The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism 0198789610, 9780198789611

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The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism
 0198789610, 9780198789611

Table of contents :
Cover
The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
EVANGELICALS, CHILDHOOD, AND THE CHANGING RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE
RESEARCHING EVANGELICALS AND CHILDHOOD
BOOK AIMS AND OUTLINE
1: The Agency of Children and the Study of Religion
LOCATING CHILDHOOD IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION
CONCEPTUALIZING CHILDREN’S AGENCY
EVANGELICAL FIGURATIONS OF THE CHILD
‘Where Did You Pick That Up?’
HAND-IN-HAND CHILDREN’S AND FAMILY MINISTRY CONFERENCE
CONCLUSION
2: Learning a Form of Life
CHILDREN AND RELIGION: A RELATIONAL APPROACH
FRIENDSHIP WITH GOD AND OTHERS
LEARNING TO HEAR GOD
‘EVERYBODY IS IMPORTANT’
CONCLUSION
3: Parenthood: Anxiety, Authority, and Agency
FAITH IN PARENTING CULTURES
‘THERE ARE NO EXPERTS’: AUTHORITY AND INSTRUCTION AT ST JOHN’S
INTIMACY, ATTACHMENT, AND EMOTIONAL SECURITY AT ST GEORGE’S
CONCLUSION
4: Building an Academy
INTRODUCTION
FAITH SCHOOLS, NEOLIBERALISM, AND SOCIAL CLASS
RAGGED SCHOOLS AND RIVERSIDE’S EDUCATIONAL AMBITIONS
BREAKING THE CLASS CEILING?
CONCLUSION: NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF ‘MORAL SELVING’
POSTSCRIPT: ADDRESSING THE LANGUAGE OF CAPITAL
5: School Visitors
INTRODUCTION
ST GEORGE’S: CULTIVATING RELATIONSHIPS
RIVERSIDE: ‘TRANSFORMING COMMUNITY’
CONCLUSION
6: Marking Times and Transitions
INTRODUCTION
RITES OF PASSAGE AND THEIR AFTERLIVES
ST JOHN’S
ST GEORGE’S
RIVERSIDE
CONCLUSION
7: Living with Mess
INTRODUCTION
MESSING UP CHURCH
NATALITY, NEWNESS, AND THE IMMANENT TRANSCENDENT
CONCLUSION: SHIFTING WORLD VIEWS AND THE APORIA OF COMMUNITY
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 23/7/2019, SPi

T H E F I GU R E O F T H E C H I L D IN CONTEMPORARY EVANGELICALISM

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The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism ANNA STRHAN

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Anna Strhan 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934012 ISBN 978–0–19–878961–1 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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For Jesse and Nell

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Acknowledgements This book was made possible by many people. First and foremost, I would like to thank those at Riverside, St John’s, St George’s, and all those who participated in this research and were willing to share their experiences, time, and stories with me. I would also like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for the funding that made this research possible under the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship Scheme. The Religious Studies Department at the University of Kent and the Department of Sociology at the University of York have each provided supportive and stimulating environments as the project progressed through different stages. Special thanks to Gordon Lynch for his invaluable support, mentorship, and generosity of spirit throughout. Many other friends, colleagues, and students also shaped the development of this work. The list is too long to mention everyone, but I would especially like to thank: Ruth Sheldon, Lois Lee, Abby Day, Linda Woodhead, Grace Davie, David Henig, Rob Barward-Symmons, Sue Ridgely, Yvonne Sherwood, David Garbin, Simon Coleman, Jeremy Carrette, Matthew Engelke, Rachel Hanemann, Titus Hjelm, Jon Mair, Stephen Parker, and Andrew McKinnon. Dawn Llewellyn, Rachael Shillitoe, and Gordon Lynch went above and beyond the call of duty in reading and providing really helpful comments on the whole manuscript. The British Library London Lady Sociologists group has provided intellectual and emotional support, and encouraged many productive writing sessions. The book has benefited from opportunities to present papers at symposia and research seminars. Thanks are due to those who listened to and offered thoughtful engagements with early drafts of this material at the following: Ethics and Politics of the Neighbour Symposium, Birkbeck College, London; Senior Anthropology Research Seminar, University of Cambridge; Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion Research Seminar, Lancaster University; School of Anthropology Research Seminar, University of Kent; Religion in Urban Contexts Symposium, Utrecht University; Religions and Theology Research Seminar, University of Manchester; Theology and Ethics Research Seminar, Edinburgh University; Social Sciences Research Seminar, University of Roehampton; Social Sciences and Religion Research Seminar, King’s College London; Centre for Parenting Culture Studies Forum, University of Kent. I also spoke on these subjects at annual meetings of the British Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion Study Group, the American Anthropological Association, and the Association for Social Anthropologists, and at the biennial meetings of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and the International Society for the Sociology of Religion.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Karen Raith and Tom Perridge at Oxford University Press and to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful readings and suggestions. Thanks also to Kim Richardson for his help with copyediting and to Seemadevi Sekar for their help in the final stages of preparing the manuscript. Parts of this book have been published in different forms elsewhere, although substantially revised here. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appears as ‘“I want there to be no glass ceiling”: Evangelicals’ Engagements with Class, Education, and Urban Childhoods’, Sociological Research Online 22(1), DOI: 10.5153/sro.4259. Sections of Chapter 3 appear in ‘Children in Contemporary British Evangelicalism’, in The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood, ed. Anna Strhan, Stephen G. Parker, and Susan B. Ridgely, 2017 (London, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc), pp. 51–60, and in ‘Evangelical Anglicans and the Formation of Children in Modern Britain’, in Contemporary Issues in the Worldwide Anglican Communion, ed. Abby Day, 2016 (Farnham, Ashgate), pp. 39–53. Sections of the introduction and Chapter 1 appear in the introduction to The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood, ed. Anna Strhan, Stephen G. Parker, and Susan B. Ridgely, 2017 (London, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc). Portions of Chapters 6 and 7 appeared in ‘A New Jerusalem’, The Immanent Frame, 17 November 2017. Finally, my family has been a huge source of support and care throughout, especially Petra and Lou Strhan, Phil and Lesley Block, and above all my husband, Martin Block. He has given me the time and space for this research and writing, provided encouragement and sustenance, and read and discussed each chapter with great insight. Our children, Jesse and Nell, were born during the writing of the book, and have brought such joy to our lives. This book is dedicated to them.

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Contents Introduction

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1. The Agency of Children and the Study of Religion

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2. Learning a Form of Life

48

3. Parenthood: Anxiety, Authority, and Agency

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4. Building an Academy

108

5. School Visitors

134

6. Marking Times and Transitions

154

7. Living with Mess

178

Conclusion

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Bibliography Index

211 227

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Introduction ‘How will we know about God’s love if no one tells us?’ said a small child in a video clip that Becky, one of the children’s workers at Riverside evangelical church, was playing at a meeting for the volunteers and church staff who helped with Kids Church¹ one Thursday evening in May 2013. After a ‘bring and share’ supper of cheese, salad, sausage rolls, vegan flapjacks, and scones, Becky had turned the lights down to play a short film about churches’ ministry with children on her laptop. The film emphasized the importance of this ministry in a de-Christianizing cultural context, stating that unless children have the opportunity to engage with faith, they would not end up going to church and will not end up as Christians. After the film had finished, Becky commented that she found its message ‘very powerful’, and said that she thought it was also important to think that what they did in Kids Church was about children ‘being disciples now’, and that by helping at Kids Church, ‘that’s our being disciples’. Jon, one of the children’s workers, added that children’s ministry is also important ‘because pretty much all the studies show that the majority of people come to faith before they’re eleven years old’. He repeated this to everyone for emphasis. Becky and Jon asked everyone to share their stories or experiences from Kids Church with each other. Gemma, a teaching assistant, began by commenting that one thing she had noticed recently was how very keen the children were to get out to Kids Church from the main church service, which, she said, ‘shows how much they feel it is their space’. Joy, the church’s community development manager, said that she had got to know one girl from visiting Riverside Primary Academy (the local primary school linked with the church) who had been having ‘some issues’ at school, and had decided to come to Kids Church. Joy said that it was ‘amazing’ that from the first session the girl ‘has been so happy there’, and that this had made a difference not just to her, but also to her family. Becky commented that she was encouraged by a conversation she had had with a mother at the church’s toddlers’ group that

¹ ‘Kids Church’ was the term used at Riverside for their Sunday school.

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week. She said that the mother had ‘got quite emotional’ talking to her, and that she had wanted to say how much it meant to her ‘that her children were learning about God in Kids Church, that she worried about passing her beliefs on to her children’, and so it meant a lot to her ‘that her kids were growing in faith through the church’. Becky told the volunteers that they shouldn’t underestimate how much the work they did at Kids Church means to the parents and emphasized again that this mother had been ‘pretty emotional’ when talking to her about this. Jon commented that he had been talking to a mother at the church who had been thinking about changing churches and had visited some other churches with her child. He said that this mother had asked her child what he thought of the other churches, and that he had replied, ‘I like my church’, referring to Riverside. Jon said he thought it was ‘pretty great’ that the children thought of Riverside as their church. At the end of the meeting, Becky introduced a time of prayer. The group closed their eyes and bowed their heads, and everyone said a prayer except me and a new volunteer. Alice, a young doctor, spoke quickly and fluently as she prayed, asking that God ‘would really be at work through his Holy Spirit in Kids Church in drawing the children to him’. Joy thanked God for what they could learn about him ‘through the children and through their innocence’, while Jon prayed that they ‘would never be satisfied. May we always be working to improve things, to make Kids Church better.’ Children powerfully embody the future for adults, representing the possible futures or non-futures of a particular religious culture, and their involvement or non-involvement in religion can therefore provoke anxiety. The falling numbers of young people identifying with or practising religion across Europe (Bullivant 2018) can give those involved in working with children in churches a sense of the importance and urgency of their work, as we see suggested in this meeting, as they seek to stem this flow. At the same time, as numbers of the avowedly non-religious continue to rise and non-religion comes to replace Christianity as the cultural default in the UK (Lee 2015, Woodhead 2017), religious institutions’ efforts to engage with and influence the lives of children, such as through their involvement in schooling, can also cause concern. Heated public debates about faith schools, for instance, often invoke fears of indoctrination, with ‘religion’ viewed as threatening the developing independence and freedom of the child, while concerns are also expressed about whether faith schools and religious child-raising practices exacerbate forms of religious and classbased social segregation. While the establishment and expansion of statefunded Islamic schools has been a particular cause for controversy in many Western nations, religious efforts to engage with children and education more broadly have also generated controversy, with evangelicals often also singled out as posing a potentially indoctrinatory threat to children or

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presented as extremist groups undermining ‘fundamental British values’² of freedom and tolerance. Contemporary debates about the relationship between children and religion reflect wider social changes that have, from the late 1960s onwards, repositioned childhood at the forefront of personal and political agendas, manifested, for example, in what the historian Raphael Samuel refers to as ‘the middle-class cult of childhood’ (1994: 93). Focus on children has intensified due to changes in family structure and demographic shifts towards an ageing population, which have imbued the ‘priceless’ child with a unique scarcity value (Zelizer 1994). Complex, interwoven ideational currents have also sharpened this focus: the increasingly pressing need to invest in futures; the repositioning of personhood as societies have moved away from traditional categories of identity; and the rapid pace of social and cultural change readjusting orientations towards time and mortality (James et al. 1998: 5). At the same time, Western modernization has increasingly emphasized the importance of providing children with freedoms and rights to lives of their own, celebrating norms of equality, mutual respect, and autonomy between children and adults in the context of the family and elsewhere (Beck 1997, Giddens 1998, Oswell 2013). We are living in times marked by both a heightened concern for children—in which the care of children has come to take on a sacred status (Lynch 2012)—and a sense of childhood as under threat, with children seen as increasingly ‘confined, trapped indoors, cocooned by anxieties . . . and by increased pressures, demands and expectations’ (Thomson 2013: 1). These processes also affect religion, and as control over what happens to children has moved away from religious bodies and become concentrated in structures of state education, the media, or commercial interests, childhood is often a site of particular struggle, anxiety, and controversy in relation to religion. In this wider context, this book explores the lived realities of how different evangelical churches seek to engage with children across the spaces of church, home, school, and other informal educational settings, how children experience these forms of engagement, and the meanings and significance of childhood across different evangelical groups. Moving beyond simplistic portrayals of the evangelical indoctrination of children in which children are perceived as the passive receptors of religious belief, I argue for attention to be paid to the multiple registers and formations of children’s agency, addressing how both

² The UK government defines ‘fundamental British values’ as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and of no faith. Teachers in English schools have been required to promote these values since 2014, in initial response to the ‘Trojan Horse Affair’, when documents were leaked to the media alleging a plot to ‘Islamize’ twenty-one state-funded schools in Birmingham, although no evidence was found to support these accusations (Vincent and Hunter-Henin 2018, Holmwood and O’Toole 2018).

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children and the idea of childhood act within religious life and engaging with the temporal, spatial, material, and moral complexity of this (Oswell 2013). The book sets out a new, relational approach to the study of childhood and religion, which invites us to consider how particular forms of children’s agency are not given a priori but emerge through practices and forms of relationship, how the figure of ‘the child’ exerts agency shaping the hopes, fears, and imaginations of adults, and how these processes enable or constrain children’s agency in lived experience. The study of evangelicalism has largely ignored the lives of children, reflecting a wider historic marginalization of children within the study of religion. Yet as children and childhood occupy an important place within evangelical imaginaries and practices, understanding the empirical realities of evangelicalism requires that children—and adults’ hopes and concerns in relation to them—are integrated more fully into research. As Priscilla Alderson puts it, ‘childhood, like adulthood, is not a discrete specialist topic to be flattened, sliced and squeezed into a distinct subsociology. Instead, children and adults exist and interact across practically all social concerns, and are understood through multidisciplinary research’ (2016). Focusing on children in relation to evangelicalism is, however, I argue, not only about understanding childhood, but opens up deeper understanding of the nature of evangelical lifeworlds, of what it is to be a parent, of what it is to educate, of the place of religion and religious–secular relations in public life, and of wider questions of personhood, temporality, the nature of authority, and moral aspiration in the contemporary moment. Setting out an approach that explores the interrelations between the figure of the child, children’s agency, and how adult religious subjectivities are constructed in both imagined and practical relationships with children, this book aims to demonstrate the importance of studying children and childhood within the sociology of religion in order to enrich our understanding of the contemporary social realities of religion.

EVANGELICALS, CHILDHOOD, AND THE CHANGING RELIGIOUS L ANDSCAPE Over the past century and a half, public perceptions of evangelicals’ engagements with children—and of evangelicalism itself—have shifted radically. While the evangelical Lord Shaftesbury was romantically celebrated as leading ‘the children of bondage into their Promised Land’ as he took up the cause of factory children and climbing boys and welcomed ‘poor children into his Ragged Schools’ (Cunningham 1991: 9), today evangelicals’ engagements with children in the UK are often regarded with ambivalence, and sometimes

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as cause for heightened public concern.³ This shift needs to be located within a wider landscape of religious change in Britain, a country in which Christianity remains deeply culturally embedded, but which is also becoming increasingly secular, non-religious, and diverse in its religious profile at the same time (Davie 2015: xii). As formal religious participation has declined precipitously since the 1960s while affiliation to Christianity is falling, there has been a significant growth in the number of individuals claiming to have ‘no religion’ (Lee 2015, Woodhead 2017). The fastest-growing forms of religion are no longer those linked with established political power and prestige, but are more closely associated with minority groups, such as Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Pentecostals ‘forging new forms of identity and representation in British society’ (Woodhead 2012: 25). Claims that Britain is a secular nation fail to acknowledge the extent to which religion has remained embedded in aspects of culture, in institutions associated with government, in the educational system, and in other aspects of public life, as a legacy of the historic and complex intertwining of the monarchy, the established churches, and the major public institutions (Johnson and Vanderbeck 2014: 11). In an increasingly religiously diverse society, a range of faith groups and leaders (including other Christian denominations besides the established churches) are also now often included within strategies of consultation seeking to enhance the inclusion of minority interests (ibid.). Religion thus became ‘something to be dealt with by consultations, legislation and policy’, with a distinction increasingly made between ‘socially useful “faith” initiatives, and dangerous forms of “religion” which put the claims of God above those of citizenship’ (Woodhead 2012: 2). Alongside these changing modes of religious engagement with governance and policy, the growing salience of different forms of religion in the public sphere, together with its unavoidable prominence in global politics relayed across omnipresent news channels and social media, has often provoked strong reactions from secular groups and elites. Religion is now often viewed as ‘a “toxic brand”, prejudiced and illiberal at best, divisive and destructive at worst’ (Woodhead 2016: 258). Against this backdrop of longer-term religious decline and the growth of forms of non-religion, evangelicalism has become an increasingly prominent force within the Protestant churches. As Linda Woodhead argues, evangelicalism’s social conservatism in terms of gender roles and the nuclear family resonated with the Christian ‘revival’ of the immediate post-war years, and as the post-war era continued, the more friendly, personal God known directly in Jesus Christ that evangelicalism emphasized ‘would eclipse the sterner God of civic tradition’ (Woodhead 2012: 13). The mood of national revival and Christian confidence of the 1950s was, however, replaced by a progressively

³ See, for example, BBC 2013, Independent 2013, Spielman 2018.

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more secular era (ibid.). Some commentators present this as a rapid process, with the repressive and puritanical ethos of Christian moral narratives overturned by the 1960s counterculture and the ‘vigorous promulgation of new narratives which, with amazing suddenness, swept liberal culture: postcolonial narratives, feminism, gay liberation, the green movement and narratives of sexual freedom’ (Brown 2009: 232, see also Brown and Lynch 2012). Other historians (e.g. McLeod 2007) portray this shift as ‘more gradual than that, . . . in which the churches were willing partners rather than reactionary critics’ (Woodhead 2012: 13). Yet while much of mainstream Protestantism became increasingly liberalized, a sub-cultural perspective became dominant amongst evangelicalism, with evangelical worship songs from the 1980s onwards, for example, increasingly portraying followers of Christ using military imagery, as an army or stronghold against a prevailing culture of unbelief (Brown and Lynch 2012: 341). Religious responses opposing liberalizing moral currents are often presented as ‘patriarchal protest movements’ against modernity (Riesebrodt 1998), and the strength of global evangelicalism is often explained in at least partly these terms. Conservative evangelical teachings on gender difference and emphasis on certain truths as revealed in the Bible have been portrayed as a response to a growing fluidity of meaning and existential anxieties, as traditional sources of authority and security are overturned through globalization and the extension of impersonal market forces across ever-greater areas of life (Strhan 2015: 8). Yet while norms of submission, the acceptance of religious and scriptural authority, and the traditionalist re-inscription of gender difference prevalent in many evangelical churches grew increasingly countercultural, in other ways evangelicalism chimed well with cultural trends emerging over this period. As Grace Davie notes, late modern currents such as an emphasis on expressivism, self-awareness, and reflexivity may be seen as aids rather than barriers to the evangelical movement, especially in its charismatic expressions (2015: 143). At the same time, the entrepreneurial ethos and emphasis on the individual (situated within tight social networks of family and faith) resonated well with the Thatcher era and beyond, in which evangelicalism was one of the fastest-growing forms of religion in the UK (Woodhead 2012: 19). It is difficult to ascertain the precise number of evangelicals in the UK today, with estimates varying widely according to different forms of measurement and identification used (Smith 2015: 17). However, they make up an increasing proportion of churchgoers in the UK (40 per cent according to the 2005 English Church Census, Brierley 2006: 51), spread across a variety of denominations, including roughly a third belonging to the Church of England (Smith and Woodhead 2018: 210). The only large-scale survey data on evangelicals in the UK derives from the ‘21st Century Evangelicals’ research programme, carried out by the Evangelical Alliance since 2010. The data from the 2016

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panel survey for this programme suggests that the majority identify as ‘white British’ (93 per cent of the sample),⁴ with an older population (58 per cent having been born before 1960, 32 per cent in the 1960s or 1970s, and only 10 per cent since 1980) (Smith and Woodhead 2018: 210). The evangelicals surveyed in the programme were predominantly middle to upper class, with the 2012 survey revealing 70 per cent with a university degree and 41 per cent with postgraduate qualifications, probably reflecting the socio-economic profile of evangelicals in Britain more generally (Smith and Woodhead 2018: 211). The term ‘evangelical’ is broad, and scholars—as well as evangelicals themselves—disagree about the question of definition. I use ‘evangelical’ in what follows to refer, following David Bebbington, to the tradition existing in Britain since the 1730s, marked by characteristics of conversionism, Biblicism, activism, and crucicentrism (Bebbington 1989: 3). I use the term ‘conservative evangelical’ for the tradition emerging within British evangelicalism following a rift with liberal evangelicals in the 1920s, with differing estimates of the Bible a central point of tension (pp. 181–228). I use ‘charismatic’ to refer here to those evangelicals who place an emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit and practise spiritual gifts, but retain their membership in older, established congregations, rather than participating in Pentecostal or neo-Pentecostal churches (Coleman and Hackett 2015: 9). I use ‘open evangelical’ to describe a culture united in dissatisfaction with dominant evangelical culture’s focus on personal salvation and propositional beliefs, critiquing conservative evangelical teachings on gender, sexuality, and the exclusivity of salvation in Christ. They have close links with—and many describe themselves as part of—the ‘emerging Church/emerging evangelical’ movement (Bielo 2011, Engelke 2013, Marti and Ganiel 2014). However, understanding what it means to be ‘evangelical’ today means holding each of these definitions loosely, and examining the range of people and organizations who claim these terms for themselves, exploring both what they share and points of difference and tension, and the ways in which the meanings of these terms can shift over time. It is worth noting that it is the more theologically conservative forms of evangelicalism that are often the most culturally prominent in the UK and elsewhere. These groups have acquired a media and public significance greater than their numbers through, as Brown and Lynch comment (2012: 341), generating conflicts within religious institutions (e.g. over LGBTQ clergy, same-sex marriage, and women’s ordination in the Church of England and

⁴ Smith notes, however, that BAME groups may be under-represented in the sample because while a high proportion of such groups may in many ways be evangelical in terms of their theology, they may not themselves self-identify as ‘evangelical’, and are more likely to use the term ‘Pentecostal’ (2015: 21).

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the Anglican Communion⁵), and through their participation in particular forms of religious activism and protest in public life. It is more conservative forms of evangelicalism that especially generate media attention because of the tendency of news media to be drawn to stories which frame social life in terms of conflict and controversy (Brown and Lynch 2012: 341). This situation, however, skews wider public perceptions of contemporary evangelicalism, leading to stereotypes of evangelicals as reactionary fundamentalists who feel themselves increasingly oppressed and marginalized by a hostile, secular state, and fails to appreciate the diversity of those who identify as ‘evangelical’. In the decade following the financial crisis, some evangelicals’ social activism in responding to aspects of poverty and social need has also captured public attention, such as their engagement in food banks or the initiatives to address financial exclusion set in motion by the Archbishop of Canterbury—whose background is charismatic evangelical—following his well-publicized critique of the payday loans company Wonga. However, it is worth noting that in media portrayals of these kinds of social engagement, churches’ and individuals’ evangelicalism is often not mentioned. Seeking to move beyond well-worn stereotypes of evangelicals, this book uses ‘childhood’ as a lens through which to explore the contemporary realities of evangelicals’ lives and concerns. While tensions related to gender and sexuality have frequently commanded the attention of sociologists of religion, parent–child relations and understandings of the family are also a fundamental aspect of wider social changes in relation to religion and have thus far received relatively little empirical attention (in contrast with the literature on religion in the public sphere). At the same time, focusing on how evangelicals seek to engage with children allows insight into the lived realities of the relationship between religion and education. A side-effect of neoliberal and post-welfarist policies has been the increased opportunities afforded for faith groups in educational provision (Dinham and Jackson 2012), and it is thus not surprising that faith-based schooling has attracted growing scholarly attention over the past decade or so.⁶ However, much of this data has been either theoretical or based on quantitative analysis, and we still know relatively little about how religion and the secular are located and negotiated within the mundane micropractices of everyday school life, or about what the links between schools and religious institutions look like in practical terms. Focus on the lived realities of how evangelicals engage with children and the agency of childhood across church, school, and home life also opens onto broader questions surrounding the place of religion in modernity. Popular ⁵ See discussion in Brittain and McKinnon (2018). ⁶ See, for example, Halstead and McLaughlin 2005, Gardner et al. 2005, Allen and West 2009, 2011, Andrews and Johnes 2016, Clayton et al. 2018.

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cultural conceptions of ‘childhood’, ‘education’, and ‘adulthood’ bear the traces of emancipatory Enlightenment ideals, in which what it is to be an adult and what it is to be educated are held to entail the development of individual autonomy and self-determination. Concepts of freedom, selfdetermination, and tolerance acquired a new centrality in visions of social progress as Enlightenment thinkers sought to move beyond what they saw as the destructive legacy of obedience to earlier social and political institutions and the religious orders that legitimated them, and ideas of collective belonging became oriented around the nation state rather than the churches. A secularliberal vision of an ideal society of autonomous actors (Seligman 2014: 14) became over time closely linked with understandings of Enlightenment modernity as the ‘autonomous adversary of “revealed religion”’ (Rose 1997: 127). If the path to Enlightenment or modernity was perceived to be about becoming determined by one’s own mind, this was often seen at odds with a religious ethic of submission to a divine Other. While religion had remained central for many Enlightenment thinkers, they also advocated a stronger separation of religion and the state. As Calhoun et al. argue, many preferred a ‘reasonable’ religion, as John Locke put it, opposing excessive ‘enthusiasm’. They sensed a need to think of religion as a social construct that was potentially limited and controllable—something, in brief, that could be dominated by a different way of thinking. This new way of thinking was characterized by reason and secular ideals. (2011: 7)

This Enlightenment vision worked its way out in Euro-American contexts in different configurations of the relations between education and religion.⁷ However, the Enlightenment emphasis on autonomy also shaped modern understandings of education as concerned with the progressive development of autonomy. In this narrative, children are implicitly heteronomous, to be developed into autonomous, rational citizens through education and childraising practices. Many Enlightenment advocates of autonomy were also pioneers of educational theories that have been enormously influential in shaping dominant approaches to education. Kant, for example, emphasized the idea of education as about the formation of the rational, autonomous subject, and he saw the moral subject as one who is free to obey the dictates of reason without being affected by anything else, rejecting heteronomy as ‘the source of all spurious principles of morality’ (Kant 1998: 47). Children, in Kant’s view, were not yet capable of submitting to the dictates of reason, and

⁷ Adam B. Seligman’s excellent Religious Education and the Challenge of Pluralism (2014) provides a comparative analysis of religious education and state policies towards religious education across seven different countries and in the European Union as a whole.

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the educator’s role was therefore to lead them towards reason and autonomy (Strhan 2012: 84). Religion seemed in these wider narratives to stand for all that ‘secular modernity’ was supposed to have left behind, with children and infants understood as not yet capable of determining their own minds. It is thus easy to see why religious child-raising practices and religious institutions’ involvement in education can become subject to contestation, prompting fears that children’s developing independence, freedom, and autonomy are under threat. Political theorist Matthew Clayton, for instance, argues that in accounts of liberal legitimacy, infant baptism is an illegitimate practice, as a nonvoluntary enrolment of a child into a ‘particular comprehensive doctrine’, which violates the principle of autonomy (2006: 88), while Richard Dawkins, arguing that it was ‘preposterous to speak of “Christian children” or “Muslim children”’ (2015), states that labelling children as religious ‘negates the ideal, held by all decent educationists, that children should be taught to think for themselves’. However, by attending to the specific modalities of children’s agency, including how norms of self-determination are promoted within some evangelical churches and in schools linked with them, this book challenges simplistic notions of religion as fundamentally opposed to ideals of autonomy that still abound in many debates about education. The picture that emerges reveals how while some evangelicals emphasize norms of submission, other aspects of evangelicals’ work with children are shaped by broader contemporary ideational currents and processes, such as neoliberalism, individualization, and an emphasis on reflexivity. Attending to how ideas of autonomy and agency are implicated in evangelical constructions of the child, the book argues that the ways in which some conservative evangelicals understand childhood today enacts a narrative of declinism, in which a de-Christianizing British society is understood to be in a downward moral and cultural spiral. Within this narrative, my conservative evangelical interlocutors describe themselves as increasingly countercultural, moving against the grain of pervasive norms of individual agency and autonomy as they prioritize norms of submission and obedience not only for their children, but also in family life and in how individuals should relate to God. At odds with this, charismatic and open evangelicals’ engagements with children are increasingly shaped by wider democratizing cultural norms that seek to allow children to ‘be themselves’ and for adults to learn from the ‘wisdom’ and ‘innocence’ of children. My interlocutors in these churches express their desires for children to be regarded as equal to adults in the church, although the children themselves do not necessarily experience this to be the case. Across all these evangelical lifeworlds, however, engagements with children become laden with moral meanings for adults, as the figure of the child within each embodies not only the possible futures of evangelicalism but also their hopes to engage with and influence the future of British society.

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RESEARCHING E VANGELICALS AND CHILDHOOD My initial plan for this research was to focus on childhood in relation to conservative evangelicalism. My previous research had been an ethnographic study of how conservative evangelicals negotiated their faith—including their countercultural teachings on gender, sexuality, and other religions—across different urban spaces, revealing the processes through which they learnt to understand themselves as an alienated minority in contemporary British society. Although the book based on this research (Strhan 2015) did not focus on children or childhood, questions surrounding child-rearing and religious socialization frequently arose during my fieldwork. I became increasingly aware of how childhood seemed to be a site of anxiety for some conservative evangelicals, reflected in the emergence of church-run parenting courses, and evangelicals’ visibility in highly publicized national campaigns on issues such as the sexualization of childhood and sex education. These initiatives were attracting wider public attention, generating criticism both of the rise of a politically influential conservative Christian movement, with links to generous donors in the United States, and fears about the effects of religiously separatist child-raising practices. My intention was therefore to open up understanding not only of the contemporary significance of childhood within evangelicalism but also how ‘religious’ subjects are formed in ‘secular’ times and the changing place of children within this. When I began to investigate possible fieldsites for this research, however, I soon discovered that the ways in which other churches were engaging with children also illuminated important questions about childhood, evangelicalism, and the contemporary nature of children’s formation. Since there had been so little empirical research into childhood and children’s lives in relation to evangelicalism, I decided to broaden my focus to include charismatic and open evangelicals to add to the small but growing literature on childhood and religion, using ethnography to enable insight into the everyday practices shaping children’s experiences and the concerns of adults in relation to them. Ethnography has become a privileged method in the sociological study of children’s lives and culture. James and Prout argue that ethnography has a particular part to play in attending to children as social actors in their own right, allowing them ‘a more direct voice in the production of sociological data’ than is possible through surveys or experimental styles of research, and enabling insight into how children play particular roles and into ‘the meanings that they themselves attach to their lives’ (1997: 4–5). In relation to the study of religion and childhood, Robert Orsi highlights the practical issues that might seem to be involved in carrying out fieldwork with children, asking: ‘Is it possible to know their religious worlds from the inside? How can adults be present in such conversations without being overwhelming?’ (cited in Bales

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2005: 54). Yet, as Bales notes, these concerns about what it is to know another’s world and unequal power dynamics apply to all ethnographic research. I decided to use ethnography in this research not only because it allows us to hear children’s voices more directly, but because it also enables insight into the subtleties of how people—both adults and children—move and act across different times and spaces, such as how church and school spaces afford different ways of speaking, acting, and locating religion, each shaped by their own institutional cultures. This book draws primarily on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with three evangelical churches, which I call ‘Riverside’ (open evangelical), ‘St George’s’ (charismatic evangelical), and ‘St John’s’ (conservative evangelical). I had already amassed a significant amount of relevant data during my research with the conservative evangelical ‘St John’s’ over nineteen months’ ethnographic fieldwork there (February 2010–August 2011). I therefore decided to conduct secondary data analysis of this material⁸ and supplement this data with further fieldsite visits, interviews, and observations where there were specific issues or questions I wanted to investigate further in relation to children’s experiences. This then enabled me to extend the scope of the research through conducting new ethnographic research with a charismatic evangelical church, ‘St George’s’, and an open evangelical congregation, ‘Riverside’, between January 2013 and June 2015.⁹ I chose to approach Riverside and St George’s because, like St John’s, they were each regarded as important and influential representatives of their style of evangelicalism. Each church had close links with other prominent doctrinally similar evangelical churches and leaders across different global contexts (especially the US) and were regarded by other evangelical churches of their type as leading the way in areas of theological controversy. David, the rector of St John’s, emphasized to me that in his view a key feature of St John’s was its ‘church planting and pioneering agenda’, and St George’s likewise had a programme of ‘church planting’. Riverside was not involved in church planting in the same way, but was developing a national network of churches, and, like St John’s, hosted regular national conferences and events examining particular theological issues, aimed at other church leaders. All three are large churches, located in central London: St John’s the largest, with three ⁸ This comprised 777 single-spaced typed pages of detailed fieldnotes, together with transcripts of formal, open-ended interviews with thirty-one church members, and of sermons and talks given in the church during this period. ⁹ I conducted the majority of my fieldwork with Riverside between January 2013 and October 2014, and with St George’s between March 2013 and June 2015. The greater length of time I spent with St George’s was in part due to my regular participation in Kids Church (as an extra adult present) being helpful to the church. This form of ongoing immersion in the everyday ‘duties’ of church life enriched the depth of this research, but also made leaving difficult (Day 2017: 16).

