The Byzantine church had two major iconoclastic controversies in the eighth and ninth centuries with bitter arguments between the iconoclasts (deniers of images as vehicles to experience God) and the iconophiles (lovers of images). The peculiar challenge that artists have in Christianity is trying to represent the dual natures of Christ – the human and the divine. If Christ is depicted as one of us, then his divine nature is suppressed, leading to the conclusion that Christ could not be made visible. If he is depicted like other mortals, this was tantamount to idolatry, in that it replaces his Divine self with an ordinary, tangible human being. The opposite is the belief that art can make Christ sacramentally accessible through art due to the doctrine of the incarnation – the belief that Christ became ‘enfleshed’ and existed among us. The writings that recount these fiercely defended arguments come largely from key theologians or Church Fathers of the time. Then, as now, however, ordinary citizens would have got involved in the actual attack on perceived idols and were driven on by religious and political leaders of the time. Religious images often represent power and corruption, which ordinary people will revolt against given the right reasons. The Protestant focus on the personal encounter with God through faith meant that art began to disappear in Western churches as it was seen to detract from the Word. There were waves of Puritanical-driven iconoclastic attacks on churches and cathedrals across Europe throughout the sixteenth century: statues were hacked off from their niches or their eyes gouged out (eyes were particularly problematic), altars were stripped of their art work and frescos on walls were whitewashed over. The focus in Protestant churches was to be on the Gospel reading and the Sermon; the aural became more important than the visual to attain salvation. While Protestant churches avoided the use religious imagery, it continued to have a central role in the life of the Roman Catholic Church. In response to the criticisms of the Reformation, Catholics reformed the way they used art at the Council of Trent (1545–1563) as part of what is known as the Counter-Reformation which affirmed the principle of veneration as opposed to worship. Any representation that could be defined as ‘profane’ that might incite superstition of lust was strictly censored under the control of the Church (Dillenberger 1986: 77). The Baroque art that developed from this arguably became overly pious and didactic. Iconoclastic responses to art provide us with insights into religious sensibilities concerning visual art, particularly what is deemed acceptable and what might be blasphemous or offensive to Christians.

MAIN DENOMINATIONAL DIFFERENCES One of the most important areas of Christian art is observed in the veneration of icons, which grew out of the Byzantine tradition and remains an active tradition in the Orthodox Christian Church so is assessable to the researcher. There is a belief that some icons of Jesus and Mary are true likenesses that have been faithfully replicated down the centuries. Orthodox Christians venerate icons believing that they function as ‘windows to heaven’, while scholars are more easily persuaded that they represent pagan images of the gods

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common in Egypt and Greece (Williamson 2004: 10). For the scholar of religion, it is more important to understand how people transact with these images and the beliefs that they hold rather than tracing historical origins. A Roman Catholic church can contain a broad range of art pieces within its walls, with the intent of illustrating Catholic doctrine or functioning as aids to devotion. People often mistakenly describe Roman Catholics as worshiping statues of Jesus, Mary and the saints. Catholic piety nonetheless is rooted in the use of art artefacts. Perhaps, the main distinguishing feature of Catholic art is the focus on the Virgin Mary; the devotion to Mary is primarily through her image. Images of Mary can be found in a vast array of classical art, icons, contemporary Catholic art and statues. Echoing the medieval practice, pilgrims bring back plastic bottles of holy water in the shape of Virgin Mary from Lourdes. Images of Mary are often processed through local streets at key Christian festivals and display local variations and quirks as part of popular Marian devotional practices. One of the most intriguing aspects of Marian iconography is that of the Black Madonna. Found in both Catholic and Orthodox countries, these images, showing the Virgin Mary with a dark skin, have continued to fascinate researchers. Various suggestions have been offered to account for her blackness, linking them to the verse in the Song of Songs: ‘I am black but comely’ (1:5–6), or simply dirt from centuries of candle smoke. Regardless of the historical truth of their origins, at grassroots level, they have played an important role in the liturgical year and personal devotion. When Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI visited the Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Poland, they were publicly affirming their commitment to ordinary Catholics. Similarly, Cassandra Walker links the Black Madonnas to pre-Christian folk traditions. During the medieval period, most Catholics would have been impoverished rural workers and would have developed darker skins than the wealthy upper classes due to working outside. Significantly, Walker also asserts that Black Madonna iconography ‘was used as a metaphor for the disenfranchised populace who may have had very little authority in the political or social hierarchy’ (2011: iii). The Black Madonna image is linked to popular belief that Mary can help alleviate human suffering and is ‘venerated for her dominion over death and the power of resurrection’ (Walker 2011: 66). Later, due to their popularity and universal acceptance, the Black Madonnas began to ‘take on more aristocratic elements such as a crown’ due to these images being appropriated by the church and state authority. In turn, the Madonnas were often destroyed by the local communities that had once cherished them (Walker 2011: 70), demonstrating how Christian attitudes shift according to wider political and cultural factors. Outside the church or cathedral, visual artefacts are very popular within the private sphere for most Roman Catholics. Largely, much of the art used within the home falls under the category of ‘kitsch’ in the form of mass-produced images of the Crucifixion, the Virgin Mary and saints. Many Roman Catholics, especially in poorer or migrant communities, will decorate the church or shrines in their homes or along the roadside with neon lights and glitter and cheap plastic images or silk flowers. Yet almost in contradiction, Pope Benedict XVI stated that works of art ‘open the door to the infinite, to a beauty and a truth that goes beyond the ordinary. A work of art can open the eyes of the mind and heart’ (Fournier 2011). We can only speculate whether he includes all types of creative visualization or was referring to the great masterpieces like those of Michelangelo, Caravaggio or Da Vinci. Much of the art that is produced for popular Catholic consumption appears to the outsider to be overly sentimental. An example is images of Christ as ‘The Divine Mercy

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of Jesus’, which was reportedly revealed to St Faustina (1905–1938), a Polish nun, in 1931. She records in her diary that Jesus appeared to her and commanded that an image of the vision be painted stating, ‘I promise that the soul that will venerate this image will not perish. I also promise victory over its enemies already here on earth, especially at the hour of death. I myself will defend it as my own glory’ (Diary 48). The original painting was done according to strict input from St Faustina so is, therefore, seen as a miraculous revelation: a divine manifestation in the ordinary world. Much like the Black Madonnas, these images provide spiritual substance in times of need; the fact that it is mass-produced does not seem to matter to those who use it for devotional purposes.

PROTESTANT CHURCHES Since the Protestant Reformation, a key text has been Exodus 20:4–5, which forbids the making of ‘a graven image’, meaning that for Reformers like Martin Luther, art should not have a central role in the life of the Church, as sola scriptura, or the Word, must be the focus; later reformers such as Calvin and Zwingli took more of a strident view believing that art has no place in a Christian place of worship. Due to the belief that the individual works out his or her own faith alongside the critique of the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church, artists began to move away from depicting the more mystical and authoritarian aspects found in Roman Catholicism, especially anything linked to Marian doctrine and the papacy. Instead, artists like Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606– 1669) began to portray either ordinary folk living everyday lives focused on living out the ideals of the Gospel or key biblical narratives. Like the Catholic Church, there was still recognition of the role that art could play in the life of the Church but with an eye to avoiding idolatry and excessive emotion. A key example of this is found in the Protestant preference for a symbolic plain cross as opposed to the Crucifix in Catholic and Orthodox traditions, which portrays the actual crucified body of Christ. The act of veneration of these images in the Catholic tradition often involves the faithful kissing or kneeling before such images, which is tantamount to idolatry for some Protestants. An example of how Protestant churches are nevertheless deploying art can be found in Liverpool Cathedral. The English artist Tracey Emin, notorious for her unmade bed, was commissioned to do a piece of neon lighting ‘For You’ (2008): ‘I felt you and I knew you loved me.’ This is a key example of how a secular artist has been invited into the church, thereby deliberately courting controversy. Whilst the image of her other pieces testifies to a troubled relationship with men, Emin described her intention here to facilitate contemplation on the nature of love (Jones 2008). There is a deliberately ambiguous message here that could mean God’s love for the world or human love as the place where God’s love is manifest. Ben Quash suggests that using words to bridge the gap between the literal and the figurative might be extended to ‘the physical and the metaphysical’ (2017: 73). In any event, this type of art opens a space for dialogue and discussion between the Church and the secular world.

ART AND CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES Art is intrinsic to the formation of Christian community identity and its worldview. If it is produced through collaboration, it can provide a visible articulation of shared beliefs, ideals and hopes. Alternatively, contemplating and praying around art as a community can provide the stimulus for shared spiritual experience and function as ‘pastoral Word’ for

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the community of believers (Stone 2003: 129). The Methodist Art Collection was formed due to the community believing that looking at art provides ‘an opportunity for new encounters, vibrant expressions of God’s love, and a whole range of conversations that are both missional and pastoral’ (Methodist Church 2018). For some Christians, notably in the Easter Orthodox tradition, art in the form of sacred icons allows the sacred to be present in their midst. Christian communities across the globe are becoming increasingly democratic, particularly at grassroots level; community forms of art provide a vehicle for authentic, lived expressions of faith as opposed to doctrinal exhortations typical in much of the art produced by great masters of Western Classical Art.

THE GOSPEL IN ART BY THE PEASANTS OF SOLENTINAME One of the most remarkable examples of a community of ordinary Christians who produced art to express shared interpretations of the Gospel in context of their lives is found in the community of Solentiname, which is situated across an archipelago of islands in Lake Nicaragua. In the early 1960s, a Nicaraguan priest, Ernesto Cardenal, and a Colombian poet, William Agudelo, began a small Christian commune among the ninety families who lived on the islands, which included an artists’ centre. At the time the Somoza family exploited the poor in Nicaragua, and there was little sense of social justice. In 1966, those who came to mass in the small wooden church began to discuss the Gospel and found a message of liberation. These interpretations led to ‘Gospel-rooted radicalisms’ (Scharper 1984: back cover), which were visualized in the art produced by the peasants at the time. The discussions were communal, with individual artists representing their interpretations by drawing on local indigenous art forms. The example of The Good Samaritan by Rodofo Arellano is set in their own geographical location with the priest and Levite who pass by the beaten-up man reimaged as local church leaders who turn a blind eye to the suffering of the people. The Samaritan is reimagined as a hippy-like figure – someone who was counter-cultural and marginalized from mainstream society at the time. For the Solentiname community, this offers hope and a better vision of the future based on Christ’s parable interpreted within their context. This art is meaningful in one particular context, but some paintings with Christian subject matter can attract global recognition.

ART THAT HAS MASS APPEAL A seemingly benign but still spiritually confrontational example of art that has attracted much popular devotion is Holman Hunt’s Light of the World (1851–1853), which has reached the status of being an iconic piece of Christian piece of art. It represents Revelation 3:20 (KJV): ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear My voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and him with me’, and John 8:12: ‘I am the light of the world, whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’ It gained great popularity in the Victorian period and travelled across the British Empire to Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand from 1905 to 1907, organized by Charles Booth. Hunt was concerned with the dwindling of Christian faith from the end of the nineteenth century, which was partly due to Darwinism and the turn to science to explain existence, and the increasing secularization of society. There was also the perceived threat of Marxist theories that supported the ideal of atheism from 1844. The painting brought together ideologies of Christian faith and nationalism

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associated with the British Empire; the symbolism of the light neatly synchronized with the phrase ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire.’ Engraved copies soon hung widely in nurseries, homes and churches (Fulford 2007). This was one of the earliest examples of mass-produced copies of Christian art that imprinted itself on the subconscious of thousands of Christians globally, which was to become a widely loved and appreciated representation of Christian faith. This image is still popular today although the political ends of linking of Christian faith and the British Empire together are lost to a more contemporary viewer. So how art is publicized and where it is displayed is an important factor in understanding how Christians interact with art.

CHRISTIAN ART IN MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES Many of the great works of Christian art have now been removed from their original ecclesiastical settings and are housed in art galleries and museums; Christians can still encounter them albeit in a secular context. A good example of this is what is known as the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–1516) by Matthias Grünwald, which was originally designed for a hospital at the monastery of St Anthony in Isenhiem, which has since moved around between France and Germany and is today housed in the Colmar museum in Alsace. The graphic depiction of Christ’s suffering, which shows ‘death without disguise, grotesque and terrifying’ (Jones 2007), presumably allowed the patients in the hospital to identify visually with the suffering of Christ. Ironically, this image formed the backdrop for Protestant Karl Barth’s vast writings in theology as he had a copy of it over his desk. It was also reportedly influential in Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of Christ (2004), which Christians went to see in droves. What is lost to Barth and Gibson, and a contemporary audience, is the associated panels which the main piece has become separated from that linked to the context and experience of the hospital at the time that cared for patients with plague and skin diseases. There are also various panels that can be opened and closed that add more depth to the central panel, which are often left out in contemporary replications. These would have been essential to the whole experience of faith at the time; for example, two wings open to reveal St Anthony and St Sebastian, who were believed to heal and protect the sick, thus providing extra spiritual support. Graham Howes confirms that it is virtually impossible to ascertain what type of transaction takes place between the art object and the viewer in circumstances where an art object is removed from its original context into a gallery (Howes 2007: 45). Questions as to whether such art becomes desacralized or whether those who view such art can still gain spiritual connections are complex. Occasionally, examples of Christian art are curated for specific exhibitions that bring relevant images together, providing opportunities for research such as that which took place at the National Gallery in 2000: ‘Seeing Salvation – the Image of Christ’. Graham Howes (2007) undertook research on the oral and written testimonies of people’s experience of viewing the exhibits, classifying four main transactional responses: the iconographic, the didactic, institutional, and the aesthetic. For Howes, an icon may be a traditional Orthodox icon but also any image that ‘communicate[s] a transfigured and transfiguring Christian vision’ (Howes 2007: 11). This will not be produced for liturgical reasons and often comes from painters with a Christian vision, like Vincent Van Gogh or Georges Rouault, who show Christian themes amid nature or everyday life; because they see the Divine in the ordinary, they are able to communicate a more accessible Christian perspective. The didactic function of Christian

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art in asserting dogma was traditionally central to the commissioning of much of the art work, but in the pre-modern era, this is virtually nonexistent – not overtly anyway. As a development to this, the earlier reference to the role of the visual alongside the verbal contains exciting possibilities for expressing Christian ‘truths’ in a predominantly scientific world. The institutional refers to the ways that art can help to create community; the case of Coventry Cathedral demonstrates how art is central to reconfiguring the spiritual and cultural role of the Cathedral following the Second World War. Creedal responses are based on a mirroring of personally held Christian beliefs. I experienced this myself when accompanying a friend with literalistic evangelical Christian beliefs to the British Tate, who was enamoured by Stanley Spencer’s ‘The Resurrection, Cookham’ (1924–1927), which depicts all the faithful rising from their graves on the Last Day. The resurrection of the dead is for her a fundamental belief, which this painting affirmed. In the aesthetic category, Howes places nostalgic, mass-produced images such as Holman Hunt’s Light of the World and Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ, as well as images like Jesus of Divine Mercy. Many of Howe’s respondents reported having an experience of some sort. The experiential testifies to a sense of presence, a glimpse of the transcendent or changes in awareness. In layman’s terms this relates to that sense of being ‘grabbed’ by a painting. I myself felt this when viewing The Good Samaritan (1850) by George Frederick Watts in Manchester Art Gallery and The Polish Rider (1650s) by Rembrandt in the Frick Collection in New York. These were personal and emotive experiences, undoubtedly drawing on a whole range of past experiences, personal beliefs and knowledge and maybe just how I was feeling on the day. For those, like me, with a background in Christian teachings, biblical stories will have more impact than looking at a depiction of a Hindu myth, for example, as that will not have engrained itself on my psyche. Sometimes a piece of art just has a mysterious, unfathomable quality which relates to what Howes refers to as ‘loosely numinous’ which is open to all sorts of possibility in a post-secular age. Howes also noted ‘essentially negative’ responses from those who either fear proselytizing or doubt the historicity of Jesus (Howes 2007: 56). The role of art for proselytizing or affirming faith is surprisingly robust in evangelical circles, particularly in America. Lastly, Christians may engage spiritually with secular art that may or may not have allusions to the legacy of Christian teachings.

CHRISTIANS AND SECULAR ART Whereas in the Medieval and Renaissance periods artists would be commissioned to paint something that depicts a biblical narrative or Church doctrine, today secular artists are often employed, as in the example of Tracy Emin above, to freely create something for a Christian space. Richard Harries testifies to the ongoing use of art, asserting ‘that art is not just an optional extra to the Christian faith, but is essential to it. We are called to try to convey, through the material of paint and canvas and stone, the fact that the invisible has been made visible; the Word has been made flesh’ (2013: 7). The baseline contention is that Christianity, like other world faiths, finds sensory experience conducive to spiritual perception. Robin Jenson argues that unless Christians can learn lessons about the importance of visual communication from secular culture, their ‘worship will seem completely out of touch – unrelated to the ordinary life experience of most Christian churchgoers’ (2004: 78); ordinary Christians live in the real world, with its varied and fast-paced popular culture.

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POPULAR ART Our time is one of mass communications and global consumerism. It is possible to purchase copies of art work to display in your own spaces or ‘Google’ them and download them as wall paper on a computer, tablet or smartphone. Cheap kitsch and popular devotional prints or statues of Christian figures are easily available. A whole myriad of religious objects are mass-produced for popular consumption, with Christians being the main consumers. Interestingly one of the most popular symbols is the ichthus, mentioned earlier, which is now once again very popular, appearing in such forms as lapel badges or stickers on car windows. The difference between a piece of fine art and a mass-produced artefact showing the same image is its price tag. Fine art has contributed to ‘ideological constructs that serve the privileged in society’ (Morgan 1999a: xiii), as discussed in relation to Hunt’s ‘Light of the World’. Morgan identifies popular ‘religious stuff’ as a ‘category of the things that mark the halls and walls of countertops of everyday life’ (Morgan 1999a:  xi). One image that represents the transformation of classical or fine art into the subject of ‘religious stuff’ is Albrecht Dürer’s pen-and-ink sketch ‘Praying Hands’ or Betend Hände (1508), which has become popular with Christians and is instantly recognizable; a Google search brings up ‘about 153000 results’. This is an example of art that has both a private and public life as a symbol. Today this image is found imprinted on numerous objects that Christians might use, with a prominence in the Protestant tradition as a popular icon (Morris 2012). Places where this image would typically be found include gravestones, wall plaques and 3D models in the home, personal tattoos, iPhone cases, various items of clothing, jewellery and of course desktop wallpaper and screensavers. Inevitably, in our age of technology, the praying hands image has been transposed into what is known as Christian Clipart, which extends the use of popular symbols infinitely. Free access to astounding range of free clipart for Christian use is easily available on the internet. They are widely used in Parish newsletters, service sheets and as background visuals for sermons. However, the use of such symbols has arguably reduced Christian beliefs to the banal; they represent what Paul Tillich described as ‘a poverty of vision’ (Tillich 1959: 74). It could be argued that this is evident in the popular trend for tattoos, which have really taken hold amongst the younger generation; the icon of praying hands is a popular choice. But like all art forms, the relationship between the art object and personal belief is never the same, so assumptions can never be made. The personal symbols are chosen with care (mostly) to reflect a personal belief or to remind the individual of what is important in life. Many of the younger generation of the Christian faith choose to mark and testify to their faith in this way with images of Jesus, crosses, sacred hearts and angels. A news item described it as ‘evangelical chic’ (The Christian Century 1998: 1240). Faithmarks is an online project that documents individual choices for images that young Christians have tattooed on their bodies (Faithmarks 2019). Pastor Carl Green suggests: Instead of looking to religious presentations displayed on the stained glass windows of the local church, members of this new generation of evangelicals find meaning in inscribing images of their own ‘private temple of the Holy Spirit … as a symbol of identity and individuality, an extreme expression of an extreme faith, religious tattooing among young evangelical Christians embodies – literally – their beliefs in a new and radical way’. (The Christian Century cites Jenson, Flory and Miller)

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More commonly, the most used item portraying Christian art in our consumer culture is that of the Christmas card. Whilst winter or Dickensian scenes are increasingly common, the use of religious art and symbolism still proliferates. It is interesting to note that there are certain images that seem to have been popularized by the Christmas market, typically reproducing nativity scenes from great classics of Western art or kitsch on a grand, glittery scale. The Christmas card is ultimately part of mass consumer culture, which replaces desire for connection with God with ‘consumer desire’, which involves ‘a rhythm of want, acquisition, depletion and renewed want [where] images fuel consumption by both perpetuating desire and making satisfaction appear possible’ (Morgan 1999b:17). The multiplication of Christian images is then largely linked to consumerist lifestyles and arguably contributes towards Tillich’s notion of ‘poverty of vision’ for Christians who no longer have the opportunity to contemplate great works of art in situ. The declining ability to engage visually with the deeper meanings of art is perhaps behind some of the controversies that secular artists have attracted due to their representations of Christian subject matter.

ART THAT OFFENDS Somewhat ironically, one fruitful area to ascertain ways that Christians interact with art is art that promotes violent outbursts or expressions of offence; the responses to art that is perceived as offensive or blasphemous can tell the researcher a lot about Christian sensibilities to art; Christians can either be profoundly moved or be offended by the same piece of art. One such example was Head of Christ (1940) by Warner Sallman, which David Morgan researched; some Christians found it comforting, while others found it idolatrous. Christians in the latter category largely fell into the fundamentalist or conservative camps in the Protestant tradition (Brent Plate, S 2002: 81). Not believing that Jesus would have been vain, one respondent asked, ‘Would JESUS have sat for a portrait?’ (Brent Plate, S 2002: 83). There were also concerns that such depictions were too effeminate, which could, in turn, help promote homosexuality, and so the maleness of Christ must be preserved for such Christians. Imagining Christ as an actual woman is therefore hugely problematic for many Christians as it subverts the historicity of the Christ event. Elizabeth Sandy’s bronze statue Christa of the crucified Christ in the form of a woman was publicly displayed during Holy Week in 1984 in New York’s Cathedral Church of St John the Divine. There were both positive and negative responses, with the cathedral receiving complaints that the image was ‘blasphemous, shocking and inappropriate’ (Conger 2016). Positive reviews found it comforting for women who had experienced abuse, seeing their own suffering reflected in a female Christ figure. Debates ensued as to whether the image of a semi-naked female Christ figure highlighted such abuse or whether it could even provoke it (Jenson 2004: 149). Of course, such an image diverges from core theological teachings about Christ incarnated in body of a man, so the controversy is not completely surprising. Interestingly, the image returned to the same cathedral in 2016 as part of an exhibition entitled The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies, which sought to open a dialogue about the Divine being manifested in all of human diversity but did not attract the same publicity. Sometimes hostile reactions spill over into public affairs. David Morgan describes an image entitled The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), by British artist Chris Ofili, which caused

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a reaction: where she is depicted with ‘black skin, wearing a stylized blue shawl against a field of yellow that is littered with magazine cut-outs of female genitalia while one of the Virgin Mary’s breasts is fashioned out of elephant dung’ (Brent Plate, S 2002: 1). The mayor of New York at the time interpreted it as ‘Catholic bashing’ and threatened to close the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where it was being displayed. Ofili is himself a Catholic and spoke about how as a young altar boy, he was confused by the teaching that a virgin gave birth to a baby boy. While issues of race and sexuality were present, the inclusion of elephant dung was the real problem, as it juxtaposed the pure with the impure. Ofili reportedly did not intend to offend; elephant dung is a cultural reference to his African roots, meaning that ‘dung actually takes on a religious-symbolic connotation’ (Brent Plate S 2002: 2) that allows Christians to ‘subjectively reformulate [their] beliefs and awareness of metaphysical existence’ as opposed to accusing the artist of promoting anti-Christian sentiments (Yoon 2010: 24). All three of these examples demonstrate a continuing alienation from the body and material lives and a reluctance to engage with art that opens new spaces for dialogue by some Christians. Jenson argues that artists who appropriate Christian iconography and produce them in such a way that believers find shocking or disturbing should not be ignored as they can invoke ‘deeply faithful’ responses despite the viewer feeling scandalized (2004: 138). As long as Christians and visual arts continue to converge and diverge, we can conclude that art continues to play a significant role. Although art has always been present in the life of Christian communities, not all Christians have consciously engaged with it, their understanding perhaps limited to seeing it as mere decoration, while others are so invested in the power of the Word that any attempt to portray divine figures is seen as deeply offensive. Certainly, looking at art is an intensely personal and private experience that often eludes rational explanation; the full nuances will remain elusive to the researcher because it draws on deeply held religious feelings and beliefs that may evolve and develop over time; art continues to work on the viewer as his or her life changes so that the matter of interpretation is never settled in what can sometimes become an intimate relationship. More significantly, Christians today, both individually and collectively, try to work out faith ‘in a culture saturated with images … ranging from the banal to the sublime’ (Jenson 2004: x); the sacred and profane constantly collide with each other, so that secular art finds its way into Christian spaces of worship and Christian imagery and ideas are utilized in secular art.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Interreligious encounter ELIZABETH J. HARRIS

INTRODUCTION Christians have engaged with people from other religious communities for as long as Christianity has existed. Indeed, the first followers of Jesus were part of a religious community that is now separate from Christianity – Judaism – and the separation between the two was painful, leading to polemic on both sides. On the Christian side, the unwillingness of the majority of Jews to accept Jesus as the promised Messiah nurtured an antisemitism that eventually informed the Sho’ah, the ‘calamity’ or genocide of over six million Jews in Europe from 1933 to 1945 under Hitler’s Nazi regime. Martin Luther (1483–1546), for instance, in 1543, wrote a polemical and ferocious piece, entitled, ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’, which accused the Jews of arrogance, hardness of heart, lying before God, falsifying their scriptures, being parasites on society and murder. It interpreted their suffering since the resurrection of Jesus as proof of God’s rejection of them and even urged Christians to destroy Jewish houses (Luther 1546/2015). Luther’s attitude to the Jews, which no Lutheran Church would accept today, lies at one end of a spectrum of Christian attitudes to people of other religions, which, from the beginnings of Christianity to the present, have variously been marked by intolerance, violence, proselytizing mission, rapprochement, coexistence and what some contemporary Christians term ‘dialogue’. This section surveys these attitudes from the perspective of what Christians have done and are doing in practice. It will argue that contextual factors, such as whether Christians hold a majority or a minority position, have been and remain crucial in conditioning Christian practice. It will focus on four illustrative case studies: Christian missionary activity during the period of British expansionism from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century; the move towards greater rapprochement between Christians and people of other religions in the twentieth century, taking the United Kingdom as the main example; Christians in a minority position in Asia; contemporary trends and contexts. First, however, the ambivalence of biblical guidance on the religious other will be mentioned.

THE BIBLE AND THE RELIGIOUS OTHER The Bible does not contain a unified message about how Christians should relate to people of other religions and which texts have been given priority in practice has again been conditioned by context. For instance, in the Old Testament, King Saul is told by God to utterly destroy the non-Jewish Amalekites as an enemy of Israel (1 Samuel 15:3), but there is also a strand that portrays God as non-exclusive, namely as maintaining a

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relationship not only with the Jews but with all peoples (O’Collins 2008: 17–53). In the New Testament, some verses, when taken out of context, imply that only Christians can be saved and, by extension, that all other religious traditions are false: Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’. (John 14.6) There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name [that of Jesus] under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved. (Acts 4:12) Other narratives, however, show the non-Jew in a positive light, for example the Roman member of the military who asks Jesus to heal his servant and who is affirmed by Jesus for his faith (Luke 7:1–10). In addition to these internally contradictory emphases, the concepts of idolatry and heresy became particularly important within Christian history, building on biblical texts. The Ten Commandments in the Old Testament declare worship of ‘idols’ or images as abhorrent to God (Exodus 20:1–6). Some Christians have been quick to apply this to religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, which appear to prioritize worship of images, to condemn them. A heresy is a belief or practice that is considered to be doctrinally unacceptable or deviant within a religious tradition by the faction in power at a particular time. Throughout the history of Christianity, Christians have punished those judged to be heretics with death. The majority of these have been Christians who held differing views from the majority. It was mainly with heretics in mind that Cyprian (200–258) coined the term extra ecclesiam nulla salus (no salvation outside the Church). However, the Crusades (‘cross-marked’ military expeditions) from Christian Europe into the Middle East, from 1095 to the end of the thirteenth century, which sought to end Muslim control of Christian sites in Jerusalem (even though the Muslim rulers did not prevent Christian pilgrimage), appealed to the concept of heresy. The Muslim rulers of the holy sites were ‘heretics’, because they held beliefs deemed incompatible with Christianity and had to be ejected. A further strand of theological thought in Christian history, however, concerned the possibility that knowledge of God was possible outside Christian ‘revelation’ through the exercise of reason or our natural capacities. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was the first to develop this in a systematic way, and it was a strand that continued, finding expression in William Paley’s 1802 book, Natural Theology, which argued that evidence for a creator God could be gained from the natural world. Natural theology opened the door to the view that people within other religions could possess knowledge of God.

CHRISTIAN MISSIONARY ACTIVITY DURING THE PERIOD OF EUROPEAN EXPANSIONISM European expansionism was spearheaded by Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, followed by Britain. Each of these powers combined Empire-building and the gaining of commercial profit with Christianization. Portugal, for instance, gained control of the maritime regions of what is now Sri Lanka in the first decade of the sixteenth century. At first, although privileges were given to those who converted to Christianity, there was no systematic Christianization programme. This changed in the mid-sixteenth century under the influence of what has been termed the Counter Reformation or the Catholic Reformation, which took a more hard-line attitude to people from other religious traditions. The Franciscans arrived

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in 1543, to be followed by Jesuits, Dominicans and Augustinians (Harris 2012: 270), all of whom sought to gain converts, and, after 1560, some Buddhist and Hindu places of worship were destroyed (Strathern 2010: 197). Buddhists and Hindus to this day in Sri Lanka link the Roman Catholic Portuguese with intolerance and violence. Goa suffered the same fate. At first Portuguese explorers, traders and colonizers saw Indian religious practices, to use Henn’s words, as ‘a hidden and distorted form of the religious Self’ (Henn 2014: 39), appealing to a form of natural theology. In a pattern similar to that found in Sri Lanka, however, under the influence of the Catholic Reformation and the Council of Goa (1567), the material expressions of Hinduism in Goa were later systematically destroyed, unless Hindus had taken them to safety beforehand, and replaced with Roman Catholic shrines, churches and images (Henn 2014: 40–47). British Empire-building occurred at the same time as what has been called the Evangelical Revival. This was characterized by an emphasis on social justice and the equality of all humans – it was among evangelicals that opposition to the slave trade arose – and also the conviction that the Bible was the sole authority in matters of faith. The theology underpinning this movement is significant. The Evangelical Alliance Basis of Faith of 1846 stated that their doctrines included: The utter Depravity of Human Nature, in consequence of the Fall. The Incarnation of the Son of God, His work of Atonement for sinners of mankind, and His Mediatorial Intercession and Reign … The Immortality of the Soul, the Resurrection of the Body, the Judgment of the World by our Lord Jesus Christ, with the Eternal Blessedness of the Righteous, and the Eternal Punishment of the Wicked. (Bebbington 2006: 49) When this theology was applied to people of other religious traditions, the majority position was that they were destined for an eternity in hell, because they had not repented and turned towards Jesus. In other words, they were ‘the wicked’ who, on the day of judgement, would be given ‘eternal punishment’. Biblical verses such as Acts 4:12 were used to justify this. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, there was disagreement amongst Christians about whether non-Christians should actually be invited to convert. Strong Calvinists, who believed that God had predestined human beings to either heaven or hell, generally resisted it. Yet, there were many others who preferred to believe that God’s forgiveness was open to everyone who repented and had faith in Jesus, a position linked with the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609). It was this conviction, together with the fact that British power was increasing in Africa and Asia, that nurtured an evangelical missionary movement within revival. Key figures were the Baptists, Andrew Fuller (1754–1815) and William Carey (1761–1834), and the Wesleyan Methodists, Richard Watson (1781–1833) and Thomas Coke (1747–1814). Watson, for instance, declared: The question before us, put into its most simple form, is, whether our Lord Jesus Christ did so die for all men, as to make salvation attainable by all men. The affirmative of this question is, I think, the doctrine of Scripture. (Bebbington 2006: 62) This view was entrenched in hymns of the time. The collection compiled by John Wesley, founder of Wesleyan Methodism, drawing on the hymns of his brother, Charles, contained verses such as this:

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O Jesus! Ride on Till all are subdued, Thy mercy make known, And sprinkle thy blood; Display thy salvation, And teach the new song To every nation, And people, and tongue. (No 40 Wesley 1876: 25) The London Missionary Society was formed in 1796, the Scottish Missionary Society in 1816, the Church Missionary Society in 1799, the General Baptist Missionary Society in 1816, although Baptists were travelling as missionaries before then, and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in 1813, although, again, Thomas Coke was promoting missionary work before this date. In line with the evangelical theology outlined above, those who travelled to Asia and Africa through these societies were convinced that to convert people of other faiths to Christianity was a compassionate act that saved souls from the horror of hell. In order to make new Christians, some missionaries studied the religions of the people they worked amongst. In Sri Lanka, for instance, the Wesleyan Methodist Daniel J. Gogerly (1792–1862) studied Pāli, the original language of the Buddhist texts in the country, and was one of the first Westerners to translate Pāli texts into English (Harris 2010). His bottom line, however, was that Buddhism was false. In 1861, in an account of Buddhism given to the Colombo YMCA, he pointed out the differences between the two religions, accusing Buddhism of having an ‘unphilosophical confusion of thought and expression’ about the human person that was used ‘to avoid the necessity of acknowledging the existence of a Creator’ (Bishop Vol 1 1908: 41). Some of his contemporaries were much more strident in their criticism. Robert Spence Hardy (1803–1868), also a Wesleyan Methodist missionary in Sri Lanka, towards the end of his life, wrote a polemical book that compared Buddhist cosmological beliefs with contemporary science, within which he lampooned Buddhism, with words such as these: The system of Buddha is humiliating, cheerless, man-marring, soul-crushing. It tells me that I am not a reality; I have no soul. It tells me that there is no unalloyed happiness, no plenitude of enjoyment, no perfect unbroken peace, in the possession of any being whatever, from the highest to the lowest, in any world. It tells me that I may live a myriad of millions of ages, and that not in any of these ages, not in any portion of an age, can I be free from apprehension as to the future, until I attain a state of unconsciousness; and in order to arrive at this consummation, I must turn away from all that is pleasant, or lovely, or instructive, or elevating or sublime. (Spence Hardy 1990 (1866): 218) Here Spence Hardy twists the Buddhist doctrines of non-self (anattā), unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) and the state of enlightenment (Pāli: nibbāna) so that they are completely negative. His words were typical of missionaries who were convinced that Christianity would only spread if other religions were proved to be false at every point. The beliefs of Hindus in India fared little better during most of the nineteenth century. Beliefs in rebirth, many gods and the caste system were utterly condemned. In India and Sri Lanka, these missionary methods drew some converts to Christianity, but they also stimulated defensive Buddhist and Hindu revivals (Malalgoda 1976; Young 1981; Bond 1988; Young and Jebanesan 1995; Harris 2006). There were, however, exceptions among nineteenth-century Christians to those who inflexibly believed that all practitioners of other religions were destined for hell and change often came through deep encounter. In 1818, two Buddhist monks sailed to Britain from Sri Lanka saying that

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they wished to convert. They were tutored by the Methodist academic Dr Adam Clarke (c. 1750–1832), who judged them to be ‘men of profound erudition’, who could not be seen as ‘common heathens’ although he considered their ‘theology and philosophy’ false (Harris 2006: 34). Clarke wrote a set of Christian principles for them, published in 1820. They contained the assertion that the Holy Spirit was present in all people, teaching them right from wrong and that those ‘who have acted conscientiously, according to the dictates of this heavenly light in their minds, shall not perish eternally; but have that measure of glory and happiness suited to their state’ (Harris 2006: 34). This view was taken up by others. William Cooke (1806–1864), another prominent nineteenth-century Methodist, asserted in a treatise on Christian theology that many heathens who had not heard of Jesus and children who died in infancy would be saved (Larsen 2011: 98). Those who had heard of Jesus and had not responded positively, however, would not. It is possible that he knew the work of Frederick D. Maurice (1805–1872), professor of theology at King’s College London, who, in the Boyle Lectures of 1846, claimed that the world’s great religions had been used by God and that Christians could learn from them (Harris 2006: 40). The attitudes of Christian missionaries on the ground, however, began to change only towards the end of the nineteenth century, due to changes in European theology, for instance Maurice’s writings, and their own experience. As missionaries related more deeply to people of other religious traditions and witnessed the depth of anger among some of them towards missionary attitudes, they realized that religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam could not simply be condemned as false. Thomas Ebenezer Slater (1840–1912) was one. He arrived in India with the London Missionary Society in 1866 (Cracknell 1995: 109) and eventually wrote positively about what he called ‘higher Hinduism’, rejecting the view that all Hindus were destined to hell and becoming convinced that there were similarities between Hindu philosophy and Christianity. For instance, he wrote movingly of the ‘crowning assumption of the Vedanta’, namely, ‘Not only does the enlightened soul know Brahma in his essential Being, but he comes to know that he himself is Brahma’ (Slater 1903: 167), and could state that the ‘doctrine of Karma’ was present in the Bible: ‘It is a true conception that all deeds, be they good or evil, will inevitably bear fruit according to their nature’ (Slater 1903: 201). However, his praise was not unadulterated. He could not see in Hinduism the Christian concepts of mercy, grace and atoning love (Slater 1903: 251) or a path of moral development: ‘The aim of the Hindu recluse is not to become something, but to come to a true understanding of reality’ (Slater 1903: 263). Ultimately, therefore, Hinduism, for Slater, lacked the fullness of truth. Slater was an early proponent of fulfilment theology, namely a theology that accepted that other religions contained truth but argued that they needed Christianity in order to be fulfilled and made whole. This idea was developed by others, for instance by J.N. Farquhar in The Crown of Hinduism (Farquhar 1913 – republished in 2008 by Kessinger Books). Fulfilment theology gained influence in the twentieth-century West and was the dominant view at a world missionary conference held in Edinburgh in 1910. Before the conference, several commissions were put in place, including ‘The Missionary Message in Relation to non-Christian Religions’ (Commission IV). The commissioners sent out a questionnaire to missionaries worldwide, which included the following questions: ‘What attitude should the Christian preacher take towards the religion of the people among whom he labours?’; ‘What are the elements in the said religion or religions which present points of contact with Christianity and may be regarded as a preparation for it?’ (Cracknell 1995: 192).

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The latter implicitly evoked fulfilment theology. One hundred and fifty-seven replies were received. Cracknell’s survey of these highlights the difference between 1910 and the mid-nineteenth century. Missionary after missionary stressed that Christians should take one or more of the following attitudes towards other religious traditions: friendliness, reverence, respect, sympathy, appreciation, a willingness to commend elements of truth, an ability to engage in informed criticism coming from knowledge of the people. For example, the Anglican George Whitehead, in Myanmar, wrote, ‘The missionary should rejoice in every element of truth and goodness that he finds in the religion and the practice of the people with whom he has to deal’ (Cracknell 1995: 202). Nevertheless, in the 1930s and 1940s, after the First World War had shattered the optimism that was present in Edinburgh 1910, there was a hardening of missionary attitudes. For instance, in 1938, the International Missionary Council met in Tambaram, India. In preparation for it, a Dutch missionary theologian, Hendrik Kraemer (1888– 1966), wrote The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (1938), contesting fulfilment theology, by arguing for a radical discontinuity between Christianity and all other religious traditions. If the world was to be claimed for Jesus Christ, he argued, there could be no cooperation with other religious traditions. As the mid-twentieth century approached, therefore, Christian attitudes to other religious traditions ranged from what has been termed exclusivism, namely the ongoing conviction among some that only one religion (Christianity) embodied truth, to more inclusivist attitudes, namely the view that other religions contained truth either because the Holy Spirit was already at work within them or because they contained that which could be fulfilled by Christianity.

THE MOVE TOWARDS GREATER RAPPROCHEMENT BETWEEN CHRISTIANS AND PEOPLE OF OTHER RELIGIONS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The Second World War revealed the ongoing power of antisemitism, with the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ entering global vocabulary (Sands 2016). With this came a retreat from the Christian triumphalism that had accompanied Empire within some communities of Christians. Several other factors in addition to changing power relationships were important in the move towards greater rapprochement between Christians and people of other religious traditions in the twentieth century: the return of missionaries who had had positive experiences of another religion to the West, the arrival of large numbers of people of other religious traditions in Europe and the United States, the wish of some Christians in Africa and Asia to redress the mistrust of Christianity that had grown up in the colonial period and changes in theological thinking. All of these shaped new forms of Christian practice that engaged with the empirical reality that Christianity was one among many religious traditions, most of which were strong and not, according to their practitioners, in need of ‘fulfilment’. Two steps in this direction came before 1945. In 1936, Francis Younghusband (1863– 1942), a decorated army officer, and traveller in India and Central Asia, founded an organization with an aspirational title – the World Congress of Faiths – with the explicit aim of creating understanding between people of different religions. And in 1942, as news of Hitler’s persecution of Jews reached Britain, a Council of Christians and Jews

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was founded in Britain, through cooperation between Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz and Archbishop William Temple. A key moment for Roman Catholics was the Second Vatican Council in the mid1960s, which revolutionized Catholic practice and theology. One of its documents, dated 28 October 1965, Nostra Aetate (In our time), specifically addressed the question of ‘The Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions’. It recognized that all religions sought to answer the same questions about divine reality and the meaning of life, and stated, referring particularly to religions other than Islam and Judaism: The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself. The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men. After these words, the document focused on Jews and Muslims in particular. Roman Catholics were urged to forget past hostility between Christians and Muslims and work towards ‘mutual understanding’. As for the Jews, Nostra Aetate recognized that there was a spiritual bond that tied Jews and Christians together and recommended the fostering of ‘mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues’. The impact of Nostra Aetate should not be underestimated. Its influence was global, giving permission to Roman Catholic priests, members of monastic orders and lay people to engage positively with practitioners within other religious traditions at a practical level. The theology behind the statement did not go much further than fulfilment theology, but its impact on the ground was to open doors of encounter and learning. It was particularly influential where Roman Catholics were in a minority, such as in India, Pakistan, Japan, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Numerous examples could be taken of its empowering force. Edmond Pezet (1923–2008), for instance, from France, arrived in northeast Thailand in 1956 as a missionary priest. He was drawn to Buddhism and in 1970 travelled to Bangkok to study it, staying in a Buddhist temple. Afterwards, he became particularly close to monastic communities within the Buddhist forest tradition (Huysegoms and Liesse 2012). In Sri Lanka, Vatican II inspired two remarkable priests in their academic study of Buddhism, and their loving and respectful encounter with the lived tradition: Michael Rodrigo O.M.I. (1927–1987) (Gunewardena 2017) and Aloysius Pieris S. J. (b. 1934) (e.g. Pieris 1988).

THE CASE STUDY OF THE UK To take Britain as an example of Christian practice during these years, by the 1960s and 1970s, British cities were becoming religiously plural with migration from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, initially to fill labour shortages after the Second World War. Many Christians were unsure about how to handle the new situation. Long accustomed to

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the presence of synagogues and growing numbers of people from Ireland, they now saw Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs establishing a religious identity for themselves, sometimes buying redundant churches for worship. Missionaries returning from countries such as Pakistan and India were among the first to encourage Christians to make positive steps towards these communities. In some cities, interfaith groups were formed, often pioneered by Christians. Among the first were those created in Wolverhampton and Birmingham in 1974. Leeds soon followed in 1976, although it had had an International Council since 1952 that had aimed to ‘provide opportunities for people of all nationalities, who live in and around Leeds, to meet together in friendship’ (Bates 2016: 249). This grassroots activity trickled up to national level with The United Reformed Church (URC) in 1972 starting a Mission and Other Faiths Committee. The British Council of Churches (BCC), which at this time brought Protestant churches in Britain together, also responded, by commissioning Lamin Sanneh (b. 1942), then living in Britain, to write a survey of Islam in the United Kingdom. As a result, in 1974, the BCC and the Conference of British Missionary Societies (CBMS) established a Presence of Islam in Britain Advisory Group, chaired by David Brown, Bishop of Guildford. An informal BCC ‘Inter-Faith Staff Group’ also emerged, and publications started. David Brown published A New Threshold: Guidelines for the Churches in Their Relations with Muslim Communities (Brown 1976; Harris 2007). The next step came in April 1977, when the Assembly of the BCC endorsed help being given to the churches on ‘the religiously plural character of the world community’ (Harris 2007), and, as a result, the Committee for Relations with People of Other Faiths (CRPOF) came into being, headed by former Methodist missionary, Kenneth Cracknell, as executive secretary, with Roman Catholics as observers. Meeting first on 23 May 1978, most members were experts and enthusiasts, who wanted to see Christians engaging positively with other religious communities. Cracknell became a tireless networker and writer, making links with many different groups, in the four nations of the United Kingdom and internationally. When the World Council of Churches, in 1979, published thirteen principles or guidelines on inter-religious dialogue (Geneva: WCC, 1979), Cracknell was quick to translate them into the British context. By 1981, he and CRPOF had reduced these to four: Dialogue begins when people meet each other, dialogue depends on mutual understanding and mutual trust, dialogue makes it possible to share in service to the community and dialogue becomes the medium for authentic witness (BCC 1983). These were endorsed by a number of churches, including the URC and the Methodist, and a more detailed study guide on them was produced in 1991, under CRPOF’s new executive secretary, Clinton Bennett (CRPOF 1991). To return to Cracknell, between 1980 and 1989, more than ten publications on interfaith relations were published from the BCC, covering the purpose of ‘dialogue’, mixed-faith marriages, praying together with Muslims, worship in multifaith schools and the theology behind inter-faith dialogue, and a journal, Discernment, was started.1 With this activity, at local and national level, new theological perspectives emerged at every level. Cracknell, in 1980, published a first response to the WCC guidelines, Why Dialogue?, which highlighted New Testament passages that involved inter-religious encounter, for instance St Paul’s in-depth dialogue with Jews in the synagogue at Ephesus (Cracknell 1980: 8–10) and Old Testament passages that demonstrated that God was seen by the Hebrews as a ‘universal creator and sustainer’ (Cracknell 1980: 15), in contact with people who were not Jews. At the end he recommended four ways forward: to meet people of other religions and not theologize about them ‘on the basis of total

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ignorance’, to listen to pioneers who have seen the action of God in other religions, to pray with people of other religions and to make the best possible use of the WCC Guidelines (Cracknell 1980: 23–24). Cracknell expanded on this theological position in two subsequent publications, one in 1986 and one in 2005 (Cracknell 1986, 2005). In both, he sought to give Christians permission to meet people of other religions with positive appreciation, without thinking they had to convert them or fearing that they were betraying Jesus if they did not. The theology he promoted was essentially inclusivist. It was inspired by the first chapter of St John’s Gospel (John 1:1–18), which states that Jesus was an incarnation the Word, the Logos in Greek. The Word, according to this passage, was with God from the beginning of the world, pre-dating Jesus. Cracknell argued, therefore, that wherever goodness was found in other religious traditions, it was a sign that the Logos was already there. So, in 2005, he explained his aim as follows: The argument of this book is that Christians should look forward to a future in which they will be able to contemplate a plurality of religious traditions with a good and generous faith. Because of the theological framework set out in the first two chapters [drawing on arguments similar to the above] they should be able to live alongside men and women of other religious paths, without undue anxiety lest, not having been converted to belief in Jesus Christ in this life, the latter should be lost eternally. Our intention in setting out an inclusivist salvation history and an inclusivist Christology has been to enable Christians to behave with a new openness and generosity towards others in the light of their understanding of the purposes of God. (Cracknell 2005: 96) In 1985, a Sri Lankan theologian, Wesley Ariarajah, then working at the WCC headquarters in Geneva, wrote The Bible and People of Other Faiths, drawing on his grassroots experience in Asia. He challenged outright the kind of theology that hung the whole biblical message on an exclusivist interpretation of John 14:6, pointing to language and context, and using accessible illustrations. For instance, he explained, his little girl thought he was the best daddy in the world, but the girl next door thought the same of her daddy. So it is with religions. Practitioners believed their religion was the best in the world but so did practitioners of other religions (Ariarajah 1985: 25–26). With the writings of Christians such as Ariarajah, a more pluralist theology developed in Britain, namely that each religion could lead its practitioners to salvation or liberation, in its own right. Anglican priest Alan Race was among the first to systematize exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism into a typology that could be used to assess Christian attitudes (Race 1983). It was not only Ariarajah and Cracknell who tried to change attitudes through the written word at this time. Martin Forward, the first Methodist executive secretary for Inter-Faith Relations, edited God of All Faith: Discerning God’s Presence in a Multi-Faith Society in 1989 (Forward 1989). It was a compendium of Bible studies and testimonies of encounter from Christians on the ground that urged humility in the presence of other religious traditions, and a readiness to learn and to see the presence of the holy in the religious Other. Within the next decade, a plethora of other books about inter-religious encounter rather than theory were published in Britain, urging a similar response, for instance Peter Bishop’s Written on the Flyleaf: A Christian Faith in the Light of Other Faiths (Bishop 1998) and Maureen Henderson’s Friends on the Way: A Life Enriched by Engagement with People of Other Faiths (Henderson 1999). More followed in the early years of the twenty-first century (Nesbitt 2003; Disbrey 2004; Braybrooke 2005;

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Wingate 2005; Butler 2006; Forward 2008; Torry and Thorley 2008). One of the most moving was by Anglican Ray Gaston, whose A Heart Broken Open: Radical Faith in an Age of Fear (Gaston 2009) gave an account of his grassroots engagement with and learning from Muslims in Leeds. He wrote: I want to give the message to Muslims that their tradition is one in which I find beauty and depth, challenge and sustenance, and I want to open my heart more fully to God who is known in the mosque and I want to know God more profoundly by allowing Muslims, and particularly islam [submission to God], to work in my heart so that my vision of God expands and becomes fuller, truer. (Gaston 2009: 116) In the same period, the ecumenical organization Christians Aware began a series of non-academic books that focused on ‘meeting’ people of another religion, for example: Meeting Sikhs (Barrow); Meeting Buddhists (Harris & Kauth); Meeting Hindus (Little). It also published Paths of Faith (Harris 2002), a series of articles first published in the Methodist Recorder, on eight faiths and the New Age movement. Individual churches also published their own resources for group and individual study. To take the Methodist Church in Britain as an example, Faith Meeting Faith was published in 2002. The Life We Share, a study resource with CDs published in cooperation with the Anglican, United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, followed in 2003 and May I Call You Friend?: Sharing Our Faith with People of Other Faiths, in 2006. Alongside these books, courses were being offered to British Christians. Chris Hewer, an Anglican, who had worked in Pakistan, gave courses in several parts of the country on Islam to encourage empathy with the living tradition. His course was eventually published as Understanding Islam: The First Ten Steps (Hewer 2006). The Methodist/Anglican United College of the Ascension in Birmingham ran short courses open to all on interfaith themes, for instance: Women of Faith (1999); The Trinity in Inter Faith Dialogue (2001); Faith and liberation, faiths and justice (2002); Reading the Bible in a Multi-Faith Context (2002); and People of Faith at Prayer (2005). And the successor to CRPOF, the Churches’ Commission for Inter Faith Relations, held several significant conferences, again open to all, including ‘Christology: A Conference for Practitioners and Theologians’ (1999 – a conference on the same theme was held in Edinburgh in 2002) and ‘Yr Ysbryd: The Holy Spirit in a World of Many Faiths’ (2003 – in Wales). A Christian Inter Faith Practitioners Association (CIPA) was formed, which sought to network and strengthen Christian involvement on the ground. By 2012, however, it was losing steam and eventually closed. Did this advocacy of respectful and generous attitudes to other religious traditions reach Christians in the pew? To a certain extent, it did, particularly in religiously plural regions, where there were a number of pioneers on the ground. In Southall, in the 1980s, John Parry, a URC minister, began a Christian–Sikh encounter group that studied the scriptures of the two traditions. In Bradford, David Bowen, also of the URC, involved many Christians in working with Muslims after the 1988–1989 controversy over Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses. After 9/11 particularly, there was an upsurge of contact between local churches and mosques, as clergy and lay people sought to understand Muslims rather than succumb to negative media representations. In Edinburgh, for instance, shared times of prayer took place alternately in the Methodist Church at Nicolson Square and the adjacent Central Mosque for six weeks after 9/11. In Horwich, the Methodist minister there invited Muslims from the local mosque to a Christian service and afterwards provided a Halal meal.2 However, many Christians in the pews, particularly in areas where there were only limited numbers of people from

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other religious traditions, remained cautious and largely exclusivist in their theology. If someone from outside was asked to speak about inter-religious relations in these areas, they were frequently asked, ‘What about John 14.6?’ Attitudes changed when there was the possibility of encounter. Where Christians met people of other religious traditions, many realized that their previous thinking had been faulty and that people of other religions could be friends rather than an alien ‘Other’. Nevertheless, throughout this period, evangelical, conservative positions also continued to be influential among some communities of Christians in Britain and in other countries, not least the United States. At one end of this spectrum were studies that sought to compare another religious tradition to Christianity in order to demonstrate the greater plausibility of the latter, for example Netland and Yandell’s study of the differences between Buddhism and Christianity (Netland and Yandell 2009). In the middle were writings that presented one or several religions as a threat to the Christian culture of the West, such as Solomon and Al Maqdisi’s privately published book on the Islamic concept of immigration, hijra, which argued that Muslims were involved in a strategic process of infiltration in Britain to expand the realm of Islam. The book’s cover showed a Trojan Horse and its message was that the Muslim presence in Britain was indeed a Trojan Horse that sought a complete takeover, in spite of overtures of friendship made to Christians (Solomon and Al Maqdisi 2009). At the other end of the spectrum were writings that included other religious traditions within a call for spiritual warfare against demonic forces that sought to destroy Christianity, for example by Bob Larson (Larson 1999). In addition, Jack Chick, in his cartoon Crusaders Books on religious ‘history’, combined an anti-Islamic message with a virulent attack on the Roman Catholic Church (e.g. Chick 2013).

CHRISTIANS IN A MINORITY POSITION IN ASIA On 28 October 2001, eighteen Christians were murdered by Muslims at St Dominic’s Church in Bahawalpur, Pakistan. It was not an isolated event. Christians in Pakistan, India, Egypt, Sri Lanka and several other countries have been attacked and sometimes murdered by people of other religious traditions. In most of these countries, Christians are in a minority, without state power. Many are also poor. The majority of Christians in Pakistan, for instance, are from the lowest caste or class. Their families converted when the country was under British rule, because they saw conversion as bringing with it the possibility of greater equality. The same aspiration was present in India, where many converts to Christianity under the British were outside the Hindu caste system. They were what most now call Dalits (lit. crushed, broken). About 60 per cent of contemporary Indian Christians fall into this category. In Sri Lanka, under Portuguese rule, many converts to Roman Catholicism were from the fisher caste, who were looked down upon by the majority Buddhists because their livelihood involved killing. It must be added, however, that the Christian churches in these countries often have money, either from their colonial legacy or from contemporary international partnerships. However, this does not always trickle down to ordinary Christian villagers. In these contexts, several responses to other religious traditions are present among Christians: a co-existence that has been dubbed syncretism, the creation of empowering and defensive theologies in the face of perceived oppression and proactive attempts to redress mistrust stemming from the colonial period. There is space to give only a handful of illustrative examples of these.

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COEXISTENCE AND ‘SYNCRETISM’ Christianity and Hinduism in Goa have already been mentioned. The contemporary situation is that twin shrines exist in the region, namely shrines that boast a Hindu and a Christian symbol, side by side. The history behind them is one of competition rather than coexistence, namely Hindus re-asserting their right to locations important to the mythologies and iconographies surrounding village identities, after the relaxing of exclusionary rules under the Portuguese. Yet, it has led in the present to Christians and Hindus engaging in joint rituals and having identities that encompass both what is Christian and what is Hindu. As Henn has demonstrated, there is an expression of popular religion in Goa that intertwines the worship of Hindu village gods and Catholic patron saints. He not only analyses this from a religious perspective but also takes into account economic and social factors that influence the way in which this intertwining takes place. He argues, for instance, that ‘doctrinal differences’ are ‘overruled’ by a worldview that sees the village ‘as an embodiment of gods and saints’ (Henn 2014: 85). This worldview, in some villages, leads to Roman Catholics and Hindus participating both in rituals and festivals connected with the gods (Hindu) and with the saints (Catholic). Goa is not unique. Hindus, for instance, will attend the Roman Catholic festivals at Our Lady of Madhu Church, in Mannar, in the north of Sri Lanka, and are welcomed by Catholics there. A more structured and elite approach to Hindu–Christian ritual was expressed at Shantivanam or Saccidananda Ashram, near Tiruchirapalli in South India, founded in 1938 by two French Roman Catholic priests, who sought to combine Christian and Hindu contemplative and liturgical practices. One of these, Henri Le Saux (1910–1973), took the Indian name, Abhishiktananda, and pioneered a form of dual belonging.

THE CREATION OF EMPOWERING AND DEFENSIVE THEOLOGIES IN THE FACE OF PERCEIVED OPPRESSION In some parts of India, however, a defensive approach was taken against the inequalities of the caste system within brahmanical Hinduism, in the form of a Dalit theology, which drew on liberation themes in the Bible, in a similar way to the liberation theologians of South America. Their main focus, however, was not the injustices caused by capitalism, but the discrimination experienced by Dalits from a powerful brahmanical Hindu theology. Sherinian’s study, Tamil Folk Music as Dalit Liberation Theology, is helpful here. It focuses on Tamil composer, Theophilus Appavoo, to demonstrate how nonelite music and liturgy is being used in Tamil Dalit communities to create an oral theology that is able to empower Dalits against what are seen as oppressive economic and religious forces, by allowing them to express joy in their own identity and wisdom (Sherinian 2014: 132–39), reversing ‘cultural and psychological shame’ (Sherinian 2014: 149). A non-elite theology resulted that presents Jesus as a worker rather than a king. Important for this chapter is that the spirituality behind this is willing to draw from non-elite and non-brahmanical Hindu practices, such as those within the Tamil festival of Thai Pongal in January, but shuns official dialogue with elite Hinduism (Sherinian 2014: 188–91).

