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183 17 Differences at Play in the Fields of the Lord Susan F. Harding All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. —Martin Luther King Jr. The televangelical preachers of the 1980s each emerged out of, embodied, and performed particular lineages within the American evangelical Protestant tradition. Their particular lineages were visible in their attire, audible in their voices and sermons, and legible in their actions and writings. The Arminian pulse of reversible, repeatable salvation punctuated the testimonies and lives of Pentecostal preachers Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker with episodes of moral backsliding, devil wrestling, and deep spiritual crisis. The content of Swaggart’s preaching was marbled with fundamentalism in regard to morality and the end times, but his histrionic preaching style was hardcore Pentecostal crusade evangelism. The Bakkers were more pastoral on stage, low-key and chatty, and they took the non-fundamentalist fork in the Pentecostal road, preaching an aggressively “positive gospel.” The charismatic white Southern Baptist Pat Robertson cast his life and life stories in a Calvinist, once-saved-always-saved mold of irreversible salvation infused with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. His faith was tested many times, but he never backslid. He seamlessly performed his special blend of faith in miracles, moral fundamentalism , and apocalypticism as if it were as routine as the nightly news. The fundamental white Southern Baptist Jerry Falwell, the man, his life, and his story, was likewise framed by a Calvinist presumption of irreversible salvation, but one untainted by any Pentecostal-derived spiritual gifts. Falwell’s stiff-bodied demeanor and stolid voice conveyed the unambiguous message that God lives in the Word, not the human body.1 Falwell did leaven his militant Baptist fundamentalist posture , not with Pentecostalism, but by drawing from conservative evangelicalism its more active engagement with “the world.” This kind of account of the distinctive practices of televangelical preachers attempts to understand them as outcomes of their particular theological traditions and church histories. The part is explained, or interpreted, in terms of its whole. Customs, history, and beliefs are the source of characteristic religious behavior Susan F. Harding 184 and language. A “religion” is thus much like what anthropologist Fredrick Barth refers to as the classic definition of an “ethnic group”: “a unit for the reproduction of a shared culture.”2 Religion and ethnicity in these kinds of accounts are “ideal type” models of recurring empirical content and form that foreground continuity, identity, and internal dynamics. “History,” according to this view, “has produced a world of separate peoples, each with their culture and each organized in a society which can be legitimately isolated for description as an island to itself.”3 Barth has devoted much of his writing to a critique of the ideal-type model of ethnic groups.4 For him, ethnic groups are not based on shared cultures but rather on the play of cultural difference. “To think of ethnicity in relation to one group and its culture is like trying to clap with one hand. The contrast between ‘us’ and ‘others’ is what is embedded in the organization of ethnicity: an otherness of the others that is explicitly linked to the assertion of cultural differences.”5 What is shared among members of an ethnic group is their difference from those around them and the icons and idioms that come to stand for that difference. In this view, what matters is “the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff it encloses.”6 Arguably, it makes more sense to think of religions as shared cultures than it does ethnic groups. Religions are, after all, composed of organized, institutionalized , and ritualized practices whose outcome, if not express purpose, is to produce and reproduce shared assumptions, knowledge, experience, sentiments, desire—in a word, culture. But Barth’s point about the importance of difference and boundary making is still germane. Religions—preachers, faiths, rites, scriptures—do not arise, exist, act, speak, and change as islands unto themselves but only and always in relation to the field of others around them. The televangelical preachers of the 1980s arose out of and enacted their traditions , but the meaning of their words and actions was also an outcome of the differences, the boundaries, they signaled and signified. When the televangelists spoke their faith in a living savior Jesus Christ, they collectively announced who they were, and also who they were not—not modern, not secular, not theologically liberal. They also performed who they were not...

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