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Sunday services each averaging about five hundred in attendance; St George’s attracting around two hundred to each of its two Sunday services; and Riverside also drawing around two hundred to its Sunday morning service, and around fifty to its Sunday evening service. I make no claims as to their national representativeness as churches, but rather aim to draw out similarities and differences between their respective cultures that provide insight into the varied textures and moral rhythms of contemporary evangelicalism, and how this relates to their processes of engaging with children. However, it is worth noting that while evangelicalism has often flourished in suburban and rural settings, urban settings—and specifically London—are of strategic importance for understanding the potential futures of evangelicalism. In the twenty-first century, Greater London is the only county to have witnessed an overall increase in church attendance (Brierley 2006) and is home to 23 per cent of evangelical churchgoers and 57 per cent of all churchgoers aged twenty to twenty-nine (pp. 249–50).¹⁰ Ethnographic comparisons of conservative and progressive religious groups are rare. Therefore conducting fieldwork across different evangelical churches appealed for theoretical reasons, drawing attention to ‘unexpected parallels between the groups while also casting subtle differences between them into clearer relief ’ (Braunstein 2017: 13) and affording insight into how each negotiated their position in relation to wider cultural, social, and political contexts. Comparison is, as Michael Herzfeld suggests, useful as a heuristic device and it is important to recognize that the process of comparison takes place not only across fieldsites, but also in relation to the ethnographer’s own professional and personal trajectory (2001: 262). Here, it is worth underscoring that the fact I conducted fieldwork with St John’s before I began fieldwork with Riverside and St George’s meant that I was perhaps more struck than others with less immersion in conservative evangelicalism would have been by differences between these churches and St John’s. I was, for instance, conscious of how some members of St George’s and Riverside at times ‘othered’ conservative evangelicals, as those at St John’s had also distinguished themselves from charismatics (Strhan 2015: 185). Yet I also observed fluidity across these groups, with some individuals who had previously been at St John’s now regular attendees at St George’s, while a couple of individuals also simultaneously attended morning services at Riverside and evening services at St George’s.

¹⁰ With more resources, it would have been useful to also include a black majority congregation in this research. However, the time-intensive nature of fieldwork meant including a fourth church was beyond the comparative scope (and funding) of this project. It is worth noting that while many black majority churches may be evangelical in terms of their theology, they are more likely to identify as Pentecostal rather than evangelical (Smith 2015: 21).

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My own personal history was also relevant to the process of comparison. My decision to begin researching evangelicals can, as I have discussed elsewhere (2015: 25), be linked to my teenage involvement in and subsequent path away from the charismatic evangelical movement. This teenage experience of evangelicalism in part motivated my initial desire to understand the social and cultural effects of evangelicalism better. But it is also worth noting that my own personal experience meant that I was especially struck by how attitudes to issues such as women’s leadership in the church and the acceptance of LGBTQ identities and same-sex relationships at St George’s were shifting rapidly away from the more conservative teachings I had encountered in the late 1990s. These are themes I explore in the later chapters of this book. All three churches were located in inner urban areas of heightened socioeconomic polarization and this shaped their congregational dynamics in somewhat different ways. The congregation of St John’s was predominantly (but not exclusively) white, affluent, educated, and middle-class, with a high proportion of students, single graduates in their twenties and thirties, and married couples and young families with children, with many of its members working in fields such as law, finance, medicine, and teaching. There was a relatively low proportion of teenage children, as a significant number of families with children ended up moving out to more suburban churches, and those with teenage children who did stay at St John’s were often wealthy enough to send their children to fee-paying schools. The membership of St George’s was also young, with a high proportion of students and professionals working in the creative arts, media, and technology sectors. Although many of the children at St George’s were from white, middle-class families, the church had a significant proportion of children (and of its adult membership) from a diverse range of ethnicities and nationalities, including Nigerian, Rwandan, South African, Chinese, Brazilian, Japanese, and Polish. Although there were certainly well-heeled members of St George’s, the overall culture of the church was not ‘posh’ middle-class as it was at St John’s (see Strhan 2015: 15), with emphasis instead placed on the idea of the church as ‘creative’. A few of the children attended fee-paying schools, but the majority did not. Riverside’s membership was diverse in terms of ethnicity and social class, with the majority of those attending services living in the local area surrounding the church, in contrast with both St John’s and St George’s, which both drew a significant proportion of their membership from further afield in London. Many of Riverside’s most prominent members (who were involved in leading services, speaking in various capacities at the front of the church, and leading work with children) were young, white, and middle-class, and tended to work in the public or third sector or in Christian ministry. It is worth noting, however, that Riverside’s church leadership, in contrast with St John’s and St George’s, had largely not been educated at elite universities, and although the majority were white, there were also BAME leaders. Those who

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attended church services were from a more diverse range of social class and ethnic backgrounds, working in a range of fields (including politics, education, catering, and the civil service), with some currently unemployed, and a small handful of regular attendees either homeless or living in temporary hostel accommodation. My fieldwork with the children also made me aware of how several of the families at Riverside were affected by the impact of economic recession and austerity policies, with children sometimes saying prayers telling God that they needed money in their houses because the previous week they ‘couldn’t buy a lot of shopping so the fridge was nearly empty’. Only a small minority of children and local families were white and middle-class, with the majority from African, Afro-Caribbean, Latin American, white working-class, and mixed heritage backgrounds. St John’s and St George’s are both Anglican, while Riverside is Baptist. St John’s, however, did not have an easy relationship with the Church of England, and was closely linked with the Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON), a movement which grew out of transnational alliances that had developed since the mid-1990s in opposition to the growing acceptance of homosexual relationships in some Anglican provinces (GAFCON 2009, Sadgrove et al. 2010, Brittain and McKinnon 2018) and was critical of liberalism within the Anglican Communion more broadly. As is typical of GAFCON-supporting churches, St John’s opposed same-sex relationships and the ordination of LGBTQ bishops in the Anglican Communion. The church was also representative of the conservative evangelical wing of the Church of England in opposing women bishops and not accepting the ordained ministry of women. St George’s had an easier relationship with the Church of England, but placed little overt emphasis on its Anglican identity, describing the church as ‘religion-free’ and trying to ‘do church’ in a way that is accessible to ‘everyone, whatever your experience of church and whatever you believe’. While the ordained ministers at St George’s were men, the church supported the ordination of women and sought to encourage the participation of more women in leadership roles in the church and more BAME leaders, acknowledging that their current staff leadership team did not reflect the diversity of the congregation in this sense. The only time I ever saw a minister at either St John’s or St George’s in clerical dress was when Alex, the curate, wore a clerical shirt and dog collar, with black skinny jeans, to lead occasional services at St George’s Primary School. Riverside’s formal affiliation was Baptist, although this was rarely explicitly alluded to, except at infant thanksgiving services or adult baptisms. Members of the congregation had previously attended a range of other churches, including other evangelical churches, Anglican, and Roman Catholic churches. Riverside encouraged the leadership of women in the church, supported same-sex marriage, and had established an LGBTQ+ group in the church shortly before I began conducting fieldwork.

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During my fieldwork with Riverside and St George’s, I spent time following church staff who worked with children (e.g. children’s workers) in order to gain insight into the range of ways in which these churches were engaging with children and to build relationships with children and their families over time. I carried out participant observation every Sunday at church services and Sunday school/Kids Church, alternating each week between Riverside and St George’s. Over half these Sundays also involved attending additional activities organized for children or their families, such as Messy Church or Family Kitchen at Riverside, or a monthly lunch and Bible study group for single mothers at St George’s. To get to know parents and to gain insight into the everyday rhythms of life at both churches beyond the specific activities involving children, I also attended a range of other activities over the course of fieldwork. These included a toddlers’ group and groups and seminars for parents, a weekly small group for church members, some Sunday evening services (for which I volunteered on the coffee rota), and a range of other events the churches organized, such as local community fairs and public debates. I also carried out fieldwork in the schools linked with both churches, following the children’s workers in their engagements with local schools in order to gain insight into what the links between churches and schools looked like in practice. This included attending weekly assemblies and lunchtime clubs at St George’s and weekly lunchtime clubs at Riverside, and two weeklong holiday clubs run by each church. I also went along to two annual weekend trips to a large camp, organized by a national evangelical youth organization, attended by members of Riverside’s Kids Church with their leaders. The children I worked with were aged between six and eleven years old, although I also carried out fieldwork with Year 7 children (aged 11–12) at Riverside Secondary Academy, since the establishment of this school was important to how the church understood its relationships with local children and families, and I draw on this fieldwork in Chapters 4 and 5. My decision to focus on this period of ‘middle childhood’ was in order to address the neglect of this particular age range within the growing literature on religion and youth (Scourfield et al. 2013: 18). During my fieldwork with St John’s, I attended two services every Sunday (morning and evening), participated in two small Bible study groups on a weekly basis, volunteered on the coffee rota, helped prepare and serve food at ‘guest events’, attended midweek lunchtime services, and went on a ‘church family’ weekend away conference. I was also often invited to church members’ homes for suppers or Sunday lunch, and met up with people for tea or coffee, in cafes or at their workplaces. Through this immersion in the church, I had regular contact with a range of parents in the church and got to know some of their children. My overall focus in this fieldwork was the difference that faith made to the everyday lives of church members, and the question of what it

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meant to be a parent and the everyday realities of bringing up children were themes that often arose in the course of exploring this question. I discussed the development of this project on childhood with several members of the congregation and church leaders and interviewed several children’s workers during this initial period of fieldwork. Where there were specific issues I wanted to explore more fully subsequently, I carried out further interviews with parents and children and those involved in children’s work at St John’s. I also carried out short periods of observation at two further conservative evangelical churches and interviews at three further conservative evangelical churches in different areas of the UK to get a sense of how the modes of practice I was seeing at St John’s related to other conservative evangelical congregations. To get a feel for how my fieldwork with St George’s related to other charismatic churches, I also interviewed adults involved in children’s work at three other charismatic evangelical churches and attended a national conference about children’s ministry organized by the Kingsway Trust (which was also attended by those involved in children’s ministry at Riverside). I carried out thirty-one formal, open-ended interviews during my initial period of fieldwork with St John’s, and was expecting to carry out a similar number of interviews at St George’s and Riverside. In practice, while I did carry out interviews with twenty-two children and twelve adults as part of this project, I found that the more informal, casual conversations I had with children and adults about my research in the everyday course of my fieldwork, together with my observations of informants’ modes of practice and interaction, provided more valuable insights about the everyday realities of how these churches engaged with children. In particular, this allowed the children to express their voices in their own social context and afforded them more freedom in the production of data, such as allowing them to write notes or draw pictures for me or express their opinions directly to my digital voice recorder, as and when they often wanted to. Throughout my fieldwork, I kept a detailed fieldnote diary, which I completed in a notebook during the day and typed up later in the day or evening or the following morning. These fieldnotes included detailed descriptions of specific encounters and records of events, conversations, and interactions that had occurred, and my own reflections on and emotional reactions to these events.¹¹ I also collected many hundreds of pages of print and digital materials, such as Kids Church and Sunday school plans, assembly scripts, flyers, newsletters, and training materials that circulated among the groups during the period of fieldwork, and recorded and transcribed relevant sermons

¹¹ Overall, these fieldnotes collected between January 2013 and June 2015 comprised 666,376 words, in addition to the 557,958 words of fieldnotes produced during my original period of fieldwork at St John’s.

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and talks in each of the churches. Full ethical approval was obtained through the University of Kent, and ethical issues were taken seriously. Standard ethical procedures were followed in relation to ensuring the informed consent, privacy, confidentiality, and avoidance of harm of adult participants. Within ethnography, the negotiation of ethical issues is an ongoing, relational process over time, and I was conscious of the importance of maintaining an ethics ‘embedded in a continuous awareness of your participants, your relationship to others throughout the process, and how you choose to commit accounts to paper’ (Kulz 2017: 32). The same ethical issues also arise in research with children. However, there were further considerations which needed to be addressed sensitively, including ensuring that children were able to give consent through presenting information about the project to them in childfriendly language, and confirming children’s consent by parental and school consent, as well as church leaders’ consent (Alderson and Morrow 2011, Allerton 2016). Children were given opportunities to choose their own pseudonyms, although because of their often imaginative choices (e.g. ‘Burger’), I have sometimes replaced these with alternatives. Church and school safeguarding procedures were always followed. The names of the churches and all individuals here are pseudonyms, except the speakers at the public events described in Chapter 1. I was fortunate that each of the churches’ openness to newcomers helped me gain entry to their groups relatively easily. When initially visiting each church, individuals I sat next to offered to put me in touch with church leaders, who were each, in turn, very willing to host a researcher. Participant observation at St George’s and Riverside was undertaken from the role of a Kids Church/Sunday school helper, and within this role I worked together with and following guidance from other church volunteers to facilitate activities such as discussions and games (both in Kids Church sessions and in the holiday, lunchtime, and after-school clubs they ran), but did not lead teaching activities or prayers. In my fieldwork with schools, when I was not accompanying the children’s workers, I undertook participant observation from the role of classroom assistant, which allowed me insight not only into formal lesson times but also other informal spaces. Within child-centred research, the idea of the researcher adopting the ‘least-adult’ role has been very influential. In practice, it was impossible to rid myself of adult status (Bales 2005, Shillitoe 2018). However, I found that because the children had relaxed, friendly relations with the churches’ children’s workers, whom they perceived not as teachers but as other adults who were concerned for them and were especially interested in their lives, this mode of interaction shaped how the children expected to relate to me. For example, the desire of the younger children in the primary schools to include me in their games and discussions during lunch and play time suggested that they perceived my role there as different from their teachers.

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Across all the fieldwork settings I spent time in, I treated both my own engagements with children and adults and their responses to me as data relevant for understanding the formation of their identities and their different modes of relationality. It is worth noting that my own religious identity was something that my interlocutors at St John’s were interested in but those at St George’s and Riverside only very rarely inquired about. My having had a liberal Anglican upbringing, and teenage immersion in and subsequent path away from evangelicalism (while retaining a commitment to an Anglican identity), positioned me as ‘other’ for those at St John’s, but not at St George’s or Riverside, where, as I explore in Chapter 7, there was a self-conscious movement away from a traditional evangelical emphasis on adjudicating clearly demarcated theological and moral boundaries of inside/outside. I should underscore that none of the children (in any of the fieldsites) ever asked about my religious identity or beliefs, but they did ask lots of questions about aspects of my identity that they were more interested in, such as gender (‘are you a tomboy, Anna?’) or national identity (‘Are you Italian?’, ‘Where are you from?’, ‘What is your country?’). They also often crossed boundaries that adults carefully observe (Allerton 2016: 8), such as asking personal questions about my appearance or crossing physical boundaries (pinching my cheeks affectionately or clambering over me to get to a favoured spot on a sofa).

BOOK AIMS A ND OUTLINE Overall, the book aims both to situate childhood as an important area of study in the sociology of religion and to spark a long overdue conversation about how we should approach childhood within this field, both theoretically and methodologically. The chapters that follow can be seen as a mapping exercise, identifying and examining particular sites of encounter or spaces of ‘sociation’ (Simmel 1964) in which the question of what a child is (or should be) is in play. The questions addressed in relation to each space of encounter— surrounding what it is to learn a (religious) form of life, the contested nature of authority in relation to parenting, the moral ambitions of religious institutions in engaging with both schooling and informal educational spaces, the marking of times of transition, and normative conceptions of order and disorder—are of wider relevance beyond evangelicalism for the study of children in a broad range of religious contexts. The book sets out and is underpinned by a relational approach to the study of children and religion that aims not only to address the particular modalities of children’s agency and the ways in which this is afforded or constrained in particular settings, but also to demonstrate the ways in which ‘childhood’ is significant in shaping the lives, hopes, concerns, and desires of adults in religious contexts. Threaded

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throughout the volume is the central question of the meaning and significance of the figure of the child, and the differing ways in which this is articulated, imagined, experienced, and contested within and beyond contemporary evangelicalism. Rather than providing a comparison of conservative, charismatic, and open evangelicalism in every chapter, I zero in on particular ethnographic examples and theoretical issues that are revealing of the spaces, times, and meanings of childhood in relation to evangelicalism, and are of wider analytical significance in understanding the location of religion in contemporary society. The chapters address the techniques through which evangelicals seek to form children as believers within the space of church, cultures of parenting, evangelical organizations’ provision of state-funded schooling, churches’ practical modes of engaging with schools and other informal activities for children such as holiday and after-school clubs, and the practical marking of time and transitions in children’s lives. Chapter 1 reviews dominant theoretical approaches to the study of childhood and religion and critically assesses the understandings of childhood and religion they index, situating these in relation to two different approaches taken to children’s agency in wider childhood studies. The chapter then examines different understandings of children’s agency in conservative and charismatic evangelicalism through comparing two different national events focused on childhood. Turning to the space of churches, Chapter 2 explores the practices through which adults sought to form children as subjects able to ‘engage with God’ in Sunday school and Kids Churches and the ways in which the children responded to these practices. Focusing on the desired formation of children provides insight into the morally charged ideals of personhood articulated in each church, and draws out the particular emphasis on biblical literacy and ideals of submission to God expressed in conservative evangelicals’ work with children in comparison with the emphasis on ideals of friendship with Jesus that is privileged at St George’s and Riverside. I argue that despite these differences, the techniques of formation used in each church aims to shape the children as reflexive individuals, able to reflect on their actions in the light of church teachings. Chapter 3 takes as its ethnographic focus ideals and practices of ‘parenting’ by examining the normative constructions of parenthood articulated at parenting classes run by St John’s and St George’s, in which the parent–child relationship and its relationship with wider social norms was in question. The chapter explores how leaders at St John’s situated their ideals of children’s obedience to the father and understanding of children as inherently sinful as countercultural and outlines the techniques of parenting that were encouraged here. I then describe how, in contrast, ideas about parenting at St George’s drew on psychoanalytic literature and encouraged parents to learn from secular expertise on parenting. The chapter considers how these differing ways of understanding what it is to be a parent are shaped by processes of

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individualization, and are bound up with wider questions about the agency of the child, human agency, and the social and existential order. Turning to evangelicals’ engagements with children in education, Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the lived interrelations between the churches and the schools that are linked with them. Chapter 4 focuses on the relations between Riverside Church and the local schools it is involved in running, situating this in relation to broader debates about faith schools, neoliberalism, and social class in relation to education. The chapter examines how members of Riverside Church described the moral and religious significance of their engagement with these schools, drawing on a romanticized narrative of evangelicals’ historic work with the children of the urban poor. The chapter demonstrates how these schools are of central moral significance for the church’s aspiration to affect both the local area and wider British society, and explores how the ways in which those at Riverside talk about the work of these schools at times enacts moralizing power relations that are simultaneously held in tension with their inclusivist aspirations and self-understanding. Against the backdrop of public concerns raised about the role of external evangelical visitors in statefunded schools, Chapter 5 examines the mundane realities of the relationships that children’s workers and volunteers from the churches developed with local schools. Focusing on the visits made by children’s workers to deliver assemblies, and the after-school, lunchtime, and holiday clubs they ran, this chapter considers how children’s agency was either limited or enabled across these different spaces. Examining how the adults involved in these engagements with children spoke about the moral significance of their work, I argue that these kinds of engagement offered adults a sense of meaning and hope, allowing them to understand themselves as agents of change at a time when the public sphere often seems unwieldy and beyond individuals’ control. Living through times in which traditional religious rites of passage are in question in Western societies, Chapter 6 focuses on what rites of passage in relation to childhood looked like at each of the three churches and examines how particular moments of transition were being constructed and marked in children’s lives. The chapter explores the different ways in which those at St John’s, St George’s, and Riverside engaged with traditional rites of passage such as infant baptism and often demonstrated ritual creativity in their marking of other moments of transition, such as the move from primary to secondary school, and examines how these rites reveal different understandings of children’s agency. Through ethnographic focus on Riverside’s ‘Messy Church’, which was aimed at local children and families, Chapter 7 turns to examine shifting ethical currents within conservative, charismatic, and open evangelical cultures. Considering the contemporary significance of ideas of ‘mess’ and ‘messiness’ at Riverside and St George’s, the chapter argues that this turn to ‘mess’ at both churches is shaped both by a strategy of differentiation from conservative evangelicalism—which emphasizes a desire for hierarchical

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order within church, self, and society—and by an ethics of responsiveness to the everyday needs of those in their local area, marked by heightened socioeconomic polarization. How groups engage with ideas of ‘order’ and ‘mess’, I suggest, is significant for understanding how different groups respond to fragmented experiences of social life, and how they enact modes of difference and belonging in the contemporary moment. The conclusion draws together the book’s key findings and contributions and reflects on the importance of attending to the agency of children in deepening our understanding of religion in the contemporary world.

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1 The Agency of Children and the Study of Religion Every Sunday at 10 a.m., Katie, the children’s worker at St George’s, would lead a planning meeting for the helpers at Kids Church in the church hall to run through the plans for that morning and pray about the planned activities. One Sunday, when I arrived for the meeting, Katie was telling the helpers about how the previous day she had been at a special day ‘focused on receiving the Holy Spirit . . . And it was just an amazing time. We saw healings. We saw God working in amazing ways.’ She said she had prayed for a woman with arthritis in her knees, and it was ‘completely healed’. During the week, she said, she had ‘really struggled’ with planning Kids Church, but the day before, she’d realized, ‘often we’re just trying to cram Sundays full of activities, but we really need to give space for the kids to have time to just receive the Holy Spirit and be listening to God’. She said that she wanted that week’s session to be a space ‘where the kids will receive the Holy Spirit’ and ‘be able to prophesy, to receive words and pictures. This isn’t something that God gives to just a few of us, but to everyone, and we just need to have time to develop that in the kids and to encourage them to share the words and pictures they might receive.’ As she talked through the plans for the morning, she said that Kids Church should be a space where ‘kids really meet with God. If we don’t do that, then I don’t know what we’re about, because, let’s face it, they won’t be doing this during the rest of the week.’ She explained that she planned to use a guided meditation called ‘The Throne Room’ and would ask them to sit or lie quietly during this and then to write down ‘any words or pictures that come to them and share them afterwards’. She said, ‘I don’t know how that will go, but I’ll just follow what’s going on, and it might seem like not much is happening, but it will be. Or it may be that God will move really powerfully.’ She said it would be ‘great for the kids to have the chance to share words and pictures and to prophesy—I know there are some kids here who hear really powerfully from God’, and reiterated, ‘I don’t quite know where the morning will go, but we will follow where God wants to take us.’

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After the meeting, we walked back across the square to the church, where, as every Sunday, people were milling around at the back of the church over breakfast served before the service—warm croissants, pains au chocolat, and bacon and egg muffins—while the smaller children chased each other around the church. At 11.05 a.m., the worship band came onto the stage to play the first song, during which people started to take their seats, bringing their breakfasts with them. Maddie, the church’s Head of Children and Families (and the vicar’s wife), was leading the service and welcomed everyone, with the children still running around while she read out a psalm. She then introduced a time of ‘family worship’ and encouraged ‘smaller members of the church’ to come up to the front. Katie went on the stage with the musicians and one of the other children’s helpers to perform the actions accompanying the songs. Most, but not all, of the younger children and their parents came up to the space in front of the stage. The first song was ‘Dance, dance, everybody dance’, accompanied by the children’s and Katie’s energetic dancing, with running for the lyrics ‘run, run, everybody run’, jumping for ‘jump, jump, everybody jump’, lying on the floor for ‘sleep, sleep, everybody sleep’. The children at the front performed the actions enthusiastically, in contrast with most of the adults and older children in the church, who sat observing proceedings. After the songs, Maddie came up to the stage and said a prayer for the children as they headed out for their different groups, differentiated by age, asking, ‘God, would you be with them and bless them in their groups this morning.’ Kids Church that morning began as usual with ten minutes of games, starting with ‘duck duck goose’ led by Joe, wearing a Chelsea football shirt and shorts, whom Katie had put in charge of leading the games. Katie then got the children to sit on benches facing the stage, while Joe and Jude, another ten-year-old, with freckles and a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, went to get jugs of squash and custard cream biscuits for the others. Katie then addressed everyone, recounting how the day before she’d been at a church where ‘God moved powerfully by his Holy Spirit. He healed people who were sick, and he spoke to people, and gave them pictures.’ She said, ‘Now we’re going to spend some time being quiet, listening to him.’ She asked the children to go and sit around the room quietly, and shut their eyes and hold their hands out. Some were quiet; others were not especially quiet. Some shut their eyes, but not all. Louis and Jamie, blond brothers of nine and seven years old, went to sit on the stage, and laughed and kept talking with each other, while the girls congregated towards the back of the room. Eventually they were mostly all sitting quietly, apart from Louis and Jamie who continued making each other giggle. Katie read out ‘The Throne Room’ passage, which asked them to imagine opening a door to go into a room with a throne and a figure seated on it, drawing on imagery from the book of Revelation. Katie read the passage out slowly, followed by thirty seconds of silence before she asked them ‘to come back away from the throne room, back to this room’.

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Katie said that they were now going to have some time to draw what they saw, ‘or any pictures you had while you were listening’. She gave large sheets of sugar paper and felt tips to each child. The girls mostly stayed in a group together at the back of the room, drawing, while the boys sat in pairs. Louis was drawing a seated figure, and I asked him what it was. He explained, in a slightly impatient tone implying he thought the answer obvious, ‘he’s seated on a throne’. Jamie commented, ‘It looks like he’s sitting on the toilet.’ Louis and I laughed. Jamie said, ‘Actually, I think God’s bigger and shinier than that.’ Louis, concurring, scrubbed out what he’d drawn, and began again on the other side of the paper. Jamie started drawing, and I asked what his picture was of. ‘It’s a battle’, he explained, and, after a pause, ‘It’s a battle between Satan and God. God’s winning of course.’ The brothers carried on drawing for a few more minutes, and then moved on to playing noughts and crosses on the paper. Katie got out some gold mesh material for the children to use, and Chloe made herself a crown with this, while one of the younger girls covered most of her paper with shiny gold. Several of the children were drawing doors and stairs in their pictures, echoing the passage Katie had read out. At the end of the session, Katie got the children all sitting back on the benches. They didn’t talk about their pictures as she had planned, but she asked them whether they had any requests for things they would like to do in Kids Church. Chloe said, ‘I’d like to do old-fashioned church.’ Katie asked what she meant, and Chloe replied, ‘I’d like to come in old-fashioned clothes.’ Several of the boys made noises indicating they didn’t like the sound of this, and Jude said, diplomatically, ‘We could do old-fashioned church one week, and then Church 2013 the next week.’ Katie asked if any of them would like to say a closing prayer. After a short pause, Jude volunteered. He stood in front of the others, who mostly shut their eyes, and prayed aloud, in his softly spoken voice, thanking God for the things they had, and praying that they would help those in need. Katie asked if anyone else would like to pray. Joe stood up, and said a short prayer, ‘Thank you that over ten million pounds was raised during Christian Aid week. Please help us help people in need.’ Katie said ‘Amen’ to signal the formal end of this. Parents had started arriving to collect children by this point and were standing at the back waiting for the session to finish. After the children had all left and we were clearing up, I chatted with Katie, who seemed happy about how the session had gone, even though there hadn’t been any sharing of ‘words and pictures’, or obvious visible manifestations of the Holy Spirit. On the bus home, I considered how many of the children had drawn pictures of doors and seated figures, and wondered how far this indicated that they had engaged in the imaginative exercise Katie had led, while noting that they could also joke about the holy enthroned figure looking as if he were ‘on the toilet’. Reflecting on the Kids Church session that morning draws attention to the question of children’s agency in relation to religion. There is often a tendency

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in how people talk about children and religion to treat children as passive, underlying both fears about the religious indoctrination of children and the opposite fears of some religious people of each generation being formed by wider cultural values at odds with religion (Scourfield et al. 2013: 19). The dominant concepts used in the study of children and religion—religious socialization, religious transmission, and religious nurture—also tend to underplay children’s agency. Yet within childhood studies and wider public discourse, children’s agency has been a major concern. As David Oswell writes: Children are not simply seen to be, but seen, heard and felt to do. Children are not simply beings, they are more significantly doings. They are actors, authors, authorities and agents. They make a difference to the world we live in. Over the period from the late nineteenth century up until now, in the early twenty-first century, children’s capacity to do has intensified and the areas in which they are able to do have proliferated. Children have been seen and felt to do in the life of the family, the life of society, the life of politics and the life of the economy. (Oswell 2013: 3)

As adults try and form children to be able to have particular kinds of experience, indeed, to be particular kinds of people, what does it mean to take children’s agency seriously in relation to religion? This chapter reviews dominant approaches to the study of childhood and religion and assesses the underlying assumptions about the meanings of childhood, agency, society, and religion they index. I situate these approaches in relation to two different strands of conceptualizing children’s agency in wider childhood studies, as highlighted by Oswell’s work on the agency of children (2013, 2016). I then examine how we can see two different understandings of children’s agency in play in conservative evangelicalism and charismatic evangelicalism through discussing two different national events focused on childhood: ‘Where Did You Pick That Up?’, organized by Anglican Mainstream, and the Hand-in-Hand Children’s and Family Ministry Conference. I argue that these events empirically demonstrate the importance of childhood as a key site within the sociology of religion and suggest a way of understanding children’s agency in relation to religion as a ‘dynamic and ongoing convergence of factors’, which affords ‘children more or less capacity to act as social agents’ (Wyness 2015: 23).

LOCATIN G CHILD HOOD IN THE S TUDY OF RELIGIO N Children have not been absent throughout the history of the study of religion, but they have often been silent, appearing ‘primarily as reflections of adult concerns about the present or as projections of adult concerns for the future’

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(Ridgely 2011: 1). This reflects a broader historical silencing across the social sciences and humanities, which since the 1990s has been challenged by the approach that became known as the ‘new paradigm’ of childhood research, or the ‘new social studies of childhood’ (e.g. James and Prout 1997, James, Jenks, and Prout 1998, Holloway and Valentine 2000). This approach argued that scholars need to understand childhood as a social construction and a variable of social analysis that intersects with other variables (class, race, gender, etc.), and emphasized that children should be studied in their own right as social agents, rather than as refracted solely through the prism of their relationships with adults (Oswell 2016). Historically, there has been little engagement with this work in the study of religion, and this is reflected in the theoretical frameworks that have been used to approach the intersection between religion and childhood: religious transmission, cognitive development, religious socialization, and religious nurture. To date, much research in childhood and religion has emerged from psychology, and to a lesser extent theology. Approaches in developmental psychology mirrored and drew on cognitive developmental approaches within the discipline as a whole, through which children were measured, assessed, and judged in the context of ‘normal’ religious development. Goldman (1964), for example, drawing on the work of Piaget, linked children’s intellectual development to their understanding of religion by examining children’s understandings of Bible stories, and proposed a developmental model, which presented intuitive thought as predominant from five to seven years; ‘concrete operational thought’ dominant between eight and ten years, as children developed a focus on particular details in religious stories and pictures; and then a third stage of ‘formal operational thought’, when religion began to be seen in more hypothetical and abstract terms (Goldman 1964; see Madge et al. 2014: 13). This developmental model delineated a notion of personhood with rationality its universal mark, with childhood the period of apprenticeship for this, an essentially evolutionary model in which ‘the child developing into an adult represents a progression from simplicity to complexity of thought, from irrational to rational behaviour’ (Prout and James 1997: 10). This was influenced by earlier anthropologists’ constructions of ‘other’ cultures as ‘childish’ and ‘simple’ (ibid.), as can be seen in the words of Tylor, for instance, who argued that he could apply ‘the often-repeated comparison of savages to children as fairly to their moral as to their intellectual condition’ (cited in Prout and James 1997: 11). This developmental approach shaped the orientation of a body of work in psychology on children’s religion and spirituality.¹ This developmental understanding of childhood has come to dominate Western thought, and, as Prout and James note, it connects social with biological

¹ See Roehlkepartain et al. 2006.