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PRO-ACTIVE ATTEMPTS TO REDRESS MISTRUST STEMMING FROM THE COLONIAL PERIOD In Sri Lanka, in the twentieth century, a remarkable group of indigenous Christians sought to reverse the mistrust of Buddhists towards Christianity that had grown in the colonial period. Aloysius Pieris and Michael Rodrigo have already been mentioned in the context of Vatican II. Michael Rodrigo was an academic practitioner, whose second doctorate was on The Moral Passover from Selfishness to Selflessness in Christianity and the Other Religions of Sri Lanka (Fernando 1988; Harris 2016: 68). Eventually, he taught at a Sri Lankan seminary that pioneered contextual and practical theological training. He then made another move – to live in an entirely Buddhist village in the south of Sri Lanka, where there was much mistrust of Christianity. His aim was not to convert villagers to Christianity but to be a Christian presence among Buddhists that could inspire trust. He took part in Buddhist ritual, even writing songs and poems for performance at nearby Buddhist temples. Together with two Catholic sisters, he set up projects to help the villagers with social issues and advocated their rights when a large multinational threatened their land (Harris 2016: 68–73; Gunewardena 2017). Lynn de Silva (1918–1982) and Yohan Devananda (1928–2016) were also part of this group. De Silva was a Methodist minister and academic who studied Pāli and Buddhism, and called Buddhists into a rigorous but respectful dialogue about difference and similarity between the two religions. He was also a prolific writer. His study of the self in Christianity and Buddhism remains a classic (De Silva 1975). Yohan Devananda (1928– 2016), an Anglican priest, had an elite upbringing, studying at Cuddesdon Theological College in Britain. In the 1960s, however, influenced by Shantivanam, he started a Christian ashram in Sri Lanka that sought to ‘live in harmony with the surrounding Buddhist culture’ (Harris 2016: 61). It stressed meditation, prayer and vegetarianism, and developed liturgies that were inspired by Buddhist precedent. The community also made links with nearby Buddhist monasteries, Devananda sharing in Buddhist ritual (Harris 2016: 61). The community eventually changed from being a male Christian community to being an interfaith community with a concern for the causes of poverty. Throughout this process, Devananda developed strong relationships with Buddhists, rooted in trust and a willingness to cooperate on issues connected with poverty alleviation and interethnic harmony. These four and others helped to change mistrust to trust among some Buddhists. However, their impact has been limited, since many Buddhists in Sri Lanka continue to see Christians as a threat, fearing rightly that some still seek to convert Buddhist villagers to Christianity. To mention briefly one further example – Christian study centres were established to create better relationships with Muslims. In 1930 the Henry Martyn Institute of Islamic Studies was founded in Lahore, eventually moving to India. It is currently based in Hyderabad, under the name the Henry Martyn Institute, offering validated courses on Islam, and topics related to peace and reconciliation. The Christian Study Centre in Rawalpindi was founded in 1968. It has offered courses on Islam for Christians and developed Christian theologies appropriate to the Pakistan context (Amjad-Ali 1996; Moghul and Jivan 1996).

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CONTEMPORARY TRENDS Now, towards the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Christians are not united in their attitude to people within other religious traditions. Globally, some respect, learn from and cooperate with their neighbours of other religions. Inter-religious marriages are happening in increasing numbers, creating families with a dual religious heritage. Inter-religious communities are being established, and, in many contexts, Christians are involved with Inter-Faith Councils and Forums. Yet, particularly in the West, a retreat from the enthusiasm of the decades between 1970 and 2010 can also be seen, as churches concern themselves with dwindling numbers rather than the positive benefits of what has been called inter-religious learning. In addition, the conservative evangelical voice remains strong. American Baptist Robert Jeffress, for instance, influences many with his argument that John 14:6 should be taken literally. For him, other religions are false paths, Islam is a product of Satan and Jews who have not accepted Jesus are destined for hell (Jeffress 2016). Nevertheless, there are four contemporary trends not yet examined in this chapter that are worth noting. First is the phenomenon of dual or multiple belonging. At the end of the twentieth century, some Christians encountered another religion at such depth that they found they could no longer live with only one religious identity. It happened most frequently with Buddhism and Hinduism. Henri Le Saux was an early dual belonger, undertaking Hindu practices long before the term gained currency. There are now a minority of Christians who self-identify as Christian-Buddhist or Christian-Hindu (Drew 2011). It is becoming a focus for academic research projects and for international organizations such as the WCC.3 Second is the growth of interest in comparative mysticism. Illustrative of this trend is a conference that was held in Avila, Spain, in July 2017, comparing the teaching of the Spanish Carmelite mystic Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) with Theravāda Buddhism: ‘Theravāda Buddhism and Teresian Mysticism: Meditation and Contemplation, Pathways to Peace’, organized jointly by the International Centre of Teresian and Sanjuanist Studies in Avila and the Centre of Buddhist Studies, University of Hong Kong. Third, and on a different note, is the increasing willingness of Christian leaders to engage with counterparts in other religious traditions in serious dialogue about religion, society and the meaning of life. One remarkable example is a conversation between Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama on joy (Tutu and Dalai Lama 2016). Fourth is grassroots inter-religious campaigning on issues connected with peace, poverty and environmental degradation. Christians are active in organizations such as Greenfaith, Interfaith Power and Light and A Rocha. These now stand alongside evangelical conservative perspectives. All will shape the future of Christian engagement with other religious traditions.

CHAPTER NINE

Calendar MARGARET Z. WILKINS

In the secular world of the twenty-first century, many of the festivals of the Christian calendar have not just survived secularization but are possibly even more prominent than they ever were in the past, thanks to their potential for commercial exploitation. In the United Kingdom we proceed by way of Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day (which it seems only the Church of England still calls by its original name of Mothering Sunday) and Pancake Day, the popular name now for Shrove Tuesday, through Easter, until we reach Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes Day and at last come to December, the month of Advent candles and calendars and Christmas cards, presents and parties. Behind the advertising and the marketing, however, the shape of the Christian year is still the shape of the civil year in Europe and most of the English-speaking world, with its seven-day week and its major holidays. Schools and universities still have to fit their teaching programmes around Easter, which falls at a different time every year, and Christmas annually brings most of society to a temporary halt. It is worth remembering that for many Christians, the concept of a liturgical year is a fairly recent innovation; while in England, the established church maintained the traditional Western church calendar at the Reformation, in Scotland, the much more radical reformers abolished the observance of Christmas and other festivals. Christmas Day only became a public holiday in Scotland in 1958, while the important midwinter celebration was the secular Hogmanay, New Year’s Eve, a tradition which still flourishes. The celebration of Easter, Christmas and other festivals was banned in England under the Commonwealth in the middle of the seventeenth century, and the Puritans carried their dislike of the festivals of the Christian year to America with them, though Thanksgiving, now largely a secular festival, had its beginnings in Puritan New England. This attitude is still alive and well today among fringe groups; an internet search will readily turn up any number of groups, mostly based in America, who typically claim that since Christmas and Easter are not mentioned in the Bible, Christians should have nothing to do with them. The Puritan understanding that every day was a holy day and so there was no need for special days, except for Sunday, still survives among inheritors of the radical tradition such as Quakers, but nearly all Protestant denominations now share the annual cycle of festivals to a greater or lesser extent. There is wide variation in the extent to which denominations observe the seasons of the liturgical year: Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans follow a clearly defined pattern, but almost all Protestant churches will at least observe the two major festivals of Easter and Christmas, while some Protestant churches, probably as a result of the Ecumenical Movement, have begun to show more interest in the traditional liturgical calendar; a few years ago, I was in a Baptist Church on the first Sunday of February and found they were celebrating Candlemas, commemorating the presentation of Jesus in the Temple.

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FEASTING AND FASTING Feasting and fasting are built into the Christian calendar and have been since early times, though it has to be said that fasting is much less in evidence, at least in the West, than feasting these days. The fast of Lent, interestingly, seems to have been observed before the feast of Christmas became one of the fixtures of the Church calendar. Part of the successful establishment of Lent may be due to the fact that it falls in late winter and early spring, a time of scarcity before the advent of modern methods of food preservation. Now that fresh food is available and affordable by most people all the year round, it takes a great deal of self-discipline to fast in Lent, and fasting in the West has largely become attenuated into ‘giving something up for Lent’ or superseded by the idea of taking something up instead, perhaps more prayer, reading and giving to charity, while many churches organize study groups and extra services in Lent. Publications such as the Church of England’s Love Life Live Lent (Gooder and Babington 2012) suggest simple practical actions for each day of Lent. Fasting as part of a community, with the mutual support that it entails, is easier to maintain than fasting on one’s own, but that kind of support may not be easy to find in today’s dispersed church congregations. In Orthodox countries fasting is still more strictly observed than it is in the West, and devout Orthodox can check colour-coded calendars online (see e.g. Russian Orthodox 2019) to remind them of how and when to fast; there are four major fasts in the year, with the severest degree of fasting involving abstention from meat, fish, dairy, eggs, wine and olive oil. Shrove Tuesday is a reminder that fasting in the West was once equally rigorous, and dairy products needed to be used up before the Lent fast began on Ash Wednesday; now it is a day for pancake parties and pancake races, often held to raise money for good causes. Chocolate and alcohol feature largely on the list of items that are typically given up for Lent, both inside and outside the churches, though I know of one person who gave up potatoes, which she particularly enjoyed. Modern fasting can also include giving up the use of social media or even of the internet in general to cut out distractions and make more space for prayer and contemplation.

CHRISTMAS IN A DIVERSE SOCIETY The origins of Christmas are disputed, and there is no single explanation of why the birth of Jesus started to be celebrated at the end of December early in the fourth century.1 The middle of the winter, when the world is at its darkest and coldest, and there is little work to do in a largely agricultural society, is a very natural time to have some sort of festival to lift the spirits and banish the darkness for a while. But Christmas has always had a slightly equivocal character, often celebrated boisterously, not to say riotously, with drinking, dancing and gambling, in the Middle Ages and early modern period, as Puritans disapprovingly observed. Complaints that celebrations of Christmas are not Christian enough are nothing new, and neither is the fact that Christmas maintains its role as a midwinter festival, a time when people get together with family and friends to eat and drink and enjoy themselves. It could be argued that in some ways there are two parallel Christmases, sacred and secular, linked in various ways by such things as carol services, which are surprisingly well-attended in the secular UK, and school Nativity plays. Secular Christmas begins well

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before December (‘Merry Christmas’ signs start to appear at the beginning of November) and indeed well before the beginning of Advent, which Christians in many churches observe as preparation for the Feast of the Nativity. Fears that Christmas is under threat from atheists, other faiths, or the politically correct, surface routinely in the popular press and social media, as in the case of Winterval in Birmingham some years ago (Arscott 2011; Winterval 2019); the Muslim Council of Britain carries a lighthearted but firm statement about it on their website (Muslim Council of Britain 2013). In practice Christmas is no longer just for Christians, but in the UK at least, it has become a general secular celebration, a break when families and friends can get together, and people enjoy some shared leisure. People of all faiths put up Christmas trees, Muslims can buy halal turkeys and I recently witnessed a Sikh wishing a Buddhist a happy Christmas without the slightest sense of incongruity. These seasonal feasts and fasts fit with the seasons of the northern hemisphere, but when Christianity was carried to the southern hemisphere by migrants and missionaries, the seasons were reversed; Christmas falls in midsummer and Easter in the autumn. While this may not be a cause for great concern to Christian churches, Christmas has become so inextricably linked in popular thought with the coldest time of year, at least for Australians of European heritage, that tour companies put on ‘Christmas in July’ in Australia; it may be difficult to replicate the temperatures of Northern Europe but there are places where people can enjoy a Christmas lunch in frosty surroundings and even sing Christmas carols. The link between Christmas and midwinter cold is so firmly entrenched that in Taiwan people visit an area near Tainan where hillocks of waste salt stand in for a snow scene where they can have their photographs taken at Christmas with Santa Claus.

SAINTS Commemorations of saints are an integral part of the calendar for those denominations which follow one. Some saints are universally celebrated in the churches of both the east and the west; others are remembered in particular countries or denominations. The countries of the UK still celebrate their patron saints, though it could be argued that this is as much civic as religious. St Patrick’s Day was taken to the United States by Irish emigrants and is now very generally celebrated even by people with no Irish ancestors. In those denominations which dedicate individual churches to saints, the feast day of the Church’s saint is usually celebrated by special services and social gatherings. Other saints have traditionally been assigned particular roles, such as St Nicholas of Myra, who as Sinterklaas brings children in the Netherlands gifts on his feast day, 6 December. St Francis of Assisi is the patron saint of animals, and a recent trend has been for churches to hold services to which people can bring their pet animals to be blessed on his feast day, 4 October. The most popular saint in the calendar, however, is one who was dropped from the official calendar of the Roman Catholic Church in 1969 – St Valentine. Since the late Middle Ages, his day (or their day, since there are a number of martyrs called Valentine, with a variety of legends attached to them) has come to be associated with spring and the mating of birds, and so with romantic love, not just in the West but increasingly around the world, even in such unlikely places as Saudi Arabia, where it is officially banned (Arab News 2019).

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REMEMBRANCE AND THE FESTIVALS OF LATE AUTUMN The approach of winter is marked by a number of commemorations of one sort or another; the first two days of November are kept by many Christians as All Saints Day and All Souls Day, remembering both the saints of the Church and their own departed family and friends. Halloween, All Hallows Eve, is the day before All Saints; it was widely believed that on this day the spirits of the dead visited their old homes and were welcomed back. It is traditionally an occasion for parties and games, with children going from house to house and being given sweets and other treats in Scotland, and this has also become a tradition in the United States. However, recent commercial developments have emphasized the frightening aspect of Halloween rather than its role as a friendly neighbourhood festival, and it has become the target of attacks by evangelical Christians as a gateway to the occult, with all the spiritual dangers that it entails. In England the traditional early November celebration is Guy Fawkes Day on the 5th, and parties with bonfires and fireworks are still popular around that time despite the importation of Halloween. It has, rather surprisingly, a religious origin; until the middle of the nineteenth century the Book of Common Prayer contained a service of thanksgiving for the foiling of the plot to blow up Parliament on that day, and the ‘guy’ who is still sometimes burned in effigy is Guy Fawkes, the chief plotter. At Lewes in Sussex, where enormous bonfires are lit, the range of effigies now includes politicians and other unpopular public figures.

NEW WAYS OF CELEBRATING ANCIENT FESTIVALS Secularization may have sent traditional church attendance into decline in many countries, not least the UK, but the Christian calendar still defines the shape of the year, and the major festivals, particularly Christmas, still have a resonance among people who would never think of going to church on a Sunday. Richard Thomas (2003) has argued that ‘believing is the strongest and most important form of belonging’, and Christmas and the period leading up to it still see surprisingly high levels of attendance at services. Lichfield Cathedral, for instance, which once held a single Advent carol service on Advent Sunday, now has to hold another one on Saturday to accommodate the number of people who want to attend. Traditions constantly develop and adapt to new circumstances, and the customs of the Christian calendar are no exception. Commercial pressures have blurred the sharp outlines of the calendar, and Easter eggs are now on sale before the beginning of Lent, hot cross buns are available long before and after Good Friday and restaurants start urging their customers to book their Christmas parties as early as June; Mothering Sunday is now almost universally known as Mother’s Day, like the purely secular occasion celebrated on the second Sunday in May in the United States. But within the churches, new (and in these days usually ecumenical) ways of celebrating fasts and festivals are evolving all the time: fasting from social media, highlighting the significance of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost by wearing red clothes to church that day and most recently the popularity of ‘Ashes to Go’, where clergy take ashes out of church and into public places on Ash Wednesday and invite passersby to receive the sign of the cross on their foreheads. The vitality of the Christian calendar shows no signs of fading in a secular age.

CHAPTER TEN

Children – family – childlessness DAWN LLEWELLYN

The family is a central social, cultural and moral structure at the heart of Christian thinking and practice. However, despite the range of beliefs that comprise contemporary Christianity, in its teachings, doctrine and church life, the family is overwhelmingly presented as a heterosexual married couple with biological children. While some communities adopt this paradigm to signal their faith identity and commitment to God, others question and depart from it as they try to make sense of their diverse experiences of family, children and childlessness. Amongst the multiple patterns of family life – blended families, singleness, intergenerational carers, declining birth rates and same-sex relationships, to the social global and local networks that can constitute family – Christian teaching rarely deviates from endorsing the nuclear model. In 2016, following two Synods, Pope Francis released Amoris Lætitiai (‘The Joy of Love’): On Love in the Family, in which he offers the Church a pastoral message about the complexities and the challenges the family faces in the contemporary world, such as estrangement and divorce, economic hardship, violence against women and families separated through migration or political conflict. As an apostolic exhortation, Amoris Lætitiai is not doctrinally determining, but it encourages Roman Catholics to ‘value the gifts of marriage and family’ (para. 5) because it ‘is a good which society cannot do without’ (para. 44). At times, the document appears to acknowledge that the family does not necessarily fit the neat image of husband, wife and children as it calls for ‘mercy and closeness wherever family life remains imperfect or lacks peace and joy’ (para. 5). However, Amoris Lætitiai is unwavering in its particular identification of family: only the exclusive and indissoluble union between a man and a woman has a plenary role to play in society … We need to acknowledge the great variety of family situations that can offer a certain stability, but de facto or same-sex unions, for example, may not simply be equated with marriage. No union that is temporary or closed to the transmission of life can ensure the future of society. (52) In Roman Catholic thought, while marriage is for love, help, affirmation and for the physical expression of sexuality, it is primarily for the ‘natural’ procreation and nurturance of children and is therefore defended as a heterosexual institution – predicated on recognizing only two biological sexes, male and female (see also, Gaudium et Spes; Humanae Vitae) – that forms the foundation for society.

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This view is not restricted to Roman Catholicism. In the Church of England, marriage is the union between a man and a woman and is the ‘foundation of family life’ (Common Worship 2000), and many evangelicals, following the creation stories in Genesis, believe that the family constitutes men and women in a secure, binding, exclusive sexual relationship that results in biological children (see the writings of Tim and Beverley LaHaye (1998 [1976]) as lay, evangelical theologians who propose this view). The ‘Quiverfull’ movement is a conservative, largely Protestant Christian religious group, mostly based in the United States. Following the New Testament writings such as Ephesians 5:21–6:9, Quiverfull hold a patriarchal and anti-feminist worldview, in which men are the ‘head’ of the household and women and children are expected to obey their husbands and fathers. They advocate pronatalism, which promotes parenting and childbearing as the principal focus for one’s life, and they emphasize, strongly, the moral importance of a high birth rate because it contributes to growing the Christian population. While Christianity (and most societies) can, to some extent, be described as pronatalist – in the ways that women are naturalized as mothers and carers of children – Quiverfull Christians are inspired by the literal reading and interpretation of Psalm 127:3–5 to reject all forms of birth control: ‘Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.’ Rather than control reproduction naturally or artificially, Quiverfull couples believe that God governs the number of times a woman conceives and gives birth, and young women usually marry before the age of 20, rather than continue with their education, to increase the opportunities to have many children (Joyce 2009; McIntosh, forthcoming; McKeowen 2014). Across different expressions of Christianity, ‘procreation as a meaning of married sex signifies that children are born within the covenant of marriage’ (Ritchie 2013: 129) and it is anticipated that couples are ‘open’ to the possibility of children. However, when the nuclear family is presented as normative and authentic for Christian living, it simultaneously excludes same-sex partnerships, unmarried couples, childlessness and childfree, divorce and separation from the family, and sometimes refuses or at least questions the use of artificial contraception, abortion and casual sex. There are many scholars who have challenged the heteronormative pronatalism underlying the Christian family (Baden and Moss 2015; Cornwall 2017), and some have drawn attention to times when Christian identity does not rely on biological kinship. Rosemary Radford Ruether (2001) historically examines the ‘making’ of the family, and argues: ‘There has never … been only one form of family’ (2001: 4). Ruether highlights the ‘antifamily traditions’ in the ancient world when marriage and children are incompatible with higher, ascetic forms of living, while the celibate, unmarried life is taken as pure and unblemished. In the New Testament, there are examples of Jesus rejecting family life, including his own relations (Mark 3:31, 33–35; Matthew 4:21–22; Luke 14:26), and in the Pauline, martyrdom and apocryphal narratives, sometimes the family prevents the fulfilment of Christian identity. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity (Heffernan 2012) is a third-century text thought to be the earliest surviving writing by a Christian woman. It is the prison diary of Perpetua, a noble woman from Carthage, who is condemned to death for her faith – but she has an infant son. When her father pleads with her to retract her confession because of her baby, Perpetua refuses. Instead, she gives her child to be cared for by others and is then killed by the wild animals in the gladiatorial stadium: her status as a mother is secondary to her desire to die a martyr (Middleton 2014, 2016).

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Perpetua’s rejection of motherhood to achieve the ultimate marker of Christian identity is striking because it runs counter to the ‘heavy maternal expectation’ (Llewellyn 2016) that suggests women’s Christian selves are realized by becoming mothers. From the biblical call to ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ (Genesis 1:28, KJV), the declaration that ‘women will be saved through childbearing’ (1 Timothy 2:15) and the Roman Catholic teaching that motherhood is the ‘fundamental contribution that the Church and humanity expect from women’ (Evangelium Vitae, para. 19), the dominant message is that lay women are ‘supposed’ to be mothers. In feminist studies of religion, the general concern has been to critique the contradictory ways motherhood is represented, such as its simultaneous association with Eve’s punishment and painful childbirth, and the romanticized, idealized figure of the Virgin Mary (Warner 1985 [1976]; Daly 1986, 1991; Bennett Moore 2002), or to highlight how maternal stereotypes essentialize women and restrict their roles to mothering (Walker 1984; McFague 1987; Christ 1992; Hogan 1995). While motherhood is incredibly demanding, for some women, it is a key factor in faith development because it can prompt new spiritual insights and provoke a heightened relationship with God (Miller-McLemore 1994; Halbertal 2002; Slee 2004; Buller and Fast 2013; Molina 2013; Reimer 2016). However, the value that is given to motherhood, parenting, the family and children can marginalize others. As well as teachings, regular practices are often orientated towards the family, because of its significance for Christian life. Women with children may be very visible in church through dedicated activities – Sunday school, the importance of Mother’s Day, familybased social events, mother and baby groups and parenting classes – but these specific times and spaces can alienate those who do not identify with these roles or can discount those who do not seem to correspond with the ‘traditional’ family image. For example, Kristin Aune (2002, 2008) describes how single evangelical women are constructed as ‘non-normative’. She suggests that when churches act as though being unmarried is ‘nonstandard, even deviant, behaviour’, it generates ‘a sense of insignificance’ (2008: 60) in single people. Similarly, Line Andronovienė reveals that single women in Baptistic communities feel ‘invisible’ (2014: 42) and are perceived to be lacking because Christian discourses idealize marriage and family. When the Church attempts to redress this isolation, it usually encourages single people to pray for marriage or treats singleness as a gift that offers opportunities to serve the community, despite the infrequent presence of single women in church leadership. Mainly, the Church responds by setting up specific single ministries, which reinscribe the message that ‘marriage/sex/kids’ is the route to contentment (2014: 53) because such groups are ‘commonly seen as the place for finding a spouse’ (2014: 49). Therefore, even when churches openly acknowledge single Christians, they still report feeling excluded. The focus on the family is also difficult for those who are childless – involuntary, by circumstance or voluntarily – either permanently or temporarily. Voluntary childlessness is the active, positive choice not to have children or be ‘childfree’. Involuntary childlessness includes a range of experiences, such as infertility: ‘a disease of the reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a clinical pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular unprotected sexual intercourse’ (World Health Organisation, WHO) and can be ‘secondary’ when it follows a previous pregnancy or live birth. Currently, these terms are under revision by WHO to incorporate non-medical reasons for childlessness, which is generally termed ‘social childlessness’ or ‘childless by circumstance’. This covers situations when individual, cultural or legal structures prevent or hinder conception or birth: poverty can impact health to reduce the likelihood of pregnancy and childbirth, same-

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sex couples in some societies are denied access to adoption or reproductive technologies, being single involuntarily, when one partner in a relationship wants children but the other does not, caring for others, early menopause or illnesses unrelated to fertility or sterility (such as mental health conditions or recovery from addiction). Such labels are always shaped by their social contexts, and there is a tendency to define having children against not having children in ways that neglect how these identities may overlap: involuntary and voluntary childless people might still care for children; voluntary childlessness can coincide infertility; and intentions towards parenting or voluntary childlessness are complex, often accidental, sometimes hesitant, or there might be ambivalence or regret (Campbell 1999; Gillespie 1999; Donath 2017). Christian men and women who are involuntary childless or childless by circumstance can find the Church difficult to inhabit because the pronatalist expectation stigmatizes those who do not have children. In an article in The Church Times, journalist Rachel Giles (2015) asks whether the Church offers a ‘welcoming space’ for involuntary childless couples. Her informants report that some churches try to create opportunities to discuss biological childlessness, but provision is limited and sometimes damaging, and so those wanting help find it elsewhere. Christians who are childless by choice often face explicit criticism. In February 2015, responding in part to lowering fertility rates in Europe, Pope Francis declared that choosing not to have children ‘is a selfish act’ and in 2014 reproached those attracted more to vacations and ‘a fancy home in the country’ than to having children. Christian voluntary childless men and women expect vilification if they speak out about their choice and feel silenced by the pronatalism circulating their faith lives. For example, one participant in a study on Christian women’s choices towards motherhood and voluntary childlessness explains that as a minister, she feels there is a ‘hiddenness’ and ‘guilt’ that prohibit from telling her congregation, friends and relations that she is childfree. In response, the women in that research trouble the assumption that the family depends upon heterosexual marriage and children and understand that a partnership without children is a legitimate vocation and answer to God’s call (Llewellyn 2016). Teachings, doctrine, scripture and practices may enforce a relatively singular understanding of family and herald children as necessary ‘good’, but there are a variety of experiences that depart and challenge this as the authentic outworking of faith. Yet, even when communities reflect and maintain marriage and children, everyday religious lives disclose the complex and fluid meanings of Christian families.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Education TIM JENSEN

The Jews there were amazed and asked, ‘How did this man get such learning without having been taught?’ Jesus answered, ‘My teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me.’ (John 7:15–16) For Christians, Jesus is represented as a teacher, and teaching (indistinct from preaching in much Christian activity) is a central instrument in proselytizing. Though believing that Jesus was divine, the Son and incarnation of God, and that he taught about matters beyond normal human experience, Christianity, as a tradition which has paid great attention to scriptures, became dependent on teaching the ‘meaning’ of the scriptures as interpreted by the leaders of the churches. This is exemplified in the ‘Great Commission’ to the earliest groups of Christians: ‘Therefore go and make disciples of all nations’ (Matthew 28:19), which may be understood to mean go teach people to become Christians. Though rituals such as baptism and the Eucharist play an important role in the lives of many Christians, the transmission of the religion has been, to a large degree, dependent on transmission through sermons and Bible readings. The Christian priest or minister, usually trained in a seminary to interpret and teach the Bible, was, for centuries, the only educated person who could read and teach reading. For generations, learning to read meant learning to read the Bible. The village preacher was therefore often the only teacher, and even when states set up general education systems, teaching often continued to be intimately linked to the Church. Indeed, in many parts of the world today, some countries’ economies or civic structures do not allow for organized forms of public education, meaning that many churches, which do have the money, take the opportunity to provide education. One such example is the Booth Leadership Initiative, which has helped to fund Justo Mwale University in Lusaka, Zambia, which is partly funded by The Outreach Foundation, set up by Dr Alex Booth – a successful businessman – and his wife Katherine. A dedication of one project reads: ‘Dedicated to the glory of God, for the continuing spiritual enrichment of those who serve the Lord’s church. Funds given by elder Alex Booth Through the Presbyterian Church (USA)’ (see Weingartner 2013). For Christians, teaching, preaching, proselytizing, moralizing and socializing go hand in hand – it is a core part of ‘being Christian’ – and a direct line can be traced from St Augustine’s classic De Doctrina Christiana (Shaw 2010) to modern websites related to Anglican Christianity, which simply state: ‘Teaching children and adults is an important activity for every church’ (Anglicans Online 2019). Christianities are as many and diverse as their traditions, denominations and churches. Christian education therefore also comes in a wide variety of forms and may be studied and represented from different perspectives, and with different aims. Largely disregarding the past and present-day Christian education that comes in the form of institutionalized

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mission, directed towards non-Christian adults and children (often living in countries other than that of the missionary mother church), the focus here is on a selection of contemporary forms of Christian education and mission directed at children and adolescents in countries where the majority religion is Christianity. Christian education, for the purpose of this chapter, is subdivided into four aspects, at times overlapping, each characterized and differentiated by their main location and stakeholders: family, civil society, church- or Christianity-linked private schools and state schools with various kinds of confessional or semi-confessional Christian education. Christian education is therefore understood as a part of the efforts of parents, churches, societies and states to Christianize, influence or govern children and future citizens through primary and secondary socialization that, one way or another, includes pro-Christian, religious instruction into Christianity rather than neutral, non-religious education about Christianity.

FAMILY AND CHURCH Christian parents frequently try to transmit their particular understanding of Christianity and its influence upon their way of living to their children (Bengston et al. 2017). This kind of Christian education may also be termed ‘upbringing’ and takes place primarily within the family home. Pedagogical strategies employed by family members, consciously or not, range from ‘learning by doing’ – taking part in rituals and festivals (for instance, saying grace before meals and saying bedtime prayers; celebrating Christmas; Bible reading) – to oral and more explicit teaching. This may take the form of telling Christian stories or more explicit theologizing (explaining the meaning of concepts that underpin the rituals and festivals mentioned above), or moralizing – instructing the child in what is good or bad using such narratives. In Lutheran-Protestant countries a famous tool used for Christian home education of children for centuries was Martin Luther’s 1529 Der Kleine Katechismus (Luther 1529). Christian pedagogics at home may include the use of rewards and punishments – including physical punishment in some cultures – in order for children literally to feel the consequences of immoral or ‘sinful’ behaviour, as well as to have them learn what is still, for many families, considered the God-given authority of the father in the home. For many Christians, establishing the authority of their religion and church is often accompanied by learning to adopt specific gendered roles and attitudes to sexuality, framed within their particular interpretation of the religion. Parents today can link their teaching to church-affiliated initiatives and materials. In Denmark, for example, parents may take their babies to ‘baby-hymn-singing’ (singing of arrangements of hymns and musical games, for babies aged between three and twelve months) and their children to ‘spaghetti services’ (special services where the churchgoers are also served food attractive to children), and the church may establish pre-confirmation outreach through schools to homes. National and international Christian corporations, publishing companies and churches produce innumerable books for use in child and adolescent education, not just by teachers and ministers but also by parents. Additionally, parents can obtain information online for resources in Christian home schooling (Christian Education Europe 2019). On the intersection between family and church are the Christian rites of passage. Children if baptized in church as babies or at a very young age will have no lasting memory of this fundamental Christian rite, which is supposed to change their religious status, not just for their lifetime but for ever. Yet, this initial way of Christianizing children may, with

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regard to lived religion, be of utmost importance for the lives lived by many Christians. Consider the example of Denmark: each child baptized within the Lutheran-Protestant established church is a formal member of the Church, and thus, in terms of civil as well as official religious status, a Christian. This is the case until he or she formally exits the church, by making a statement explicitly against the established religion, traditions and norms of their family and of the majority of people in their society. Renouncing the Christian religion in this way, of course, is anything but easy: it is a major undertaking. Baptisms, confirmations, weddings and burials belong to a highly important group of rites of passage which, linked to various ages, stages and social roles, bond the individual, family and society at large. Though performed in church, they are intimately linked to uniting the family and society, with the accompanying drinking, eating and partying. This kind of upbringing and education – with the children of the family experiencing what it means to be a child, an adolescent, married or unmarried, a dead or alive family member – is one of the most important and effective kinds of Christian education because it is so intimately tied to the normative power of the family and society, to the power of tradition and social identity construction. Looking at the long and impressive history of the spread, perseverance and power of Christian traditions, including the number of baptisms, confirmations, weddings and burials, this kind of Christian education has had some long-lasting effect on children, adolescents and societies throughout the world. However, in many countries, all these efforts by parents and churches have not always been successful. In many countries, baptized parents no longer present their children for baptism, and though confirmation is still popular in many countries among adolescents and their parents, some choose to have no confirmation, or a ‘non-firmation’, or some other secular or humanist celebration allowing them to bond with family and friends and celebrate in a non-Christian way. Likewise, the number of non-religious marriages has increased steadily in large parts of the world, and in several historically Christian countries, it is becoming increasingly normal to have a non-Christian burial ceremony. Religiously motivated homeschooling might be regarded as an intersection of family, church and school, compelled as it often is by a perceived clash between the parents’ religious beliefs and practices and the values and programmes of the state school.

CIVIL SOCIETY Apart from the aforementioned church-linked publishers and institutions that cater to church-linked schools, ministries and families, brief mention must be made of a few famous, international and highly influential Christian-related educational and social enterprises: the YMCA, the scouting movement and the Sunday School. The YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) was established in 1844 in the UK. Today it has millions of members – male and female – with 120 national associations (YMCA 2019). The YMCA arose as one of many Christian reactions to urbanization, industrialization and increasing de-Christianization. It paid special attention to youngsters who might be caught up in social problems. Today, with its activities linked to sports and social work, it has a much broader basis of recruitment. The aim remains the same: to help young people see and feel the relevance of the Christian religion in their everyday lives. In 1910, Robert Baden-Powell, a Christian retired army officer, set up the Boy Scouts Association in the UK, today a worldwide movement for both boys and girls. Though physical training and health were important, the aim was also mental fitness and health,

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deeply influenced by Baden-Powell’s Christianity, combining its specific aims with the practice of Christianity in everyday life. Sunday schools date back to the Industrial Revolution, in the late 1700s, in England with a Christian evangelist, Robert Raikes (1786–1811), who tried to get children and young people who would be working on weekdays off the streets and into school – a school with the Bible as the textbook. Sunday schools later became the name for different types of Christian education conducted on Sundays by churches. Mention must also be made of the many ways in which Christian education, broadly speaking, has been and still is pursued by institutions linked to the state – for example, through state-sponsored or state-linked public TV and broadcasting. It is directed not just at children and adolescents but also at adults, and it takes place in the form of specific programmes focused on, and heavily influenced by, Christianity. Examples include TV series regarding Christmas or representing the nation’s history and culture as being based upon Christian values. These kinds of media play a central role in educating future generations so that they understand and adopt the claim that their country or nation is rooted in and built on Christianity and heavily influenced by Christian values. This, certainly, is also an important part of Christian education.

CHURCHES AND STATE-FUNDED PRIVATE SCHOOLS In the early days of Christianity, adult baptism took place only after doctrinal education of the candidates. With the baptism of children, such teaching now occurs before confirmation, a ceremony meant to confirm and reinforce baptism. In a country like Denmark, this form of religious teaching is closely linked to, and supported by, the state or public school, since the schools allow pupils to leave school to attend classes in their church congregation. Moreover, in Denmark, religious education, in principle nonconfessional and separated from the established church, is suspended during the year where the majority of pupils ‘go to priest’ as education for confirmation is called. As well as church initiatives aimed at educating new generations of Christians (such as the baby-hymn-singing and spaghetti services previously mentioned), many churches and congregations in Norway and Denmark – with significant support from the state – have a whole series of programmes for training ministers to teach members of the congregation, children included. In these activities, ‘learning by doing’ – using participation in standard rituals or newly invented ritual-like events – seems to be a popular device to facilitate learning more effectively than the use of traditional sermons and the intellectual teaching of doctrines. In Denmark, the state church has its own educational institute to provide in-service training, not just for ministers but for a variety of church-affiliated families, groups and individuals. The church likewise has established (often in cooperation with schools which, in principle, have a neutral approach to all religions) ‘school-service centres’, where ministers and teachers develop materials for, and offer their services to, state schools for their teaching of Christianity. Many schools in Denmark use this service and find this cooperation between church and school unproblematic. In many countries the state school system runs parallel to a system with more or less state-funded private or voluntary schools, some of which are religious in character. In England there are voluntary faith schools, linked to the Roman Catholic Church as well as the Church of England, and in Denmark, private or so-called free schools (supported up to 75 per cent by the state), linked to minority-Christian and other religious groups of parents as well as to the majority Lutheran-Protestant religion, are numerous and

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popular. In Denmark, moreover, the whole idea of independent schools (in Danish, friskoler) is intimately linked to the theology and educational thinking of a Danish pastor, N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872). In all of these private, voluntary or free Christianity-based schools, the aims and hopes are that schools contribute to the moral-religious upbringing of the children. The schools attempt to familiarize the pupils with the teachings, rituals and history of the Church or the religion in question and to show its relevance for modern life and society, and for the life and identity of the pupils. It aims at the student’s personal, spiritual identity formation and realization that the religious dimension is a fundamental aspect of all human life and a foundation for true values and morals.

STATE SCHOOLS One of many ways of classifying religious education (RE), a school subject offered in many state schools in Europe, is to differentiate between confessional or denominational RE and non-confessional RE. Confessional RE corresponds almost exactly to the abovementioned teaching in private or voluntary faith schools. The state-supported confessional RE in the educational system of Germany may serve as an example: the German constitution, though separating religion and state, guarantees state-supported religious education in state schools, allowing the various churches, denominations and religions to provide teachers, materials and curricula for confessional education. Even if the state nowadays – due to the plurality of religions in the country and to human rights’ standards regarding freedom of religion – provides this for many religions, not just Christianity, and even if some alternative to the confessional religious education is offered, it is still evident that the state implicitly or explicitly considers Christian values and Christian cultural heritage to be of paramount importance for the good life, the good citizen and the good society. Religious education in state schools, offered in many countries with a Christian majority and history, still serves as a key instrument in the upbringing of citizens who, one way or the other, ought, in the eyes of the state, to be influenced by Christianity. It is therefore not difficult to find many examples of how many forms of RE, purportedly non-confessional, in practice are often confessional. For decades, this has been the case in primary state schools in Norway and Denmark, and even in Sweden – famous for its secular RE – where RE can be seen to be saturated in Lutheran-Protestant Christianity. In Denmark not much has really changed since outright confessional education was introduced in state schools in 1814 – indeed, in contemporary Danish society, political parties are as likely to link to Christian values as to secular, democratic and human rights. Christian or Christian-related education thus still serves as an important part of civil education. In this chapter, I have sought to outline several of the ways in which education, and specifically Christian education, has played a role in the transmission of Christianity. This is important as, from the earliest times to the present, Christianity has depended on mission for its geographical extension and on efficient transmission for its continued vitality. Now as before, Christians devote themselves and their institutions to the teaching of their myths, beliefs and practices, and Christian education thus plays a central role in the lives of many Christians, be they parents, children, pastors or teachers. Indeed, in many countries around the world with a majority of Christian citizens, Christianity continues to receive statesupported influence through public education, whether in the shape of singing morning psalms, saying prayers in school or in the shape of time-tabled religious education.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Death CHRISTINA WELCH

There are various ways in which Christians around the world perform death rites. This variety is not new, and practices continue to develop. A recent development concerns the rituals connected to the disposal of cremains (human ashes following cremation). The cremation of the Christian body is a controversial topic. It is largely accepted in Protestantism, although there are cultural disparities, with it being more common in England (approx. 75 per cent) than in Germany (approx. 55 per cent) or the United States (approx. 46 per cent) (ICS 2016). In Roman Catholicism, only since 15th August 2016 has cremation been officially acceptable, although burial is preferable. If cremation is performed, then cremains cannot be scattered or buried at a crematorium, but must be interred in sacred ground (CDF 2016). Orthodox forms of Christianity retain burial as the only doctrinally acceptable form of body disposal (OCTP 2014). What follows is a small selection of Christian death practices that are influenced by factors such as geographical context, the influence of pre-Christian cultural traditions and theological norms of the period in which the practice developed. First, we turn to Renaissance northern Europe and the artistic genre of Transi memorials commissioned by the wealthy (c. 1400–1600). These depicted the memorialized as a naked, emaciated corpse, sometimes rotting and infested with creatures associated both with sin and decomposition. These unusual items were intimately connected with medieval Roman Catholicism and its Dantesque afterlife of Purgatorial torment. Hugely expensive, transis acted as a lavish memento mori, encouraging the living to lead a good Christian life in the knowledge that Purgatory and its punishments awaited them, but also reminded them to pray for the dead as these prayers helped ease the pains of purgation for those remembered (Welch 2016). Slightly later, and in the Protestant tradition, we find the notion of the Sin Eater: a poor person who consumed food and drink over a corpse in order to take the sins of that person into one’s self (Hartland 1892). The last Sin Eater in Britain died in 1906 (BBC 2010). But the notion of a strong relationship between the living and the dead is not one that purely inhabits the past but can be found in a number of contemporary Christian communities around the world. Many Māori, despite being Christian, retain the traditional mourning ritual of the Tangihanga. The Tangihanga takes place on the Marae, the area in front of the Wharenui (a ritual meeting house), where the deceased lies in an open casket for three days to enable the final farewells of family and friends. The Christian burial service takes place on the last day, officiated by a priest. The ritual serves as a medium for the spirit of the deceased to journey to the afterlife, and the word Tangi loosely means crying process (Higgins 2011), and the notion of keening for the dead is common in many cultures, such as the African American homegoing ritual.

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African American funerals celebrate the deceased person’s move from this life to the next life, from earth to Heaven, and have their origins in slave culture (hence homegoings – the liberation from earthly oppression). Funerals were one of the few areas where slave owners did not intrude into black culture, and secret burial societies date back to the 1600s (Walter 2009). Highly gender segregated, young men act as pall bearers during the funeral service and young girls as flower girls, carrying the flowers that are placed around the casket. Prominent women of the community act as nurses, and their keening is an integral part of the funeral. Raising the emotional charge of the event, they ensure the ‘dramatic expression of grief’ that gives the deceased an appropriate send-off (Cann 2017); the traditional African basis for the importance of keening at a funeral features in the South African film Max and Mona (Mattera 2004), and the use of personal property placed on the grave to form a ‘burial landscape’ has its origins in West and Central Africa (McMickle 2002). Another culture to incorporate elements of traditional culture into contemporary Christian funeral practice is the Tlingit of Alaska, many of whom were converted to Russian Orthodoxy in mid-1880s. The shared concern for the ‘unity of the living and the dead’ is prominent in both cultures, and this includes prayers from the living for the deceased and elaborate funeral rites (Kan 1999: 421). A number of traditional Tlingit rites were highly controversial, such as cremation. The compromise that Orthodox Tlingit make is to cover the buried with a large cemented slab that keeps the deceased warm in the cold, wet Alaskan ground; food, drink and possessions are also put inside, or on top of, the coffin. In efforts to keep Tlingit cemeteries looking Orthodox, there is a prohibition of non-Christian headstones, although this aspect of mortuary culture is one that has been adapted. For the Tlingit, status is important and thus relatives often erect large memorials on graves for significant individuals, echoing in effect Victorianera funeral practices (Barnes 2016). Some Orthodox Tlinglit funerals even include clan members dancing in traditional regalia and the holding of a traditional-style potlatch ceremony (a giveaway ceremony that celebrates the life of the deceased and includes food, drink, dancing and singing) to reward the gravediggers and other funeral workers, and to pass on possessions of the deceased to family and friends (Kan 1999: 424). A further Orthodox Tlingit mortuary adaptation is that traditionally dreams and visions of the dead would mean they required food and drink, which was given through the medium of offerings in a fire. Today, however, such dreams and visions are interpreted as the need for prayers; these can be given either by the priest or by members of the surviving family. Dreams today though have moved from being largely of the ancestors, to being of the saints, Mary Mother of God and Jesus (Kan 1999: 425–26). Traditionally in Tlingit culture, after death there would be a long vigil for the deceased. The Orthodox Tlingit have adapted this to fit the Orthodox three-day/night watch, and whereas traditional items of regalia would be the order of the day, Christian accoutrements, such as candlesticks, Orthodox Icons and cloth decorated with crosses, have replaced these, although there are reports of headdresses appearing when the clerics are not present. In Russian Orthodox belief, the soul takes forty days to reach Heaven. Here it is pre-judged to determine whether it will await Judgement Day in Heaven or Hell. For the first few days, the soul is believed to wander the earth accompanied by angels. For the Orthodox Tlingit, these first few days are (re)interpreted as the soul of the deceased staying close to the family home, and a candle is burnt during the forty days to ‘light the way for the soul’ of the deceased. Celebrations take place on the fortieth day, with a further vigil and with food and drink being left out by the door as parting/ partaking gift (Kan 1999: 432–35).

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This hybrid form of Christian-based spiritual death tradition is just one of the many ways that colonized peoples have adapted Christianity to fit with the most important parts of their own pre-contact cultural norms. The Grassfields people of Cameroon for instance do not use cemeteries to bury their dead, but inter them in compounds so ancestors can remain close to their descendants. The local church conducts the memorial service for the deceased, but other funeral-related activities are compound based. With social ties being important, death celebrations are large and small markets can spring up to sell snacks to friends and relatives of the deceased who come to pay their respects and enjoy the party-like commemoration that includes dancing and gift-giving. Before Christianity, ancestors were made only through burial in the village compound, and this form of burial was available only to prestigious man, but by becoming Christian, the afterlife (and thus ancestorhood) is available to everyone; effectively now death is a social leveller, with all becoming an honoured and remembered forebear. Rituals as well as myths, such as the use of gunfire as part of the commemorations, have all taken on a Christian hue. No longer symbolizing the keeping of death at bay, because death is no longer something to be feared, gunfire is now considered an honour. Dreams of the deceased too have altered now that death has lost its sting; once signifying an unhappy ancestor and the need for an appeasing ritual, dreams of the dead are now an avenue for them to advise on family matters or even provide the cause of their own demise (Jindra 2005). The Shung Him Tong people of Hong Kong are another group especially concerned with maintaining a link with their dead; they have their own graveyards to ensure their dead are not buried with strangers. They too have (re)interpreted traditional death beliefs in the light of their new faith; the traditional Chinese burning of the possessions of the dead, once a way to send these to the afterworld for use, is now ‘merely a good way to dispose of thing’. Thus, whilst Chinese Christian and non-Christian mortuary rituals may bear many similarities, the reasoning behind actions reiterates the spiritual values of a particular community and reinforces religious bonds (Constable 1994: 108). Perhaps the most well-known Christian-hybrid death tradition is the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’, although its celebrations of death and the remembering of the dead have spread throughout the Western world in the increasingly commercialized form of Halloween/ Samhain celebrations. The Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ is the culturally adapted version of the Roman Catholic All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, observed on 1st and 2nd of November, respectively. In Mexico, the celebrations are properly known as Día de Animas (Souls’ Day), and Día de los Finados (Day of the Deceased), or Día de los Finados Difuntos (Day of the Faithful Departed), and both days make up Días de Muertos, or more properly, Días de los Muertos. The Roman Catholic Church requires only the observance of special masses for the saints on the first day, and observances to honour the souls in Purgatory in the second day, however, in Mexico, with the adoption of Christianity have meant adapted commemorations (Brandes 2006). Días de los Muertos preparations involve a grave cleaning, although this ritual is perhaps not so unusual as it is a standard Spanish Roman Catholic mortuary culture, which features in the award-winning movie Volver (Almodóvar 2006). Indeed, the producer of Volver is quoted as saying that the film is ‘about the rich culture that surrounds death in the region of La Mancha … [and] the way (not tragic at all) in which various female characters, of different generations, deal with this culture’ (Almodóvar 2005). What perhaps makes Días de los Muertos less standard in terms of Christian death practice is that the dead are welcomed home, albeit just for the night. Sugar skulls on home altars tempt the angelitos, the spirits of dead children, whilst fruits, flowers, cups of chocolate and pan de los mueros (special bread) make up

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the ofrenda on the altar for deceased adults; photographs of the dead and candles also decorate the altars, where everyone maintains a vigil. Over recent years, special altars have been erected in honour of those who have died of socially bad deaths; by homicide, by war, in childhood and of diseases such as HIV/AIDS (Brandes 2006: 137). With this recent innovation, and with the skull iconography harking back to pre-Christian Toltec and Aztec culture, perhaps it is no surprise that an offshoot of Días de los Muertos is the creolized-Christian cult of La Santa Muerte. Here the ubiquitous skeleton, the medieval symbol of death, has become a vernacular saint, albeit one opposed by the Church despite an earlier incorporation into its Latin American beliefs and practices. La Santa Muerte is known for her healings and miracle-workings and is believed to be the fastest growing religion in the Americas (Chestnut 2012). Although perhaps not authentically Christian (if indeed there is such a thing), the Bony Lady is evidence that, as the other examples demonstrate, Christian death-related myths and rituals continue to adapt to their location and the needs of the living.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Spirituality STEFANIA PALMISANO

INTRODUCTION Usually sociologists analyse critically the definitions of people’s conceptual categories. However, when dealing with spirituality, scholars come up against a specific problem: the vagueness which the concept presents to the actors themselves. From America to Europe, empirical studies make the point: some people declare themselves ‘religious and spiritual’, others ‘spiritual but not religious’, yet others – albeit atheist or indifferent – have no objection to defining themselves as ‘spiritual’, while there are those who flee from spirituality by calling themselves ‘only religious’. What unites these categories is, on the one hand, the lack of agreement about the meanings implied by the spirituality concept and, on the other, the abundance of meanings attributed to it. So what does spirituality mean, and what is the use of defining it? Is there really any need for this concept in the study of religion? If the answer is yes, what is its relationship with the religion concept? Indeterminacy reigns on both emic and etic levels. Despite the development, starting from the 1990s, of lively international research into the study of spirituality, the quarrel between the concept’s detractors and defenders has not yet been settled; its theoretical and epistemological status is still being heatedly debated. Among the various approaches, one deserves particular attention because it dominates the contemporary sociological debate: that of Lived Religion. We shall examine the Italian case – relations between spirituality and Catholicism – from this perspective.

SPIRITUALITY THROUGH THE LENS OF LIVED RELIGION The aim of the Lived Religion approach is to show, by the study of everyday religion, how much it overflows the traditional banks of the sacred – more than some sociologists have been willing to recognize. It attempts to overcome the binary (sacred/profane, immanent/ transcendent, internal/external) logic which still dominates the sociological interpretation of religion. In line with these premises, this approach rejects the conceptual religion/ spirituality dichotomy in favour of the synthetic category of Lived Religion. Ammerman, in Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes (2013), explores (by means of complex research combining photo-elicitation interviews with diaries) how her specimen (95) of Americans use the concepts of religion and spirituality in daily life – at work, at home, in sport – even more than in conventional religious spaces. Cynthia’s words, in an interview with Ammerman, illustrate this approach:

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Washing the dishes … ‘[I was] noticing the rainbow colors in the suds. Thich Nhat Hahn refers to it as being in the moment, to be in the moment. But I think for me as a Christian, being in the moment is also when I can really be aware of God … feel the warmth of the water on my skin, and to see the colors in the soap bubbles, to hear the squeak of the clean plate. And when I can really be in that moment there is a peace comes over me that isn’t there when I’m frantic and working and obsessing and worrying and always doing.’ Ammerman’s findings suggest many reasons why religion and spirituality should not be separated. First of all, such separation is not empirically valid: in America most people define themselves as being ‘religious and spiritual’. Secondly, while it is true that it is mostly church attendees who use the language of spirituality, it is also true that even those who do not go to church make use of it. Finally, arguments in favour of not dividing the concepts derive from studying the ‘spiritual but not religious’ group. Even though some interviewees profit from this label to distance themselves from religion, many others do so for the opposite reason. For example, some Protestant conservatives interviewed by Ammerman declared themselves ‘only spiritual’ in order to criticize conventional religiosity which ignores personal, direct relationship with the divine (‘finding Jesus’), whereas others, barely practising, used the label to indicate that they felt closer to God than to churches. Ammerman concludes that what is ‘spiritually religious’ and what is ‘religiously spiritual’ are indivisible. This narrative of Lived Religion has developed and found novel applications in Europe, being enriched by the reflections of scholars of vernacular religion. Aune (2014), having researched the religious-spiritual lives of thirty active women feminists, advocates the immediate abandonment of the religion–spirituality dichotomy. As Lived Religion teaches, it is time to shift our gaze from beliefs to daily practices: Aune concludes that if religion is no longer conceived of as a static reality but as a dynamic reality evolving and avoiding fixed schemes, then there is no need to separate the categories. Aune’s conclusions echo Eccles’s, in her study about seventy elderly women in Lancashire, England, half belonging to a church and half not. Her analysis illustrates not only the daily practices in which religion and spirituality cross paths but also how these can continue obstinately to characterize the life of women who have left their churches. Her conclusion is that the separation of religion and spirituality, with the former remaining in the churches and the latter in the holistic milieu, would prevent us from discovering spirituality in the churches and religion outside them. Based on various ethnographic research which explores women-religion-spirituality relations – with case studies from France, Spain, Germany, Greece and Portugal – Fedele and Knibbe (2013) reach the conclusion that the antinomy between religion and spirituality should be rejected, because if they are examined ethnographically, they turn out to be much more similar than even their adherents believe. Their ethnography illustrates how, in different cultural and geographical contexts, relations between religion and spirituality are differently structured but at the same time reveal a certain uniformity of research findings. Although they appear very different in practitioners’ narratives – religion is fixed, authoritarian, patriarchal and body/sexuality hostile, while spirituality is flexible, non-hierarchical, gender-sensitive and body/sexuality friendly – when they are viewed in their practices and distinguishing relationships, they appear quite similar. This is particularly true from the point of view of gender and authority relationships because, according to the authors, spiritual forms often assume those structural or hierarchical characteristics of religion which, in theory, they claim to criticize, reject or overturn.

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LIVING RELIGION APPROACH TO CATHOLICISM AND SPIRITUALITY IN ITALY Any observer of the religious phenomena is bound to notice that, to give but one example, attending Mass and channelling spirits in Stonehenge are very different practices depending on very different attitudes towards the sacred. This intuitively reveals the distance between traditional religion and contemporary spirituality and suggests the usefulness of distinguishing between them on an analytical level. At one extreme, I define religion as experience of the sacred mediated by institutions which, by virtue of a tradition, regulate its beliefs and practices (orthodoxy and orthopraxis). Spirituality, at the other extreme, is understood as experience of the sacred regulated by the subject unmoored from the dominant Western religious institutions and traditions. Nevertheless, although I claim that religion and spirituality should be distinguished on the theoretical level, I believe that they are not autonomous in practice, but have a dialectical relationship, as both historical analysis and contemporary reality reveal. This interdependence is illuminated by the Living Religion approach. The Italian case, seen through this lens, shows clearly that, on the one hand, Catholicism influences the perception and experience of spirituality and, on the other, spirituality (including extra-ecclesial) is influenced by Catholicism. A recent qualitative survey of young people (18–29 years old) supplies us with some important practical examples of the influence of the Catholic religion on ‘alternative’ spirituality (Palmisano 2017). The Lived Religion approach clearly shows that Catholicism in Italy works as a ‘prototypical religion’ (Paden 1991),1 which permeates not only those who define themselves as ‘religious and spiritual’ but also those who call themselves socalled spiritual atheists and spiritual seekers. This analysis focusses mainly on 144 young people’s answers to the question ‘Have you got a spiritual life?’, and we divided them as a result into four distinct ideal types: ‘Neither religious nor spiritual’, ‘Religious and spiritual’, ‘Spiritual seekers’ and ‘Spiritual atheists’. In spite of the fact that no explicit definition of ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ is presented to interviewees, in the interviews they associated ‘religion’ with the Church and institutions, and ‘spirituality’ with the sphere of personal religious experience. About a quarter of interviewees may be included among those who demonstrate indifference towards the sacred sphere or who have developed an openly hostile attitude towards faith and religion in general. They gave strongly polemic reasons, portraying religion as obstructing. If their critical distance from faith and religion clearly defines the ‘Neither religious nor spiritual’ group, in the other three interviewee groups’ openness towards the spiritual dimension is accompanied by individual cultivation of relationship with religion, focused specifically on their view of Catholicism. This continuing harking back to the dominant religion among ‘Religious and spiritual’, ‘Spiritual seekers’ and ‘Spiritual atheists’ points to two crucial aspects. The first concerns the fact that the debate about spirituality among our interviewees is implicitly based upon a prototypical concept of religion (Paden 1991), that is to say a specific religious model, Christianity and, more likely, Catholicism – the religion into which the interviewees were born and which informs their most familiar religious-cultural horizon. In the interviews, the theological concepts related to the sacred sphere, the conception of the divine and the transcendent, thus reflect the patterns of Catholicism into which Italian young people were socialized throughout their lives. The second – directly connected – aspect indicates that the construction of spiritual identity, even for those who distance themselves most from the traditional Catholic system of beliefs and practices, is not detached from, but is rather

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built in relationship with Catholicism. Institutional church religion therefore remains in the background as a religious and cultural model, as an expressive lexicon, serving both those for whom it is a positive reference in their self-definition and those who use it as a polemical target. The answers of the first group – ‘Religious and spiritual’ – about one-third of the sample – reveal an intimate and personal relationship with the divine, a faith which is nourished by lived experiences with emotional undertones, supported by the Church’s doctrinal system: I have a spiritual life which I cultivate through my religion, weekly attendance at Mass, parish meetings, the Rosary and the Sacraments. (25-year-old female) My spiritual life is staying close to God, who is almighty, omnipresent and can be reached at any moment through prayer. He is the one you thank for the good things that happen to you and you blame for the things you consider wrong. He doesn’t get offended! He loves everybody and He forgives. (23-year-old female) This kind of spirituality can be seen in the framework of traditional religion, which presupposes that its beliefs and values reflect the concept of spiritualitas in its ancient meaning, that is an interior Christian faith distinct from – but not opposed to – faith as an institutional, public dimension of organized church religion. Although the words ‘Religious and spiritual’ may seem very different from ‘Neither religious nor spiritual’, both groups of youths talk in a way which accepts Catholicism and church religion as their conceptual and cultural model of reference when reflecting upon their conception of the world and their spiritual identity. The ‘Spiritual seekers’ are more open in their relationship with the sacred, highlighting the ongoing mystical tendency in various streams of contemporary spirituality. Nevertheless, even though they eclectically construct ideas and beliefs with variegated origins, at the same time they reflexively reinterpret Catholic theological categories, as can be seen in the two extracts below: God is not a single definite entity but rather a natural expression of cosmic equilibrium and the planet Earth. Identifying the divine in an anthropomorphic image is reductive and ‘self-centered’. As I see it, the divine is in contact with everything, with the delicacy and natural beauty which for centuries we have been ignoring and destroying. (23-year-old male) I think that alternative spiritualities are quite widespread because they are not based simply on venerating a God but also on being mentally and physically healthy both in this world and the next, a heaven where everybody goes in the end. (28-year-old male) The last group of interviewees, the ‘Spiritual atheists’, is made up of young people who exhibit a clear desire to have spiritual experiences, but they are a long way from religion. They aspire to a spiritual life whose contents adopt markedly heterogeneous – and often ill-defined – outlines, characterized by ethical spirituality (Palmisano 2010) where moral values tend to free themselves from the Catholic framework in which they were originally formed. The resulting lay spirituality indicates a this-worldly, immanent orientation towards valorization of ‘seekership’ as a fundamental moment of an individual’s spiritual and identity path. This position may be collocated in the postChristian spiritual framework in which emphasis is placed on a horizontal and diffused

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perception of the divine and on the capacity to ask existential questions rather than on the answers obtained by this research: A spiritual life? Yes, I try to help other people as much as possible to do good – or at least not to do evil. (29-year-old female) I have a spiritual viewpoint but not in a strictly religious sense. By spiritual I mean that I base my existence on values of sympathy, understanding and the general teachings of great religions and philosophies. I act in such a way as to cultivate the spirit of values which improve existence, directed towards individual, spiritual wellbeing. (24-yearold female) In short, Catholicism constitutes the prototype of religion in interviewees’ answers. Those who are mainly critical of faith (the ‘Neither religious nor spiritual’ youth), those inhabiting a church-religion environment (‘Religious and spiritual’) and those developing spiritual but not strictly religious positions – all elaborate discourses where a common reference to Catholicism as an exemplary religious model appears, whether explicitly or implicitly. This model supplies the repertory of theological and doctrinal concepts which, in line with the individual interviewee’s ideological position, is adapted polemically against the Church or religion in general, or within a traditional religious framework or, finally, towards a spiritual itinerary which – at least partly – liberates itself from religion ascribed by birth.

