To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism

Anderson, Virginia; Bozeman, Theodore Dwight

doi:10.2307/366068

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“…It emerged from its leaders’ dismay with the quarrelsome nature of American Protestantism and its ever‐splintering denominations. Restorationists sought to bring all Christians together around an ‘objective method’ for biblical interpretation that, they claimed, would enable believers to ‘restore’ authentic first‐century practices (Foster 2020; Hughes 1996; see also Bozeman 1988). Such a method, it was believed, would put an end to Christian in‐fighting by stripping away the human contrivances of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ that distorted God's original plan.…”

Section: Biblical Literalism and The Virtue Of Objectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Proselytizing is not evangelism: epistemic virtue and religious suasion at a post‐fundamentalist church in Nashville

Victor

2024

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This essay proposes a moral epistemological explanation for many US evangelicals’ growing unease about proselytizing. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at a church in Nashville, Tennessee, it highlights how a particular kind of epistemological certainty became a driving value of evangelical biblicism when early nineteenth‐century evangelicals attempted to apply the precepts of inductive science to textual interpretation. Members of the church I studied routinely express regret about this historical entanglement, which they blame for their denomination's dogmatic and ultimately unsuccessful fixation on persuading other people to believe the exact same things as they do. Against ‘proselytizing’ driven by ‘the desire to be right’, my interlocutors are trying to develop a practical social ethics whose explicitly biblical inspiration, they hope, will motivate others to want to become Christians. I show that as an analytic, religious suasion makes concepts like ‘proselytizing’ and ‘evangelism’ ethnographic again by sending them back to the field where our interlocutors themselves define and critique them. Doing this allows us to better grasp nuances in evangelicals’ own evolving ideologies and practices for making their religion intelligible to themselves and others.

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Section: Biblical Literalism and The Virtue Of Objectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Proselytizing is not evangelism: epistemic virtue and religious suasion at a post‐fundamentalist church in Nashville

Victor

2024

Royal Anthropological Inst

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Proselytizing is not evangelism: epistemic virtue and religious suasion at a post‐fundamentalist church in Nashville

Proselytizing is not evangelism: epistemic virtue and religious suasion at a post‐fundamentalist church in Nashville

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