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development, so that children’s interactions, language, and behaviour were taken as evidence marking progressive stages of development, with little account of the significance of these for children themselves (1997: 11). The 1990s saw something of a reaction against this developmental approach in relation to religion, following the publication in 1990 of Robert Coles’s The Spiritual Life of Children. Coles noted that psychological research tended to look for signs of children’s ‘faith development’, but that his own research with Hopi children in the United States, who ‘are illiterate, never learned how to take a test . . . and clam up tightly even if approached by an investigator’ (1990: 23), showed him the inadequacy of this, and his book included many narratives of children’s spirituality, ‘visionary moments’, and metaphysical curiosity. The influence of this and subsequent work on children’s spirituality (e.g. Hay and Nye 1998), along with a growing interest in childhood studies across the academy, stimulated wider interest in children and religion beyond developmental psychology, for example, within history, the edited Church and Childhood (1994), and the anthropologist Charlotte Hardman’s edited Children in New Religions (1999). Within the sociology of religion, as Susan Ridgely comments (2011: 3), there emerged a more sustained interest in youth and religion, with Robert Wuthnow’s (1999) Growing Up Religious and Christian Smith’s National Study of Youth and Religion sparking wider interest. At the same time, there was growing interest in childhood from theologians, with Marcia Bunge’s Child in Christian Thought published in 2001, and Don Browning and Bonnie J. MillerMcLemore’s Children and Childhood in American Religions published in 2009. In 2003 Bunge and her colleagues created the ‘Childhood Studies and Religion’ consultation in the American Academy of Religion. Yet despite this growing interest, the prevailing construction of children as mirrors of adult concerns and hopes largely remained unchallenged, with research about children rather than informed by their perspectives or experiences and the understanding of what a child is generally taken for granted (Ridgely 2011: 3). Dominant concepts in the study of religion contributed to rendering the voices of children silent and the agency of children invisible, and, through focusing on cognitive beliefs and a developmental model predicated on a universal notion of rationality, perpetuated a particular Western Christian construction of religion. ‘Religious transmission’ has been one of the concepts most often used, particularly in analysing intergenerational patterns of religion across populations and in measuring how religious affiliation and practices associated with institutional forms of religion are passed across generations and over time. This research is generally quantitative, using aggregate statistics on whole populations, and, as Scourfield et al. note, the term transmission ‘is rather passive and does not capture the dynamic process of inter- and intragenerational negotiation of belief and morality’, while also often normalizing a construction of religion in relation to affiliation to religious institutions (2013: 20).

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The term ‘socialization’ was subject to the same critique in the social studies of childhood as implying the child’s passivity, predicated on an unquestioned division between adults and children, with a relationship of instruction or socialization needed for the transition of people from one category of personhood to another (Oswell 2013: 35). However, the term ‘socialization’ is widely used, mostly uncritically, in relation to religion.² The idea of ‘religious nurture’ has also been used, implying a particular normative construction of family life and of religion, with the adult ‘nurturing’ the child into faith as a positive process. In their study of Muslim childhoods in Cardiff, Scourfield et al. argue that the term is overall preferable to the other concepts, since it implies attention to micro-level social processes (2013: 21), but suggest that all these terms should together be utilized to encompass macro- and microapproaches, and that socialization is helpful to capture how religion is learned in informal spaces outside of religious institutions, and most specifically, the home. Scourfield et al.’s Muslim Childhood forms part of a small but growing body of work that is beginning to engage with the everyday realities of children’s lives in relation to religion, and is influenced by the approach to children’s agency brought into focus by the new social studies of childhood.³ Much of this emerging literature also builds on the ‘lived religion’ approach in sociology of religion and religious studies, which has encouraged attention to those such as the ‘women, children, and other illiterates’ who have historically been silenced by dominant lenses in the study of religion (McDannell 2011: 139). There are also wider social and political factors sharpening the focus on children and religion, from the child sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches to increased concern about the perceived radicalization of children. While the growing body of research influenced by the new paradigm of childhood studies is opening up rich possibilities for the field, this literature has tended to engage uncritically with the conceptualization of children’s agency developed within the new paradigm. Yet agency as a topic of theory and research is plural, and, as Oswell notes, across the range of disciplines that comprise childhood studies there are ‘different and differently accented models of accounting for the activeness and interactions of children’ (2016: 1). To develop a model for studying children and religion, we need a more nuanced understanding of not only the fact that children have agency, but of what we mean by children’s agency. Let us turn to examine two distinct lines of thought in conceptualizing ² Scourfield et al. note the criticisms of the term emerging from childhood studies, yet suggest that ‘socialization’ is more open than the idea of transmission ‘to encompassing a dynamic process and an element of negotiation of religiosity, whilst also quite properly keeping a focus on social structural influences’ (2013: 21). ³ See e.g. Bales 2005, Ridgely 2011, Arweck and Nesbitt 2011, Madge et al. 2014, Hemming 2015.

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the agency of children, which Oswell (2016) identifies in relation to broader shifts concerning the ontology of agency.

C O N C EP T U A LI Z I N G CH I L D R E N’S AGE NC Y The new paradigm of childhood studies that began with Allison James and Alan Prout’s Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, originally published in 1990, brought the question of children’s agency to the forefront of academic agenda.⁴ The book set out a programmatic approach to childhood research, emphasizing that childhood is a social construction, that its construction takes place through the actions of both adults and children, and that childhood can never be separated from other variables of social analysis (James and Prout 1997a: 4). Children are, they argued, worth studying in their own right as ‘actively involved in the construction of their own social lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live’, rather than just as reflections of adults’ concerns and ‘passive subjects of structural determinations’ (ibid.). Ethnography was the favoured method in this approach, allowing researchers to attend to the meanings children themselves attach to their lives (ibid.: 4–5). Drawing on Giddens’s structuration theory (1979), the new paradigm presented children as reflexive, meaning-making agents, able to interpret their lifeworld and to act intentionally in response. Prout and James cited Giddens’s argument that agency and structure are always intertwined: ‘Every act which contributes to the reproduction of a structure is also an act of production, and as such may initiate change by altering the structure at the same time as it reproduces it’ (Giddens, cited in Prout and James 1997: 27; discussed in Oswell 2016). Childhood here is understood as a social institution that exists beyond the individual activities of any adult or child, and thus ‘there must be theoretical space for both the construction of childhood as an institution and the activity of children within and upon the constraints and possibilities that the institutional level creates’ (Prout and James 1997: 27). The new paradigm allowed space for children as a focus of study by inverting established dichotomies such as nature/culture and being/becoming (Gallacher and Kehily 2013: 240). Where children were previously seen as having been part of ‘nature’ and thus the concern of the biological and medical ⁴ This growing attention to children’s agency was also developing in wider public contexts, with Gillick v. West Norfolk and Wisbech Health Authority (1985) establishing the ‘Gillick competence’ test to decide the capacity of children (under the age of sixteen) to consent to their own medical treatment, and the UN General Assembly adopting the Convention on the Rights of the Child in November 1989, coming into force in 1990.

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sciences, transitioning from ‘natural’ to ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ beings through a process of socialization, the new paradigm emphasized children as already social actors, and childhood as a social and cultural construction. In relation to the being/becoming dichotomy, while traditionally children had been theorized as ‘growing up’, in a process of becoming, and were therefore studied through the lenses of development and socialization, the new paradigm sought to overturn this by understanding children as ‘beings in their own right rather than pre-adult becomings’ (Holloway and Valentine 2000: 5). Temporality was, as Oswell notes (2016), an important element of this reconceptualization. Jens Qvortrup (1985) had earlier argued for the need to understand children as social beings rather than social becomings. Prout and James’s Giddensian approach built on this, arguing that children’s agency in social construction is realized in the present (Oswell 2016: 2). This was a move against the tendency in much sociological writing to locate childhood in ‘some timeless zone standing as it were to the side of the mainstream (that is adult) history and culture. Childhood appears to be, so to speak, lost in time, its present is continuously banished to the past, the future, or out of time altogether’ (James and Prout 1997b: 234). Their critique of the notion of childhood implicit in models of socialization and development was articulated on the basis that children’s agency to change social structures is materialized in the present. Thus, as Oswell argues, their theory of the being-ness of children was ‘a form of political ontology, inasmuch as a statement about what children are is also a statement about their capacity to change the organisation of the social world in which they live’ (2016: 2–3). This ontological claim was, as Oswell suggests, held together with a methodological claim about ‘not only how we might, but how we should, investigate the beingness of children: namely the agentic presentness of children is understood in terms of children’s lived experience, which can be empirically investigated through forms of ethnographic and qualitative method’ (2016: 3). However, at the same time that the new social studies of childhood were emphasizing the present-ness of children as self-reflexive social actors, the idea of the centred reflexive subject was being called into question through poststructuralist critiques. Alan Prout, a key figure in the new paradigm throughout the 1990s, in 2005 expressed his sense that the new social studies of childhood, located within a broader history of modernist thought, had ended up occupying an anachronistic position within wider sociocultural research: At the very time when social theory was coming to terms with late modernity by decentring the subject, the sociology of childhood was valorizing the subjectivity of children. While sociology was searching for metaphors of mobility, fluidity and complexity, the sociology of childhood was raising the edifice of childhood as a permanent social structure. The sociology of childhood arrives, then, on the cusp

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of modernity when the social theory adequate to the transformations underway in modernity was in the process of being constituted. Childhood sociology, then, seemed to need to run in order to catch up with modernist social theory that was itself becoming disorganized by social changes that exceeded and defeated its conceptual range. So to sum up, one could say that sociology’s encounter with childhood is marked by late modernity—but primarily in an ironic sense: at the very time that sociological assumptions about modernity were being eroded they arrived, late, to childhood. (Prout 2005: 62)

Much of the writing on children’s agency in the new paradigm, as Oswell argues, emphasized a modernist understanding of agency in terms of knowledge and reflexivity, drawing on a particular understanding of agency and structure that largely centred on the work of Giddens and ignoring the wealth of writing on agency in wider sociology and social theory (Oswell 2013: 38). This approach to children’s agency has largely become part of the common sense of the field and can be seen as in large part motivated less by theoretical concerns than by a political desire to redress perceived inequalities of power in relation to children (ibid.). Moving against the grain of poststructuralist critiques at the time, childhood studies, as Oswell argues, founded itself on the ‘metaphysics of presence’ (Derrida 1982): ‘the alignment of the centred child subject (as both agentic and reflexive), with experience and authenticity of experience, and with clarity of voice (as organised political speech) rests on a notion that the agency of the child and children centres on their being and acting in the present’ (Oswell 2016: 4). Alongside the new paradigm of childhood studies, there has also emerged, as Oswell identifies (2016), a body of writings about childhood located within and after the poststructuralist approaches that questioned the notions of selfpresent subjectivity and the configuration of experience, authenticity, and voice that underpinned the new paradigm. This body of literature is influenced by Foucauldian ideas of power, knowledge, and subjection, work on materiality and notions of distributed agency from actor-network theory, and Deleuzian notions of connectedness.⁵ ‘Agency’ in the new paradigm was possessed by individual humans, including children, which allowed them to act in the world as reflexive agents and authors of their own meanings. In this alternative literature, agency is distributed among networks of humans and non-humans, who are able to act because of the networks of connections within which they are located,⁶ or is understood as the outcome of flows of power. Power here does not belong to any individual adult or child, but flows through different organizations and institutions, and is ‘inventive, creative,

⁵ e.g. Lee 2001, Castañeda 2002, Turmel 2008. ⁶ e.g. Lee 2001; see Gallacher and Kehily 2013: 241ff.

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and contingent . . . The agencies of power are collective, decentred, and disaggregated in particular contingent associations and dispositifs’ (Oswell 2013: 74–5). Power and knowledge are here understood as directed towards the child as they are rendered unequal to adults in terms of their status as subjects, but adults are also caught within its operations, as power here ‘is not understood in binary terms (i.e. there are those who do have it and those who don’t); rather, its workings are more insidious and fluid’ (p. 74). This alternative body of writings on childhood begins, as Oswell notes (2016), with a methodological axiom of ‘no a priori’ and focuses on the practices and discourses through which childhood becomes marked off as a socially visible phenomenon. Claudia Castañeda notes, for example, how the child is produced as an absence or void in the writings of Foucault and as a ‘not-yet’ subject in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari: ‘The girl and the child do not become; it is becoming itself that is . . . a child. The . . . child is the becoming-young of every age’ (Deleuze and Guattari, cited in Castañeda 2002: 144). Such theories thus seek to address how the child is constructed as inhabiting a condition of possibility, and as such, becomes a ‘time-space available for occupation by the (adult) subject’ (Castañeda 2002: 146). This production of the child as a form of pure possibility, she argues, is only made possible ‘by the erasure of the child as the bearer of experience. In order to be figured as an inhabitable space, the child is voided of experience equal to that of . . . the subject’ (ibid.). While the new paradigm of childhood studies offered a political challenge to notions of children as lacking in agency, the alternative paradigm also presents a political challenge in drawing attention to how constructions of children as absent or as figures of pure possibility can allow forms of violence or harm to children. In these approaches, however, there is no originary claim to experience, and human agency is decentred through a relational understanding of the subject as formed through relations with texts, performances, language, and material and embodied interactions which together inform ‘an understanding of children’s agency and experience shaped through a complex performative fabrication’ (Oswell 2013: 83). Given these differing understandings of children’s agency, how should we approach the question of children’s agency in relation to religion? As already noted, there is a small but growing body of literature engaging with the new paradigm in childhood studies which has drawn attention to the ways in which children act within religious lifeworlds, but this has mostly taken up the notion of children’s agency in terms of the child as reflexive agent uncritically.⁷ However, to deepen understanding of the multiple registers of children’s lives in relation to religion and to the complex range of ways in ⁷ Scourfield et al. articulate some criticisms (e.g. 2013: 20), although they do not engage with the ideas of agency articulated within the alternative paradigm.

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which children’s agency is produced and constrained through networks and hierarchies of power, we also need a concept of children’s agency that draws on the alternative paradigm. Oswell (2016) suggests incorporating the new paradigm’s emphasis on children having agency within what he terms the ‘weak ontology’ of the alternative paradigm. This ‘weak ontology’ means approaching the world in terms of multiple modalities of being,⁸ situated in relation to multiple accounts of being. Children are then ‘present in the present, but there is much more to say than this. Children have “presence”, but such presence is supported and infrastructured, itself situated in claims and counter-claims’, and we can understand these claims as speculative and contestable (Oswell 2016: 5). Approaching children’s agency through this weak ontology, in which different configurations of children’s agency are the outcome of networks of relations of human and non-human actors, offers us potentially richer perspectives in understanding the child, the child-self, the social, and the world (Oswell 2016: 5). Drawing on the work of Latour and Simmel, I have elsewhere (2015) argued for the importance of relational approaches in the sociology of religion which explore the processes through which particular forms of connection and relationality are made in space and time and are attentive to the agency not just of people, but of things, objects, media, and other non-human entities in these forms of sociation. These interrelational approaches, I argue, are especially fruitful for the sociology of religion, offering us conceptual tools to attend to forms of relationality with divine figures or the transcendental in ways that avoid the kinds of metaphysical speculation that worries social scientists (Strhan 2015: 70–1). In relation to the study of childhood and religion, a relational approach likewise allows us to explore children’s forms of connection with sacred beings and how these are mediated and shaped by the actions of children and adults. A relational approach also allows us to consider the means through which particular constructions of childhood become sacralized across intimate, national, and global scales, for example, the gut-wrenching images and sounds of children separated from their parents at the southern US border in 2018, which drew their power from the ‘affective authority of children as sufferers’ (Malkki 2015: 87). Such an approach also draws attention to how particular understandings of childhood allow or foreclose forms of agency for children in experience. To explore the everyday realities of children’s agency, I suggest that we need an approach that attends to the ways in which children’s agency is formed through both particular practices of subjectivation and modes of relationality (with human and non-human actors) and the judgements, concerns, and experiences of children and adults in relation to them, grounded in singular

⁸ See Latour 2013.

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events within their lives. In the following chapters, I will explore both how children are formed through practices and forms of relationality between a range of actors, and the power of particular figurations of childhood in shaping the actions of evangelical adults across different spaces. I will also consider how children (and adults in relation to them) engage with and have agency in relation to these practices and modes of formation and cultural figurations of childhood. First, I will discuss how conservative and charismatic evangelical cultures construct particular ontologies of childhood, in each of which children’s agency is figured somewhat differently.

EVANGELICAL FIGURATIONS OF THE CHILD Historians have drawn attention to how British evangelical and nonconformist teachings in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were at odds with new ideas of childhood as a time of ‘original innocence’ emerging under the influence of Romanticism. Wordsworth’s influential perception of childhood, for example, was of a ‘seed-time’ of the ‘soul’, with children having access to unique levels of spiritual understanding: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! (cited in Cunningham 2006: 134)

Cunningham notes that by the middle of the nineteenth century, many Christians had come to believe that children came directly from heaven, bearing messages from God. Childhood had become a special source of sensitivity, wisdom, and sentimentality, and adults had a duty to stay in touch with childhood (Cunningham 2006: 134). Yet while Romantics celebrated the innate goodness of children and Rousseau earlier in the eighteenth century had espoused in Émile an idea of ‘natural education’, John Wesley moved against the grain of this, urging parents to ‘break the will of your child’, to ‘bring his will into subjection to yours that it may be afterward subject to the will of God’ (1831: 312). The evangelical founder of the Sunday school movement, Hannah More, also opposed the Romantics’ view. Denouncing the idea of the rights of man and of women, she warned that future society would be subject to ‘the rights of children, the rights of babies’, and wrote, ‘Is it not a fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings, whose little weaknesses may, perhaps, want some correction, rather than as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil dispositions, which it should be

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the great end of education to rectify?’ (1846: 323). Bound up with this view was an emphasis on the importance of education and child-rearing, and in the nineteenth century, amid rapid industrialization and urbanization, evangelicals produced their own agenda for child welfare reform, largely promulgating ‘a Domestic Ideal with its emphasis on home, family, duty, love and respect’ (Hendrick 1997: 39). This emphasis on the ideal of the family within evangelicalism largely persisted and arguably intensified through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as ‘the family’ became within wider society a symbol of social stability and ‘haven and retreat’ in a fast-changing, unpredictable world (Ward 1996: 145). At the same time children increasingly became seen as a central part of church life within evangelicalism, and the idea that children have rights became taken for granted by many evangelicals, although this ‘rights culture’ is still contested by some evangelical groups. As well as some churches allowing children to receive Communion, churches increasingly developed programmes of education for children which linked with the sermons in the belief that the whole family should be learning about faith together, while congregations aimed to foster a sense of intimacy that was imagined to reside in an ideal family (Ward 1996: 152). Greater emphasis was also, as Ward argues, placed ‘on the role of the natural family as the basic unit of Christian care, intimacy and nurture’ (ibid.). To what extent do these senses of childhood reverberate within contemporary evangelical cultures? Let us turn to consider two national events focused on childhood organized by (broadly) evangelical organizations: ‘Where Did You Pick That Up?’, organized by Anglican Mainstream⁹ in London in October 2010, and the Hand-in-Hand Children’s and Family Ministries Conference organized by the Kingsway Trust in Eastbourne in January 2014.

‘Where Did You Pick That Up?’ ‘Where Did You Pick That Up?’ was aimed, its promotional material stated, at ‘concerned parents, educators, ministers and leaders’. It was held at a church in London, attended by about two hundred people (including a couple of my informants from St John’s), the location of which had been revealed only a couple of days beforehand, due, Anglican Mainstream’s chair Chris Sugden announced at the start of the day, to ‘concerns about security’. The day began with everyone singing hymns, and then Sugden, who was chairing the day,

⁹ Anglican Mainstream is an organization with a broadly conservative Anglican identity. As well as involvement in church politics, much of Anglican Mainstream’s day-to-day work is concerned with promoting a conservative stance on issues of sexuality and the family.

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gave the first address. He said that ‘our schools are in the frontline of aggressive secularism’ and that at Anglican Mainstream they deal with parents’ concerns over these issues. He invited a mother from the East Midlands to talk about how sex education had been brought in for Year 5 children at her daughter’s school. She described how she’d been shocked when her daughter came home from school and told her details of how to masturbate. She said that the behaviour of children at the school had become more sexualized after the sex education lesson, to sharp intakes of breath and people shaking their head in the room around her. Sugden thanked her and said, ‘This day is beginning something’ and that the people there were like ‘Gideon’s band of warriors’. Sugden invited an American minister to speak next, who talked in general terms of the West as experiencing a moral crisis due to individualism, which he described as ‘anarchic’, and argued that Christians were well placed to offer a critique of this. The next speaker, whom Sugden introduced as having done ‘lots of research in this area’, was Patricia Morgan. The title of her talk was ‘Return to the Planet of the Apes’. She began by talking about how she had been involved in looking at the government’s teenage pregnancy strategy in her local borough and said that her local borough encouraged children ‘always to carry condoms’. The main thrust of her talk, outlined on PowerPoint slides projected behind her crammed with lots of text, was that the ‘teenage pregnancy strategy was/is a vehicle for wider covert goals of sexual liberationist aspiration . . . to get rid of the conjugal family’. She described this liberationism as ‘a mixture of Freudianism and Marxism’ in which children are ideally reared by the collective rather than the conjugal family, and said that it was also influenced by ‘radical feminism’. She presented the gay rights movement as largely responsible for this ‘liberationist’ agenda and in particular singled out Foucault who, she stated, ‘wrote about bodies, pleasure and polymorphous perversity’ and who, she added, ‘had died of AIDS’. Morgan stated that the gay rights movement saw the best approach to achieve their ends as focusing on the rights of the child, and said that this was then supported by ‘New Labour, quangos etc.’. She asserted that ‘sexual rights groups now make family policy . . . these leftists, sexual liberation for them has been allowed by the nihilism of capitalism’. She concluded by arguing that ‘Foucauldian postmodernism has uncritically been taken up as the only valid worldview’ and said that it is the majority position now taught in higher education. She said that this approach deconstructs objective truths to ‘pave the way for nihilism . . . All reality has become an oppressive construct . . . The family is accused of creating the categories male and female . . . What we have with postmodernism is the subversion of everything it is to be human . . . It is wicked, it is unhuman . . . It is the great lie of the devil.’ The audience appeared engaged throughout, making approving mutterings of ‘that’s right’ at certain points.

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Following Morgan was one of the day’s organizers, Lisa Nolland, who offered an account of what children are taught in sex education lessons. Before she began, she prayed, ‘Lord, hold us tight’, and then explained in an authoritative tone to the audience that ‘what the majority of us, if we’re married, engage in is “vanilla” sex’, whereas ‘many young people describe themselves as “post-vanilla” and engage in kinky sex using pain or power or submission for stimulation and using whips, chains and needles’, and said that this is a growing area. She said that the sex education materials she would be talking about were ‘toxic . . . profoundly anti-sex and anti-child’, and that the main issues with sex education are that it is ‘too much too young . . . and that marriage and babies are never mentioned’. Over coffee following her talk, attendees milled around stalls set up by organizations such as the Christian Institute, Safermedia, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, and organizations promoting abstinence education. At one stall selling books, I noticed that Foucault was not the only theorist to come in for criticism: Judith Butler was also the subject of a book critiquing her understanding of gender.¹⁰ The next speaker after the break was meant to be the Anglican minister Vinay Samuel, but he couldn’t be there on the day, so Sugden gave his talk using the PowerPoint slides he had sent instead. Sugden began by discussing philosophical conceptions of well-being, and said that the moral and spiritual dimensions of children’s well-being are neglected in broader society, with a focus on physical, social, cognitive, and psychological well-being instead. He said that the Christian view of ‘the natural’ includes the capacity for the supernatural, but that secular world views exclude the supernatural, and therefore create a reality that is ‘unnatural’. He repeated this sentence for emphasis. He said that as a result of this, ‘child well-being becomes embedded in the world of rights, where moral norms are excluded and permissiveness posing as love is promoted’. Sugden read aloud from Mark 9:36, in which Jesus places a child among the disciples and says, ‘Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.’ Sugden said that here we see a child as a representative symbol of Jesus and God. He said that the child has a calling as a child from God, and talked about the Old Testament as having a high view of children as agents. He then said, ‘We mustn’t over-romanticize children though: children symbolize human iniquity’ and gave as an illustration of this a passage from Isaiah (3:4) which states that as a punishment on Israel, God ‘will make mere youths their officials; children will rule over them’. He then referred to the idea of Jesus speaking about receiving the Kingdom of God as a child and said that this shows an idea of childhood as characterized ¹⁰ See http://www.latimertrust.org/index.php/publications/studies/16-ls73 (accessed 4 January 2018).

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by ‘joy, obedience, innocence, vulnerability, and receiving without the obligation to offer’. The child, he said, represents ‘the love and will of God’. He said that Christians live in two orders—‘the created order and the kingdom of God’—and they need to nurture ‘the child’s personhood’ in this context. He said that personhood means having ‘self-direction and agency, becoming a subject in God’s creation’ and that education should engage ‘an intuitive sense of God’s presence’, and concluded by stating that ‘children need to have a sense of a moral order and justice’ that would enable them to become the people God has called them to be. He said that the church family can support this whereas ‘secular institutions’ can’t provide this, and that ‘the secular order is attacking and reshaping this moral intuition of children’. The rest of the day included presentations from speakers from organizations such as the Christian Institute and Safermedia, most of whom talked about their concerns as parents in relation to sexuality and sex education. There was also a talk from a homeschooler encouraging others to homeschool, and from a school governor encouraging parents to get involved in intervening in their children’s education through becoming school governors. Many of the speakers positioned their ‘battles’ in relation to childhood as central to their work in trying to convert people, for example, Chris Sugden said at one point, ‘This is frontline, a way into showing young people the difference the gospel makes. So this isn’t just a sideline, but is central to church missiology.’ In my fieldnotes from the day, I’d noted that given that the day was billed as about the sexualization of children, I was surprised by the extent to which the day focused on sex education. However, in the period since the event, the concerns expressed by organizations such as the Christian Institute in relation to sex education have intensified following moves to introduce compulsory sex education to all schools and worries that ‘British values’ Ofsted inspections in schools are targeting children in Christian (and other faith) schools by asking them questions about sexuality and gender.¹¹ The day after the event, when I mentioned to a couple of women at St John’s that I had been along to it, they were however critical of Anglican Mainstream’s work in this area. Liz said that she’d been asked to promote the event to the mothers’ group at the church, and said that she hadn’t done so: ‘I just thought it would be quite negative and not really that helpful.’¹² One mother emphasized that it was important that sex education should include information about LGBT relationships and sexuality, commenting that gay children are more likely to suffer bullying ¹¹ See, for example, http://www.christian.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Ofsted_briefing_web-2. pdf (accessed 1 December 2017). ¹² Another member of the church, Alastair, was also critical of socially conservative Christian organizations which ‘tend to be very negative about everything’, and said that there was a problem with their framing their campaigns ‘around protecting the family, as if that’s distinctively Christian. It doesn’t reflect the views of Christians who struggle with same-sex attraction, or those who are, like me, single and heterosexual’ (discussed in Strhan 2016c: 172).

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and depression, and that sex education enables children to understand their sexual orientation better, helping to prevent this. Other parents, however, were concerned about sex education in primary school. One mother said, ‘That whole thing is brought up a lot earlier in schools these days . . . That was one of my questions for the head [of her daughter’s primary school] when I went to see her, just to find out what they teach. The previous school she was at—the nursery—I’ve heard horror stories about what they’re taught. I just thought, I don’t want my children taught that. A friend at the church has a friend who’s a teacher there and they just have this question box, which I think is great. But some of the language used I hadn’t even heard of. And you think, these kids are coming out with this, and there was no filter, she just read them all. Too much, too soon, I think—not that I don’t want them to know about that side of things, but it’s how it’s taught, and when.’ At ‘Where Did You Pick That Up?’, we can discern different moral threads and ideas of childhood interwoven to form a particular idea of what a child is. On the one hand, there was an image of a child as a symbol of ‘human iniquity’, yet this was held together with the idea of a child as a ‘symbol of Jesus and God’. While children’s rights were criticized, the most prominent image of the child was the vulnerable child—under threat of being corrupted by a range of hostile forces, including state sex education programmes, a ‘liberationist’ movement, individualism and a culture of rights, the gay rights movement, and postmodern epistemologies. These forces threatening children were presented as interlinked and on the opposing side within a cosmic battle between good and evil, in which it was the duty of those there to fight ‘frontline’ against these forces to protect and nurture ‘the child’s personhood’. The face of the church here seemed firmly set against ‘the world’, with the rights of parents and the church to determine what is in a child’s best interest pitted against state structures of schooling. Only protected by the church could children become the people ‘God called them to be’, implying a sense of their still becoming subjects. The focus on children in relation to sex education also indexes particular anxieties surrounding the sexualization of childhood and the idea of a child as especially vulnerable and at risk of the imposition of an adult sexuality before they are able to deal with it. Concerns about sexualization ‘exemplify a dominant adult gaze that emphasizes notions of innocence and emotional and cognitive immaturity. Within these terms, children are in a vulnerable position, easily influenced and corrupted, with limited capacities to resist the alleged ubiquity of these messages’ (Wyness 2015: 38). In his influential work on the cultural power of stories of sexual child abuse, James Kincaid (1998) examines how defining children as both pure and innocent on the one hand and savage and sinful on the other has contributed to an eroticization of childhood that is ultimately damaging for both children and adults. He describes how, for instance, the Romantic idealization of the child, gifted

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with spontaneity and closeness to God, was largely constructed in opposition to an adulthood defined in terms of sophistication, rational moderation, and judicious adjustment to the ways of the modern world. The child, in contrast, was seen in terms of the negations of this: innocence, purity, emptiness. Kincaid argues that in the nineteenth century, innocence became more firmly attached to this world’s sexuality, and Freud did little to change this: ‘In sexualizing the infant and then making sexuality merely “latent” in the slightly older child, Freud, by this now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, smoothed the way for our contemporary crisis’ (Kincaid 1998: 15–16). By this idea of latent sexuality, Freud was able to drive under cover the sexuality he had just implanted in infants, thereby, as Kincaid argues, giving us the cake without the calories: the child is both sexual and pure. Freud upset no applecarts; he provided a useful and dangerous way of telling one story and living another. The latent child, empty of the sexuality by which he had earlier been defined, is haunted by an absence, by an amputation that may seem to leave the child incomplete, unnatural . . . We seem stuck with a vacant child that is both marginal and central to our lives: easily disposed of, abused, neglected, abandoned; and yet idealized, treasured, adored. The eroticizing of empty innocence seems to have left us ashamed and transfixed, unable to change and unable to resist the cultural directives that instruct us to long for children precisely in reference to what they do not have. (1998: 16–17)

The concerns expressed at the ‘Where Did You Pick That Up?’ event that children are being sexualized through school sex education lessons seem infused with these conflicting ideas of children’s sexuality that permeate more widely through contemporary culture. However, these ideas are intensified in a conservative evangelical culture in which a particular ideal of heteronormative marriage and family life is sacralized, perceived as in tension with the secular state, and in which tensions over sexuality become defining symbolic boundaries of identity.