CONCLUSION Through the lens of the Lived Religion approach, the Italian case helps to illuminate the religion-spirituality nexus: even though a minority of the sample of young Italians seem directed towards alternative paths, the positions of the majority portray a religious identity where traditional religion and new spirituality are mutually and closely intertwined. Traditional religion offers the reference model of young Italians’ spiritual perspective, whereas spirituality supplies a repertory of critical arguments used to distance themselves from, or re-elaborate in a personal way, their relationship with institutional faith and religion.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Fundamentalism CAMILLE K. LEWIS

Fundamentalism is a social and ideological subset of Protestant Evangelicalism as well as a perpetually liminal position within all Christian denominations. Since the origin of the term in 1920, ‘fundamentalism’ has denoted a militantly separatist space within established religious groups. Evangelicalism itself is a subcategory within Protestantism, which emphasizes conversionism, activism, Biblicism and Crucicentrism. D. W. Bebbington identified these themes in his analysis of Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, and scholars have adopted the descriptors as canon (2004: 2–17). Dating a distinct conversion event, participating in active public evangelism and personal piety, privileging the Bible above all else for faith and practice and focusing primarily on Christ’s death on the cross – these are the assumed characteristics for all Evangelicals into the twenty-first century. However, after the American Civil War, a socio-political faction coalesced within Evangelicalism. Beginning with the publication of The Fundamentals, Evangelical clergy invented a reaction among more conservative Protestants against an opposing trend towards rationalism. From 1910 to 1915, Lyman Stewart, the co-founder of Union Oil and a devout dispensationalist Presbyterian, financed the series’ publication in order to differentiate from cultivated expressions of higher criticism. Covering everything from the virgin birth to evolution, the editors and authors of The Fundamentals hoped to identify the new ideological boundary markers for orthodox Protestants. The series inspired the editor of the Baptist Watchman-Examiner, Curtis Lee Laws, to coin the term ‘Fundamentalist’ in 1920. He reasoned that ‘conservative’ was too derogatory, but ‘Fundamentalist’ was unencumbered with ideological baggage (Marty 1997: 159–60). Within a decade, however, fundamentalism morphed from this bookish but still dissenting expression to a more simplistic reactionary protest. The Fundamentals pamphlets, which are stored in YMCA libraries and pastors’ studies, could not contain the socio-political clout that grew out of the pugnacious impulse to separate. In naming themselves ‘Fundamentalist’, as twentieth-century scholars of American religion point out, these Protestants countered the progressive trend towards broadminded academic inquiry with a novel but still intransigent response. Noted Evangelical theologian Carl Henry identified Fundamentalism’s separatism as ‘a distinctly twentieth-century expression of Christianity’ (1957: 33). Religious historian George Marsden distils lengthier explanations as follows: ‘a Fundamentalist is an Evangelical who is angry about something.’ He describes the fundamentalist as ‘militant in opposition to liberal theology in the church or to changes in cultural values or mores, such as those associated with “secular humanism.”’ More than mere conservatives, Fundamentalists are conservatives who want to ‘take a stand and fight’ (Marsden 1991: 1).

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Martin Marty notes that when confronted with the more academic, arcane questions, ‘Fundamentalists protested. That reactive character was at the heart of this American ingathering and in the consequent drawing of permanent party lines’ (1997: 160). In other words, Fundamentalism has always identified itself by what it was not. Rather than question the rationality of miracles as the more liberal theologians did, Fundamentalists boasted their veracity all the louder. Rather than assume that the future would move along just like the past as Christianity had traditionally interpreted eschatology, Fundamentalists literalized the book of Revelation into proving an increasingly dystopic future until Christ’s return. Rather than join the established denominational charities to reform society at large, Fundamentalists ‘hit the sawdust trail’ in urban revivals in an attempt to individualize and privatize moral improvement. Rather than shrug off lifestyle differences as personal preference, Fundamentalists proudly refused to drink alcohol, play cards or attend dances. Resisting rationalism and higher criticism, adopting a novel dispensational eschatology, preferring revivalism over reform and choosing more rigorous boundary markers than their mainline Protestant neighbours, Fundamentalists could sniff out any innovative trend and subsequently craft the most separatist or, in their vernacular, ‘biblical’ response. Marty distils the Fundamentalist’s combative response to modernism with the individualistic rejoinder, ‘the Bible is all I need’ (1997: 155–59). As singular actors battling within the larger secular rush to progress, the Fundamentalist dismisses any social or political criticism since the things of God will be foolishness to the world. Within their resistance, Fundamentalists quickly ‘[developed] instincts to determine who was inside and who outside their circle’. With heightened sensitivity to all things secular, Fundamentalists splintered off existing Protestant denominations and created new networks that acted in a parallel confederation to the churches they left behind. No denomination has been immune. As a result, Marty concludes, the Fundamentalist’s individualistic, resistant, and militant ethic make a nationalistic political ideology seem expected and even Scriptural (1970: 177–87). Thus, religious historians frame Fundamentalism as a social and ideological splintering within already conservative Protestant groups. For half a century, Fundamentalists would co-exist in the same large tent with other Evangelicals. However, during the Civil Rights Era, the tent collapsed. At that mid-century point, Fundamentalists fully separated themselves from their Evangelical siblings. The final straw for both Northern and Southern Fundamentalists was Evangelical revivalist Billy Graham’s inclusion of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1957 Crusade in New York City. The clash between Graham and his Southern Fundamentalist roots had been brewing since 1953, according to Graham’s autobiography, Just as I Am (1997: 425–26). But when Graham honoured King as a social revolutionary at his evangelistic revival (Taylor 2017), white segregationists were done. New Jersey’s own Fundamentalist radio preacher, Carl McIntire, called Graham’s ‘soft, weak, compromising Christianity’ ‘inclusivist’ and dangerous for America’s standing against the Soviets (Ruotsila 2015: 133). Through the 1980s, as historian Randall Balmer has revealed, racial segregation would induce new coalitions. Fundamentalist Baptist Jerry Falwell intended to make racial segregation, coded as ‘religious freedom’, his initial issue for his new political parachurch organization, the Moral Majority. Falwell’s Catholic advisor Paul Weyrich, however, discerned that segregation would backfire on the new organization. Instead he recommended abortion as the wedge issue to gain national attention and to aggressively resist an ideological swing away from so-called ‘traditional values’ (2014: 102–10).

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However, no one can fight forever. Even for those clashing in only a culture war, battle fatigue is real. Fundamentalists and Evangelicals have responded to that exhaustion with a kind of socio-political détente. The mid-twentieth-century split seems to have healed over. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the terms ‘Fundamentalist’ and ‘Evangelical’ are nearly as synonymous as they were a century ago since even the most stalwart groups have adopted the softer moniker (Cary 2016). And with their joining, both identifying terms have fallen into disrepute. Few believers, whom religious scholars would classify as ‘Evangelical’ based on Bebbington’s terms, would don that identification (Zauzmer 2017). Just as the descriptor ‘conservative’ seemed too pejorative to Curtis Lee Laws’ sensibilities in 1920, now both ‘Fundamentalist’ and ‘Evangelical’ suffer the same fate. The reactionary frame of fundamentalism nonetheless is alive and well. The power gained from standing outside a religious group persists. Within Protestantism, contemporary fundamentalists still cling to familiar sectarian symbols. The ideological boundary markers have adapted to the twenty-first century, moving away from cleanshaven faces and tee-totalling and toward praise bands and church trips to Ken Ham’s Kentucky attraction, the Ark Encounter (Storey 2017). Some groups have narrowed to accept only the 1611 King James English translation of the Bible as the singular guide for faith and practice (Carson 1978). Other factions have tightened politically with statements to interpret contemporary conflicts in an increasingly retrograde fashion. Both the 1987 Danvers Statement and the 2017 Nashville Statement, for instance, reinforce heteronormative gender binaries and hierarchies (Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood 1987, 2017). Interpretations of the past and the future remain fairly fixed within the contemporary frame. Fundamentalists still assume a literalist interpretation of the Bible especially for the Creation story, and dispensationalism still governs their view of the future. Many have moved away from pre-tribulation perspectives to articulate a ‘mid-tribulation’ or ‘post-tribulation’ position. Popular Calvinistic Baptist John Piper describes himself as an ‘optimistic premillennialist’ who believes in post-tribulation rapture (2008). Their piety, like their religious grandparents’, still emphasizes personal agency over public reform efforts. Fundamentalists will want to have a routine practice of daily Bible reading whether or not it actually happens. They will want to attend local conferences promoting personal evangelism over organizing a protest for social reform. This piety is motivated by the assumption that the war on their own flesh is a continuous battle. If they let up on Bible reading or church attendance, the war is lost to Satan. For those within a Fundamentalist subculture, all decisions boil down to a binary switch. Either the will is tamed and God is honoured, or the will runs rampant and Satan wins. There is no spectrum. There is no middle ground. There is only a simple right and a simple wrong. Rather than call themselves ‘Fundamentalists’ these same people are now ‘Bible-based’ or ‘Gospel-centred’ or ‘Christ-centred’ indicating the reducing to a single idea is still an important function in their faith. Rather than complicate, they want to simplify (Lewis 2008; Berg 2018: 18, 57, 62). From that distrust of the body, the contemporary Fundamentalist will inevitably choose punitive and behaviouristic parenting methods believing the parents’ punishment mirrors God’s wrath against sin (Ellison 1996). Alongside this rigid parenting ethic, the Fundamentalist still staunchly defers to authority (Ellison 1993). This deference governs their political, ecclesiastical, and familial relationships. Equality is suspect. Status quo hierarchies are maintained. And, as Marty pointed out with the early Fundamentalists, a nationalistic ideology feels like a natural fit.

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Protestants are not the only ones with the fundamentalist impulse. Contemporary Catholics might stubbornly resist the larger group as well. A fundamentalist Catholic might sing Gregorian chants from St. Michael’s Hymnal, just as their Protestant cousins sing exclusively from the psalter (Schafer 2011). The Catholic worshippers might embrace a more demanding, nostalgic piety by attending the older all-Latin Tridentine Mass. Some Catholic women might cover their heads with a chapel veil (Canons Regular 2018). Other believers might kneel during the Eucharist and receive the Host right on the tongue rather than in the hand (Carstens 2016). One priest in Greenville, South Carolina has even refused giving the Eucharist to congregants who voted for a pro-abortion candidate (Associated Press 2008). Worship wars, devotional practices, and political alignment – these contemporary Catholics separate from their fellow Catholics in much the same way conservative Protestants did a century ago. The fundamentalist frame is not unique to American soil or contemporary conditions. One recent example in Anglo-Protestantism has a direct connection to American Fundamentalism. The Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster separated from the national denomination over financing mission boards and attending dance parties (Moore 2001: 26–30). Its co-founder Ian Paisley was a close ally to the infamous and ultraFundamentalist stronghold in the American South, Bob Jones University. Since even the Apostle Paul warned the early Church about those Gentile Christians who combatively adopted a more strenuous set of boundary markers from traditionalist Jewish rituals (Galatians 2:11–3:23), perhaps the fundamentalist impulse to separate and stand above a group is neither a uniquely American nor recent compulsion. Fundamentalism as scholars have identified it, however, has flourished especially on American soil. Now a century after its beginning, the specific Protestant sectarian movement of Fundamentalism as identified in The Fundamentals is waning. Few people identify themselves with the term ‘Fundamentalist’, yet the fundamentalist reactionary frame endures. A long-time critic of those early Fundamentalists, Henry Emerson Fosdick waxed sentimental during the Second World War about those First-World-War era skirmishes. War does strange things to religion. It makes some people fundamentalists. Fundamentalism always has a revival in wartime, and for an obvious reason. When everything is shaken, chaotic, and insecure, the psychological effect on some is to make them turn back to old ideas that seem familiar and stable, and so in wartime the fundamentalists revive, vehemently insisting on ancient dogmas long overpassed by modern knowledge, seeking security there where no real security is. (1943: 178) If Fosdick is correct, humanity will always have periodic surges of fundamentalisms. As long as socio-political angst can be relieved with a creative use of retrograde separatism, the fundamentalist frame will continue with or without the specific, twentieth-century label of ‘Fundamentalism’.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Christians in Africa LOUISE MÜLLER

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Christianity was predominantly a white EuroAmerican religion with 83 per cent of all Christians living in the Global North. Today, it is a global religion where over two-thirds of the world’s Christians are non-Westerners, who live in the Global South. Christianity is on the rise in Latin America, Asia and especially Africa: a trend that is predicted to continue in the second half of the twentyfirst century. This has had a large impact on the nature of Christianity as a world religion. In the 1970s, Christianity was the religion of the haves. Today, the numerous and most devoted adherents of Christianity are the world’s poorest inhabitants, and prosperity churches are mushrooming. Global Christianity is the religion of the have-nots (Jenkins 2011). In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, a German white European Protestant philosopher, held the opinion that Christianity was part of the European civilization and that, consequently, non-Europeans including Africans were incapable of understanding the divine and true Christianity (Ault 2013). Today, Christianity in Africa is increasingly important at the world stage. The prognoses show that by the year 2020 Africa will be the most Christian continent in the Global South and that by 2050 most Christians in the entire world will live in Africa (Jenkins 2011). In 2018, Africa houses over 1.2 billion people and is the second most populous continent on earth. It has a predominantly young and fast-growing population, in most African countries in excess of 2 per cent a year. Beyond 2050, it will be the only continent with a substantial population growth1 (Factbook 2017; Kazeem 2017). No doubt, Africa’s impact on the nature of Christianity will continue to increase. I will explore explanations for the appeal of Christianity, and Pentecostalism in particular, for contemporary Africans. Pentecostalism is a form of Christianity that is predominantly popular in those African countries with the fastest population growth. Alongside Catholicism, it is the most rapidly growing religion on the African continent.

THE SURGE OF PENTECOSTALISM IN AFRICA: KEY REASONS I will discuss four key reasons for the surge of Pentecostalism. To illustrate the reasons for the religion’s surge, we will delve into the moving images of Nollywood films. The burgeoning Nigerian film industry, which is native to Africa, is characterized by a global export of its films to Africans in both African and African diasporic communities. The Nollywood films express the popular cultural imaginations of many young Africans,

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whose precarious lives are affected by globalization and neoliberalism and who find solace in the hopeful and comforting religious expressions that Pentecostalism in Africa entails.

NEOLIBERALISM, GLOBALIZATION AND CHRISTIANITY In the Nigerian feature film Maroko (2016), written by Yinka Ogun and directed by Femi Odugbemi, some influential urban housing project developers demolish a low-income area in Eti-Osa Lagos State to make space for luxurious flats for the new urban elites. Consequently, over 300,000 Nigerians are unlawfully evicted. Entire families become homeless and displaced. The film tells the story of the precarious life of the African youth who grow up under these disenfranchised conditions. It concentrates on their struggle to fill their bellies, stay healthy and find shelter against the forces of nature. The poor and homeless are on the losing end of the neoliberal market and the mechanisms of globalization. In the absence of a social safety net due to a failing African state, Maroko’s poor and young Africans elsewhere with similar fates find a new home in an improvised Pentecostal church. These Christians give the African youth shelter, a social network and a message of hope. Odugbemi’s Nollywood film, which is based on the real forced eviction of Maroko’s underprivileged in July of the 1990s, is exemplary for the fate of many deprived Africans who find solace in Pentecostalism (Megbolu 2009; Nations 2017). Pentecostal churches in Africa were first founded in the 1920s by marginalized African church leaders, many of whom came to Sierra Leone after migrating from the United States. They founded, for instance, the Zion churches in South Africa, the Aladura movement in Western Africa and the Church of God on Earth in Central Africa. Pentecostalism, inspired by the New Testament, places supreme importance to the descent of the Holy Spirit on Christians, speaking in tongues and the display of the miraculous and healing through personal prayer in daily life (Gore 2009; Lehmann 2009; Woodhead 2009). The rapid spread of Pentecostalism in sub-Saharan Africa is not coincidental. The success of this belief coincides with the dark side of global capitalism on the predominantly young African population, such as youth unemployment, low youth wages,2 poor housing opportunities, over-expensive health care and the overall precariousness of life of the poor in the urban African slums. Pentecostalism is especially attractive for the African youth, which stands at about 75 per cent of the total population of contemporary subSaharan Africa (News 2016). This form of Christianity offers a moral value system that linguistically connects to and gives access to the neoliberal job market to the millions of young Africans for whom the official doors to attractive jobs are locked. The Pentecostal youth is empowered by the words of their pastor, who ensures that Jesus can materially reward them and make them rich overnight. The belief of these youngsters enables them to become part of the global economy by investing in Christ, which means that they should materially and spiritually invest in their church. It offers them an identity, a social network and a home in a society that is experiencing ‘tremendous political instability and religious violence and there are key vectors that could cause the state to fail in 2030’ (Kinnan 2011: 4). The prognoses indicate that states in Africa will weaken and the relative power of religious organizations will grow (National Intelligence Council 2008). The Church fills the void left by the African state, which does not offer any social network and very limited financial support.3 A classic Nollywood production that links up to the popularity of Pentecostalism among Africa’s youth is Living in Bondage (1992). This influential video film, which has been analysed by various scholars (Haynes 2011,

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2013; Ugor 2016), is directed by Christ Obi-Rapu and written by Kenneth Nnebue. It tells the story of Andy Okeke, a young unemployed husband, who lacks self-esteem due to his deprived situation. His family is forced to migrate to the city of Lagos, where he observes the financial success of some of his contemporaries. This fuels Andy’s eagerness to become one of the haves, which isn’t going well. He succeeds in his endeavours by entering into a satanic cult and signing a pact with Lucifer and offering his wife to Old Nick by killing her. Only by becoming a member of a Pentecostal church, Andy repents his sins and succeeds in leading a morally acceptable life. Pentecostalism offers a moral economy and an alternative entry into the global capitalist market less lurid than the satanic cults that metaphorically express the dark side of global neoliberal capitalism.

RELIGIOUS SYNCRETISM – AFRICAN INDIGENOUS RELIGIONS AND PENTECOSTALISM IN AFRICA The success and growth of Pentecostalism in Africa cannot be understood without knowledge of Africa’s Indigenous Religions (AIR), which predate the introduction of Christianity on the continent and are often referred to as a form of pre-Pentecostalism. Despite the criticism of Pentecostals on AIRs, Pentecostalism is embedded in the African traditional belief in spirits, such as those of the ancestors and those that dwell inside plants, animals and inanimate objects. But where the adherents of AIR adhere to the idea that all spirits can behave either good or bad depending on the circumstances, the Pentecostals believe that except for the Holy Ghost, all spirits are evil and bring misfortune (Wiredu 1992; Müller 2013b). Spirits can, for instance, enter the body of a human being to cause health problems or turn that person into a wrongdoer. On a community level, spirits can destroy all crops in the natural environment or bring communal diseases. For the Pentecostals, the veneration of spirits by indigenous religious believers is the cause of almost all misfortune. Their pastor calls upon the Holy Spirit to protect the Pentecostals against the evil doings of these spirits (Müller 2011, 2013). This is the topic of the Christian Nollywood film The Prodigal Ones (2008), written and directed by Mike Bamiloye and analysed by the scholar Paul Ugor. In the film, a rich Nigerian Pentecost family in Texas (USA) used to pray in an overseas branch of the Lagosbased ‘Redeemed Christian Church of God’.4 When the protagonist transfers money to his mother in Nigeria so she can attend and pay for an ancestral ritual, a masquerade, the overseas family members are brought into moral decay. The film demonstrates to fellow Pentecostals that, even transnationally, the veneration of ancestral spirits can be detrimental. It ends with a scene in which the pastor prays for the family to break their bond with the evil ancestral spirits and for the Holy Spirit to descend upon them (Ugor 2016). Pentecostalism thus criticizes the African Indigenous Religions but owes its success to the continuation of its members in a belief in Africa’s indigenous spirits.

PENTECOSTAL CHRISTIANITY AND ITS LIBERTY FROM THE COLONIAL HERITAGE OF AFRICA A third key reason for the success of Pentecostalism in Africa is that unlike European missionary Christianity, Pentecostal Christianity does not have its roots in the era and culture of European colonization. Since the fifteenth century, Southern European Catholic missionaries legitimized their urge for expansion and exploitation of Africa’s

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resources and people with their Christian mission and faith. Portuguese and Spanish missionaries condemned the African Indigenous Religions, which they referred to as ‘fetish worship’ (feitiço in Portuguese). They believed that Africans worshipped animals, nature and things, whereas, in reality, Africans venerated the spirits and power that dwelled inside animate and inanimate objects. The Southern European colonialists, who came to Africa with their missionaries, felt superior to Africans. They morally marketed their colonization of African territory by their preparedness to civilize the, in their eyes, ‘underdeveloped’ Africans by bringing the gospel. Since the seventeenth century, missionaries of other European nations, both Protestants and Catholics, continued to condemn the AIR. The missionaries promoted the Christian God as a supreme being and suppressed the veneration of African ancestors. Not surprisingly, regarding the attitude of these missionaries towards Africans, they were not very successful in their attempts to convert Africans to Christianity. Even though the conversion to this new religion could bring them socioeconomic benefits, such as an increase in wealth and access to Westernstyle circles of trust, most Africans remained loyal to their ancestors. They continued to perform African indigenous religious rituals (Müller 2013). Only after African prophets started to bring the gospel, Christianity was successfully planted in Africa. Mass conversion to Christianity did not take place before the 1910s when African men of God became involved in the business of proselytization. After all, only African missionaries understood how to convey the Christian faith such that fellow Africans would comprehend and appreciate God’s messages to them. The African missionaries brought the Christian religion closer to the traditional African way of life. For them, God was not an abstract and distant entity. Instead, they perceived Him as an active God, a mobile force that will remain present in the heart of all Africans to love and empower them, as long as they actively worship their Lord. In the spirit of these African forefathers in the Christian faith, Pentecostals actively perform religious ceremonies that include dance, music and trance. The emphasis in Pentecostalism does not lay on the metaphorical interpretation of the biblical text but on the religious experience and the intuitive understanding of the divine (Walls 2003).

THE PENTECOSTAL RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Pentecostal sermons in Africa are spectacular. The pastors use their microphones to scream out the healing message of God and aim for a direct success of their interactions. The Pentecostals often fall into a trance and scream loudly. These screams are, in their view, caused by the evil spirits that dwell inside them and which need to be exorcised for them to be healed. Drummers support the ceremony, and members are encouraged to clap and sing in praise of the Lord. Their God is a mobile spiritual being, whose spiritual power directly influences their lives. God can use His power to their advancement in the here and now. He manifests Himself by descending the Holy Spirit upon His believers and by empowering holy objects, such as the Bible. The Bible is perceived as a powerful book because it is believed to be an object that literally contains the power of God. Those Pentecostals who are in touch with the Bible and other holy objects or animals can feel Him entering their bodies. They experience that their bodies are filled with His blessings and with the Holy Spirit. This offers them protection against the Devil and other evil forces that inhabit the universe and manifest themselves in the same way as God. These forces can attack any person and make (deadly) victims among all those who are unprotected by

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the love and light of Jesus Christ. For Pentecostals to pray for Holy Spirit of God is not a symbolic act but of vital importance to their direct well-being. In Africa, no condition is permanent, and those who are blessed today with good health and fortune can fall ill tomorrow and vice versa. Pentecostals in Africa, therefore, take their time to repeatedly tune into the music of the universe and to fill their bodies with the protective light and the warmth of God (Müller 2013a, 2013b). In the Nollywood film Career woman (2014), written and directed by Chidi Anyanwu Chidox, the protagonist, Anita Okoronkwo, is a successful lawyer, who used to be poor. Anita is convinced that her success is the result of her own and her mother’s many prayers to God. She is convinced that her wealth and success depend on the strength of her own and her family’s faith in the Lord. Like many other Pentecostals, this young African woman is committed to the belief that her stamina and talents are the results of God’s blessings. Anita is exemplary for Pentecostals, who generally believe that their future in Africa will be great as long as they can bodily experience the love and protection of God. This is a comforting belief for the many young Africans, who often do not have the education to read and (metaphorically) interpret the Bible and who live a precarious life in the absence of a protective welfare system and a well-operating nation-state.

CONCLUSION Pentecostalism in Africa provides an answer to the many urging questions and emotional needs of a generation of young Africans, who struggle to survive in the globalized economic jungle in urban megacities in Africa, such as Lagos. Nollywood is the aesthetic expression of these questions and needs that are caused by the disenfranchised state of the majority of Africa’s youth within the global neoliberal capitalist system that determines so much of the quality of their lives. The surge of Pentecostalism in Africa is likely to continue in the second half of the twenty-first century.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Social action CHRIS SHANNAHAN

INTRODUCTION Jesus suggests that those who follow him should feed the hungry, clothe the naked and welcome the stranger. Social action is not an optional extra for believers who are interested in politics, but the heart and soul of Christian discipleship, and yet for 2,000 years, it has divided the Church. The important question to consider is not, therefore, whether religion and politics mix but what kind of activism their relationship gives rise to (Scott and Cavanaugh 2004). In this chapter, I introduce the main features of Christian social action, its contested nature, the differing theological visions that guide it and the impact that it continues to have in the twenty-first century.

INWARD LOOKING OR OUTWARDS FACING Christian social action revolves around five ‘Ps’. First, it reflects a personal response to the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Second, for some Christians, faith is intensely private, revolving around an inward-looking existential relationship with God and evangelical outreach, rather than social action. Third, in contrast, other Christians envisage faith as inherently public – translating Jesus’ teaching into social action intended to foster the common good. Fourth, conversations about Christian social action need to acknowledge the central importance of principles if they are to avoid the trap of divorcing activism from its theological foundations. Fifth, it is important to realize that grassroots Christian social action can be a pragmatic response to the influence of a local priest or pastor or the pressure of unspoken expectations within the congregation, rather than as a result of deeply felt principles.

WHAT’S GOD GOT TO DO WITH IT? In response to the 1985 Anglican report Faith in the City, which critiqued the social policy of the then Conservative government, an un-named minister insisted that the bishops should keep out of politics. This division of life into the public political realm and the private religious realm is often associated with industrialization, modernity and Enlightenment rationalism. However, such a perspective is, arguably, far older, finding its roots in conservative (but contested) readings of Augustine’s reflections about the ‘City of Man’ and the ‘City of God’ and Martin Luther’s doctrine of ‘two

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kingdoms’ – the kingdom of princes and the kingdom of the Church. This secularization thesis dominated much sociological analysis for most of the twentieth century but is problematic for three reasons. First, it neglects the inherently public nature of Christian discipleship. Second, it reflects a secularized Eurocentric mindset, which does not resonate in large parts of the world where the assertion of a secular/sacred divide is an alien concept. Third, even in a European context, it fails to reflect daily life in twentyfirst-century towns and cities where faith groups remain central players in many local communities. In recent decades the credibility of the secularization thesis has been widely questioned by former advocates like Peter Berger, who suggests that ‘Most of the world today is certainly not secular. It’s very religious’ (Berger 1997: 994). Christianity remains as central to social, cultural and political challenges as ever in the Global ‘South’. In the United States, despite its separation of Church and State, the Christian community is a major player in civil society and national politics. In seemingly secularized societies like the UK successive, prime ministers since the late 1990s have recognized the ongoing influence that faith groups have because of their enduring social capital in local communities (Baker and Skinner 2014). Adam Dinham and Vivien Lowndes summarize, ‘Academics, policymakers and practitioners are grappling with the emphatic return of faith to the public table’ (2009: 1). Furthermore, following the electoral success of the political right in the aftermath of the 2007–2008 financial crash, faith groups have, in some contexts, like the UK and the United States, become an informal opposition to the politics of austerity and populism.

EXAMPLES OF CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ACTION This summary of historic influences, the declining resonance of secularist analyses and the ‘new visibility’ of religion in civil society politics (Hoelzl and Ward 2008) contextualizes contemporary Christian social action. The following short case studies are intended to encourage the reader to consider each case study in greater depth and represent just a small sample of contemporary Christian social action.

REFUGEES AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING Christian attitudes towards diversity, migration and refugees are not inherently inclusive. In the past some Christians have justified slavery, colonialism and Apartheid, and in the twenty-first century, the values and practice of some churches still reflect white supremacist ideology, as seen in the United States following the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. In spite of this, a key strand within Christian social action is inspired by an anti-racist ethic and biblical commands to ‘welcome the stranger’ (see for example Deuteronomy 10:18–19 and Matthew 25:31–46). Two UK-based NGOs reflect this tradition: ●●

Restore: An ecumenical organization in the UK, which exemplifies a ‘pastoral’ model of Christian social action in relation to its work befriending asylum seekers and refugees. A focus is placed on helping refugees to gain paid employment, social activities for women and for men and on providing training for local churches and workshops intended to raise awareness about the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees.

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Adavu: A Methodist advocacy project focusing on modern slavery and human trafficking. Adavu specializes in awareness-raising training and pastoral support for people who have been trafficked or are the survivors of modern slavery.

FOODBANKS OR A LIVING WAGE? Following the 2007–2008 financial crash, poverty rose more dramatically in the UK than in any other G7 nation. Between 2009 and 2016 the number of people earning less than a living wage rose from 3.4 to 5.6 million. In 2017 just over 30 per cent of British children were living in relative poverty. The work of two NGOs, the Trussell Trust (foodbank provider) and Church Action on Poverty (advocate for a living wage), exemplifies differing Christian approaches to this issue. Shaped by an ethic of servanthood and a common good theological approach, the Trussell Trust fed 1,100,000 people and provided them with financial and nutritional advice at its 400+ foodbanks in 2017. The Trussell Trust exemplifies ‘pastoral’ social action. Shaped by the core values of liberation theology, Church Action on Poverty has been at the forefront of campaigns for a living wage and an end to fuel poverty for almost twenty years. It organizes ‘Poverty Hearings’, provides worship and theological material for local and national churches and has developed the National Poverty Consultation with the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations. Church Action on Poverty exemplifies ‘prophetic’ social action.

AID, TRADE AND PEACEBUILDING In 2015 just over 700,000,000 people across the world were living on less than 2 US dollars a day. In the aftermath of the Second World War, a more systemic approach to international development emerged. This development agenda has focused on humanitarian aid, health care, education, gender equality, human rights, the environment, global debt and fair trade. Christian development NGOs, such as Christian Aid, Tearfund, World Vision and CAFOD, are key players in international development. Their work is varied and reflects different scriptural and theological traditions. Christian development agencies engage in disaster relief, food aid, sponsoring children from poor communities and campaigns against child labour. Their work includes campaigning for women’s rights and gender justice; support and advocacy for refugees and displaced people; and campaigning for changes to government policies relating to refugees. Such development agencies can adopt community organizing methodologies to campaign for tax justice and fair trade, ensure environmental justice and the preservation of natural resources, and create worship resources for use by ‘eco-friendly’ congregations. Furthermore, such Christian social action increasingly involves development agencies in conflict prevention in war zones and peacebuilding in post-conflict societies. ●●

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Christian development work connects political action, local campaigning, Bible study, worship and the payer life of individual Christians. It can be faith-inspired but not evangelistic or faith-focused and more publicly Christian. It can reflect evangelical, liberal or radical theological traditions. Whilst it is often shaped by a ‘pastoral’ focus on the common good, it can often reflect a commitment to ‘prophetic’ campaigning for systemic social change.

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GENDER JUSTICE Christian attitudes towards gender, women’s rights and sexuality vary. Some conservative groups oppose the use of contraception, abortion, Planned Parenthood and women’s rights. The significance of evangelical groups such as ‘40 Days for Life’ in the United States or the opposition to gender justice, abortion and same-sex relationships by some senior bishops and archbishops in the Anglican Communion should not be underestimated. However, Christian social action for gender justice reflects the position of a growing number of Christians and can exemplify both ‘pastoral’ and ‘prophetic’ perspectives. Three organizations exemplify Christian action for gender justice: ●●

●●

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Side by Side: Strategic Christian network of groups working at global, national and local levels on advocacy, education, research and resourcing grassroots gender justice work. Restored: An international Christian alliance working to end violence against women, which combines ‘pastoral’ concern for women who have experienced domestic violence with a ‘prophetic’ commitment to systemic change within Christian churches. Restored’s work focuses on educational resources for schools, support for the survivors of abuse, workshops with men about masculinity and gender justice, training programmes for local churches and awareness raising at conferences and through the media. Casa Noeli dos Santos: A Christian Aid safe house in Sao Paolo (Brazil) for women who have experienced domestic violence which is run by a female Anglican deacon.

PEOPLE’S POLITICS Campaigning social action exemplifies a ‘prophetic’ theological tradition as the two examples below demonstrate. ●●

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Community organizing finds its origins in the work of Saul Alinsky in Chicago in the 1940s. It is an approach to people’s politics that is strong in the United States, the UK, Southern Africa, Central America and the Philippines. Community organizing is a clearly politicized model of social action and reflects a ‘prophetic’ ethical, scriptural and theological tradition. An example of faith-based community organizing is found in the work of the Gamaliel Foundation in the United States, which draws explicitly on the US civil rights movement, the teaching of Jesus, the Torah, the Qur’an and Catholic social teaching as the basis for its campaigning in relation to immigration, housing, civil rights, employment and healthcare. Sojourners: Originally a physical community of evangelical Christians committed to social justice in Washington DC, Sojourners has evolved in a US-based internationally active online social action network, led by Jim Wallis, a former faith advisor of President Barack Obama. Its activism focuses on awareness raising, civil rights and liberative education. Following the 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president, Sojourners became a focal point for faith-based opposition to policies on immigration, tax cuts, health care, the so-called ‘Muslim ban’, the environment and Native American rights. In November 2016, Sojourners published an online civil disobedience manifesto entitled ‘10 Commitments of Resistance in the Trump era’.

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GUIDING PRINCIPLES The form that Christian social action takes is influenced by attitudes to the interpretation of the Bible and formalized church teaching and can reflect evangelical, liberal or radical theological frameworks. These complex and fluid theological traditions reflect what I refer to as pastoral and prophetic perspectives, which are briefly summarized below. ‘Pastoral’ Christian social action represents the dominant tradition of faith-based activism and often focuses on individual suffering rather than campaigning for sociopolitical change. This approach is often nourished by theologies of the common good or the Social Gospel movement. Theologies of the common good largely emerge from Catholic Social Teaching (Pope Leo XIII, 1891, Rerum Novarum) and emphasize six key themes – the innate dignity of all people, mutual solidarity as the basis for community building, social policies that enable human flourishing, widely distributed property ownership, empowering local communities and a preferential option for the poor. The Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ‘rejected the prevailing theological belief that all present social structures were ordained by the will of God’ (Baker 2009: 71). Shaped by the work of the Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, the Social Gospel movement emphasized the, ‘political and social dimensions of [Jesus’] proclamation of the Kingdom of God with regard to the commitment to practice justice … to the poor and marginalized’ (Baker 2009: 71). Whereas ‘pastoral’ approaches to Christian social action rest on an ethic of social responsibility, the ‘prophetic’ model builds on a more theologically radical perspective characterized by a focus on systemic injustice and the need for structural social change. Such activism is influenced by the theological vision articulated within Latin American liberation theology, which continues to have a major impact on the ‘prophetic’ model of Christian social action. At the heart of the work of iconic theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez is the assertion that in a structurally unjust world, a loving God necessarily has a preferential option for the poor (Gutiérrez 1988: xxviii). Consequently, Christian activism should be characterized by long-term solidarity with oppressed communities rather than short-term action, which leaves unjust structures unchanged. As Gutiérrez puts it, ‘Only authentic solidarity with the poor and a real protest against the poverty of our time can provide the concrete, vital context necessary for a theological discussion of poverty’ (1988: 173).

CONCLUSION This chapter has introduced the key features of Christian social action, commented on historic debates about the public/private nature of faith, the ongoing localized social capital of churches and the theological perspectives that inform such activism. I have identified five arenas of Christian social action, whilst recognizing that there are many more that could be addressed. It is increasingly clear that the Church has not withered away or been reduced to an inward-looking community of believers. In many contexts faith groups are more deeply rooted in socially excluded communities than any other institutions. The social capital they possess can, if harnessed, provide the energy needed to stimulate and sustain social action that has the potential to include the excluded and build communities in which all people can flourish.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Work ANDREW HAMBLER

INTRODUCTION Theological writings on Christianity at work have tended to focus on the extent to which work may be regarded as a curse (a result of the Fall) or a vocation, an opportunity to serve God and others, or indeed to participate in God’s creative work (Hardy 1990). In more practical Christian literature, there is encouragement towards honesty, integrity and hard work; there is also a sense of the workplace as a place for acting out faith in different ways, not least seeing it as a field of mission (e.g. Keller 2012; Heersink and Bene 2017). However, how Christians actually behave at work is another question which is somewhat under-researched. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss this issue by considering a range of employment tribunal cases involving Christians, within the particular national context of the United Kingdom, and specifically the legal jurisdiction of England and Wales. It is of course unwise to overgeneralize from tribunal judgements. However, what they do offer, in the absence of detailed empirical evidence, is an insight into the ways in which some Christians have acted out their faith at work and where this has sometimes caused conflict with an employer, customer or co-worker. The tribunal claims are usually brought under those provisions of the Equality Act 2010 (and before that the Employment Equality [Religion and Belief] Regulations 2003) relating to religion and belief, for which various types of prohibited conduct are forbidden including direct discrimination, indirect discrimination and harassment (Hepple 2014). Claimants also sometimes invoke Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which guarantees an absolute right to hold a religious belief and a qualified right to manifest (or ‘express’) these beliefs in public (Evans 2001). On the basis of the tribunal reports, it may be proposed that there are different ways in which Christians visibly manifest their religious beliefs which may create a conflict with employers, and that these can be grouped into four broad domains (Hambler 2008, 2015): (1) through dress and the wearing of symbols; (2) by requesting time off from the workplace for reasons of religious obligation (e.g. to attend church services); (3) by wishing to ‘opt out’ of aspects of a work role which are perceived to conflict with religiously inspired convictions; and (4) by seeking to ‘witness’ to customers and colleagues, or to challenge the behaviours or lifestyles of others which are perceived to be sinful and therefore harmful to them.

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These four domains will be further explored below. It may also be suggested that there are other often unobtrusive ways in which some Christian employees express their religious faith, for example through maintaining particular ethical standards, which are quite likely to be welcomed by most ‘ethical’ employers and are aptly described by Robert Audi (2000: 118) as ‘secularly-aligned religious obligations’. As another example, an entirely ‘invisible’ expression of Christianity might involve praying for colleagues, albeit without their knowledge (Vickers 2008).

DRESS AND SYMBOLS Unlike Islam or Sikhism, there are no recognized obligations in mainstream Christianity for the wearing of particular forms of dress or styles of personal grooming (albeit that some minority Christian groups, mainly in the Anabaptist tradition, insist that women wear ‘modest’ dress and/or head coverings). From a Roman Catholic perspective, Neil Addison (2006) makes a brave attempt to argue that wearing a cross is mandated by the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787 ce, but he is something of a lone voice and the argument is arcane. Nevertheless, it is clear from the case law that some Christians do choose to wear a cross. One possible explanation as to why they might do so was provided by John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York (2009): For me, the cross is important because it reminds me that God keeps his promises. Wearing a cross carries with it not only a symbol of our hopes but also a responsibility to act and to live as Christians. This symbol does not point only upwards but also outwards, it reminds us of our duties not only to God but also to one another. The archbishop offered this insight at the time of the high-profile employment dispute Eweida v British Airways,1 which was ultimately appealed before the European Court of Human Rights as Eweida v UK.2 The claimant was Nadia Eweida, a British Airways employee in a customer-facing role, who wore a visible cross in contravention of the dress code in operation at British Airways at the time and who brought a religious discrimination claim when she was suspended. The original claim before the English courts was unsuccessful in part because the court noted that wearing the cross was not mandated by Christianity. Eweida argued that wearing a visible cross resulted from a sincerely held desire to demonstrate a personal religious commitment and that should be enough for her decision to wear it to be respected. In a parallel claim, a nurse, Shirley Chaplin, described her desire to wear a cross as ‘an outward manifestation of her deeply held religious conviction’ (Chaplin v Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust).3 Ultimately, the European Court of Human Rights agreed with Eweida, allowing for (discreet) personal symbols of religious commitment to enjoy a measure of protection. Although the Eweida and, to a lesser extent, Chaplin cases received a lot of publicity, it is far from clear how many Christians would take a similar stand. It is quite possible that a number of Christians (like a Mrs Babcock, a nurse referred to in the Chaplin case) would be prepared to remove their crosses if so required, though doubtless with a measure of regret.

REQUESTS FOR TIME-OFF There have been a number of tribunal claims which centre around a Christian employee’s desire to be absent from the workplace due to what are perceived to be the greater claims of religious observance on a Sunday. The tribunal claims suggest two

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possible rationales for this. The first is where Christians hold a Sabbatarian belief in the sacredness of Sunday as a holy day and do not wish to work as a result (Copsey v Devon Clays Limited).4 The second is the more practical rationale that some Christians wish to attend church on a Sunday and therefore seek to avoid work commitments that day which might prevent this (Williams-Drabble v Pathway Care Solutions Ltd and Anor).5 An example of the former is found in the case of Mba v Merton Borough Council.6 The claimant, Mrs Mba, was a residential care worker in a children’s home and her contract involved the possibility of Sunday working. For two years her desire not to do this, as a committed Christian with Sabbatarian convictions, was accommodated by her employer. However, at length it decided that making such accommodations was too costly and administratively inconvenient, and it gave her notice that she would be required to work Sundays on a rota basis. She resigned rather than accept this and brought a claim for indirect religious discrimination. Although her claim was unsuccessful (on the basis that the employer could justify their stance based on cost and the apparent desirability of continuity of care), it does illustrate that some Christians are willing to go to considerable lengths in pursuit of their faith convictions at work, including voluntarily surrendering a job and livelihood.

REQUESTS TO OPT OUT There are doubtless many situations where some Christians may feel uncomfortable with some aspects of their job role because they conflict with their faith convictions. However, at times this feeling of discomfort may be so strong as to lead to a Christian objecting on the grounds of conscience and seeking an opt-out of the offending activity. This possibility has been accommodated in law in certain situations, for example the permitted opt-outs for medical practitioners from participating in abortion procedures (Abortion Act 1967, s 4(1)) and embryo research (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, s 38). However, these exceptions have been narrowly interpreted by courts, such that administrative staff (R v Salford AHA ex parte Janaway)7 and even midwives (Doogan & Anor, Re Judicial Review)8 have been unsuccessful in seeking to rely on them to avoid any (ancillary) involvement in abortion. A desire to ‘conscientiously object’ to parts of a job role has not been limited to issues of medical ethics. There have also been cases where claimants have objected to what they may see as the promotion of same-sex relationships intrinsic to their job roles, those relationships being perceived to be displeasing to God. Examples of this include a Christian magistrate concerned at the possibility that he might be asked to make adoption orders to gay couples (McClintock v Department for Constitutional Affairs);9 a registrar of marriages who was designated as a Civil Partnerships registrar against her wishes (Ladele v Islington Borough Council)10 and a Christian relationships therapist who did not want to counsel same-sex couples on sexual techniques (McFarlane v Relate Avon Ltd).11 It is notable that in all three cases, the claimants were refused permission by their respective employers to opt out of the work activity, to which they objected. In the process they all found it preferable to lose their jobs rather than back down in the face of employer unwillingness to accommodate and, therefore in their minds, engage in compromise (Childress 1979).

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WITNESSING/CHALLENGING OTHERS One of the most interesting things to emerge from the tribunal data is the different ways in which some Christians seek to engage others. There is an array of examples which has emerged through the case law. For example, in Chondol v Liverpool City Council,12 a Christian social worker had been reported for giving Bibles to ‘service users’ – and was dismissed for ‘overtly promoting’ his religious beliefs. Similarly, in Petrie v North Somerset Primary Care Trust, a dispute which did not in the end reach a tribunal, a Christian nurse was disciplined for making offers of prayer to patients. In Wasteney v East London NHS Foundation Trust,13 a speech therapist engaged in religious conversations with a Muslim junior member of staff with a view to converting her to Christianity and was formally disciplined. In Apelogun Gabriels v London Borough of Lambeth,14 a Christian employee and lay preacher was dismissed after sharing selected Bible passages critical of homosexuality in a lunchtime Bible study and which were then shared more widely with colleagues, some of whom took offence.

TRENDS The tribunal judgements provide some examples of how at least some Christian employees may seek to express their beliefs at work. Each of the examples considered here involved conflict with employers and/or co-workers. What the judgements do not show is the extent to which Christians in general are encountering further obstacles or hostility in acting out their faith at work. At the time of the Eweida case, it certainly appeared to be the view of the Archbishop of York that the workplace was becoming a difficult place for Christians through the increase of secularism (Daily Mail, 13 February 2009). This in turn is supported by the report of Christians in Parliament (February 2010), and a ComRes survey commissioned by the Sunday Telegraph (May 2009) in which, amongst other things, 19 per cent of participants said they had faced opposition at work because of being a Christian, and 6 per cent said they had been reprimanded or cautioned at work for sharing their faith.15 Whereas much of this information relies on perception, there may be grounds for believing that institutional and legal changes may be increasing the pressure on Christians in certain occupations or roles. Some years ago, the rules on Sunday trading were relaxed (under the provisions of the Sunday Trading Act 1994), allowing more shops to open and for longer – there was some protection for shop and betting workers who objected to Sunday working but these only applied to those employed on a particular date (26 August 1994 for shop workers; 3 January 1995 for betting workers).16 Legal changes which have created additional rights for same-sex couples (e.g. the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013) and transgender people (the Gender Recognition Act 2004) have also increased the scope for difficulties of conscience for conservative Christians. According to the logic of the judgements in cases such as Ladele, Christians with conscientious objections which cut across sexual orientation or transgender rights must either live with these objections or leave the job role (Parkinson 2011; Hambler 2015).

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CONCLUSION To summarize, on the basis of evidence gleaned from employment tribunal judgements, at least some Christians express their Christianity through the wearing of religious symbols, through a desire for time-off on Sundays in particular, through seeking opt-outs from some aspects of work which may conflict with conscience and by treating the workplace as a ‘mission field’. As well as highlighting behaviours, the tribunal judgements also illustrate the potential for Christians to encounter problems when seeking to articulate their Christian faith, in these different ways, not least the hostility of colleagues or employers. Occasionally they may feel the need to resign. Sometimes they are dismissed. Christians have generally expected to endure opposition in the public square (which can be read to be inclusive of the employment situation) so in a sense this should be no surprise (1 Peter 4:12). However, it may be that a trend is emerging that opposition is being directed at Christianity per se rather than simply individual Christians themselves. If true, this is potentially a worrying trend for the future.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Politics DANIEL NILSSON DEHANAS

Christian attitudes to politics can be bewilderingly varied. Across much of Christianity’s 2,000 years of history, the views of the faithful have run the gamut from pie-in-the-sky disengagement to radical calls for social change. This chapter will consider Christian political positions in brief historical context, in various national church-state models and in terms of a set of political orientations that focus on the case of the United States, before looking ahead to emerging developments. Christians can find justification for diverse and seemingly contradictory views on politics when they look to the writings of the New Testament. Jesus Christ was a dissident figure who was considered genuinely dangerous by the ruling class of Judea. He counted among his friends a number of zealots who sought the violent overthrow of Roman rule. At the same time, Jesus preached that if his followers were hit by their oppressors, they should ‘turn the other cheek’, or if a Roman soldier forced them to walk a single mile, they should ‘go the extra mile’. The hymn ‘Onward Christian soldiers’ can sound warmongering, until it is tempered by the knowledge that the Christian ‘sword’ and ‘shield’ are spiritual. Perhaps most prominently, Jesus demonstrated his particular genius for the ambiguous phrase when asked if his followers should pay taxes to Caesar: ‘give to Caesar what is Caesar’s’, he replied, ‘and to God what is God’s’. Christians have held a tremendous range of visions of the Good Society: from the protocommunist sharing of all possessions in Acts 2 to the virtue-based radical individualism of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. There is also a wide spectrum of approaches to power. The early Christians were an underground sect of Judaism who met in private homes or catacombs and faced violent persecution. Emperor Nero famously sent Christians to their deaths in colosseum spectacles or tied them to tall poles to burn as human torches. Christian fortunes changed dramatically in the fourth century, when Emperor Constantine himself took a favourable view to the Christian message, issuing the Edict of Milan to extend religious toleration and personally overseeing major theological councils. It was only a matter of time before, under Emperor Theodosius, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christians throughout history have held in tension two states of being: a downtrodden persecuted people and a Constantinian power elite. A rising tide of secularism has further complicated the position of Christians in politics. Medieval Europe had taken the Constantinian model to a kind of excess, in which Christianity lent legitimacy to the divine right of kings. Rulers were unimpeachable because they had God on their side. Medieval Europe was Christendom, a fusion of the religious and political in which military force was used to defend theological aims, such as the sanctity of Jerusalem during the Crusades. The Reformation and the Wars of Religion

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revealed the potential for bloodshed inherent in the Constantinian model. The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, put an end to the most violent of these wars by stipulating that each state would remain sovereign over its own religious affairs. From this peace a new international system emerged in which the secular needs of states took priority over transnational religious causes. In our post-Christendom modern world, Christians must typically couch their political aspirations in forms of secular reasoning if they wish to effectively influence government (Rawls 1997; cf. Habermas 2006). Even so, some argue that over the past forty or fifty years, Christians and other religious people have become increasingly assertive in their expressions of public religion (Casanova 1994; Toft et al. 2011).

THE STATE In our world today, Christians engage in politics in the context of states. These states can follow quite different models of religion-state relations. Some repressive states have clear records of persecuting Christian worshipers, such as in theocratic regimes (Iran) or atheistic ones (North Korea). In China, Christian worship is allowed but carefully monitored and regulated in the official Three Self Patriotic Movement churches. In all such cases, Christian movements to a substantial extent must exist ‘underground’, and any Christian influence on politics has been muted. On the other end of the spectrum are states, such as Uganda or Zambia, where the official declaration of being a ‘Christian country’ has been accompanied by laws that favour a particular Christian vision of society which can extend to the personal realm by, for example, regulating or outlawing homosexual relationships. In some Eastern Orthodox nations, most notably Russia and Greece, the close fusion of religion with national identity has given special status to a particular conception of Christianity that either tacitly or overtly excludes its religious rivals. Most nations today exist somewhere between the poles of ‘Christian’ and ‘antiChristian’ vision. The fact that England has an established church (see Chapter 2) might at first seem to indicate that Christianity has a strong influence in the country’s legal and political arenas. After all there are twenty-six guaranteed places for bishops in the upper house of Parliament and the monarch has a formal role as head of the Church of England. However, scholars who have studied the English case tend to characterize it as a kind of ‘restrained establishment’, which, beyond roles in schooling and ceremonies, does not intrude often into the life of the average citizen (Soper et al. 2017). Grace Davie (2007) writes insightfully of England being characterized by a ‘vicarious religion’ in which an active minority perform Christianity on behalf of the general public. It is perhaps ironic that in a nation with an established church, many of the most vocal advocates for church disestablishment are in fact Christians. These Christians are largely non-conformists who object to Anglican privilege or evangelicals who expect that more distance between Church and State would enable the Church to grow numerically. Another model of religion-state relations is the separation of Church and State, exemplified by France and the United States. In France, coming out of the Revolution of 1789, this separation took on a radical anti-clerical character. The French conception of secular separation, laïcité, is generally interpreted as a radical exclusion of religion from the public square and has meant that ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols (such as a headscarf or a large crucifix necklace) are banned from state schools. The United States has taken a different approach to the separation of Church and State based on the First Amendment

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to the Constitution. Rather than the thoroughgoing exclusion of religion as seen in France, the US model emphasizes the mutual independence of Church and State in order to enable both to flourish. Although the US government cannot fund or favour a church, there is nothing to stop US politicians from demonstrating public piety by invoking God in political speeches that resonate with the still relatively religious population. A final religion-state model worthy of mention is the partnership model in Germany, whereby the state works together with a set of faith institutions which have received public corporation status. These German faith institutions, including the Catholic Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church, have the right to levy a church tax on their members and, enabled by such funds, provide a high proportion of the country’s social welfare services such as schools and hospitals. Christian principles (rather than Christian piety) are deeply embedded in German political life. It is no accident that the Christian Democratic Union, the political party of Angela Merkel, has been easily the most successful political party since the postwar founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. Examples of the cooperation model can also be found in the Nordic countries (Kühle 2011). With or without a church tax, there is a global trend towards religion-state partnerships as seen in Germany because states are realizing their own limitations in financially austere times and recognizing the important contributions faith institutions can make to a mixed economy of welfare provision (Neuberger 2012).

POLITICAL ORIENTATIONS Christians’ approaches to politics can be roughly divided into four orientations. I base these on placement on the Left-Right spectrum combined with degree of political engagement or disengagement. These four political orientations are: fundamentalists, the Christian Right, the Christian Left and Neo-Anabaptists. I derive the final three political orientations from James D. Hunter’s (2010) authoritative work on Christian political thinking in the United States. Partly for that reason, my discussion here will focus on the American context, where these political tendencies are best exemplified. Fundamentalists are Christians who tend towards the Right of the political spectrum and believe that their faith is best practised in separate enclaves with like-minded believers. The movement was birthed in the years immediately prior to the First World War when American conservative Christian scholars published The Fundamentals of the Christian Religion, a series of booklets responding to modernist trends that they thought threatened to undermine the inerrancy of scripture. Fundamentalists believe that the Bible is the infallible Word of God and consider its account of events to be inviolable. Many, for example, believe that the biblical narrative of creation and the theory of evolution cannot be reconciled. Fundamentalists take a premillennial eschatological view that the world is becoming increasingly sinful. There will be a final apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil, popularly portrayed in the bestselling fundamentalist series of Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Terry Jenkins. In recent years certain strands of American fundamentalist Christianity have melded with other trends, including survivalism, gun ownership, nativism and alt-right activity, to make this traditionally apolitical religious orientation peculiarly enamoured with the politics of Donald Trump (Crockford 2018). It is important to distinguish fundamentalists from evangelicals, the latter of whom do not seclude themselves but instead attempt to change the world through a kind of ‘engaged orthodoxy’ (Smith et al. 1998). Evangelicals believe that a personal relationship with Jesus Christ transforms believers both privately and publicly, leading them to want

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to share their faith with others. Evangelicals are at the beating heart of the next two orientations I will profile: the Christian Right and the Christian Left. The Christian Right is a moral-political movement which developed in reaction to the libertine excesses of the 1960s (Putnam and Campbell 2010). Key American evangelical leaders, including Jerry Falwell (also considered a fundamentalist), Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed and James Dobson, crafted a set of networks to support political candidates and legislation for the defence of Christian public morality. Some Catholics, such as Richard John Neuhaus, helped broaden the movement’s appeal. The Christian Right has been most concerned with topics relating to traditional family life, taking stances against abortion and same-sex marriage while advocating male ‘headship’ in the home. The movement reached its apotheosis with the election of Ronald Reagan as US president, ushering many conservative evangelicals into the halls of power. Ironically, media coverage of the aggressive traditionalism of Christian Right organizations such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority served to alienate large segments of the American public, potentially leading to a national decline in those willing to identify as Christian (Hout and Fischer 2002) while also galvanizing opponents on the Christian Left. The Christian Left in the United States is an evangelical and Catholic-led movement that takes progressive political stances, such as campaigning for immigrant amnesty or for action on climate change. The most prominent leaders of the Christian Left include Jim Wallis (author and editor of Sojourners magazine) and Tony Campolo (a popular speaker and former spiritual advisor to Bill Clinton). The Christian Left in America – and indeed worldwide – sees the gospel as inherently including social justice, reconciliation and stewardship of the Earth. This gospel has been embodied in history by leaders such as William Wilberforce, Óscar Romero and Martin Luther King. The Christian Left, while modest in numbers compared to the Christian Right, sees the Right as its foil in its own attempts to influence state power. Neo-Anabaptists are the final, and smallest, of the four orientations. Their political tendencies are progressive like the Christian Left, although they have a more radical edge that emphasizes pacifism and the critique of neoliberal capitalism. Their main difference from the Left is their deep suspicion of the Constantinian will to power. Instead, like their Anabaptist forerunners, Neo-Anabaptists emphasize personal lifestyle change and membership in a like-minded community. John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas have been key intellectual architects of this orientation, while Shane Claiborne, and his new monastic movement, is perhaps its greatest practical exemplar. As a Christian political orientation, Neo-Anabaptists have been highly creative, yet remain rather marginal.

WHITHER CHRISTIANS AND POLITICS? Our brief foray into American Christian political orientations reveals that though there is a tendency towards Right-leaning politics, Christians take a wide range of stances on politics and hold a variety of views on the appropriate use of state power. We can also see that Christian politics has largely been played as a male sport. Although most churchgoers are women, Christian political leaders have predominantly been men, sometimes with male-oriented visions. Our short description of Christian political orientations has been limited in several ways. Most importantly it has centred on one national case which, although influential, has meant we have not explored transnational or global dimensions of Christian political

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experience, such as the impact of Christians in the Global South on geopolitics (see Jenkins 2011). Relatedly, our description here has not done justice to Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Christian political orientations, which tend to operate much differently from those of white evangelicals or white Catholics (see e.g. Lincoln and Mamiya 1990). Indeed, our discussion has not considered Pentecostal or charismatic forms of Christianity, the most rapidly growing segment of Christianity around the world. Some researchers have demonstrated that such ‘renewalist’ Christians take relatively conservative views on moral issues, such as homosexuality or drinking alcohol (Pew Research Center 2006). Others note that a theological emphasis on the Holy Spirit can be democratizing or even ‘progressive’, as it opens the way for women in religious leadership and gives new voice to the poor and the disenfranchised (Miller and Yamamori 2007). Whither Christians and politics? Some key developments on the horizon are worth noting. Firstly, it is important not to overestimate the coherence of Christian political orientations. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the remarkable support of American Christians for Donald Trump. Trump’s history of philandering and untruthfulness does not exactly convey a Christian moral vision. Indeed, he was seen by prospective voters as the least religious of all major candidates, even less religious than Hillary Clinton (Pew Research Center 2016a). Yet exit poll data on white evangelicals and fundamentalists (counted together as ‘evangelicals’ in most surveys) shows that they voted for Trump in higher proportions than they had for any recent Republican presidential candidate, including Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush (Pew Research Center 2016b). The Trump vote paradox is symptomatic of a changing institutional and media environment in which thinned-out religion can more seamlessly aid and abet the global rise of populist nationalism (DeHanas and Shterin 2018). It is possible that the disjuncture between evangelical values and Trump’s moral recklessness will one day precipitate a realignment of American religion and politics. Secondly, the past few decades have seen developments in community organizing that increasingly transcend categories of political Left and Right or bridge from Christian faith commitments to include others such as Muslims or those of no faith. Important examples can be found in PICO in California and the Citizens UK movement in Britain, who campaign for issues such as the living wage. It remains to be seen whether such groups merely amount to an archipelago of inventive energy or if they have the capacity to spark a wider renewal of Christian involvement in democratic politics.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

War – violence – peace TED GRIMSRUD

Accounts of how Christians think and act in relation to war have tended to repeat the general typology that was introduced back in 1960 by historian Roland Bainton in Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace. Bainton saw three categories: pacifism (the commitment not to participate in war in any form), the just war (the willingness to go to war when certain criteria insuring the justness of the war are met) and the crusade (a sense of call from God to fight in a war that is understood to be divinely required). However, this typology has been criticized for leaving too many options out and oversimplifying what is left. As an alternative, I propose a revised typology that has two main types: (1) negatively disposed towards war and (2) positively disposed towards war. Each of these two types has three subtypes.

