Paradoxical commitments : Evangelicals, Muslims, and relational authenticity in the American Bible Belt
In the past decade, a movement among American evangelicals has emerged that is highly critical of fundamentalist theology and social conservatism. Recently, these evangelicals have garnered national attention through their perhaps unexpectedly positive outlook on immigration and religious diversity. This research focuses on an evangelical church in Nashville, Tennessee whose members seek “authentic relationships” with Muslim immigrants. I discovered that my informants’ moral inclination to evangelize their Muslim neighbours was complicated by their desire to acknowledge and respect religious diversity. Paradoxically, they articulated their respect for religious otherness as the most effective means by which to evangelize in the long term. In this thesis, I describe these competing commitments—evangelism, on the one hand, and the acceptance of difference on the other—as a paradoxical situation called a double bind (Bateson 1972). I observed that for my informants, living double bound can contribute to significant changes in religious beliefs and social behaviour as they recognized and attempted to navigate different levels of sociability, namely between their in-group values and norms of religious exclusivism and the perceived values and norms of religious pluralism in their broader social context. Some epistemological issues in the anthropological study of religious pluralism are discussed.
Immigration Anthropology of Christianity Evangelicals Inter-religious relations Authenticity Cosmopolitanism Pluralism Conviviality Immigration United States