HAND-IN -HAN D CHILD REN ’S AND F AM IL Y MINISTRY CONFERENCE The Kingsway Trust’s Hand-in-Hand Conference, held at a theatre and a range of other nearby venues in Eastbourne, was attended by approximately a thousand delegates over a rainy January weekend. The conference had been recommended to me by both Katie from St George’s and two of the Riverside children’s leaders, who were both there. On the Saturday morning, there was time before the main morning meeting to look around the exhibition hall,

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which had stalls for a range of organizations involved in children’s ministry. The main meeting that morning was held in the theatre and began with the woman leading the session welcoming a band led by a young man wearing skinny jeans and a keffiyeh scarf to ‘lead the worship’, which were charismatic songs I was familiar with from both St George’s and Riverside. The singing went on for about half an hour, with a euphoric atmosphere created by the emotional energy of this large gathering singing together, and some people in the area where I was sitting took photos on their phones of everyone singing with their arms uplifted. After the music, a couple of people came up to the stage to publicize their organizations to everyone. First, a young man from an organization called Hope Ministries spoke, talking about a ‘dream for mission in the UK in word and action’. He said that his organization was ‘passionate about releasing children and young people to be all God created them to be, so that mission becomes a part of their everyday lives’. He said that they were developing a ‘Mission Academy Curriculum’ and would be organizing a weekend that encourages children to ‘pioneer mission, as they have amazing gifts in this’. The next speaker was a woman from an organization called Starshine Music Ministries. She said that putting on a show with people from your local community was ‘an opportunity for ministry’, as it ‘brings people into relationship with each other, can bridge gaps and build relationships as it brings people together with a shared purpose, and can teach godly wisdom if you choose the right musical, as lyrics stick in the head’. She said that there are ‘core kingdom values in secular musicals’, for example, talking about how the Pied Piper teaches about ‘truth and integrity’. The main speaker that morning was Rachel Turner, a Southern Californian author and pastor whom all the children’s ministers at charismatic churches I had spoken with had either recommended to me or had invited to run workshops at their churches. She began with an anecdote about how she had dislocated her hips without knowing it and had got used to living with that level of pain, and was, she said, ‘fundamentally dislocated’ (until fixed by a chiropractor). She said that we are raising our children to be ‘dislocated from how they were designed’. She joked that from time to time she decided to read the Bible from cover to cover, ‘which means I have a lot of meditations on Genesis 1 through to 15’, and then read out a short passage from Genesis, and said that the first thing God gave to people after blessing them was ‘their purpose’. She said that when she gave birth, all she could think about her new son was how beautiful he was, whereas with the new human God had made, ‘purpose is really important to God’. She said that there are three things that God communicates to people: their identity in Christ, their relationship with God, and their purpose: ‘identity, relationship and purpose are spoken again and again and again in Scripture. . . . But we’re only giving children bits of this. It’s like their purpose comes later, as an add-on.’

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She talked about how in her book, Parenting Children for a Life of Purpose, she addressed ‘the practicals of this—how to help children to achieve their calling’, but said that ‘today I want to talk about the fundamentals’. She talked about how often people use a developmental model in communicating faith with children, beginning with ‘putting love on children, so that they feel loved . . . and then taking love forward, we want them to love others, and we tell them that God wants us to be kind to others. . . . And then about five, six, seven [years old], we hit them with the sin bomb: there’s sin in the world, but that’s ok, Jesus deals with that.’ When they’re older, she went on, ‘we bring the Bible in, talk about holiness . . . And then we overwhelm them with all these “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” and when finally they get to eighteen, we’re like, “the world is messed up”.’ She said that the problem with this is that ‘when they’re five and their mum has cancer, they don’t know what to do with it, or when they see a tsunami on TV, it doesn’t make sense in their world because all we’ve talked about is love’. She said, ‘We need to shift how we approach this, because we need to help them to know their purpose. Instead of starting small and adding things in, we should tell them the story of the gospel from the beginning.’ She talked through what she described as ‘the simple version’ of the gospel, saying that the first point of the story is ‘God is love. He made all things from his vast creativity and knows and loves all individuals.’ The second point, she said, was that ‘people walked away from God. Instead of loving God, we love our stuff and the people who give us what we want.’ The world, she said, ‘does not have love at the centre’. The third point, she said, was that ‘Jesus cleared a way back to closeness to God. Through what Jesus did, we have a way back to God.’ The fourth point, she said, was that ‘God is active in the world to bring us back to him’, and fifthly, ‘the Holy Spirit enables us to put love back at the centre’. The final point was that ‘one day it will all be good and loving, and nothing will get in the way of us loving God and each other’. She said that all kids can understand this; even when they are going through tough times, ‘they can see where they fit in this’. She said that ‘today God is moving in the world, and God wants to change it for good. They [children] need to see this God: an active God who has plans and purposes on earth.’ She said that the church ‘can give a community that says to kids that they are powerful, that says to sevenyear-olds that they are people called by God as people as purpose . . . We need to stop seeing the child and adult as different. I would never treat an adult in the ways I treat children’, and talked about how we treat children as there to help us in our purposes a lot of the time. We need, she said, ‘to pivot to thinking of walking alongside kids in their purposes’. She said a closing prayer, about ‘children knowing their identity, relationships and purpose. . . . and walking shoulder to shoulder with them’. After she had spoken, the woman who was leading the session asked everyone to ‘pause to reflect on what God has laid on our hearts this morning’, and then gave out some administrative

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notices, asking everyone to wear their badges at all times, to keep the venue secure at all times, pointing out the emergency exits, and asking everyone to complete an evaluation form to ‘help us to plan forward for next year’. In this event, we see a somewhat different figuration of the child. Rather than the vulnerable child at risk from a hostile secular society, here we see a call to treat children as equal to adults, indeed to stop seeing children as different, and to allow children to see that they are powerful agents and have a divinely ordained purpose. Turner criticized a mode of evangelical teaching that doesn’t allow children to engage with a God who is active and has plans for the world and for children as part of that world. While a dualist understanding of church/world was implicit in the understanding of children articulated at ‘Where Did You Pick That Up?’, there was little of that emphasis here, and instead a focus on all creation as belonging to God, with love at the centre of creation, and a jokey rejection of ‘the sin bomb’. The idea of ‘purpose’, ‘plans’, and ‘activity’ was central to how the ontologies of both God and children were being constructed here, expressing a Weberian notion of this-worldly asceticism, where the world becomes the stage for a vaguely articulated transformation—changing the world ‘for good’—that children, adults, and God are all invested in. This emphasis on children as part of the divine mission and on allowing them to know their purpose can be seen as shaped by the broader cultural focus on children’s rights and agency, as children are increasingly treated as reflexive social actors, agents of their own lives rather than just determined by adults. As the new paradigm of childhood studies emphasized the agentic presentness of children, here we also see an emphasis on children’s agency as in the present, and a concern that giving children an inadequate understanding of ‘the gospel’ would mean that they aren’t equipped to respond to forms of suffering in the present.

CONCLUSION The empirical study of religion demands that children be integrated fully into social research. Children and childhood, as suggested by the two events described above, occupy a significant position within evangelical imaginaries and practices. Therefore any genuine effort to understand the contemporary social realities of evangelicalism must explore both the lives of children within it and the particular ideas of childhood that resonate within different evangelical constituencies, which have agency in shaping adults’ actions, plans, and desires, as well as those of children. This requires attending to the multiple registers of children’s agency, the ways in which children often come to be the focus of especially fervent cultural attention, and the particular constructions of childhood that allow or foreclose children’s agency in lived experience.

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While the study of children and religion is beginning to engage with the approach to children’s agency in the new paradigm, the relational approach that I have outlined in this chapter invites us to consider at the same time how particular forms of children’s agency are not given a priori but emerge through particular practices and forms of relationality. It also invites us to explore how the construction of the figure of the child itself exerts particular agency shaping the hopes, imaginations, and desires of adults in relation to children, and can enable or constrain children’s agency in experience. Children’s agency has multiple modalities as children are both receptive and resistant to adults’ seeking to form them as particular kinds of subjects, and as the figure of the child is constructed in particular ways. At St George’s, we see this both in how the children respond to the desire to inculcate them as listening to God and having an intimate sense of relationship with Jesus, as discussed at the start of the chapter, and also in how leaders sought to form them as having a desire to share Jesus with others. In a session focused on evangelism, Chloe was asked to talk to the other children about a time she had set up a church in her living room for a non-Christian friend, as a model of this particular virtuous disposition. The other children were then asked to write the names of friends they would like to invite to church inside some photocopied picture frames and to decorate the frames. Some of the children did this. One boy wrote the name of a friend and wrote by the side, ‘Joe would be a good person to invite to this church, because he’s unkind to me.’ Some other children, though, wrote ‘no one’, and others wrote nothing at all, and just coloured in their picture frames. When I asked one boy about this, he said, ‘Most of my friends live in Islington; it would be too far to invite them.’ Other children more intentionally subverted the activity, writing things like ‘Mr Banana’, ‘Mr Orange’, or ‘Mrs Chicken’, and drawing pictures of a banana, an orange, and a chicken in their picture frames. We see here how the space of Kids Church afforded the children with agency to be receptive or resistant to the church leaders’ desire to form them as evangelistic subjects. We can interpret their actions here in terms of Michel de Certeau’s (1984) differentiation between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’. These are two different modes of acting, in which ‘strategies’ are actions available to those with institutional power, whereas ‘tactics’ name modes of practice available to those without such power, which seek to reverse and alter its operation. Although there was an emphasis on children’s autonomy and freedom at St George’s, adults still largely controlled children’s resources and time and there remained a construction of two camps, the stronger and the weaker, so that ‘the generational division is mapped onto a division between space and time, strategy and tactics, power and resistance’ (Oswell 2013: 59). Their drawings can therefore be seen as a form of ‘tactical interstitial agency’ (ibid.) in which children are able to improvise and make their own places through the structures and resources at hand to them in the ‘borderland

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condition’ they inhabit (Honwana 2005: 50). Yet they might also be interpreted as embodying precisely the expressive freedom and agency that their parents and the church leaders hope for. Understanding children’s agency means attending to its multiple registers, including to the ways in which childhood is constructed by adults through material and discursive practices that set children apart from adults. At St George’s, this included practices that situated children as different to the adults, such as dancing and jumping in the main church service, lying on the floor to learn to hear God, and drawing their responses, or colouring in picture frames. The child was here constructed as a particular kind of being and becoming, and their agency created through their responding to the ways in which adults—and other children—addressed them, naming them as particular kinds of subject. Yet at the same time, they also had a reflexive agency instantiated in the present, and they were conscious of some the reasons why, for instance, they did not want to invite friends to church, and found creative ways of resisting adults’ intentions for them. Thus, while the children demonstrated the new paradigm’s idea of agency in terms of acting with selfconsciousness and reflexivity, the alternative paradigm encourages us to acknowledge how this idea of agency is part of a broader historical and political normative construction of the autonomous self-reflexive actor which shapes the adults’ desires for the children to develop as particular kinds of subject. Reverberating here in both the adults’ and children’s actions and imaginations is an ontology of the figure of the child in charismatic evangelicalism that is suffused with the wider cultural emphasis on children having creative freedom and an ability to consciously reflect on the meaning of their actions. Understanding the social and cultural location of children in relation to religion requires attunement to these different registers of agency. We need to explore both the ways in which children have an agency through which they are self-reflexive actors, as the new social studies of childhood emphasized, and also the ways in which there are other forms of sociation at work, which include the figuration of the child who inhabits and shapes the imaginings and desires of adults. This does not mean rejecting developmental accounts, but rather acknowledging how these situate the agency of children in particular ways, including ways that can deny children agency and voice.¹³ Marilyn Strathern defined anthropology’s problem as that of ‘how to create an awareness of different social worlds when all at one’s disposal is terms which belong to one’s own’ (1987: 256). In attending to children’s religion, the question is ¹³ It also means noting, as Oswell suggests, how the lenses of progression and development are sites for the ‘invention of methods and resources for making children and childhood observable’ (Oswell 2016: 8). What, he argues, ‘is needed is not that “theory” provides an epistemological blinker, or an easy shadow against which to box and spar, but rather that method is understood with regard to the techniques and devices through which children and their relation to the world is disclosed’ (ibid.).

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shifted somewhat, as children may seem to answer to a different world, yet they also simultaneously inhabit the same worlds as adults in many ways, and adults’ subjectivities are suffused by the memories and imprint of their own childhoods. The task then becomes about how we attend to the processes through which we see children as constructed in these terms, how we perceive them as inhabiting other worlds, and the meanings this has for children and for adults, and the attendant problems of representation, since, as Oswell notes (2015: 15–16), children are most often represented by other agencies with other interests. Let us turn then to examine the registers of children’s agency across different sites in relation to evangelicalism: the spaces of church, family life, school, and other informal everyday places they inhabit. What are the means through which adults seek to form children across these different spaces? How do children respond? What figurations of the child are indexed within these exchanges? How do these affect adults? And how does power flow through these interactions?

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2 Learning a Form of Life One morning at Riverside’s Kids Church, the children were sitting in a circle. Trying to make a distinction between the idea of ‘wants’ and ‘needs’, Jon, one of the leaders, asked them what they thought our ‘needs’ are. Tania replied, ‘We really need water’ and Dylan added, ‘We really need trees, as trees absorb carbon dioxide and give us oxygen.’ Carlos said, ‘We need water and vegetables’, while Natalie said ‘We need love.’ Malachi said he didn’t think we need houses, but ‘we do need community’. Jon disagreed, saying we do need houses, but added, ‘needing love and community are really important, and we come to church to be part of a community’. Jon then asked the children, ‘So has anyone here ever tried praying?’ Most put their hands up. Malachi muttered to me, ‘I haven’t tried praying, I have prayed.’ Jon then asked the children, ‘Hands up if God has answered your prayer.’ The same children put their hands up. Jon then asked, ‘Has anyone ever prayed and felt that God has not answered your prayer?’ A few children raised their hands. Jon asked, ‘And has anyone ever felt like God wasn’t there for them when they prayed?’ Again, a few hands went up. Malachi’s hand was still raised, but Jon didn’t ask him to speak. Instead he said, ‘Often we can struggle to see if our prayer has been answered, and sometimes we might feel it hasn’t been answered at all.’ He then said, ‘Who here would like some chocolate?’ Everyone raised their hands, and he asked Malachi to ask him for the chocolate. ‘Can I have some chocolate?’ Malachi asked. Jon answered, ‘No’, and then explained, ‘We don’t always understand the way that God talks to us, or the way that he answers. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you and doesn’t mean he has ignored you. We don’t always understand the way God works or why things happen as they do, but no matter what happens, God always loves you.’ Malachi still had his hand up, and Jon finally allowed him to speak. Malachi said that he had prayed for six years for his father, who lives in America, to come to England to visit him, and eventually he did come. Jon gave the children worksheets to write down prayers under different headings for family members, for personal prayer requests, and for friends and teachers, and encouraged them to spread out round the room. They did this, sitting and lying on the floor, using felt tips to write down names, and

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sometimes drawing things. I chatted with Tania about her list. She had written names of family members, and under the ‘personal prayer requests’ heading she had written ‘Jesus’ and ‘prayers for the dead’. I asked what she meant. She replied, ‘I just talk to Jesus about what’s been going on in my life’, and added that we need to pray to remember the dead, the people who died in the war (it was Remembrance Sunday). Anamaria had drawn some pictures to illustrate her prayers, and at the bottom of her sheet had written ‘love other people’. Through this interaction, we can see that the children were understood as having a reflexive agency in the sense of being able to reflect on their own prayer practices, and on who and what they would like to pray for. At the same time, adults still controlled this space and determined the activities for children. Jon, for instance, granted children the right to speak only after he had finished explaining the point he wanted to make. Malachi’s comment to me that he hadn’t tried praying demonstrated an implicit challenge to how Jon’s words presented the children’s prayers as somehow less developed than adults’ actual prayers. Adults at Riverside saw Kids Church as a space that enabled children ‘to learn about and engage with God’, as the Kids Church ‘Vision Statement and Mission’ expressed this. This chapter explores the practices through which adults sought to form children in church spaces as subjects able to ‘engage with God’, and the ways in which children responded to these practices. I outline the different ideals that we can see in play in these practices across conservative, charismatic, and open evangelical churches, and show how focusing on the desired formation of children provides not only insight into children’s lives in relation to religion, but also into settings in which morally charged ideals of personhood are explicitly articulated. Thus, we see particular emphasis on biblical literacy and ideas of submission to God within conservative evangelicals’ work with children, contrasted with an emphasis on ideals of friendship with Jesus within charismatic and open evangelicalism. Despite these differences, I argue that the techniques of formation used across all these churches were means of shaping the children as reflexive individuals, able to reflect on their behaviour and actions in the light of the church teachings. I begin by outlining a relational approach to studying children’s religion that is attentive to questions of embodiment and ethics.

C H I L D R E N A N D RE L I G I ON: A RE LATI ONAL APPROACH How do children come to inhabit a religious form of life? How do they learn to ‘just talk to Jesus about what’s going on’ in their lives, as Tania described? How does this relate to other areas of their lives? And what does this learning mean for adults in relation to children? While historically much of the work on

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religion and childhood has focused on the transmission of beliefs, a small body of work¹ has drawn attention to the importance of studying practices, objects, and materialities in children’s religious lives, emphasizing that coming to inhabit a religious form of life is more than a matter of cognitive belief, but is also about shaping bodies, emotions, and dispositions. Religious embodiment has been a significant focus in the broader turn to ‘lived religion’, allowing us to examine how religious lifeworlds flow beyond neat categories of belief and institutional affiliation. In understanding children’s formation, this focus is especially significant, drawing attention to how adults seek to form children as religious subjects through the habituation of specific practices, and how children engage with this process. Embodiment has been a significant theme in wider childhood studies beyond the study of religion. Chris Shilling’s (1993) presentation of the human body as socially and biologically unfinished has been influential in this body of work, helping move beyond the nature/culture binary that positioned children as either of the realm of the natural (and belonging to the realm of the biological and medical sciences) or of the cultural (as in the new paradigm). Shilling emphasizes that the body changes over the life course in ways that are social and biological, and he presents the relationship between the body and society as reciprocal: the body both constrains and allows social relations at the same time as it is shaped by them (Gallacher and Kehily 2013: 245). Prout describes this understanding of embodiment, drawn together with a focus on social meanings, as especially promising for childhood studies, since it allows children’s bodies to appear in a variety of roles: ‘in the construction of social relations, meanings and experiences between children themselves and with adults; as products of and resources for agency, action and interaction; and as sites for socialization through embodiment’ (2005: 107). Shilling’s later work with Philip Mellor on ‘body pedagogics’ provides a useful model for approaching children’s religious formation. Mellor and Shilling use the term ‘body pedagogics’ to signify the centrality of embodiment as the experiential mediator of religious social facts and the basis on which ‘a creative religious habitus can be produced’ (2010: 28). Studying body pedagogics involves ‘an investigation of the central institutional means through which a religious culture seeks to transmit its main embodied techniques, dispositions and beliefs, the experiences typically associated with acquiring these attributes, and the embodied outcomes resulting from these processes’ (p. 28). This approach allows us to explore how particular religious practices have significant consequences for shaping ‘embodied orientations to the self and world, characterised by a transcendent configuration of immanent social realities’ (p. 30), enabling us to analyse the directional logic towards the

¹ See, for example, Bales 2005, Orsi 2005, Scourfield et al. 2013, Hemming 2015.

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self and the world shaped through these means. Focusing on the religious habitus² associated with particular body pedagogic techniques means attending to deeply rooted social inclinations, habits, tastes, dispositions, and forms of emotion. The body pedagogics approach also invites us to consider the failure to transmit particular dispositions, for example, the unwillingness of some children, as we saw in the previous chapter, to engage in particular forms of evangelism, and how such instances of failure may be bound up with norms of practice encountered outside religious institutions that run in conflict with religious norms. While Mellor and Shilling focus primarily on obvious religious rituals, such as Muslim salat, the practices shaping the formation of an evangelical habitus also include, as I will show, pedagogical techniques mirroring those used at schools, the use of games, and acts of reflexivity. The formation of a habitus also includes the cultivation of certain ethical dispositions, as emphasized by Saba Mahmood’s (2012) pioneering study of a women’s piety movement in the mosques of Cairo. Mahmood drew on Foucault’s work on ethics and Pierre Hadot’s (1995) writing on spiritual exercises to describe how processes of self-formation involve the repetition of embodied, ethical practices. Foucault has often been a useful theorist for childhood studies, since children feature prominently in his early studies of governmentality, with children’s daily routines an exemplary instance of the operations of power. Yet, as Kylie Valentine notes, ‘taking up only this lesson from Foucault risks a vaguely paranoid, vaguely libertarian account, in which the exercise of power on individuals is detected in more and more settings, but the role of power in forming individuals and individuals’ roles in enacting and resisting power remains unscrutinised’ (2009: 352). In his later writing, Foucault moved away from his earlier more deterministic focus to consider how forms of power were part of the relation between self and other and the role they played in the formation of the self. In ‘Technologies of the Self ’, he stated, ‘Perhaps I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others and in the technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself, in the technology of the self ’ (1988: 19). However, within childhood studies, ‘the Foucault of Discipline and Punish is far more influential . . . than the Foucault of Hermeneutics of the Subject or the histories of sexuality’ (Valentine 2009: 353). A consequence of this, Valentine argues, is that childhood studies often positions children as claiming the benefits of agency ‘but not the obligations and ambivalences of political subjectivity’, and therefore does not always sufficiently attend to how children’s agency is always inflected with power (2009: 353). ² My use of the term ‘habitus’ follows Marcel Mauss’s definition, denoting the ‘exis, the “acquired ability” and “faculty” of Aristotle’, formed through particular techniques of the body that ‘vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions’ (2006: 74–5).

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Foucault’s work on ethics is helpful for exploring religious technologies of the self in relation to the formation of children, drawing attention to how particular modes of children’s agency can be both implicated in and the outcome of processes of self-formation. Foucault defines ‘technologies of the self ’ as the processes that permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality . . . [This] implies certain modes of training and modification of individuals, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes. (1988: 18)

Despite his language here of the self working on itself, this is a thoroughly social process, and Foucault describes technologies of the self as ‘patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group’ (1987: 122). This process of self-formation is always interwoven with morality and ethics. Morality here refers to ‘the set of values and rules of action that are recommended to individuals through the intermediary of various prescriptive agencies such as the family (in one of its roles), educational institutions, churches, and so forth’ (Foucault 1985: 25). Morality also refers to individuals’ actual behaviour in relation to these rules and manners, and the extent to which they comply more or less with a particular standard of conduct, the ways in which they obey or resist a command or respect or resist a set of values (ibid.). While in the previous chapter we saw how Foucauldian epistemologies were rejected by some conservative evangelicals, this approach to self-formation invites attention to the values and ethical orientations that evangelical culture seeks to reproduce in children and the ways these are interwoven in particular practices. Foucault’s later work on ethics has been very widely taken up in the growing anthropological literature on ethics (see discussions in Faubion 2011, Laidlaw 2014). While there has been little attention to children in this literature, focusing on children in relation to ethics and practices of selfformation is illuminating, opening up insight into the ethical orientations adults seek to impart to children as they try to form them as particular kinds of subject, and the orientation to self, other, and world that is the outcome of these practices. In studying the formation of evangelical adults, I have argued (2015) that this Foucauldian approach to ethics needs to be understood within a broader relational approach to religion, attentive to the exigencies of actual practice and to the ‘processes which unite and disunite, bind and unbind social relationships in space and time’ (Turner 1983: 8). As social actors, people are constituted both by the forms of embodied practice that Foucault’s work draws out and by our relations with others, and this is, as Michael Lambek notes,

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partly an intersubjective process, beginning with the mother-infant bond, but it is mediated by what society objectifies as the identities people are given (names and statuses), tasks expected of them (roles), positions they are given to occupy (offices), and programs they come to identify with (callings) as well as the structures of relations in which statuses, roles, offices, and callings are manifest, the everyday activities and conversations through which people engage with others, and the myriad ways in which the world invites our response. In all these respects people are called upon and answer their calls. (2015: 19)

How then are children called upon and how do they answer the calls of others? Through what social processes and everyday practices do they come to inhabit particular identities and forms of relationality, and how is this experienced across different settings? And how do children call on adults in these exchanges? What are the directional modalities of the relationship between ‘self ’ and particular ‘others’ implicated in and shaped by these relationships? Exemplifying this relational approach, Veena Das draws attention to how when children learn language, they do not merely learn the words for things, but are initiated into a ‘form of life’, which is shaped by their relations with others. She cites Stanley Cavell’s meditation on the figure of the child that haunts Wittgenstein’s writing: When you say ‘I love you my love’: the child learns the meaning of the word ‘love’ and what love is. That (what you do) will be love in the child’s world; and if it is mixed with resentment and intimidation, then love is a mixture of resentment and intimidation, and when love is sought that will be sought. When you say ‘I’ll take you tomorrow, I promise,’ the child begins to learn what temporal durations are, and what trust is, and what you do will show what trust is worth. When you say, ‘Put on your sweater,’ the child learns what commands are and what authority is, and if giving orders is something that creates anxiety for you, then authorities are anxious, authority itself is uncertain. To summarize what has been said about this: In ‘learning language’ you learn not merely what the names of things are, but what a name is; not merely what the form of expression is for expressing a wish but what expressing a wish is; not merely what the word for ‘father’ is, but what a father is; not merely what the word for ‘love’ is, but what love is. In learning language, you do not merely learn the pronunciation of sounds, and their grammatical orders, but the ‘form of life’ which makes those sounds the words they are, do what they do—e.g. name, call, point, express a wish or affection, indicate a choice or an aversion, etc. And Wittgenstein sees the relation among these forms as ‘grammatical’ also. (Cavell 1979: 177–8)

As Das describes, Cavell presents the child’s initiation into a form of life in everyday settings, but within such quotidian encounters ‘is built the possibility that love could be anxious and authority uncertain and trust betrayed’ (Das 2007: 200). While ‘relationship’ might seem a friendly word, taking a relational approach to children’s religion means attending to the realities of power and

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to the ambiguities and ambivalences of particular forms of relationship implicated in religious forms of life, as well as to the everyday practices shaping a particular form of life, as we will explore. Let us consider the practices through which adults sought to form children and how children learnt to form themselves across different churches.

FRIENDSHIP WITH GO D AND OTHERS Sunday mornings at St George’s Kids Church followed the same pattern each week. Before the service, as people started arriving, breakfast was served in the main space of the church, while the children ran around the church freely, including on the stage and the pulpit. The leaders of the church saw this freedom as significant: in the prayers before one service, one of the church staff thanked God that ‘this is a countercultural space, where the children can have freedom and can just run around and play and be free’. After this time before the service, while the adults were mostly chatting over coffee and croissants or sitting on sofas reading the papers, one of the ministers came to the stage to welcome everyone and introduce a time of ‘worship for everyone’, inviting children and their parents to come to the front. The songs sung at this point typically reinforced the idea of Jesus as a friend, with lyrics and actions focusing on Jesus loving them, his love being ‘fab’ and his being their mate, accompanied by actions such as holding both hands on the chest to mark the idea of God’s love. The younger children stood on the stage and in the space in front of the stage for the songs with their parents, and danced and performed the actions demonstrated by the children’s leaders to accompany the music, often including a song that required them to ‘zoom zoom zoom around the room room room’. James, the vicar, at times described this ‘worship for everyone’ as ‘the high point’ of services. It is worth noting that while the smaller children engaged in this enthusiastically with their parents, by the age of ten, children mostly didn’t join in with the singing at the front. One boy I interviewed said, ‘They do kids’ songs and adult songs, but there’s nothing in the middle. We don’t want to go up to do the kids’ songs, because they’re too babyish’, and another said, ‘No one our age goes to the front and does little rhyme-like things’, adding emphatically, ‘I don’t sing, I don’t sing, I don’t sing.’ After the period of music in the main church, the children headed out to their children’s groups while the adults remained in the church, and the adults prayed for them as they left. One boy commented to me that it made him feel ‘special when you leave that someone is praying for you’. The leaders at St George’s placed a strong emphasis on developing ‘intimacy’ with God, and this shaped how the children’s leaders sought to form children

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as subjects who experienced a sense of intimate friendship with Jesus. The leaders also emphasized the role of emotion as an important area of life, and, as we will see in the next chapter, ran therapeutic style courses on various aspects of family and personal life led by psychiatrists and psychotherapists. This emphasis on emotion shaped how the leaders thought about the formation of children, as they expressed a desire for Kids Church to be a space where the children could be free to express their emotions and form attachments to each other and God, and they also emphasized the idea of children having agency and freedom. Katie frequently told the children that the church was ‘their church and their space just as much as the adults’’. She consulted the children about what they would like to be doing in Kids Church, often (although not always) taking up their suggestions, and she encouraged them to lead activities, such as organizing the games in Kids Church. The children were involved in forms of hospitality together with the adults, such as serving breakfast before services, which they said made them feel valued within the church. Katie always meticulously planned each Kids Church session, but she also expressed a desire for spontaneity, and said that she was happy if the sessions did not follow her plans, interpreting this divergence as a sign that, in her words, what was happening was being ‘led by the Holy Spirit’ and wanting to ‘follow where that leads’. Despite this emphasis on spontaneity, Kids Church sessions almost always consisted of the same key elements: games, some form of teaching from one of the adult leaders about a biblical passage or particular theme, sometimes a ‘memory verse’ activity (in which the children were encouraged to learn a particular Bible verse), group discussions, a craft, art, or role play activity, cookies and squash, and the leaders choosing one child as ‘star of the morning’ at the end of the morning. A session led by Justin—in his late thirties, and father to two children in the group—typified this pattern. Katie had written the plan for the session, which focused on the idea of ‘the sword of the Spirit’, as part of a broader series on ‘the armour of God’. There were seventeen children there that morning (twelve boys; five girls).³ Justin asked the children to sit in a circle for a game of ‘duck duck goose’, which involved them running to chase each other in turns around the circle, followed by a game of ‘mummy wrap’, which had the children split into three teams each wrapping a nominated ‘mummy’ in toilet roll, with the leaders choosing the best ‘mummy’. The children engaged with these games enthusiastically, with the ‘mummies’ tearing the toilet roll off themselves dramatically at the end of the game. Justin told them they had to clear this up, and then they all sat on chairs facing the

³ This session was early on in my fieldwork, and numbers attending Kids Church increased over the period of my fieldwork, with later sessions averaging twenty-five to thirty children.