‘NEGATIVELY DISPOSED’ TOWARDS WAR What unites the three ‘negatively disposed’ approaches is the conviction that, morally, the benefit of the doubt is always against war. 1. Principled pacifism. This view is against war based on starting principles. For example, some Christians have said that they cannot fight due to their understanding of Jesus’ commands such as ‘love your enemies’. The relative justice of particular wars is irrelevant. In the United States, during the Second World War, those who were morally opposed to fighting were allowed to do alternative service as conscientious objectors (Grimsrud 2014). Such conscientious objectors refused military service simply because they believed any possible war was wrong due to their moral principles. Even if their country was to fight in a ‘just war’, principled pacifists would still refuse to fight. 2. Pragmatic pacifism. This view is against war based on the evidence of how warfare works in actual practice. These conclusions follow from using just war criteria to conclude that all actual wars are certain to be unjust; that is, this pacifism is based on evidence. This view suggests that each war has violated some, if not all, of the standard just war criteria. 3. Critical just war. This view differs from ‘pragmatic pacifism’ due to openness about the possibility that just war criteria may be met. These criteria typically are sorted into two categories (Yoder 2001): ‘just cause’ (e.g. defending against aggression, resisting tyranny, stopping atrocities, declared by a legitimate authority, only undertaken as a last resort) and ‘just means’ (e.g. non-combatants are not targeted, the violence used is not out of proportion to the good that the war achieves, of limited duration, the humane treatment of prisoners of war).

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This view starts with the assumption that any particular war is not just unless proved otherwise. The logical conclusion for those holding this view is that wars that do not overcome that burden of proof should be opposed. Something like this was a common view in the United States during the Vietnam War, for many draftees who refused to fight went to Canada or prison. This description of the ‘critical just war’ view is close to the way many describe the ‘just war’ position in general. They assume that this is the main alternative to pacifism in the Christian tradition. However, this view actually has fewer adherents. Notice that this view has no legal standing in the United States; those opposed to particular wars are still required to enter the military in the case of a draft or stay in the military if they are already there. If this view actually were common, there should have been more effort to make it legally viable.

‘POSITIVELY DISPOSED’ TOWARDS WAR What unites the three ‘positively disposed’ approaches that follow is the conviction that war is inevitable and therefore we should not imagine a world without war. With this approach, we should not assume that wars need to overcome an anti-war benefit of the doubt. 4. Just war as restraint. This view accepts the inevitability of war and believes that it is dangerous to seek to do away with war. A negative attitude towards war hinders preparedness efforts and jeopardizes national interests by weakening the ability to respond appropriately with military force when necessary. The purpose of moral reasoning is to advocate for restraint in the tactics of war, not to try to end war (Ramsey 1960; Johnson 1984; Elshtein 2003). 5. Blank check. Though this view has not been named or studied by students of the history of war, it is by far the most common view held by Christians since the fourth century. The core conviction here is that citizens by definition have the responsibility to go to war when their nation calls upon them to (Yoder 2009). Although the influential fourth-century bishop Augustine has been called the ‘founder’ of Christian just war thought, he exerted great influence in undergirding the ‘blank check’ approach. Augustine argued that citizens should leave the reasoning concerning a war’s justness to the government. A citizen’s responsibility is simply to obey one’s government (Paolucci, ed. 1962). 6. Crusade. This view differs from the blank check by having a more positive view of the goodness of war. If there are transcendental values at stake, when one has a clear sense of calling to fight, then one must do so. Since for a crusade, the war serves an absolute good, one need not be concerned with just war concerns for proper procedures. In a crusade, the calling is to fight, all-out. The typology outlined here helpfully separates two general approaches to pacifism. It also helps us see how pacifism and certain approaches to just war philosophy actually have a great deal in common. Also, this typology draws a dividing line between two distinct just war approaches. The ‘critical just war’ view has much more in common with pacifism than with the ‘just war as restraint’ view. This typology lifts up the ‘blank check’ not only as a distinctive view rarely noticed in most discussions on this topic but actually as by far the dominant view among Christians (and other citizens).

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CHRISTIANITY’S DEFAULT POSITION Although our data is sparse, most historians of the early Christian era agree that most Christians likely affirmed some form of pacifism. For a number of generations following the time of Jesus, those who named themselves his followers indeed did generally express a commitment to pacifism. The pacifism of the early Christians shows that those closest in history to Jesus understood his message to call them to radical love that precluded violence (Swift 1983; Wengst 1987; Hornus 1990). It is not until after the beginning of the fourth century that church leaders openly articulate an acceptance of Christians in the military. However, then the change from pacifism to acceptance of military involvement came decisively – indicating that the way had been prepared for quite some time. Probably the most central factor then, and in the generations down to our present day, in Christians turning away from their default pacifist position was a rejection of the distinction between loyalty to the community of faith and loyalty to the nation-state. Christian pacifism survived, but at the margins of the Church (Cahill 1994; Miller and Nelson Gingerich 1994). Christian pacifism surfaced among small groups that in some sense may be seen as movements that tried to restore a more Jesus-oriented approach to faith (Brock 1972). The two traditions that sustained their peace witness into our present day were the Anabaptists, who emerged in the sixteenth century (Stayer 1976; Weaver 2005), and the Quakers, who emerged in the seventeenth century (Brock 1990). They have been called the ‘Historic Peace Churches’. It took an Indian Hindu, Mohandas Gandhi, to demonstrate the potential of nonviolent action for effecting social change without bloodshed (Wink 1992). Gandhi drew deep inspiration from the life and teaching of Jesus – and, in turn, inspired twentieth-century Christians to take more seriously the possible confluence between the quest for social change and pacifism (Ellsberg 1991). Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist preacher who actually did not enter the civil rights movement as a pacifist, established the linkage between civil rights activism and nonviolence in a way that captured the imagination of millions. King did end his all-too-short life espousing a principled pacifism that was forged through on the ground experience (Branch 1988, 1998, 2006).

THE ‘BLANK CHECK’ AND CRITICAL JUST WAR THOUGHT Today’s pro-military Christians are in many ways closer to the actual Christian tradition than pacifists. The fourth century provides us with the key symbols that provide a framework for understanding the general practical philosophy of Christianity towards warfare. Constantine the Emperor at the beginning of the century and Augustine the Bishop at the end of the century may be said to reflect two poles within post-pacifist Christianity. Constantine symbolizes the acceptance by Christians of the role of national leaders in determining the justifiability of war. In deferring to national leaders and national interests concerning warfare, the large majority of Christians have essentially uncritically understood it to be their responsibility simply to obey their government when it calls upon them to fight – that is, to give the government a blank check (Yoder 2009). The other pole of the post-pacifist context concerning Christians and war may be called the ‘critical just war’ approach. Augustine symbolizes this approach because he is often considered the father of the just war tradition. However, Augustine never articulated a

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formal just war philosophy with organized, systematic lists of criteria that could actually function as a critical resource for Christian responses to warfare. His actual approach in practice was much closer to the blank. The ordinary Christian is to defer to one’s leaders (Deane 1963; Stevenson 1987). It is not until the sixteenth century that we have a systematic delineation of the just war criteria as a formal statement (Yoder 2009). Only in the twentieth century did the critical just war pole among post-pacifist Christianity begin to play a genuinely critical role. For most of the past seventeen centuries, the fundamental approach to warfare among the vast majority of Christians has been the blank check. Only in this way could you have war after war where Christians take up arms against other Christians. The events of August 1945 changed application of just war principles forever. The use of nuclear weapons galvanized an outpouring of horror. A position called ‘nuclear pacifism’ emerged based on just war criteria that says, ahead of time, that a nuclear war could never be justifiable. Just war criteria actually became a basis for opposing real wars. ‘Nuclear pacifism’ among Christians received a tremendous boost with the 1983 pastoral letter from the US Roman Catholic bishops who pointed strongly towards nuclear pacifism (Hollenbach 1983; Murnion, ed. 1983). In the 1960s, for the first time the United States engaged in an extended war that did not meet with overwhelming public support. During the Vietnam War, a new category emerged, ‘selective conscientious objection’. This category included people who objected to participation in this particular war – not because they were pacifists but because they believed that that particular war was unjust. Just war thought has in recent years served a critical function in fostering a refusal to participate in what is seen as an unjust war. Just war thought served, as well, as a resource for those who actively opposed a war as it was being fought and not only after it was fought. Now it also provides the language for opposing a war before it happens (e.g. note pre-war opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s). Nuclear pacifism and selective conscientious objection are products of the ‘critical just war’ sensibility. They show that the main divide among Christians is not between pacifism and just war but between being negatively or positively disposed towards war as a starting point.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Ethics ELEANOR TIPLADY HIGGS

INTRODUCTION The emergence of ‘Lived Religion’ and critical feminist innovations in the study of Christianity has dovetailed with the emergence, in anthropology and philosophy, of studies of ethics in everyday life known as ‘ordinary ethics’. Influenced by these recent developments, the approach taken in this chapter offers some principles for capturing Christians’ everyday engagement with ethical problems. Ethics is the domain of human activity that seeks to answer the question ‘what should I do?’ in relation to immediate dilemmas and lifelong commitments. The concept of ‘ethics’ and what is ‘ethical’ is often conflated with ‘morality’ and what is ‘moral’. In this chapter’s discussion of Christian ethics, ‘morals’ are considered as specific claims about the right and good way to behave and rules that have been formulated to guide conduct (e.g. the Ten Commandments). On the other hand, ‘ethics’ refers to the identification and deliberation of such questions in practice; in other words, ideas and decisions about how to live and conduct oneself in particular ‘real life’ situations. Thus, we look for ethics as embodied in the hard choices and commitments that constitute our relationships with our families, friends, neighbours, distant others and oppressors.

THEORIZING CHRISTIAN ETHICS The academic study of ‘Christian ethics’ must be approached critically to avoid presuming unity and homogeneity among Christians, where, in fact, we find much contradiction and disagreement. Indeed, the introduction to Christian ethics presented in this chapter is not comprehensive; rather it presents a few theoretical considerations that have emerged from a particular case study. The diversity of Christian ethics is not captured in full here, and we should remember that different churches offer different answers to ethical questions. This is the case not least because of the internal differentiation of ‘Christianity’ into denominations: the distinctions between Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic and Protestant churches. Each church contains a highly diverse group of voices, many of which are critical of the official positions of the institutions to which they belong. There is also the wide spread of Christianity around the world and its interaction with the cultural contexts in which it finds itself in Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Middle East and Europe. Despite their differences, Christian approaches to ethics tend to presuppose that insights about how to live can be gained through the exercise of individual conscience and reason in conformity with Christian tradition and the revelation of God’s Word in the Bible (e.g. Outka 2005). Differences emerge primarily over the proper ethical conclusions drawn from these efforts.

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While studies of Christian ethics are interested in these conclusions, offering answers to questions of right and wrong is the domain of moral philosophy and moral theology. Religious studies generally does not attempt to discern whether Christian ethical norms are correct, and instead focuses on describing the content, form, and effects of particular practices and teachings. Often, this has involved taking institutions, leaders, and scriptures as legitimate and authoritative sources on the ethics and morals of the communities they are presumed to represent. This would suggest that studies of Christian ethics should start with an investigation into the explicit instructions issued by the Vatican or written in the New Testament. Such an approach might begin with a definition of Christian ethics – for instance, the principle of imitatio dei (Latin: imitation of God), the principle of copying Jesus’ moral instruction and behaviour – and look for examples of Christians applying it in their lives (e.g. Burridge 2007). To the extent that Christians do refer to scripture and tradition to draw ethical conclusions, it is often an appeal to authority. However, this strategy runs into problems when dealing with ethical questions that have arisen in relation to contemporary contexts and technologies that are not mentioned in the Bible. Such ‘extramural’ or secular phenomena seem to present Christians with the need to determine whether existing Christian moral teachings can be applied or whether nonChristian (or ‘secular’) ethical principles can be followed (Outka 2005: 199–200). Some responses to this problem apply an overriding principle, usually the decentring of the self implied by the ‘golden rule’, or the transformative potential of love; whether framed as the love for one’s neighbour, one’s love for God or God’s love of humanity. However, as will be discussed at greater length below, the proclamations of the Bible, clergy and churches should not be presupposed to direct or reflect the behaviour or opinions of their communities and congregations. While the influence of the Bible, for example, is relevant to understanding Christian ethics, we must go further than noting what it says, to analyse how what it says is used within particular Christian communities. In other words, we should shift our attention away from ‘authoritative’ sources like the Bible, and towards the practices of Christian individuals and communities. By approaching ethics in this way, we acknowledge that ordinary people reason with, produce knowledge about and adapt their own religious beliefs and practices. Christians’ reasoning and creative engagement with tradition and authority takes place in the context of everyday life, which is embedded in particular communities, cultures and histories. Thus Christian ethics must engage with dilemmas related to such diverse topics as the environment, political corruption, global inequality, modern slavery, fair trade, vegetarianism and bioethical issues such as stem cell research and euthanasia (e.g. Kunhiyop 2008; Barton and Muers 2013; Hinga 2017: 93–182). Theorizations of ‘ordinary’ ethics – exemplified in the work of Veena Das (2015), Didier Fassin (2012), Webb Keane (2016) and Michael Lambek (2010) – consider ethics in this way. For those who take an ‘ordinary ethics’ approach, ethics is an inescapable aspect of social life, and social phenomena are inherently ethical (Laidlaw 2014). The ordinary character of ethics describes its ubiquitous occurrence, its relationship to social practices and the effects of ethical speech and action (Lambek 2010). Approaching the study of Christians using this framework makes studying Christian ethics considerably different to doing moral theology. It enables us to identify ethics in practical judgement, to acknowledge that ethics is expressed in non-specialist language and to recognize that ethics does not require academic expertise. Furthermore, it suggests that an ethnographic study of Christian life can be read as an in-depth document of Christian ethical practices.

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CHRISTIAN SEXUAL ETHICS Christian ethics is approached here through a brief case study of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA)’s work on sexual health and reproductive rights in Kenya. As suggested above, Christian ethics addresses a wide range of topics, but sexual ethics have particularly acute significance for women and sexual minorities. We begin by looking at the relationships, communities, cultures and histories that form the YWCA’s context, starting with colonialism. The legacies of Britain’s colonization of Kenya underlie many of the YWCA’s concerns: the national and local effects of economic exploitation, lack of access to education and health care and social inequality. The region’s colonial history is also relevant in this case because sexuality and reproduction had central importance in the colonial project. Colonization was justified and reinforced by the ethical assertion that Christian European cultures were civilized and morally superior to African cultures.1 On this basis, colonizers and missionaries initiated efforts to devalue, regulate and eradicate various local ‘African’ practices related to sexuality and fertility, such as polygamy (e.g. Thomas, L. 2003; Kanogo 2005). Missionaries and colonizers disseminated gendered, sexual and reproductive norms that were considered universally Christian, but which were, in fact, distinctively European. As a result of these complex interactions between power, culture, gender and reproduction, Kenyan debates about Christian sexual ethics have a range of meanings beyond evaluating conduct as right or wrong. The YWCA’s health programmes for girls and young women in the twenty-first century have addressed HIV, female genital mutilation (FGM) and sexual health education. As a Christian organization, the YWCA’s decisions about these programmes implicate it in ongoing and contentious ethical debates about sexuality. Feminist analyses of the power wielded by religious institutions, like churches, have shown that sexuality serves as a battlefield for the oppositional construction of identity and group belonging. Women and queer people often find their bodies and lives subject to declarations of sexual morality that position them as deviations from the norm, and as outsiders to Christian communities (e.g. Hemmings, Gedalof and Bland 2006). In Kenya and elsewhere, the HIV epidemic has catalysed a public discourse of ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ sexual conduct that problematically associates HIV with immorality and impurity. This discourse establishes Christian faith as a guard against the temptations to conduct that might lead to HIV infection and correspondingly promotes Christian identity as sexually ‘pure’ (e.g. Kamau 2009). In this way, Christian identity is constructed in opposition to sexually immoral others. This tendency illustrates a crucial insight of ordinary ethics: that the conclusions drawn from ethical deliberations can be mistaken and actions based on them can be harmful. The specific content of a moral assertion must be analysed in relation to its effects: in other words, we must ask who benefits from such a declaration and who is harmed by it. For HIV-positive women and girls in Kenya, public declarations about sexual immorality cause harm by contributing to the stigma that surrounds their status and making them more vulnerable to discrimination. In the context of the HIV epidemic, the status of condoms is especially significant. In their prophylactic function, condoms remain the primary focus of many public health interventions against HIV. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church and many other evangelical, Pentecostal and Protestant Christian institutions have continued to prohibit the use of condoms and other forms of contraception, primarily because they are thought to facilitate ‘sinful’ non-reproductive sex and sex outside heterosexual marriage.2 In Kenya, a minority of Protestant and Catholic clergy have expressed and stoked anti-condom sentiment by burning bonfires of condoms in public demonstrations

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(Balchin 2008). Despite this hostile climate, Kenya YWCA cautiously promotes the use of condoms through its sexual health projects as a means to an end: protection against HIV transmission. The organization does not refer to the Bible, doctrine or theology to support this ethical stance. It has evaluated the official positions of the churches from the perspective of protecting and promoting the health and rights of girls and women, an ethical position made available and comprehensible by borrowing ethical values and scripts from international development and the women’s movement. The YWCA’s programmes are not presented here because they are representative of a shared Kenyan Christian sexual ethics. Rather, this example illustrates how ethics is embedded in everyday life, even within institutions. An ordinary ethical analysis begins from the insight that it would be inadequate to explain the choices and ethical positions negotiated by Christians solely in terms of their adherence to or deviation from official, authoritative scriptural and doctrinal moral pronouncements. Kenya YWCA’s attitude towards condoms responds to the reality of sexual health in the HIV epidemic, demonstrating that official church teaching about condoms is not the only consideration or the most significant consideration when making decisions about the content of sexual health programmes. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the (apparent) contradictions between Christian morality and ‘secular’ rights-based perspectives can be navigated, if not combined, in institutional practices. Ordinary ethics explains this by considering ethical practices such as these as context-specific; they are dependent on the implicit understanding of how the themes and values in question implicate personal and collective identity, institutional authority and group membership. The YWCA’s practical navigation of sexual ethics demonstrates the disconnection between institutional pronouncements and doctrine, on the one hand, and the everyday practices of Christians, on the other.

CONCLUSION This introduction to the study of Christian ethics presumes that ethics is situated in the everyday interactions and deliberations of Christians in their communities. The considerations that appear to be relevant for Christians when they discuss and attempt to resolve ethical dilemmas of sex and sexuality suggest that moral claims and statements about proper conduct are never only about what is right and wrong. Rather, claims to moral authority are embedded in wider social and political power structures and therefore often reflect the interests of those who wish to reinforce their own position of power. In this way, ethical conduct is deeply implicated in establishing personal identity and constituting group membership, so Christian women and queer Christians are central to arguments about belonging and believing (Kwok 2005). In other words, Christian doctrine, tradition and scripture are relevant to the study of Christian ethics not because they dictate Christian morals. They are relevant because they provide Christians with vocabularies, models and other resources with which to think about and express ethical issues. The results of these efforts sometimes align with the positions publicly espoused by clergy and churches, while at other times, they contradict them. This suggests that, at the level of quotidian ethical discourse, explicit ethical reasoning is less effective, or less important, than a convincing story.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Healing GEORGE D. CHRYSSIDES

In my childhood my mother joined an evangelical church in Glasgow. One of the members was a woman who claimed to have the powers of spiritual healing. She was a disciple of a renowned healer in the Glasgow area by the name of J. Cameron Peddie (1887–1968), whose autobiography was entitled The Forgotten Talent. My mother, who suffered from painful bouts of fibrositis, used to go to her home for healing, where she kept a large record book itemizing her clients’ names, dates of treatment and the outcome. When Mrs Davidson started a weekly healing clinic in the church vestry, I had expected the congregation, who were much inclined towards biblical fundamentalism, to applaud Mrs Davidson’s efforts, but, much to my surprise, her services aroused quite vehement hostility. I did not realize at the time that the two opposing camps represented conflicting positions in the theological controversy between ‘cessationists’ and ‘continuationists’. The controversy is not confined to the ivory towers of theological seminaries – in fact, this debate was never mentioned in my studies when I later became a theology student, but appears to be taken up more in American conservative evangelical circles, and exponents of each position have made their arguments accessible on online social media such as YouTube. Both camps acknowledge the veracity of the biblical accounts of miracles and do not attempt to offer rationalistic explanations. However, the cessationist view is that these signs and wonders died out with the first generation of apostles. Paul writes, ‘where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away’ (1 Corinthians 13:8); and this indication that supernatural powers will disappear is taken to include the power to work healing miracles. By contrast, continuationists point to Jesus’ post-resurrection assurance to his disciples that ‘these signs will accompany those who believe’, and he itemizes exorcism, speaking in tongues, snake handling, the ability to drink poison unharmed and finally promises that ‘they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well’ (Mark 16:17–18). Cessationists, of course, will point out that Jesus was merely addressing this first generation. Spiritual healing is particularly found among charismatic Christians. The 1906 Azusa Street revival, which marked the beginning of the modern Pentecostal tradition, brought with it an emphasis on the power of the Holy Spirit and the accompanying ‘signs and wonders’, which included miraculous healing. It is not uncommon for a Pentecostalist service to end with the leader inviting anyone in need of healing to come forward and receive the laying on of hands. Physical contact between the healer and the sick person is considered appropriate, since Jesus himself made physical contact with those he healed.

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However, the book of Acts records that in Ephesus people brought handkerchiefs and garments to Paul, and took them back to the sick after Paul had touched them (Acts 19:11–12), and the practice of going back to the sick with cloths that a healer has blessed still prevails in some congregations, particularly in Africa. There are several high-profile healers in the United States, mainly televangelists such as Kenneth Copeland, Pat Robertson, Benny Hinn and Peter Popoff, the last two of which – as well as Morris Cerullo – are famed for purportedly performing healings at large public rallies. Not all Christians, including evangelicals, welcome such ministries, accusing numerous acclaimed healers of fraud and financial irregularities. However, many Christians regard it as unnecessary to seek out high-profile healers, believing that curative powers do not reside in individuals but are channelled from God’s Holy Spirit. Peddie believed that he did not have special powers of his own, but that it was possible for any Christian to heal, provided that he or she had a sufficient life of earnest prayer. Many believers pray for healing privately or participate in prayer groups within their congregations, in which prayers for healing form a significant part. Although the phenomenon is sometimes termed ‘faith healing’, its success or failure does not appear to be related to the patient’s faith. Peddie reported that, in the course of his ministry, there were those with strong faith who did not experience cures and, conversely, unbelievers who were miraculously healed. Most spiritual healers do not regard faith as a substitute for conventional medicine, and recommend the continuation of prescribed medical treatment, although a very small minority have viewed spiritual healing and medical healing as exclusive alternatives, often with harmful results. Being distinct from conventional medicine, spiritual healing does not depend on diagnosing the condition of those who seek healing. Although faith healers have been the butt of many jokes, a 2010 Pew Research Center survey revealed that 79 per cent of the US population believes in miracles, and a 2003 Newsweek survey claimed that 72 per cent of Americans believed in supernatural miraculous healing, even for incurable conditions (Kalb 2003; Pew Research Center 2010a). The Roman Catholic tradition recognizes a number of holy men and women to whom miraculous powers have been attributed. Padre Pio (1887–1968) was particularly renowned for his stigmata; he is accredited with over a thousand miracles during his lifetime and many more through his intercession after his death. The invocation of the saints, although unacceptable to Protestants, is commonplace within the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, where designated saints are particularly sought for specific conditions. Probably the best known is Raphael, who cures Tobit’s blindness, as recounted in the Apocrypha. Other saints are associated with specific conditions such as mental illness (St Dymphna), cancer (St Peregrine), addictions (St Maximillian Kolbe – a Polish friar who died in Auschwitz), chronic pain (St Lidwina) and lost causes (St Jude). Healing also tends to be associated with shrines and pilgrimage. In the Roman Catholic tradition, shrines are particularly associated with Marian apparitions, the most famous being that of Bernadette of Lourdes in 1858; the shrine attracts around five million pilgrims each year, many of whom seek healing through drinking the shrine’s holy water or bathing in the piscenes. The shrine is accredited with over 7,000 inexplicable cures since its beginning. Healing need not be associated with specific miracles, rituals or acts of healing: some researchers have claimed that practising the Christian faith (or religion more widely) is itself conducive to health. However, such a broad generalization is problematic for a number of reasons. It is not clear what practising one’s religion amounts to: worshipping

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regularly, putting faith into practice, engaging in private devotion. If those who attend church regularly are healthier than those who do not, perhaps the obvious explanation is that the sick are unable to get to church. There is also a problem of defining health. Some Christians have regarded homosexuality as a mental disorder that is in need of a cure, while a recent survey indicated that 54 per cent of the US population believed it should be accepted (Pew Research Center 2014b). There are problems, too, of distinguishing supernatural cures from remissions, natural recovery, incorrect initial diagnosis and a healing ritual’s possible placebo effect. Disentangling these factors is highly problematical, and it is not surprising that various scientific studies of the topic have been met with inconclusive findings (Jonas and Crawford 2003). A few research projects have been undertaken on religion and health. Writing in 1872, Sir Francis Galton commented on the relative longevity of various classes of people. He noted that members of the Royal family, despite being regularly prayed for, had an average life span of 64.4 years – the lowest, compared with other classes such as physicians, lawyers and landed gentry. Although the majority of Christians would no doubt agree that prayer does not offer the Royal family special protection, one ultraconservative Christian organization – Christian Voice – attributed Prince Philip’s survival of a recent car crash to the constancy of prayer for the royal household (Green 2019). Most studies on the relation between spiritual practices and health have sided with Galton, supporting the conclusion that there is little or no relation between prayer and health. Randolph C. Byrd (1988) studied 393 coronary care patients in San Francisco General Hospital between 1982 and 1983, assigning them into two groups – one who would be prayed for and one who would not. His findings indicated that patients who were prayed for had slightly less need for ventilatory assistance, antibiotics and diuretics than those who were not. However, on many other criteria – such as readmission, incidence of angina and mortality – there was no significant difference between the two groups. Probably the most meticulous recent study is that of Dr Herbert Benson (2006), who investigated the effects of intercessory prayer on a total of 1,802 patients in six US hospitals who were about to undergo coronary bypass surgery. Benson divided the patients into three groups: the first group would be prayed for, and would be told that this was happening; the second would be prayed for, but not told; and the third group would not be prayed for, and not told. Three Christian congregations, in Minnesota, Massachusetts and Missouri, undertook to offer prayers for the two selected groups, using a prescribed formula, and at specified and consistent times. The results indicated that there was no marked difference between patients who were prayed for and those who were not; indeed, those who did not receive prayers fared marginally better. The group who knew they were being prayed for developed slightly more complications (59 per cent) compared with the group who were not told that they were prayed for (52 per cent) and those who were not prayed for at all (51 per cent). Surveying numerous past scientific studies of religious interventions and health, Alex Harris et al. (1999) concluded that there was little evidence for the efficacy of intercessory prayer, but that certain other forms of spiritual therapy made some difference. In particular, pastoral counselling, meditation (Transcendental Meditation, TM – practised by some Christians, although Indian in origin – appeared to be the most effective), twelvestep programmes such as those of Alcoholics Anonymous (an organization founded by American Protestants and which uses prayer as a component) and encouraging forgiveness appeared to have some beneficial effects. There still remains the question, however, of how interventions such as prayer might work. Does it generate divine activity; does the

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person who prays release some kind of supernatural energy; or is there some kind of telepathic rapport between those who pray and those who suffer that somehow improves the sufferer’s condition? Healing forms part of the Church’s ritual and liturgical practice. In the Roman Catholic tradition, anointing the sick is one of its seven sacraments. As one of the consequences of the Second Vatican Council, the term ‘anointing the sick’ became used in preference to ‘extreme unction’ – sometimes popularly known as the ‘last rites’ – the ritual, performed by a priest, for anointing a dying person in preparation for the journey into life beyond death. Those who are in danger of death, either because of illness or age, may appropriately receive the sacrament. If someone faces a serious operation, this is also an appropriate time for anointing. The rite is not believed to have miraculous curative powers but offers a number of spiritual benefits, such as ‘strengthening, peace and courage’, ‘union with the passion of Christ’ and a ‘preparation for the final journey’ (Catechism 1520–1523). Healing is different from curing. Curing involves the elimination of a specific condition, while healing is a wider concept, referring to one’s general wholeness and well-being. The World Health Organisation’s Constitution defines health as ‘physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity’ (World Health Organisation 1958: 459). Christians therefore show a wider concern with healing, regarding it as involving one’s entire condition of physical and mental well-being, as well as one’s environment, which ideally ought to be conducive to health. The Bible tends to speak of health in this wider sense, and Jesus particularly associates illness with sin, the implication being not that sin is the cause of physical maladies, but rather that it is more important to receive the full salvation that Christ offers. The Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer contains the words ‘there is no health in us, miserable offenders’; while this may sound pessimistically Calvinist, it draws attention to the universally prevalent condition of sin, from which Christ brings salvation. As the famous Christmas carol puts it, quoting the prophet Malachi: Hail! the heav’n born Prince of peace! Hail! the Son of Righteousness! Light and life to all he brings, Risen with healing in his wings. (Malachi 4:2) And at the Giving of Communion in the Roman Catholic and Anglican liturgy, these words are commonly said by the congregation: Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed. (Church of England 2006: 276). A slightly older version reads, ‘my soul shall be healed’, indicating that the purpose of the sacrament a spiritual cleansing, not miraculous curing. Accordingly, Anglicans and Roman Catholics make regular provision for receiving healing within their liturgy. In many churches there is an opportunity for members of the congregation, optionally, after receiving the Eucharistic bread and wine, to go to a side chapel or transept to be anointed for healing, where the priest makes the sign of the cross on one’s forehead with holy oil. Some go because they are ill, while others may wish to address some personal difficulty in their lives, and attendees are also invited to

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be anointed for healing on behalf of someone else who is known to them. The priest pronounces the words: [N], I anoint you in the name of God who gives you life. Receive Christ’s forgiveness, his healing and his love. May the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ grant you the riches of his grace, his wholeness and his peace. Amen. In Lloyd C. Douglas’s novel The Robe (subsequently a blockbuster film), Marcellus, the Roman soldier who is searching for Christ’s robe, arrives in Cana, where he meets Miriam, a woman who is paralysed, but a beautiful singer. Miriam was once embittered about her disability but is now happy and contented. The conversation reveals that she met Jesus, to whom she attributes her talent. Marcellus asks, ‘But – assuming that Jesus spoke a word that made you sing – why did he not add a word that would give you power to walk?’ to which Miriam replies: ‘I cannot tell you how I came by my gift, … but I do not regret my lameness. Perhaps the people of Cana are more helped by the songs I sing – from my cot – than they might be if I were physically well’ (Douglas 1942: 266). Healing is a wider concept than curing, and it is regarded as compatible with illness and disability. John the Revelator describes the New Jerusalem as containing the tree of life, whose leaves are ‘for the healing of the nations’ (Revelation 22:2). Christians hope not merely for an everlasting paradise that will be free from all illness but for a state in which people and nations will be at peace with each other, and humans will be reconciled to God.

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Music BRIAN W. NAIL

An emphasis upon Lived Religion provides a theoretical framework for examining the creative interplay and tensions that persist between institutionalized forms of Christian music and the everyday acts of musical invention that transcend as well as infuse established theological and doctrinal traditions (Slobin 2011: 2; Nail 2013). Christianity is not only, or even mainly, practised in places of worship, but it is rather in the socalled ‘secular’ spaces of neighbourhoods, homes and workplaces that religious meaning is created through forms of worship (Orsi 1997: 7). The emergence of social media in the twenty-first century has expanded the possibilities for creating religious community online and has led to a proliferation of religious music-making. It has rapidly accelerated the commodification and consumerization of Christian culture while also potentially exacerbating the sense of alienation and social fragmentation that has typified modern life. Nevertheless, praying, singing and creating music are among the ways that humans create a sense of the sacred in everyday life, and music directly or indirectly related to the cultural legacy of Christianity remains prevalent within contemporary artistic culture.

THE BODY MADE SACRED THROUGH SONG Ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have theorized that music, language and ritual all emerged in dynamic relation to one another as early hominids developed the capacity for symbolic communication (Wallin, Merker and Brown 2001). Rather than simply functioning as a kind of accoutrement to religious worship, music performs the crucial work of creating social cohesion within a community. According to Tia DeNora, ‘Music has organizational properties. It may serve as a resource in daily life, and it may be understood to have “social” powers in relation to human social being’ (2000: 151). Music plays a prominent role within Christian religious experience because it is ‘the medium par excellence of emotional construction’ (DeNora 2003: 91). The experience of congregational singing, whether exuberant or austere, has a unique capacity for linking emotional, often cathartic musical expressions, with the collective rituals of worship that serve to connect individuals to one another within religious communities. Also noting music’s socio-religious importance, Jeremy Begbie argues, ‘Music has an irreducible role to play in coming to terms with the world, in exploring and negotiating the constraints of our environment and the networks of relationships with others, and thus in forming human identity’ (Begbie 2000: 20). Music-making embodies the essential dynamics of Christian religious practice. It connects people to one another through aural experiences of symbols that link them to the past, present and the future while also giving voice to a wide range of subjective emotions that accompany human life (Flood 2012: 7).

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Liturgical music has undergone a number of transformations as Christianity developed from a small group of Jewish disciples into a global religion. Throughout its history, music has been integral to Christian worship and a persistent point of contention. Stylistic and formal aspects of music have also served to delimit communities of worship, and divergent approaches to liturgical music have often created fierce divisions. The so-called ‘worship wars’ of recent decades are part of a much longer history of conflict over the role that popular, presumably non-Christian, culture plays in the practices of Christian worship. The survival of any community, religious or otherwise, depends upon its ability to reproduce its culture and its population, but it must do so in a productive tension with the people and cultures that exist outside of it. Long before conflicts between traditional and contemporary worship music arose, Christians faced the challenge of incorporating, appropriating or resisting the influences of secular as well as non-Christian artistic cultures. The music of the early Church developed within the context of just such a dynamic tension with the musical cultures of Judaism and Hellenism (Makrides 2009). While religious communities ensure their survival through the reproduction of worship practices, it may be argued that individuals also survive through creative acts of self-representation, which serve to sacralize the body as the site of existential joy as well as struggle. Contemplating the significance of the body as a site of religious struggle for African Americans, Anthony B. Pinn suggests that ‘this struggle is known by and through the body, in the ways in which bodies occupy time and space, and chronicled in a variety of forms including musical production’ (2010: 101). The signifying power of the voice contends with disembodying power of institutionalized racism and oppression. In spirituals, Pinn suggests that ‘enslaved Christians spoke of the battle between good and evil, and noted their souls and their existential condition as the prize and battlefield respectively’ (2010: 105). It was not enough for slaves to ‘simply quote scripture or manipulate written texts’, but rather ‘the materiality of the body had to be brought into play. The body had to feel or experience this struggle’ (Pinn 2010: 105). Music is essential to the process of bringing the body into play because of its capacity to create affective space, which is the space created by music wherein the ‘internal and social worlds of individuals’ converge (Partridge 2013: 37). As a medium for expressing and experiencing emotions, music is essential to the cultural production of sacred forms which serve to connect worshippers to one another while also fundamentally shaping their moral and theological imaginaries.

HYBRIDIZATION AND LITURGICAL INCULTURATION The ascendancy of Christianity as a global religion is inseparable from the history of European colonialism and the various forms of religious and political violence that defined it. Gospel music, perhaps one of the most influential forms of Christian music, emerged within the context of chattel slavery in America. Although Christianity was introduced to slaves as a form of social control that was instrumental to slaveowners’ agendas of obedience and provided theological justifications for the institution of slavery, African slaves quickly fused the religious and musical traditions of their homelands with Christianity’s narratives of redemption and deliverance. The tradition of spirituals provided a crucial point of reference for articulating a liberatory theology that was otherwise obscured through the conflation of Christianity with the religion of white supremacy in America (Hopkins 2000). In order to practise their own liberatory forms of Christian worship, slaves retreated to the relative privacy of their homes, singing into

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an overturned pot that was presumed to mute the sound of their voices, or they would gather in secluded, wooded areas known as hush arbours, where they would sing and pray in secret (Raboteau 2004: 219). In the face of an economic and religious ideology that reduced human lives to mere property, the dynamic religious culture of spiritual singing provided slaves with a liturgical means of claiming the sacrality of life in the midst of their struggle for liberation (Spencer 2006). The spiritual tradition’s creative synthesis of non-Western religious and folk music traditions with the theological and narrative components of Christianity is representative of a dynamic of musical hybridization that has occurred in other colonial and post-colonial contexts throughout the world (Dempsey 2001: 74). While Protestant communities, with their emphasis on vernacular worship, have been somewhat more flexible in accommodating non-Christian and non-Western musical cultures, the Catholic Church has a long but often conflicted history of inculturating alternative musical traditions (Swain 2004). The dynamics of inculturation that characterize such musical movements of hybridization are often viewed as antagonistic to established Eurocentric liturgical traditions. However, in some cases, the synthesis of religious and cultural practices has the effect of simultaneously preserving certain musical traditions while also constructing new ones (Andaya 2012). For example, some Native Americans preserved elements of their indigenous language within Protestant hymnals, even after their language had faded from vernacular use (Bohlman 2006: 244–45). Christian music-making, as a temporal activity, not only connects individuals to the past but also helps to resituate them in the present, often reassembling fragmented cultural traditions in the ongoing process of religious signification and social reproduction.

CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIAN MUSIC The advent of new media in recent years has transformed practically every facet of life for those with the resources and technological means of accessing the internet. While many scholars have viewed creating church online as either a supplement to or a replacement for traditional congregations, others have viewed the virtualization of Christianity and its potential synthesis with secular forms of mass media as exacerbating the religion’s cultural and institutional decline (Hutchings 2017: 31). In much the same way that the dynamics of liturgical inculturation and hybridization simultaneously preserve and transform traditions of music-making, social media and music-hosting platforms like YouTube and Spotify have also created vast archives that provide access to a range of otherwise obscure musical recordings. But perhaps social media’s role as a space for virtual self-representation is what makes it an ideal forum for musical expression and religious signification (Hogan 2010). Social media platforms are shaping public discourse, including religious discourse, in ways that are often increasingly oppositional and prone to ideological entrenchment (Pihlaja 2018). However, they are also creating hitherto unimaginable spaces for self-expression and religious exploration. For over a decade, Protestant Christianity has been on the rise throughout the developing world. In China, Pentecostal Christianity has undergone exponential growth (Anderson and Tang 2011). Although some question the authenticity of the consumeristic forms of Christian culture that have motivated much of this recent growth (Yang 2005), the global expansion of the Christian music industry and the advent of new media have set the stage for the proliferation of global Christian congregations such as Hillsong Church, Vineyard Churches and other non-denominational churches. For these churches,

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the distinction between and religious and popular music has grown increasingly opaque as worship music is transformed into a commodified cultural product that is nonetheless essential to the social reproduction of these global congregations. In the case of the non-denominational Hillsong Church, its distinctive style of congregational worship music has proven instrumental to the community’s global expansion (Martí 2018). In his study of Hillsong’s ‘powerful’ brand, Tom Wagner argues that for the church’s attendees, ‘worship is a lifestyle’ and the unique appeal of the Hillsong brand is integral to their efforts to hear God’s voice in every aspect of life (2017: 255). Part of the appeal of Hillsong’s unique worship culture is its adaptability to individual or congregational worship settings: individuals can listen to Hillsong’s music on their digital devices, while working, commuting or completing everyday tasks, or they can participate in corporate worship in the arena-style setting of a mega-church. Increasingly, social media provides a reliable connection between these two discrete sites of worship, providing a sense of continuity and community, while also remaining adaptable to the highly transient nature of professional and personal life for millennials. The transient and seemingly ephemeral nature of life in the twenty-first century has motivated some Christians to pursue more traditional forms of worship in an effort to re-engage with the materiality of the world. Like rosaries, Bibles and hymnals, which have long functioned as portable and deeply personal sanctuaries for worship, mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops provide individuals with stable connections to religious communities and may function as multimedia devotional objects (Mitchell 2012). In addition to the ethical problems associated with their manufacturing and production, the comingling of mass media advertisement with personal life, the monetization of internet activity and the socioeconomic inequality implicit to the digital divide, all provide sufficient cause to resist an overly optimistic assessment of the transformative role that digital technology plays in Christian religious practice. Despite the rapidly changing technological and cultural landscape of Christian worship, congregational and individual expressions of music-making remain central to its practice. Musical vernaculars, like the people who perform them, are migratory in nature; they are inclined towards hybridization, appropriation and improvisation. Its proclivity for adaptation and transformation is perhaps what makes music’s role so essential as well as so divisive within Christianity. The future of Christian music-making holds both the promise of increased creativity and freedom of expression as well as the potential to generate new conflicts as the discursive infrastructure and cultural hybridity of new media continues to press society to its communicational limits.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Pilgrimage STELLA ROCK

As a lens through which to study Christians, and the societies in which they live and move, pilgrimage has been taken up with increasing enthusiasm by scholars from a broad variety of disciplines. It is also a practice which has grown in popularity in the last half-century, particularly in Europe, stimulating debate on what this tells us about contemporary religiosity. As a topic which has gained in importance, then, it is a new direction in Christian studies, although anglophone scholars discovered pilgrimage somewhat later than their international counterparts (Albera and Eade 2015). Since initial attempts to stimulate interdisciplinary debate stumbled over ‘very different academic assumptions’ (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 196), the field has generated increasingly fruitful collaborations, theories and methods. The general direction of travel in pilgrimage studies has been away from the universalizing, structuralist approach of the Turners, whose seminal study of Christian pilgrimage nevertheless remains the starting point for much anglophone study and research (1978). Attention to fluidity, discourses and dynamics has fostered understandings of pilgrimage as a context-dependent kaleidoscope of elements rather than a denominationally discrete institution or all-embracing model. The academic usefulness of the concept itself has been challenged: Is it legitimate to conceptualize such a diversity of participants, spaces, rituals, understandings, motivations and modes of journeying – from Glastonbury goddess processions to Vietnam veteran motorcycle rides – under the one rubric of pilgrimage (Eade and Sallnow 1991: 3; see also Coleman 2002)? Attention to heterogeneity also prompts us to acknowledge the multiplicity and variety of words used by pilgrims to describe what may be embraced by the English term ‘pilgrimage’. While this chapter restricts the focus to contemporary Christian pilgrimage, the issue of diversity still challenges us to think harder about our definitions. Pilgrimage is generally understood as involving a journey to a holy or significant place, undertaken out of devotion. Within academia, every aspect of this vernacular definition has been questioned: Must pilgrimage involve travel and/or separation from ordinary life? Does it imply devotion? Must it be place-orientated? The seminal conception of pilgrimage as an extraordinary, ‘liminoid phenomenon’ stressed how pilgrims are freed from mundane structures and their associated burdens, and in journeying to the ‘sacred periphery’, they experience a temporary, non-hierarchical unity with their fellow pilgrims (Turner and Turner 1978). This so-called communitas model was criticized as idealizing, with a call to examine how shrines also amplify difference (Eade and Sallnow 1991). Pilgrims may take social, economic, political and familial structures with them rather than leave them behind, and focus on the exceptional nature of pilgrimage has given way to exploration of it as entangled with the ordinary (Coleman and Eade 2004; Reader 2014).

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Christian pilgrimages may still involve a journey to the margins, into the ‘wilderness’, however. Extended walking, during which pilgrims are stripped of home comforts and endure physical discomfort, promotes varieties of mutual support that are ascribed deep significance by participants. For some contemporary pilgrims the holy destination may have lost its centrality, but the walking itself has become a goal: pedestrian travel is embraced as ‘authentic’, replicating the assumed behaviours of earlier pilgrims. This has been observed along reinvented pilgrim paths in countries where the divine has not been localized since the Reformation and in revived Catholic and Orthodox pilgrimage (Coleman 2004; Davidsson Bremborg 2013). Treading in the footsteps of divine figures may also facilitate proximity to the holy at local, peripheral or desecrated sites, as well as engagement with gospel events at the religious centre. Pilgrimage is often conceptualized as somehow at the margins of, even in opposition to, institutional religion. Growth in pilgrimage has been interpreted as a ‘post-secular’ manifestation of new spiritual seeking, an effort to escape ‘the impoverishing logic of disenchantment’ rather than a symptom of religious revival, even as a turning away from religion as an organized entity (Reader 2007; Oviedo et al. 2014: 441). Pilgrimage in post-Soviet Russia, for example, has been interpreted as sidestepping the institutional church in a search for personal religious experiences (Kormina 2010, 2012). However, the degree to which pilgrimage is part of ‘a dynamic representation of popular religion, which cares little for institutional regulations and develops on the fringe of official religion’ (Camhi-Rayer and Frégosi 2012: 282), is a moot point. The revival of pilgrimage in Europe has also been interpreted as one way those who may not be ‘practising’ Christians nevertheless engage with, draw on or identify with traditional Christianity (Davie 2006; Jenkins 2007). The relationship between heritage tourism and Christian pilgrimage is complex territory, but the importance – and contested nature – of the ‘traditional’, ‘authentic’ and ‘ancient’ for some contemporary pilgrims is clear. This interest in pilgrimage may provide a pastoral tool for religious institutions to access and potentially influence those who do not attend church services. However, while the flexible, optional practice of pilgrimage may offer a user-friendly introduction to Christian traditions, this is a two-way dynamic. Long-term research attuned to diversity within a holy place has also revealed the degree to which lived Christianity accommodates, and is influenced by, newer sorts of spiritual seeking (Bowman 2009). Pilgrimage is also an opportunity for regular churchgoers to immerse in devotional practice for an extended period. Intense engagement with a Christian institution may also continue beyond the temporal bounds of a pilgrimage: pilgrims may maintain extended relationships with urban or local monasteries that afford them some separation from ordinary life despite being intimately entwined with it. Repeat pilgrimage to one place may forge relationships that generate a feeling of the shrine as a ‘second home’, or the shrine may be replicated at home, overcoming distance and other obstacles to veneration. It is not always easy to disentangle home from away, or lived from institutional.

TO BE A PILGRIM: IDENTITIES, MOTIVATIONS, PRACTICES Surveying the diversity of Christian pilgrimage worldwide prompts us to question both what makes a Christian and what makes a pilgrim. If walkers to the Spanish shrine of St James profess ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘religious’ motives, or hold beliefs at odds with the Catholic authorities issuing the pilgrimage certificate, can they tell us anything about Christian pilgrimage (Frey 1998: 127)? Are the urban Russians enjoying a coach trip

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to a rural monastery pilgrims or religious tourists (Hann and Goltz 2010: 21)? What about those on pilgrimage for a cheap holiday or those who reject a pilgrim identity – or deny it to others – because they are staying in a comfortable hotel, or travelling at speed? What about those praying in art galleries or museums? Researchers address such questions implicitly if not explicitly, even as the nature of pilgrimage undermines binary oppositions of pilgrim/tourist, sacred/secular, tradition/modernity. Since the Turners declared that ‘a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist’ (1978: 20), academics have continued to question the distinction, or melded these categories via ‘religious tourism’. The identity of a pilgrim is not singular, and pilgrimage may bolster, interrogate or undermine national, ethnic, gender and denominational identities. Pilgrimage may unite communities around ethnic identities or reinforce family ties in diaspora, but pilgrimage sites which attract devotees from different communities and religious groups may also sustain intercommunal and interreligious contact. Although such pilgrimages may be marginalized, even threatened, by religious authorities or nationalist movements, their existence is a reminder that devotional practices do not have to function as mechanisms for reinforcing religious and ethnic boundaries, but may contribute to transcending such divisions (Albera and Couroucli 2012). Pilgrimage may also bolster or undermine existing power structures, and much attention has been paid to how marginalized groups are empowered – or not – by such practices. Guadeloupean matrifocality is reinforced by regular, domestic pilgrimages into the sea, for example, in the face of colonial norms, while Bolivian pilgrims access the powerful Virgin of Urkupiña to help them cope with inequality. While the ‘socially weak’ journey to Marian shrines seeking support to endure or challenge injustice, Mary may be also appropriated to control others, reinforce difference and provoke conflict (Derks 2009; Hermkens et al. 2009). The importance – and difficulty – of understanding pilgrim motives has been acknowledged, and it has been suggested that reasons for accessing the holy are predominantly connected with life in this world (Reader 1993; Margry 2008). Vows are sometimes made in return for divine aid, and the distance travelled or mode of movement may reflect the seriousness of the request. The search for healing was central to historic Christian pilgrimage and, at some shrines, seeking better health remains key. Some pilgrimage sites – via their miraculous objects or the holy people living at them – develop a reputation for miracle-working in particular fields, such as childlessness or demonic possession. Divine power may supplement other interventions, but at Ethiopian shrines, for example, this generates an uneasy relationship with conventional medicine (Hermann 2012). As the above suggests, pilgrimage places are also therapeutic landscapes in which the sacred topography – springs, caves, mountains and architectural or landscaped features – acts alongside holy figures and objects. While cures for cancer, infertility and other medical conditions are still negotiated via divine mediators, contemporary Christians also display more holistic understandings of health, finding in pilgrimage an opportunity to ‘recharge’. Shrines may provide a temporary refuge for those struggling with significant life events, such as bereavement or relationship breakdown. While healing may encompass the social, psychological, emotional and spiritual suffering of the individual, individuals and groups also seek broader transformations via pilgrimage – for their families, their communities, the Church and the world. Collective walking may also be undertaken during a ‘time of transition’ which prompts pilgrims to seek personal transformation ‘in the wilderness’ or ‘at the edge’ (Weiss

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Ozorak 2005: 63, 78). Such peripatetic effort has been described as a ‘holistic project of self-realisation through motion’ (Hyndman-Rizk 2012: xiv). It is also pilgrimage as a model of labour rather than retreat. Hardship – the physical exertion intrinsic to an extended procession or lengthy pilgrimage – has been identified as a particularly Russian contribution to Orthodox pilgrimage, usually interpreted as prioritizing veneration over movement in contrast to ‘Western’ models (Chulos 2003). However, public demonstrations of significant physical effort such as crawling may be found amongst Greek Orthodox pilgrims, as well as Catholics. This public aspect of pilgrim movement is particularly noticeable in processions. Multi-day processions of the cross in post-Soviet Russia, for example, are colourful spectacles which proclaim the revival of Orthodoxy and contribute to re-sanctifying desecrated or secularized space (Naletova 2010). Switching from ‘place-centred’ research to how pilgrims move to, from and within holy sites also highlights the relationship between pilgrims, movement and landscape. Geographers examining pilgrimage as an embodied practice, in which physical and spiritual movement is linked, emphasize that while pilgrims may stop at certain fixed points, they may experience the divine anywhere. Sacred space is constantly created and re-created by mobile relationships between humans and divine actors such as travelling icons (della Dora 2009; Maddrell et al. 2015). Not all pilgrims move through physical landscapes, however. Recent research has explored how webspace, social media and cinema enable those distant from a shrine to access divine healing, or travel mentally to holy places and engage in rituals with the help of new technologies (MacWilliams 2002; Heo 2013; Kormina and Luehrmann 2017). In many ways, these are further manifestations of inner pilgrimage and practices such as the Stations of the Cross, and the proxy pilgrimage by which would-be pilgrims send requests, gifts and personal objects such as clothing via those accessing a holy place directly. Taking objects to be blessed at the shrine, or left at the shrine in petition or thanksgiving, remains a key aspect of contemporary pilgrimage – one in which power relations between shrine guardians and pilgrims are played out, and relationships between home and away secured. In addition to traditional ex-votos, more personal tokens may be left. Pilgrims also bring things home: their walking sticks, souvenirs, cards testifying to a devotion carried out on behalf of another, or ‘blessings’ such as oil, water, earth and flowers that are portable sources of divine power. Such two-way engagement with the physical environment of the shrine is one element of the somatic spirituality found on pilgrimage. Orthodox and Catholic pilgrims, in particular, interact with the divine through images gazed at, touched and carried, and via the bodies of others, living and dead. They ingest the holy, immerse or rub their bodies and those of others with water, oil, earth. Pilgrimage is also shaped by music, and the divine mediated by words spoken, read and heard. As this suggests, narratives are intertwined with action, and recent attention has focused on guiding as a form of mediation, as well as the interplay between pilgrim and clerical narratives. Pilgrims also mediate for each other: they copy each other, tell each other stories, recommend shrines and share memoirs, photographs and academic research. Pilgrims are actors as much as consumers, vital to the creation, maintenance and re-sacralization of holy places (Kormina 2004; Vinogradov 2012; Bănică 2015; Mesaritou et al. 2016). The study of pilgrimage is, above all, the study of relationships – between text, place and person; between landscape/place, movement and people; between individuals,

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groups and institutions; between supernatural beings and humans; and between the living and the dead. The positioning of the researcher, too, is increasingly brought into focus. As we explore this dynamic nexus of conversations and interactions between pilgrims and those they encounter (other pilgrims, guides, shrine guardians, clergy, tourists, local populace, the researcher), our understanding of Lived Religion is enriched even as the binary oppositions underpinning it are challenged.

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Laity GEORGE D. CHRYSSIDES

Pope Pius X defined the Church as consisting of two ranks of people: ‘pastors’ and ‘flock’, denoting clergy and laity, respectively. However, in the twenty-first century, with advances in education and participation in democratic government, people are less willing simply to be led like sheep, and some Protestant congregations now subject their minister to evaluation and annual appraisal. The recent scandals involving paedophile priests inevitably raise the question of how well God’s flock have been shepherded. Pope Pius XII described the laity as the ‘front line of the Church’: they do not just belong to the Church – they are the Church. Pius X defined a threefold role of the laity: priestly, prophetic and kingly. These three figures are described as ‘anointed’ in the old Testament, being specifically commissioned by God; these three roles are ascribed to Christ, who is ‘prophet, priest, and king’, and Paul taught that the Church is the body of Christ. Although this sounds like abstruse theology, the themes are developed in some Christian hymns: James Quinn’s frequently sung recessional hymn ‘Forth in the peace of Christ we go’ develops these three aspects of the laity. The priestly role is a sacrificial one: the Christian laity should make their lives a sacrifice to God, by personal devotion, service to the Church and by their lives in general. Their prophetic role is to lead others to the faith and to proclaim the gospel through their lives. The ‘kingly’ office involves being sovereign over temptation and over the body, which is subject to sin; just as the monarch is historically associated with justice, the Christian should act as a judge of what is right. In 1955 the Archbishops of Canterbury and York sent out a statement entitled ‘A Short Guide to the Duties of Church Membership’. The text read: All baptized and confirmed members of the church must play their full part in its life and witness. That you may fulfil this duty, we call upon you: To follow the example of Christ in home and daily life, and to bear personal witness to him. To be regular in private prayer day by day. To read the Bible carefully. To come to church every Sunday. To receive the Holy Communion faithfully and regularly. To give personal service to Church, neighbours and community. To give money for the work of the Parish and diocese and for the work of the church at home and overseas. To uphold the standards of marriage entrusted by Christ to His Church. To care that children are brought up to love and serve the Lord. (Cited in Jones 2012: 101)

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Although the history of Christianity tends to be defined in terms of its clergy and monastic orders, there would be no churches without the contribution of architects, builders, stone masons, artists and musicians, not to mention flower arrangers, cleaners and those who are responsible for their finances. Even though mundane activities, such as cleaning, may not seem spiritually uplifting, they are regarded as part of one’s Christian service. Writing about the ability to see God in all things, George Herbert (1593–1633) wrote: A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine, Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws Makes that and the action fine. Herbert’s poem is frequently sung as a hymn. The word laity comes from the Greek laos, meaning ‘people’, and the Bible often uses the words as an abbreviated form of ‘people of God’, denoting God’s chosen people the Israelites, and subsequently the Christian community (Judges 20:2; Hebrews 4:9). Although the laity are often contrasted with the priesthood or clergy, the Protestant Reformation emphasized ‘the priesthood of all believers’, signifying that each individual had direct access to God through Christ’s sole mediatorship. A few denominations have taken this Reformation principle to its extreme and are entirely lay-led: there are no clergy among the Brethren and the Quakers, and the Salvation Army is organized in a series of quasi-military ranks. In some independent congregations, the leader is chosen from among the members, who value spiritual maturity above academic training. The Protestant Reformation principle implied that the average believer need not invoke the saints or the Virgin Mary in order to approach God and that there was no need of a priest to whom one confessed one’s sins. Within the Protestant tradition, the word ‘minister’, meaning ‘servant’, is frequently used in place of ‘priest’, thus implying that the minister is there to serve both God and the congregation. Both the laity and the clergy, therefore, serve God, and the laity too have a role which involves prayer, service, study, meeting together and proclaiming the gospel. The priesthood of all believers, however, does not imply a complete blurring of a clergy/laity distinction: lay members may receive, but not celebrate the sacrament of Holy Communion – a role that is reserved for fully ordained clergy. The laity assume various roles in worship, according to tradition. Roman Catholicism was predominantly clerical until the Second Vatican Council, one outcome of which was Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Lumen Gentium, which defined the Church as the entire people of God, asserting that those in holy orders were not superior in status to the laity. In practice, lay members can serve as altar servers and lectors, but may not celebrate Mass and do not baptize or hear confessions. They do not have a role in ecclesiastical governance, but lay members are routinely appointed to sit on commissions and committees, and each parish has a parish council, which includes lay members, and a finance council of laypersons. There are also many Catholic lay organizations: the Society of St Vincent de Paul and Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity are two wellknown examples. The Church of England, although hierarchical in structure, makes its key decisions through the General Synod, of which half the members are lay people, and at local level Parish Councils undertake decision-making and consist of lay members. Churches that are congregational in character – for example Congregational, United Reformed and

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Baptist churches – are democratic, with matters of policy and finance being decided at congregational meetings, and where each member has a vote. Some Protestant churches distinguish between material and spiritual matters, and appoint a body of elders to supervise the spiritual life of the church, while congregational meetings determine issues relating to fabric. For Quakers, decisions must be unanimous, and not merely determined by a majority vote; where disagreement occurs, attendees postpone the decision and are asked to reflect and return on a subsequent occasion. One controversial issue is the role of women in worship and whether they can assume clerical roles as well as lay ones. In most Protestant denominations, women are eligible for the full range of lay and clerical roles: deacon,1 elder and ordained minister. One notable exception is the Southern Baptist Convention, where their interpretation of the Bible leads them to hold that women should not have a teaching role in the church and that wives should be subordinate and obedient to their husbands. The Movement for the Ordination of Women in the Church of England was successful in enabling women to become ordained, but such opportunities are not afforded in the Roman Catholic Church, or in Eastern Orthodoxy. In the Roman Catholic Church, they are entitled to read biblical lessons – but not the Gospel, which is the prerogative of the (male) deacon or priest. Some denominations have instituted the (lay) role of the deaconess, which entails devoting one’s life to caring for the sick or the poor. In Eastern Orthodoxy, women may assist the priest in baptisms of women, which involve total immersion, in order to maintain standards of decorum. When it comes to division of labour within churches, women continue to adopt traditional roles, such as working in the kitchen, while men undertake more technical and manual tasks. The Archbishops’ 1955 statement itemized their ideal expectations of the laity, but to what extent are they lived out in practice? Apart from Africa, where it is estimated that some 90 per cent of Christians attend worship regularly, a relatively small proportion of self-declared Christians do so, probably around 30 per cent in the United States, 20 per cent in the UK, 15 per cent in France, 13 per cent in the Netherlands and 11 per cent in Australia. In the United States, the Christian track record on prayer is better, with 68 per cent claiming to pray daily, and a further 22 per cent stating that they do so weekly or monthly. This degree of private devotion does not appear to be mirrored in other countries: 6 per cent in the UK, 10 per cent in France and 18 per cent in Australia. Regarding Bible study, 90 per cent of US citizens own a Bible, compared with 52 per cent in the UK. Yet study of the Bible appears to be low: some 45 per cent of US Christians claim to read it at least once a week, while in the UK, a mere 14 per cent state that they do so (Pew Research Center 2015b). Regarding marriage and family life, values have changed over the last half-century, both in society and in the Church. Despite the fact that popular Christian literature, particularly in the evangelical Protestant tradition, continues to promote the idea among young people that they should engage in sexual activity solely within marriage, this does not appear to be what happens in practice. A recent survey indicated that 64 per cent of US millennials and 61 per cent of the Christian population did not object to extramarital sex, and one estimate suggests that over 80 per cent of self-identifying Christians in the United States have engaged in sex outside the context of marriage, with 41 per cent believing that it is acceptable to live together without having undergone a marriage ceremony. Indeed, in the UK in 2009 the Church of England decided to accept popular attitudes, by offering a ‘two for one’ marriage ceremony, which concluded with the couples having their babies baptized.

