Evangelicals and Moral Ambition

Several years ago I received a copy of the Wheaton College alumni magazine with the words, “Why is student activism on the rise?” on the cover. What I remember most about the articles that answered this question was their ambivalent tone. While the goal of the authors was clearly to celebrate campus efforts toward social engagement, these pieces took great pains to communicate that activism had in no way replaced the verbal proclamation of the gospel as the primary objective of Wheaton College students and faculty. The tension evident in this set of articles reflects the uncertainty conservative American Protestants often feel about social engagement. In part this is the result of the evangelical history of separation—or at least distinction—from the “social gospel” of the liberal mainline. However, one might expect that the issue runs a bit deeper than efforts at group differentiation, and specifically that it is embedded not only in history but also in culture and social life. In order to understand the conflicted attitude of American evangelicals toward social activism, then, it is helpful to turn to ethnographic analysis.

Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches (The Anthropology of Christianity) (Volume 12)

Omri Elisha (Author)

University of California Press

276 pages

$34.95

In his study of socially engaged evangelicals in Knoxville, Tennessee, Omri Elisha offers a rich and multilayered portrait of conservative (Western) Protestantism. Drawing on long-term anthropological research in two different megachurches, Elisha explores the various cultural, political, and theological ideas that shape American evangelicalism in general and evangelical social engagement in particular. One of the best things about this book is the consistent clarity of Elisha’s writing; his prose moves along easily to bring Protestantism in the Tennessee River Valley to life. Moreover, he is sensitive to the diversity of conservative Bible Belt Christianity. While evangelicals are often portrayed (and sometimes portray themselves) as a homogeneous group or a united political front, the internal reality of this group is much more nuanced.

Elisha defines “socially engaged evangelicals” as believers who “draw strong associations between religiosity and social conscience” and who are “notably active … in promoting and participating in various forms of organized benevolence.” As evangelicals who have had what they sometimes refer to as “social conversions”—that is, personal transformations that raise the position of social engagement on their list of religious priorities—these believers find their Christian vocation in mobilizing others to join them in outreach to the inner city.

Elisha begins his analysis with three chapters devoted to an ethnographic discussion of the two congregations he studied, the city of Knoxville, and some of the individuals who served as his key informants. Through these chapters we are given a glimpse of the social world of suburban Tennessee and the difficulties socially engaged evangelicals often encounter in their efforts to galvanize support for their causes among fellow conservative Christians. Building on this ethnographic foundation, Elisha then turns his attention to what he calls “the spiritual injuries of class.” While his evangelical informants do not offer a critique of capitalism as such, they are aware that economic privilege has its dangers; the comforts of middle-class life are gifts from God, but they may easily lead to spiritual stagnation or the neglect of family relationships.

The unease that many of their co-parishioners feel about class privilege provides a point of entry for socially engaged evangelicals to recruit participants for inner-city ministry. However, while church members may acknowledge, for example, the importance of caring for AIDS patients or volunteering at a downtown soup kitchen, many of the character traits of conservative American Protestantism make it difficult for the evangelicals who participate in these projects to remain involved, much less to convince others to join them in their work. Beyond a firm commitment to salvation by grace rather than works, which appears to make some of Elisha’s informants hesitant to participate in social ministries, the theological underpinnings that inform evangelical social action are themselves bound up in crosscutting emphases that together make social engagement more complicated. Elisha takes up this issue in what I found to be the most compelling chapter of the book. In it he draws on key themes in the anthropological study of exchange to analyze the simultaneous emphasis that believers place on compassion and accountability in their interactions with the inner-city poor.

For socially engaged evangelicals, compassion and accountability are two values central to any outreach endeavor. Compassion is what pushes them “out of their comfort zones” and into contact with disenfranchised residents of urban Knoxville. For the suburban Christians who choose to venture into the unknown world of the city, accountability presents an important way to manage the vulnerability they feel as economic, cultural, and racial outsiders. By including accountability as a component of their outreach programs, believers ask that those they assist adhere to certain standards with regard to work ethic, sobriety, and humility. Put in terms of exchange, compassion represents a free gift given without the thought of a return, an act of love and care that does not take into account the potential of its recipient to reciprocate but is instead motivated only by his suffering. Accountability, in contrast, requires that the beneficiaries of evangelical ministries respond with appropriate actions and attitudes.

Negotiating the demands of these divergent models of exchange is especially difficult for conservative Protestants because their efforts to feed the hungry or care for the sick are always subordinated to, and described in terms of, evangelism. In the hyper-commercialized context of late capitalism it is not hard to see why the free, compassionate gift is something that suburban evangelicals find attractive and something they imagine non-believing others will be attracted to as well. The expectation that recipients of mercy ministries will find such gifts compelling provides a way for Christian social services to be invested with evangelistic potential. But embedding acts of compassion in a larger proselytizing mission also implies that social ministries are ultimately about effecting transformation in their recipients. Compassionate social engagement, in other words, is always bound up with expectations of an appropriate return. As Elisha puts it, “When charity and evangelism are one and the same, a conflicted code of exchange comes into play in which Christians are expected to give selflessly and sacrificially while recipients of charity are obliged to reciprocate in kind.” This clear contradiction is further complicated when Christians romanticize the compassionate quality of their efforts. Because the actions of socially engaged evangelicals are described in terms of love and compassion, they are not recognized as requiring reciprocity, as leaving their recipients beholden to the generosity of another. Rather, the beguiling power of the apparently free gift allows the economic and racial inequalities inherent in evangelical social engagement to be obscured and perpetuated.

Through analysis like this, Elisha successfully illuminates the difficulty evangelicals have with social ministries. The term he uses to frame his argument, “moral ambition,” is meant to reflect the two poles between which social engagement is worked out. On one hand, morally ambitious evangelicals act within the various ideological and relational frameworks of their religious community to inspire others to take up their cause; on the other, those same frameworks push back on believers, both fueling and constraining their efforts. To be sure, this tension between structure and agency sits at the heart of any social scientific analysis. It is tempting, however, to imagine that there might be something particularly helpful about inserting this dialectic into a discussion of evangelical social engagement.

Throughout his research Elisha’s informants routinely stated that they were grateful for his presence, and indeed that they found it providential. An outside, “objective” observer might be just the thing they needed to make their operations more effective. Clearly, this wasn’t Elisha’s focus as an ethnographer, and in writing this review I have been reticent to frame my comments in terms of what evangelicals interested in social action or activism might learn from reading his book. The point of ethnography is not to crack a cultural code, much less to expose the internal contradictions present in any social group so that its members might try to resolve them. Rather, it is to bring to light the myriad ideas and actions, the relationships and rituals, that together give communities their structure.

What emerges from Elisha’s account is a picture of a group of believers who have different ideas about the position of social engagement in the constellation of evangelical priorities. He also reveals that many of these people embrace contradictory ideas about what social engagement means and does. I do not think his discussion provides us with a clear path to overcoming these tensions, nor do I wish that it did; it may, however, prompt us to consider what it is we hope for in our congregations. As anthropologists attend more and more frequently to Christianity as an object of study, Western believers will do well to examine not just how social research might help them work better—how the tools of social science might streamline ministry—but also, and more important, how these analyses provide an opportunity for reflection on the life and work of the church. When the mirror of ethnography is held up to one’s own community, it makes sense to look.

Naomi Haynes is a Chancellor’s Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is completing a monograph tentatively entitled Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostalism, Social Life, and Political Economy on the Zambian Copperbelt.