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stage, while two of the older girls handed around cups of squash and chocolate chip cookies. As they were eating, Justin asked the children if they could remember what they had been looking at the previous week. One of the boys, Akintoye, said, ‘the armour of God’. Justin asked who could remember the memory verse from the previous week. A couple of the boys could remember the first part and said ‘stand firm then with the belt of truth buckled round your waist’, and tried to guess what followed. Justin, reading from the script Katie had prepared, said that this week they would be looking at the final piece of armour and asked, ‘Who can tell me how a sword is different from other pieces of armour we have been learning about?’ Jack replied, ‘It has a blade.’ ‘That’s right,’ Justin said, ‘it’s the only one that’s a weapon. The others we use to defend ourselves.’ Joe, one of the older boys (ten years old), said, ‘You defend yourself with a sword too’, and Jude added, ‘That’s right, you use a sword to block the other person.’ ‘Yes,’ Justin said, ‘but a sword is still the only weapon from the armour that we are using. We use the sword in a battle against Satan. What does the Bible say a sword is? Let’s look at Ephesians 6:17, which shows us that the sword we use is the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.’ Sue, the other leader that morning, handed out Bibles. Justin said that they were going to do a ‘sword drill, which is a race to see who can find the Bible verse first. Everybody close your Bible and hold it in your right hand above your head. Does everyone have a Bible?’ Two boys put their hands up to ask if they could work together. ‘When I say go,’ Justin said, ‘start looking for the verse I say, and give me a thumbs up when you find it. Right, Ephesians 6:17.’ Some of the children turned to their Bible’s contents page, but some of the younger children did not know how to look up the verses. Jamie, a small blond boy, found the verse first, and read it out for everyone. Justin then asked the children to look up Hebrews 4:12. Joe found this one very quickly, and read it aloud to the other the children: ‘For the Word of God is alive and powerful. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to divide soul and spirit, joints and marrow, it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.’ Some of the children were still trying to find the right verse, but Justin had returned to reading out from the talk that Katie had written: ‘A sharp sword can cut through just about anything. When we use the Bible as a sword, we are able to cut through the things the world tells us and get to the truth. This verse shows us that the most important thing in the world isn’t money or stuff, but following God.’ He then asked the children, ‘Did you know that even Jesus used the Word of God as a sword against Satan? Can anybody remember when?’ No one responded. ‘I’ll give you a clue,’ Justin said, ‘it happened in the desert.’ Jamie’s younger brother Louis, wearing a stripey T-shirt and jeans, put his hand up and said, ‘Jesus was in the desert for forty days and nights and was tempted by Satan.’ ‘And how did he use the Bible then?’ Justin asked. ‘He used words from the Bible to answer Satan,’ Louis said. ‘That’s an excellent answer,’

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Justin said. ‘Whenever Satan tempted Jesus to sin, Jesus fought back by quoting from the Word of God. Jesus is the perfect example of a good swordsman. A good swordsman spends time practising with his sword every day. He takes care to make sure that his sword is always sharp.’ He then asked, ‘How do we keep our sword of the spirit sharp?’ His son Joshua, with floppy curly hair, put his hand up and said, ‘By praying?’ ‘No, not by praying,’ Justin said. ‘Any other suggestions?’ Louis put his hand up, and said, ‘By looking at the Bible.’ ‘Exactly,’ Justin said, ‘by reading the Bible every day and memorizing scripture. With the help of Jesus, we can become expert swordsmen and we can win against sin. Let’s practise keeping our swords sharp by saying the memory verse now.’ Sue introduced the ‘memory verse’ activity. Joe and Joshua volunteered to act out the verse for the rest of the children and went up onto the stage. Sue read out the verse about putting on ‘the armour of God’ which she’d written on a large A3 piece of paper while Joe dressed Joshua with a plastic medieval breastplate, a green piece of cloth for the ‘belt of truth’, some large blue comedy shoes to demonstrate ‘feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace’. As Sue continued reading, ‘in addition to this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take up the helmet of salvation . . . ’, Joe and Joshua both picked up brightly coloured Velcro shields and put on plastic helmets to demonstrate taking up ‘the shield of faith’ and ‘the helmet of salvation’. Sue then led all the children in repeating the verse aloud together. ‘Right then,’ Justin said, ‘now we’re going to have a gladiator contest.’ He asked for children to volunteer to be gladiators, each choosing only one piece of plastic armour, and fencing in pairs while the other children watched. The point that he was trying to get across through the game was that the sword was the most important piece of armour, but this did not come across, because all the children chose swords as their one piece of armour. The boys engaged with the activity enthusiastically. Gina had her hand up to volunteer, but Justin did not pick her, and a few other girls put their hands up, but were not chosen. Two of the older girls sat at the side with me, and when Akintoye (who was the tallest child there) was a gladiator, the girls said to each other, ‘I could beat Akintoye.’ Sue then introduced a quick game involving handing each of the children a card with a term such as ‘sword’, ‘faith’, ‘righteousness’ on it. She explained that the words went together in pairs and asked the children to find the other person whose term went with theirs, and then to find the correct piece of armour for their pair of words, and to stand at the front. Most of the children grasped the activity, with the older boys competing with each other to see who could find their partner and the armour quickest. Justin then split the children into two teams, initially boys and girls, although then asking a couple of the younger boys, Mark and Louis, to join the girls’ team to make the numbers more even. He introduced a game of

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Pictionary, with the children having to draw a Bible story, although the children didn’t all know the stories they were asked to draw. Akintoye, Jack, and Sebastian sat at the back and didn’t participate with the rest of the boys’ team, and I asked why they didn’t want to play. Jack replied, ‘It’s boring. How much time is there left?’ ‘Not long,’ I replied. ‘Yess!’, Jack responded. I asked if he was looking forward to going home. ‘Well, it’s just—Akintoye is coming round to my house this afternoon, and we’re going to play computer games.’ Justin divided the children into groups to discuss the Bible passage. He and I sat with the boys, and Sue with the girls. The parents had started arriving by this point, but Justin carried on with the discussion. He read some more from the script that Katie had prepared. ‘The devil’, he read, ‘wanted to stop Jesus from following God’s plan for his life . . . Instead of going to the cross, Satan suggested that Jesus just jump off a tower or worship him to get a crowd of followers. Jesus decided to follow God’s plan even though it was harder. Today, even though we will probably never have an experience like Jesus did, we can still be tempted away from following God and his plan for our lives, and sometimes it is the devil who is behind it. We can learn from Jesus how to use the Bible and to do what we know is the right thing.’ He then asked the children the questions from Katie’s plan, beginning, ‘How should you put God first when you are at school?’ The boys were quick with their answers: ‘By getting good grades,’ Akintoye volunteered. ‘By not bullying people,’ Joshua said. ‘By being kind to people,’ Louis said. Louis and Joe were lying on the floor, and Justin told them to ‘sit up and be respectful’. He then asked, ‘And how should you put God first when you are at home?’ ‘By helping out,’ Joshua said. ‘How is that putting God first?’ Justin asked. ‘By praying about it and helping?’ Joshua said uncertainly. ‘By being tidy,’ Jack said. ‘Not arguing with my brother,’ Jamie volunteered. ‘What’s God’s plan for your life?’ Justin then asked. ‘It’s not the same as Jesus, dying on the cross.’ The boys didn’t answer, so Justin answered himself, ‘To love God and tell others about him.’ He then asked, ‘What stops you from following God wholeheartedly?’ and again began to answer this himself when the boys didn’t answer initially, saying, ‘Things like celebrity and money can become temptations . . . ’ ‘Drugs,’ Jack said. Justin agreed. ‘Why do drugs stop you following God?’ Joe asked. ‘Because God wants us to follow his plan for our lives, and drugs are not part of that plan,’ Justin answered. He then asked, ‘How can you choose to stand up against this problem?’ ‘By praying,’ Akintoye said. ‘By reading the Bible,’ Joe volunteered. Justin asked the boys if they would like to pray. None of them said anything, so Justin said a short prayer, asking God to help them to know when they were tempted, and to try to follow God. Louis asked him if they would be doing ‘star of the morning’. Justin said that they would, and he picked three stars: Louis, Mark, and Gina. They got a round of applause from the rest of the children and the parents at the back, and the chosen stars ran to the bucket full of prizes

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to each choose a toy. Gina spent a while, and then said, ‘There’s nothing here for girls.’ Sue suggested that she could take a prize for someone else instead. The range of methods used in that morning’s session were repeated from week to week, with the desire of inculcating a specific habitus in which the children would have a sense of intimate relationship with God and a desire to tell others about him, as Justin indicated was central to faith. Many of the techniques used were similar to educational practices used in schools, and the children saw Kids Church as a space of learning, with Joe describing to me the main thing they do in Kids Church as ‘learning about Jesus’. Although there was an emphasis on the idea of children having agency, the embodied techniques that were used still located authoritative knowledge in adults, with Justin standing and speaking while the children sat down and listened to his teaching, and his authority to tell the children to sit up and ‘be respectful’ was unquestioned. The children’s own understanding of what it meant to be a child in the space of church also largely mirrored wider cultural conceptions of childhood as a stage of learning and becoming, marked off from adulthood. Akintoye said to me that as a child ‘you’re still learning the Christian faith, but adults, they already know most things, but the children are still learning’. At the same time, children expressed their ‘tactical interstitital agency’ (Oswell 2013: 59) through the resources available to them. This sometimes meant refusing to participate in what was asked of them, for example, by not praying aloud when asked to. In one session, Katie introduced ‘a time of open prayer, where we can say thank you to God for the gifts you have given us, and ask him to give us more of them’, and this was followed by a minute’s silence. Amelia, a girl sitting next to me, said, ‘Well, this is an awkward silence.’ Finally, Tom, one of the leaders, said, ‘Would anyone like to pray anything? Akintoye?’, but Akintoye shook his head, so Tom said a prayer himself. The adult leaders saw games as an important way of shaping children’s faith perspectives, by developing their knowledge and understanding of biblical stories and ideas. Yet the implicit purpose of the games was also to make church fun and to develop the children’s sense of relationship with each other through these very physical embodied activities. While not all the children participated in all the games, the majority enjoyed them, with several boys telling me that games were their favourite thing about church. Although play is common across Sunday schools, it is a rare focus in studies of religious or spiritual subject formation.⁴ As religion is mostly considered a serious business, shaping people’s engagement with existential questions about life, death, and meaning, ‘the dichotomization of religion and play’, as Rebecca Sachs

⁴ Studies of children’s spirituality have, however, explored the influential idea of ‘godly play’ (e.g. Hyde 2011, Berryman 2017).

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Norris notes, ‘is understandable . . . For many people, the risk of trivializing religious concerns puts play and religion in opposing camps’ (2011: 198). Yet the games played by the children at St George’s dissolved the ‘apparent boundaries between play and religion’ (p. 199). The children also used humour and laughter in discussing ‘serious’ religious ideas, in ways that can be seen as exercising their agency in relation to the activities they were asked to do. In one session, for example, in which they were asked to work in groups to draw pictures of things that make them feel peaceful, Ethan drew a picture of himself on a bed and a stereo next to it, while Joe had drawn a picture of a TV, and beside this, had written ‘TV makes me feel peeful.’ He laughed and repeated, ‘peeful’ to the others in the group. Jude had written in large letters, ‘stay calm and keep loving peace’. Joe crossed out the ‘a’ and ‘c’ from this, and laughed, and then drew a picture of a toilet, and wrote ‘PEE’ in large letters in the centre. Akintoye and Jude told him to ‘stop being silly’, but did not seem bothered or in any way offended. The focus on play and games as embodied practices helped the children to get to know each other and feel that they belonged to a community. At St George’s, the adults emphasized this idea of church as a space of community, bound up with a normative sense that the Christian subject is fundamentally relational. In a sermon on the theme of hospitality, for instance, Maddie, the church’s children’s and families minister, said that ‘as human beings, we are called to actually live in community in relationship with each other, we function best, that’s actually how we’re designed’. She said that this is something that is scientifically demonstrated: ‘The more we look into all the different brain functioning, we see that . . . everything functions best when we have close connections, when we feel loved and when we feel accepted.’ She situated the idea of the church as being a place for building relationships against the backdrop of increasing social atomism: This is all done against a backdrop really where we’re living increasingly on our own. In 1950 four million Americans lived on their own, in 2001 it had risen to 30 million, which puts incredible strain on the relationships that we have. And I would say that even living in nuclear families puts quite a lot of strain on those families because again we probably were designed to have quite a lot more close relationships. It’s probably better for us if we live in sort of more extended communities where if our children are driving us completely nuts someone else will step in and speak nicely to them, or where we don’t need to get all our emotional needs for support and love and affection from one person, because that puts incredible strain on that one relationship.

This idea of the church as a special space of community was something the children largely internalized. Chloe (eleven years old), for example, said, ‘I love that we’re in a community and we’re all in the same boat, and we all know how

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everyone’s feeling, so it’s good we can all share our problems together and we know we’re talking to God.’ The everyday practices at Kids Church sometimes sought to shape the children as perceiving cosmic reality in terms of a dualistic spiritual battle between God and Satan in which Christians took part, through, for instance, the use of battle imagery and the focus on the ‘armour of God’ and games such as gladiator fighting. Many of the children accepted and used that kind of dualistic language when discussing biblical passages and images, although it is worth noting that this was not language that they used when talking about their own everyday lives. Yet in contrast with this dualism, Kids Church leaders also encouraged the children to think about their relations with others in ways that did not entail this oppositional spiritual logic, and placed significantly more emphasis on ideas of friendship with others and of thinking of the world as fundamentally ‘good’. In another Kids Church session, Katie encouraged the children to think about their relations with different kinds of others in terms of different directions: ‘Up’ (relationship with God), ‘In’ (relationships with Christians), and ‘Out’ (relationships with non-Christians). Although she sought to encourage the children to make a distinction in their thinking about relationships with Christians and nonChristians through this activity, she nevertheless described all these forms of relationship as ‘friendship’. Discussing their friendships with non-Christians in this session and in interviews, several of the children at St George’s spoke about how their best friends were not Christians, and the children did not draw a strong sense of distinction between their friendships with Christians and others. Lily, for example, said she didn’t feel a strong sense of distinction between Christians and Muslims: ‘My Muslim friends, they just act the same way we do, and we just play together all the time. It doesn’t really matter what religion you are, we all just play together . . . You can be in any religion you want really.’ While the leaders at St George’s sought to encourage the formation of a habitus in which the children had a sense of loving God and a desire to tell others about him, the children, while they did express their sense of love for God, placed little emphasis on the idea of ‘telling others’. For them, faith was expressed more in terms of everyday moral actions. Akintoye said that in his view being a Christian was about ‘following God’, and when I asked him what that meant, he said, ‘You follow in his footsteps to do the right things and tell right from wrong.’ Shanequa said that for her faith meant ‘loving each other’, and Megan added that for her it was ‘being able to worship God like every week and learning more about him’. When I interviewed Chloe and Joshua, Chloe said that for her being a Christian meant ‘forgiveness, and just to be honest, and know the right from wrong stuff ’, and Joshua added, ‘and you can feel the love of Jesus’.

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LEARNING TO HEAR GOD The techniques that adults used with children at St John’s were in many ways similar to those used at St George’s. Children also began the morning in the main church service with the adults. But they did not run around the church, and if any child tried to climb the pulpit, they were swiftly ushered down by parents or church staff. The services always began with notices and a short prayer, followed by a hymn (often organ-accompanied). Children did not perform actions or stand at the front of the church but remained by their parents’ sides.⁵ The hymn was always followed by a prayer (often the Confession from the Church of England Book of Common Worship) and then another hymn or worship song, during which the children left for their Sunday school groups. As at St George’s and Riverside, children were not present for the sermon, which was constructed as ‘the high point’ of services at St John’s, with the sacrality of the act of listening to the Bible reading and sermon explicitly articulated by the church ministers in almost every service (Strhan 2015: 121). While the period of ‘worship for everyone’ was described by adults as ‘the high point’ of the service at St George’s, the visual and atmospheric contrast in these two ‘high points’ indicates much about the distinctiveness of these two evangelical cultures from each other: the messiness and freedom given to the children to run around the church noisily, jumping about on stage while singing and doing actions at St George’s, in contrast with the seriousminded adults seated at St John’s to listen to the minister addressing them for this ‘high point’ of the service. The aims that the leaders at St John’s articulated for the formation of children mirrored their understanding of what it means to be an evangelical adult. British conservative evangelical culture emphasizes the idea of the evangelical subject as one who learns to hear God speak in the words of the Bible, chooses to submit to God, and has a sense of themselves as a disciple and distinctive from wider culture. These same ideals were also emphasized in work with children. Jeremy, the leader of children’s ministry at St John’s, told me: the convictions we have in our children’s ministry are the same as the convictions we have in the wider church. So we’re wanting to know God. God has revealed himself to us supremely in Jesus in the Bible, and so unashamedly everything that ⁵ There was variety amongst conservative evangelical churches in relation to this, with other churches I observed having songs with actions for children, and one church I visited having a short ‘reflection for everyone’—a short talk, led by the children’s minister, aimed at children and adults. There were also differences among conservative evangelical churches in relation to gender and children’s ministry. St John’s held that women should not teach men in the church, and the leader of children’s ministry was therefore a man (although women were involved in different aspects of children’s ministry), but other conservative evangelical churches had women leading children’s ministry.

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I try and get the Sunday school to be doing is from the Bible. I want them to hear what God says in the Bible. I want them to respond to it in faith. I think the only difference I would see between the children and the adults is in the children’s ministry you’ve got the addition of parents, and what we do in the Sunday school on Sunday is in partnership with the parents, and so the expectation is that through the week, the parents who are Christians are seeking to live Christianly, and to involve their children in Christian conversation and in teaching them from the Bible during the week as well.

Sunday school meetings began with the children singing a couple of songs together, and then that morning’s leader would ask the children about whether they’d had a good or bad week. The children then broke off into three agedifferentiated groups. The preschool group began their session by singing the same song each week: ‘Let’s gather together to hear from God’. The leader then held out a box and led the children in a chant, ‘What are we going to learn today?’ with accompanying actions, and chanted ‘Let’s find out from the Bible box’. One of the children would open the box, in which was a picture illustrating the theme of that morning, such as ‘God saves his people’. The child then got the Bible out of the box, and the leader would read a Bible verse that related to that theme, and explain the story using images the children could relate to. To illustrate the theme of ‘God saving his people’, for instance, the leader used pictures to show a burning building, and asked the children who would save them from that (a fireman), and who would save someone if they were drowning (a lifeguard), and then talked about the idea of Jesus being sent by God to ‘save his people’. After this teaching, the children were asked to do an action rhyme related to that story. The group would then split into two smaller groups, and each played a game that repeated that week’s teaching theme. Jeremy explained to me that he wanted the repetition of the same practices each week to habituate the children to expect to be ‘learning to hear from God’ in Sunday school: ‘The games have always just fun things they enjoy doing, which involves their whole body, but repetition so that by the end of the game of the children know that what we’re learning that day is that God saves.’ After this, the children would then come together as a group to sing what Jeremy called ‘the gathering song’ and the group would then pray together. The leaders then told the Bible story for that day again, with the Bible open as a visual marker reinforcing this sense that they were all gathered to hear God in the Bible. Jeremy explained to me that the two older children’s groups would look at the same themes and Bible stories each week, but with the older children the teaching was consciously presented more in the form of a sermon. As he described, ‘The content’s the same with all ages, but with the older children, it feels like more of a talk. Like the person [giving the talk] will stand up to give it, and the children are sat on the floor on cushions, whereas the younger age group, they’re sat on the floor . . . and the teacher’s kind of sitting at eye level

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and interacting, whereas for the older one it’s more they look up.’ While conservative evangelical culture places more emphasis on listening rather than visuality as the privileged means of relating to God (Strhan 2015), here we see a desire for the children to become habituated to a particular visual arrangement, in which the embodied disposition of sitting and looking up at the speaker indexes a ‘correct’ way of relating to the higher authority of a minister, who is understood to be teaching the Word of God. The older children’s groups had periods of chatting together and different activities, such as craft or drama activities, and, as at St George’s, they also used ‘memory verse’ games. The children in the middle age groups prayed in their groups using the acronym ACTS each week, encouraging them to pray in terms of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication, so that each week followed this four-part structure, with the children sometimes praying aloud, and sometimes writing down prayers for the adult leaders to read aloud for them. This ACTS prayer was also included on resource sheets for parents to download from the church website to use with their children during the week. The children in the oldest age group, instead of ACTS, had an activity entitled ‘digging deeper’, in which the children had the Bible open at the passage that they had discussed in the teaching session, and then discussed together what that passage might mean in relation to their lives. While St George’s at times expressed a dualist imaginary of a battle between God and Satan, the primary mode of relationality towards those outside of the church was conceived of in terms of friendship. At St John’s, adults emphasized a stronger sense of separation between church and world, with the world described as a place of potential hostility for Christians. The teaching resources for one week, for example, stated that when Christians tell other people about Jesus, ‘this pattern often happens. Some believe in Jesus and some don’t. Those who don’t believe can be pretty nasty to Christians’, but stressed that ‘God is still in charge, and his good news keeps spreading to the ends of the earth.’ This dualistic imaginary was more pronounced at a large conservative evangelical church I visited in the north of England. The children’s group that morning at this church was focusing on the book of Zephaniah and ‘the impending day of the Lord’ Zephaniah foretold, as the video they watched at the start of their kids’ groups one Sunday morning put it. After reading the first chapter of Zephaniah, the children filled in a worksheet with the headings ‘what/why/when/who’ was being destroyed in the passage, and then discussed their answers and the passage together with their leader. In feeding back their answers, the children noted that ‘everything’ would be destroyed ‘because of sin’. The teacher asked the children if they really believed that everything would be destroyed, including ‘all our gadgets and gizmos’, and got out her iPad. She then showed a video which showed someone smashing up an iPad and putting it in a blender. ‘That’s such a

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waste,’ one child sighed. The teacher said, ‘It’s interesting to think that not everything’s going to last. So how should we think about things like iPads then?’ One boy suggested that they should be put in a blender, while another said that they should enjoy them while they could. The teacher replied, authoritatively, ‘We should enjoy them but not put them first in our lives.’ One boy asked what would happen if a nuclear bomb destroyed everything before God did. The teacher replied, ‘That might be God’s way of destroying everything. But does that mean God hates the world?’ ‘No,’ the children all chorused together. ‘How do we know?’ the teacher asked. ‘Because he could have destroyed it earlier,’ one girl answered, and another said, ‘Because it tells us in the Bible that he loves us.’ Later in the same session, the children read Revelation 21:5 aloud together: ‘He who was seated on the throne says, “I am making everything new”’, and their teacher asked them to draw what God would make new when he comes again. Some of the girls drew pictures of cakes, and one drew a globe. A student leader then asked the children to sit on the floor to recap the story, ‘So what’s going to happen on the Day of the Lord?’ One of the girls answered that some things would be destroyed, and others ‘will be renewed’. One boy said that the devil would be destroyed. The leader corrected him, ‘No. Judgement: sinners will be destroyed. But we’re all sinners, so what gives us the confidence to know that we won’t be destroyed?’ ‘Because we believe in Jesus,’ one of the boys answered. The leader then asked, ‘And what does this mean for how we think about our friends?’ One boy answered that they would die ‘in a puff of smoke’. ‘And what does that mean?’ the leader went on. One child answered that they ‘should tell them, so they will believe in Jesus’. The group of boys I was with then discussed, in response to a question the leader had raised, how they should act as Christians in school. One said that sometimes his friends swore, and so he stayed quiet when they were swearing. A boy of dual heritage said, ‘I want to go to Africa to tell people about Jesus.’ ‘Africa isn’t a country,’ another boy said to him. Another boy said he felt it was ‘easier to tell people who have no religion about Jesus’. One boy commented, ‘So many people are going to be destroyed.’ The leader said, as if to reassure him, ‘The Bible tells us though that everyone will have heard the gospel before the Day of the Lord happens,’ and she mentioned that she had watched a TV programme about a tribe that had just been discovered in the Amazon, and how there was a missionary working there. Biblical teachings about hell or the destruction of the world were never mentioned during my fieldwork at St George’s or Riverside. Here we see how children in conservative evangelical churches learnt to accept this dualistic vision of the impending destruction of sinners, with a remnant of the faithful saved and made holy because they believe in Jesus. Some of their questions implied that they had a fairly literal interpretation of these kinds of biblical narratives, even if this raised moral anxieties for some of the children, for

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example, about the number of people who would be destroyed on the Day of the Lord. As conservative evangelical culture emphasizes the centrality of the idea of being a ‘believer’ and learning to relate to God through the Bible (Strhan 2015), the children had broadly internalized this sensibility. For them, being a Christian meant, as some of the children from St John’s told me when I interviewed them, ‘learning about Jesus’, ‘believing in Jesus and reading the Bible’, and ‘believing in Jesus and hearing about Jesus’. An eleven-year-old boy I interviewed from a conservative evangelical church in the south-east of England also emphasized that belief in God was important, but said, ‘I think it’s not necessarily just believing in him but you have to give up your life for him, and be willing to serve him.’ When I asked one girl from St John’s how she would summarize what they did at church to someone who had never been, her response was ‘read the Bible’, and when I asked her sister what she liked best about church, she replied, ‘learning about Jesus, singing songs, playing games, reading the Bible, that’s all’. For these children, a relationship with God is intrinsic to what it means to be a Christian, and belief and the Bible are central. As adult conservative evangelicals understood their faith as increasingly countercultural in a de-Christianizing cultural context and therefore emphasized the importance of developing close relationships with other Christians that would keep them within the church, so they also understood children’s formation as about developing relationships not only with God but with others in their church as a means of helping to keep their children in the church. One father, explaining how important he felt it was that children came on church weekends away, said, ‘We want to introduce as many Christian anchors as we can into the children’s lives.’ However, this did not lead to a separationist mentality in relation to children’s friendships, with children at St John’s having close friends from non-religious or other faith backgrounds. While there was a strong emphasis at St George’s on the idea of children having agency, children at St John’s were seen by adults as occupying a more liminal place in relation to their having full Christian personhood. One woman I spoke with, Deborah, commented that her own (evangelical) parents didn’t treat her and her brother as Christians until they were old enough to understand and make a commitment for themselves to be Christians, and she, like some other church members, said that she thought an individual was not a Christian until they had made their own conscious commitment. Church members, however, acknowledged that this question of whether or not children could be Christians was something that they disagreed on. Deborah commented that Pete, one of the ministers, thought it was possible ‘for a child who has two committed loving Christian parents to be a Christian and loved by God while still in the womb’. Despite this liminality, the children themselves usually expressed a strong sense that they were Christians, and the

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resources and language that adults used with children in Sunday schools likewise expressed a language of ‘us’ to imply that the children were included and that they should understand themselves as Christians. As the ideals for adult evangelical subject formation located biblical literacy and a sense of relationship with God as central, these ideals then were available to children— perhaps especially to middle-class literate children—who were able to engage with the techniques of formation that the adults also used, despite the somewhat ambivalent positioning of religious personhood for children in the space of the church.

‘ EV ERYBODY IS I MPORTANT ’ Children’s activities at Riverside also included games, craft, or drama activities, and some form of teaching related to a biblical passage. Adults sought to form the children in relation to what they saw as their ‘core values’ for the church, which included ‘Intimacy (with God)’ and ‘Inclusion’, articulated in terms of welcoming all people regardless of ‘social standing, gender, ability, sexuality or ethnicity’. Many Riverside members had come from more conservative evangelical backgrounds and were conscious of these ‘core values’ as setting them apart from more conservative churches. While St George’s and Riverside sought to shape the children as having a desire to tell non-Christians about their faith, at Riverside salvation was understood in terms of ‘bringing hope and transformation to all’, not in terms of proselytizing, but in terms of creating ‘just and compassionate social, economic and political structures’. The adults at Riverside placed particular emphasis on the value of inclusivity and emphasized this especially in relation to the inclusion of those with LGBTQ identities, and the church was supportive of same-sex marriage and had a significant and growing LGBTQ membership. As well as these ‘core values’, the idea of self-realization was frequently emphasized as a central aspect of faith. Andy, the church’s senior minister, said one Sunday morning to the congregation that ‘following Christ is about becoming the best possible version of yourself. And we need one another for that.’ As he spoke, I noticed that on the back of the service sheet there was a note explaining that this theme would be the focus of their small group meetings over the course of the year: ‘“Life”: Becoming the best version of yourself? Three questions to ask yourself this week—how are you learning from others? What are you admiring in those around you and how is this impacting the way you live? What are you learning about Jesus currently?’ Adults’ consciousness of their difference from conservative evangelical churches permeated how they thought about their work with children. Becky, one of the children’s leaders, told me that she had grown up in a

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church in Northern Ireland that placed a lot of emphasis on the Bible and encouraged the children to memorize verses and teachings such as the Westminster Declaration, which she said ‘got in the way of thinking about knowing God’. Rob, the children’s and families’ minister at Riverside, was also critical of other evangelical churches which focus on ‘trying to get people to believe certain things, as if that’s what being a Christian is about’, and said that his aim was to set up a church for kids that wasn’t focused on beliefs but would be about ‘looking at Jesus, and saying that we think he shows us the best way of life’. Of the church’s core values, ‘inclusion’ and ‘intimacy with Jesus’ were the most prevalent in Kids Church during my fieldwork. The value of ‘inclusion’ was the focus one December morning. Children started the services with adults in the main church space, and as at St John’s, the songs were not specifically aimed at children. The songs were usually charismatic worship songs, but that morning there were Christmas carols. Before these, Phil, who was leading the service, said that he would like to challenge everyone there to turn their phones off, ‘so that we can really be in the present here, leaving other stuff behind’. After the carols, Phil gave the notices. He mentioned that Starbucks were doing a ‘suspended coffee offer’, where if you bought a coffee and paid for one extra, Starbucks would match that and give the money to support charitable work that Riverside was engaged in, adding, ‘We’re probably the only church in the country encouraging people to drink Starbucks.’ A tall bearded man at the back called out loudly, ‘Tell them to pay their taxes! We claim to care about social justice, so why are we supporting a company that doesn’t?’ There was an awkward pause and Phil then said in response, ‘Er, I don’t quite know what to do with that.’ The children then went out to their groups. Once in the large room where Kids Church met, we sat on the floor in a circle, and Becky began by asking the children each to say one good thing about their week. We then played a game, involving one of the children going out of the room and changing something about their appearance, and the rest of the group having to guess what this was. After the game, there followed a period of teaching, which began with Becky asking children questions to elicit their understanding of that week’s theme. Becky wrote the word PRAISE in large letters on a flipchart and asked the children what ‘praise’ means. Natalie, one of the older children, said, ‘It means being thankful to God and saying that you love him.’ Becky then split the children into groups and asked them to write down in their groups things that they might want to thank God for. The children seemed engaged in this task, and I asked one of the groups what they were writing down. Anamaria read out for me the things she had written down, which included: ‘for making all the people, for love, for church, for listening to us all the time, for making everything for us, for watching us all the time’. Another group had written down simple words, such as ‘church, praise, polobers [sic], trees, lisons [sic]’.

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Becky then said that in each of our groups, we were going to hear the story of a child from around the world, and she gave each of the groups a printout about the daily life of a child from a different part of the world, produced by Oxfam, to read together. After about five minutes, Becky asked the children what they had learnt in their groups. Anamaria talked about the Brazilian girl she had been reading about with her group, while Dylan and Mason told the rest of the group about the Siberian girl their group had been reading about. Becky then gave each of the children a Post-it note with a particular role or identity written on it. These included: a nurse, a painter, a homeless person, a child from the UK, a child from Romania, a child from the Philippines. Dylan’s Post-it read ‘nurse’, and he complained that he didn’t want to be a nurse. The children stuck their Post-it notes on their foreheads, and Becky asked them to arrange themselves from ‘the most to the least important’. The children disagreed with each other as they were doing this. Natalie said that the homeless person was more important than any of the children, ‘because they need the most help’. The order that the children settled on in the end had the nurse as most important, and the homeless person as the least important. Becky asked all the children to sit in a circle to discuss their choices. The children talked about how some people might seem to be less important to others because they have less money, but in reality, as Natalie put it, ‘everyone is important’. Becky wrote this down on the flipchart in capitals: EVERYONE IS IMPORTANT. Becky then asked them about where they had placed the children in this activity, and the fact that they had placed a child from the UK as more important than a child from the Philippines. Dylan replied, showing his consciousness of how global inequalities shape perceptions of value, ‘That’s because people in the Philippines have very little at the moment, because they had a tsunami.’ Becky asked the children whether children are treated as less important than adults. The children all said ‘yes’, and Becky asked them why. ‘Because we’re smaller,’ Dylan said. ‘Some parents put their children first though, so it’s not always the case children are less important,’ Natalie commented. Becky asked them whether they thought that children from the UK are more important. ‘They’re all equally important,’ Mason, Natalie’s younger brother, said. ‘Have you ever been in situations where you’ve felt less important than other people?’ Becky asked. Anamaria said that she had felt less important when she got seven out of ten in a spelling test: ‘It felt really bad.’ This prompted other children to talk about times when they hadn’t done well in tests, although Mason also added that his mum (a schoolteacher) was really busy with work, and he felt less important because she didn’t have time to spend with him. Becky asked the children to repeat aloud the phrase, ‘everyone is important’, and added, ‘God loves everyone.’ She said that they were going to be looking at the Christmas story over the coming weeks, and that morning they would be looking at the shepherds. She asked for a volunteer to play a shepherd.