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Christian ‘witness’, mentioned by the archbishops, is capable of a variety of interpretations. Many Christian laypeople would construe witnessing as overtly maintaining standards of personal integrity. A Barna survey in 2018 indicated that 96 per cent of Christians in the United States agreed that ‘being a witness’ was important, and a similar proportion thought that it would be best if others could come to ‘know Jesus’. (Slightly fewer millennials agreed with this statement – 94 per cent.) A different response was given to the question of whether one should actively share one’s personal faith in the hopes of converting others: 53 per cent of millennials thought it was wrong to do so, while 80 per cent of ‘elders’ (those born before 1946) found it acceptable (Barna Group 2019). The 1955 statement specified ‘[t]o give money for the work of the Parish and diocese and for the work of the church,’ which today might seem somewhat inward-looking. Twenty-first-century Christians tend to be concerned with obligations such as overseas aid, social justice, poverty, ethical consumerism and care for the environment – issues which are highly prevalent in society more widely. Christians appear to be more involved in volunteering and with donating to the poor than the unaffiliated, and churches provide the opportunities for this, accounting for roughly one-third of donations. A 2014 survey showed that 34 per cent of US Christians had engaged in volunteering work in the previous week, compared with 27 per cent of the unaffiliated, and 52 per cent claimed to have donated to the poor, as compared with 31 per cent of the unaffiliated. In other areas, Christians do not appear to do more for society than the unaffiliated, however: only 75 per cent of Christians claim to recycle most of the time, compared with 79 per cent among the unaffiliated – possibly because some Christians believe that humanity is living in the end-times, and hence see little point in conserving resources. Regarding ethical consumerism, only 22 per cent of US Christians claim that they should work to help the environment (37 per cent of non-Christians agreed), and a mere 14 per cent stated that they should purchase from companies that paid a fair wage (compared with 21 per cent of non-Christians) (Pew Research Center 2016c). Whatever importance may theoretically be attached to the laity, membership of the clergy or monastic orders has tended to be a profession and can be criticized for distancing those in holy orders from the workaday world. One attempt to address this problem was the inception of worker-priest movement within the French Roman Catholic Church in 1941, which spread to Belgium and Italy. It was initially approved by Pius XII, but the movement encountered problems, predominantly because the priests became members of trade unions, which contributed to industrial unrest. Some of these priests married, and others joined the Communist Party. In 1953 they were recalled; nevertheless, the movement helped the Church to establish a greater rapport with the poor and those who were engaged in menial occupations. Within the Protestant tradition, many of the clergy have been engaged in secular work before ordination, and such experience has tended to be welcomed by selection panels. The Church of England now appoints Ministers in Secular Employment (MSEs), who are clergy who are unpaid, earning their living through secular employment. They have sometimes been known as Non-Stipendiary Ministers (NSMs), although the two are not quite identical. (An NSM may be retired, subsequently devoting his or her time to parish work.) As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsay, wrote: I regard the contemporary development of a priesthood which combines a ministry of word and sacrament with employment in a secular profession not as a modern fad but as a recovery of something indubitably apostolic and primitive … What we call our ‘auxiliaries’ today belong most truly to the apostolic foundation. (Ramsey 1972: 4)

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A further merging of the roles of clergy and laity can be seen in chaplaincies. Historically, chaplains were custodians of sacred relics and combined this role with saying Mass for royalty. As centuries passed, the scope of the office widened, and chaplains – who may be either lay or ordained – offer spiritual services to those in secular institutions. Particularly within hospitals, prisons and the armed forces, members are prevented from having normal access to churches, and hence there is the need for a ministry to them. Chaplaincy can typically be found in educational establishments, and more recently the work has been extended so that appropriately trained chaplains can be found in airports, railway stations, cruise ships and sometimes department stores, where they can offer counselling or prayer for those who require such services. The role of the laity can involve much more than being part of a Sunday congregation or engaging in private devotion. One denomination’s website expresses the laity’s role in these words: the Church is not an altar, not a sanctuary, not a fellowship hall. We are the Church. We are the Church at work. We are the Church at play. We are the Church at rest. We are God’s chosen means to reach the lost with the good news of Jesus Christ … and each one of us has an important role to play. (Tysdal 2018)

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LGBTQ Christians MELISSA M. WILCOX

Are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people new arrivals in Christianity? Or have they been a part of the religion all along? Different people answer this question differently, not only because of their understanding of Christianity but also because of their understanding of LGBTQ people. From one perspective, LGBTQ people are new arrivals because the concepts that led to today’s ideas of gayness, lesbianism, bisexuality, queerness and transness were invented in Europe around the middle of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, same-sex attraction, same-sex eroticism and gender variance seem to have a widespread, perhaps even ubiquitous, presence in human history. From this perspective, people who are in some ways like LGBTQ people have always been around and have therefore always been part of Christianity. This chapter discusses a few of the myriad ways in which Christians who identify as LGBTQ live out their sexual and gender identities and their religion, including the ways they find and create spaces for themselves within Christian traditions, rituals, texts and organizations.

WHAT’S IN AN ACRONYM? LGBTQ Erotic attraction to members of the same sex, sexual activities with members of the same sex and gendered activities that depart from those expected of people with certain bodies – these are all phenomena that appear across human cultures and human history. Different cultures have incorporated these phenomena in a variety of ways, just as they have varied in how they incorporate different-sex erotic attraction, different-sex sexual activities and gender-conforming activities. The system of gender and sexuality that eventually produced the terminology of ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer’ was conceived of by nineteenth-century European sexologists. These scientists followed an established European pattern of linking desire and gender, suggesting that same-sex-attracted people were also gendervariant ‘inverts’ – a word that eventually was changed to ‘homosexual’ while still retaining the idea of gender ‘inversion’ as the cause of same-sex desire. These scientists believed what they called ‘inversion’ to be an innate state of being with consequences for many different aspects of one’s life, but they disagreed on whether it should be considered pathological or benign. By the early twentieth century, those who believed that so-called ‘homosexuals’ were pathological had won out. But people who were gender variant and/ or same-sex attracted and who lived in cultures impacted by sexology learned about these terms, and they came to identify with them. Thus was born what eventually became the gay (and then lesbian and gay, and now LGBTQ) rights movement.

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Historian Heather R. White tells us that just over a half-century after the invention of heterosexuality and homosexuality as key categories of human existence, within a few decades of the pathologization of homosexuality as a mental illness by the brand-new field of psychology, liberal Protestant Christian ministers began to become interested in learning how they could help their ‘homosexual’ parishioners. Their interest stemmed from a broader concern to bring the new insights of psychology into the traditional practice of pastoral care. A new field of study and practice was initiated in these years, called ‘pastoral counselling’, and as a direct consequence, the word ‘homosexuals’ first appeared in an English translation of the Bible in 1946. Prior to that time, the words that have come to be translated in some versions of the Bible as ‘homosexuals’ were understood to mean other things, such as over-indulgence or weakness. And while sexual sin has been a concern in Christianity at least since the time of Augustine, what constitutes such sin has varied over the centuries in much the same way as the definition of sex itself has changed. The concept of the invert began to fracture in the early twentieth century, particularly in the theories and the clinical practice of Magnus Hirschfeld, who performed some of the first gender confirmation surgeries. By the late twentieth century, when the word ‘transgender’ was coined, transgender activists made it firmly clear that gender identity and expression are unrelated to sexual desire – so much so that the concept of ‘homosexuality’ itself began to crumble, especially as people whose sexual desires were not limited to one biological sex also began to speak out. Beyond the limiting nature of the ‘homosexual-heterosexual’ binary and its incapacity to recognize people whose desires are not significantly shaped by biological sex, transgender activists have pointed out that if gender is more than a simple binary, then the entire premise of assigning a sexual identity based on the sex of those one desires is incoherent. Christianity as a whole, which really only arrived to the ‘homosexuality’ party partway through the twentieth century, has been struggling to keep up with these changing perspectives. LGBTQ Christians, on the other hand, have not waited for their heterosexual and cisgender co-religionists to catch up; they have found room for themselves within the religion all along.

FINDING ONESELF AND BEING FOUND Given the rejection and condemnation of LGBTQ people by many conservative Christian groups and by a majority of heterosexual and cisgender Christians worldwide, and also given the hostility that many non-Christian LGBTQ people return in full measure to Christianity as a whole, how do LGBTQ Christians find the ability and the resources to thrive at the intersection of these two communities? This is one of the key questions that a Lived Religion approach asks, and one way to answer it is to consider how LGBTQ Christians have found themselves in their religion and how their religion and its sacred beings have found them. Twenty years on, I still recall the powerful stories told to me by LGBTQ Christians about being found by God. One man from a fundamentalist background recalled celebrating his birthday by praying that God would help him to know himself better. In response, he told me, God revealed that my interviewee was gay. Aware that his tradition of Christianity teaches that same-sex attraction is discussed negatively in the Bible, this man picked up his concordance – a sort of index to the Bible – and looked up each of the passages. After reading them, he decided that being gay was not anything to be concerned about, and he embraced the new self-knowledge with which God had gifted him.

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A woman in the same study who had a charismatic Christian background described the experience of being slain in the spirit. During this time, she felt overcome by the spirit of God. Collapsing as many people do who are ‘slain’, she felt that she was held in God’s arms. Holding her like a child, God told her that she was divinely loved just as she was and that being a lesbian was just as much an aspect of her that God loved as any other part of her identity and her life. Reverend Nancy Wilson, pastor and former leader of the LGBTQ-focused Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, tells a similar story in which a young man who was dying from complications of AIDS realized that there might be gay angels coming to take him to heaven and lost his fear of dying alone. LGBTQ Christians regularly experience themselves being found by God and by God’s angels; they also find themselves in the sacred texts and traditions of their religion. As Donald Boisvert has demonstrated, some gay men find in the delicate, ravaged figure of the martyr Sebastian a saint with whom they can identify and whom they can even approach erotically. Others, like heterosexual Christian women over the millennia, have seen in Jesus a lover as well as a friend. Transgender Christians, too, have saints in whom they find themselves, especially Saint Joan of Arc, who dressed as a man and subsequently led French forces to victory, all in response to a vision from God. Samesex-attracted women may find ancestors in the passionate relationships, whether sexual or not, between prominent women in Christian history, such as a nun who had visions of physically transferring the love of Christ to her fellow nun through her body or the deep love between the biblical figures of Ruth and Naomi. Interestingly, both queer and transgender interpreters have found inspiration in the stories of pious Ethiopian eunuchs in the New Testament books of Luke and Acts, understanding the figure of the eunuch to be variously a gay man or a transgender woman.

CREATING SPACE Same-sex-attracted and gender-variant people have always found and created space for themselves in Christian traditions. Historian John Boswell, for instance, has argued that the medieval European Church had rituals for the lifetime bonding of members of the same sex. While sexual activity may or may not have been directly relevant to such rituals, many LGBTQ Christians view them as a forerunner to and a source of inspiration for Christian same-sex marriage rites today. Likewise, there are a number of gender-variant figures in Christian history, including not only Joan of Arc but also the martyr Perpetua, who had a vision in which she was transformed into a man. Since the time when communities of self-identified LGBTQ people began to form in the late nineteenth century, and especially since Christian leaders began to take notice of these new, medically condemned identities, there has been a need for LGBTQ Christians to create space for themselves in the religion’s organizations and rituals. It is likely not coincidental that the first publicly advertised LGBTQ-focused Christian service happened in the same year when homosexuality was first introduced into an English-language Bible as a severe sin. This gathering in Atlanta, Georgia, was the first meeting of the Eucharistic Catholic Church, which went on to be an important LGBTQ Christian organization. Many other organizations for LGBTQ Christians have formed since 1946. Some constitute themselves as LGBTQ-focused denominations, movements and networks, while others work within established denominations, with or without the official approval of the governing body. Groups working within larger denominations have frequently

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played pivotal roles in encouraging their denominations to become more inclusive of their LGBTQ members. LGBTQ Christian organizing, whether within a denomination, alongside it or creating new congregations, movements and denominations entirely, faces challenges within Global North/Global West countries predominantly from those Christians whose interpretation of their tradition excludes those sexually active with members of the same sex and those expressing variant genders. Among communities of colour in the Global North/Global West, the challenge is exacerbated by a claim often made by conservatives that LGBTQ identities and communities are a ‘white thing’, and by the centrality of religion in some of these communities as a resource in the daily struggle against racism. In the Global South the argument that LGBTQ identities are white changes into a closely related argument that they are colonial. In such settings, LGBTQ Christians face at least two additional intertwined challenges: navigating the movement in a postcolonial/ neocolonial setting and including traditional sexual and gender identities. Although some anti-LGBTQ activists in current and former European colonies are vociferous in their arguments that Europeans introduced ‘homosexuality’ to their region, it is clear from the work of both scholars and activists that most, if not all, of these areas have a history of traditional gender-variant roles and/or same-sex (not always same-gender) eroticism. These traditional roles and activities were, and often are, structured differently than LGBTQ identities and lives are structured in contemporary Global North/Global West understandings. Therefore, organizers and activists in these regions who work with Global North/Global West institutions often must translate the populations they serve into terms recognizable by funding agencies, influential governments and the like. In so doing, however, they also encounter two important problems: (1) their programmes, designed to be comprehensible to people who understand same-sex eroticism and gender variance through the identities of ‘LGBTQ’, may not be ideally designed to support those who structure such experiences differently; and (2) in trying to serve a population that has long been a part of the local cultures, but doing so through Global North/Global West identities, politics and economic support, they risk not only their own organizations but those they are attempting to serve being labelled as colonial dupes.

CONCLUSION The story of LGBTQ people in Christianity, then, is one in which history, local culture, global politics, individual innovation and community support and organizing all play a role. These Christians would say that God, too, plays an important role – perhaps the central one. Persecuted at times by their religion, invisible or even celebrated at other times, gender-variant and same-sex-attracted Christians have a history as lengthy as the religion itself. As LGBTQ people, living into identities crafted by sexologists but reclaimed by the people those scientists sought to name, they have had to create their own spaces and their own theologies to counter the persistent Othering they have endured at the hands of straight and cisgender Christians. As the latter have increasingly come to share their perspective, even at times within quite conservative churches, LGBTQ people have stepped into leadership roles whether formally, through ordination, or informally, through community leadership. This is hardly a simple story, however, inflected as it is by the dynamics of power around sex, gender identity, colonialism, race, class and tradition.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Food BENJAMIN E. ZELLER

Christians are unique among the followers of the world’s major religions for not following a formal dietary code. At least in ideal practice (or so religious authorities would insist!) Jews follow the laws of kashrut, Muslims eat only halal food, high-caste Hindus and most monastic Buddhists practise vegetarianism and Sikhs avoid any meat ritually slaughtered by members of other religions. However, Christians lack such regulations and daily dietary traditions. Or do they? Ask Christians where food relates to their religion and you will likely hear about the liturgical side: the ritual meal of wine and bread (or grape juice and wafer) that forms the heart of the practice variously called the Eucharist, Communion or Lord’s Supper. But much more exists under the surface. In fact, Christians follow a variety of dietary practices, ranging from traditions of fasting in accordance with the liturgical calendar, to avoidance of specific types of food predicated on religious objections, to cooking and eating particular foods that they associate with Christianity. Yet since the vast majority of these practices are confined to kitchens and dining rooms, they occupy the lives of the everyday people. They are often vernacular traditions, though sometimes with theological backing or support. Such Christian food traditions are therefore often invisible, even to scholars.

FASTING One way to think about Christianity and food is to consider when Christians do not eat food, that is fasting. Christian fasting takes multiple forms, but the most common form as practised by Christians requires avoiding eating meat or other animals, products (at times this includes eggs or dairy) for the duration of the fast, which generally follows the liturgical calendar. Effectively, such Christian fasters follow a vegan or vegetarian diet during such a fast, though one does find fasting regimens calling for total abstention of food among some Christian monastics. Fasting has ancient roots. Historian of Christianity Caroline Walker Bynum writes that fasting, as well as the ritual consumption of food during communion, represented the heart of ancient Christian practice: ‘To a Christian of the Mediterranean world in the fourth century, feast and fast defined the church. Fasting and Sunday eucharist were what everyone had in common’ (1988: 33). Then and now, fasting served multiple roles: spiritual purification, demonstration of mastery of the body and its desires, health, identification with the poor, emulation of the life of Christ or other biblical figures, communal practice, accumulation of spiritual merit, penance or some combination of

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all of these. Bynum notes that by the Middle Ages, ‘the Lenten fasts and weekly fast days, especially Fridays, remained basic marks of the Christian’ (1988: 40). To be a Christian, one fasted. This tradition continued well into the twentieth century. Until the advent of the Second Vatican Council, religiously devout Catholics fasted on Fridays. Some continue to do so (Dugan 1995). One still finds fasting among Eastern Orthodox Christians, and some Protestants. Today, one finds the most developed models of fasting within the Eastern Orthodox Churches, most notably the Greek and other ‘Oriental’ (Middle Eastern) Orthodox Christian communities. As in the Western (or Roman) tradition, Orthodox fasting has received official sanction over the centuries, with the fasts now affixed to specific liturgical dates, which includes every Wednesday and Friday and four fasting (Lenten) periods throughout the year. In total, the Church teaches that Christians should fast between 150 and 180 days per year. During such fasts, Orthodox Christians avoid all meat products, wine and in some cases olive oil. Some Orthodox Christians hold that shellfish or other seafood is permitted, though this varies by fast day and by authority (Matalas, Tourlouki and Lazarou: 192). Orthodox Christians fast in a multitude of ways. Sociologists Antonia-Leda Matalas, Eleni Tourlouki and Chrystalleni Lazarou have found in their studies of Greek Orthodox Christians that ‘a rather small portion of the Greek population complies with the traditional fasting regime of the Orthodox Church. The evidence suggests that urban Greeks are less likely to observe extended periods of fasting compared to their rural counterparts’ (200–201). The sociologists also found a variety of forms of fasting, with some Orthodox Christians observing only some of the official days or avoiding some of the official foods. Orthodox fasting, in other words, has become a highly individualized vernacular practice. One finds the same reality among Catholics, who maintain a similar Lenten tradition. While early modern Protestants developed an extensive fasting tradition, fasting has dwindled in recent times among the descendent of the Reformation. Those Protestants who continue to fast generally do so under idiosyncratic circumstances, making Protestant fasting a truly vernacular tradition. Protestants fast for spiritual development, in solidarity with the poor, for reasons of health or other reasons all together; their fasts vary from total abstention of food to more traditional vegetarianism or veganism. While lacking any official church sanction, proponents of Protestant fasting often consider this food-based practice central to their Christian identity (Fields 2010). Among some Christians, dieting and weightloss have adsorbed some of the same function as Christian fasting. Food studies scholar Trudy Eden envisions a ‘direct line between fasting in the early modern period to dieting in the postmodern period’ (Albala and Eden: 4). Cultural historians R. Marie Griffith and Lynne Gerber have each traced the way that the Christian diet and health industries have built themselves around concepts embedding food within theology. For many proponents of Christian dieting, healthy eating represents a form of devotion, and even godliness (Griffith 2004; Gerber 2012).

FEASTING For many Christians, the Eucharist represents the positive aspect of food in Christian life (as opposed to fasting, which represents a negative approach to food). Eucharist is understood differently in various Christian denominations, but it always represents a reminder of the sacrifices of Christ’s body and blood, and Jesus’ instructions during the

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last supper with his disciples to eat and drink in memory of him (Mark 15, Luke 22, Matthew 26). In early Christianity, Eucharistic practices appear to have been related to the ‘agape’ or ‘love feast’, a communal meal that served a nutritive role beyond the merely symbolic, theological or social. New Testament (1 Corinthians 11) and Roman sources (Pliny’s letter to Trajan) attest to Christian communal eating practices and a blending of the ideas of the Lord’s Supper in its formal Eucharistic sense, and a shared meal intended to represent the sanctity and wholeness of the community and its relationship with God. For most Christians today, the Eucharist is a feast only in the theological sense, and the foodstuffs themselves are minimal. Christians belonging to liturgical traditions may take Communion as often as daily, with a small piece of bread or wafer as the body of Christ and wine or juice as the blood of Christ. Christians in some Protestant denominations take communion much less frequently, with the elements varying dramatically between traditions. A recent movement among some Protestants has seen the return to an agape-style communal meal as a central practice. Since many Protestants are less fettered by both long-standing church traditions and also institutional norms, one finds a variety of such experimental approaches to food among such groups. Often the modern Protestant agape or love feast involves a sort of ‘table fellowship’, wherein the ideas of welcoming, grace and community combine with the practices of prayer and eating. Lutheran theologian L. Shannon Jung labels these practices, ‘food as a communal expression of grace’ (2004: 123) and argues that Christian table fellowship combined with meal-time prayer and the sharing of food represents a new model of Christian spirituality. While some small Christian denominations, such as the Church of the Brethren, have formalized modern agape practices, in many cases, these remain vernacular traditions among individual congregations or fellowships. Most Christians practise food traditions in the home without even thinking about them as religious. These vernacular food traditions include holiday meals, Sunday dinners and particular foods associated with life transitions such as baptisms, weddings and funerals. Because Christian theologians have so emphasized texts and ideas over bodily practices – even defining the Christian tradition as one based on beliefs rather than daily practices – these traditions go unnoticed and undervalued. Yet the comparative study of religion shows that food practices are in fact central to religious identity in both a communal and individualistic sense (Zeller et al. 2014). This is true in the Christian case as well. A complete accounting of such traditions would require encyclopaedic treatment. To offer just one example: among communities of Swedish Lutherans, the Feast of St Lucia (13 December) is celebrated with an elaborate set of events, including the election of young girl to represent the saint, candle-lit procession and the sharing and consumption of a special pastry, the lussekatt, or St Lucia bun. The bun’s shape is unique to this holiday and essential to its routine celebration. Regardless of theological claims, the lussekatt occupies a central place in the vernacular Christian practices of everyday Swedes on St Lucia’s day. Even Swedes with minimal religious affiliation could identify the lussekatt bun as associated with the saint and saint day, and in some cases, the preparation, sharing and consumption of the buns represent the primary way that individuals engage the holiday. While some might argue that this represents religious estrangement or secularization, in fact it shows the way in which the food practices of Christianity are actually quite resilient. One can make an analogous argument about other holiday-linked Christian food traditions, not to mention those associated with life cycle events.

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Finally, some Christians have sought to imbue their eating and drinking practices with a sense of Christian meaning by embracing what they call ‘Biblical eating’ or ‘Biblical meals’. In some cases, Christians have tried to reconstruct or imagine what Jesus and first-century Christians would have eaten. This follows a long line of primitivist thought within the Christian tradition. Cookbook with titles such as Cooking with Christ, Eating the Bible, and Cooking with the Bible abound. One such cookbook promises that it offers the ‘original Mediterranean diet’! While easy to dismiss on culinary-historical grounds, from a religious perspective, these diets represent attempts to imitate the life of Christ, and therefore serve real religious functions in the lives of practitioners. Other Christian cookbooks and Christian food practices claim to offer biblical approaches to eating but do not make such primitivist moves. Rather, they represent Christian eating as a sort of healthy, holistic, spiritual practice. Again, the specifics vary. One movement preaches the consumption of only raw foods as in keeping with God’s plans (Blazer 2014). Others call for vegetarianism (Grumett and Muers 2008). Still others explicitly embrace an omnivore position, but call for infusing Christian practices such as prayer into daily eating (Jung 2004). Each of these approaches claims that what Christians eat in some way reflects their religious identity and willingness to put into daily practice their religious convictions.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Literature CRAWFORD GRIBBEN

Christianity is a religion of books, a religion of readers and, arguably, a religion of readers who invented the book as we know it. The portrait of Saint Paul, possibly by Valentin de Boulogne (1592–1632), in the which the apostle writes his letters beside an open codex, is much less anachronistic than it looks. For early Christians abandoned the scrolls that are described in the New Testament to adopt a new format for their books, which allowed the adherents of this new religious movement more rapidly to refer to the small number of proof texts that became central to their method of apologetics. But, if Christian readers invented books as we know them, books have also invented Christianity as we know it. The ante-Nicene fathers and their followers laid out in books the ideas that would be developed in the Great Schism of 1054, and the invention of printing and movable type facilitated the later transformation of the Western church, as Gutenberg’s Bible (1454/1455), an under-capitalized project that led to his bankruptcy, was followed by the development of the culture of cheap print that led to the extraordinary circulation of Lutheran and Reformed polemic and to the delineation of the Catholic Church from competing protestant denominations and, eventually, the democratization of religious decision-making in and beyond the cultures of global evangelicalism. For the circulation of Luther’s work was staggering: by the mid-sixteenth century, he was identified as the author of around 30 per cent of printed material in German. His writing, which shaped the emerging Protestantism, also shaped the nation within which this religious community was being formed and established modern Christian habits of reading. In the centuries since the Reformation, little has changed: Christianity is still a religion of books, and readers, books and reading practices remain central to the formation of its distinct religious communities, and, especially in the religious marketplace of Protestantism, a small number of authors exercise enormous influence over wider religious publics. The religion of the book, supported over the last several centuries by the increasing power of print capitalism and the decreasing influence of ecclesiastical authority, has tended to encourage popular habits of reading, and Bible reading in particular. The Bible is still regularly identified as the world’s best-selling book, although Christian communities continue to disagree about its canon, the optimal principles of translation, its authority, its meaning, its relevance and the extent to which it should be required reading for the faithful. Nevertheless, since the seventeenth century, protestant laypeople have been provided with publications that assist in Bible reading by arranging daily portions and by offering basic commentary on their content. This vibrant literature guides personal engagement with the Bible, encouraging the individualistic approach to Scripture that has done so much to break up ecclesiastical monopolies and to drive the

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distinctive character of popular Protestantism, in which the daily ‘quiet time’ sustains the individual’s relationship with God while also enabling habits of interpretation that may pay little attention to the historic orthodoxies or communal experience of the Christian faith. The ‘quiet time’ enables the spiritual life of evangelicals at the same time as it divides their habits of reading from the teaching authority of the Church – at least historically considered. But this spiritual discipline is gaining converts elsewhere. After Vatican II, the Catholic Church also encouraged regular Bible reading among the laity, and Catholic bookshops have rushed to catch up with their evangelical counterparts in providing for the Bible-reading necessities of their own patrons. They have done so by drawing upon the print culture of Protestants, so that Catholic bookshops now routinely sell Bibles containing the Protestant canon of Scripture with study notes advancing evangelical theological claims. Five hundred years after Luther’s writing precipitated sharp division within the Western church, Catholic and evangelical bookshops now stock many of the same kinds of publications, and many of the same texts. Of course, this reading culture has been geographically demarcated. Bibles and other Christian books have been more accessible in some countries than in others. Over the course of the twentieth century, the production of Bibles grew to become a major commercial venture, with new translations in most languages making the text available to larger numbers of readers, sometimes controversially, and most obviously so in terms of the production of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (1946/1952), in which updated language was widely interpreted as representing doctrinal erosion, even as the translation was adopted as the official text of the Catholic Church and several major Protestant denominations. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Bible reading was actively discouraged by some governments, especially in Communist and Eastern countries. But even here the structures of capitalism have come to prevail. After more than half a century in which its government attempted to control Christianity, China has become the world’s largest producer of Bibles, with one publisher having produced almost 150 million copies of Scripture in the last thirty years. Some Christian communities now encourage, and even require, the consumption of key texts from within their own tradition as guidelines to understanding the Bible. This is often the case when these communities are gathered around a leader or leaders who are thought to be invested with special knowledge, sanctity or authority. For example, members of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (PBCC) ascribe special status to an individual they identify as ‘the man of God’. In the PBCC, the sayings of ‘the man of God’ are followed very closely, and members of the community subscribe to publications that relay his latest teachings. But while the leader’s sayings are required reading for the faithful, where they are the subject of private study, they are not made available to outsiders. The requirement that members of the group read materials that are forbidden to those outside the group has the obvious effect of heightening group boundaries, but it likely also limits opportunities for growth: the literary culture of the PBCC, like that of other secluded religious movements, may actually be concealing its unique selling points and hence its potential to recruit. Other Christian cultures sustain and encourage wide reading from a more or less agreed theological centre. Presbyterian denominations tend to recognize the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) as a ‘subordinate standard’, a doctrinal statement that reflects a distinctive tradition and that recognizes its subservience to Scripture. Some Presbyterian Churches are openly critical of this statement, having passed motions that contradict its assumptions, while a small number of denominations adhere to its original claims.

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Members of each of these communities engage with a much broader literary culture from this doctrinal centre. The Catholic Church is similarly organized around a long history of creedal formulations, an agreed catechism and occasional statements from the Pope that carry ex cathedra authority. The doctrinal centre of the Catholic Church is both fixed and, in another sense, growing. Catholics are now encouraged to read Scripture, but are required to do so within these established parameters. Religious communities that reflect the mainline denominations, and others with links to historic identities, engage with a broad literary culture having inherited a doctrinal centre to which, to varying degrees, they continue to adhere. But other religious communities fashion themselves as conservative while effectively abandoning any historical creedal obligations. These communities may sustain a market of ideas rather than a defined doctrinal centre. This trend is particularly evident among evangelicals. The evangelical movement emerged from historical Protestant denominations in the early eighteenth century and has developed to create its own culture, or series of cultures, only some of which depend upon historic confessional identities. There is no doctrinal centre within evangelicalism, but a sequence of competing identities or loyalties that refer to and perhaps depend upon a multiplication of communities, leaders and their ministry organizations. The typical religious bookshop is the perfect metaphor for this community, for it sells tracts, memoirs of conversion, theological works, biblical commentaries, books about family life, inspirational fiction, humour and politics (which is most often represented as the study of biblical prophecy), lifestyle magazines and newspapers, alongside greetings cards and other items of ‘holy hardware’, without any concern as to whether the assumptions or arguments of these texts cohere or contradict. To its critics, therefore, evangelicalism represents the marketization of religion, and it is telling that the most successful literary products to have emerged from this movement are not reflective of the orthodoxies of historic Christian churches. The effect of print capitalism upon patterns of orthodoxy is evident in a survey of some of the best-selling texts within the evangelical market. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), which sold 19 million copies, was recognized as the New York Times’s best-selling non-fiction book of the decade. Its sometimes lurid contents balanced sometimes amusing wordplay against a conspiratorial and apocalyptic account of Cold War geopolitics and its likely ramifications in terms of Lindsey’s strongly Zionist reading of biblical prophecy. The system of eschatology that it advanced – known as ‘dispensational premillennialism’ – was an innovation developed since the 1820s to replace the historic orthodoxies of the Eastern, Catholic and reformation churches, dramatizing an eschatology that has become the dominant view of American evangelicals. Some of Lindsey’s ideas were picked up in the Left Behind novels (1995–2006), by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, which sold 65 million copies. The plot begins with the ‘rapture’, the sudden disappearance of billions of Christians, and follows the adventures of the ‘tribulation force’, a high-calibre cadre of converts whose task is to subvert the objectives of the antichrist by whatever means are necessary. William P. Young’s novel, The Shack (2007), which advanced from self-published status to sell over 10 million copies, promoted an idiosyncratic and perhaps classically heretical view of the Trinity. Its plot reflects the increasingly therapeutic cultures of North American evangelicalism and deals with issues of gender and sexual abuse, while drawing criticism from a range of theological perspectives. These publications, and their mostly entirely uncritical reception within evangelicalism, illustrate the triumph of venture capital over classical orthodoxy and demonstrate that

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within the literary cultures of born-again Protestants, there are effectively no theological limits on the materials that can be published or consumed. But what may be most surprising about these texts is the extent to which they are virtually unknown outside the cultures of evangelicalism. Amy Frykholm’s anthropological investigation into the readers of Left Behind illustrated how the books were being used to promote conversion within family and friendship networks and how those outside the community read the novels against the grain. This reading of the rapture for its entertainment value was evident in The Leftovers, a novel by Tom Perrotta (2011), that appropriated this distinctive apocalyptic narrative structure within paying any respect to its distinctive origins within the literary culture of evangelicalism. Turned into a major TV series produced by HBO, The Leftovers demonstrated the mass-market appeal of this kind of narrative and bore witness not to the triumph of evangelical literary culture, but to its failure. In terms of lived experience, these competing reading cultures do promote different kinds of piety and different expectations of behaviour. Prescriptive reading cultures reinforce the boundary-setting of their movements’ leaders, and adherents are expected to turn inwards and to find the resources for their spirituality inside the group. This often leads to the formulation of idiosyncratic theological claims or behavioural expectations. Reading cultures that share an agreed centre but permit latitude around the boundaries of the community often allow developments on the community’s margins to challenge what was regarded as its operating consensus. And reading cultures that have no fixed centre, or in which publishers compete for influence, encourage innovation and maximize difference, will work always increasingly to reduce whatever level of common agreement that may exist. This is why we should not be surprised that one of the most successful inspirational novels within American evangelicalism – Young’s The Shack – encodes a doctrine of the Trinity that has no support in the ancient ecumenical creeds and that verges on tri-theism. The dependence of the Christian churches upon books has been both a strength and a weakness. Organized around claims to divine revelation, which different communities link in different ways to the Bible, Christians have promoted the consumption of texts as being central to piety. But the centrality of books to Christian faith has also challenged the status of the text, for religious communities have created literary cultures that they have struggled to control. Tightly controlled literary cultures become idiosyncratic and are problematized by believers’ exposure to the broader media culture in which their works are consumed. In each of these paradigms, the encouragement of popular Bible reading leads to the proliferation of ideas, the emergence of new habits and, ultimately, the evisceration of what might once have been recognized as orthodoxy in a religion that has been made and unmade by its readers. After all, as one Gospel writer put it, ‘even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written’ about the faith of Christians (John 21:25). Of course, Christians participate in a literary culture and practice of reading that stretches far beyond their own confessional or religious boundaries. But, as the Bible itself recognizes, literary culture is an essential component of the religious practice of many Christians: the religion of the book is necessarily also a religion of reading.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Film and media RHONDA BURNETTE-BLETSCH

Early discussions of religion and media tended to conceptualize these two phenomena as separate, competing realms. Engagement with ‘secular’ media, it was assumed, rivalled and detracted from religious devotion. Yet, recent attention to vernacular religion undercuts any clear boundary between the secular and the religious. Many everyday Christian practices not traditionally identified by scholars as ‘religious’ involve the use of media. Indeed, the emergence of new media technologies over the last century, from the introduction of motion pictures in 1887 to the public debut of the internet in 1991 and on to the explosion of mobile technologies over the past two decades, has shifted how Christians practise their faith. The current panoply of available media technologies provides new opportunities for religious expression through the consumption of or participation in broadcasts, digital streaming, social media, online communities, virtual reality and more. Yet, because these practices occur outside of traditional institutions, they are often overlooked or dismissed by scholars as perversions of ‘real’ Christianity. Space allows only for a few specific examples, illustrating Christian use of film and media.

BIBLICAL FILMS Western viewers have encountered biblical figures onscreen from the earliest days of cinema. Biblical subject matter also flourished under the censorship regulations of the mid-twentieth century (e.g. the Motion Picture Production Code in the United States). Following the loosening of these moral strictures, the biblical epic largely disappeared from cinemas until the record-breaking success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in 2004 spawned a revival of the genre. How do Christian audiences receive these films? Until the past few decades, biblical movies were available for consumption only in theatres and then as seasonal television fair aired around religious holidays. Many Christian families ritually gathered around television sets each Easter to experience Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 extravaganza, The Ten Commandments. Several Jesus films also rerun annually around Easter (e.g. The Greatest Story Ever Told, 1965) and Christmas (e.g. The Nativity Story, 2006). For many Christian families, these films are as much a part of their seasonal devotional practices as is church attendance. However, technological developments (e.g. VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, streaming and digital downloads) have now made religious films available to Christians year-round for viewing in whole or in part. This development gives individual Christian viewers more autonomous control over their media consumption and potentially undermines

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a communal experience of the liturgical year. Younger generations of Christians are more likely to experience repeated, year-round viewings of VeggieTales episodes and DreamWorks Studio’s The Prince of Egypt (1998). Recent studies show that children currently spend over eight hours per day with media of some kind, and for Christian children, this is often religious media (Dunlap/Warren 2013: 231). Nowadays, film plays a decisive role in shaping Christians’ knowledge of their faith and scriptures, thanks largely to the immediacy and apparent realism of this medium. Viewing biblical films can function as a religious experience, as was apparently the case for many Christian viewers of Gibson’s Passion. Film reviews posted online by ordinary viewers permit some insight into their reception of Gibson’s film. Reviewer mm-39 on the internet Movie Database (IMDb), for example, compared her viewing experience to praying the Rosary. I pray the Rosary, and Tuesdays and Fridays meditations is [sic] on the crucifixion, and I believe this is where Gibson bases this film on [sic]. The viewer better understands the sacrifice Jesus made for man, and the trials and events that unfold during Good Friday. Another IMDb reviewer, bigmike174, describes the strong emotional response he witnessed Gibson’s film evoke in fellow viewers. The second the movie was over, I was dumbstruck, and I wasn’t the only one. When the movie ended I thought there would be a big round of applause but when I turned around I saw that about half the audience was still in their seats …. some were speechless [sic] and most were crying. Nonetheless I didn’t hear a word. When I thought about it, i [sic] realized an applause [sic] would have been ridiculous. When someone asked me how the movie was I was going to say it was amazing, but that wouldn’t have done the movie justice. The movie was an extremely moving, emotional experience. Based on interviews with American evangelical audiences, John Pauley and Amy King conclude that most accepted Gibson’s Passion as a faithful retelling of Jesus’ crucifixion, which is the biblical episode most central to evangelical faith (2013: 44–45). This particular Christian audience experienced the film as emotionally compelling specifically because it created a ‘corporeal reality representative of this moment’ with excruciating realism and visual detail. Thus, it functioned as a visual reminder of their core belief that Christ suffered and died for their sins. The overwhelmingly positive response to Gibson’s film among conservative Christians is particularly surprising given that, a few decades earlier, most of them would have regarded the cinema with suspicion if not avoided it altogether (Johnston 2000: 43–45). This illustrates a dramatic shift in the role of media in the everyday practice of Christianity.

CHRISTIAN BROADCASTING For thousands of Christians around the world, the practice of their faith includes the reception of religious broadcasts via radio, local television stations, cable, satellite and digital streaming. In the United States and Europe, radio and TV stations were initially required to provide free airtime to ‘religious’ (i.e. Christian) broadcasts. However, by the 1950s and 1960s religious organizations had to purchase time in an increasingly competitive and diverse market (Horsfield 2015: 252). Because the cost of these

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programmes necessitated fundraising, broadcast ministries undertook extensive market research to maximize ratings and financial donations. As a result, when the American preacher Oral Roberts transitioned from radio to television in 1969, he adopted a variety style format featuring celebrity guests and performers in response to viewer preferences. By the 1990s, airwaves were dominated by Pentecostal broadcasts, which proved adept at appropriating the medium of devotional television. These programmes included personal testimonies of exorcisms, healings, financial windfalls and other supernatural miracles reputedly brought about by the power of God (Peck 1993: 5–6). These testimonies, promising instant solutions to life’s problems, proved a powerful draw among viewers. The 1990s brought increased consumption of devotional programming in the United States with estimates that it reached as many as 40–45 per cent of television viewers (Brown 2013: 144). As Pentecostal Christianity spread across the globe in the early twenty-first century, so did televangelism. Christian broadcasts expanded rapidly into India, Indonesia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. While it is difficult to know exactly how various groups of socially located Christians interact with religious broadcasts, isolated studies provide some insight. For example, Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu has studied viewer reception of Pentecostal broadcasts in Ghana, which receive substantial space on all four Ghanaian television stations. Advertisements for these broadcasts promise viewers that ‘your lack shall turn into abundance’ and ‘the Spirit will meet you at the point of your need’ (2005: 11). The programmes themselves are filled with testimonies from individuals claiming to have reaped the benefits of God’s ‘anointing’. Viewers hoping for similar miracles are told to perform particular actions – such as placing their hands on an ailing body part while the pastor prays – to enable the healing benefits of the broadcast to take effect (2005: 17). Viewers are also encouraged to give financially to these programmes in the confidence that the giver will receive blessings from God in return. At least for the Christians reflected in Asamoah-Gyadu’s study, participating in such broadcasts provides hope and encouragement that their faith can result in spiritual and/or material benefits.

BIBLE APPS AND ONLINE COMMUNITIES The ubiquity of smartphones has made a range of Bible translations more accessible to Christians than ever, although digitized Bible apps (such as YouVersion or Bible Gateway) provide a very different user interface than do print Bibles. Native users of digitized Bibles generally have less sense of the overall shape of biblical books, much less the canon as a whole. Instead, they tend to encounter a few verses at a time often located through proffered daily readings or keyword searches. Conversely, digitized Bibles provide easy access to online Bible study tools such as dictionaries, maps and commentaries. Many Christians use online media as a vehicle for sharing personalized expressions of faith with others through tweeting, posting or blogging. Christians also publicly express their faith by producing and consuming memes that overlay classical iconography with colloquial language. In addition to their entertainment value, these memes can also stir debate over issues of faith in relation to current social issues and politics. For example, the viral ‘Republican Jesus’ memes ironically spoof American political policies that seem to clash with biblical teachings. Social media provide further opportunities for such debates among Christians.

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Social media, chat rooms, discussion boards, video games and virtual worlds provide online spaces in which people interact around common interests. Christians can create or seek out online communities that, unlike traditional churches, are not generally limited by denominational affiliation or geographic location. Like churches, these online communities allow Christians to cultivate and maintain social ties with like-minded individuals. These groups range from transient associations to long-term virtual churches, such as the ironically named Church of Fools, launched in 2004 and later renamed St Pixels (Hutchings 2015: 151). Visitors to Church of Fools used an avatar to pilot around a 3D virtual church environment while interacting with other visitors through typed words and animated gestures. Like most brick-and-mortar churches, Church of Fools/ St. Pixels had both long-term members and regular visitors. Studies indicate that most participants in virtual churches are also active in local churches and, therefore, use this vernacular media practice to enhance more traditional ‘real world’ practices (Hutchings 2015: 158).

THE IMPACT OF MEDIA ON CHRISTIANITY Film and other media provide the means and opportunity for countless different expressions of vernacular Christianity. While many observers continue to worry that new media will prove detrimental to traditional forms of Christianity, others note that religions have always existed and evolved in ever-changing environments of mediated social communication (Horsfield 2015: 286). Among the changes in Christian practice brought about by new media is the expectation that its users are always connected. Because individual users expect media to be constantly and immediately accessible, mediated Christian practice involves less solitude, less silence and less formal structure. The constant flow and tremendous volume of information available through media requires that users become culturally and technologically adept at selecting, processing and evaluating information.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Digital Christianity TIM HUTCHINGS

Digital media today are integrated into the fabric of society, forming part of the infrastructure of daily life. The ‘cyberspace’ popularized by 1980s science fiction and early internet commentary was imagined as a separate reality, in which alternate identities could be explored, hierarchies would be destabilized and new kinds of relationships and communities could form. Some of these aspirations remain, but today’s internet is ‘embodied, embedded and everyday’ (Hine 2015). Digital technologies are essential to the functioning of routines, networks and institutions in society, and our online activity is often linked to our real names and faces. The digital landscape has become so integral to our existence that it fades easily into the background of our consciousness. Like any infrastructure, the digital now returns to our awareness only when it acts to surprise us – by breaking down, or by doing something new. Christian interest in the potential of computer technologies dates back to the 1940s, when Catholic priest and scholar Roberto Busa began working with IBM to analyse the writings of Thomas Aquinas. This fascination with archiving, automation and analysis continues today, for example in the vast marketplace of Bible study software. The advent of computer-mediated communication, the internet and the rise of the World Wide Web raised new possibilities, and in the 1980s and 1990s, Christians began finding ways to build online networks for conversation, evangelism and prayer. In 1986, a Presbyterian discussion group called Presbynet created one of the first experiments in online worship in response to the Challenger space shuttle disaster. David Lochhead, one of the first pioneers of theological evaluation of computer-mediated communication, recalls this memorial liturgy as an event that ‘demonstrated the power of the computer medium to unite a community in a time of crisis beyond the limits of geography or denomination’ (1997: 52). Early encounters with cyberspace inspired and excited some Christians, while others looked on with great concern. In 1985, one online church promised to liberate Christians from the distractions of flesh, hiding those who might be ‘fat, short, beautiful or ugly’ to ensure that believers could at last worship in the freedom of the spirit. This quote is included the Church of England’s strikingly titled report Cybernauts Awake! (Church of England Board for Social Responsibility 1999: Chapter 5), which proposed a more balanced approach while still exhorting Christians to engage online. The Vatican also produced cautious reports, arguing that the internet can enrich Catholic faith, but must not be allowed to distort it. In The Church and internet, for example, we read that ‘the virtual reality of cyberspace cannot substitute for real interpersonal community’ (Pontifical Council 2002: para. 9) and that Church or even State intervention might be needed

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to crack down on websites spreading false doctrine and anti-Catholic hate (para.  8). Nonetheless, many early onlookers saw the rise of digital Christianity as inevitable. Barna, the evangelical Christian polling agency, claimed in The Cyberchurch Is Coming (1998) that millions would soon be leaving churches to rely on the internet for all their spiritual resources. As computer-mediated communication has evolved, Christian online activity and academic analysis have changed with it. Beginning in the late 1990s, the first studies of religion and the internet looked for ritual innovations, described emerging cultures and tried to demonstrate that online relationships, communities and religious practices really were significant for their participants. Recent work builds on these origins, but emphasizes the embeddedness of the digital in wider social, cultural and religious contexts. Instead of leaving local congregations to go to church online, we now know that Christians have found ways to combine different modes of participation and belonging. Heidi Campbell defines Digital Religion as ‘the technological and cultural space that is evoked when we talk about how online and offline religious spheres have become blended or integrated’ (2013: 3), and this complex blending continues to fascinate researchers today. In my own research on self-described ‘online churches’, I encountered very few new converts. The majority of online participants regularly attended a local church as well, sometimes visiting on a Sunday morning and coming home to join their online congregation in the evening. Some participants were unable to attend a local church because of disability, negative experiences or theological disagreement, but even this minority had been part of a local congregation in the past. The internet allowed my research participants to connect with believers around the world for conversation, debate or prayer. For some, online church provided an opportunity to participate in what they saw as an experimental, groundbreaking new form of ministry. For others, the main appeal was the chance to hear sermons from preachers they admired. Another key attraction was anonymity: the online church was a private and therefore safe space for many participants, a network of support that their offline friends, family and congregations did not know about. Some churchgoers were happy to blend their different social worlds, but others insisted on keeping them strictly separate. Many of the online church leaders I spoke to expressed concern with the transience of digital culture and tried to encourage their audiences to a higher level of commitment. If participants gathered together around a screen in a member’s home or spent time each week in a private chatroom, these leaders hoped, perhaps some of the accountability and discipline of a local congregation could be replicated online. In practice, these kinds of initiatives rarely attracted much support: online engagement is fluid and self-directed, and participants move smoothly in and out of different online networks as their own tastes and needs require. These comments indicate some of the complex effects of the internet on Christian structures and perceptions of authority. The internet allows Christians to access information, news and commentary from diverse perspectives, including theological teaching, preaching and ministry. It also makes it easier to disconnect and move on from a source of authority when their message or behaviour ceases to appeal. New voices can rise to prominence if they attract sufficient attention, whether or not they have received official training and authorization within their tradition. Critical voices and campaigns can gain attention more easily, forging networks of like-minded individuals who might never meet offline.

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This chaotic situation can undermine established Christian leaders, but it can also play to their advantage. Pauline Cheong identifies two competing logics of digital religious authority: displacement and disjuncture, or complementarity and continuity (Cheong 2013). The Vatican has expressed concern that the internet would confuse the faithful with false teachings (Pontifical Council 2002: para. 8), but quickly built its own website to help communicate directly with Catholics and other interested audiences around the world. More recently, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis both developed a high-profile presence on social media, distributing prayers and advice to millions of followers. Pope Francis uses Instagram to share his own image and has posed for selfies. The internet has helped liberal and conservative Catholics to network and amplify their criticisms of the Catholic Church, but it has also supported moves to personalize the Church in the thoughts and image of the Pope. The internet has also been embraced by Christians whose ideas receive less institutional support. Paolo Apolito’s The internet and the Madonna (2005) explores online networks emerging around Catholic visions and prophecies, a phenomenon which has often met with official disapproval. Robert Howard’s Digital Jesus (2011) is a long-term study of fundamentalist networks, showing how internet users with an interest in biblical end-times prophecy build an audience for their predictions. Both projects demonstrate the ability of independent Christian voices to connect online, with or without official approval. Charismatic and Pentecostal ministries are making use of similar network dynamics on a much larger scale. One of the transformative technologies for online Christianity has been streaming video, which introduced new opportunities for preachers, prophets and healers. Older technologies, like mailing lists, chatrooms, forums or blogs, favoured text-based practices like prayer, liturgy and conversation. Video favours performance. On a livestream, one preacher can captivate a vast audience with emotive and visually compelling content. Brad Christerson and Richard Flory (2017) have studied what they term the INCs, or Independent Networked Charismatics, and the internet is central to their explanation of why this category is growing so quickly around the world. INCs avoid denominationalism, preferring to build loose networks while retaining their freedom to experiment with the power of the Holy Spirit. The most influential INC ministries use the internet to share conferences, preaching, high-energy worship sessions and displays of supernatural power, and can now draw more of their income from web sales of their videos, books and access to livestreams than from their congregation’s tithes. The authors report that many INC Christians participate in events and training camps and consume Web-based content instead of joining a local congregation (2017: 81), suggesting that this form of Christianity may be a rare exception to the general trend of digital complementarity outlined above. Scholars of media, religion and culture draw on a range of theoretical approaches (summarized by Campbell 2017). The mediatization approach argues that media have their own distinctive logic, a way of operating, to which all other institutions in society must adapt (Hjarvard 2008). Heidi Campbell (2010) has proposed an alternative model, the Religious-Social Shaping of Technology (RSST), giving more independence to religious groups. RSST is a process of negotiation in which a community evaluates and adapts a new technology to fit its own values, beliefs and practices. Christian organizations are often motivated by a desire to engage with wider society, to evangelize, to promote social change or to demonstrate their continued relevance in contexts of secularization. Christian technology projects therefore tend to combine reflection on Christian values with ideas about audience expectations and media logics, adopted from technology consultants and

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business experts – a process of Mediatized Religious Design (Hutchings 2017). Other scholars have focused their attention on the audience, exploring the processes through which consumers use media to find meaning in their lives (Hoover 2006) or to encounter the sacred outside traditional religious settings (Lynch 2012). To date, these different approaches have tended to rely on qualitative methods, particularly interviews and media ethnographies, and new digital methods will be needed in future to engage more thoroughly with the possibilities of digital data (see Cheruvallil-Contractor and Shakkour 2015). More ambitiously, studies of mediation can also challenge our understanding of religion itself. As Jeremy Stolow has argued, we need to consider religion as media (Stolow 2005). Media are not secondary in importance to the cognitive dimension of beliefs, doctrines and experience; instead, they are essential to what religion is and how it works. Sacred texts, images, clothes, television broadcasts and websites are just some of the ways in which adherents are connected to the divine and to each other. Birgit Meyer defines religion as ‘a practice of mediation between humans and the professed transcendent’ (2012a: 8) and argues that each religious group develops a range of authorized ‘sensational forms’ through which this mediation is allowed to take place. In official Catholic teaching, the sacramental presence of God does not extend through the screen: the sacraments can only occur when priest and congregation are physically together. In contrast, many Charismatic and Pentecostal preachers invite audiences to receive healing, blessing and spiritual power directly through their internet connection. Nigerian pastor T. B. Joshua, for example, invites his viewers to place their hands on the screen while watching him on Emmanuel TV or YouTube. These groups authorize different media and different sensational forms, supporting different constructions of the relationship between God and humanity. Digital media are now part of the infrastructure of Christianity, operating to extend the work of Christian institutions while also supporting the emergence of new independent voices and networks. By studying the digital presence of Christian ministries, groups and practitioners, we can gain new insight into themes of great importance for the study of Christians, including presence, embodiment, community and authority. Digital media are used to develop and perform Christian identities, make contact across faith group boundaries and coordinate campaigns for social or religious change. They can be used to exchange support or to harass, to find safe private communication spaces or to conduct surveillance. Digital media continue to gain in social significance and sophistication, and attention to digital networks, experiences and innovations is increasingly important for any attempt to study Christians today.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Science and technology LISA H. SIDERIS

There are many angles from which to examine the relationship between Christianity and science. In the contemporary American context, issues that immediately come to mind might be the notorious clashes between Christianity and science, as in evolution/creation controversies, or the role played by Christianity in climate change denial. But when we look more closely at the ways in which Christians engage with science and technology in day-to-day life, a more complex picture emerges than that suggested by the conflict model. In fact, many Christians, and Americans generally, take a fairly positive, even optimistic, view of science and technology. Does such optimism – what we might loosely call ‘faith’ in science and technology – function as its own form of Lived Religion? As a religion scholar with interests in science and the natural environment, I am intrigued by the ways in which science and technology are sometimes practised as a religion or are appropriated as expressions of religious or spiritual aspirations. At times, these ‘religious’ investments in science and technology can shift concern away from the natural environment in ways we might not expect (Sideris 2017). To explore these ideas, I turn to the case of Christian responses, or lack of response, to climate change, while also offering some reflections on Christian attitudes towards proposed solutions to climate change, such as geoengineering. America’s apparent lack of concern with climate change, compared with other nations, is often understood to be driven in some way by religion. Adherence to Christianity (and to specific denominations thereof) is a documented factor in how Americans perceive climate change. For example, some studies have found that Americans who are most dismissive of climate change are more likely to be evangelical Christians who demonstrate a high level of religious observance (Leiserowitz et al. 2007). Other studies find that White mainline Protestants are less likely than Hispanic Catholics to attribute climate change to human activity (Pew Research Center 2015c). Research linking particular Christian groups to particular environmental beliefs and practices is eye-opening and important. But we should also be aware that a secularized or universalized form of Christianity – a kind of stealth religion that can fly under the radar – influences Americans’ perceptions of environmental threats and their expectations of science and technology.

