Theoretical Rubber, Empirical Pavement

One of the striking features of Jon Bialecki's bracing book is the scope and consistency of its theorization. A Diagram for Fire revolves around a fundamental question about continuity and change: how does Charismatic Christianity socially reproduce itself even as it exhibits surprising cultural plasticity? In exploring this question, Bialecki elaborates an extended analogy with topology, the branch of mathematics dealing with geometric properties that remain constant even as shapes undergo what appear to be radical deformations. Shapes-in-transformation are a fitting image for the kind of process Bialecki seeks to describe—the growth of a highly malleable religious movement—and he sustains and develops it over the course of the entire book. It is rare to encounter ethnographies so tightly organized around a single theoretical motif, and so resolutely committed to its extension. This alone makes for an exhilarating read, to say nothing of the rich insight the book offers into the flourishing of contemporary American Pentecostalism. Because this topological model of culture provides such a compelling analytic for Bialecki's ethnography, I want to spend some time examining how he develops and deploys it. What does this topological model make visible, and what might it obscure?

To adequately conceptualize the kind of cultural form that the Vineyard represents, Bialecki says,

we need to think of something that is topological and capable of being realized as different topographies. In essence this is to say that we need to think of some set of relations as if they were drawn on a piece of rubber or fabric that is capable of being folded, twisted, stretched or compressed in numerous and possibly infinite ways . . . And we need to do so in a way that says that this rubber sheet has no "natural" shape or tension that it desires to return to: this "theoretical" rubber is flexible, infinitely so, and is not prone to "snapping back" into any one shape.

(66)

Such a view of cultural practices as pliable maps on theoretical rubber makes good sense ethnographically, given the task Bialecki has set for himself: explaining the vitality of a loosely structured religious movement that by, emphasizing the direct experience of God through miraculous charismata, has achieved meteoric growth throughout the U.S. and around the world. As he writes: "From Southern California and Midwestern megachurches to fellowships in the United Kingdom, Rome, South Africa, and Kathmandu, we are looking not only at something that is capable of being iterated but is also capable of being transplanted" (64–5). How can we understand all these heterogenous, far-flung churches to be—synchronically—somehow the same as one another and—diachronically—somehow the same as the Early Church from which they draw inspiration?

Clearly the culture-as-topology model is doing some important work, highlighting change processes that a culture-as-text model (for instance) might occlude. It seems to me that there is an important connection between social structure and phenomenology here: the topological model works so well for describing this Charismatic religious movement because it reflects the dynamic relationship between organizational egalitarianism and an attunement to the subtle, emergent, and often highly individuated nature of God's miraculous intervention in human experience. For Vineyard Christians, God is both always absent and always present, communicating "in parts of the quotidian" and through "day-to-day material external to the person, as well as in aspects of . . . the sensorium or the psychic landscape" (71). This kind of miraculous but also "quotidian event . . . is one having a surprising saliency that cannot be accounted for. This saliency is usually framed as the statistically improbable, the physically impossible, the aesthetically striking, or the uncanny" (71). The problem is that miracles, if they occur regularly, are subject to standardization, routinization, or worse—fakery. Besides wham-bang gifts of the spirit—glossolalia, prophesy, healing, exorcism—Vineyard Christians undertake an "education of the senses" and a "pedagogy of the spirit" (101) that help them tune into novel manifestations of God in unexpected places, but which they also offset with a healthy dose...