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Dylan was first with his hand up, and Becky role-played an interview with him, asking the other children to question him about what it was like to be a shepherd. Dylan engaged creatively with his performance, making up imaginative details about having to work night shifts. Becky said to everyone that in Jesus’ time ‘shepherds were looked down on’. She then asked Dylan to act as if he was asleep, and the other children to sing, ‘Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna to the King of Kings’, increasing in volume until Dylan woke up and said, ‘Who’s there?’ Natalie then donned sparkly angel wings to play an angel who was bringing him ‘the goods news’. Becky asked the children what this ‘good news’ was, and Natalie answered, ‘You’re invited, everyone’s invited, to the birth of Jesus.’ Becky then said to the children, ‘The angels came to the shepherds, who were poor and outcasts in society, to the kings, to everyone, to invite them to celebrate Jesus’s birth.’ She asked the children all to shut their eyes and to think about someone they knew who might be left out or thought of as less important, and to imagine Jesus coming up to that person, and how he would react to them. After a few moments of silence, she asked the children to open their eyes and whether any of them would like to share what they had imagined. Mason said that Jesus had hugged the person he was thinking of, and Eduardo said that Jesus had given food to the person he was thinking of. As was usual for Kids Church, the final part of the session was a craft activity linked to that week’s theme. The children sat at a table while Becky showed them how to make bookmarks with red card and yellow ribbons. She asked them to write on one side of the bookmark ‘everybody is important’, and on the other side to write the names of some people ‘who might not be considered as important, who we might want to pray for and find ways to include’. While the children were working on this, Becky said to them, ‘You do know that each of you is very important, don’t you?’ No one responded, so she asked, ‘Do you feel that, in the church, you are treated as important?’ All the children except Natalie shook their heads and said they didn’t feel like that. ‘Why is that?’ Becky asked. ‘Because I’m small,’ Mason said. ‘Because people don’t know my name,’ Anamaria said. ‘Because no one speaks to me,’ Eduardo said. Nicki, one of the other adult leaders, asked them if there were things they could do differently to make them feel more important. The children didn’t reply. Becky asked them if they felt like they were treated as important in Kids Church. They all nodded. ‘Yes, because we have to feel important here,’ Anamaria said. The parents began to arrive and stood chatting with each other at the far end of the room. Becky said that it would be nice to close in prayer and asked the children to link their little fingers with the person next to them ‘to show that we are all connected with others’. She then asked the children if any of them would like to pray about people who don’t feel included. The children shut their eyes, and Eduardo was the first to pray: ‘I pray about all the poor

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people in the world, who are hungry, who do not have enough food to eat.’ Mason then said, ‘I pray for my mum, because she is always busy.’ Becky then said a short closing prayer, asking God that the children would know that they are important, and that they would find ways to help people who do not feel important ‘to know that they are important’. In this session, many of the same techniques for children’s formation were used at Riverside as at charismatic and conservative evangelical churches. All the churches included games, and craft or drama activities that engaged the children with a sense of fun and moving their bodies, together with a form of teaching related to a biblical passage, with the leaders then encouraging the children to reflect on their own behaviour in the light of that teaching, in terms of how they ought to behave in relation to others. Although Becky rejected the idea of ‘memory verses’, the repetition throughout the session of the phrase ‘everybody is included’ invited the children to internalize this ethical ideal instead. The teaching at Riverside, however, took a different form from St John’s and St George’s, where the adults had explained a particular biblical passage to the children. At Riverside, Becky instead asked the children about their understanding of what it meant to praise God, how they thought about who is important, and what their understanding was of ‘the good news’ of Christmas in response to a role play of a familiar biblical story. This idea of Kids Church as a space where children both have agency and were at the same time being formed as particular kinds of subject—as both being and becoming—was explicitly articulated in the Riverside Kids Church ‘Vision Statement and Mission’, which Jon and Becky explained to all the helpers at Kids Church meeting one evening. This Statement outlined their aims: we want to see a vibrant and fun space for children to learn about and engage with God. Our aim is to build solid foundations of faith for children . . . We will teach, live and demonstrate God’s love, commitment and relationship in community with the children. This means that as leaders we will endeavour to learn and engage fully with the children and our shared journey of faith as a church community. We believe that Kids Church is a space for the children to learn, but acknowledge that we too can learn from each other and the children. As a church community, we endeavour to include people, regardless of their cultural background, ethnicity, age, gender, behaviour or ability. All people, including children, are made in the image of God and therefore should be included, respected, loved and treated equally.

Yet despite this desire to allow children to have agency and the emphasis that adults could learn from children, the children still expressed a sense that they were not as important as the adults in the church, where adults controlled the activities and what was said. The children’s comments in this session and throughout my fieldwork indicated that they had internalized the sense of faith as being about social

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inclusion that was a core value at Riverside. While the church leaders at Riverside placed a particular emphasis on inclusion and the idea of equality in relation to LGBTQ issues, this was not a focus of Kids Church sessions, and the children themselves placed more emphasis on challenging exclusion and inequality related to poverty and race. When I interviewed nine-year-old Emma, she highlighted the cultural scapegoating of those on welfare benefits in programmes like Channel 4’s ‘Benefits Street’, saying that their situation was often ‘other people’s fault’ rather than their own. In contrast with children at St George’s and St John’s, the children at Riverside did not articulate their understanding of faith in terms of a dualistic imaginary, and did not mention Satan, the devil, or the idea of sin, just as these were not terms that adults mentioned at Riverside. However, while adults in the church explicitly rejected more conservative theological doctrines such as atonement theology, occasionally children in the church did express their understanding of faith in these terms, and the children’s leaders were uncertain how to respond to this. In one Kids Church session, Emma expressed her belief that ‘Jesus sacrificed his life for us’, and in a debrief at the end of the session, Gemma, one of the leaders, said, ‘I felt like Emma’s engagement with church is somewhat different from the others, and I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with that.’ As at St George’s, the children expressed a strong sense of intimate relationship with God. This was often the focus of teaching, for example, in sessions in which the children were asked to reflect on ‘the things they treasure about Jesus’, in which Mason said, ‘it’s easy to love Jesus, because he’s like one of our own family’, while Emma described Jesus as ‘our best friend’, and, as we saw at the start of the chapter, many children talked about how they prayed to God regularly in their everyday lives. They also shared with St George’s a strong sense of valuing ideals of ‘community’ and being connected with others, encouraged through embodied practices such as interlinking their fingers in prayer. Malachi articulated the idea of ‘community’ as important to him when I asked him about things that were especially important to him in life, and he also emphasized the idea of ‘social justice’. As well as friendship with God, friendship with each other was also important to the children. Dylan talked about how one of the things he liked best about church was meeting new friends, and mentioned his friendship with Malachi. Although the leaders at Riverside would not have narrativized this idea of making friends in terms of forming ‘Christian anchors’ that would keep the children within the church, their idea of church as modelling ideals of ‘community’ and ‘interdependence’ meant that developing friendships with each other was seen as an important aspect of being part of the church, and this idea of church as a space of friendship was something that the children also expressed. It is worth noting that while the children in each of the churches expressed varying senses of difference from those outside the church, children in all of the churches formed close

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friendships with those from different faith or non-religious backgrounds. This was most likely related to the diversity of the schools they attended. Research on children’s friendships in super-diverse primary school settings has demonstrated that children recognize forms of cultural, ethnic, or racial difference, but this does not inhibit their forming friendships across difference (Iqbal et al. 2016), and the children I spoke with likewise recognized difference, but nevertheless formed strong friendships across forms of religious difference in their schools.⁶ The children here, like many at St George’s, saw religion as a matter of personal choice, expressing a broader liberal ethos that is widespread in Britain as a whole (Woodhead 2017), emphasizing ‘the rights and personal fulfilment of individuals provided they also consider the rights and needs of others’ (Madge et al. 2014: 8). Emma said, ‘You can choose your own religion. You don’t have to be one, or you can be any. It’s about what you think, not what other people think of you. And you can’t bully someone just because they’re not the same religion.’ One girl from St George’s, who also went to the primary school linked with St George’s, was however critical of the niqab, because, she said, Muslim men ‘make women . . . cover their face up . . . They don’t have the free choice of wearing whatever they want to, they just have to wear something that covers most of their body.’ Yet she also talked about how she had close friends who are Muslims and also described religion as a matter of personal choice. Madge et al.’s study of secondary school age young people’s views on religion in multifaith urban settings found that they adopted a form of ‘liberal individualism’ whether they were religious or not (2014: 137). At Riverside and St George’s, the children’s liberal understanding of faith as a matter of personal choice rather than a matter of potential salvation or eternal damnation can be seen as marking something of a shift from more conservative theological teachings usually associated with evangelicalism. These children’s range of perspectives across different churches are therefore important for enlarging our understanding of the diverse sensibilities within contemporary evangelicalism and the ways in which children may express different—often more liberal—perspectives from their evangelical parents, and also for gesturing towards the possible futures of these different forms of evangelicalism, with a further liberalization of forms of charismatic and open evangelicalism in contrast with conservative evangelicalism.

⁶ In their research with secondary school age children in multifaith urban environments, Madge et al. found that some young people said they had friends from a range of backgrounds, but others suggested that most of their friends were from similar faith backgrounds to themselves. Madge et al. argue that these friendships tend to reflect opportunities for mixing with those from different faith backgrounds, and the areas where they have lived and attended schools (2014: 160–1).

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CONCLUSION It is easy to highlight the differences in the formation of children across these churches. The conservative evangelical children were being formed as believers who submit to a transcendent God, revealed in the words of the Bible, conscious of their difference from (and with a responsibility to speak about their faith to) those whom they saw as standing outside of this relationship. At St George’s and Riverside, the children were being formed as having a sense of intimacy and friendship with God, with a strong emphasis also placed on the ideal of ‘community’. While St George’s, like St John’s, sought to develop a sense of mission to share faith with non-Christians, Riverside sought to interrupt the implicit dualist logic of us/them in traditional evangelical theology as they perceived it and placed greater emphasis on seeking to develop the value of inclusivity. These differences in how they engaged with children are not surprising, given the propensity of evangelical churches to schism (Davie 2015: 142) and different evangelical constituencies’ histories of strategies of self-definition in opposition to particular evangelical ‘others’ (Warner 2007, Hutchinson and Wolffe 2012). We can, however, also see similarities across the churches, particularly in the embodied techniques of formation. At each church, children participated with adults in songs and prayers at the start of the service. In Kids Church and Sunday school, they played games that helped develop their friendships with each other and sense of belonging in the church, they listened to and discussed teachings related to Bible passages, they prayed together, and engaged in role plays and craft activities that sought to reinforce the teaching for that morning, focused on perceived ideals of how to live in relation to a particular understanding of faith. Across all these churches, understanding the meanings associated with particular embodied practices such as prayer was seen by the adults as an important pedagogical aspect of the practices, and therefore activities such as group discussions explaining what it means to pray were shared across all these churches, and adults frequently used questions to check the children’s understanding of key points. While the children did not develop all the dispositions that adults sought to reproduce in them, they mostly expressed a sense of relationship with God, and reflected on their sense of relationship with God and on their own behaviour and needs in the light of the teaching they were engaging with in church, albeit understood in different ways across the different churches. All the churches placed an emphasis on a relationship with God in terms of intimacy, shaped through practices such as personal prayers which encouraged the children to pray to God about everyday events in their lives and through singing songs expressing a love relationship. Giddens argues that in late modernity, intimate relations became transformed from a set of obligations to forms of dependency, based on personal understandings between

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individuals mediated by emotional communication and bonds of trust rather than externally determined roles and values, a transformation to new more personalised forms of ‘pure relationships’ (Giddens 1992, Kehily 2013: 17). This emphasis on intimacy in terms of ‘pure relationships’ based on emotional communication can be seen in how the children at St George’s and Riverside expressed their sense of relationship with God in terms of ‘love’, being ‘just like one of the family’, and ‘our best friend’. Yet although all these churches placed emphasis on intimacy with God, conservative evangelicals often rejected this more democratized notion of intimate relationality and friendship with God pervading charismatic culture (Strhan 2015: 143). They instead placed more emphasis on norms of submission to the authority of God, so that the language the children used to describe faith used the idea of ‘service’, a term rarely used by the children at St George’s or Riverside. Evangelicalism is often presented as flourishing in contexts of broader church decline because evangelicals’ emphasis on the importance of the individual and forms of self-presentation resonate with broader processes of individualization, in which individuals take responsibility for producing and maintaining their own biographies (Giddens 1991, 1992, Beck 1992). Bauman describes this aspect of modernity: Everyone has to answer for himself the question ‘who am I?’, ‘how should I live’, ‘who do I want to become’ – and, at the end of the day, be prepared to accept responsibility for the answer. In this sense, freedom is for the modern individual the fate he cannot escape, except by retreating into a fantasy world or through mental disorders . . . One needs it [freedom] to be oneself; yet being oneself solely on the strength of one’s free choice means a life full of doubts and fears of error. (1988: 62)

This idea of self-realization permeated both Riverside and St George’s, encapsulated in Riverside’s teaching that faith was about ‘becoming the best possible version of yourself ’. This idea was evident in one of the St George’s Kids Church sessions in which Katie asked each of the children to complete an activity book, ‘Discover God’s Special Gifts for You: Your Gifts for Children’. The booklet listed nine different ‘gift’ types—evangelist, prophet, teacher, exhorter, shepherd, server, mercy-shower, giver, leader/administrator—and the children were asked to complete a psychology-style questionnaire to help identify which of these areas they were most ‘gifted’ in, following the same pattern, Katie explained, as one that the church was using with the adults. The booklet’s introduction stated, ‘Knowing and understanding your spiritual gift will help you know how you can serve God the best. It will also help you be the very special person God made you to be . . . I pray that this booklet will help you discover YOUR own spiritual gift and how you can serve God’ (Gilbert 2014: 2). Several of the children struggled with the questionnaire, wanting

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there to be ‘right answers’ to the questions, and after the session, one of the helpers commented that she felt the questionnaire was ‘a bit involved and tricky for some of them’, while Harry, one of the leaders, said, ‘I hate personality questionnaires like this. It’s just about putting you in a box—I never feel like I fit straightforwardly into any of them.’ Yet while critiquing the questionnaire, he nevertheless explained to the children when giving them the talk that morning that it was important ‘to develop our spiritual gifts to become the best that we can be’. In activities such as these, the children were being shaped as reflexive individuals, with a responsibility to identify their unique gifts in order to develop into the best possible versions of themselves. Rather than seeing this reflexive agency as a given, the church sought to form the children as reflexive agents, using techniques such as discussion about their own practice, times for reflection especially in relation to prayer, and craft activities that enabled them to reflect on their relations with and responsibilities to others. This emphasis on individual responsibility for self-formation also pervades other social institutions such as schools, and can be understood in relation to Foucault’s thesis that modern societies are shaped through the integration of two forms of power relation: ‘the mode of the polis, structured according to principles of universality, law, citizenship and the public life and the mode of what Foucault calls “pastoral power”, which . . . accords an absolute priority to the exhaustive and individualized guidance of singular existences’ (Gordon 1987: 297). For Foucault, the modern state is both individualizing and totalizing, and these reflexive technologies of the self through which the children are formed as evangelical subjects can be seen as expressing these individualizing aspects of governmental rationality, through which each individual must learn to act on himself ‘to monitor, test, improve, and transform himself ’ (Foucault 1985: 28). While reflexive individualism is often highlighted as a particular feature of late modernity, it possible to see a norm of reflexivity as implicated in the deeper theological logic of Christianity. Towards the end of my fieldwork, I commented to Rob, Riverside’s children’s and families’ minister, that I wasn’t sure what they and conservative evangelicals really have in common. ‘We use the same words,’ he quipped. While he was perhaps distancing himself from conservative evangelicalism, the words that were used across the different churches—God, Kingdom of God, salvation—together with the embodied practices through which children were taught to engage with these terms, do matter in the relational logic of self, society, and other, and forms of moral motivation they imply. In his essay ‘Experience’, Emerson writes, ‘I know that the world I converse with in the cities and in the forms, is not the world I think’ (cited in Cavell 2004: 1). In my previous study of conservative evangelicals (Strhan 2015), I noted that this captures a central idea within Christianity: that of ‘the human being regarding his existence from two standpoints, and through which human nature can be seen as divided, or

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double’ (Cavell 2004: 1). The ways in which each of these churches sought to develop the children as subjects, shaped through a particular sense of relationship with God, involve forming a divided self, in which the children are invited to internalize a sense of the logic of faith as different from that of the world, and to be able to reflect critically on this tension in their experience. We see this, for example, in Justin telling the children at St George’s that the Bible enables them ‘to cut through the things the world tells us, and get to the truth’, and in the children at Riverside’s reflections on how their conviction that ‘everyone is important’ runs in tension with the ways in which contemporary society attributes value to people. As the children learn to carry transcendent meanings and relationships within their bodies, this creates a reflexive space for them to reflect upon their ‘“immanent” ethnic, economic or cultural loyalties’ (Mellor and Shilling 2010: 32). Mellor and Shilling note the centrality of the New Testament teaching ‘that Christians are called out of the world (John 15:19), and . . . this involved changing their bodies so that they walk, talk, desire, think and feel in a way that is entirely at odds with their previous existence’ (p. 33). This conversionist habitus does not translate to the experience of children, as they do not have a ‘previous existence’ in quite this way. However, I would argue that while St John’s sought to develop a sense in the children that they were called out of the world, at Riverside the ways in which children learnt to relate to God entailed a call into the world, to be fully ‘involved’ in society, and at St George’s children were called to be alongside the world, as ‘friends’. Comparing children’s formation across these churches therefore provides insight into the different textures of evangelical cultures in the contemporary moment. However, it also suggests a shared theological logic of engagement with the world, where the practices used with children encourage them to experience the world as in need of salvation—albeit understood in very different senses across different evangelical churches—creating a sense of moral responsibility to work towards that salvation through actions ranging from a missionizing desire to go ‘to Africa to tell people about Jesus’ to ‘being tidy’, challenging social exclusion, and everyday acts of kindness.

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3 Parenthood Anxiety, Authority, and Agency

In his parenting advice book How to Succeed as a Parent (2003), the open evangelical minister Steve Chalke notes that ‘parenting advice’ is now ‘a boom industry’ which can exacerbate parents’ everyday anxieties: There are ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ galore telling us exactly what we’re doing wrong and how to correct it in the future. As a result, we have to cope not just with our children, but with the experts as well. Advice is constantly on offer from an overwhelming variety of places: books, magazines, TV, and no doubt from Internet Nannies as well. If you’re anything like me, this advice is sometimes intimidating. It often makes me feel more guilty about messing things up than I did before. And my feelings of guilt and inadequacy are then reinforced by Hollywood pictures of healthy, happy, low-fat, low-cholesterol, all-singing, all-dancing, minty-fresh families, with perfect smiles and pure white teeth, calmly eating a balanced breakfast in a wonderfully clean and hygienic fully-fitted kitchen. (2003: 10–11)

The proliferation of ‘parenting advice’ and ‘experts’, and indeed the language of ‘parenting’ itself, raises questions about relationships between children, parents, and the social order. How it is that a person is formed through their relations to others? Who can claim moral authority to determine what is in a child’s interests? And how, when, and where is that authority created, sustained, and contested? The meaning of the term ‘parenting’ has changed over the past century. Until recently the term referred to ‘the act of begetting a child’, but has come to refer generally to parents’ activities in relation to their children (Lee 2014a: 7). Although this use of the term is now ubiquitous, ‘parenting’ first became widely used in specific fields such as psychology and self-help in the 1950s, and the use of the verb form ‘to parent’ really ‘exploded’ in use from the early and mid-1970s (Smith 2010: 360). The contemporary language of parenting, as Smith argues, conveys particular meanings: ‘parenting’ has become a technical matter on which generalized advice can be offered by experts, and the

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parent–child relationship is generally not represented as an easy or comfortable one (ibid.). From the outset of the term, as Lee notes, parenting was ‘associated with the view that parent–child relationships are problematic or deficient’ and a serious, potentially anxiety-provoking business, in which experts have a proper role (Lee 2014a: 8). Chalke’s description of a sense of guilt ‘about messing things up’ demonstrates this sensibility. We can also see this evoked in Rachel Cusk’s vivid autobiographical account of becoming a mother,¹ A Life’s Work: sometimes when I hold my daughter . . . I try to imagine what it would be like to have me as a mother, and when I do it seems remarkable to me that this mysterious and momentous transaction has been accomplished here, in my house. The transaction I refer to is . . . the process by which a mother has been made of me, and though I know it is the hardest work I have ever done I still worry that my execution of it has been somehow flawed and inauthentic, a burned offering, a botched canvas. (2001: 212–13, 215)

This sense of anxiety in Cusk’s words, and of guilt in Chalke’s, can be seen as bound up with ‘the intensification of parenting’,² a term used to refer to childrearing becoming a more labour-intensive, demanding task for parents. Charlotte Faircloth suggests that this intensification is premised on a wider cultural acceptance of ‘infant determinism, which attributes lifelong outcomes to infant experience, highlighting children’s vulnerability, . . . thereby inflating the importance of the parent’s role’ (2014a: 49). This intensification is also related to parenting becoming a form of ‘identity work’, in which parents’ decisions about how to dress, feed, educate, and engage with their children is not just about responding to children’s needs, but becomes a means through which adults make statements about themselves (Faircloth 2013: 33). Parenting here is no longer experienced primarily as a social obligation, but, as Beck and BeckGernsheim (1995) argue, has become a source of meaning, offering a potential ‘claim to happiness’ and a particular kind of experience of the self. Wanting to have children, they argue, has become: ego-related and connected with the present: parents want to . . . get something for themselves from giving birth, nursing, raising and providing for their children . . . Hope of discovering oneself though one’s children is more widespread . . . it is [typical] of a large number of parents that having children is no longer primarily understood as a service, a kind of devotion of social obligation. Instead it is admitted to be a way of life in which one pursues one’s own interests. (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995: x) ¹ This chapter follows the language used at St John’s and St George’s, in which the language of ‘parenting’ was far more prominent than ideas of ‘mothering’ or ‘fathering’. ² The use of this term arises from Sharon Hays’s coining of the phrase ‘intensive motherhood’ to describe an ideology that encourages mothers to spend ‘an enormous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children’ (Hays 1996: x).

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These shifting ideas of parenthood are bound up with the changing status of the child in wider contexts of individualization and new practices of intimacy. As the modern family is reshaped in late modernity, the child becomes ‘a sign of commitment and stability that takes precedence over the transient status of adult relationships’ (Chambers 2012: 80). With the ideal of ‘pure relationships’ contingent upon bonds of trust and emotional communication, it is the child who becomes ‘the emotional anchor for the couple, the thing that turns choice into permanency and commitment’ (Kehily 2013: 20). As Beck puts it, ‘The child is the last remaining irrevocable, unexchangeable primary relationship. Parents come and go. The child stays. Everything that is not realisable in the relationship is directed towards the child’ (Beck 1992: 18). This emotional weight is related to children’s capacity to embody the future. The novelist James Salter expresses this sentiment in Light Years: Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness . . . [T]hey are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see. (2007: 69)

Karl Ove Knausgaard also expresses a similar sentiment, which he articulates in terms of the sacred: ‘The parents give the child life, the child gives the parents hope. That is the transaction . . . But how to write about this, which is so small and so great, so simple and so complicated, so trivial and so . . . well, sacred?’ (2017: 84). As wider society appears beyond individuals’ control, and as private life is often experienced as the pre-eminent domain for finding happiness, the emotional and moral weight accorded to parenting is thus intensified: ‘In a moment when the public sphere seems unwieldy and undisciplined, being a parent seems . . . the only way to change the world’ (Lofton 2016: 830). Contemporary parenting reflects both long-term shifts in understandings of parent–child relations (Hardyment 2007) and is also informed by processes of individualization which have increasingly provided children with their own freedoms and rights to lives of their own, which have been seen as contributing to ‘a democratization of the family’ (Beck 1997). Giddens’s work in the late 1990s, for example, developed an idealized notion of the family as a ‘basic institution of civil society’ (1998: 89) and argued: ‘The family is becoming democratized, in ways which track processes of public democracy; and such democratization suggests how family life might combine individual choice and social solidarity’ (p. 93). This democratization ‘implies equality, mutual respect, autonomy, decision-making through communication and freedom from violence’ (p. 93). This conception of the democratization of the family emphasized, as Oswell describes, ideals of ‘emotional and sexual equality, mutual rights and responsibilities, co-parenting, lifelong parental contracts,

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negotiated authority over children, obligations of children to parents and social integration’ (2013: 103). In his 1984 book The Minimal Self, Christopher Lasch had argued that these changing modes of family relationality were rooted in much longer-term social changes that drew authority away from parents, and from the father in particular: ‘a combination of philanthropists, educators, and social reformers’ began to side with: the weaker members of the family against patriarchal authority. They played off the housewife against her husband and tried to make women the arbiters of domestic morality [and] championed the rights of children, condemning the arbitrary power parents allegedly exercised over their offspring and questioning their competence as well. (1984: 185)

Thus, ‘children gained a certain independence from both parents, not only because other authorities asserted their jurisdiction over childhood but because parents lost confidence in the old rules of child-rearing and hesitated to assert their own claims in the face of professional expertise’ (pp. 185–6). At the same time, Lasch argued, the advertising industry in the twentieth century further weakened parental authority through glorifying youth and insisting that ‘parents owed their children the best of everything while insisting that they had only a rudimentary understanding of children’s needs’ (p. 186). Contemporary parenting practices are interwoven with these notions of children’s agency on the one hand, and a notion of a cherished and protected childhood on the other, in which children are set apart and sanctified symbols of lasting emotional commitment (Chambers 2012: 80). At the same time, wider political discourses position parenting as both the cause and solution of a range of social problems. Following the summer riots of 2011 in the UK, for example, the Prime Minister David Cameron described these as a symptom of ‘broken Britain’ and introduced ‘parenting classes’ as a means of tackling this.³ The figure of the parent, as much as the child, becomes riven with internal contradictions: both godlike in their capacities to determine a child’s future, yet also unable to meet the demands of parenting without expert guidance, so that child-rearing becomes ‘both child-centred and expert guided’ (Faircloth 2013: 17). The contemporary intensification of parenting finds a historical parallel in the Puritans, who published a steady stream of child-rearing advice manuals in the seventeenth century,⁴ becoming the first society to create a comprehensive theory of child-rearing. These Puritans were perhaps the first anxious ³ See Faircloth, Hoffman, and Layne (2013: 5). This scheme was not, however, widely taken up. See http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/mar/24/free-parenting-classes-scheme (accessed 3 August 2015). ⁴ These manuals were addressed to men, not their wives, as ‘the patriarchal family was the basic building block of Puritan society’ (Mintz 2004: 13).

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parents, fearing that if they failed, their children’s virtue, character, and salvation were at risk (Lancy 2015). The field of parenting expertise expanded throughout the nineteenth century, with the tone of parenting manuals in the early nineteenth century in both England and the USA suggesting both a sacralization of the domestic sphere as the realm of the mother (Hays 1996) and confidence in mothers enjoying the responsibilities of motherhood (Hardyment 2007: 116). However, by the late nineteenth century, the advice offered by experts became more marked by a scepticism towards the instinctive child-rearing capacities of mothers, with ‘efforts by experts to educate and influence the mother, and make her “instinct” secondary to their “science” ’ (Lee 2014b: 55). Over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, the diversity and quantity of parenting expertise and advice available has expanded exponentially, ranging from ‘natural parenting’ to the increased scientization of parenting. While the advice offered by parenting ‘experts’ reflected their particular social, cultural, and historical contexts, the ongoing prominence of the figure of the ‘expert’ suggests that ‘the ability of the parent to raise their child in an effective way is continually called into question (Lee 2014b: 74). As Mrs Hartshorn put it in Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group, ‘First we nursed our babies; then science told us not to. Now it tells us we were right in the first place. Or were we wrong then but would be right now?’ (2009: 261). Although parenting has become one of the most contested issues in contemporary society, with cultures of parenting a growing field of sociological and anthropological interest, the interrelation between religion and parenting cultures remains relatively under-explored. Penny Edgell’s (2006) study of how families in upstate New York participate in local Christian congregations has demonstrated the range of ways in which churches have responded to changing family structures, through, for instance, either nostalgia for the ideal of suburban male-breadwinner lifestyles or innovating to welcome those from non-traditional families. At the same time, studies examining the significance of religion in ‘battles over the family’ in the United States have devoted significant attention to questions of gender and sexuality. Yet the nature of parent–child relations is also a fundamental part of these wider social changes and conflicts, as Bartkowski and Ellison argue (1995: 22). Taking up their call for greater attention to be given to religious parenting ideologies, this chapter examines the ideals and practices of ‘parenting’ at St John’s and St George’s,⁵ ⁵ Space precludes discussion of parenting at Riverside. Riverside’s senior minister had written about parenting, addressing a wider (not necessarily Christian) readership, and during my fieldwork, the church set up a fortnightly evening discussion group for parents of the church (which were, in practice, attended by mothers), as well as Saturday morning informal meetings for fathers in the church, set up by a church member who had recently become a father.

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focusing in particular on the normative constructions of parenthood articulated at parenting classes and courses run by these churches in order to explore how these relate to broader cultural changes associated with individualization and the democratization of the family. I explore how conservative evangelical leaders at St John’s articulated their ideals of children’s obedience to the father and their notions of children as inherently sinful as countercultural and describe the techniques of parenting that were encouraged here, in which the broader contemporary appeal of ‘parenting experts’ was criticized. I then describe how, in contrast, ideas about parenting at St George’s drew explicitly on psychoanalytic literature on attachment theory, encouraging parents to learn from secular expertise on parenting. I consider how these ways of understanding what it is to be a parent are shaped through processes of individualization and open onto questions about the agency of the child, human agency, and the social and existential order. I will first briefly consider how parenting has been addressed in research on religion.

FAITH IN P ARENTING CULTURES Sociologists of religion have often asserted that changing family structures have made a decisive contribution to secularization. Daniele Hervièu-Léger, for example, argues that ‘the collapse of the traditional family, wholly dedicated to biological reproduction and the transmission of a biological, material and symbolic inheritance from generation to generation, probably counts as the central factor in the disintegration of the imagined continuity that lies at the heart of the modern crisis of religion’ (2000: 133). W. Bradford Wilcox terms this the ‘family modernization’ perspective, in which macro-level economic and cultural changes—such as individualization and the post-industrial economy—strip the family of many of its functions, authority, and salience, changes which ‘in turn, undercut the ability of religious institutions to exercise moral authority and offer social support to the family in ways that strengthen it as an institution’ (2004: 7). Much of the literature that addresses parenting in sociology of religion has been primarily concerned with religious transmission across generations against this wider context of changing family relations. In this literature, the primary concern is largely why and how some parents succeed in passing on their faith to their children rather than the lived practices and discourses of parenting. Vern Bengtson, Norella Putney, and Susan Harris, for instance, have conducted a study of three thousand subjects and over three hundred multigenerational families over the past thirty-five years to determine whether religion is successfully transmitted across generations. They argue that family influences, ‘starting with the religious inheritance of children, what they are

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born into’, are the most significant factor affecting religious transmission, and note the importance of ‘intergenerational solidarity . . . Parents who are warm and affirming are more likely to have children who follow them; parents who are cold or authoritarian, ambivalent or distracted are less likely to do so’ (Bengtson et al. 2013: 194). The existence of such a study, as Lofton argues, ‘indicates the extent to which the parenting of children and the perpetuation of religious adherence are understood to be analogous, even interrelated, projects of human cultivation’ (2016: 810). Questions of transmission are significant for understanding overall patterns of religious growth or decline. However, the practices and ideals of parenting in relation to religion are also important in allowing insight into particular moral cultures of parenting, and the negotiation and contestation of forms of authority in relation to religion and the secular. Scholarship on the secular, as Lofton notes, ‘has sought to discern the phenomenological flavor of a modernity in which authority, sociability, and human psychology are understood to be quite different from before: from before the Enlightenment, before the Reformation, before the West, before humanism, before colonialism’ (2016: 807). Questions about the nature of authority—of parents, the state, experts, and scientific discourses—figure prominently in contemporary debates about parenting, and thus, as Lofton argues, ‘parenting may provide us with a way to thread the needle between epistemology, sociology, and history, between how we live and how we conceive of the histories of our living’ (p. 808). Contemporary public debates often articulate the emotional and moral intensity with which parenting is today imbued using the language of religious devotion. ‘Sometime between when we were children and when we had children of our own, parenthood became a religion in America,’ began a widely disseminated essay on the online magazine Quartz in September 2014.⁶ In this ‘epochal intensity’ surrounding parenting in contemporary Western societies, few things seem as ‘imperative as right parenting decisions’ (Lofton 2016: 807). While scholars such as Douglas and Michaels (2004) have criticized the idealistic portrayal of motherhood as an ultimately fulfilling, almost sacred endeavour for women, the moralization of parenting is not only the concern of conservatives seeking to promote ‘family values’ but is also the concern of ‘the aspiring and occupied middle class, liberal and conservative, who have made their work as parents something political through the signification of minute particulars (pacifier or no pacifier?)’ (Lofton 2016: 807). While Lofton advocates attending to how parenting is itself a mode of religious expression (p. 829), I want to suggest that examining how religious ideals and

⁶ Online: https://qz.com/273255/how-american-parenting-is-killing-the-american-marriage/ (accessed 4 December 2018).