IN TECHNOLOGY WE TRUST? America is often said to be a Christian country, though the meaning of this assertion may be vague. It is the case that the United States has the largest Christian population in the world (though not the highest rate of Christianity per capita), and recent surveys indicate that somewhere between 70 and 75 per cent of Americans identify as Christian

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(Pew 2015). Thus, American behaviours and attitudes towards a range of issues are likely to be influenced by Christian values (broadly construed), for better and for worse. The difficult – and interesting – question, at least for scholars of religion, is how to determine the boundaries of ‘Christianity’. Americans’ greater religiosity compared to much of the world, their suspicion of big government and the prevalence of disinformation campaigns financed by the fossil fuel industry all play a role in climate denial (Paarlberg 2015). What is easier to miss is the surprising degree of trust Americans place in innovative new technologies, even as they exhibit scepticism about certain forms and findings of science. According to some surveys, 90 per cent of Americans agree with the statement that ‘science and technology are making our lives healthier, easier, and more comfortable’ compared with 66 per cent of Europeans and 73 per cent of Japanese (Paarlberg 2015: 111). Related to this finding, Americans also exhibit greater faith that humans can ‘control’ their environment, compared to their counterparts in Europe or the United Kingdom (Paarlberg 2015: 111). Distinctive features of American culture – values like individualism, self-reliance and faith in God – come together in interesting ways to engender a certain religious-like optimism about science and technology. ‘Americans believe less in government because they believe so much more in themselves, in their God, and in science’ (Paarlberg 2015: 111). Optimism, in turn, appears to lower anxiety about the impacts of behaviours and choices that contribute to climate change. For example, confidence that new technologies will become available for clean burning of coal can undermine the inclination to cut back on coal consumption. Americans show a general fondness for technological workarounds, as Robert Paarlberg has noted, and this extends to technological solutions to environmental problems, even when those solutions are risky and unproven (127). Currently, there is little data on how Christians regard the prospect of geoengineering and other climate adaptation proposals for counteracting the effects of climate change. However, religion scholar Forrest Clingerman (2012) hypothesizes that Christians are likely to fall along a continuum marked by belief in human fallibility, at one end, and belief in human capability, on the other. Concern with fallibility takes seriously the finitude of humans and human knowledge and encourages an attitude of caution with regard to interventions in nature. A view that endorses human capability or ingenuity casts humans in a more optimistic light, believing that past failures can be avoided and that new technologies will emerge to address pressing issues like climate change. With regard to geoengineering proposals in particular, Christians who emphasize human fallibility might see this technology as an ‘attempt to wrest control of creation from God’ in ways that will only lead to ‘division, destruction, and human failure’ (Clingerman 2012: 210). For those on the more optimistic end of the spectrum (a perspective Clingerman dubs ‘Pelagianism’1), humanity’s creation in God’s image could be seen as sanctioning creative intervention in nature, including engineering the climate. On this account, which takes a positive view of humans’ role as ‘co-creators’ with God, science and technology are seen as the work of God carried out by humans (Clingerman 214). Additionally (and rightly, I think) Clingerman detects similarities between Christian/ Pelagian optimism and a certain crypto-theology that is implicit in ostensibly secular geoengineering proposals like Solar Radiation Management or SRM.2 Both converge on a view of humans as fundamentally free rather than corrupt, both embrace human exceptionalism and ‘both suggest the presence of an intellectual capacity to work toward our salvation … whether it is a salvation from sin or the worst effects of climate change’

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(Clingerman 214). He goes on to note that ‘seeing SRM proposals as theologically akin to Pelagianism highlights a fundamental optimism and vision concerning scientific progress’ (216). This implicit theology that endorses optimism, faith and freedom is at work in a variety of American contexts, and it both is and is not a ‘Christian’ perspective, as I discuss in greater detail below. The possibility that faith in human innovation and technology breeds inaction on environmental issues finds some support in empirical research (conducted, in this case, outside the United States). The more participants in one study ‘believed in the power of scientific progress, the more they saw the world as orderly and controllable, and the less likely they were to act in an environmentally friendly way’ (Valdesolo 2014). Note that belief in scientific progress aligned with confidence that humans can exert control over the world – a belief that Paarlberg finds to be strong in predominantly Christian America. This sort of faith in science can induce complacency and inaction, precisely because it leads individuals to trust that fixes will be found and implemented. Here again, we might say that beliefs about the fallibility or infallibility of humans and their knowledge play an important role in how individuals assess environmental threats, as well as their proposed solutions. Given the large percentage of Americans who, surveys indicate, are optimistic about science and technology – and given that a majority of Americans identify as Christian – the ‘Pelagian’ perspective Clingerman describes may be well represented in America. But there is more to the story than ‘Christian’ (narrowly defined) optimism. A fluid form of religiosity that both is and is not Christianity anchors such faith in science, and, quite possibly, attendant attitudes of complacency. That Christian values are coextensive with seemingly secular American values is something not easily captured by surveys that focus on denominational categories or traditional religious institutions. These orientations on the world are as nebulous as they are deeply embedded. When it comes to explaining America’s take on climate change and climate science, the tendency may be to treat features of the culture – faith in technology, individualism, belief in exceptionalism, preference for technological workarounds and so on – as rival factors to religion, rather than expressions of a universalized or implicit theology. Religion of this sort can appear as merely part of the day-to-day fabric of American life, a ‘naturalized’ form of Christianity (or Protestantism3) that merges imperceptibly with the aforementioned values (Hurd 2017). This naturalized religion may present itself straightforwardly as Christianity in some circumstances. But it can also ‘shape-shift and be not a religion legally but rather a [presumed] universal system of values’ (Hurd and Sideris 2017).

EXCEPTIONAL EXCESS One of the hallmarks of this shape-shifting form of American Christianity is its commitment to ideas of – theologies of – exceptionalism, an investment that shapes perceptions of environmental threats, science and technology and a host of other issues. Americans tend to see themselves and their country as exceptional in the positive sense of the word, but they are also the exception – that is, genuine outliers – in ways that are dangerous and unhealthy, individually and collectively. ‘Americans who take pride in their “exceptionalism” are not always aware that exceptional excess is part of the package’ (Paarlberg 9). Americans’ exceptional patterns of overconsumption (whether of food or fossil fuels) and a preference for adaptation strategies over efforts at mitigation go hand-in-hand. For example, Americans opt for medical interventions for obesity

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(adaptation) rather than reducing food intake and exercising (mitigation). In the same way, the United States shows a growing interest in risky climate adaptation strategies, such as Solar Radiation Management, over and above reduction of greenhouse gasses (mitigation). Adaptation is attractive because it blends readily with American values of the free market and innovation. Climate adaptation ‘will not require asking Americans to do less of anything’. Instead, the idea is that it ‘presents opportunities to do new things that many Americans will be good at and can even profit from’ (Paarlberg 142). This may sound like a win-win, but in the case of climate change, opting for adaptation over mitigation will create greater danger, particularly for vulnerable nations and people beyond the United States. Adaptation, one might say, is the more Pelagian option. Research in other areas similarly affirms the downsides of American exceptionalism and optimism. Studies cite a tendency to underestimate the struggles of the poor and to overestimate the potential for social mobility in the United States, ‘since [Americans] believe that they are already living among throngs of Horatio Algers’ (Thompson 2017). Similarly, in the case of climate change, American optimism – bolstered by a mix of secular and Christian values – leads some to underestimate the threat of climate change and to overestimate the potential of science and technology to fix the problem.

GOD BLESS AMERICA It may seem paradoxical that Christians put faith in solutions to a problem that they scarcely acknowledge to be a problem. However, concerns about the impact of climate mitigation policies on capitalism and free enterprise keep many Americans – notably conservative and Evangelical Christians – from viewing climate change as a top priority. What appears to be straightforward climate scepticism may actually (or also) be a rejection of solutions to climate change that involve government intervention and loss of freedoms. As a case in point, the Cornwall Alliance, a conservative Christian public policy group founded by evangelical theologian Calvin Beisner, recently issued a ‘Prayer for a Free Market Economy and Energy Abundance’. The prayer asks for God’s assistance in maintaining ‘an economic system that is not restrictive’ and ‘an abundance of energy’ – including coal and nuclear – to support growing economies (Jayaraj 2017). It will be difficult for many Americans, whether they explicitly identify as Christian or not, to endorse any narrative that calls into question the unique and divinely sanctioned claim of the United States to unending prosperity. To be sure, the arguments I have drawn together here are more suggestive than conclusive. They indicate patterns of belief and practice in American culture that elude binaries of religious/non-religious or Christian/not-Christian. These patterns suggest even that the boundaries between ‘religion’, on the one hand, and science and technology (or free enterprise), on the other, are porous and shifting. They sketch a profile of American religiosity that may confound efforts to galvanize action on climate change through science literacy campaigns or appeals to discipline and restraint. This peculiar combination of American values and commitments may well ensure that the United States remains exceptional, if only in being singularly unconcerned about the threat of climate change.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Sacred space and sacred objects AMY WHITEHEAD

Christianity, similar to other religions, is intimately entangled with material culture. Theories in the emergent field of material religion concede that religion and lived religious experiences are, in fact, mediated and performed through and with sacred objects and sacred spaces (McDannell 1995; Morgan 2010; Meyer 2012b; Bielo 2017). Geographical sites, spaces, traditions and devotional objects merge to inspire, inform and orientate the lived performances of Christians of all sects, from all denominations and in those parts of the world where Christianity in its dispersion has taken root and grown. Embedded in the psyche of the world’s Christian cultural heritage past and present are the religious art works of Velázquez, El Greco and Da Vinci. Architectural structures such as the Basilica at Rome and St Paul’s Cathedral in London remain front and central in famous urban centres, while more humbly designed Protestant meeting halls sit at the hearts of local communities worldwide. Christian tourist destinations intended to ‘materialize the Bible’ (Bielo 2017) take the form of biblical theme parks and gardens, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem continues to be the holiest of holy sites to visit for many Christians. Votive candles to saints sit on myriad Catholic altars, while Saint Joseph, the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe can be found on the common cotton T-shirt. In contrast, Baptist ‘Sunday School’ classrooms depict pastoral scenes of Jesus teaching young children, the otherwise starkness of their sanctuaries reflecting John Calvin’s credo that Protestantism is a religion of hearing instead of seeing. Myriad roadside shrines and grottos are dotted across a variety of landscapes in countries such as France, Portugal, Ireland and Argentina; and ‘things’ such as religious statues, medallions, crucifixes, prayer cards, religious dress, offerings, prayer apps and incense play significant roles in local and global consumer economies. The fact that Christianity has and continues to engage space, place, art and objects is not in question. What is interesting here is how these things are understood, managed and figure into the daily lives of Christians. This will, however, be most effective by beginning with a brief discussion of the major historical disruptions responsible for dictating Christianity’s different directions, and therefore its different approaches to its material cultures. Wine, bread, bodies and statues have, for example, been the source of endless polemics throughout Christianity’s history. Concerns over the creation and treatment of images can be found in the early Byzantine iconoclast/iconodule debates of the eighth century. According to Miles (1995), ‘narrative representations’ had been superseded by the creation of portrait busts with large engaging eyes in the sixth century. This led to the

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possibility of the viewer engaging the images of holy figures as more than representational prototypes. In fact, the fear was that the images themselves would be worshipped (Miles 1995: 165), which is, of course, idolatry. Within European cultures, anti-Catholic rhetoric has been fuelled by these notions. More recent discourses of Enlightenment modernity and Protestantism in Western Europe have dismissed religious object use and devotion as the stuff of superstition and ignorance, or the remnants of a pagan and thus primitive past. The Protestant Reformation was carried out in the sixteenth century as a virtual attack on Catholic idols and a war on transubstantiation. Deemed incorrect and even dangerous in their approaches to ‘devotionals’, Catholics have been deemed ‘other’ within Protestant and Orthodox discourses, both of which have distinctly different ideas about how religious materiality should be treated as opposed to their Catholic cousins. Protestant Reformers waged wars on Catholic material cultures on similar grounds to that which had served as the later justifying means for European colonists and Dutch Protestant traders in Africa to demean and dehumanize the peoples (and objects labelled as ‘fetishes’) they encountered there as ‘others’, too (Pels 2010: 617). Whatever shape these polemics concerning religious objects have taken, the tie that binds all Christian material cultures is this: despite theological orientations toward discourses of representation and transcendence, sacred spaces and objects are more than symbolic, metaphorical and abstract. They play significant and complex roles in the daily lives of ordinary Christians, and they have been major players on the world stage of Christianity since its emergence and spread over the past two millennia. The material turn in the study of religions alongside developments in field of vernacular/ Lived Religion has paved the way for the emergence of new and exciting platforms from which to examine religious objects and spaces in culture. Whereas religion used to be typically thought of in terms of text and metaphysics, one of the greatest achievements of this ‘turn to (religious) things’ is that it has readily invited examinations into the stuff of everyday devotions and practice. From ‘Jesus kitsch’ to the Sistine Chapel, the materialities of Christianity are diverse in range, variety and scope. The ways in which they are produced and valued reflect a vast array of socio-economic conditions, languages, local traditions and places. This has led to a highlighting of the differences between theological expectations and what people actually do in their everyday religious lives. This ‘downup’ approach challenges the hierarchical yet abstract configuration that supports the notion of a ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ form of Christianity or that which is often associated with doxa (which is oftentimes prized over material objects and related praxis). As McDannell (1995) suggests, this gives the appearance of there being two different Christianities – that of lay and clergy. Yet the reality is more complex than that It is, instead, the ways in which doxa, praxis, cultural influences, spaces, the senses, individuals, religious objects and local traditions interact with one another that expand upon notions of homogeneity, duality and uniformity. Spaces, objects, performances and people interface in ways that indicate the true nature of Christianity as it is lived in partnership with creativity and matter: in a continual and volatile state of relating and coming into being (Whitehead 2013). Considering the parts of the whole of Christian devotion allows for clear and accurate pictures of lived religious practice. Christian presences are legitimized by sacred, ‘marked-off’ spaces in villages, towns and cities, and these sites sit at the heart of Christian communities. From natural wells and springs to the architectural and landscaped structures that inhabit the built environment, Christian spaces are diverse. However, within that diversity, common features can be found. In buildings such as shrines and churches, pulpits, crosses, altars, flowers and

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other things are typically on display. For that matter, Christian space and the things that comprise it (design, decoration) often work like a visual language that speaks volumes about the ways in which particular strands of Christianity practise their faith. Christian things and spaces can, for example, highlight either ‘sameness’ or ‘difference’ in traditions. One would not normally see a statue of the Virgin Mary, for example, at the centre of a Pentecostal church. One might, however, see images of pastoral scenes depicting Jesus, lambs and children in most Protestant churches (which is agreeable to Protestants due to the lack of focus on one main figure, the fear of which is the allure that devotion will be focused thereon). The piece of imagery that binds all Christian churches is the holy cross. However, in terms of the academy, Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred and profane casts thinking about spaces and objects into a dualistic paradigm that does little to account for the ‘lived realities’ of religion. The concept of the sacred is, in fact, relational and fluid, as are sacred spaces and the objects that form and reside within. According to Tweed (2015), religious spaces are ‘generative’ sites. They are ‘processes’, not ‘things’. Religious spaces and their boundaries are, in fact, negotiated sites that work for and with believers, devotees and practitioners in a variety of ways that indicates once again the lived, volatile and interactive nature of Christianity. The interactive nature of Christianity is, however, more evident in some forms than in others. Similar to all religions, Christianity is sensual. In terms of sacred space, contemporary tourism and pilgrimages to Christian sites are flourishing, as are Christians’ desires to ‘sense place’ and history. Organizations such as ILLUME are providing excursion opportunities to sites of historical significances that integrate a programme of spirituality, education and travel to sites of historical Christian significance. The ‘Ark Encounter’ is another site of inspiration and sensation. According to Bielo (2016), the Bible is materialized in this ‘$150 million creationist project in the US state of Kentucky that opened to the public in July 2016’, and ‘there are more than 400 such attractions globally, ranging widely from biblical gardens to museums, theme parks, art collections, and replications’ (2016: 122–23). At more local levels, interactions between objects, devotees and spaces take different shapes again. A Spanish Catholic shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary, for example, will usually contain offerings, images, statues, candles, petitions, flowers, ex votos and other forms of materiality designed to either engage or negotiate with the divine. A prayer to the Virgin Mary might be: ‘If you heal my mother’s cancer, I will pay for a new roof for your shrine.’ These reciprocal engagements are, as Tweed might suggest, generative. They generate performances and protocols of devotion, and stand as testimony to the perceived power of Mary to implore her son. Yet if we again consider Calvinist church halls where the intentional lack of materiality indicates the Calvinist focus on ‘hearing’ instead of ‘seeing’, we can see that these are also working devotional spaces. They simply work in different ways than, for example, Catholic shrines. Recent research (2018) at a Calvinist Baptist Church in the Appalachian mountains of East Tennessee suggests that the primary form and use of generative materiality in this local form of Calvinism consists of food. ‘Covered dish suppers’ are the focus around which Calvinists meet, pray and eat; communion with God and with one’s fellow man is played out in Appalachian Baptist communities. Comparatively, food also plays a significant role in Catholic feast days and is central to social activity; yet feast days, according to Calvin, were concerned with worshipping seasonal cycles and saints, not God. For Calvin, food is meant to nourish humans so that humans can serve and worship God. Calvin’s reading of the book of Ephesians inspired an ethos that allowed for the enjoying of food and drink (Bowdler 2009). Food is, however, a form of material

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religion, albeit an impermanent and unstable one that tests ideas of that which constitutes sacred Christian objects. Calvin’s emphasis on hearing instead of seeing might have been well served with a further emphasis on taste. Arguably, the transient nature of food as Baptist material culture is indicative of the Protestant approach to matter – namely that it is to be used as fuel to achieve a greater end; not as an end in and of itself. Whichever way Christian material cultures are perceived from the stand point of its many traditions, Christian sacred spaces and objects play significant roles in the lives of contemporary Christians. They have no choice. Christianity is a material, sensual religion.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Tourism ALEX NORMAN

Tourism phenomena provide researchers with useful opportunities for studying Christian populations. While research focus has largely been upon institutionally sanctioned traditions of travel such as pilgrimages, the ways in which Christians participate in other forms of tourism are increasingly understood as important indicators of group and individual identity. Indeed, there are a range of ways that Christian tourists travel that may have nothing to do with ‘Christianity’, and that may not primarily be motivated by notions of sacrality or salvation, but which still have meaning in their lives. As tourism constitutes part of the lived experience of many Christians, scholars seeking to understand people and practices rather than institutions and texts have an interest in investigating it. This chapter outlines avenues of enquiry that might shape the study of Christians doing tourism. Those investigating phenomena involving Christian tourists can use these outlines to help design research projects that adopt both the ‘Lived Religion’ paradigm and tourist studies perspective. Tourism, defined as an overnight visit, is a part of normal life for many people around the world. The sheer number of annual tourist arrivals around the world – 1.3 billion in 2017 for international arrivals alone (United Nations World Tourism Organization 2018) – makes tourism an essential facet of the study of everyday life in a wide range of societies and communities. For scholars of religion, this means tourism is of interest, as many of the individuals we study are likely to be tourists at some point in their lives. Further, the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has indicated that ‘religion/pilgrimages’ constitute one of eight fundamental reasons human beings might undertake a journey (United Nations World Tourism Organization 2010). This kind of partitioning of ‘religious’ from ‘not religious’, is, however, problematic. While ‘religion/ pilgrimages’ may be a reason to undertake travel for religious people, other motivations are also possible. Indeed, recent literature in tourism studies makes clear that tourism can operate for individuals and communities to satisfy a wide range of everyday life concerns. In the context of research seeking to understand Christian communities, this may include acts of travel articulated as part of a Christian identity, but not motivated by Christian faith. In this respect, scholars can learn something of the everyday life concerns for members of religious communities by studying their touristic journeys.

I am indebted to Annabel Carr for her critical eye and guidance in writing this chapter.

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It is vital that we include all kinds of travel activities when studying Christian tourism. As per Stausberg (2011), the benefit of this approach is that it emphasizes the interface between Christian communities and tourism practice, rather than forcing a dichotomy between ‘religious’ and other forms of travel. Such an approach to researching Christian tourists enables analysis and explanation, rather than normative assertion. Importantly, this approach also avoids the error of thinking that the only points at which tourism and Christian identity meet are in the domain of ‘sacred travel’. Moving focus away from ‘sacrality’ opens the possibility of studying travel phenomena that are conceived and practised within a Christian context but are not necessarily articulated as discretely Christian. In this respect, we might look either for tourism phenomena that is deliberately marketed towards Christian travellers or at the orientations of Christian communities and individuals towards their touristic activities. For the purposes of social scientific research investigating the ways tourism is used by members of Christian communities, the primary drive should be to understand motivations and impacts. A number of studies have identified motivation, as opposed to destination or activity, as a way for researchers to understand the purpose of tourism in a particular context (Collins-Kreiner et al. 2006; Norman 2011; Lean 2012). These studies, and many more, have argued that origin, destination and activity are useful but not reliable ways of understanding how touristic activity is employed in the context of everyday life. Instead, researchers should look to understand the reasons why people choose to travel and how they understand the role of previous acts of travel in their lives and the lives of their community members. Based on this outlook, we can conjecture that the concerns of Christian tourists fall into three overlapping but separate categories: (1) Spiritual concerns – which can include journeys motivated by a desire to investigate meaning, purpose or identity concerns. This kind of tourism can also be motivated by a need to find some kind of self-orientation for day-to-day life. Research from a number of sources has indicated spiritual concerns to be a motivational factor in participation in pilgrimage traditions (Frey 1998; Digance 2006), group travel events such as World Youth Day (Norman and Johnson 2011; Cleary 2013), visitation as part of mega-events (Dowson 2018) and recreational leisure travel (e.g. Roeland et al. 2012). (2) Health and well-being concerns – which can include travel motivated by both personal and communal issues. This kind of tourism can be motivated by a desire for relief from stress (McGettigan 2016), or more broadly for physical and psychological health (C. Kelly 2012). Tourism of this type may be characterized as ‘wellness tourism’, which can range from luxurious to simply ordinary. The point, for our purposes here, however, is to focus on motivation rather than destination. (3) Pragmatic concerns – which can include travel informed by questions to do with how people spend leisure time (e.g. Moal-Ulvoas 2016) and manage family and community obligations (e.g. Coleman 2018). This category could include ‘secular’ journeys, such as a beach holiday, or seemingly ‘religious’ journeys, such as to a theme park like The Creation Museum (e.g. C. R. Kelly and Hoerl 2012). Utilizing a motivational approach to studying Christian tourists may help develop understanding of the kinds of everyday life concerns of participants. With this perspective, studying tourism provides a way to access the issues people in Christian communities feel unable to resolve or satisfy with respect to the constraints and obligations of dayto-day life. It may be something of a paradox, but studying tourism can enable a deep understanding of life at home. This, of course, requires understanding motivations and intentions for participating in tourism.

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The field of tourism and religion has largely been dominated by studies of pilgrimage traditions. The discussion around pilgrimage was, for many years, plagued by the theoretical distinction between ‘tourist’ and ‘pilgrim’, and between tourism and pilgrimage. Indeed, this dichotomy persists as a trope in academic writing, despite numerous critiques (e.g. Aziz 1987; Collins-Kreiner 2010) that seek to partition ‘religion’ from things that are ‘not religion’. Tourism, according to such a model, entails acts of sightseeing and satisfaction of hedonic concerns. The ‘religious’ pilgrimage, by contrast, is understood as ‘sacred’ and serious with, ideally, soteriological aspects (e.g. Turner and Ash 1975). This normative understanding of ‘religious travel’ was born in part from Christo-centric scholarly re-description of medieval Christian pilgrimage traditions (Taylor 2010) and developed somewhat unintentionally by latetwentieth-century writing on pilgrimage by Victor and Edith Turner (Turner 1973; Victor Witter Turner and Turner 1978). Indeed, the work of the Turners linked pilgrimage with liturgy and ritual experience, suggesting that pilgrimage was best understood structurally. This reading, however, does not quite seem the intention of Turner and Turner, who at least gestured towards this problem by stating that ‘a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist’ (Victor Witter Turner and Turner 1978, 20). Indeed, from this statement a vital theoretical paradigm shift began in the 1990s (see Smith 1992) to account for studies reporting on travellers who self-identified as ‘pilgrims’ acting in ways indistinguishable from other ‘tourists’ (Reader 2014). Accordingly, for analytical purposes, pilgrimage is now understood as a form of tourism (Collins-Kreiner 2010). What is needed are theoretical and conceptual frameworks that present alternatives to the models of ‘religious travel’ by which scholarship has been possessed. The Turnerian ‘liminoid’ model of ritual travel (Turner 1973; Victor W. Turner and Turner 1978) and MacCannell’s (1976) characterization of tourism as a search for authenticity are both rendered problematic by recent studies. Neither places emphasize on forms of tourism that are concerned with problem-solving or with relaxation. For the purposes of studying Christian tourists, we need ways to include such phenomena, as Christians clearly participate in such touristic activity. While it might seem reasonable to posit that Christians ‘do Christian things’ when they travel, this is too simplistic a summary for the reality we can observe. Christian travellers may well do ‘Christian’ things, but they also do a range of things that are not discretely Christian. To further complicate matters for researchers, a repeated finding in the study of visitation of Christian sites, such as churches or pilgrimage routes, is the high proportion of participants who claim no religious affiliation (e.g. Coleman 2018). This makes the study of Christians in such sites somewhat more difficult than one might imagine, as a significant proportion of potential participants may be excluded. Further, travellers at a particular site may do what researchers might identify as a ‘Christian’ activity, even though they may not self-identify that way (e.g. Frey 1998). This suggests that a way for scholars to understand Christian tourists is to concentrate on the communities from which they come, rather than the sites to which they travel or activities that they involve in. Doing so ensures research study design limits participants to communities of interest, and in so doing, places emphasize on issues relevant to specific community contexts. What may further confuse researchers of Christian communities are those instances of tourism that coincide with a pilgrimage tradition but are outside a tourist’s own denomination. Studies of such instances, such as Lutheran travel to Mt Athos in Greece, may benefit from theoretical frameworks developed to understand ‘secular’ travel. In such instances, Christian travellers may be said to be travelling for ‘spiritual’ reasons,

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and so theoretical Norman’s (2011) ‘spiritual tourism’ or Lean’s (2012) ‘transformative travel’ theses may be useful. Each seeks to provide a conceptual framework with which to approach touristic phenomena broadly; Norman’s thesis, since revised and critiqued (Norman 2012), explicitly problematizes the notion of ‘religiosity’ in the context of participating in ‘religious activity’ in the context of tourism; Lean’s thesis seeks to understand how people’s lives are shaped by both the intention to travel and the effects of a journey taken. Subsequently, the following questions can be used to provoke investigation: What sorts of activities do Christians do while on holiday? What kinds of strategies do tourism sites and local businesses use to appeal to Christian tourists? In what ways are the experiences of everyday life changed because people have participated in touristic activities? Such locally oriented questions may be important more broadly for the study of religions, too. Recent discussion of the ‘World Religions Paradigm’ (Cotter and Robertson 2016) has cast light on the problem of viewing people of vastly different backgrounds, orientations and circumstances to the same theoretical lens. One question which has not sufficiently been discussed in tourism literature is why it matters, for example, that what we find for members of Anglican churches in Sydney, Australia, should relate in some way to members of Orthodox communities in northern Greece. Given this, one of the problems facing researchers interested in the topic of ‘Christian tourism’ is the sheer lack of specificity in the term itself; ‘Christian’ is simply too broad. Without the specificity of a particular community to focus on, it is difficult to conceive of any useful theoretical outcomes from a study. The category ‘Christian’ is simply too problematic to be deployed uncritically.

CONCLUSION When people travel, they take themselves with them. This is to say that it is not possible to separate the ‘religious’ aspects of an individual from the ‘non-religious’ aspects. When Christians travel, they continue to be Christian. Tourism is an important part of the study of everyday life because it takes place in relation to it. Pragmatically speaking, travel involves significant expenditure of resources, most notably money and time. Both how expenditure is directed and the purpose of such expenditure are important indicators for researchers studying Christians. Tourism gives access to the use of leisure time, expressions of identity, patterns of consumption, the formation of group and meta-group meaning and the care of the self and of the community as a whole. Despite the variegated ways people use tourism, it offers us the opportunity to catch a glimpse into the lives of normal Christians.

A-Z This section covers topics that are not substantially addressed elsewhere in the main text and concepts that provide appropriate background information to the main body of material.

ANGELS Angels feature largely in Christian art and hymnody, rather than preaching. A 2001 survey indicated that 72 per cent of the US population believe in angels: this statistic also includes Jews and Muslims, in whose religions angels feature. The proportion is less in Canada, where it is 56 per cent, and in the UK, where it is a mere 36 per cent. Of the Christian population, 88 per cent of US Christians and 95 per cent of evangelical Christians in 2001 stated that they believe in them. While the proportion of Christians who claim to have experienced angels cannot be determined, Emma Heathcote-James’ research on the topic indicated a degree of prevalence of such experiences. Perhaps surprisingly, she discovered that Protestants were substantially more likely to claim such experiences than Roman Catholics (39.1 per cent, compared with 6.3 per cent of all subjects claiming angelic sightings) (Heathcote-James 2002: 237), and that respondents between the ages of 31 and 50 were more likely to claim angelic experiences than other age groups. Angels are not worshipped or prayed to. Etymologically, the word ‘angel’ derives from the Greek angelos, meaning messenger, and angels are believed to offer protection and deliver messages of comfort and, at times, warning. In scripture, they announce God’s purposes, foretelling the births of John the Baptist and Jesus to Zechariah and Mary, respectively (Luke 1:13, 26). They are also associated with worshipping God (Revelation 7:11–12). Popular belief, as well as artistic portrayal, includes the notion of a ‘recording angel’, who notes each individual’s deeds. The notion of assigning an angel to each individual finds expression in the concept of a guardian angel. This idea may originate from Matthew 18:10, where Jesus is speaking about children and mentions ‘their angels in heaven’, which could be taken to mean that each child has his or her personal angel. The popular belief that people become angels after death has no basis in official Christian teaching. Traditionally, angels are arranged into ‘choirs’, divided into nine ‘hierarchies’: seraphim, cherubim, thrones (first hierarchy); dominions, virtues, powers (second hierarchy); principalities, archangels, angels (third hierarchy). This traditional arrangement is probably only vaguely known to the majority of Christians, although members of this list appear in various hymns. For example, Horatius Bonar’s popular hymn ‘Glory be to God the Father’ contains a somewhat shortened and altered allusion:

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Glory, blessing, praise eternal! Thus the choir of angels sings: Honour, riches, pow’r, dominion! Thus its praise creation brings. It is only Michael who is named as an Archangel in the Bible (Jude 9), but the Roman Catholic Church acknowledges three, who are honoured on 29 September: Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, the last of whom features in the Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha. To these three, Uriel is typically added: he appears in the extra-canonical writings the Testament of Solomon and 4 Esdras. The Orthodox tradition acknowledges seven archangels – the four previously mentioned, together with Selaphiel, Jegudiel, Barachiel – with occasionally an eighth, Jeremiel. Although Christians often associate cherubim and seraphim, they are never mentioned as a matched pair in the Bible, although they are associated in some Christian hymns, and they jointly give their name to the African Initiated Church: The Cherubim and Seraphim. Although angels are not mentioned in the Genesis account of creation, the book of Psalms affirms their formation by God (Psalm 148:2, 5). Popular Christian thinking tends to associate angels with the ‘last trump’, where angels herald Christ’s second coming (1 Thessalonians 4:16), and the Archangel Michael is portrayed as engaging in cosmic combat with the dragon at the Battle of Armageddon (Revelation 12:7). Not all angels are benign. Heathcote-James noted that some of her informants reported negative angelic experiences, although they were by far the exception. However, the book of Revelation portrays angels as delivering plagues and pouring down bowls of wrath (Revelation 15–18) – scenes that are prophetically portrayed in LaHaye and Jenkins’ Left Behind end-time novels. These novels also feature Apollyon, who also appears in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, also known as Abaddon (Revelation 9:11), the Angel of Death. Abaddon has been variously identified with the Antichrist, and with Satan. Satan is believed to be a fallen angel, a belief that is based on a dubious interpretation of the verse: ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!’ (Isaiah 14:12, KJV), an interpretation prompted by John Milton’s poem ‘Paradise Lost’. Satan is portrayed as having his own angels; Jesus mentions ‘the devil and his angels’ (Matthew 25:41), and these are often identified with demons, whose reality is increasingly affirmed by evangelical Christians.

BEHAVIOUR Christians sometimes claim to have better personal behaviour than non-Christians. Such a claim is problematic for various reasons. The concept of good behaviour is contested; for example, some Christians view same-sex relationships, abortion and sex before marriage as sinful, and since these values are not widely shared by their secular counterparts, they can readily claim moral superiority. Good behaviour is difficult to measure. Jesus and Paul identified various virtues: in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus mentions meekness, integrity, mercy, purity of heart, peace-making and undergoing persecution for righteousness as virtues (Matthew 5:3–12), and Paul enumerates sinful acts as ‘sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies and the like’ (Galatians 5:19–21). Traditionally, Christians have listed ‘seven deadly sins’ – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Most of these qualities are impossible to

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measure, with the possible exception of gluttony: if it is linked with obesity, it might be noted that the most religiously Christian US states rank higher than the others. Particularly within Protestant circles, the ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ (WWJD) movement captured the imagination of many in the United States and UK. The name derives from the subtitle of a book by Charles Sheldon (1896), entitled In His Steps. Sheldon advocated a social gospel, but the WWJD Movement, which gained momentum in the 1990s, appeals more to evangelical Christians. The movement advocates considering what Jesus would do when making important decisions, and it has been propagated commercially with paraphernalia such as T-shirts, mugs and bracelets, which can serve to remind those who use them to follow Jesus’ example. Of course, there are obvious difficulties about knowing what Jesus would do, 2,000 years on. One notable experiment to assess altruistic behaviour was the Good Samaritan study by J. M. Darley and C. D. Batson (1973). The researchers set up a scenario in which subjects had to walk past a seemingly injured man in order to arrive at a location where they were to give a short talk. They found that religious differences did not affect their willingness to help, even among those who were assigned the topic of the Good Samaritan as their speech. A 1999 Barna study showed that atheists and agnostics had lower divorce rates than Christians, but Kosmin and Keysar (2009) concluded that there was no difference in divorce rates between religious and secular people. Another commentator contends that Christians are more likely to give to charity and watch less pornography on Sundays (Xygalatas 2017), although clearly if they spent a significant part of the day in church, this could explain the phenomenon, particularly if churches are counted as charities. Religious people are less likely to drink alcohol to excess and to use illegal drugs, but there appear to be no differences when it comes to violent crimes or murder. Teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are evidently more common in the more religious US states than elsewhere in the country. Domestic violence among non-religious people was purportedly higher in New Zealand, but the opposite trend was found in Canada. A disproportionately low number of atheists serve prison sentences (0.2 per cent of the US prison population), while in the UK, the proportion of Christians in prison in 2018 was slightly lower than the wider population (48 per cent compared with 61 per cent) with a disproportionately high number of Muslims (15 per cent compared with 4 per cent) (Sturge 2018). Religious people are more likely to have large families than average and are more favourably disposed to inflicting corporal punishment on the children. Atheists are more inclined to emphasize the virtue of questioning when raising children, while religious parents are more inclined to stress obedience. On political affairs, Scandinavian countries give more economic aid per capita than countries where Christianity is the dominant religion, and non-religious people are more likely to vote for political parties that seek to redistribute wealth more evenly in their country. Another survey indicated that Muslims were the most generous in charitable giving, with Jews coming second, and Christians third, substantially ahead of atheists (Huffington Post 2013). In the United States, Christians have been more inclined to support the Iraq War, the death penalty and torture, and support retributive punishment for offenders. In business matters, Christians can be credited with concern for fair trade and the ethical consumer movement, although they are not alone in this regard. Altogether, this information presents a rather patchy picture of Christian behaviour. The data have been collected in different ways, and presented piecemeal, thus potentially encouraging the criticism of cherry-picking. It would be justifiable to conclude that

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Christian organizations have done substantial work in improving societal conditions, but in matters of personal morality, despite claims that the Christian faith transforms people’s lives, there is no firm evidence that Christian behaviour is superior to that of others.

BIBLE TRANSLATION Christian missionaries pioneered the work of Bible translation, and the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) was set up for this purpose. Bible translation, however, proved controversial for a number of reasons. Some Bible Societies included the Apocrypha, which proved controversial in Protestant circles, and the BFBS maintained its policy of excluding books that did not form part of the Protestant canon. The Roman Catholic Church was initially opposed to Bible Societies, and Pope Gregory XVI sent out an encyclical Inter Praecipuas (‘Among the special schemes’), in which he expressed concern that the Bible would be read in places that lacked teachers to explain it adequately. More recently, in 2002, Pope John Paul II took a more positive stance, quoting Saint Jerome’s declaration that ‘ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ’ (Pope John Paul II 2002). By 2018, the Bible was available in its entirety in 683 different languages, and the New Testament in at least 1534. Selected passages and Bible stories were accessible in 1133 languages. In English, there are some 450 different translations. Until the 1960s, the King James Version (1611) was the translation normally used in churches, as well as for private study. Most churches now prefer to use more modern translations. Within Anglicanism it is insisted that an approved translation is used, to ensure accuracy: hence the New Revised Standard Version is preferred, although others, such as the New International Version, are permitted. The Good News Bible tends to be popular in the Protestant tradition, although it is a somewhat free translation of scripture, while the Roman Catholic-preferred translation is the New Jerusalem Bible. Until the early 1960s it was customary for churchgoers to carry a Bible with them. This practice has largely died out; this may be due to the fact that the variety of translations created uncertainty as to which version would be used. Some churches provide their own copies of their preferred translation, available in the pews, while others print the set passages on a service sheet, which is distributed to the congregation on arrival. One member of the clergy known to us explained this as placing the Bible in the hands of the people, and hence saw a positive virtue in this practice. Many Christians, however, are still attached to the King James Version, and there exists a body of Christians in the United States known as King James Fundamentalists. These Christians believe that the King James Version, contrary to the overwhelming body of Christian scholarship, remains the best and most accurate translation of scripture. In 2012 the (US) Christian Booksellers Association reported that the top five sales of Bible translation, in descending order of popularity, were: the New International Version, the King James Version, the New Living Translation, the New King James Version and the English Standard Version. When it comes to Bible-reading habits, a 2014 survey revealed that 55 per cent of Americans still use the King James Version, 19 per cent the New International Version, 7 per cent the Revised Standard Version, 6 per cent the New American Bible, 5 per cent the Living Bible, with the remaining 8 per cent using other translations (Goff et al. 2014: 12). Despite the popularity of the Living Bible, it is not strictly a translation, but a paraphrase of the 1901 American Standard Version, without recourse to the original languages of Hebrew and Greek.

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CANON The root meaning of the word ‘canon’ is derived from the Greek kanōn, which means a measuring rod or standard, and hence the term signifies laws or criteria by which something is judged. In the Christian tradition, clergy in the Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions are sometimes called canons, particularly if they are associated with a cathedral or collegiate church. The term signifies that they conform to a specified rule of life. In the Roman Catholic tradition, a ‘canon regular’ is a member of a community of priests, usually living under Augustinian rule. The word is also used in the expression ‘canon law’, which means a fully fledged legal system operating in various denominations, principally the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Church of England. Within Protestant denominations the term tends not to be used, expressions such as ‘practice and procedure’ being favoured. In Roman Catholicism, canon law has been laid down over the centuries by the Curia (the collective body of higher-ranking clergy, consisting of bishops, archbishops, cardinals) and covers all areas of life, applying to clergy and laity alike. Because of the autocephalous nature of the Orthodox Churches, there is more diversity in Orthodox canon law. The Church of England’s position as the ‘established church’ in the country results in some overlap between civil and religious law. The term ‘canon’ is also, importantly, applied to scripture. Historically, the four canonical Gospels are acknowledged as supremely important, together with the letters of Paul; Jewish scriptures were also incorporated into the Christian canon. Up to the middle of the fourth century, there was some diversity of opinion as to which other writings should be included. In 367 ce, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria (296–373), in his 39th Festival Epistle, defined the list of New Testament writings that are acknowledged today, and which became generally accepted. The books of the Old Testament that are regarded as canonical are: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon (also known as Song of Songs), Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. The New Testament canon consists of: Matthew; Mark; Luke; John; Acts; Romans; 1 and 2 Corinthians; Galatians; Ephesians; Philippians; Colossians; 1 and 2 Thessalonians; 1 and 2 Timothy; Titus; Philemon; Hebrews; James; 1 and 2 Peter; 1, 2 and 3 John; Jude; and Revelation. The Roman Catholic tradition accepts the Apocrypha as part of its canon. These are books written during the intertestamental period – between the last Old Testament prophet, Malachi (c. 420 bce), and the appearance of John the Baptist. These books were written in Greek rather than Hebrew and hence are considered by Protestants and Orthodox Christians to be inferior scripture. Some passages from these writings are occasionally read in Anglican and – very occasionally – Protestant churches. Both traditions affirm that the Apocrypha can be read for instruction, but lacking the authority of the Old and New Testaments. The books of the Apocrypha are: 1 and 2 Esdras; Tobit; Judith; a second part of Esther; The Wisdom of Solomon; Ecclesiasticus; Baruch; A Letter of Jeremiah; The Song of the Three Holy Children; Daniel and Susannah; Daniel, Bel and the Snake; The Prayer of Manasseh; and 1 and 2 Maccabees.

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There is slight variation in the names of some books. In the Orthodox and Catholic traditions, the books of Samuel and Kings are sometimes titled 1, 2, 3, 4 Kings, and the books of Chronicles are sometimes titled Parlipomenon. The Song of Solomon is sometimes called Canticles, and Ezra and Nehemiah are at times named 1 and 2 Esdras, respectively, with the Apocryphal books of Esdras being renumbered as 3 and 4. There are also minor variations in the spellings and in the ordering of some books. Few Christians would claim to have read the Bible in its entirety, or to be able to recount its contents in detail. They would probably be familiar with popular stories such as Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, the Exodus and numerous Gospel stories, but little more. Some pious Christians make a point of regular Bible reading, and a number of organizations, particularly in the Protestant tradition, seek to encourage the practice, with one organization setting out a plan for participants to read the entire Bible in a single year. The Scripture Union, an international organization founded in 1847, was set up to encourage daily Bible reading and prayer and issues Bible-reading notes – and now podcasts – to explain scripture. Protestants are significantly more prone to private study of the Bible than Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox Christians. However, at least some parts of scripture are invariably read during public worship in all Christian traditions, and it is an expectation that all major services will have a Gospel reading. Although lay Christians are divided on the question of what the authority of scripture entails, the Bible is believed to contain all that is necessary for salvation. Christians therefore tend to oppose strongly any attempts to add to scripture, for example the Book of Mormon, or the Unification Church’s Divine Principle.

CHURCH The word ‘church’ popularly designates Christian buildings that house congregations. However, in its wider theological sense, the word ‘Church’ (often spelt with an initial capital for clarification) refers to the totality of Christian believers in all places and at all times – past, present and future. The tradition of using church premises as graveyards, often requiring visitors to pass numerous burial places, serves to underline the fact that the dead as well as the living constitute the Church. Christians use various metaphors to describe the Church. It is described as the ‘ark of salvation’, which harks back to the story of Noah, whose ark saved humanity from total destruction. Hence Christians have affirmed the doctrine – often expressed in Latin – of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (no salvation outside the Church). Many Christians hold that it is only through the Church that eternal salvation is possible; however, in recent times, particularly in theological circles, it has been questioned whether this doctrine is unduly exclusivist, and whether God might make provision for saving those of other faiths, or those who lived before the Church came into being. Christians who are involved in interfaith dialogue are less likely to hold on to exclusivist views of this kind. Christian theologians distinguish between the ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ Church. Even though the average practising Christian is not well versed in theology, it is recognized that formal membership of the Church does not guarantee salvation and that there are false Christians within it. Although the Roman Catholic Church formally has powers of excommunication, these are rarely exercised, and in most congregations, the good and bad members are allowed to coexist. Most Christians are familiar with Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds: an enemy sows weeds among a farmer’s good crops, but the farmer decides to leave both until the harvest, when he can separate the two (Matthew 13:24–30).

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The import of the parable is that it is God, not humans, who will judge who his true followers are, and that this will only become apparent at the end of time. Christians are also familiar with the terms ‘Church militant’ and the ‘Church triumphant’ – a distinction to which Christian hymnody often alludes – military metaphors, which indicate that the Church is in a state of progress, rather than at its final culmination, warring against evil, over which it will finally triumph. The ambiguity of the Church as a physical entity or as a spiritual reality is reflected in the fact that its members are sometimes described as builders of the Church (1 Corinthians 12:12, 26), with Christ as the foundation stone and his followers as ‘living stones’ that serve as the brickwork (Mark 12:10; 1 Peter 4–7). Associated with this metaphor is another – the Church as the ‘body of Christ’, an expression which is used at holy communion, when the officiant distributes the bread. The sharing of bread indicates a commonality, and signifies – among other things – that the believer mystically shares in Christ himself. Another metaphor with which Christians are familiar is the Church as the ‘bride of Christ’. The well-known Christian hymn ‘The Church’s one foundation’ employs both the metaphor of building and that of marriage. The common practice of referring to the Church as ‘she’ rather than ‘it’ relates to the notion of the Church as Christ’s bride. The bridal metaphor draws on a biblical view relating to marriage, that the husband and wife ‘become one flesh’ (Genesis 2:24; Mark 10:8; Ephesians 5:31). The metaphor is extended by portraying the culmination of God’s kingdom as ‘the marriage of the Lamb’ (Revelation 19:7–8), the ‘lamb’ being a reference to Jesus as the ‘Lamb of God’, and on various occasions Jesus uses the imagery of the wedding banquet to portray God’s kingdom, the coming of which will be a joyful occasion, with all suffering and imperfection having come to an end.

CREATIONISM The controversy between Christian fundamentalists and their opponents is often set up as ‘Creation versus Evolution’. However, this characterization conflates two phenomena: the creation of the universe and the creation of humankind. The Bible portrays the world’s creation as a process which took six ‘days’, rather than an instantaneous happening. Since the sun, which defines the length of an Earth day, was not created until the fourth day, most fundamentalists would accept that the word ‘day’ indicates an indeterminate period of time. God’s time scale may well be different from that of humans, as the Psalmist confirms when he writes, ‘A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, like a watch in the night’ (Psalm 90:4). The unspecified duration of the creative ‘day’ therefore allows variation amongst Creationists about the age of the universe, and hence Creationists can be divided into ‘Young Earth’ Creationists, who contend that the Earth could be less than 10,000 years old, and ‘Old Earth’ Creationists, who contend that the Earth might been created around 4,000,000,000 years ago. Old Earth Creationism might claim the advantage of being able to account for geological phenomena, such as fossils and the Earth’s sedimentary layers. Some Creationists have contended that there could be a large time gap between the events described in Genesis 1:1 and what follows in Genesis 1:2. Thus, God could have created a formless, empty, dark universe and allowed billions of years to elapse before ordering it by his creative process. This particular form of Creationism is sometimes known as ‘Gap Creationism’.

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Since men and women are the last to be created, the time span for human life on earth, according to Creationists, must be significantly less than the age of the universe itself. Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, which was published in 1859, raised a different question from the age of the Earth, particularly since Old Earth Creationism, at least in theory, would have allowed plenty time for species to evolve. The really disturbing question which Darwin posed was whether homo sapiens was a special creation or whether humans might have come into being as a result of a lengthy process, rather than an instantaneous creative act of God. Further, evolution theory suggested an alternative explanation to divine creation: perhaps divine activity was not the only possible explanation for order in the world. At a practical level, the theory of evolution has raised problems in the US educational system. The country prohibits the teaching of religion in schools, and Creationism is a religious doctrine, while evolution is a secular scientific theory; hence the latter could be taught, but not the former. One way of dealing with this issue was for school textbooks in some US states to incorporate a caveat. Since 2001 in Alabama, biology textbooks have contained an insert, which reads in part: This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things, such as plants, animals and humans. No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life’s origins should be considered as theory, and not fact. (Schlanger 2015) Another attempt to combat evolution theory in education was to redefine Creationism. In 1981 Christian fundamentalists persuaded the Arkansas Board of Education to introduce ‘Creation Science’, which purported to be a rival scientific (rather than religious) theory to evolution. Its principles made no reference to God, but rather affirmed tenets such as the ‘sudden creation of the universe, energy and life from nothing’ (Arkansas Act 590, 1981). When this policy was successfully challenged in court, a further attempt was to introduce the term ‘Intelligent Design’, which purportedly left open the question of the intelligent designer’s nature. However, this move also failed to convince lawyers and scientists. A further issue for Creationists related to the story of Noah and the flood (Genesis 6:9–8:22). According to the biblical account, only living creatures that boarded the Ark survived. However, there are reckoned to be around 8.7 million different species, and the Bible gives the dimensions of Noah’s Ark as ‘450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high’ (Genesis 6:15). Even allowing for the fact that some creatures are extremely small, and others, such as turtles, would not have needed the Ark’s shelter, it seems impossible that the vessel could have contained such a large number. One solution to the problem, particularly favoured by Adventists, is the ‘theory of kinds’. The theory draws attention to the fact that the book of Genesis states that ‘[t]wo of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature’ boarded the Ark (Genesis 6:20). The word ‘kind’ is taken to mean a kind of proto-species, from which a variety of types of bird and animal developed. Hence the theory allows for evolution on a limited scale to develop after the time of Noah, while affirming the veracity of the biblical account of creation. In recent times, a number of entrepreneurs have created museums and theme parks to promote Creationism. These include a Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which aims to show the veracity of the Bible from the beginning of creation to Christ’s return, and

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which also includes a zoo to demonstrate the variety of God’s world. Forty miles distant is the Ark Encounter, situated between Cincinnati and Lexington, which accommodates a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark, constructed in part by Amish craftsmen, and which is complete with live animals. Children are encouraged to have rides on donkeys and camels. These attractions presuppose Young Earth Creationism, portraying human life as contemporaneous with dinosaurs, and they employ the theory of kinds as an explanation of the capacity of the Ark. Other such museums include the Creation Evidence Museum of Texas and the Museum of Creation and Earth History in Santee, California. Other creationist museums can be found in parts of Canada, in Hong Kong and in England.

CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS The traditional Christian Creeds set out the fundamental teachings of the Christian faith. The best known and most widely used are the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. Despite the name, the Apostles’ Creed is unlikely to have been written by the apostles, although there is a tradition that each of Jesus’ twelve disciples contributed a clause. Saint Ambrose was the first to refer to it, writing around 390 ce, and it only attained its final form around 700 ce. It is noteworthy that its contents are couched in the first-person singular (‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty’), thus indicating that its original function was a personal confession of faith, used by baptismal candidates. The Creed is typically used for this purpose today and is sometimes interspersed with successive questions put to the candidates: ‘Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty?’, ‘Do you believe in Jesus Christ?’, ‘Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?’ The candidates, together with the entire congregation, respond by reciting the words of the relevant sections. The Nicene Creed is a longer statement of belief, recited liturgically in the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions and, less frequently, by Protestants. This Creed is a set of doctrinal statements, originally defined to rule out a number of early theological views that the Church considered heretical. For example, the presbyter Arius (256–336) taught that Christ was created by God in time and was ‘of like substance with the Father’, whereas Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, insisted that Christ was ‘eternally begotten of the Father’. The Creed reached its final formulation at the Council of Chalcedon in 425 ce. Although most rank-and-file Christians would struggle to interpret the various clauses of the Creed, both Creeds are used liturgically and recited regularly by congregations. The Protestant denominations may occasionally use creeds within their worship, but nonetheless officially affirm their contents. Neither the Apostles’ Creed nor the Nicene Creed explicitly affirms the doctrine of the Trinity, although their threefold structure suggests God’s triune nature. The Trinity was first affirmed in the Athanasian Creed, which is sometimes known as Quicunque Vult – ‘Whoever wants’ – the opening lines being ‘Whoever wants to be saved should above all cling to the Catholic faith.’ The Creed then affirms that ‘We worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the divine being.’ Despite the name, the Creed was not written by Athanasius himself, but more probably originated in the sixth century. All the ancient creeds that were formulated before the Great Schism of 1054 are regarded as agreed by the entire Church and hence are affirmed by Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism alike – apart from the filioque clause, which states that the Holy Spirit ‘proceeds from the Father and the Son’, and which the Orthodox Churches point out was a later interpolation.

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Following the Protestant Reformation, the various branches of Protestantism formulated their own confessions of faith. The Lutheran Churches acknowledge the Augsburg Confession (1530), while many Presbyterian Churches have affirmed the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), and the Church of England’s historical doctrines consist of the 39 Articles (1571), incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer. Baptists, Congregationalists and Methodists have all formulated their various statements of doctrine. These confessions affirm the Church’s ancient doctrines, but also address the issues that concerned the Protestant Reformers, such as justification through faith rather than works, doctrines relating to the sacraments, the role of the saints and attitudes to civil government. These confessions are more detailed than the traditional Creeds and are not used liturgically, but those seeking ordination are required to affirm them. Some of these are described as ‘subordinate standards of doctrine’, meaning that the Christian scriptures are the final authority in matters of belief. Mention should be made of catechisms. These are summaries of doctrines, often in question-and-answer form. In previous eras, candidates for baptism or confirmation were required to memorize these questions and answers and were subjected to being ‘catechized’ before admission to the Church. This practice, however, has largely died out.

DEAD SEA SCROLLS The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by a shepherd boy in Qumran in 1947. They appear to have belonged to a large monastic community at Qumran, which probably arose around 125 bce. The scrolls are dated between 20 bce and 70 ce and were possibly hidden when the destruction of the community seemed immanent. The manuscripts are in Hebrew and Aramaic, and they include all the books of the Old Testament, apart from Esther and Nehemiah, together with some apocryphal pseudepigraphical books, some of which were unknown, and others only available in translation. The scrolls contain some Old Testament commentaries and also documents called ‘Psalms of Thanksgiving’ and ‘War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness’ (an apocalyptic text). ‘The Manual of Discipline’ sets out the rules of life for the communities, as do the ‘Damascus Fragments’. Little is known about the Dead Sea Sect, except that they appear to have lived simple lives of abstinence. Some have suggested that the Dead Sea community were Essenes, and that the scrolls were their library, but this theory is largely discounted. (The Essenes are mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus; they were communities that were committed to poverty and asceticism and flourished during the first and second centuries bce.) The scrolls are of value to Old Testament scholars, being the most ancient versions of Hebrew scriptures, and they shed light on the matrix in which Christianity had its inception. However, they contain no Christian material, contrary to some popular belief. In his novel The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown portrays Professor Langdon giving a lecture in which he claims that the Dead Sea Scrolls provide much new evidence about Jesus, but such a portrayal is totally absurd, and it is inconceivable that such a character would be found in any academic community. The first seven scrolls are housed in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, which was dedicated in 1965, and which is dedicated to the history of the Hebrew Bible. A number of the Scrolls have been digitized and can be accessed online.

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DEMONS Jesus and his contemporaries firmly believed in the existence of Satan and demons, but many Christians today believe that such beings belong to an outmoded worldview, and that those to whom demon possession was attributed were suffering from physical and mental illnesses such as epilepsy, convulsions or schizophrenia. At best, they believe, they are personified representations of evil forces at work in the world. In recent times there appears to have been a resurgence of belief in their reality, however; many fundamentalists hold that, since the Bible is inerrant, its assertions about the Devil and his demons should be taken literally. Accordingly, in certain sectors of the Protestant tradition, there has been a rise in ‘deliverance ministries’, which are a kind of counterpart to exorcism, as practised in the Roman Catholic and – perhaps less frequently – in the Anglican traditions. Media interest in the topic, and the popularity of films such as The Exorcist, may be associated with recent concern on the part of some sectors within the Church. There is conflicting evidence about the degree of belief in Satan and demons. According to a 2009 Barna survey, 59 per cent of Americans agreed or ‘agreed somewhat’ that Satan ‘is not a living being but is a symbol of evil’, with 35 per cent disagreeing or disagreeing somewhat. However, the same survey indicated that 64 per cent believed that a person could come under the influence of spiritual forces such as evil spirits or demons, while 28 per cent disagreed. By contrast, the Gospel Coalition quotes a 2013 YouGov survey which found that 57 per cent of Americans believe in the reality of Satan, and 51 per cent in the possibility of spirit possession (Carter 2013). A distinction is sometimes made between ordinary and extraordinary possession. The former is the normal prevalent temptation to sin and can be dealt with through the usual channels of spirituality, such as prayer and confession. Provision is made for the prevention of possession by spirits by means of ‘minor exorcism’, the most common of which occurs at baptism or confirmation, where candidates are asked formally to renounce the devil. The use of holy water and the anointing of the candidates with chrism oil are ‘sacramentals’ – rites which are not themselves sacraments, but which bestow spiritual benefit. In mediaeval times it was regarded as important to baptize an infant as quickly as possible, to prevent fairies from stealing one’s child and substituting a changeling. Such beliefs are no longer prevalent but find expression in literature and film. The popular belief that it is lucky for an infant to cry during baptism may have its origins in the belief that the rite is efficacious in casting out evil spirits. Extraordinary possession is more serious, although a rarer phenomenon, and it involves one or more of six phenomena identified by Roman Catholic exorcists: (1) possession, in which a demon or spirit takes full control over the victim’s body; (2) obsession – irrational obsessions, sometimes causing suicidal behaviour; (3) oppression – involuntary action or loss of consciousness; (4) external physical pain, attributable to Satan or to demons; (5) infestation – habitation of an evil spirit or spirits in buildings, objects or animals; (6) subjection – voluntary submission to Satan. Symptoms of demon possession are believed to include knowledge of secret things, ability to speak languages one has not learnt and supernatural strength. Such problems may require the services of an exorcist, for which there is provision in the Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions. Pope Benedict XVI ensured that each diocese had its own exorcist. Exorcism may only be performed by a priest, and the ritual is not provided routinely. He must first be assured that the victim has undergone proper medical examination, to rule out the possibility of physical or mental illness being the

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cause. The normal spiritual practices should first be attempted, such as prayer, counselling and the laying on of hands. If an exorcist is summoned, use is made of the specified rite, which the Vatican defined in 1999, and which involves commanding the spirit to leave, and the saying of prayers, particularly the Lord’s Prayer, repeating ‘Hail Mary’ and reciting the Athanasian Creed. The rite needs to be completed, since it is a contest between the Church and Satan, although it is acknowledged that exorcism is not always successful and that the attempt may need repetition. Some Protestants, particularly in the evangelical charismatic tradition, perform ‘deliverance ministries’ – their preferred term for exorcisms. The Bible is held to confirm the reality of demons: ‘our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms’ (Ephesians 6:12). These Christians point out not only that Jesus cast out demons but that he gave his followers powers to do likewise: ‘Heal those who are ill, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons’ (Matthew 10:8). The Bible does not include exorcists among the Church’s office bearers: ‘Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers to equip his people for works of service’ (Ephesians 4:11–12), hence they are not officially appointed as such. However, it has been estimated that there are some 500 deliverance ministries in the United States, and the best known deliverance minister is Bob Larson (Robinson 2006). Deliverance ministries in the Protestant tradition do not use sacramentals such as crucifixes or holy water; there is no fixed liturgy for deliverance, but it is common practice for the Bible to be held in front of the victim, and the casting out should explicitly use the words, ‘In the name of Jesus’. Evangelical Protestants in particular have offered strong advice about ways of avoiding demonic possession: illicit sex, watching pornography, using recreational drugs and listening to some types of pop music are commonly believed to present the risk of possession. Christians are particularly warned to avoid dabbling in the occult: consulting psychics and astrologers is to be avoided, and Ouija boards are regarded as particularly abhorrent, since they are often held to contain their own resident spirit. The Eastern Orthodox view is that Satan and evil spirits are at work in the world, but only have power if the believer submits to them. Thus every Christian has the power to drive out demons.

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES Christians are aware of the Bible’s teaching that the earth is God’s creation, that it belongs to him, as the Psalmist writes (Psalm 24:1), and that, although humans have been given dominion over the earth, stewardship is their responsibility. Those Christians who support environmental initiatives are also concerned about future generations, whom they believe are included as ‘neighbours’ whom one has a duty to love. Although one might think that this is an impetus for Christians to be environmentally aware, there is no evidence that they do better than their non-Christian counterparts, and indeed the best-known environmental organizations are secular, although we lack firm data about the level of Christian support for them. A number of specifically Christian attempts have been made to raise awareness of environmental issues and to campaign on their behalf. Examples include Operation Noah, which is a ‘green’ ecumenical Christian charity, set up in 2004 in the UK, seeking to raise awareness of climate change and encouraging churches to disinvest in fossil fuels. In the United States, the Evangelical

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Climate Initiative is a campaigning organization, which works independently of secular environmental groups, contending that climate change is real and that it is likely to affect the poorest rather than the wealthy. The Green Bible is a special edition of the New Revised Standard Version, originally published in 2008, with the distinctive feature of printing passages relevant to environmental issues in green. The text is preceded by a number of essays on creation care and sustainability by prominent Christian leaders, including John Paul II, Desmond Tutu and New Testament scholar N. T. Wright. Notwithstanding these examples of Christian concern, a recent study by Indiana University suggested a decline in environmental concern among evangelical Christians (Konisky 2018). Some of the lack of interest may relate to belief in an imminent Second Coming of Christ. If the earth’s lifespan is likely to end by divine intervention, then there will be few, if any, further generations to experience future environmental calamities. A 2006 survey indicated that 75 per cent of Republicans believe in the Second Coming, and such belief, combined with support of business interests, is likely to be a disincentive to support for environmentalism (Barker and Bearce 2013). In all, one can distinguish three different views on the part of Christians on environmental issues. The first is denial: the Southern Baptist Convention insists the phenomenon of climate change is not unanimously affirmed by the scientific community. One organization, the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation (in the United States), denies that there is a problem, and put forward a statement in 2000, signed by clergy and theologians, as well as some Jewish leaders, contending that the Earth is a divinely protected ecosystem and that market forces will be sufficient to restore any imbalances. The organization’s supporters believe that changes in the Earth’s temperature are due to natural fluctuation and deny that human use of fossil fuels is responsible for any change. The second view, which can be held jointly with the first, is that Christ’s Second Coming will put an end to human affairs on earth and that natural disasters, such as floods and hurricanes, are part of the signs of the end, as described in the Bible. The third view is that environmental issues are a serious and urgent concern and that the Earth needs to be protected. However, responsible stewardship of creation offers hope, and supporters of this view affirm the possibility of the redemption of the world.

