Aliens and Strangers?

Abstract

In this work of qualitative sociology, Anna Strhan offers an in-depth study of the everyday lives of members of a conservative evangelical Anglican church in London. ‘St John’s’ is a vibrant church, with a congregation of young and middle-aged members, one in which the life of the mind is important, and faith is both a comfort and a struggle—a way of questioning the order of things within society and for themselves. The congregants of St John’s see themselves as increasingly countercultural, moving against the grain of wider culture in London and in British society, yet they take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian. This book reveals the processes through which the congregants of St John’s learn to understand themselves as ‘aliens and strangers’ in the world, demonstrating the precariousness of their projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness. Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, Strhan shows how the everyday experiences of these evangelicals are simultaneously shaped by the secular norms of their workplaces and other city spaces and by the moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these. Thus their self-identification as ‘aliens and strangers’ both articulates and constructs an ambition to be different from others around them in the city, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their hopes, concerns, and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world.

On Learning from the Margins: Jewish Nonreligious Grammars within a Secular-Protestant Landscape

“…However, this critical discursive focus can also risk reproducing a decontextualized, dehistoricized account of Jewish identity and practice. Significantly, this can mirror a similarly reified account of the 'Protestant' framing of religion-as-belief and conversely of nonreligion as non-belief (Lee 2015;Strhan 2015). To put this simply, my ethnography shows that, unsurprisingly, the terminology of the 'secular', '(un) belief' and related words do have purchase within the self-descriptions of British Jews, including for myself as a Jewish ethnographer shaped within an assimilatory secular-Protestant culture.…”

‘The Person God Made Me to Be’: Navigating Working-Class and Christian Identities in English Evangelical Christianity

“…In relation to the particular religious context in this study, English evangelical Christianity, sociologists of religion have observed the predominantly middle-class contexts in which key evangelical networks have developed historically (Guest 2007: 27) and the middle-class status of many of its leaders and flagship churches has been highlighted (Guest 2007;Strhan 2012Strhan , 2015. Recent ethnographic study (Strhan 2012(Strhan , 2015 of a conservative evangelical congregation in London examines the embodied nature of evangelical subjectivity and pays attention to how this is shaped by its metropolitan, urban location, including the classed nature of this context.…”

“…Recent ethnographic study (Strhan 2012(Strhan , 2015 of a conservative evangelical congregation in London examines the embodied nature of evangelical subjectivity and pays attention to how this is shaped by its metropolitan, urban location, including the classed nature of this context. However, overall, despite highlighting the classed nature of English evangelicalism, research on evangelical subjectivity has often primarily focused on the impact of gender and ethnicity with more limited attention to class (see for example Aune 2006;Baillie 2002;Hunt and Lightly 2001;Schaefer 2004;Toulis 1997).…”

“…So, whilst social relationships and interactions within the church community and other corporate Christian contexts remain key sites of analysis in the study of class and lived evangelicalism, exploration of the individual's understanding of their relationship to God is also critical in exploring the navigation of feelings of class difference. Moreover, social relationships and the individual's relationship with God are interwoven: relating to God has a strong corporate dimension, as the local church congregation and other transdenominational gatherings are sites where the Christian community gather to listen to God's words in the Bible and seek together to have their lives shaped by these (see Strhan 2012Strhan , 2015. For evangelicals, therefore, Christian identity is expressed corporately, primarily through participation in a local church congregation, but also through participation in evangelical para-church organizations.…”

‘I Want There to be no Glass Ceiling:’ Evangelicals’ Engagements with Class, Education, and Urban Childhoods

“…3.11 Riverside's work with children and young people today suggests alternative aspirations. While many evangelicals’ engagements with young people are still today shaped by a conversionist logic, and many focus primarily on middle-class children, there are also growing efforts across different evangelical constituencies to engage in different forms of ‘mission’, shaped by a consciousness of the exclusions perpetuated by evangelical culture's dominant white middle-class culture (Elisha 2011; Strhan 2013, 2015). Open evangelicals self-consciously distinguish their urban engagements from historical and other contemporary evangelicals’ desires for the religious conversion of non-Christians.…”