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practices of parenting intersect with broader moral cultures provides a window into the contemporary relation between religious and secular forms of authority, and the contested agency of the child. Within the literature on religion and parenting,⁷ almost all the studies addressing contemporary evangelicalism focus on the United States. The distinctive disciplinary and authoritarian style of conservative Protestant parenting has attracted particular attention, often portrayed as part of a ‘culture wars’ thesis as a reactionary mobilization against gender equality and rights for children (e.g. Davison Hunter 1992). A range of studies have demonstrated that evangelicals are more likely than other parents to value children’s obedience and to support the use of corporal punishment to discipline their children (Ellison et al. 1996, Bartkowski and Wilcox 2000) while reacting with hostility to calls for democracy within the family (Bartkowski and Ellison 1995). Ridgely’s (2017) study of James Dobson’s ‘Focus on the Family’ resources and the practices of Focus users describes the historical context shaping this conservative divergence from mainstream childrearing styles in the United States. Originally published in 1970, Dobson’s bestselling Dare to Discipline was a reaction to the progressive ideals of family democracies articulated in the work of parenting experts such as Dr Benjamin Spock in the 1960s. Ridgely suggests that Dobson appealed to the millions of parents—‘many a part of what Richard Nixon would call the Silent Majority’— who were looking for ‘an alternative to Spock that would put an end to the anti-authoritarian protests and the sexual revolution, which seemed to be turning the world on its end’ (Ridgely 2017: 9). For the Christians amongst these, Dobson’s Dare to Discipline offered: an authoritarian, God-centered approach that was vague enough to appeal across Christian denominations as well as the liberal/conservative divide . . . These parents wanted to restore their homes to what they believed was a traditional order, with children who obeyed their parents and who did not feel free to experiment with sex and drugs or to challenge patriotism. Dobson instructed them that rebellion was not natural but indeed detrimental to the earthly lives and heavenly salvation of their children. (Ridgely 2017: 9–10)

As Dobson sought to position the family—rather than the individual and a personal relationship with Jesus—at the centre of Christian life, Ridgely argues that families turned to Dobson’s materials not in order to execute his teachings perfectly but because of their commitment ‘to engage in the struggle of focusing on their families, even as they recognized that their family ideal

⁷ This body of literature includes: Bendroth 2002, Hartman Halbertal 2003, Frosh 2004, Edgell 2006, Howarth et al. 2008, Mayblin 2010 and 2012, Page 2010, Hakak 2011, Scourfield et al. 2013, Manning 2015, Ridgely 2017.

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was always being reshaped as their children grew older, their circumstances changed, and their relationship with God continued to develop’ (2017: 11). Bartkowski (1995) and Bartkowski and Ellison (1995, 2009) also studied Dobson’s materials as part of their broader work on conservative Protestant parenting advice manuals, and they and other scholars such as Bradford Wilcox (2004) draw attention to the layered logics, nuances, and ambiguities of these resources. On the one hand, these resources advocate an authoritarian brand of parenting which places ‘a premium on obedience to parental authority and control of youngsters’ behaviour through the use of physical discipline’ and gender-differentiated parenting roles (Bartkowski and Ellison 2009: 44), yet this is interwoven with a ‘countervailing logic that promotes expressive and nurturant parenting’ (p. 46). Bartkowski and Ellison also note that while evangelicals endorse patriarchal family structures, their version of patriarchy values active paternal involvement in child-rearing rather than male dominance. Evangelical parenting advice therefore: dovetails quite nicely with the New Father ideal in contemporary American society, a paradigm in which normative expectations encourage greater levels of paternal involvement in child care than was the case in years past. However, the neotraditional language of ‘leadership’ remains a central feature within conservative Protestant child-rearing discourse, perhaps as an incentive to coax men into making their (gender-specific) contributions to children’s well-being through paternal involvement. (Bartkowski and Ellison 2009: 48)

Bartkowski and Xu (2000) note tensions between evangelical fatherhood discourses and actual practice. Describing the dual ideals of ‘distant patriarchs’ and ‘expressive dads’ within evangelical literature, they argue that the ideal of ‘expressive dads’ comes out on top, while Bartkowski’s research on evangelicals, gender, and family life (2001) indicates little broad consensus among US evangelicals about gender and family relations. Wilcox’s research, drawing on data from the General Social Survey, the National Survey of Families and Households, and the Survey of Adults and Youth, also highlights the different interwoven logics of evangelical parenting. Wilcox found that evangelical fathers take a more authoritarian approach to their children than mainline Christians yet are also more involved in expressive parenting, arguing that ‘the soft patriarchs found in evangelical Protestantism come closer to approximating the iconic new man than either mainline or unaffiliated men do’, suggesting that their faith ‘plays a role in domesticating men’ (2004: 13–14). There is little research on parenting in contemporary evangelicalism (or Christianity more broadly) in Europe, with Kristin Aune’s study (2010) of fatherhood in a New Frontiers congregation providing one of the only qualitative studies. Aune’s research echoes findings about evangelicals in the United States in terms of the tension she found between older authoritarian

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ideas about fathering and new egalitarian perspectives. Aune argues that this tension in ideas of fathering in fact mirrors those found elsewhere in twenty-first-century British society, and that while public New Frontiers discourses concentrate on ‘maintaining gendered parenting divisions and giving fathers the key role, their congregational settings demonstrate greater flexibility and the desire for intimate and involved fathering’ (2010: 184). A recent survey of British evangelicals conducted by the Evangelical Alliance suggests that this ideal of ‘involved fatherhood’ is widely shared, with 90 per cent of those who responded believing that fathers should be fully involved in caring for their children (White 2015: 126). The survey also indicates generational and denominational differences in relation to ideas of male headship, with older generations and Pentecostals and charismatics more likely to support the idea, and Anglicans and Baptists more likely to disagree. The survey also indicated the sacrality of the family for evangelicals, with 84 per cent of those who responded describing ‘family’ as the most important thing in life apart from God (White 2015: 125). Pete Ward argues (1996: 143) that it was in the second half of the twentieth century that the ideas of church and family became intimately interlinked in this way in the British evangelical mind, with a growth in ‘family services’ and ‘all-age worship’ focusing attention on the idea of the church as ‘family’. Ward argues that this increased emphasis on the family emerged in response to a sense of anxiety about the rapid pace of social and cultural change. He cites an Anglican report, Something to Celebrate, published in 1995, which describes a temptation to look back to a golden age of ‘moral certainty and family stability, where roles and rules were clear and everybody knew his or her place’ (cited in Ward 1996: 145). The report stated that in a fluid and unpredictable world, families offered a sense of ‘haven and a retreat’, and for evangelicals, ‘the family matters as a symbol of social stability and moral virtue. It is a divinely ordained guard against the ambiguities, individuation and experimentation of the modern world which has lost its way morally and religiously’ (cited in Ward 1996: 145). To what extent are the ‘layered logics’ of evangelical parenting described in studies of US evangelicals, and the tensions identified by Aune in her study of a New Frontiers congregation, mirrored across different forms of evangelicalism in the UK? And how do these logics relate to differing ideas about children’s agency and the wider moral threads interwoven in contemporary parenting cultures? To what extent are they also shaped by the broader intensification of parenting? In exploring these questions, I focus especially on how St John’s and St George’s positioned parenting in seminars and courses provided for parents, as these provide insight into ideals for parenting and the assignment of parental authority within these discourses, as well as how this relates to the agency of children.

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‘THERE ARE NO EXPERTS ’ : AUTHORITY AND INSTRUCTION AT S T J OHN’ S During my fieldwork at St John’s, the church held a Saturday morning ‘parenting seminar’, led by two of the church’s ministers, David and Pete, both educated at elite universities, David (the rector) in his late forties, and Pete (one of the curates) in his mid-thirties. David and Pete each spoke for fortyfive minutes, with a break in-between, followed by a forty-five-minute question and answer session, in which attendees posed questions anonymously in a ‘question box’.⁸ As discussed in the previous chapter, members of St John’s position the authority of the Bible as the Word of God and obedience to the Bible as central to their faith. This was reflected in the significance given to ministers’ discussion of biblical passages in sermons and the close exegesis in Bible study discussion groups,⁹ and here shaped what was said about parenting. David began by stating that ‘there is not a huge amount in the Bible by way of prescription in terms of parenting, in fact, not a lot on parenting per se . . . I looked up the references to children in the Bible, of which there are 498, and went through every single one of them. Very few of them give specific instruction.’ He acknowledged the ambivalence about the family in some passages in the Bible, noting, ‘there are strong negatives and warnings about family,¹⁰ many of them not to make your family an idol’, and then said, as there’s not a vast amount of specific instruction in the Bible, there is, I think, great danger in talks and mornings like these being prescriptive rather than principled. Where the Bible is silent, we are free, and the danger is always to set up kind of surefire programmes for raising children—that always leads to division and pharisaical laws and judgementalism.

As Steve Chalke described feeling overwhelmed by the range of parenting advice available, so David also commented: ‘there are myriad books on parenting in both Christian and non-Christian bookshops. Many of these follow the latest fad, a bit like diet books, and most of them, again like diet books, provide the reader with more guilt than useful advice. There are courses and books that imply—if not state—the necessity of raising children by their particular method. Failing to do so seems sinful and complying seems to provide the assurance that your child will grow up free of the problems of ⁸ This ‘question box’ format following sermons and talks was a common practice at St John’s, although now questions are often texted to a specific mobile number instead. ⁹ See Strhan 2015: ch. 4. ¹⁰ During my fieldwork at St John’s, another curate preached a sermon arguing that the church needs to place more emphasis on the positive values of choosing not to marry and to remain single, holding up another curate and some unmarried members of church staff as virtuous exemplars of this, and addressing the need not to hold up (heterosexual) marriage with children as the ideal.

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youth and become a Christian in adulthood. But life is not quite so simple.’ David was similarly dismissive of Christian parenting manuals in a Sunday morning sermon, describing them as ‘basically secular social work, attached to a few verses of the Bible’, and reiterated that these can contribute to ‘massive guilt around the area of the family. And I want to say that all of us have L-plates on . . . There are no experts.’ David went on in the seminar to outline the ‘fundamental principles’ he saw as central to Christian parenting. The first of these was ‘grace-centred parenting’, which he explained meant children should know ‘that we are their number one, 100 per cent top supporters . . . I think it’s very easy for us to know that, but through the way we do our parenting, for our children to get the idea that somehow our love is conditional on their performance, on their meeting the criteria that we think they ought to meet.’ He described this as related to parents’ comparing their children’s ‘performances’ with others, saying ‘Satan would love us to spend our life looking over our shoulder at other families, wondering whether our children are performing along the same levels as other families.’ The second principle, David said, was ‘faith not fear’, stating that love for children raises numerous potential fears: ‘Am I doing my part right? How will they turn out? Is my loved one going to survive in the world? And it’s easy to forget the immense power of God’s Word and his readiness and willingness to hear and answer every single one of our prayers.’ He said that being reminded of ‘the power of God’s Word’ would protect against the ‘dangers’ of three particular parenting styles, which he listed as: ‘interfering parenting’ (‘always wanting to know whether my child is actually responding to this teaching or that teaching, rather than bringing up my children in faith’), ‘hothouse parenting’ (‘intense and rule-bound’), and ‘overprotective parenting’. He emphasized that trusting in God’s sovereignty ‘gives us real liberty . . . and takes the heat out of parenting. I can’t force my child; it’s God’s job.’ David reiterated the importance of freedom, ‘I want to stress this, and keep on stressing it, because once we start focusing on parenting . . . there’s great danger that we begin to create rules and suggest it should be done like this . . . and we begin the pharisaical looking over shoulders.’ He emphasized that comparisons with other parents were unhelpful: ‘some of our families will have rigid rule-based regimes and will be positively fascist; some will have no clear way of doing things and . . . be positively liberal . . . Some will have all the latest gadgets and toys, Xboxes, Gameboys, Facebook, books, computers, iPads, and everything else, and others will be Luddites and only allow books and jigsaw puzzles . . . I hope there’ll be real variety because we should be free where the Bible says we should be free.’ The final principle he outlined was the importance of fun, ‘making sure our family is a place of fun and enjoyment and not rule-bound legalism’. David went on to encourage the attendees to think about what a child is and emphasized that a child is a ‘gift from God’. Counter to broader cultural

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constructions of children as innocent, David said, ‘Children are not blank slates. They are children of Adam, born with an inbuilt bias to rebel against God’, and stated that this idea is ‘100 per cent against the world—the world whose philosophy is “your child is essentially good” . . . . Our understanding of children is that . . . folly is bound up in the heart of a child, that children are not naturally born again, it requires the work of God for them to be born again, and that without instruction, protection and discipline they will be clueless about God, wander from God, and have their godless desires fed and nurtured rather than godly character fed and nurtured.’ Pete, in his talk, reiterated this, When you think about it biblically, every act of a child’s disobedience provides a further illustration of the state of their heart. In their natural state children love themselves and doing what they want more than they love Jesus and doing what he wants. That’s what children are like. And every act of rebellion, sin, naughtiness—whatever you want to call it—proves that to them and to us, so very often we’ll talk with them [his children] in those terms.

This idea of children as inherently sinful leads to an understanding of parenting that will, David emphasized, be: countercultural . . . because the world is saying, ‘Just let the child express itself, let the child be the centre of its own little world.’ But we are saying, ‘No, we must teach the child that it’s not the centre of its own little world, that there are authority structures built into God’s Kingdom, that God is the centre of the world in instruction, protection, and discipline.’

He said that this led to an ideal of children’s obedience to their parents, reiterating, ‘This is a countercultural model, as I said already: children are to obey their parents, for this is right. Authority is good and positive. The Garden of Eden has authority structures in it, and in the redeemed community of the church we are to see those authority structures re-established: God, Father, Husband, Wife, Children.’ Pete likewise emphasized this idea of paternal authority: Paul [in the letter to the Ephesians] could have used the generic word for parents; . . . he went for the gender-specific ‘fathers’ to make the point. Dads will hold the primary responsibility in the family for making sure the children are brought up in line with the word of God. It’s teamwork in which the dad takes the lead, the wife there as helper.

David added that the expression of maternal authority over children could become an area of struggle: My own observation and experience is that boys hate submitting to their mother’s authority in particular. Am I alone in that? I hated doing what my mother told me but was very happy to do what my father told me—just intuitively acted against what my mother told me . . . [H]usbands, we need to be reinforcing our wives’ authority wherever possible, and the children will seek to do everything they can do to undermine that.

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In another Sunday morning sermon on parenting, focusing on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, David further emphasized this idea of order and children’s obedience. He began by mentioning that the Labour peer Maurice Glasman had recently stated, ‘We have never been in greater need of the gifts that the Christian tradition brings’, and then said that Phillip Blond¹¹ had described marriage and family as ‘the pre-eminent social structure’. David said that in Ephesians, Paul states that God’s aim is for churches to be ‘display cabinets . . . of what it looks like to have relationships rightly ordered under the rule of the Lord Jesus Christ . . . family life is designed to be part of God’s display cabinet’, and, therefore, it should be something all church members ‘have a stake in’, whether or not they have children. He described this as becoming further at odds with wider cultural norms, stating: ‘Increasingly in a culture that departs from the teaching of Jesus, one should expect what goes on here on a Sunday morning to be a radical countercultural example, old and young, different backgrounds . . . meeting together in rightly ordered relationships and radiating what it looks like to belong to the Lord Jesus Christ.’ David then expanded on the idea of children’s obedience, stating that the first principle for family relationships that Paul expresses in Ephesians is that ‘children are to obey their parents’, and went on: ‘Paul has in mind a hierarchy of relationships, where God-given authority in the human family is to be recognized and respected. So God rules, he’s delegated his authority to the head of the family. And then the father, and the mother under the headship of the man, are in authority over the children, who are to obey.’ As in the parenting seminar, David described this hierarchical ordering of family relationships as a working out of ‘the redeemed community, restored order, with the anarchy of Genesis Three now, under Christ, put back in its proper place and overturned’. He continued: ‘Parents, we need to realize that, whether we warm to the idea or not . . . and whatever our culture might say, God has given us a position of authority within the home. It is ours, by virtue of our parenthood, and children are to recognize it.’ He described the term ‘obedience’ as stronger than mere ‘submission’ and emphasized that ‘children are to obey their parents in everything’. He then gave examples of this idea of obedience as precluding ‘things like answering back, or obedience only when threatened or bribed. Parents should not have to explain or discuss or—worse still—argue through every decision with their children: children are to learn to do as they’re told, as part of their Christian witness.’ David commented, ‘I’m aware that this cuts right across the trend of much of our culture, which at its worst extreme has enthroned a child’s individual rights above that of their God-given duty to their parents,’ and predicted that the progressively increasing autonomy of children would lead to disorder:

¹¹ Blond is founder of the think tank ResPublica.

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we should anticipate . . . that as a culture drifts away from Christ and refuses to recognize the rule of God, we would expect over time . . . that anarchy will develop within the home, whether middle-class, celebrity, or low-income. Within the Christian home, under the loving, gracious, gentle rule of Christ, modelled by a sacrificial selfless loving leadership of a father, we should expect to see order restored.

David went on in the seminar to emphasize fathers’ responsibilities for bringing up their children ‘in the discipline and instruction of the Lord’ in terms of teaching and knowledge first and foremost: ‘there is an imperative on instruction . . . Instruction is literally “to put into the mind”.’ He then expanded on fathers’ practical duties in terms of regular Bible reading with their children, making space for the routine of ‘family prayer time’, and ‘taking an interest in your children’. David then briefly addressed mothers in the congregation: ‘Mothers, the best thing you can do for your children is to submit to your husband. How is your child ever going to learn the meaning of the word authority if all the time you are undermining the authority that God has put in the place in the home?’ A parenting manual by two conservative evangelical ministers articulated this same emphasis on children’s obedience, drawing out the theological significance of this: ‘Let your child realize they’re not the centre of the world. . . . Parents are to model God’s good, liberating, just rule in the way they bring up their children. We’re to show that it is good to live under authority’ (Chester and Moll 2009: 13). The authors situated this model of obedience to parents as enabling obedience to God: ‘Don’t let your child rule the home. If they do, you’ll be teaching them that they are king in their lives. They’re not. It won’t prepare them for wider social interaction. And it won’t prepare them to meet the true King’ (ibid.). This parenting seminar and sermon repeatedly and self-consciously emphasized that this understanding of parenting in terms of paternal authority and children’s obedience is countercultural. This is part of a broader conservative evangelical narrative of their becoming increasingly countercultural in a deChristianizing society (Strhan 2015), which was something frequently reiterated to me by the conservative evangelicals I spoke with. One mother from a church in Surrey said to me, ‘As a parent watching my children grow up, I think it’s harder than it’s ever been, really, to be a Christian. Although maybe at the same time it’s more obvious whether—, there’s much more of a contrast.’ Although it is issues related to sexuality that most frequently command attention in relation to conservative evangelicals’ growing tensions with liberals, it is also possible to see this stated desire to form children as obedient religious subjects, figuring obedience to the father as a model of obedience to the divine Father, as indexing tensions between their teachings and ideals of progressive freedoms. These tensions, I want to suggest, are also significant for understanding the relation between conservative evangelical moral cultures and broader secular ideals of personhood in terms of autonomy and self-determination.

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Despite the prevailing narrative of a drift away from a Christian cultural heritage towards an individualizing secular modernity, I found that the everyday concerns of most parents at St John’s did not focus on questions of parental or paternal authority. As noted in Chapter 1, some parents expressed concern about sex education being taught at a younger age, for example, and several parents expressed a sense that it was harder to be a Christian parent now than in previous decades. However, the everyday anxieties they discussed were mostly related to the singularities of their children’s particular circumstances, for example, football practice clashing with church, or how their children were doing at school, or the effects of the media on their children’s sense of self-worth, or the easy availability of pornography, expressed in terms pretty similar to those that might be used by Guardian-reading middle-class parents, whether religious or not. In the question-and-answer session following another parenting seminar, the anonymous questions put to David and his wife Liz by attendees were suggestive of parents’ everyday concerns, and included: ‘how to get two boys to brush their teeth together at the same time without fighting’, whether it was appropriate to talk to young children about hell, how ‘to deal with whining children’, how to respond to children’s use of social media, how to ‘nurture godliness’ in children, whether the use of rules and sanctions contradicts ideas of grace, whether parents should use rewards to encourage obedience, and how to ‘maintain a good sex life when you have small children and are constantly tired’. In contrast with the strong emphasis on discipline in terms of corporal punishment in studies of evangelical parenting in the United States, parents did not raise this as an issue at St John’s, and in response to a comment by the minister chairing the session (rather than a parent), Liz acknowledged that spanking was something that church members disagreed about. She said that while the Bible supported the idea of punishing a child for wrongdoing, ‘we don’t want to talk about spanking too much because everybody has different opinions. I think, erm, there’s nothing wrong with spanking . . . but I think people can slightly overdo it. David, I suspect, has spanked his children probably three times in total.’¹² In question-and-answer sessions following sermons or parenting seminars such as these, often the first question raised was what this kind of teaching meant for single-parent families. The standard response, for instance, offered by David, was that ‘if I were a single mother, I would want to get into a church family where I would find safe

¹² This was the only discussion that I encountered at St John’s about physical discipline. In this setting, while it was acknowledged that church members held different views about physical discipline, there was no discussion of the emotional harm physical discipline could cause, which was understood by the time of the 1946 Curtis Report, and no reflexivity or discussion about the risks that this kind of theological framing of discipline could potentially evolve into harmful or abusive actions towards children.

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relationships with families where my children could be exposed to godly men and families where there are godly men’. I did not hear anyone at St John’s challenge the church’s teaching on children’s obedience and male headship in the home, and they, like their leaders, situated their teachings on marriage and the family as countercultural. Yet in practice, observing their interactions and conversations, children appeared to have relative autonomy within the home. Many (although not all) parents did seek to instil disciplines such as Bible-reading through practices such as shared family reading at mealtimes or regular bedtime Bible stories and prayer. One girl told me that her family read the Bible together over breakfast, and they then prayed together about the day ahead, asking, for example, that ‘we would have a good time at school, Daddy would have a good time at work, if anyone’s poorly that they would feel better’. However, in the families I spoke with, such collective practices had stopped by the time the children were of secondary school age, if not younger. Although members of St John’s held to an ideal of paternal authority in what they said about their family relationships, the everyday practicalities of their family lives nevertheless were at the same time shaped in terms of democratic relationships that afforded children autonomy and voice. This holding of ideals and practices that seemingly run in tension with each other can be seen as mirroring Gallagher’s (2003) research on US evangelicals and marriage. Gallagher notes, drawing on survey data, that 90 per cent of the evangelicals surveyed support male headship, but 87 per cent also claim ‘marriage is a partnership of equals’ and 78 per cent support both equality and male headship (p. 75). Most evangelicals, she concludes, practise ‘pragmatic egalitarianism’ in everyday life while holding on to ideas of gender hierarchy in family life because, she argues, they perceive a ‘principle of hierarchy and difference’ as lying ‘at the heart of the created order . . . tinker with gender, and you unravel the whole’ (p. 174). Similarly, in the sphere of parent–child relations, most parents I spoke with, while holding on to the ideal of paternal authority, were sympathetic to wider, more dominant cultural emphases on empathy, nurture, and the quality of parent–child relationships, and these, in practice, shaped more egalitarian than disciplinarian styles of parenting. The question of authority was not therefore a zero-sum game: children might be able here to have a voice—to be able to speak for themselves, to have autonomy in the context of their everyday home lives—and for their parents to have a sense of authority as well. As Oswell argues, ‘to speak as a child is not [necessarily] to usurp the power of the father. Political voice is not a matter of subtraction’ (2009: 149). Underlying the parenting seminars and sermons at St John’s, we can see a sense of uncertainty about how to bring children up as Christians in a de-Christianizing context, reflected in the fact the church runs these seminars, shaped by broader contemporary cultural uncertainties about parenting more

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generally. While the broader cultural ‘answer’ to such anxieties and uncertainties tends to be ‘expert views’, leaders at St John’s are critical of this, emphasizing the ‘freedom’ and authority of parents to determine their children’s upbringing, yet at the same time situating parents as submitting to the authority of the Bible and the church. The advice offered to parents, however, aligns with the broader contemporary intensification of parenting. The ways in which fathers are addressed, for instance, with advice to ‘take an interest in your children’ and to be responsible for their instruction can be seen as shaped by a wider cultural movement towards ‘engaging dads’ as part of an intensification of fatherhood (Faircloth 2014b: 195).¹³ The inclusion of even the most everyday of interactions in this advice relates to a broader cultural shift in expectations of fathering, where men are not thought to have a ‘natural’ foundation for fathering, and so require additional training to enable good parenting.¹⁴ In practice, many of the fathers at the church were involved with expressive parenting, and spoke about how, for example, they felt it was important to spend dedicated time with each of their individual children, such as taking them shopping, as well as leading activities such as Bible studies and prayer time when the children were younger. Yet at the same time, there were also fathers who were less involved, due to long working hours. This was raised as a concern at the parenting seminar, with one question asking, ‘What does a Christian wife do if their husband is taking a back seat, so maybe he’s not here today, and doesn’t hear all this stuff, what can the wife do when she’s basically holding the fort?’ Liz responded to this: It’s quite helpful, you men, to have a look around and see who these husbands might be, who these men might be, and to invite them into your home and befriend them. As a wife, I don’t think it’s really your place to say, ‘buck up darling’, but actually a good mate who will befriend you as a couple and just get alongside can be a great help.

Liz’s words indicate how a norm of male headship could inhibit women’s sense of authority to challenge their husbands’ behaviour. At the same time, they also express a normative culture that is critical of fathers who are less actively involved in parenting. Such a culture may, as Wilcox argues (2004: 14), play a role in ‘domesticating dads’ precisely through this discourse of paternal authority. While women at St John’s were largely more actively involved in child-rearing than their husbands, with many stopping paid employment to bring up their children, this is not unique to conservative evangelicalism, but reflects wider social structural issues such as the continued ‘linkage between

¹³ This also corresponds with Kristin Aune’s research (2010) on ideas of fatherhood within the New Frontiers movement, where there were broad similarities between practices of church members and broader society. ¹⁴ See Faircloth 2014b for discussion of other secular examples.

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masculinity and work, and the temporal demands of postindustrial capitalism’ (Aune 2010: 180). The turn towards involved fatherhood at St John’s may perhaps, however, reflect ‘a larger shift towards reassessing the centrality of careerism in men’s lives’ (Gallagher 2003: 118). Even if in practice many men still worked long hours, they were at the same time being formed as men who expressed a sense that they wanted to be actively involved in bringing up their children. To what extent were these moral currents and ideals of parental authority also present within charismatic evangelicalism?

INTIMACY, ATTACHMENT, A ND EMOTIONAL SECURITY AT ST GEORGE’ S In contrast with St John’s, the leaders at St George’s actively encouraged parents to engage with secular expertise and espoused a rather different understanding of the parent–child relationship. St George’s runs parenting seminars on specific issues and separate parenting courses for parents of children and of teenagers, aimed at parents in the local community as well as church members.¹⁵ These were consolidated, together with the groups the church runs for toddlers and children, and courses for couples, into one centre, which was launched during my fieldwork. The launch event was held at St George’s one evening, and over drinks and canapés before the main talks, I chatted with a French mother, who lived close by but did not go to church services. She spoke about how she had just gone back to work part-time after maternity leave and said she felt ‘really alone’ as a parent. She said that her banker husband was out of the house for long hours and saw it as the woman’s role to look after the baby, and so she found going to things organized by the church for parents and children, such as the toddlers’ group, helpful. We were asked to take our seats, and the chair of the evening, Suzy, a television celebrity and church member, visibly pregnant, welcomed everyone, and said how she was lucky enough to have done one of the church’s parenting courses after having her first child. She then introduced an animated film about the centre, which had a voice-over talking about children’s needs for attention, emotional connection, presence, and unconditional love, stating: The bottom line is our children are more likely to behave well when they are feeling secure in their emotional connectedness and safe in our love . . . Love is taking the time to understand your child’s emotional world and respond to it . . . Whatever the question, learning to be connected is a big part of the answer. ¹⁵ The church also runs a programme through which new mothers receive a visit from another mum, offering advice, support, and a ‘goodie bag’, ‘wine o’clock’ monthly events for mothers to socialize at a bar in London, and monthly lunches followed by Bible study groups (with church volunteers providing childcare) for single parents.

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Suzy introduced Dr Sophie Green, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and ‘clinical advisor’ to and co-founder of the new centre. She spoke about how Maddie, the church’s children’s and families’ minister, had originally founded a toddlers’ group ‘to combat social isolation’ and to develop relationships with families in the local area. She said that in her own work as a psychiatrist she kept experiencing frustrations with families whose needs were not being met. She therefore enrolled in a training course in the United States, based in attachment theory, which, she explained, aims not to modify children’s behaviour but rather ‘to change our state of mind in relation to children, to enable us to tune into the child’s emotional world’. She talked about how Don, who pioneered the course, came and spoke at an event they had hosted at St George’s, and this ended up developing into the church’s ‘families programme’, which had trained nearly two hundred facilitators for the attachment theory-based parenting course. She said that this work is not only important for the parents and children, but that ‘the big societal problems we face won’t be solved without shifting our thinking about children and babies’. Suzy thanked her, and said she was excited to welcome Don to speak and that for anyone who has done the parenting course, ‘it’s like welcoming a celebrity’. Don—with a grey beard and glasses, wearing chinos and an opennecked shirt—introduced himself as from California, and began by talking about how the psychologist John Bowlby had found that most ‘troubled kids’ suffered maternal deprivation. He said that through Bowlby’s work, he began to realize that ‘behavioural problems are attachment problems’, and so had decided with a colleague to teach attachment theory to parents. He talked through the central ideas of the parenting course, saying that children need their parents to support them by providing ‘a secure emotional base in their exploration of the world’. The next speaker, Edward, was the founder of a charity which he explained as set up to understand ‘what goes wrong with childhood’ in relation to ‘ongoing levels of child abuse’, and seeking to ‘tackle the root cause of damaging family cycles’. He, like Don, emphasized the importance of ‘children’s attachments with key emotional partners’, and said that in this country, ‘we have a lottery, with 40 per cent of children growing up with insecure attachments . . . We have a reactive system, and the most disorganized parents’ kids will be those who misbehave, steal, turn to violence, and a proportion of them will end up in the criminal justice system.’ He concluded, ‘It’s all about parenting. And the quality of parenting develops what the future of this country will be . . . If we want to develop a country full of people who are selfish, who damage the environment, who damage animals and other people, then we can carry on as we are.’ The two middle-aged women sitting to my left who, like me, were taking notes while he spoke, nodded approvingly. Maddie was the final speaker. She said that the idea of their being a ‘centre’ was significant, because ‘the quality of relationships is central to all our lives.