ESCHATOLOGY The term ‘eschatology’, meaning doctrine relating to the end of time, is probably unfamiliar to most Christian laypeople, yet many Christians believe that humanity is living in the last days. It is associated with apocalypticism, which is belief in an imminent violent disruption to human affairs, involving natural catastrophes, a decline in human behaviour and persecution of the faithful, prior to – or as evidence of – the Great Tribulation that is to be expected before Christ’s Second Coming. The destruction of earthly affairs is associated with biblical prophecy, particularly parts of Daniel, Mark 13, Matthew 25 and the book of Revelation. Not all Christians expect a catastrophic end of this kind. Others might conceive humanity’s final goal as a kingdom where social justice and peace prevail, believing that such a state will unfold gradually through human effort. Outside the conservative fundamentalist traditions, Christians are accustomed to listening to preachers who point out that Jesus taught that ‘the kingdom of God is in your midst’ (Luke 17:21) and used parables like the grain of mustard seed, which implied that the kingdom developed from small beginnings to larger fruition (Luke 13:18–19).

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GOSPEL The word ‘gospel’ is a translation of the Greek evangelion, meaning ‘good news’ – a point that one frequently hears from Christian pulpits. In its broad sense, the word refers to the basic message of the Christian faith, namely that God became human in Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for the world’s sin and rose from the dead. More specifically, the word ‘Gospel’ designates the first four books of the New Testament, which tell of Jesus’ birth, ministry, death and resurrection. These are attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, respectively, and Christians popularly believe that Matthew and John were two of Jesus’ twelve disciples and that the author of Luke’s gospel was an associate of Paul and a physician, who also compiled the book of Acts, which appears to be a sequel to the Gospel. However, the titles with the names of the authors are not found in the original manuscripts, but are editorial, and the first reference to the traditionally assigned authorship comes from the early Church Father Papias, writing in the mid-second century, who states that Mark obtained his material from the apostle Peter and that Matthew ‘made an ordered arrangement of the oracles in the Hebrew language’ (Allison; in Barton and Muddiman 2001: 844). This claim is at best guesswork and is unlikely to be correct. Although a handful of scholars continue to suggest that Matthew is the primordial Gospel, and was originally written in Aramaic, no Aramaic texts has been found, and this hypothesis is largely discarded. Although the Roman Catholic Church affirmed the primordiality of Matthew, most scholars – including Roman Catholics – now agree that Mark was written first. Although it is popularly held that Matthew was the tax collector mentioned in Matthew 9:9 and 10:3, it is unlikely that an immediate disciple would find a need to copy material from a secondary source. Christians are conscious that there is an overlap of material between Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but are no doubt less familiar with the scholarly attempts to solve ‘the synoptic problem’, which is the question of how the three sources are interrelated. There is material common to Matthew and Luke which is not found in Mark, and this has caused many scholars to believe that there is a lost sayings source, which they term ‘Q’. The Gospel of John appears to be independent of the three synoptic writers and is much more philosophical and theological, attributing long sermons to Jesus. It is almost certainly the last of the canonical gospels to be written, probably between 90 and 100 ce. Christians are familiar with the four symbols of the evangelists, which are a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle, respectively. These are frequently depicted in Christian art, and it is common for brass lecterns to be cast in the shape of an eagle, representing John’s Gospel. The oldest surviving copy of all four Gospels is in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. Numerous old copies of the Gospels have been decorated with lavish embellishments and illustrations. Among the best known are the Lindisfarne Gospels, created between 710 and 725 on the Holy Island, off England’s Northumberland coast, in honour of Saint Cuthbert (c. 634–687); these are currently displayed in the British Library in London.

HUMOUR Although the topic of humour is seldom mentioned in expositions of the Christian faith or in academic writing on religion, humour is widespread and has had an important role in the religion’s history. In Genesis 21:6, we are told by Sarah that ‘God has brought me

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laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me’, and comedic thought and deed has often been important in the performance of Christian lives. When writing his Against the Papacy in Rome, Instituted by the Devil, Martin Luther commissioned a set of ten cartoons depicting the Pope in a highly disrespectful manner. More recently, Christians have used various forms of humour for a variety of purposes. C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters (1942) is a lighthearted portrayal of human temptation, cast as a series of letters between Screwtape, who represents the Devil, and his nephew Wormwood. It remains a popular Christian classic. Other novels in the genre of Christian humour do not necessarily have a spiritual purpose, for example Christopher Moor’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002), which is a deliberately absurd attempt to fill in the lost years of Jesus. Elisha McIntyre, who has written on evangelical Christian and Mormon humour, identifies three principal roles of humour: assertion of superiority, relief and incongruity. As mentioned above, humour can be used to assert the superiority of one type of religion over another, and there is much Protestant humour, both written and narrated, which is at the expense of Roman Catholicism. Humour, too, may function as a way of expressing one’s relief from the more serious traditional image of the Christian faith; in the past Christians have attracted a reputation for being serious, and it was considered inappropriate for a preacher to make jokes or for the congregation to laugh. Much religious humour has simply used incongruity, as in the various Monty Python portrayals of the quest for the Holy Grail, the crucifixion and the Spanish Inquisition. A perusal of most Christian bookstores and websites selling Christian literature will reveal at least some humorous publications, often in cartoon form. This is no doubt partly an attempt to boost profits, since such literature is popular – indeed, the Adrian Plass series of diaries and novels have sold over one million copies – but it also has the function to present a less sombre image of the Christian faith. The subject matter of such publications ranges across portrayals of church life, parodies of the biblical incidents and ‘crack a joke’ compilations. Some of the material which is found online, such as reverendfun.com, has the additional purpose of offering permission to reproduce cartoons in order to lighten up churches’ congregational magazines. Television series and DVDs have also provided an outlet for humour. Sitcoms, such as Father Ted and The Vicar of Dibley, have poked fun, respectively, at Irish Catholicism and women’s ordination in the Church of England. Some broadcast items do not specifically focus on religion but contain substantial references to it. The series The Simpsons is a case in point: not infrequently, the Simpson family is portrayed at church or at prayer: although the episodes are absurd, Matt Groening, the series creator, wanted to portray aspects of American life that tend to be avoided elsewhere. Clearly, placing religious humour in the public domain – particularly in Christian outlets – requires a degree of respect, taking care to avoid incitement to religious hatred. However, opponents of Christians have used humour to express their hostility: comedians as varied as Ricky Gervais, Bill Maher and Richard Herring have promoted stand-up tours on the basis of performances which specifically address religion in general and Christianity in particular, with Herring’s Christ on a Bike and Marcus Brigstock’s God Collar being notable examples. Such performances are a part of the wider New Atheistemboldened resurgence of critiques of Christianity in popular culture, but it is important to remember that Christian voices are also a part of the comic landscape – in the UK alone, examples include Milton Jones, Miles Jupp and Tim Vine.

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JEWS The Gospels portray the Pharisees as nit-picking legalists who were Jesus’ opponents, and John’s Gospel appears to contrast Jesus and his followers with ‘the Jews’, thus attracting frequent criticisms of antisemitism. Sunday School children are often introduced to the Jews by way of the stereotypical portrayal of the Pharisees and continue to be taught to view them as sanctimonious hypocrites. This portrayal can still be found in Christian education and, perhaps more regrettably, in some of the Church’s preaching. Antisemitism still prevails in certain sectors of Christianity, and there exists a small number of professedly Christian organizations, collectively known as the Christian Identity movement. The Ku Klux Klan, which experienced a revival in 1915, is well known for its encouragement and even perpetration of violence against black people and Jews, although it now appears to be in decline. Theologically, Christians are divided on their attitude to Jews. Some emphasize the biblical teaching that God covenanted with Noah, Abraham, Jacob and Moses, believing that God does not renege on his promises, and the Jews continue to have a special relationship with him. Other Christians emphasize the biblical concept of the ‘new covenant’ and the New Testament’s accusations that the Jews were blind and stubborn, refusing to accept Jesus as the messiah, and hence conclude that God’s covenant with Moses and the ancient patriarchs is annulled and superseded by the new covenant between God and the Church. This doctrine is sometimes known as supersessionism, and its supporters sometimes describe themselves as the ‘new Israel’ or ‘second Israel’, erroneously believing that these are biblical expressions. Because of their historical covenant relationship with God, Christian mission has been wary of evangelizing Jews, and Christians are divided as to whether it is legitimate to attempt to win them over to the Christian faith. The Southern Baptist Convention is in favour, and some organizations exist explicitly for this purpose, such as Jews for Jesus. With the rise of the interfaith movement, many Christians now perceive Jews as partners in dialogue. In 1942 the Council for Christians and Jews was set up in Britain by Chief Rabbi Joseph H. Hertz and Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, in response to growing awareness of the Holocaust. In 2017 it celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary, choosing the theme ‘How Good It Is To Dwell Together’ (Psalm 133:1), regarding valuing differences as an important quality. The Council engages in education, dialogue and social action, seeking to combat prejudice and to promote mutual understanding between the two faiths. The position of Jews in the Middle East is an issue that has divided Christians. Many Christians have endorsed the idea that Israel is their promised land, and Christian Sunday School resources continue to applaud Joshua’s action of invading Jericho and King David’s appropriation of Jerusalem as the Jewish capital (Joshua 6; 2 Samuel 6:1–19). Many Christians welcomed the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised the restoration of a Jewish homeland and supported the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. When the Jews recaptured Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War, many Christians applauded their victory, and on 6 December 2017, President Donald Trump’s act of moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thus recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city, delighted many evangelical Christians. Palestinian Christians protested by switching off the Christmas tree lights at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and there are many Christians who support the Palestinian cause, regarding Israel as the oppressor. The US pro-Israel policy is not merely an attempt to secure the Jewish vote: there are many

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Christian Zionists, who see the establishment of the State of Israel as fulfilment of biblical prophecy and a harbinger of Christ’s Second Coming. In a 2017 survey of American evangelical Christians by LifeWay Research, 86 per cent agreed that ‘God’s promise to Abraham and his descendants was for all time’; 80 per cent believed that the resettlement of Jews in Israel since 1948 was a fulfilment of biblical prophecy; 76 per cent believed that Christians should support the Jewish right to live in Israel; and 24 per cent – nearly a quarter – agreed with the statement, ‘I support the existence, security, and prosperity of the State of Israel no matter what Israel does.’ Only 41 per cent agreed that ‘the Jewish people have a biblical right to the land of Israel, but also have a responsibility to share the land with Palestinian Arabs’ (Rosenberg 2017).

LIFE AFTER DEATH A 2007 survey revealed that 79 per cent of religiously affiliated Americans believed in life after death; this belief is highest amongst evangelical Protestants (86 per cent) and slightly lower among mainline Protestants (78 per cent) and Roman Catholics (77 per cent), suggesting some uncertainty or rejection among almost a quarter of practising Christians in the United States. The Apostles’ Creed affirms, ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body’, and Christian evangelical writers are particularly concerned to portray a general resurrection as a fundamental belief and important expectation. Traditionally it is believed that the resurrection will be followed by a final judgement, with the righteous being admitted to heaven and the wicked consigned to everlasting punishment in hell. Yet, the same survey indicates that only 81 per cent of religiously affiliated Americans believe in heaven, and 65 per cent in hell. Official Roman Catholic teaching adds two additional after-death states: purgatory and limbo. Contrary to popular parlance, purgatory is not regarded as an unpleasant state, but rather an intermediate state between life on earth and life in heaven, in which the departed believer will be cleansed and made fit for admission to God’s kingdom. The living can assist those who are in purgatory: although the Roman Catholic Church has now abandoned the practice of selling indulgences – to which Martin Luther strongly objected – those who remain on earth are encouraged to pray for the dead and to perform pious or charitable acts on their behalf. A Requiem Mass is a Mass held on the deceased’s behalf, often as a component of the funeral. The term ‘Requiem Mass’ is sometimes superseded by the expressions ‘Mass of the Resurrection’ and ‘Mass of Christian Burial’. Such Masses are also held in some sectors of the Anglican and Lutheran traditions. Protestants, particularly evangelicals, entertain strong objections to praying for or attempting to aid the dead, holding that such practices are unbiblical and that the dead are in God’s hands. The state of limbo has sometimes been held by Roman Catholics to be an after-death state reserved for unbaptized infants and for those who have lived before the time of Christ. Theologically, in common with the rest of humanity, they are tainted with original sin but cannot obtain full salvation through no fault of their own. Unlike purgatory, limbo is not a transitory state, but is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. In 2005 some media reports inaccurately suggested that the Catholic Church had renounced the doctrine; however, the Church has not consistently affirmed the doctrine of limbo over the centuries, and it is not a Catholic dogma. The Catechism of the Catholic Church simply states: ‘As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God’ (Catechism 1261; italics original).

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Christians who reflect on the topic of life after death are often confused about the finer details. This is hardly surprising since, as the United Methodist Church’s webpage states, ‘the scriptures themselves offer no one clear teaching on what happens to the dead between their death and the resurrection and judgment at the Last Day’. One source of unclarity is the issue of what precisely is resurrected. There can be little doubt that the physical body does not survive, being either cremated or left to decompose in a grave. (The Orthodox Churches do not allow cremation, however, but only burial.) The familiar words in a funeral liturgy are ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. Some Christians hold that it is the soul, distinct from the body, that survives death, although the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is a Hellenistic rather than Jewish or Christian idea. The Apostles’ Creed affirms the resurrection of the body, and Christians who are familiar with the Bible will recall the famous chapter in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where he compares the general resurrection with that of Christ, who is portrayed as having a bodily resurrection. He writes, ‘So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body’ (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). If the concept of a ‘spiritual body’ seems enigmatic, Paul indicates that one cannot fully comprehend what the Christian might expect after death, except that ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God’ (1 Corinthians 15:50). A further point of uncertainty relates to the question of when one is resurrected. Paul talks about a last trumpet, which will herald the resurrection of the dead (1 Corinthians 15:52), while on the cross Jesus promises the dying thief that ‘today you will be with me in paradise’ (Luke 23:43), suggesting that heaven is already open, and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus seems to imply that heaven and hell exist contemporaneously with affairs on earth (Luke 16:19–31). Probably most Christians look to a future resurrection, although a minority of Christians subscribe to the doctrine of ‘conditional immortality’, holding that everlasting life is not guaranteed for everyone, and that the unrighteous will be consigned to a permanent state of oblivion. This view is particularly held within the Adventist tradition, but N. T. Wright, a former Bishop of Durham and a popular author, claims that the letters to Timothy assert that only God is inherently immortal, and that immortality is a gift to be earned (1 Timothy 6:15–16; 2 Timothy 1:10; Wright 2004: 74). Although rank-and-file Christians may be uncertain about the precise theological details of the resurrection, it is popularly believed that they will be reunited with their departed loved ones after death. A surprising number of Christians claim to believe in reincarnation – an estimated 22 per cent of US Christians, according to the Pew Research Center (2009). Such beliefs no doubt result from religious syncretism, but a minority of Christians have claimed that it was a tenet of the early Church, sometimes erroneously citing Origen (184–253), who believed in the pre-existence of the soul rather than reincarnation. One group that has aroused some popular interest is the Cathars, who lived in parts of northern Italy and southern France between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, and who did entertain such beliefs. Much popular evangelical literature condemns belief in reincarnation, as well as attempts to contact the dead, such as spiritualist meetings and demonstrations of mediumship. Some Christians have been slightly more amenable to entertaining accounts of neardeath experiences (NDEs). The phenomenon is relatively uncommon, but those who have experienced it have been pronounced clinically dead, yet have had conscious awareness of being detached from their bodies, and after travelling through a dark tunnel at the end

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of which there is a bright light, they are sent back to continue their earthly life. Belief in NDEs was popularized by Raymond Moody, a psychologist and physician, in his Life After Life (1975). Interest among Christians was given further impetus by Don Piper, a Baptist minister, who wrote 90 Minutes in Heaven (2004), which sold over seven million copies, and was subsequently made into a movie. Although some Christians welcome the phenomenon as evidence of life after death, in 2014 the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution condemning such literature, reaffirming ‘the sufficiency of biblical revelation over subjective experiential explanations to guide one’s understanding of the truth about heaven and hell’ (Southern Baptist Convention 2014). As a consequence, its publishing division LifeWay Christian Resources withdrew all literature purportedly recounting ‘experiential testimonies about heaven’.

LITURGY The word ‘liturgy’ derives from the Greek leitourgia, which literally means ‘people’s work’, and hence refers to the form of collective worship by Christians. One Roman Catholic website describes it as the ‘shop front of the Church’, highlighting the fact that this is likely to be one’s first acquaintance with a Christian denomination (Diocese of Shrewsbury 2019). Liturgy is enacted collectively and thus differs from private prayer, personal acts of devotion or unstructured Christian gatherings. Liturgy is traditional: although it is possible to invent new styles of worship, these cannot strictly be described as liturgies. Liturgy can be elaborate or relatively simple; however, some Christians reserve the word ‘liturgical’ to refer to highly structured worship, and ‘non-liturgical’ to describe less formal acts of worship, of the kind typically found in much of the Protestant tradition. In Eastern Orthodox Churches the liturgy invariably derives from the ancient Church Fathers, and the Sunday Eucharist is usually termed Divine Liturgy, followed by the Father’s name, for example ‘Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom’; the Liturgies of Saints Basil, Cyril, Gregory and James are also widely used. The Divine Liturgy consists of three parts. First, there is the Preparation, which is performed by the priests behind the iconostasis, after which the priests process into the nave to commence the second part – the Liturgy of the Catechumens. This consists of the reading of scripture and a short homily. The Liturgy of the Faithful – the third component – involves the distribution of the bread and wine. The service ends with those who have not received the sacrament (usually the majority) receiving the antidoron – pieces of leavened bread from which the sacramental bread has been cut. The Roman Catholic and Anglican liturgies of the Mass are likewise in in three parts: the Introduction, involving penitence and absolution; the Liturgy of the Word, which includes reading from scripture, a sermon, recitation of the Nicene Creed and prayers of intercession; and the Liturgy of the Sacrament, in which the congregation approach the altar to receive the bread and wine. The liturgy also involves instructions about when to sit and stand, and what postures and gestures – such as kneeling, bowing and genuflection – are appropriate. The Liturgy of the Hours (also known as Divine Office) is used within holy orders and refers to seven periods of prescribed prayer: ‘Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous laws’ (Psalm 119:164). The seven are: Mattins (also called Lauds, during the night), Prime (at 6 am), Terce (at 9 am), Sext (at noon), None (at 3 pm), Vespers (in the evening) and Compline (before retiring for the night).

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In Roman Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran Churches, liturgical colours are in evidence to designate the point of the Christian calendar that is being observed. The clergy’s robes and the altar cloth and pulpit fall will be of the appropriate colour: white for Trinity Sunday and for festivals relating to the Virgin Mary; red for Pentecost, feasts of Apostles and Martyrs, Palm Sunday and Good Friday; green for ‘ordinary time’ (from Epiphany to Lent, and Trinity to Advent); purple for Lent and Advent. Black is typically the colour for funerals, although some churches use white or purple. There are liturgical objects as well as times. Of particular significance are the items used for the Eucharist. The chalice is placed on a white cloth known as the corporal and covered with a ‘purificator’ (a white cloth), above which is the paten – a shallow metal plate containing the communion wafers – which is covered by a pall, which is a cardboard-stiffened white linen cloth. All these are covered by a veil, which is removed during the third part of the Mass. At the commencement of the Mass, it is customary for two members of the laity to bring the consecrated bread, together with vessels containing wine and water – known as cruets – to the altar, on which there is a small bowl and a towel to enable the priest to wash his or her hands ceremonially before consecrating the elements. In some churches incense is used at various points in the service: the vessel in which it is burnt is known as a thurible, carried by a thurifer (usually a layperson). A High Mass is one which is celebrated from the High Altar, with choir, music and incense, and it normally requires three priests – the celebrant, a deacon and a sub-deacon. (It should be noted that the word ‘deacon’ in this context denotes the function of this member of the clergy who may either be a deacon by office or who may be a fully ordained priest.) A Low Mass is less elaborate and may be conducted by a single priest. The Protestant churches tend to react against what they regard as over-elaborate worship, taking the view that it is the worshipper’s heart that is important, rather than the external manifestations. Because worship patterns tend to vary and can be modified at the officiant’s discretion, there is technically not a liturgy as such, and a minister is more likely to define an ‘order of service’, which sets out the pattern that worship will follow on a particular Sunday. Some Protestant churches are described as ‘liturgical’, which means that they observe slightly more by way of ritual that is customary. In particular, the minister may utilize the church furniture, making use of the lectern and communion table, and only ascending to the pulpit for the sermon. Some churches in this tradition use liturgical colours for pulpit and altar falls, but not for the minister’s vestments.

MILLENNIALISM The term is used in sociology and theology and is sometimes applied outside the Christian tradition to refer to a belief in a coming utopian age, often believed to be heralded by violence. Also known as chiliasm, the term is sometimes used interchangeably with millenarianism, although etymologically the term ‘millenarianism’ derives from the Latin millenarius, which simply means ‘containing a thousand’, and hence does not strictly designate a period of a thousand years. Christian interest in a millennium, which is found in certain circles, relates to an interpretation of a single verse in the book of Revelation, which describes an angel who descends from heaven with a key to the Abyss, into which he throws Satan, and locks him in for a period of a thousand years to prevent him from deceiving the nations further. After the thousand years, Satan will be released and will engage in battle against God’s people, but he will be destroyed by fire from heaven and

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thrown into a lake of burning sulphur, together with ‘the beast and the false prophet’, to experience everlasting torment (Revelation 20:1–10). The Bible lists a number of events that are associated with the end times, but they are not located in any single passage, and the order in which they are expected to occur is not specified. These events include the Great Tribulation, the Battle of Armageddon, Christ’s return, the Last Judgement, the Millennium itself and the setting up of Christ’s heavenly kingdom. These events are described in the apocalyptic passages in the Bible, which are principally parts of Daniel, Matthew 25, Mark 13 and Revelation. Christians are divided on how literally to take these descriptions of end-time events. A recent survey indicated that 41 per cent of Americans believe that Jesus Christ will return to earth by the year 2050, with 46 per cent believing that this will not occur. Unsurprisingly, belief in Christ’s return is more prevalent among white evangelical Protestants (58 per cent agreeing), and less among Roman Catholics, of whom only 32 per cent believe that Christ will return within this period, and 57 per cent disbelieve it (Pew Research Center 2010b). Seventh-day Adventists hold that in 1844 Christ entered the heavenly sanctuary, fulfilling Daniel’s prediction relating to 2300 days, interpreted as years following the Jewish exile to Babylon (Daniel 8:14). After that date, Christ began an ‘investigative judgement’ of humankind’s deeds, in preparation for a final judgement, after Christ will return on the clouds of heaven (Daniel 7:13). There are three main forms of millennialism: premillennialism, postmillennialism and amillennialism. Premillennialists hold that the present age in which we are living precedes the millennium, while postmillennialists hold either that humanity is currently living in the millennium or that it has just elapsed, as a prelude to the coming utopia. Amillennialists deny that there is a literal thousand-year period, holding that the book of Revelation and other apocalyptic writings are to be interpreted as symbol and metaphor, rather than as a calendar of end-time events. Millennialists have often taught a ‘three age’ interpretation of history, sometimes known as Dispensationalism. The most popular form of Dispensationalism divides history into the Age of Law, the Age of Grace (or the Gospel Age) and the Coming Age. (Terminology varies slightly among Dispensationalists, and some subdivide these broad periods.) The notion that God has progressively revealed himself in successive covenants has been affirmed by various theologians throughout the Church’s history, but more recently gained momentum through the writings of J. N. Darby (1800–1882), who founded the Exclusive Brethren, and whose ideas have been particularly influential on the Brethren more widely. The Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909, disseminated this threefold view of Jewish-Christian history further and helped to popularize it. Millennialism and Dispensationalism are not confined to smaller Christian denominations. Such teachings have found expression among American Protestant fundamentalists, who believe in a coming Rapture. This teaching developed partly as an attempt to reconcile seemingly conflicting teachings within the Bible, which in some places portrays Christ’s return as a spectacular cosmic event, with angels sounding trumpets to herald Jesus’ return on the clouds (Matthew 26:64; Revelation 1:7), while elsewhere portraying his return more discreetly, like a thief in the night (Matthew 24:43; 1 Thessalonians 5:2; Revelation 16:15). This apparent contradiction is resolved by a doctrine of two comings, the first being an invisible Rapture and the second a highly visible return on the clouds of heaven. This interpretation is found in the popular Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, who portray the Rapture as a prelude to the Great Tribulation, which precedes the Millennium.

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Millennialism has found expression in ideologies that lie outside the mainstream Christian tradition. One such example is Nazi ideology, in which the expression ‘Third Reich’ denoted a state that would endure for a thousand years. This state would be the Age of the Holy Ghost, the preceding two states being the Holy Roman Empire (the Age of the Father – the ‘First Reich’, commencing in 800), and the German Empire under the Hohenzollern dynasty (the Age of the Son, 1871–1918). A not dissimilar form of dispensationalism is found in the earlier forms of the so-called New Age Movement, which believed that a new age – the Age of Aquarius – was dawning or had already arrived. This third age was defined by astrological sun signs, the previous two being Aries and Pisces. The symbol of Pisces is the fish, an ancient Christian symbol, and many New Agers believed that this signified the demise of the Church, heralding a new Aquarian age, which would be characterized by peace, love and material prosperity.

MIRACLES Mark’s Gospel relates that, before his ascension, Jesus promised that his disciples would be endowed with miraculous powers, including healing, casting out demons, speaking in tongues, handling poisonous snakes and drinking poison with impunity (Mark 16:17–18). However, Christians are divided between cessationists and continuationists, the former claiming that such powers were only given to the first generation of apostles and that they died out with their death. Modern biblical scholarship has tended to be sceptical about miracles, both ancient and modern, and liberal scholars, who were influenced by the ideas of the European Enlightenment, tended to rationalize biblical miracles. Some Christians have tended to accept this position, believing that a biblical miracle such as Jesus’ feeding of the 4,000 and 5,000 was an exaggeration of a situation in which members of the crowd shared food with each other. The vast majority of Christians, however, believe that Jesus miraculously rose from the dead, regarding his resurrection as a cornerstone of their faith. Most Christians fall into the continuationist camp, however. In a US survey in 2007, it emerged that 86 per cent of Protestants (88 per cent of evangelicals), 83 per cent of Roman Catholics and 79 per cent of Orthodox Christians believed in modern-day miracles (Pew Research Center 2010a). Most of the claimed present-day miracles by Christians are cures that do not readily admit of scientific explanation, but others – particularly in the Roman Catholic tradition – also relate to apparitions and phenomena such as weeping statues of the Virgin Mary. Some believe that on 21 March 2015, Pope Francis performed a miracle of liquefying the blood of Saint Gennaro, who was martyred in 305 ce, by kissing a phial containing it. Most healing miracles reportedly occur as a result of personal devotion and prayer, while phenomena such as weeping statues are spontaneous. A few individuals are accredited with special powers of miracle working: the Roman Catholic Church holds that certain Christians are endowed with ‘charisms’ – special graces, which can include thaumaturgic powers. The Protestant tradition has a number of faith healers, a small proportion of whom have gained publicity for publicly demonstrating their powers – for example Morris Cerullo and Benny Hinn, although their ministries have proved controversial, and their abilities have been questioned. A number of small churches, mainly in the Appalachian Mountains and in southeastern states, have taken Jesus’ words literally and practise snake-handling as a way of demonstrating God’s protection. There are estimated to be around 125 such

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congregations; of course, the practice is dangerous, and there have been approximately 100 documented deaths as a consequence. An even smaller number of such Christians have taken the challenge of drinking poison, attempting to consume doses of strychnine. Although philosophical discussion has tended to define miracles as violations of scientific laws, there are remarkable occurrences that some Christians classify as miracles, even though they may be scientifically explicable, for example the achievement of a deep desire, or survival of a traumatic experience, and they would show gratitude to God for the outcome.

MISSION Christians continue to see the importance of mission as an enactment of Jesus’ Great Commission (Matthew 28:19). Modern Christian mission has taken a variety of forms. The seventeenth century witnessed the Great Awakening, of which Thomas Coke is regarded as the ‘father’, and which is associated with Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield and John and Charles Wesley, who spread the gospel in Britain and North America. Some foreign missions began at this time. Thomas Coke began work in Antigua in 1786. A number of foreign missionary societies took their rise in the nineteenth century, including the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), which now continues to function as a publishing house. While being ultimately concerned with propagating the gospel and establishing churches that were capable of self-government, Christian mission also aimed at bringing health and education. Christian missionaries were also invaluable in pioneering Bible translation. Some regard the missionary heyday of the Victorian era as imperialist and colonialist. Many mission hymns referred to members of other cultures as ‘heathen’, ‘benighted’ and living in darkness, in need of the light of the Gospel. Most of these hymns have now been removed from modern hymnals, or else toned down. Decolonization, coupled with immigration to the West, international travel and increasing knowledge of the world’s religions, has seen a change in attitudes to other faiths, whose followers had done their share of evangelizing traditionally Christian territory. Those Christians who are involved in interfaith activities now perceive them as partners in dialogue rather than opportunities for conversion. The West is also finding that Christians from countries such as Africa, which was once a prime target for evangelism, are travelling west, attempting to spread their faith in Europe and America to those who are unchurched. Christians today view part of their mission as offering aid in areas of deprivation, and where natural disaster has occurred. Christian Aid was founded in 1945 to help refugees after the Second World War, and its work has expanded to thirty-seven countries. In the 1950s a designated Christian Aid Week was launched, in which churches sought volunteers to collect funds and to raise awareness of poverty and emergency relief. CAFOD (the Catholic Agency For Overseas Development) is the official Roman Catholic agency, actively campaigning for global justice. Tearfund (The Evangelical Alliance Refugee Fund) was set up in 1968, and likewise addresses problems of world poverty and disaster. Cliff Richard was an early supporter, eventually becoming its president. Christians tend to prefer keeping charitable work separate from evangelism, not wanting to offer economic benefits as an incentive to embrace the Christian faith, and because they perceive needs to be addressed, irrespective of the religious affiliation of those needing help. There remain, however, some Christian organizations that combine charitable work with proselytization. One such example is the controversial Samaritan’s

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Purse, headed by Franklin Graham, the son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham. Its Statement of Faith reads in part: ‘Samaritan’s Purse is meeting the physical needs of victims of war, famine, natural disaster, poverty and disease with the aim of demonstrating God’s love and sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ’ (Samaritan’s Purse 2019). Samaritan’s Purse has been involved in a number of controversies. In 1990, Operation Christmas Child – one of the organization’s projects – encouraged donors to fill shoeboxes with gifts for needy children in Romania; the shoeboxes included Bibles, and there was follow-up evangelism of the recipients. In 2001 victims of the El Salvador earthquake were made to attend a prayer meeting before receiving aid. In the UK Franklin described Islam as ‘a very wicked and evil religion’, and there have been controversies too regarding Graham’s salary (Muir 2003). Christians are concerned with home as well as foreign mission. One method of expanding the Christian faith is ‘church planting’, a method associated with John Wimber (1934–1997) and the Vineyard Churches, which he pioneered. Church planting involves sending a small group of members from the mother church to a new area, in which they commence a new small group, with a separate identity and life, and which grows in the community. Sometimes this is done by pioneering terrain in which the Christian faith is absent; at other times, a small group may alight on an area with the aim of replacing churches that have once been active but have fallen into decline or have collapsed through persecution. At other times, the planters may move into areas that already have a Christian presence, but with the purpose of establishing a different form of the Christian faith. Another scenario involves the sending of planters to cooperate with and further the work of existing Christian communities. Another form of church planting stems from Charles Peter Wagner (1930–2016), who pioneered the so-called New Apostolic Reformation Movement. It is Pentecostal and charismatic and has sometimes been described as the ‘Third Wave of the Holy Spirit’. It is highly organized and has enabled accelerated growth in Africa, China, the United States and Latin America. The movement acknowledges the offices of Apostles and Prophets; the latter gave extra-biblical revelations, which has given rise to the movement being labelled as a ‘cult’. Members claim to affirm traditional Christian doctrines, such as the Apostles’ Creed, but the innovatory prophecies have placed Wagner somewhat on the fringes of the Christian faith. One recent innovation in mission in the UK is Fresh Expressions (FXs). Instead of trying to persuade people to come to church when they have other commitments on Sundays, such as young people’s sports activities, Fresh Expressions took its rise in 2005 as a project run jointly by the Church of England and the Methodist Church, and has been subsequently supported by other Protestant denominations. The underlying policy is to find ‘new ways of being Church’ and to bring the Church out into the community rather than to attempt to bring the community into a traditional Sunday service. Fresh Expressions organizes events that do not look traditionally religious, such as a breakfast meeting, a cycling event, a project to tackle dementia – the limits to possibilities are unspecified – and to use the event as a platform for expressing and discussing the Christian faith. Another venture in mission is the Alpha Course, which began in 1977 at Holy Trinity Brompton, a Church of England parish church, as a basic introduction to the Christian faith for its members. The course is now particularly associated with Nicky Gumble, who took over its running in 1990. The course lasts for ten weeks and includes either a weekend community gathering or an awayday, and each session begins with the

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communal meal, followed by a talk and discussion in small groups. While originating in the Anglican and Protestant churches, the Alpha Course has been taken up by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, with slight adaptations. The course seeks to cover the common elements of the Christian faith, rather than doctrines that are specific to one particular tradition, such as veneration of the Virgin Mary. The course is now followed in over 100 countries, and in more than 100 languages. Alpha has also developed a marriage course and works with prisons and ex-offenders. Addressing social issues and problems is very much part of the Church’s perception of mission: it is not merely about proselytizing. Addressing problems such as alcohol addiction, gambling addiction, debt, homelessness, domestic violence and a range of other social ills are all part of the agenda of various denominations and are tackled on a variety of fronts – institutionally, locally and individually. In 2018 Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, fiercely attacked the loan firm Wonga, which specialized in payday loans at extremely high rates of interest and launched a plan for the Church of England to buy the company when it collapsed, in an attempt to offer improved help for those who urgently needed loans for short periods. Many churches have now opened their doors to offer food and washing facilities for the homeless, and many Christians have taken up employment either in specifically Christian social work agencies or in secular occupations that help the community.

MONASTICISM The monastic life has been part of the Christian tradition since the fourth century, when Saint Anthony the Great (251–356) began to lead a solitary life in Egypt. It has been pursued over the centuries by men and women who seek to perfect their lives, but find the everyday world unconducive to spiritual progress. Monasticism forms part of Roman Catholicism and involves subjecting oneself to a rule of life, usually involving poverty, chastity and obedience; privation and at times physical suffering are reckoned to be conducive to perfecting oneself. The word ‘monastery’ derives from the Greek monos, meaning alone, and monks were originally recluses who led a solitary life of devotion. While some monks continue to be eremitic (hermetic, or solitary), the majority are cenobitic – that is, living in communities. Such residences have various names, the most common of which is a monastery. An abbey is a larger community of monks or nuns – technically there must be twelve or more residents for it to be so named – governed by an abbot or abbess. The word ‘priory’ is sometimes used synonymously with ‘abbey’, but is lesser in rank, and often subordinate to the abbey. In a conventual priory, the residents may choose their own prior or prioress; in other types of priory, the incumbent is appointed by the abbot to whom the priory is subordinate. A nunnery is a community of nuns; often the word ‘convent’ is used synonymously, although the term more strictly is a community of mendicants, also called a friary. The term ‘eremitic’ relates to the word ‘hermit’, and denotes the solitary monk or nun. Solitaries can again be divided into two types: the recluse lives in an enclosure, near civilization, from which he can receive support in the form of basic necessities, and the hermit, who lives in remoter parts, and who is usually male. An anchorite or anchoress is one who never leaves his or her first cell; sometimes the cell is bricked up, with only a small hole in the brickwork to allow supporters to insert food and drink. Monastics were originally solitaries but found obvious advantages in living in cenobitic communities,

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where they could offer mutual support with a common goal of life, receiving physical and spiritual support from religious communities outside the monastery. The best-known Roman Catholic monastic orders are the Benedictines and the Cistercians. The former was founded by Saint Benedict (480–543), who is sometimes called the father of Western monasticism, and who adapted monastic practice to European needs. Benedict’s sister Scholastica founded her own order, governed by the same rule. Each Benedictine monastery is independent and autonomous, but the Benedictine Confederation is an international umbrella organization which was founded in 1893 to look after the interests of the various communities. All Roman Catholic orders, however, come under papal jurisdiction. As well as prayer, Benedictine monks engage in reading, which is done privately, during worship, and collectively at meal times. There are designated hours of silence, although Benedictines are not Trappists. Benedictines have also a history of manual labour. Contrary to popular belief, however, this does not include the making of the famous Bénédictine liqueur, which was first produced in nineteenth-century France. The wine merchant Alexandre Le Grand concocted a story that it was an elixir invented by a Benedictine monk called Dom Bernardo Vincelli in 1510 and that the recipe was lost during the French Revolution. The Cistercians branched off from the Benedictines. They are sometimes known as the White Monks on account of the colour of their cuccula – a white garment worn on top of their habits – in contrast with the Benedictines, who wear white cucculas. A seventeenthcentury reform movement caused some of them to favour a simpler lifestyle, leading to the formation of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance in 1892, which was an order of Trappist communities, who observe strict silence. Those Cistercians who remain within the original order are sometimes known as the Cistercians of the Common Observance. Cistercian orders include nuns as well as monks. Also noteworthy are the Franciscans, founded in 1209 by Saint Francis of Assisi (1181/1182–1226). They are divided into three main Orders: the Order of Friars Minor (an order of male mendicants), Poor Clares and the Secular Franciscan Order. The Poor Clares is an order of contemplative nuns, founded by Saint Clare of Assisi (1194–1253) and Saint Francis in 1212. The Secular Franciscan Order consists largely of laypeople who follow a secular way of life, outside of any religious community, and who meet together for teachings, prayer and meditation, and to share in the sacrament. Franciscans are reputed to have more visionaries and stigmatics than other holy orders: Saint Padre Pio (1887–1968) was renowned for his stigmata – bodily wounds corresponding to those of Christ, and which were believed to have healing powers. The Protestant Reformation had a seriously harmful effect on monastic life. Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries during the English Reformation involved the confiscation of monastic property and the destruction of a number of monasteries. Some smaller monasteries became parish churches, but the larger ones now serve as tourist attractions. In time, some of these properties were returned to the Church, and there are a number of monastic communities in the Anglican and, less commonly, in the Protestant traditions. The nineteenth-century Oxford Movement, with its Romanizing tendencies, introduced a number of Anglican religious orders; it is estimated that there are some 2400 celibate men and women, many of whom follow the Rule of Saint Benedict. In Scotland, Iona Abbey was founded by Saint Columba (521–597), who arrived on the small island in 563, and was in the Benedictine tradition until its destruction in 1560. It was re-established as a religious community in 1938 by the Church of Scotland minister George MacLeod (1895–1991), who oversaw its rebuilding. It no longer observes the

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tradition of monasticism, but has some 270 permanent residents, and has associate members and friends. It is now an ecumenical venture, seeking to promote peace and justice, with residential facilities for pilgrims from any religious tradition or none. In France, the Taizé Community, which is monastic in character, was founded in 1940 by a Protestant, Roger Schutz (1915–2005). It is particularly renowned for its meditational prayers and its distinctive meditative music, and visitors are encouraged to come and participate in the life of the community.

OFFICE BEARERS The various branches of the Christian Church have a bewildering number of office bearers and titles. In the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, the person responsible for the congregation is known as a priest. Within Anglicanism, some clergy like to call themselves priests, but this is a matter of personal preference and usually signals that they are in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. Most Anglican parish clergy are known as vicars or, less frequently, rectors. A deacon in both traditions is normally someone who is in the final stages of training for the priesthood and is authorized to perform baptisms and conduct marriages, but not to celebrate holy communion. It is an ordained office, but normally a transitory role. In the Church of England’s ordination ceremonies, ordinands are described as becoming ‘ordained deacon’ and ‘ordained priest’, even though those who are technically ordained as priests may prefer not to describe themselves as such. The term ‘priest’ is firmly rejected in the Protestant tradition, being associated with Roman Catholicism, and the preferred term for someone responsible for a church parish is ‘minister’. In some smaller denominations, the term ‘pastor’ is preferred. Somewhat confusingly, in the Protestant tradition the word ‘deacon’ is sometimes used to designate a member of a congregation’s management committee, which in some churches is known as the ‘Deacons’ Court’: this is a lay role, not an ordained one. In the Church of England, a curate is a probationary priest who is assigned to a parish for around four years, after which he or she is eligible for full responsibility over a congregation. In the Roman Catholic Church, by contrast, a curate is a senior role within a parish. Bishops are members of the clergy in the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions who have responsibility for a diocese and to whom priests and deacons are subservient. Where necessary, in large dioceses, bishops may be assisted by less senior bishops, for whom various titles are given, such as suffragan bishop, area bishop, auxiliary bishop – all these terms mean the same. A coadjutor bishop is someone in the Roman Catholic (and occasionally Anglican) tradition who has the right of succession to the bishopric on the incumbent’s resignation. The seat of a bishopric is a cathedral – derived from the Latin word cathedra, meaning seat. Usually a cathedral contains a large superior seat, which is reserved for the Bishop, but in the twenty-first century, it is rarely used for this purpose. The responsibility for the functioning of the cathedral, however, rests with the Dean (sometimes called Provost outside England). On the appointment of a new bishop, part of the bishop’s installation involves knocking loudly three times on the Great West door, whereupon it is opened by the Dean. This is to indicate that the running of the cathedral is the Dean’s prerogative and that the bishop’s presence requires the Dean’s permission. A canon is a member of the Anglican clergy, usually associated with a cathedral, and the term implies that he or she adopts an ordered way of life, being required to lead prayers and worship at determined times. In Church of England cathedrals, the terms

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‘Canon Chancellor’ and ‘Canon Precentor’ designate members of the clergy responsible for education and music respectively. In some very traditional Presbyterian Churches, the precentor is someone who leads unaccompanied singing and may be lay or ordained. Non-episcopal churches do not have a hierarchy of bishops and archbishops, but are governed by presbyteries, synods and General Assemblies. These are presided over by a moderator, whose position may be temporary or permanent, depending on the denomination. The highest authority in the Roman Catholic Church is of course the Pope, who is elected in conclave by the College of Cardinals. Orthodox Churches and Eastern Catholic Churches are overseen by a patriarchal or major archbishop. The Church of England is led by two archbishops – Archbishop of Canterbury and Archbishop of York. Although technically they are equal, the Archbishop of Canterbury is generally regarded as the leader of the Church of England. Technically, the monarch is the supreme governor, but plays little role in the organization and decision-making of the denomination. Mention should be made of titles that accompany the above offices. An ordained minister or priest is entitled to the title ‘Reverend’ or ‘Father’, according to tradition. It should be noted that the word ‘Reverend’ is an adjective and not a noun, although there is a popular tendency for those who do not belong to the Christian tradition to talk about ‘the reverend’ when referring to a member of the clergy. Cathedral Deans prefix their names with ‘Very Reverend’, a Bishop ‘Right Reverend’ in the Anglican tradition and ‘Most Reverend’ in Roman Catholicism, and an Archbishop is ‘Most Reverend’. There are many other titles, some of which are tokens of recognition rather than designations of offices, for example ‘Monsigneur’ in Roman Catholicism and ‘Prebendary’ in the Church of England.

ORDINATION Ordination is a rite of admission to a holy office, such as deacon, priest or bishop, and is regarded as a sacrament in the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions. In the Protestant churches, the term is also applied to the initiation of elders, and the terms ‘minister’ or ‘pastor’ are preferred to ‘priest’. These are all offices requiring spiritual leadership, and other office bearers are described as ‘appointed’ rather than ordained. Although a director of music might be regarded as having a spiritual role, and it is often a requirement that he or she is a committed Christian, musicians are not ordained to their role. Ordination as a priest or minister confers special powers, especially the right to officiate at holy communion, but elders in the Protestant tradition are not empowered to celebrate the sacraments, although they assist with the distribution of bread and wine; they may also be assigned parishioners over whom to exercise spiritual care. Deacons, priests and bishops are regarded as clergy, while elders and other office bearers have lay roles, and clergy typically prefix their names with the title ‘Reverend’ or some synonym. Clergy are normally expected to have undergone training at a college or seminary and to undergo a rigorous selection process before embarking on their study. The appropriate protocol is deemed important in ordination ceremonies and usually involves the laying on of hands. Physical contact serves as a guarantor that the candidate for ordination maintains a link with the tradition into which he or she is ordained. In the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions, importance is attached to the doctrine of apostolic succession – that is, a tangible lineage that is traceable back to Jesus Christ himself, who is the founder of the Church.

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In the episcopal traditions, the ordination of deacons and priests must be performed by a bishop. When ordaining a bishop, three other bishops are required in the Eastern Orthodox traditions, while in Roman Catholicism, only one is deemed sufficient, although it is a requirement of the Roman Catholic Church that all such appointments have formal papal approval. Offices higher than that of Bishop do not require ordination as such. Archbishops and cardinals are regarded as more senior types of bishop: the Roman Catholic curia consists of all clergy from bishops upwards, and ordination to the status of Bishop serves as a kind of threshold. Ordination is both irreversible and non-repeatable: if a priest moves to a different parish, he or she is not re-ordained, but there will normally be a service at which the appointed member of the clergy will be formally received by the congregation, and the ceremony will be given some other name, such as installation or induction. On leaving a particular appointment, one who is ordained still retains his or her authority and powers; a priest, for example, may legitimately continue to hear confessions or celebrate holy communion if invited to do so. Very rarely, disciplinary action can cause a priest to be defrocked, and a bishop may occasionally bar a priest from celebrating the sacrament. In the Roman Catholic Church and Church of England, it is common practice for a new parish priest or vicar to be led around the church building, as part of the induction ceremony, in the course of which the appointee touches the significant objects and pieces of furniture, such as the door, the baptismal font, the confessional booth (in the case of a Roman Catholic church) and the altar. The incoming member of the clergy is presented with a number of gifts as part of the induction service. These usually include a key, signifying that the new appointee has the right to enter and leave the church, and other items which may include a Bible, a purse or wallet, a pen and other such objects. Some Protestant congregations make a point of stocking the new minister’s pantry with basic foodstuffs before his or her arrival. In some churches another member of the clergy comes on the new incumbent’s first Sunday and preaches the sermon, which includes an introduction to the new appointee; in some circles, this is known as ‘preaching in’ the new vicar or minister. Some categories of people are ineligible for ordination. Women may not be ordained in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, although many, but not all, Protestant denominations now accept women on equal terms. The issue of gay, lesbian, transsexual Christians receiving ordination remains a controversial, and a highly complex, issue. In all probability, the Church has ordained homosexual clergy since its origins, and although there are Christians who say they are opposed to ‘homosexuality’, it is hard to oppose undeclared inner tendencies that have no external manifestation. The problem of lesbian and gay clergy began to arise in the mid-1960s, when many countries with anti-gay legislation revised their laws in a more liberal direction, and it was safe for gay and lesbian people to ‘come out’. The various churches now have to deal with a variety of expressions of homosexual behaviour, which include self-declared homosexual leanings, same-sex sexual relationships, same-sex partnerships and same-sex marriages, and there are also transgender issues that have required decisions. There have been situations where a clergyperson’s sexual orientation has not been apparent at the time of ordination, but a situation subsequently changes. This was a particular problem in 2000 for the Church of England, when a priest decided to transition from male to female. In 1968 the Metropolitan Community Church was founded specifically for gay, lesbian and transgender Christians and continues to serve as a spiritual home where members are free from opposition and prejudice. In the 1970s the United Church of Christ began

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to ordain openly gay clergy, but it was not until the turn of the millennium that other denominations began to follow suit. A number of high-profile cases came to public attention. In 1999 Peter Wheatley was ordained as bishop of London. In 2003 Gene Robinson was elected bishop coadjutor of New Hampshire, becoming a diocesan bishop in 2004; this appointment was more controversial than Wheatley’s, since Robinson was in an openly gay relationship. Also in 2003 in England, Jeffrey John, who was Dean of St Albans Cathedral, was nominated as Bishop of Reading, but this aroused fierce opposition, owing to John’s same-sex relationship with an Anglican priest, resulting in John stepping down. The opposition to Jeffrey John prompted Giles Fraser to found the Inclusive Church, an organization aiming to achieve full equality, regardless of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation within the Church of England. Many denominations remain opposed to homosexuality, including the Seventh-day Adventists, the Southern Baptist Convention, most Pentecostal denominations and many Anglican provinces in the Global South. Within Anglicanism there have been fears of a split, and a few congregations in the United States and England have split away, forming a Continuing Anglican Movement, homosexuality being one of a number of divisive issues.

PRAYER It is unusual for any service of worship in any Christian tradition to omit prayer as a component. For the Christian, prayer may be either public or private, and it can be made at any time or in any place, although it is acknowledged that certain times and places are more conducive to prayer than others. A recent study indicated that the majority of Christians pray every day: 55 per cent in the United States, and around 50 per cent in the UK, with 21 per cent of US respondents stating that they prayed weekly or monthly, and 23 per cent seldom or never. Women are inclined to pray more often than men (64 per cent of the US female population, compared with 46 per cent male). In the UK survey, 57 per cent believe that prayer changed their lives, 32 per cent claimed they had seen its effects, 59 per cent claimed that prayer had affected the lives of others for whom they prayed, 47 per cent believed that it effected change for those living in poverty, and 50 per cent believed that prayer changed the world. Of countries where Christianity is the dominant religion, Poland showed the greatest use of prayer (87 per cent claimed to take moments of prayer and meditation) and Russia the least (only 35 per cent) (Tearfund 2007; Pew Research Center 2014a). Christians are encouraged to engage in private devotion, and various denominations make numerous aids to prayer available, either in the form of books of prayers or instruction manuals about methods of praying. Encouragement for personal prayer is particularly made at certain times of the year, notably Lent and Advent. During Lent, prayer may be accompanied by fasting, or at least the giving up of some luxury, usually a dietary one. The Roman Catholic Church has encouraged prayer using the rosary for the purpose of counting the number of prayers set by the devotee, but this practice tends to incur disapproval by Protestants. Many churches offer facilities for offering private prayers (normally petitions, but sometimes thanksgiving) in written form, either in a box or prayer wall. These are collected by the clergy, who incorporate them into their own prayers. The so-called ‘prayer tree’ is gaining in popularity: this involves either a small replica tree or a picture of a tree, placed inside a church, with blank small paper ‘leaves’ placed beside it. Visitors are invited to write their prayer on the leaf and add it to the tree. Some congregations now offer such facilities online.

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Prayers can be classified into a number of types, which tend to be distinguished in public liturgy. Prayers of penitence normally feature near the commencement of public worship, since worshippers should place themselves in a right position with God before hearing God’s word and particularly before receiving the sacrament of holy communion. Adoration usually follows, as a way of focusing worship. Other categories of prayer include thanksgiving, petition (prayer on behalf of oneself) and intercession (prayer for others). Intercession normally features as a component of public worship in its own right. Additionally, in many Christian traditions, use is made of ‘collects’; these are short set prayers with a formulaic structure – invocation, description of a divine attribute, petition, desired result, pleading, as in the following example: Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan; Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. Collects are defined for particular days in the Church’s calendar, and the above example may be used in the First Sunday of Lent, marking Jesus’ temptation by the Devil. It would be unusual for a service to omit the Lord’s Prayer, being the prayer that Jesus encouraged his disciples to use (Matthew 6:9–13). In the Protestant tradition, prayer tends to be freer in style, and Protestants often favour extempore prayer rather than prayers read from a prayer manual or prepared by the officiant in advance. This is particularly true of the Pentecostal and Adventist traditions, where it is believed that prayer should come from the heart, and hence be spontaneous. In some Protestant congregations, it is customary to hold regular prayer meetings, where members are invited to come and pray together. Some churches advertise a ‘chain of prayer’, which can take various forms. Its premise is that prayers have a critical mass and are more likely to be effective if a sufficient number of people commit themselves to praying. Accordingly, members of the chain can be organized and given time slots, so that prayers are continually being offered round the clock. Another practice is for a prayer to be circulated through a personal message, like a chain letter: the recipient is asked to send a prayer to several other people (frequently twelve), who are asked to do likewise, thus exponentially multiplying the number of people offering this prayer. Another meaning that is sometimes given to ‘chain prayer’ is a form of prayer used at prayer meetings, in which attendees are invited to put up a personal prayer successively. The Roman Catholic Church considers that such techniques of praying are superstitious, however. Certain dates are designated as days of prayer for special purposes. The World Council of Churches designates a Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. A Women’s World Day of Prayer invites Christians (including men) worldwide to observe the first Friday of March each year to pray for peace and justice. At times, churches have called special meetings for prayer where a particular need or emergency has arisen. To encourage prayer as a discipline, certain times are recommended. These are highly structured for holy orders, where ‘canonical hours’ are defined in the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions as specified times for prayer throughout the day. Within Anglicanism, these are defined as Morning Prayer, Prayer During the Day, Evening Prayer and Compline (Night Prayer). In England, priests are required by canon law to read to these prayers daily, but many find this unduly demanding amidst other responsibilities. The observance of canonical hours now tends to be confined to monastic communities.

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For private devotion, pious Christians will pray before retiring to bed and perhaps on rising in the morning. However, prayer can be offered in any time and in any place. Some churches promote the idea of ‘arrow prayers’ – sometimes called ‘bullet prayers’, ‘hurry prayers’ or even ‘microwave prayers’. These are short prayers that are to the point and for specific and often immediate purposes, such as being called into an interview or having to deal with a temptation. Such prayers can take a conversational tone, such as ‘Please help me to do my best’, although some churches recommend traditional brief prayers such as the Jesus Prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’, or ‘O send out thy light and thy truth’ (Psalm 43:3, KJV). It is believed, both in the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions, that prayer is an art that needs to be learnt. Accordingly, there is a considerable literature market in books of prayers and books about how one should pray.

PROPHECY Christians acknowledge that the Bible contains prophecy and that certain Old Testament books are attributed to authors known as prophets. Christians typically associate prophecy with prediction, although some are aware that the word ‘prophet’ means someone who speaks out on God’s behalf and may address issues like social injustice. It is generally believed that Old Testament prophecy points forward to Jesus Christ and was fulfilled in him. The fact that the Old Testament prophets spoke to situations in their own time, and not merely looked forward, has led some Christians, particularly in the Adventist tradition, to believe in a ‘lesser fulfilment’ and a ‘greater fulfilment’. For example, Isaiah was speaking about events in his own time when he prophesied that ‘a virgin shall conceive and bear a son’ (Isaiah 7:14), but Christians have generally held that he was also alluding to a greater and more significant event, namely the birth of Jesus. The Bible’s apocalyptic writings and passages are also interpreted widely as predictive, referring to end-time events, some of which are believed to be presently occurring, and others that are yet to occur. Examples include the Great Tribulation, and the rise of the Antichrist and the false prophet; such ideas are explored in various end-time works of speculative fiction, the best-known of which are LaHaye and Jenkins’ Left Behind series. The Bible also mentions prophecy as a gift of the Spirit and an office within the early Church: ‘he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers’ (Ephesians 4:11). Most Christians hold that prophecy is complete, and that such special gifts died out with the early Church. Christians tend to be wary of those who claim some new prophetic revelation, such as Joseph Smith or Sun Myung Moon. Prophecy is to be interpreted, rather than to be added to, and the canon of scripture, including prophecy, is closed. Nonetheless, there exist a small handful of denominations that have a prophet as a formally designated office: these are mainly small denominations in the Pentecostal tradition, such as New Frontiers and the Christ Apostolic Church. Some Christian preachers, equating prophecy with speech on God’s behalf, will sometimes precede their words with expressions like ‘The Lord has laid on my heart … ’ Christians have sometimes laid down principles for recognizing genuine prophecy: for example, the speakers must lead a godly life, there should be confirmation of what they say, they should not be afraid of speaking in a forthright way and above all their words should not contradict scripture.

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SACRAMENTS Sacraments are special rites within the Christian Church, which mediate divine grace by making visible what is invisible. While the believer cannot see Christ’s glorified body in its full reality, the bread and wine give substance to what cannot yet be fully experienced. As the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer states, the sacrament is ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’ and is a practice that is believed to have been instituted by Christ. Roman Catholics acknowledge seven sacraments: baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, penance, anointing the sick (previously known as extreme unction), admission to holy orders and matrimony. Individuals are not expected to undergo all seven – indeed, since monks and clergy are celibate, ordination is incompatible with matrimony. However, baptism is essential as a means of entry to the Church and is a prerequisite for participating in the other sacraments. The sacramental nature of marriage entails that it is only indissoluble through death; a marriage can only be annulled – implying that it never properly took place – and a civil divorce has no status in the Church’s eyes. The Orthodox position is that anything that occurs within the context of the Church can be regarded as a sacrament, including the consecration of the church building or burial of the dead. However, it acknowledges seven ‘principal’ sacraments, which it prefers to call ‘sacred mysteries’. These are the same as those of the Roman Catholic Church, but the nomenclature is slightly different: baptism, chrismation, Holy Eucharist, confession, holy unction, matrimony, priesthood. Chrismation is performed as part of the baptism ceremony, since the child (or adult convert) is regarded as a full member of the Church once he or she has been baptized. Also, it is possible for a priest to be married, but only if the marriage has taken place before his admission as a deacon; once he has become ordained to the priesthood, marriage is no longer allowed. Protestants acknowledge only two sacraments – baptism and holy communion, which is the preferred term for the Eucharist; they have a strong aversion to the use of the word ‘Mass’, being the Roman Catholic term. It is held that only these two rites were specifically instituted by Jesus Christ, who said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ at the Last Supper (Luke 22:19), and, ‘go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ (Matthew 28:19). Although Jesus is believed to have been present at a wedding in Cana (John 2:1–11), he gives no instruction that any of his followers should marry, although Protestant ministers will often refer to the incident in the course of a marriage ceremony, indicating Jesus’ approval of the institution of marriage. Two denominations do not celebrate sacraments: the Quakers and the Salvation Army. The Quakers originate from the Puritan tradition, which sought to remove external manifestations of religion, since true devotion should come from the heart. The Salvation Army, similarly, emphasizes inner grace rather than external ritual, and also believes that the sacraments have proved divisive in the course of Christian history. In smaller denominations, holy communion may be referred to as the ‘breaking of bread’. The different traditions have different understandings of holy communion. The Roman Catholic Church has traditionally affirmed the doctrine of transubstantiation, which entails a belief in the occurrence of a real change that the bread and wine undergo during the Mass. Historically this has been associated with Aristotelian metaphysics, where the distinction is made between an entity’s underlying ‘substance’ and its visible ‘accidents’: thus the bread and wine are deemed to change substantially, while remaining

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visibly the same. It is doubtful whether the average Catholic would be able to explain the doctrine: a 2010 survey indicated that only 55 per cent of US Catholics knew – not necessarily believed – that the Church taught that the bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood (Pew Research Center 2010c). The Protestant tradition tends to reject any metaphysical explanation of what happens to the bread and wine, tending to view the sacrament as a memorial and an act of thanksgiving. Jesus used the word ‘remembrance’, and the word ‘Eucharist’ is derived from the Greek eucharistein, ‘to thank’. In the Protestant tradition, it is usual for the altar rail to be abolished and for the elements to be brought out by elders to the congregation, who remain in the pews. Protestants dislike the word ‘altar’, preferring to use the term ‘communion table’, since an altar is a place of sacrifice, and Protestantism rejects the doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass. In the Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions, the high altar is the focal point of the church building, and it is considered inappropriate to find any object behind it, such as the organ. Less respect is given to the communion table in the Protestant tradition, and it is quite common for flowers to be placed on it for decoration – something one would not find in other traditions. In Orthodoxy, the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is not accepted, but on the other hand, the Orthodox reject the notion that the Eucharist is simply a memorial. It is a mystery in which Christ is believed to be truly present, but the Orthodox Christian’s lack of understanding is not necessarily due to ignorance, but to the fact that such matters are beyond human comprehension. The gradual unfolding of divine mystery is underlined by the slow pace of the Orthodox Eucharist; the service can last as long as two and a half hours and considerable time elapses before the priest brings out the elements from behind the iconostasis. There are three main requirements for a rite to be a valid Eucharist: it must have the right matter, the right form and the right intention. This is more than a point in liturgics: it has important implications for worshippers. The meaning of the third of these is obvious: if a filmmaker were to include a scene involving a Eucharist, it would not be a valid sacrament, since its aim was to entertain an audience, rather than to commemorate Christ’s death. The right matter is bread and wine. The type of bread is an issue that has divided Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism: the Orthodox tradition insists that the bread should be leavened, arguing that the Greek word artos means a loaf, and is the word used when the Gospel writers state that Jesus ‘took bread’ at the Last Supper (Luke 22:19). By contrast, in the Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions, an unleavened wafer is used, on the ground that the Last Supper was celebrated at Passover time, and the Jews did not permit leavened bread during the Passover season. Protestant churches use ordinary baker’s bread. The Orthodox invariably use red, alcoholic wine, and their practice is to mix the wine and bread together in a chalice. Communicants go to the altar rail, where the priest uses a long spoon to insert the mixture into each mouth; in other traditions, the two elements are kept separate. In the Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions, the wine may be either red or white. Red may seem preferable, being reminiscent of Christ’s blood; the reason for using white wine is unclear, some believing that Jewish wine was typically white, while others offer a practical explanation, namely that any spillage is less likely to stain the altar cloth. In both traditions, it is customary to mix a small quantity of water with the wine; this is an ancient practice going back to the first century, reminding the Christian that at the crucifixion, blood and water flowed from Jesus’ side after a soldier pierced him with a spear (John 19:34). Since a number of Protestants are teetotal, many

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Protestant churches use unfermented wine, and therefore prefer using small individual glasses – rather like shot glasses – since it would be unhygienic to share a chalice in which the wine was non-alcoholic. Apart from small denominations that are entirely lay-led, all Christian traditions require the Eucharist to be celebrated by an appropriately ordained priest or minister. The issue of who is regarded as properly ordained is one which divides Christians and affects one’s eligibility for receiving the sacrament. Only Orthodox Christians may communicate in an Orthodox church, and only Catholics in a Catholic church. The Anglican and Protestant traditions are more inclusive: in most Anglican churches, anyone who is accustomed to receiving communion in any mainstream denomination may participate; alternatively, anyone who is ineligible may come forward to the altar rail and receive a blessing from a priest. The protocol in Protestant churches varies somewhat, since congregations generally have discretion. It is a normal expectation that those who partake of the elements are members of a branch of the Church, but we have heard ministers extend the invitation to ‘all those who love the Lord’, and one of the authors recalls a United Reformed minister who, while the communion service was in progress, invited anyone who had decided to follow Christ ‘even from this moment’, thus placing the onus on the individual worshipper to decide his or her eligibility.

SAINTS The King James Version of the Bible uses the word ‘saint’ to refer to all members of the early Christian congregations and to those in the Old Testament who have been faithful servants of God. When the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed mention ‘the communion of saints’, the word denotes the totality of God’s faithful ones. At an early stage of the Church’s history, the word came to be applied to the spiritual virtuosos of the Christian faith. Becoming a saint involves a formal process of recognition, which can often be a lengthy process, although in recent times, there have been examples of fairly swift canonization, as in the case of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who died in 1997, and was canonized in 2016. In the Roman Catholic Church, an expert is appointed to investigate the candidate’s life and sends the information to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints (created by Pope Paul VI in 1969). If this information is favourable, the candidate may then be accorded the title of ‘Venerable’. The next stage is beatification, which confers the title ‘The Blessed’. To proceed to canonization, at least two miracles must be attributed to the candidate after his or her death, and substantiated. Until 1983, a Promoter of the Faith – commonly known as the ‘Devil’s Advocate’ – was appointed to put the case against canonization, but Pope John Paul II abolished this office. The title ‘Saint’ is only accorded to those in the Christian tradition and not to Old Testament patriarchs or matriarchs such as Abraham and Sarah. The word ‘Saint’ can also be prefixed to certain angels, notably Michael, Gabriel, Uriel and Raphael. The word ‘saint’ continues to be used in its wider application in hymnody, for example, ‘For all the saints, who from their labours rest’ and ‘Let saints on earth in concert sing.’ In Eastern Orthodoxy, the term ‘saint’ is applied to anyone who has reached heaven. Since the term essentially means ‘holy’, it can also be applied to the abstract virtue of wisdom; thus it is not uncommon to find Orthodox churches with the name of ‘Saint Sophia’. The Oriental Orthodox Churches, in common with Roman Catholicism, have a process of canonization of their spiritual virtuosos, but, since each of these Churches is autocephalous, each Church defines its own process of recognition.

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Saints can be prayed to, and they can intercede on behalf of the faithful. Particular saints are often accorded specific functions: for example, Saint Anthony is associated with lost property, and Saint Jude can be invoked for apparently lost causes. Saints are not prayed for, however, since they no longer have any necessity for human intercession. The Protestant churches do not have a process of canonization and disapprove strongly of the invocation of saints as intermediaries, holding that the believer has direct access to God, with only Christ interceding on one’s behalf. They are less likely to use the names of saints in naming churches, although biblical saints are sometimes used for such purposes, as well as Celtic saints who have brought Christianity to the relevant country, such as Saint Ninian or Saint Columba. The Anglican community’s attitude to saints is somewhat ambivalent. The 39 Articles state: The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Relics, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God. (Article 22: Of Purgatory) Anglican churches, nonetheless, frequently have their own patron saint, who will sometimes be asked to pray on behalf of the people, but they sometimes make a distinction between patronage and veneration.

VIRGIN MARY The majority of Christians believe in the Virgin Birth: ‘born of the Virgin Mary’ is a phrase that occurs in both the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds. Mary is particularly venerated in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, in which she is described as the ‘Mother of God’. The Virgin Birth is not to be confused with the Immaculate Conception, which is the doctrine that Mary was born without sin. Mary is held to have perpetual virginity, and references to Jesus having brothers and sisters are interpreted as referring to close relatives, probably cousins. In 1950 Pope Pius XII formally defined the Dogma of the Assumption ex cathedra – the belief that Mary was miraculously taken up into heaven. The Church of the Dormition in Jerusalem marks the place from which Mary is believed to have ascended. Because there are no bodily remains of Mary, no bodily relics are associated with her. However, various garments are believed to have endured: Chartres Cathedral houses the veil which Mary is said to have worn when she gave birth to Jesus, and the Shrine to the Virgin at Aachen claims to have Mary’s shroud, together with the swaddling clothes in which the baby Jesus was wrapped. Another relic is the Holy Girdle, which is a belt made of camel hair, which Mary dropped during her ascension, as a memento for the Apostles, to remind them of her presence on earth. Another place of devotion is Mary’s House, situated in Ephesus in modern Turkey. When dying on the cross, Jesus requested the apostle John to look after his mother, and, according to tradition, John went to Ephesus, and it is therefore inferred that Jesus’ mother would have gone with him. In 1830 the Virgin Mary is believed to have appeared to Saint Catherine Labouré and requested her to coin an oval medal bearing the Virgin’s image, as she appeared in the apparition. The Shrine of the Miraculous Medal in Paris contains the medal and is the second most popular place of Catholic pilgrimage after Lourdes.

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Images of the Virgin Mary can be found in all the Roman Catholic churches, and her image appears frequently in Orthodox icons. She is invoked in the liturgies of both traditions, and, despite her association with Roman Catholicism, she receives more mention in the Eastern liturgies. Many churches and monasteries are dedicated to Mary. Mary is believed to intercede on behalf of the faithful, who are encouraged to ‘pray the rosary’ – that is, to use a rosary to focus on prayer to the Virgin. A number of festivals are focused on the Virgin Mary. The Annunciation is celebrated in Roman Catholic and Anglican churches on 25 March, and the Third Sunday in Advent directs attention on Mary. Catholic and Orthodox Churches celebrate the Dormition of the Theotokos, the Nativity of the Theotokos and the Presentation of the Theotokos to the Temple. (‘Theotokos’ is Greek for ‘bearer of God’ – an ancient title, acknowledging Jesus Christ’s deity.) This last festival marks an extra-biblical story: Joachim and Anne, Mary’s parents, were childless but received a message from heaven that Anne would give birth to a daughter; in gratitude, they brought Mary to the Jerusalem Temple as a child. Mary is believed to have appeared to a number of devotees. Such appearances are known as apparitions, the most famous of which being that of Bernadette of Lourdes. Other renowned Marian shrines relate to apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico; Our Lady of La Salette, who appeared in 1846 to two children; and the Basilica of Our Lady, Queen of Ireland, at Knock. Our Lady of Fatima at Portugal is associated with prophecy as well as healing: she is believed to have predicted the Second World War. Mary also features in literature, music and art. The Madonna and Child has been painted by various famous artists, and numerous composers have written works entitled ‘Ave Maria’ for choral singing and for keyboard. While Protestants accept the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, they often react unfavourably to the emphasis given to Mary within Roman Catholicism, holding that devotion should exclusively be directed to God and to Jesus Christ, to whom they have access without the need for intermediaries such as Mary. Sometimes they have pejoratively described devotion to Mary as ‘Mariolatry’. Basing their beliefs on the Bible rather than on Church tradition, they sometimes recount an incident related by Luke, in which a woman says to Jesus, ‘Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you,’ to which Jesus replies, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it’ (Luke 11:27– 28). The Protestant accusations of Mariolatry are not eased by the apparently increasing devotion to Mary, evidenced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century papal encyclicals that have affirmed Mary’s status as Co-Mediatrix and Co-Redemptrix. Popular pressure was brought on Pope John Paul II with a petition, started in the United States 1993, urging him to acknowledge the Virgin Mary as ‘Co-Redemptrix, Mediator of all Races and Advocate for the People of God’, and which attracted over six million signatories. Pope Benedict XV (reigned 1914–1922) introduced the Feast of Mary Mediatrix of All Graces as an optional festival, to be observed annually on 15 December. Such developments have done little to further ecumenical progress.

WOMEN Despite the fact that women substantially outnumber men at public worship, Christianity has been male-dominated throughout its history. Many Christians have invoked scriptural authority for claiming that the husband is the head of the family and that the wife should be obedient and subordinate. Paul (or writers using Paul’s name) writes, ‘the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church’ (Ephesians 5:23),

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO STUDYING CHRISTIANS

and ‘I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet’ (1 Timothy 2:12). The notion of the husband’s hegemonic role is reiterated in the Southern Baptist Convention’s Basic Beliefs: while claiming that ‘The husband and wife are of equal worth before God,’ it adds, ‘A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.’ Unsurprisingly, the Southern Baptist Convention does not permit the ordination of women. Numerous other – usually conservative – denominations do not admit women to leadership roles. Women have always been allowed domestic and organizational roles within congregations, and, perhaps more importantly, there have been women saints throughout the Church’s history, and individual churches are named after them. From the mid-nineteenth century, women began seeking ordination in various denominations. Antoinette Brown (1825–1921) is often cited as the first to achieve ordination, in 1853. However, this was in a Congregationalist church and, because of congregational autonomy, her ordination was not accepted by some other congregations. When the Salvation Army was founded in 1865, women officers were appointed; however, a man may not marry a woman of superior rank. The (Pentecostal) Assemblies of God have always accepted women pastors since they were founded in 1914, and in 1917 the Congregationalist Church in England and Wales appointed women ministers for the first time, to be followed in 1920 by a number of Baptist churches. The First Anglican woman priest to be appointed was Florence Li Tim Oi, in 1944 in Hong Kong, and in 1948 some Lutheran Churches began ordaining women; subsequently Anglican churches in the United States supported female ordination. In 1992 the General Synod of the Church of England approved women’s ordination, and two years later, 32 women priests were ordained. Inevitably, because men had been in post longer than women, it was some time before women bishops were appointed. The first was Barbara Harris, ordained as a suffragan bishop in 1989, and in 2006 Katharine Jefferts Schori was appointed as a presiding bishop, responsible for an entire diocese. In England, Libby Lane became the first bishop in 2015, and on 14 September 2018, Melissa Skelton became the first female archbishop, when she was installed as Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Ecclesiastical Province of British Columbia and Yukon in Canada. In the Presbyterian tradition, the Church of Scotland began ordaining women as elders in 1966, and in 1968, women ministers were introduced. A number of more conservative denominations, such as the Free Church of Scotland, continue to exclude them. Although the Seventh-day Adventists were founded by a woman, at the time of writing, women’s ordination within the denomination is a matter of heated debate. Only four of the denomination’s thirteen Divisions have given unqualified approval, while others believe that change should only be allowed if all the divisions agree. The Southern African and Indian Division is not only opposed to female ordination but wishes to rescind the denomination’s past decision to appoint women elders. In Roman Catholicism, there appears to be little likelihood of women’s ordination in the foreseeable future. In 1994 Pope John Paul II declared that the Church had no authority to ordain women and that no further discussion was allowed. Women, however, may enter monastic orders, and they are also permitted to have roles in public worship, such as reading lessons and leading prayer. Within Orthodoxy, there appear to be no prospects of allowing women to have leadership roles. A number of movements have been set up to curb the status of women. In England, Forward in Faith opposes women’s ordination, and a number of parish churches have

A-Z

279

affiliated with the organization, creating ‘no go’ areas for women priests. Arguments against admitting women to the priesthood appeal to the historical fact that Jesus’ twelve disciples were all men and that since the priest is the representative of Christ, he must be male, since a female cannot represent a male head of the Church. Other arguments have drawn attention to Eve being created as Adam’s helper, and as subordinate to Adam, being a secondary creation, fashioned out of Adam’s rib; she is also portrayed as the first to sin. Opponents believe that the feminist movement is a cultural phenomenon and that the Christian faith should not be driven by secular ideologies, but tradition and scripture. By contrast, Christian feminists have argued that Jesus had female disciples, for example Mary of Bethany, that women had leadership roles in the early Church and that women are portrayed as the first witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, despite the fact that women’s testimony was considered inferior to that of men in Jewish law.

NOTES

CHAPTER 2 1. These statistics were first published in Daughrity, 2010. For methodological details, see pp. 255–56. The sources for my statistics are the CIA World Factbook, the World Christian Database operated by Brill Publishers and the US Department of State’s International Religious Freedom Report. 2. In 2002 there were a reported 10,745 missionaries sent from South Korea. 3. These statistics are from Bellofatto and Johnson, 2013. The full report can be downloaded here: http://www.gordonconwell.edu/ockenga/research/documents/ChristianityinitsGlobal Context.pdf. 4. Pentecostal Christianity gets its name from Acts 2, when the apostles were celebrating the Jewish feast of Pentecost in Jerusalem and began to speak in tongues. Charismatic Christianity is similar, as the word ‘charisma’ is the Greek word for ‘gifts’, meaning the gifts of the Holy Spirit. 5. For fertility rates statistics, see Daughrity 2010: 3. 6. See World Methodist Council, located at: http://worldmethodistcouncil.org/about/memberchurches/. 7. See the World Communion of Reformed Churches, located at: http://wcrc.ch/about-us. 8. See Anglican Communion, located at: http://www.aco.org/identity/about.aspx. 9. See the Lutheran World Federation, located at: https://www.lutheranworld.org/content/ about-lwf. 10. See Bebbington 2010, p. 3. See also Baptist World Alliance, located at: http://www.bwanet. org/. 11. See ‘The Death and Resurrection of Christianity in Russia’; Daughrity 2018, ch. 2. 12. A scholarly analysis of the World Christian Database was conducted by sociologists at Princeton University in 2008, confirming its reliability. See Hsu et al., 2008. 13. See Center for the Study of Global Christianity, 2018. In Daughrity, 2010, I identified eight cultural blocks in the world: Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Oceania, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and North America. 14. In this section, Kalu is borrowing from Hastings 1994: 449. 15. See the WCC membership website at: https://www.oikoumene.org/en/member-churches/ church-of-christ-harris-mission-harrist-church. 16. See my discussion of Kimbangu and Kimbanguism in Daughrity, 2015: 53ff.

CHAPTER 3 1. There is one exception – the Diocese of Leeds – which has three cathedrals, and was created in 2014 by merging the dioceses of Bradford, Ripon and Leeds, and Wakefield.

NOTES

281

CHAPTER 6 1. For work that also focuses on the importance of ‘everyday religion’, see for instance Ammerman (2006, 2013) and McGuire (2008). 2. For a volume tracing the history and resurgence of anthropological work on Catholicism, see Norget et al. eds (2017). 3. For a rural study with a similarly wide range, see Webster (2013). 4. Day draws on http://news.bbc.co.uk/l/shared/spl/hi/uk/03/census_200l/html/religion.stm (accessed March 2008).

CHAPTER 8 1. These included all works published by the British Council of Churches: Mixed Faith Marriages: A Case for Care (1982), Can We Pray Together: Guidelines for Worship in a MultiFaith Society (1983), Educational Principles in Religious Education (1986) and Worship in Education (1989). 2. See Inter Faith Issues 11, March 2002, part of the Connexional Link Mailing of the Methodist Church in Britain. 3. Current Dialogue (CD), the WCC journal on inter-religious encounter, dedicated its December 2015 edition (CD 57) to ‘Multiple Religious Belonging: Exploring Hybridity, Embracing Hospitality’. See https://www.oikoumene.org/en/what-we-do/current-dialoguemagazine/currentdialogue57.pdf (accessed 16 April 2018).

CHAPTER 9 1. For a discussion of possible calendrical dates of Jesus’ birth, see e.g. Reagan 2019; Hugg 2019.

CHAPTER 13 1. According to his theory, a prototype is an example around which the members of a given category arrange themselves, based on their degree of greater or lesser similarity to it. Thus a prototype is a typical example gathering to itself the greatest number of characteristics to be found in a conceptual category. In the light of this point of view, the definition of religion recurring in specialist and popular language seems to point to a category which functions as an exemplary prototypical model.

CHAPTER 15 1. Africa’s share of the global population will most likely rise from 17 per cent at present to 40 per cent by 2100. 2. 70 per cent or 64.4 million working youth in sub-Saharan Africa live in extreme or moderate poverty (earning less than $3.10 per day). The region has the highest youth working poverty rates globally. 3. The Redeemed Christian Church of God forms part of a compound with thousands of private homes built by the church’s construction company. There is also a health centre that is available for church members. and there are schools for children from crèche to university

282

NOTES

level. Maclean, R. (2017). ‘Eat, Pray, Live: The Lagos Megachurches Building Their Very Own Cities’. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/sep/11/eat-pray-livelagos-nigeria-megachurches-redemption-camp. 4. The Redeemed Christian Church of God is one of the many megachurches in Lagos which has millions of memberships and between 32,000 and 65,000 weekly attendees. Warren, B. (2015). ‘The World’s Largest Churches: A Country-by-Country List of Global Megachurches’. http://leadnet.org/world.

CHAPTER 17 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

[2010] EWCA Civ. 80, [2010] IRLR 322. Appl Nos. 48420/10, 59842/10, 51671/10 and 36516/10 (15 January 2013). (2010) ET Case No. 1702886 [27]. [2005] EWCA Civ. 932. (2005) ET Case No. 2601718/04. [2013] EWCA Civ 1562; [2013] WLR (D) 474 (CA). [1988] 2 All ER 1079. [2012] ScotCS CSOH_32 (29 February 2012). [2007] IRLR 29. [2009] EWCA Civ. 1357. [2010] EWCA Civ. 880. (2009) EAT/0298/08. [2015] ET 3200658/2014. (2006) ET Case No. 2301976/05. Sunday Telegraph poll prepared by ComRes. Fieldwork conducted online between 22 April and 1 May 2009. Available online at www.comres.co.uk/poll/70/the-sunday-telegraphcpanel-poll-june-2009.htm. Accessed 1 March 2018. 16. Employment Rights Act 1996, s 36.

CHAPTER 20 1. The strategy of declaring oneself to be morally good is ‘ethical’ in the sense that an ordinary ethical analysis would identify it as a declaration about right behaviour, embedded in the power dynamics of a particular place and time (e.g. Das 2015: 55); not because it is morally good in the colloquial sense of the term ‘ethical’ (e.g. ‘ethical trade’). 2. An influential anti-condom theological perspective was offered in 1930 by Pope Pius XI, in Casti Connubii.

CHAPTER 24 1. The word ‘deacon’ has significantly different meanings in different denominations. In numerous Protestant denominations, a deacon is a member of a management committee. In the Anglican tradition, a deacon is an ordained office, leading to ordination as a priest. The Roman Catholic Church has two types of deacon: trainee priests and men who undertake certain pastoral responsibilities. In Orthodoxy, deacons are ordained men who assist in the liturgy, but may not consecrate the sacrament.

NOTES

283

CHAPTER 30 1. The term stems from the historical figure Pelagius, who believed that humans are capable of moral goodness, in contrast to more pessimistic accounts of human nature defended by Augustine and others. 2. Solar Radiation Management entails injecting sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the stratosphere and is considered by many researchers to be a high-risk form of adaptation to climate change. 3. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd describes this universalized Protestant Christianity as one that ‘can choose to appear not as a religion but rather as the natural antinomian evangelical essence of America – having gotten rid of all the “religion” stuff’ (2017: 2). It functions both as a religion and as an implicit standard or backdrop against which other values, practices and religions are judged. Here I use the term ‘Christianity’ in the same way, without the specific modifier of ‘Protestant’ but with the recognition that this implicit normative backdrop skews Protestant (not merely in a denominational sense but in its belief in its own nonsectarian status).

CHRONOLOGY 1. https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/christians/. 2. Status of Global Mission, 2013, in the Context of ad 1800–2025; quoted in Christianity in View http://christianityinview.com/religion-statistics.html. Accessed 18 February 2019.

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CHRONOLOGY

c. 4 bce

Birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

c. 29 bce

Jesus is baptized by John and begins his ministry.

c. 33 ce

Jesus is crucified. Coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost marks the beginning of the Christian Church.

c. 33–36

Conversion of Saul of Tarsus (Paul).

47–57

Paul’s missionary journeys.

70

Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.

c. 100

End of the ‘Apostolic Age’.

190

Date of Easter defined.

312

Conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine.

325–451

Early Ecumenical Councils: Nicaea to Chalcedon. The Council of Chalcedon defines the ‘Nicene Creed’ in its present form.

367

Athanasius (Bishop of Rome) lists the Christian canonical writings.

400

St Jerome completes the Vulgate (Latin) translation of the Bible.

563

St Columba arrives in Iona, Scotland.

1054

The Great Schism.

1304–1321

Dante writes The Divine Comedy.

1382

John Wycliffe completes English translation of the Bible.

1508–1517

Michelangelo paints the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

1517

Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the Wittenburg Church.

1525

William Tyndale’s translation of the Bible from Greek to English is published.

1530

Augsburg Confession (Lutheran Church).

1534

Act of Supremacy declares King Henry VIII to be the ‘Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England’. Jesuit Order founded.

1536

John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.

1545–1563

Council of Trent.

1549

Thomas Cranmer compiles the Book of Common Prayer.

1560

Geneva Bible (first printed Bible in English).

1611

King James Version of the Bible (Authorized Version) is published.

1634

First Oberammergau play performed in Bavaria.

1647

The Westminster Declaration of Faith.

286

CHRONOLOGY

1648

George Fox establishes the Society of Friends (the Quakers).

1662

Book of Common Prayer revised. English Parliament passes the Act of Uniformity, followed by the Great Ejection.

1678

John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

1730–1760

The Great Awakening (Protestant revival in the United States).

1738

Conversion of John and Charles Wesley.

1741

George Frideric Handel writes The Messiah.

1751

First Sunday School opens in Dursley, Gloucestershire.

1764

John Newton writes the popular hymn ‘Amazing Grace’.

1776

Declaration of American Independence.

1780

Sunday School Movement commences.

1800–1840s

Second Great Awakening.

1819

Jefferson Bible is published.

1823

Rammohan Roy’s Precepts of Jesus is published in Calcutta.

1833–1841

Publication of Tracts for the Times, inaugurating the Tractarian Movement.

1843

The date set by William Miller for the return of Christ.

1844

The Great Disappointment: the revised date set by some Adventists for Christ’s return.

1844

Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) is founded.

1846

The Evangelical Alliance is formed.

1854

Roman Catholic Church proclaims the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.

1855

Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) is founded.

1858

Bernadette Soubirous receives her first apparition at Lourdes.

1859

Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species is published.

1863

Seventh-day Adventist Church is established.

1865

William Booth establishes the Open Christian Mission in East London (later to become the Salvation Army).

1870–1871

First Vatican Council proclaims the doctrine of papal infallibility.

1878–1899

Niagara Bible Conference defines five principles of Fundamentalism.

1878

The Open Christian Mission in East London is renamed The Salvation Army.

1883

Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Prolegomena to the History of Israel) by Julius Wellhausen is published, marking the inception of higher criticism of the Bible.

1899

Gideons International established.

1901

American Standard Version of the Bible.

1902

American Bible League founded.

1901–1915

Publication of The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, by R. A. Torry and A. C. Dixon.

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287

1904

Welsh Revival.

1905

French law on separation of Church and State.

1906

Azusa Street Revival, Los Angeles. Albert Schweitzer publishes The Quest of the Historical Jesus (English translation 1910). Guy-Blaché’s La Vie Du Christ – the first film to depict Jesus – is released.

1909

Scofield Version of the Bible.

1910

Edinburgh Missionary Conference marks the inception of the Ecumenical Movement. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church formulate five ‘fundamentals’, which define the Fundamentalist Movement. Boy Scouts Association founded.

1913

Publication of the Catholic Encyclopedia.

1914–1918

The Great War.

1925

Scopes trial.

1939–1945

Second World War.

1945

Nag Hammadi documents discovered. Christian Aid is founded by British and Irish churches.

1947

Dead Sea Scrolls discovered.

1948

World Council of Churches formed.

1949

First Billy Graham Crusade, Los Angeles.

1949–1954

C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia.

1950

Roman Catholic Church proclaims the Dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.

1952

Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

1957

Southern Christian Leadership Conference founded to promote civil rights and to organise black churches.

1961

New English Bible (New Testament) published.

1962–1965

Second Vatican Council.

1963

SCLC begins its campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Martin Luther King Jr is arrested. Publication of Bishop John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God.

1965

The papal encyclical Nostra Aetate affirms that Jews must not be held guilty of deicide.

1966

Jerusalem Bible.

1967

Six Day War in Israel. Jerusalem recaptured by Israel.

1968

Martin Luther King is assassinated.

1970

New English Bible (Old Testament) published. New American Bible. Publication of Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth.

1970s

The Jesus Movement.

1971

Publication of the novel The Exorcist.

1972

The United Reformed Church is established as a union between the English Presbyterian Church and the English Congregational Churches.

288

CHRONOLOGY

1974

First Anglican women ordained as priests in the United States.

1976

The Good News Bible.

1977

James Dobson founds Focus on the Family.

1978

New International Version of the Bible is published.

1979

Mother Teresa is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

1980–1991

Invention and development of the World Wide Web.

1984

Desmond Tutu is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

1989

Publication Rick and Jan Hess’s book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ heralds the Quiverfull movement.

1990

First Anglican woman bishop ordained in the Province of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. Bill McCartney founds Promise Keepers.

1992

Church of England General Synod approves the ordination of women priests.

1993

World Wide Web made available to the public.

1994

First women priests ordained in the Church of England. Toronto Blessing.

1995

Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins publish Left Behind – the first of their series of end-time novels.

1997

Death of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

1999

Joint Declaration on Justification by the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches.

2000

Left Behind – The Movie is released.

2001

English Standard Version.

2003

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is published.

2004

Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ is released.

2005

Pope John Paul II dies, and is succeeded by Benedict XVI.

2006

Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on Justification is adopted by the World Methodist Council.

2007

William P. Young publishes The Shack novel. Creation Museum opens in Kentucky, the United States.

2011

Beatification of Pope John Paul II.

2013

Pope Benedict XVI resigns and is succeeded by Pope Francis.

2015

First woman bishop is ordained in the Church of England.

2016

Pope Francis canonises Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Havana Declaration between Pope Francis and Patriarch Krill.

2018

Billy Graham dies, age 99. 14 September: Melissa Skelton becomes the first female Archbishop, installed as Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Ecclesiastical Province of British Columbia and Yukon. Church of England publishes guidance for transgender transition services.

CHRONOLOGY

289

CHANGES IN GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY 1960–2013 The following statistical data show demographic changes in the Christian religion over slightly more than half a century. The statistics relate to the proportion of the population in each country cited, rather than absolute numbers, and they indicate a marked increase in African countries, in contrast to a decline in the United States, Europe and Australasia. The statistics below are taken from TheGlobalEconomy.com,1 which provides extensive data on over 200 countries, and derives these statistics from the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, whose web pages provide information on the methodology used. Statistics on religious allegiance are notoriously problematic, and different sources give slightly different assessments. This is due to several factors: some sources include organizations such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-day Saints, while others do not, and measures of affiliation can be related to census declarations, membership statistics or samples of people interviewed. The statistics below have the merit of being derived from the same source, which also allows comparison of any years between these parameters. (Countries with less than one million population or with less than a 30 per cent Christian population are omitted.)

Country (%)

1960

2013

Albania

32.0

26.7

Argentina

93.5

99.0

Australia

84.4

71.9

Austria

97.9

81.0

Belgium

98.9

52.6 (2012)*

Bolivia

97.1

93.0

Brazil

94.6

100

Bulgaria

87.1

87.0

Cameroon

47.1

48.3

Canada

94.5

80.3

Central African Republic

70.3

56.6

Chile

93.3

86.4

Colombia

94.3

94.1

Congo

52.1

43.5

Costa Rica

100

100

Cuba

39.7

52.0

Cyprus

79.4

80.9

Democratic Republic of Congo

95.9

89.8

Denmark

96.7

88.8

Dominican Republic

100

84.2

Ecuador

98.5

94.9

El Salvador

99.8

86.4

* 2013 statistic unavailable.

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CHRONOLOGY

Country (%)

1960

2013

Finland

93.4

84.4

France

88.2

77.7

Gabon

88.8

72.2

Germany

95.1

71.4

Ghana

38.2

65.7

Greece

97.8

97.8

Guatemala

100

100

Haiti

95.6

87.2

Honduras

100

100

Hungary

93.0

81.9

Ireland

98.2

95.1

Italy

99.1

84.0

Lebanon

50.7

26.9

Madagascar

31.5

47.7

Mexico

97.8

88.6

Netherlands

77.9

46.3

New Zealand

67.4

53.2

Nicaragua

100

91.1

Nigeria

31.3

45.4

Norway

98.2

82.4

Panama

96.6

97.1

Paraguay

97.9

97.2

Peru

97.0

100

Philippines

88.5

90

Poland

89.9

98.5

Portugal

97.1

86.6

Romania

88.6

98.8

South Africa

59.3

63.1

South Korea

9.5

35.0

Spain

98.9

88.8

Sweden

96.6

88.0

Switzerland

98.5

82.2

UK

69.2

48.1

Uruguay

72.1

66.1

USA

89.6

76.0

Venezuela

97.4

89.7

CHRONOLOGY

291

(millions)/Year

1800

1900

1970

2000

2013

2025

World population

904

1620

3700

6123

7130

8003

Christians

205

558

1229

1985

2355

2707

Muslims

91

200

577

1291

1635

1972

Christianity is the largest world religion, with an estimated 2.4 billion adherents. But will it remain so? Comment is often made about the growth of Islam, with the suggestion that it might overtake Christianity in terms of allegiance. Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s global statistics and forecasts (‘Status of Global Mission’) provide comparative statistics on the world’s major religions, including Christianity and Islam.2 The growth rate between 2000 and 2013 is therefore 1.32 per cent for Christians and 1.84 per cent for Muslims. If such a trend were maintained, it would take 200 years for Muslims and Christians to have equal shares of the global population’s allegiance. However, neither religion has grown at a precisely uniform rate, and many factors could influence religious affiliation in the next two centuries – birth rates, major world events, political change and evangelization. At least in the foreseeable future, Christianity remains the largest global religion, while both faiths continue to grow.

RESOURCES The following are web pages that contain research on Christian belief and practice and information about Christian organizations. (The information is for research and general interest, and it should not be construed as implying that the editors or individual authors endorse their contents or views expressed.)

I. LITERATURE 1. Recommended further reading Bowden, John (ed.) (2005). Christianity: The Complete Guide. London: Continuum. Cameron, Helen et al. (2005). Studying Local Churches: A Handbook. London: SCM. Chryssides, George D. (2010). Christianity Today. London: Continuum. Chryssides, George D., and Wilkins, Margaret Z. (2011). Christians in the Twenty-First Century. Sheffield, UK: Equinox. Klein, Peter (1999). The Catholic Source Book: A Comprehensive Collection of Information about the Catholic Church. Dubuque, Iowa: Brown-Roa. Taylor, Richard (2003). How to Read a Church: An Illustrated Guide to Images, Symbols and Meanings in Churches and Cathedrals. London: Rider.

2. Reference works Catholic Encyclopedia http://www.newadvent.org/cathen Catholic Online – Catholic Encyclopedia www.catholic.org/encyclopedia Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) (provides access to many classical Christian writings and Bible commentaries) http://www.ccel.org

292

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3. Journals and magazines (Some of these may have a paywall or offer limited access.) The Tablet (Roman Catholic) (The International Catholic News Weekly) www.thetablet.co.uk The Church Times (Church of England) www.churchtimes.co.uk Christianity Today (evangelical Christian periodical, although many articles are of wider interest) www.christianitytoday.com

II. WEBSITES 1. Research organizations and data Adherents.com (Statistical information from a wide variety of sources on all religions, by country) http://www.adherents.com Barna Group (George Barna) (Research on a wide variety of Christian-related topics) https://www.barna.com/research Center for the Study of Global Christianity (Facts and discussion on Christianity) https://www.gordonconwell.edu/ockenga/research/index.cfm Christianity in View (Data on all three major traditions) http://christianityinview.com Pew Research Center (Information, discussion and statistics) http://www.pewresearch.org Public Religion Research Unit (Contains research and information on religion and culture) https://www.prri.org TheGlobalEconomy.com (Statistical information on Christianity by country and year) https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/christians

2. Bible Bible Gateway (access to many translations of the Bible, searchable) https://www.biblegateway.com Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception degruyter.com/ebr At the time of writing a 3-month trial access (free of charge) is obtainable at degruyter.com/ accesstoken, using the code ebr0197863 YouVersion Bible App https://www.youversion.com/the-bible-app

3. Christian traditions and denominations 3.1 Statements of faith and manuals Catechism of the Catholic Church (Roman Catholic Church – official statements of belief and practice) http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM 39 Articles www.anglicancommunion.org/media/109014/Thirty-Nine-Articles-of-Religion.pdf

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The Westminster Confession of Faith www.pcaac.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/WCFScriptureProofs.pdf 28 Principles of Seventh-Day Adventism www.pillarsoffaithsdachurch.org/28-fundamental-beliefs Quaker Faith and Practice https://qfp.quaker.org.uk Common Worship (Church of England) https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/ common-worship

3.2 Orthodoxy OrthodoxChristianity.net (Articles and discussion on Orthodoxy) http://www.orthodoxchristianity.net Orthodox Church in America (Information and resources) https://oca.org/orthodoxy Orthodoxy in America https://orthodoxyinamerica.org/ Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America https://www.goarch.org

3.3 Roman Catholic Church The Holy See (Official Vatican web pages, in English) http://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html Sacramentals (Marketing and explanations) www.catholicsacramentals.org Society of St Pius X (SSPX) (Conservative Catholic) https://sspx.org/en

3.4 Anglicans Church of England https://www.churchofengland.org Anglicans Online – an independent website linking to many Anglican resources http://anglicansonline.org/

3.5 Protestants Luther and the West (An extensive online course on Luther, from Northwestern University) www.coursera.org/learn/luther-and-the-west

3.5.1 Adventists Seventh-day Adventist official website www.adventist.org/en Writings of Ellen G. White https://m.egwwritings.org

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3.5.2 Baptists Baptist.org (A platform for Baptist churches) http://baptist.org Baptist Union of Great Britain www.baptist.org.uk Southern Baptist Convention www.sbc.net

3.5.3 Methodists The Methodist Church www.methodist.org.uk United Methodist Church http://www.umc.org World Methodist Council http://worldmethodistcouncil.org World Methodist Evangelism Institute https://www.wmei.org/

3.5.4 Presbyterian traditions Church of Scotland www.churchofscotland.org.uk Free Church of Scotland https://freechurch.org/ Presbyterian Church (USA) http://www.pcusa.org United Reformed Church (UK) https://urc.org.uk

3.5.5 Pentecostals Assemblies of God (USA) https://ag.org Church of God http://www.churchofgod.org European Research Network on Global Pentecostalism (GloPent) http://www.glopent.net Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center (Assemblies of God – archives and research centre) https://ifphc.org Foursquare Church https://www.foursquare.org International Holiness Pentecostal Church https://iphc.org United Pentecostal Church International (UPCI) (Oneness Pentecostal) https://www.upci.org

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3.5.6 Other denominations Metropolitan Community Church https://www.mccchurch.org Salvation Army https://www.salvationarmy.org.uk/ Society of Friends (Quakers) https://www.quaker.org.uk/

4. Ecumenical organizations and projects World Council of Churches www.oikoumene.org/en World Evangelical Alliance www.worldea.org Evangelical Alliance UK www.eauk.org Taizé Community www.taize.fr World Student Christian Federation (Oldest ecumenical student organization) http://www.wscf.ch

5. Missionary societies Missio (Roman Catholic Mission): https://missio.org.uk There are too many Protestant missionary societies to list here. A list of those established between 1691 and 1901, with a hyperlink to a timeline, can be found at https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Protestant_missionary_societies The Bible Society: https://www.biblesociety.org.uk Gideons: www.gideons.org

6. Interfaith organizations International Interfaith Centre http://iicao.org Interfaith Alliance (USA) https://interfaithalliance.org Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue www.pcinterreligious.org

7. LGBTQ Christians Courage International (RC organization encouraging chastity among Lesbian and Gay Christians) https://couragerc.org Integrity USA (Within Episcopal churches) www.integrityusa.org One Body One Faith (Formerly Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement) www.onebodyonefaith.org.uk

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Q Christian Fellowship www.qchristian.org Quest (Gay Christian Network: LGBT Catholics) https://questlgbti.uk/tag/gay-christian-network Reconciling Ministries Network (Seeks inclusion of all sexual orientation) https://rmnetwork.org

8. Counselling and therapy Alcoholics Anonymous www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk Association of Christian Counsellors www.acc-uk.org U-Turn for Christ (help for additions) https://www.uturnforchrist.com/

9. Relief organizations Links to the Christian social action projects referred to in Chapter 16 Adavu – http://www.adavu.org.uk CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) – https://cafod.org.uk Church Action Poverty – http://www.church-poverty.org.uk Christian Aid – https://www.christianaid.org.uk Gamaliel Foundation – http://www.gamaliel.org/Default.aspx Restore – http://www.restore-uk.org Restored – https://www.restoredrelationships.org Sojourners – https://sojo.net Side by Side – http://sidebysidegender.org Tearfund – https://www.tearfund.org Trussell Trust – https://www.trusselltrust.org World Vision – https://www.worldvision.org.uk

10. Campaigning organizations Christian CND http://christiancnd.org.uk Christians and Climate (Evangelical Christian environmental organization) www.christiansandclimate.org Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation (Christian environmental organization) https://cornwallalliance.org Evangelicals for Social Action https://www.evangelicalsforsocialaction.org Focus on the Family www.focusonthefamily.com (pro-life, anti-gay) Forward in Faith (For traditional Anglicanism) www.forwardinfaith.com Life https://lifecharity.org.uk Operation Noah (Campaigning on climate change) http://operationnoah.org

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Pentecostal Charismatic Peace Fellowship (For peace and justice) https://pcpj.org Priests for Life: Teachings of the Catholic Church on Abortion http://www.priestsforlife.org/magisterium/kucera.htm Promise Keepers (US men’s movement) www.promisekeepers.org QuiverFull (US Protestant organization advocating large families) www.quiverfull.com Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) https://www.spuc.org.uk

11. Women and feminism Women and the Church (For gender equality and inclusiveness) https://womenandthechurch.org Archive for the Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW) https://womenandthechurch.org/news/archive-movement-ordination-women Catholic Women’s Ordination https://catholic-womens-ordination.org.uk Christian Feminism Today (Evangelical feminist organization, officially Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus (EEWC), formerly Evangelical Women’s Caucus (EWC)) https://eewc.com

12.Children and youth Scripture Union (Global) https://scriptureunion.global https://scriptureunion.org Scripture Union (UK) https://content.scriptureunion.org.uk Sunday School Movement http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/sunday/index.htm YMCA https://www.ymca.org.uk YWCA https://www.worldywca.org

13. Other, miscellaneous Dead Sea Scrolls (The Israel Museum’s Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project) http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/shrine Hymnary.org (Gives access to words and music of many Christian hymns) https://hymnary.org Ship of Fools (a cyber community, ecumenical, satirical) https://shipoffools.com Creation Museum, Kentucky (promoting creationism) https://creationmuseum.org Ark Encounter, Kentucky (Creation Museum ‘ssister site’) https://arkencounter.com/

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INDEX

abortion 10, 37, 128, 148, 160, 165, 172, 242 abuse 15, 53, 77, 105, 160, 217 Adventists 38–40, 248, 258, 261, 270, 271, 278 Africa 19–21, 26–7, 40, 41–2, 52, 80–1, 95, 112, 138, 151–5, 181, 232 African indigenous churches 25–7, 42, 56, 242 African indigenous religions 26, 42, 153–4 afterlife 90, 137, 139, 257–9 agape 213 Amish 37–8, 249 Ammerman, N.T. 141–2 Anabaptists 22, 36, 144, 177 Neo-Anabaptists 171, 172 angels 24, 41, 105, 138, 209, 245–6 Anglicans 19, 22, 43–4, 52, 54–5, 160, 266, 267, 270, 271 Church of England 15, 43–4, 46, 52, 54–5, 57–60, 138, 170, 202–3, 267 anthropology 9, 80–3, 85, 177, 218 antisemitism 107, 112, 256 Aquinas, Thomas 108, 223 architecture 31, 33–4, 94, 95 Ariarajah, Wesley 115 art 15, 67–9, 93–106, 192, 197, 231, 241, 277 atheism 72, 81, 85–6, 90, 101, 125, 143, 170, 243, 255 Augustine 131, 157, 176–8, 208 Aune, Kristin 129, 142 Bandak, Andreas 89–90, 91 baptism 7, 22, 33, 34, 37, 39, 41, 45, 131, 133–4, 251, 273 adult 22, 36, 39, 134, 203 Baptists 22, 26, 36–7, 42, 50, 86, 109–10, 123, 203, 233–4, 278 Southern Baptists 36, 37, 42, 46, 203, 253, 256, 259, 270, 278 Bebbington, D.W. 147, 149 Begbie, Jeremy 191 Benedict XVI 32, 99, 225, 251

Bible 23–5, 49–63, 107–8, 131, 149, 154, 179–80, 215–16, 221 canon 49, 77, 215–16, 221, 244, 245–6 inerrancy of 6, 39, 40, 53–4, 171, 251 translations 50, 149, 208, 216, 244–6 Bielo, James 51, 89, 233 Black Madonnas 99–100 Blanes, Ruy 85–7 Booth, William and Catherine 15 Boswell, John 209 Bowman, Marion 12–13 Buddhists 109–11, 113, 117, 119, 120, 209 Bynum, Caroline Walker 211–12 Calley, Malcolm 83 Calvinists 47, 109, 149, 186, 233 Calvin, John 22, 36, 44, 100, 231, 233–4 Campbell, Heidi 224, 225 Cannell, Fenella 82, 83 capitalism 118, 152, 153, 155, 215, 216, 230 catechisms 132, 217, 250, 257 cathedrals 43, 83, 94–100, 103, 105, 126, 231, 267 cessationism 34, 183, 262 chaplains 15, 205 charismatics 20, 23, 25–6, 29, 55, 83, 173, 183, 209, 225–6, 252, 264 children 34, 43, 79, 111, 125–6, 127–30, 131–5, 159, 220, 241, 243 Christa 75–6, 105 Christmas 5, 7, 40, 72, 123–6, 132, 134, 219 cards 2, 105 customs 5, 8, 9 civic religion 10, 43, 125 civil rights 10, 16, 148, 160, 177 clergy 15, 32, 35, 45, 50, 60–3, 201–5, 232, 245, 267–70 Clifford, Jo 77 climate change 72, 172, 227–30, 253 Clingerman, Forrest 228–9 colonialism 17–18, 66, 68–70, 112, 117, 119, 153–4, 158, 181, 193, 210, 263

INDEX

confirmation 34, 46, 132–3, 201, 250, 251, 273 Constantine 28–9, 94, 169, 177 contraception 1, 128, 160, 181 Cox, Harvey 10, 24–5 Cracknell, Kenneth 112, 114–15 creationism 53, 89, 233, 247–9 Creation Museum, The 236, 248–9 creeds 5–7, 8, 39, 66–7, 90, 217, 218, 249–50, 258, 264 Nicene 5–7, 10, 31, 34, 66, 249, 259, 276 cremation 137, 138, 258 Cupitt, Don 63, 65 Dalits 117–18 Darwin, Charles 53, 101, 248 Davie, Grace 170 Day, Abby 83, 90 Dead Sea Scrolls 250 death 90, 95, 99, 137–40, 184, 186, 258–9, 263 of Jesus 41, 65, 72, 74, 102, 145 demons 117, 197, 242, 251–2 DeNora, Tia 191 dispensationalism 148, 149, 217, 261 divorce 38, 127, 128, 243, 273 Durkheim, Emile 233 eagles 97, 254 Easter 7, 40, 67, 73, 123, 125, 219 ecumenism 8, 37, 45–6, 116, 126, 158, 218, 252, 267, 277 education 15, 18, 27, 56–60, 66, 96–7, 131–5, 160, 181, 248, 256 Emin, Tracey 100 employment 158, 160, 163–7, 204, 265 environmental issues 120, 159, 204, 227–9, 252–3 eschatology 148, 171, 217, 253 ethics 9, 165, 179–82 ethnography 50–1, 56–7, 80–4, 88–91, 142, 226 eucharist 33, 35, 43, 66, 131, 150, 211–13, 260, 273–4 evangelicals 17, 42, 52–3, 55, 59–60, 72–3, 128, 159–61, 171–3, 230, 252 and art 103–4 Evangelical Alliance 8, 47, 109, 263 and film 220 and fundamentalism 147–50, 171 and literature 216–18, 258 evolution 46, 53, 89, 147, 171, 227, 247–8 exorcism 23, 154, 183, 221, 251–2

335

fair trade 10, 159, 180, 243 Falwell, Jerry 148, 172 family issues 127–30, 132–3, 138–9, 172, 203, 217, 277–8 fasting 124, 126, 211–12, 270 feminism 76, 129, 142, 179, 181, 279 film 73–4, 102, 139, 187, 198, 219–20, 251 in Nigeria 151–3, 155 food 124, 132, 137, 138, 159, 211–14, 223–4, 265 foodbanks 159 Francis, Pope 20, 127, 130, 235, 262 fundamentalism 37, 53–4, 88, 105, 147–50, 171–2, 183, 208, 225, 247–8, 261 Gaston, Ray 116 Geertz, Clifford 14 Gell, Alfred 81 gender 57, 60, 76, 132, 142, 159–60, 181, 207–10 glossolalia 23, 24, 40–1, 79, 85–6, 91, 152, 183 Graham, Billy 148, 264 Green, Carl 104 Gutierrez, Gustavo 55, 161 Halloween 7, 123, 126, 139 Hann, Chris 81, 83 Harris, William Wade 25–6 healing 11, 24, 27, 42, 56, 152, 183–7, 197–8, 221, 226, 262 Heaner, Gwendolyn 87–8 Heathcote-James, Emma 241, 242 Henn, Alexander 109, 118 heresy 6, 41, 67, 108, 217, 249 heterosexuality 127, 130, 181, 208–9 Hillsong 194 Hindus 66, 70, 103, 109, 110–11, 117–18, 120, 177, 210 HIV 140, 181–2 Holy Spirit 26, 31, 37, 40, 104, 111, 126, 173, 184, 225, 249 in Pentecostalism 20, 23, 25, 27, 28, 40, 41–2, 152–5 homosexuality 16, 46, 76, 105, 185, 207–10, 269–70 horizons 57, 60–3 Howell, Brian 86–7 Howes, Graham 102–3 humanists 90, 133 Hunt, Holman 101–2

336

iconoclasm 97–8, 231 iconography 93–4, 96–7, 99, 102, 106, 118, 140, 221 icons 33, 98–9, 101, 102, 104, 138, 198, 277 idolatry 93, 96, 98, 100, 105, 108, 212, 242 incarnation 5, 33, 54, 66, 67, 98, 105, 109, 115, 131 inclusivity 112, 115, 148, 158, 210, 275 Inclusive Church 270 inculturation 192–3 interfaith dialogue 70, 114–16, 120, 256 internet 28, 93, 104, 223–6 Irvine, Richard 87 Jensen, Jeppe Sinding 91 Jenson, Robin 97, 103, 106 Jews 39, 49, 107, 112–13, 120, 211, 241, 243, 256–7 John XXIII 46 John Paul II 99, 244, 253, 275, 277, 278 Jung, Carl 62 Kalu, Ogbu 26–7 Kimbangu, Simon 26–7 King, Martin Luther 10, 148, 172, 177 kitsch 99, 104, 105, 232 laity 7, 35, 51–2, 54–61, 63, 96, 113, 116, 201–5, 216, 245 Laws, Curtis Lee 147, 149 Left Behind 171, 217–18, 242, 261, 272 Lent 13, 34, 46, 124, 126, 212, 260, 270. See also fasting Le Saux, Henri 118, 120 Lindsey, Hal 217 literalism 54, 57–63, 88–9 liturgy 11, 32–5, 43, 71, 118–19, 186, 237, 259–60 liturgical year 67, 99, 123–6, 211, 220 Lourdes 11, 99, 184, 276 Lutherans 22, 82, 107, 123, 132–3, 135, 171, 213, 237, 154 Luther, Martin 22, 31–2, 35, 49, 107, 132, 157, 215–16, 255 Malinowski, Bronislaw 80, 85 Ma-ori 137 marriage 114, 120, 127–9, 133, 165, 181, 201, 203, 247, 265, 273 same-sex 166, 172, 209, 270 Marty, Martin 148–9 martyrs 28, 125, 128, 209, 260, 262

INDEX

Marxism 10, 101 Maurice, F.D. 111 media 73, 79, 116, 134, 160, 172, 193–4, 218, 219–22, 225–6, 251 mega-churches 17, 42–3, 194 Methodists 22, 25, 38, 44–5, 109–12, 116, 159, 258, 264 migration 18–19, 20, 25, 28, 69, 82–3, 127, 160, 263 millennialism 149, 171, 217, 260–2 miracles 11, 24, 26, 54, 68, 148, 183–4, 197, 221, 262–3 missionaries 18–19, 27, 37, 50, 66, 70, 108–14, 154, 181, 263 monasticism 265–7 Mormons 82, 255 motherhood 128–9 music 42, 44–5, 118, 191–4, 252, 267–8 Muslims 17, 69, 70, 108, 113–14, 116–17, 119, 125, 173, 243 Myers–Briggs 62 Nicene creed. See creeds Nostra Aetate 113 Ofili, Chris 105–6 Orthodoxy 22–3, 31, 33, 45–6, 98–9, 124, 138, 170, 198, 212, 245–6, 274 Paarlberg, Robert 228–30 pacifism 28, 37, 172, 175–8 paganism 8, 12, 40, 94–5, 98, 232 Paisley, Ian 47, 150 papacy 19, 32, 100, 217, 255 participant observation 50–1 Paul 41, 49, 56, 114, 150, 183–4, 242, 245, 258 Pentecostals 20, 22–8, 40–2, 52, 79, 83, 85–8, 91, 151–5, 221 Pew Research Center 51, 184, 258 pilgrimage 11, 66–7, 184, 195–9, 233, 235–7 Pinn, Anthony B. 192 Plymouth Brethren 216 politics 43, 54–5, 80–1, 157–61, 169–73, 180, 221, 243 prayer 14, 40, 46, 71, 116, 119, 124, 152, 185, 213, 232, 270–2 Primiano, Leonard 11, 13, 16 prophecy 25–6, 42, 154, 160–1, 201, 217, 225, 253, 257, 272 proselytizing 103, 107, 131, 154, 263, 265 prosperity teachings 82, 149

INDEX

Protestants 21–2, 28, 31–47, 52–4, 100, 123, 147–50, 201–3, 212–13, 215–18, 231–4 Pryce, Ken 83 psychology 62–3, 118, 150, 197, 208, 236 Quakers 38, 123, 177, 202, 203, 273 Quiverfull 128 racism 37, 72, 192, 210 Redfield, Robert 9 Reformation 32, 35, 36–7, 49, 98, 108–9, 123, 169, 202, 232, 266 reincarnation 26, 258 resurrection 99, 103, 109, 257–8 of Jesus 40, 54, 65, 72, 97, 107, 262, 279 rites of passage 1, 132–3 Roman Catholics 10–11, 32, 113, 127–8, 143–5, 185–6, 202, 216–17, 225, 232–3, 245, 257 and art 99–100, 137 in ecumenism 45–7 as global religion 19–22, 29, 113, 118–19 traditionalist 150 Ruether, Rosemary Radford 128 sacraments 34–5, 38, 46, 186, 202, 204, 226, 250, 259, 273–5 saints 11–12, 33–4, 35, 46, 95, 118, 125–6, 209, 275–6 salvation 5, 13, 31, 41, 45, 50, 71–3, 108, 115, 186, 228, 246 Salvation Army 45, 202, 273 Sanneh, Lamin 82, 114 Satan 24, 39, 120, 149, 153, 242, 251–2, 260 schisms 28, 36 Great Schism 31, 215, 249 science 24, 101, 110, 227–30 Second Coming 39, 242, 253, 257, 261 Second Vatican Council 34, 46, 98, 113, 119, 186, 202, 212, 216 secularization 20, 27, 87, 101, 123, 126, 158, 198, 213, 225, 227 sedevacantists 46 sexuality 55, 76, 106, 127, 132, 142, 160, 181, 207 shrines 8, 11–12, 94, 99, 109, 118, 184, 196–9, 231, 233, 276–7 Simpson, Hamilton 76 Slater, Thomas Ebenezer 111 slavery 10, 37, 45, 109, 138, 158–9, 180, 192–3

337

social action 10, 24, 43, 45, 67, 72, 119, 157–61, 256 Social Gospel movement 161 social media 124–6, 183, 191, 193–4, 198, 219, 221–2, 225 Solentiname 101 Spence Hardy, Robert 110 spirituality 24, 43, 95, 118, 141–5, 198, 213, 233, 251 spiritual war 149, 150, 169, 192, 232 sport 74–5, 79, 93, 133, 141, 172, 264 stained glass 34, 95, 96, 104 Stringer, Martin 83 Stromberg, Peter 83, 88 Sunday schools 129, 133–4, 231, 256 symbols 76, 88, 94–7, 104–5, 118, 140, 149, 177, 191, 251, 254, 263 as personal wear 164, 170 syncretism 8, 12, 118, 153, 258 technology 9, 18, 37–8, 194, 225, 227–30 televangelists 184, 226 television 43, 219, 220–1, 226, 255 theology 6–7, 15, 25, 45, 65, 86, 108–15, 118, 161, 180, 212–13, 229 feminist 75 liberation 10, 55, 159, 161 Tlingit 138 tourism 66, 125, 196–7, 199, 231, 233, 251–4, 266 transgender 76, 166, 207–9, 269 Trinity 8, 15, 41, 70, 93, 116, 217, 249 Trump, Donald 71, 158, 160, 171, 173, 256 Turner, Victor and Edith 195, 197, 237 Unitarians 67 Vanderwood, Paul 11 vegetarianism 180, 211, 212, 214 virgin birth 54, 59, 147, 276–7 Virgin Mary 11, 13, 32, 35, 46, 99, 129, 233, 276–7. See also Black Madonnas apparitions 11, 13, 262, 276–7 Vodou 12 Walker, Cassandra 99 Wallis, Jim 72, 160, 172 war 112, 140, 150, 159, 169–70, 175–8, 243 Wesley, John 22, 44, 109, 263 Westboro Baptist Church 16, 73 Westminster Confession of Faith 47, 216, 250

338

White, Heather R. 208 Wilson, Nancy 209 Wimber, John 41, 264 women 2, 37, 55–7, 60, 128–9, 142, 160, 173, 181–2, 203, 209, 277–9 ordination 15, 43, 46, 67, 203, 255, 269, 278–9 rights 70, 159–60 Word of Life 82, 91

INDEX

World Council of Churches (WCC) 8, 26, 31, 37, 45, 47, 114, 115, 271 World Religion Database 23 Wright, N.T. 253, 258 WWJD 71–2, 243 Yoder, Don 11–12 Yoder, J.H. 172 Young, William P. 217–18



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