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They make or break us. And we are here to support family relationships.’ She said many people subscribe to a ‘me too’ model of parenting, where parenting seems easier if someone else says that they have experienced similar problems. She asked us instead to imagine being lost at the top of a mountain and surrounded by mist: ‘Who would you rather trust to help you—the person who says, “I’m lost too”, or the person who says, “I’ve got a map”?’ She said that they were committed to being a centre where local families could come and join groups that ‘support this way of relating’. She said that developing this would be ‘a huge task, but we want to do what we can and make differences where we can’. She quoted the novelist Anne Lamott, saying, ‘Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up,’ and said, ‘We are a people of hope. We’re not going to give up, but we are going to do what we can to make a difference.’ As she closed, she mentioned that they don’t charge for their services, because ‘we want to be able to offer our services to more and more families who would never be able to afford this’, and said that if anyone would like to help, they could volunteer, host a group, or give some money, ‘whatever you can—anything is gratefully received’. After the talk, there was more mingling over wine and chocolate brownies, and I chatted with Katrina, a single mother of two from the church. She didn’t address the issues raised in the talk, but chatted about the fact that her daughter Jessie had just started secondary school, and wasn’t happy there, and had come home the other day and told Katrina that she didn’t like the language her new classmates were using, and had said, ‘They were using inappropriate language, Mum, they were talking about “sperm juice”.’ Katrina laughed about it, but said with a sigh that she thought she might have to write a letter to the school. Across the different parenting courses at St George’s, there was an emphasis on encouraging parents to enable their children’s independence, drawing on expertise from attachment theory and also from neuroscience. In a seminar on ‘raising emotionally resilient teenagers’, Dr Sophie Green was again one of the speakers, and she began by talking about how within psychology there have been recent developments in the understanding of brain function. She showed a slide with details about adolescence and physical, emotional, and cognitive development, and talked about the likelihood of adolescents having mental health disorders. Dr Olga Hetz, a clinical child psychologist, spoke next. She began by talking about brain development, showing images of brain cells, and describing processes of ‘synaptic development’ and ‘synaptic pruning’ between the ages of six and fourteen. Sophie then spoke again, talking about ‘external stresses’ for teenagers, such as exams, and ‘cultural pressures, such as Facebook and social media’, and said that these combinations can lead to ‘emotional dysregulation’, which can be manifest in ‘inner turmoil, and senses of shame, that are associated with surges in cortisol’. She said that parents need

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‘to help teenagers to self-regulate and internally manage their intense mood states’, and that she thought that ‘the essence of mental health problems’ is that people ‘either try and put a lid on their feelings and keep them under tight control, or they do something to try and numb the pain and end up out of control’. She said that ‘the healthy solution’ is to maintain a relationship with children, so that parents ‘can help children by sitting these experiences out with them’. She said that a key term psychologists use is ‘co-regulated affect’, which they refer to in their therapy sessions as ‘being with’, and discussed the importance of parents ‘mirroring affect’ as part of this, which she explained as ‘mirroring our children’s emotional energy and validating their emotions, how they are feeling’. She said that the failure to do this leads to ‘shame, which is a horrible, toxic emotion’. Olga then spoke again, offering some practical tips for parents, which began with encouragement to ‘support your children’s passions and involve their interests’. There was time for attendees to ask questions. One mother said that she worried that she was losing her son to a computer and didn’t know what to do, and another man commented that they are a generation of older parents, and that there isn’t advice directly aimed at them. Another father asked, ‘What are the most common errors that parents make?’, to which Sophie replied, ‘Anything that generates shame is likely to be toxic.’ She said that sometimes guilt can be useful, but ‘shame is anything that makes anyone feel like that they are a bad person, and shame is at the root of all mental health disorders’. As I listened, I was especially struck at the time by the contrast between these words and the emphasis on the inevitability of shame as part of the Christian experience articulated at St John’s.¹⁶ Yet what was equally apparent in relation to parenting was how Sophie’s words gestured towards the broader cultural move towards parents becoming both godlike in their capacity to determine their children’s futures (for good or ill) and their simultaneous need to be guided by experts in this task. This emphasis on the neuroscience of parenting was also evident at an event on ‘putting a positive spin on discipline’, led by Maddie, aimed at parents of younger children. This began with the usual social mingling over drinks and nibbles beforehand. When people had taken their seats, Maddie addressed everyone and began by saying that ‘we all tend to feel awkward about the idea of discipline’ and yet ‘we all have to do it’. In contrast with the emphasis on children as sinful at St John’s, Maddie said that ‘all children are born with fantastic capacities to be amazing human beings, and yet it’s messy, their growing up, and we all have to deal with bad behaviour at some point’. She commented that the idea of discipline often makes us feel guilty, ‘because sometimes we dodge discipline’. She put up a slide with an image of a child

¹⁶ See discussion in Strhan 2015: 21, 107, 180.

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and a dog covered in paint, and said, ‘We worry that if we don’t discipline the child who’s covered everything in paint, they’ll end up as a graffiti artist’, and projected an image of some graffiti artists, commenting that the image was from the Daily Mail, adding sarcastically, ‘lovely paper’. She said that we also feel guilty about discipline ‘because often it feels like it goes wrong’. Her next slide had an image of a child screaming and she said, ‘It leaves us feeling tired, emotionally strained, and like we’ve let ourselves down.’ She said that we need to ‘rebrand discipline’ and explained that the Latin derivation of the term ‘discipline’ refers to ‘guiding and strengthening’, which, she said, ‘is more helpful’, commenting in passing that her daughter wanted to study Latin for A level—‘we’re desperately trying to put her off ’. Before outlining ‘steps to doing it [discipline] well’, she added that often she doesn’t do it well herself, saying, ‘We will mess up and make mistakes, and we have to have grace with ourselves and with each other.’ She said that people very easily disapprove of others’ children and talked about a time when her children got into a trolley in Waitrose, and a man told her off—‘They’re putting their feet where others will put their food’—and said she hadn’t been back to that particular Waitrose since. Maddie then spoke about some ‘key principles’, and said that the first point is ‘Don’t react.’ Her next slide had an image of a brain, and she said that if we act on instinct, ‘we’re only acting out of the prefrontal cortex’, whereas if we pause and think, ‘we’re acting out of an area of the brain that is more associated with creativity and decision-making . . . We need to stop and remember who we are . . . You are the centre of a small child’s world.’ The following slide had an image of an angry man pointing a finger, and Maddie said, ‘We need to ditch “blame and shame” . . . Every child is good, and rather than thinking “my child is a nightmare”, we need to think “my child is a good child who is behaving like a nightmare”, and we need to stop and think about why they are behaving like this.’ She explained that we need to understand the child’s behaviour as a form of communication, and ‘so we need to get at what is going on underneath their behaviour’. She said that ‘we need to try and key into “what are you feeling right now?”, and to help the child understand what they are feeling and why they are behaving like that . . . We are the hands underneath, holding them up, their safe base. Wherever possible, follow your child’s needs, and if necessary, take charge.’ She said that sometimes parents need ‘to help children understand themselves, and where it is that they struggle most’, and concluded by saying, ‘We need to help children to become the people that we really want them to be.’ Alice, the headteacher of St George’s Primary School, spoke next, talking about discipline from her perspective as a headteacher. She said that ‘behaviour is not what we are looking for: behaviour is secondary to the primary point of schools: learning’. She then showed a clip from the Channel 4 programme ‘Educating the East End’, which depicted a boy who had cut out

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the centre of his textbook to hide his phone in it. Emily said you could ‘either look at this from the perspective of bad behaviour, or you can think of it in terms of his ingenuity and capability in thinking of that as a way to be able to have his phone with him’. She said, ‘Think about what you could give to that boy to work with to encourage him to use his ingenuity for something positive.’ She then showed a clip from the French film The Class, where a girl tells her teacher, ‘Your books are shit’, but instead of getting cross with her, he asks her what books she likes. Alice said that the teacher could have responded to the girl by telling her that she wasn’t showing him respect, but ‘instead, he finds out about where she’s at’. Alice explained Ofsted expectations for children in terms of behaviour, and mentioned that at the moment there is a ‘massive focus in schools on British values, which means that there is a particular emphasis on respecting others and their points of view, even if we don’t agree with them’. She closed by talking about what she thought schools could reasonably expect from parents, such as supporting the school’s aims, communicating with the school when things are difficult, as well as what parents shouldn’t expect from schools, for example, ‘We can’t “fix” a child’s behaviour. We can manage behaviour, but we’re not psychologists.’ There was space for discussion of the ideas presented in the seminar, both in terms of questions for the speaker and in small group discussions at points throughout, and many of the parents wanted to ask further questions, especially to Alice. None of these questions suggested any disagreement about the advice offered, but rather a concern about how best to respond to their children’s behaviour. In contrast to the parenting seminars aimed at church members at St John’s, the leaders at St George’s saw their parenting courses as a practical way of ministering to the needs of the surrounding community and understood their expertise on parenting as of wider moral significance in determining the future not only of children, but the future of the nation. At both St John’s and St George’s, we can see in their parenting seminars a perception of parenting in terms of uncertainty and as a potential source of guilt, and recognition of the cultural role of experts as providing potential answers to these problems. Yet we can see somewhat different ideas of parent–child relationships and of children’s autonomy articulated here, as well as different stances taken towards the cultural role of experts. While the leaders at St John’s rejected the turn to experts and wanted parents—particularly fathers—to have a sense of their own authority, mirroring the authority of God the Father, church leaders acknowledged that parents do experience anxieties, and so the church wanted to respond to this through providing the seminars. These ideas of hierarchy and children’s submission were completely absent at St George’s, and the language of ‘submission’ and ‘obedience’ was never used, with Maddie acknowledging that even the idea of ‘discipline’ evoked awkwardness. When I asked Katie what their stance would be on smacking, she said, ‘We would

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actively discourage it.’ I asked her whether any parents at St George’s smack their children, and she said that one or two of them do, ‘but we would be opposed to that, as it creates a distance between parent and child. Our stance would be about encouraging things that support the emotional connection between parent and child, rather than anything that creates a distance. We’d also be against “time outs” for the same reason.’¹⁷ St George’s also opposed male headship. Katie said, ‘We support fully equal co-parenting,¹⁸ and don’t make any gender differentiation in terms of parenting’, and commented that they had had a lesbian couple doing the parenting course, and also noted that there were many single-parent households at St George’s, including both single mothers and single fathers.¹⁹ As at St John’s, fathers were actively involved in child-rearing, including specific evangelical practices such as praying with their children. One girl I interviewed said, ‘My mum doesn’t usually pray, but me and my dad do’, and said she preferred to pray with her dad than by herself. Parents at St George’s placed particular emphasis on their desire for their children’s autonomy. John, one of the fathers, said he wanted his children to have ‘the freedom to work things out and discover the world for themselves’, while also wanting to provide them with a ‘secure emotional base’ for that. Children also showed awareness of their sense of their rights and wants and expected to be listened to by their parents (as well as other adults). While the leaders at St John’s rejected the idea of parenting experts or parenting advice manuals—whether evangelical or not—charismatic parents I spoke to did not reject these per se. Several parents I spoke with, for example, had read Rachel Turner’s Parenting Children for a Life of Purpose (2014). The main focus of Turner’s book is ‘empowering children to become who they are called to be’, emphasizing the idea of children as having agency and purpose in their relationship with God, and exploring how parents can help children ‘to see how powerful they really are; to live a life of compassion and courage; to run their individual path well and confidently’ (2014: 41). Some mothers at other charismatic churches also mentioned how they found resources specifically aimed at mothers helpful, mentioning such books as Hope for the Weary ¹⁷ A children’s and families’ minister I interviewed at another church also said that while they would encourage children to respect their parents, they would not use the idea of submission, and he said that churches that taught a message of submission ‘think it’s the role of the church to challenge the culture, but that doesn’t mean that the old ways were the best ways. It’s about what does love—, what does Jesus teach you, love God and love each other. That’s the key thing.’ ¹⁸ This emphasis on co-parenting stands in contrast with Bowlby’s emphasis, highlighted by Don in his talk, on problems arising from maternal deprivation, an emphasis that was subject to sustained feminist critique for placing the primary responsibility for the emotional care of children on to women (e.g. Riley 1979). ¹⁹ The church ran Bible study groups for single parents with childcare provided to enable them to attend. Edgell (2006) examines the different ways in which some US congregations have adapted to actively welcome single parents and those from non-traditional families.

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Mom Devotional (Thacker and McGlothlin 2015) and Ordinary Mum: Extraordinary Mission: Sharing God’s Love in Everyday Life (France-Williams and French 2013). These books offer stressed mothers a reassuring message of God being ‘in the mess with us. Right there, in the midst of it all, and walks us through’ (Thacker and McGlothlin 2015: 167) and offer readers a way of thinking about how they can practise ‘mission’ in their everyday lives as mothers, targeting mothers who ‘had big dreams of how you’d like to make a difference to the world. But now all you can think about is the next feed.’ Just as tensions surrounding evangelical fatherhood express wider social structures such as the ongoing linkage between masculinity and work, so also these resources reflect tensions surrounding motherhood in terms of the pulls of normative associations surrounding child-rearing as the domain of women and women’s expectations of fulfilment in terms of work or personal ambition, here understood in terms of evangelical mission. In Ordinary Mum: Extraordinary Mission, French writes: ‘When I first began writing this book, a close friend . . . bought me a fridge magnet that depicts a typical 1950s housewife. Printed on it is the slogan: “I wanted to change the world, but I couldn’t find a babysitter”.’ The book, in response, encourages its readers to see their everyday interactions as mothers as ways in which they are changing the world.

CO NCLUSION The expansion of the field of parenting expertise across contemporary society is part of a wider turn to experts across many spheres of life, where social problems and uncertainties are presented as issues for the individual to find solutions to through consulting the recommendations of ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’ in particular fields—whether diet, fitness, workplace productivity, or spirituality. As Ian Craib (1994) suggests, we struggle to tolerate experiences of impotence, anxiety, and disappointment, and so seek to fix perceived problems by trying to manage ourselves better in response. Zygmunt Bauman argues that contemporary preoccupations with the body and its safety are linked with the replacement of formerly dominant ‘heteronomous’ modes of coping with mortality and suffering with ‘autonomous’ means, which are selfcontained and self-directed, aiming to engage resources within the self ’s actual or potential possession and under the self ’s actual or potential control (1999: 42). As ‘the prospects of building a truly lasting and extra-temporal community fade’, Bauman argues, we direct our unused supplies of restless energy that are generated by ‘the endemic unsafety of human existence’ instead ‘to the space-and-time-bound realm of the self ’ (pp. 42–3). The rise of ‘autonomous coping strategies’ can be seen as bound up with processes of individualization. While people have always faced struggles and

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problems in life, these, as Craib (1994: 98) suggests, might once have been viewed as issues to be resolved in the context of a larger community or in relation to struggles with wider forces of destiny. The cultural shift, he argues, was to start ‘seeing them in terms of individual morality with individual solutions’, as perceptions and experience of the modern autonomous individual became increasingly isolated from the wider society (pp. 98–9). The rise of the discourse of ‘parenting’ reflects this, as the verb form indexes a wider transformation in how we perceive the human subject as a particular type of agent, with being increasingly measured by our individual doing (de Certeau 1984). The proliferation of the parenting expertise industry provides a means for parents to seek their own individual solutions to the problems and struggles they encounter. Bauman argues that the family is intrinsically laden with existential weight: it is ‘in the institution of the family that all the hauntingly contradictory aspects of human existence—mortal and immortal, doing and suffering, determining and being determined, being created and creating—most vividly meet and enter their never-ending game of mutual sustenance and reinvigoration’ (1999: 37). Drawing on Bauman, philosophers Stefan Ramaekers and Judith Suissa argue that contemporary discourses of parenting offer ‘autonomous coping strategies’ that lead us to shy away from the existential enormity of being a parent through focusing instead on particular techniques and tasks that we feel more able to manage (2012: 128). Commenting on the baby advice industry in The Guardian, the journalist Oliver Burkeman expresses a similar point: baby advice isn’t only, or perhaps even mainly, about raising children. Rather, it is a vehicle for the yearning—surely not unique to parents—that if we could only track down the correct information and apply the best techniques, it might be possible to bring the terrifying unpredictability of the world under control, and make life go right. It’s too late for us adults, of course. But a brand-new baby makes it possible to believe in the fantasy once more. Baby manuals seem to offer all the promise of self-help books, minus the challenges posed by the frustratingly intransigent obstacle of your existing self. (Burkeman 2018)

Ramaekers and Suissa argue that in our contemporary focus on generalized techniques and tasks of parenting, the ends and existential enormity of the parent–child relationship are ultimately occluded. Attending to what was said about parenting at St John’s and St George’s, we see that the cultural and moral conditions Ramaekers and Suissa diagnose are interwoven in complex ways across each setting. The fact that both churches offer parenting seminars resonates with the broader turn to parenting experts and growth of the parenting industry and the sense that the individual parent should seek to find techniques to solve particular anxieties and problems. This extends to the question of how to bring up their children within a religious lifeworld. A families’ minister I interviewed at another charismatic evangelical church said:

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In the more affluent middle-class area where we read and cogitate and reflect on how to be the best parents that we can, there’s a huge breadth of stuff that people read around how to be a good parent. But there is a real lack of stuff around how to teach faith, and I think in this kind of suburban middle-class place where it’s all about high achievement at school and there’s an enormous pressure to succeed, I think that pressure sits very uncomfortably on parents where they recognize it’s an area where they’re not really being fed—they feel there’s a skills gap, but they don’t really know what to do about it.

Yet, contra Ramaekers and Suissa, the parenting discourses at both churches also at the same time frankly acknowledged the existential enormity of being a parent. David commented in his seminar that loving a child always entails numerous fears: ‘Am I doing my part right? How will they turn out? Is my loved one going to survive in the world?’ Maddie likewise acknowledged this existential weight in a sermon on parenting: We’re setting up the next generation. A baby, a child, a young person is a malleable thing. We as parents are like gods to them, God’s given us that authority to represent him for them, to define the world for them, what is right, what is wrong, what is normal behaviour: to quarrel and bicker and never resolve the conflict? To tell half-truths? To always be late? We’re defining the world, what’s normal for them in the trivial and also the significant. What are we defining for our children? . . . The choices we make will live on for generations.

This focus on parenting as determining the future was intertwined with recognition of mortality. As Maddie said, ‘We are the product of generations, hundreds of generations that have gone before us and we’re holding the baton of life for a very short time before we hand it on to the next generation . . . It’s a responsibility.’ She closed in prayer, noting the damage that could be done by harmful parenting: God, who am I to be even talking? We acknowledge you have the power to undo, that’s why you died, to undo the damage that is passed on. And we want to make the very most of this life we’ve been given, this short time on earth, for the benefit of our ourselves but also for the benefit of those to come.

Here we see acknowledgement rather than avoidance of the existential enormity of parenting, and recognition of how this moral weight is inextricably interwoven within even the most everyday mundane tasks of child-rearing. Furthermore, we might interpret these courses and seminars as providing a means of collective social support and building relationships to help bear this weight together, even while the advice was addressed to parents as individuals. At the same time, the anxieties and uncertainties that parents experience are perhaps further exacerbated with the proliferation of parenting advice and expertise. The agency of the figure of the child in contemporary parenting discourses also contributes to this, shaping the sense that parenting must be

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got right not only for the sake of the individual child, but for the future of the nation, to avoid a ‘broken Britain’. While research on evangelical parenting in the United States has drawn attention to the ongoing significance of ideals of parental (and specifically paternal) authority and corporal punishment, focusing on the cases of St John’s and St George’s reveals how the moral ends and understanding of the child within these two evangelical cultures in the UK is constructed somewhat differently. At St George’s, parenting is ultimately perceived to be about enabling the child—who is seen as essentially good—to develop into an ‘emotionally healthy’ individual, free from shame, and with ‘secure emotional attachments’ to their parents. At St John’s, it is about enabling the child—who is seen as essentially sinful—to learn to submit to the authority of the parent (and specifically the father), the better to learn how to submit to the authority of God, but there is little of the emphasis on the corporal punishment that is a distinctive feature of US conservative evangelicalism. While studies of conservative Protestant parenting in the United States have shed light on the distinctive orientations and practices of evangelical parenting, our understanding of religious cultures and lived practices of parenting remains in its infancy (Bartkowski and Ellison 2009: 51). Further research on religion and parenting has the potential to deepen understanding of the significance of religion and the secular in relation to the ideals and practices of parents, of how religion adapts to changing family structures (Edgell 2006; see also Perry 2017), and of how questions surrounding the parent–child relation are interwoven within specific parenting cultures together with particular understandings and contestations of cultural and human authority. While St George’s celebrates and encourages trust in therapeutic and scientizing discourses of parenting—while also situating the church as offering particular knowledge to help parents to develop ‘healthy’ relationship styles—the leaders at St John’s were self-conscious about their countercultural resistance to such secular authorities, emphasizing the authority of parents (and specifically the father) over their children and over any perceived parenting advice. Yet at the same time, they situate this parental authority in relation to a submission to the authority of the Bible, the authority of the church, and ultimately submission to a divine Father. These orientations towards authority in parent–child relationships are bound up not only with different understandings of what a child is, but with a moral desire for what social order should look like, and how this is perceived to reflect human–divine relationships, as well as relationships within the church. While at St John’s the emphasis is on submission to a hierarchical order that privileges male authority, the emphasis at St George’s on parenting in terms of an emotional intimacy and security provided by a sheltering parent reflected the ways in which the relationship with God was also figured, with a desire for gender equality shown both in how they spoke about parenting and

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in leadership within the church. These differences in how ideals of parenting are presented are therefore revealing of religious imaginings of and desire for particular forms of social relationality. They also illuminate the symbolic significance of parent–child relations in shaping how different religious cultures perceive and enact their orientation towards wider society, in which the figure of the child—and thus the question of parenting—becomes particularly loaded as they seem to carry the moral weight of that culture’s possible futures. Let us turn to examine how this weight relates to evangelicals’ involvements in education.

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4 Building an Academy INTRODUCTION One sunny September Tuesday morning, the Year 7 and 8 students at Riverside Secondary Academy¹ were filing into the school hall for assembly. The head teacher had told me over a mug of tea beforehand that each day of the week the assemblies had a different focus, and in their Tuesday assemblies students were learning about news stories ‘in order to grow in social and cultural capital’. When the students were all seated in rows on the floor, their bags by their sides, Miss Brown, the Head of Languages, in her late twenties, addressed them. She began by emphasizing the importance of eye contact, telling the students that their eyes should be ‘tracking the speaker’. She then encouraged them to reflect on the impressions they had given the teachers over the past week: Think about your first week. Think about the interactions that you’ve had with the other students and the teachers. What impression do we, as teachers, have of you, as it’s your first week? If you’re in Year 8, could we be talking about you as somebody that’s setting a fantastic example? If Year 7, have we been talking about you as somebody that we’ve already noticed is going to be a fantastic role model and a fantastic ambassador for the school?

She then moved on to the main theme of the assembly: ‘this morning we will talk about why it’s important to read and listen to the news, why it’s important to look at newspapers, why it’s important to go on BBC Online when you’re walking to school instead of just constantly messaging people saying, “I can see you over the road.”’ She asked the students if they had any ideas about why they should read or watch the news. A few put their hands up. One answered, ‘to find out about the weather’, another: ‘so you can be aware of dangerous ¹ Riverside Secondary Academy is part of Riverside ‘Hub’, the term members of Riverside Church use to talk about the different services—including schools, toddlers’ groups, youth groups, food bank, debt advice, and credit union—that they provide in their local area, and which the church leaders describe as part of their vision for ‘local community transformation’, aiming ‘to create a new sense of belonging’.

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people in your local area’. Another volunteered, ‘so you know what’s going on around you’, and another: ‘so you can find out the football results’. Miss Brown talked through a slide listing reasons why they should watch the news: ‘it improves your understanding of Tier 2 and 3 words, so it gives you a bigger vocabulary and it improves your cultural capital, or your cultural understanding’. She asked the students what ‘cultural capital’ meant. One raised his hand, ‘you’re aware of the culture, what’s going on around you’. Miss Brown asked Miss Evans, the deputy head, how she would define the term. Miss Evans explained, ‘It’s the band of knowledge that you have in your head about the world, that you can bring out at dinner parties or in interviews or on the bus.’ Miss Brown continued, ‘It’s the band of knowledge you can bring out in conversation. Remember our discoveries improve our conversations, and that informs people for getting jobs.’ She went on to talk about the news coverage of the then forthcoming Scottish referendum and closed by suggesting that they should ‘read a little bit around the Scottish referendum, find out the positives and negatives, so that on community lunch this Friday,² you can have a conversation with your guest about that’. In this assembly, the use of the term ‘cultural capital’ gestures towards the significance of middle-class desires in shaping Riverside Secondary’s ethos. Here we see an aspiration to develop in the students an ethic of reflexive responsibility for forming themselves as subjects possessing the requisite ‘cultural capital’ they are perceived currently to lack, such that they should be aware not only of the impressions they make on others, but that what they look at on their phones might have implications for their future employability. The fact that Riverside Secondary—which is a free school—espoused an understanding of education in terms of forming a self-governing, entrepreneurial citizen is perhaps not surprising. Neoliberal practices in education include the marketization of educational provision (reflected in England in the drive towards academies and free schools), together with an increased focus on competition and accountability. These are processes which affect not only thinking about institutions, but also the formation of subjects— both students and teachers—who should likewise embody these neoliberal virtues (Gerrard 2014). A side-effect of neoliberal policies promoting a marketplace model of choice for the parent as consumer has been the increased prominence of faith groups in educational provision. Despite the broader decline in religious participation and identification, successive UK governments have adopted controversial policies supporting faith schools, stimulating considerable public debate about the public funding of faith schools and of the proper place of religion within education. Within these debates, evangelicals’ engagements ² Community lunches were when visitors from organizations and businesses in London had lunch with students on their house tables, every Friday.

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with education are often presented as a cause for concern, with organizations such as the National Secular Society (2013) generalizing about evangelicals’ involvement in schools as if there were a coherent evangelical culture that poses a potentially indoctrinating threat to pupils. Yet there has been little empirical research exploring evangelicals’ differing forms of engagement with schools. Providing insight into the everyday realities of evangelicals’ work in educational provision and the differing ideals shaping this work, this chapter examines the relations between Riverside Church and the local academies it is involved in running. I begin by considering debates about faith schools, neoliberalism, and social class. I then focus on the ‘moral ambitions’ (Elisha 2011) animating Riverside Church’s involvement in setting up Riverside Secondary Academy, which is a new free school, and consider the significance of class and neoliberalism in relation to both these ambitions and the mundane everyday practices of Riverside Secondary Academy. I argue that class played an important, although not consciously foregrounded, role in Riverside Church members’ sense of ‘mission’ to local children and families, as they aspired to ‘transform community’. Although church leaders articulated a desire to ‘do things with people, rather than to or for them’, this was held simultaneously with a sense of the church as providing particular kinds of social and cultural capital to improve the lives of children not from middleclass backgrounds that ran in tension with this. This contradiction, I argue, represents an intrinsic moral duality within contemporary neoliberalism. In the final section of the chapter, I consider how Riverside Primary reveals a somewhat different social imaginary.

FAITH SCHOOLS, NEOLIBERALISM, AND S OCIAL CLASS Public and policy debates about the place of religion in schools are, as Nigel Fancourt notes (2017), usually seen as divided along the lines of educational traditionalists and educational progressives. To over-simplify, as he puts it, the former: look to the legacy of the past, seeing education as the passing on of the inherited wisdom of former generations, usually through traditional structures and disciplines: Latin, uniforms, independent and grammar schools etc. . . . They would consider RE and school assemblies as almost interchangeable, and welcome the presence of faith schools in the educational landscape.

The progressives, in contrast,

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expect education to build a better future, as a way of ironing out current injustices, through wider access, preferential funding for the disadvantaged, non-selective schooling and a child-centred curriculum . . . They might be against faith schools on the grounds of divisiveness—though pragmatically they support a greater diversity of religions to offer faith schooling, on the grounds of equality. (Fancourt 2017)

However, as Fancourt argues, these debates have often ignored the growing significance of a third policy voice in shaping the place of religion in the current educational landscape: neoliberalism. Although neoliberalism is sometimes seen to be in decline, challenged by the rise of popular nationalisms across Europe and North America, within education, neoliberal policies and practices continue to hold sway. While the existence of state-funded religious schools in England stretches back to the Education Act 1870, major changes have taken place since the late 1990s in particular, with the introduction of academies and free schools affording new opportunities for faith organizations to run schools. The Labour government announced its plans to develop inner city academies (subsequently called academies) in 2000 as part of a mixed economy of different kinds of service providers allowing greater ‘choice’ in an educational marketplace (Dinham and Jackson 2012: 285). The establishment of academies was subsequently expanded by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition in the Academies Act 2010, and again by the Conservative government who in 2015 announced plans for thousands of existing schools judged by Ofsted to be inadequate or requiring improvement to be converted into academies. Academies are state-funded independent schools for children of all abilities, operating free from local education authority control, with a range of types of sponsor, including businesses, universities, other successful schools, and faith organizations. Free schools—a type of academy set up by teachers, parents, charities, or other organizations in response to local demand—were introduced by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition as part of their Big Society vision, with the creation of free schools authorized in the Academies Act 2010. These policies have led to a dramatic transformation of the educational landscape, particularly in secondary education: in January 2017, 69 per cent of secondary pupils and 24 per cent of primary pupils in England were attending academies (Roberts 2017: 9). A significant proportion of academies have been sponsored by faith groups, and secularist groups have raised concerns about the growth of ‘faith academies’.³ In January 2017, 20 per cent of primary school sponsor-led academies and 35 per cent of primary schools converting

³ See, for example, https://humanism.org.uk/campaigns/schools-and-education/faith-schools/ (accessed 26 April 2018).

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to academy status in England were schools of a religious character. 16 per cent of both sponsor-led academies and secondary schools converting to academy status were of a religious character. Around a third of primary free schools are faith-based, and 12 per cent of secondary free schools (Long and Bolton 2017: 16).⁴ Of these, the overwhelming majority are Christian, with Church of England the most common type among primary schools in January 2017 (26 per cent of all primaries) and Roman Catholic schools the most common among secondaries (9 per cent). Non-Christian faith schools were very much a minority, with forty-eight Jewish, twenty-seven Muslim, eleven Sikh, and five Hindu schools at the start of January 2017 (Long and Bolton 2017: 15). The Church of England has plans for significant expansion through the multiacademy trust scheme, through which non-faith schools become affiliated with a single church-led trust. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, described the academies programme as affording the opportunity in ‘the middle-term future’ for the Church of England to become ‘quite conceivably the largest sponsor and provider of secondary education in this country’ (cited in Johnson and Vanderbeck 2014: 189). The growing prominence of faith organizations in educational provision in England has provoked heated debate and opposition.⁵ The most common arguments used against faith schools generally concern the potential religious indoctrination or radicalization of students or social segregation in terms of religion, ethnicity, or social class. The expansion of Islamic schools and the influence of some Muslim groups in state-funded schools has been the focus of particular public controversy (Holmwood and O’Toole 2018). At the same time, socially conservative Christians have also been presented as at odds with the ‘fundamental British values’ of freedom and tolerance that David Cameron sought to place at the heart of the national curriculum in response to the Trojan Horse affair.⁶ Schools linked with churches have also been particularly criticized as encouraging class-based social segregation, with middle-class parents filling church pews with the sole aim of securing a place at a church school. ⁴ The overall number of state-funded faith schools in England, including academies and free schools, as well as foundation, voluntary-aided, and voluntary-controlled schools (see Hemming 2015: 5 for further discussion of these types of school), stood at 6,813 in January 2017. This represented 37 per cent of all state-funded primary schools, and 19 per cent of all state-funded mainstream secondaries. This proportion of state-funded faith schools increased from 35 per cent of primaries and 16 per cent of secondaries in 2000 (Long and Bolton 2017: 15). ⁵ Public opinion of single-faith schools also does not seem to regard them especially favourably. Hemming (2015: 9) notes that surveys examining the British public’s views on faith schools present a mixed picture, but many have demonstrated that the majority of respondents are either against or indifferent to state-funded single-faith institutions. ⁶ See, for example, the comments about the need for ‘muscular liberalism’ and the dangers of religious indoctrination made by the head of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, in February 2018 (Spielman 2018).

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Given the growing opportunities for faith organizations’ involvement in educational provision, it is not surprising that questions surrounding faithbased schooling have also attracted scholarly attention over the past decade or so.⁷ Much of this literature has been either theoretical or based on quantitative analysis, providing data charting how, for example, the strong performance of faith schools in relation to exam results is linked to their intake of pupils with lower levels of deprivation and special educational needs and enrolling a larger proportion of high-attaining students compared with non-faith schools (e.g. Allen 2008, Andrews and Johnes 2016). There has been less focus on how religion is located within the everyday micro-practices and cultures of faith schools, or within contemporary school life more broadly. This is in part because the majority of studies on religion in schools have emerged from education studies and have largely focused on religious education in relation to pedagogical and curriculum concerns (e.g. Conroy et al. 2013, Gill and Thomson 2015, Wright 2016). There is a growing number of studies exploring children’s religious identities and experiences within schools (e.g. Nesbitt 2004, Smith 2005, Ipgrave and McKenna 2008, Moulin 2011, Berglund and Gent 2019) and young people’s attitudes towards religious diversity (Keddie 2014, Arweck 2017), although, as Peter Hemming notes (2015: 13), this body of work is still some way off reaching a critical mass. A small number of recent qualitative studies have also begun to examine the place of religion and the secular in schools, including faith schools (e.g. Anderson 2011, Smyth et al. 2013, Hemming 2015, Hanemann 2016, Guhin 2016, Hemming and Roberts 2018, Shillitoe 2018). This emerging literature is opening up new directions in exploring the lived negotiation and experience of religion in everyday school settings, and how particular cultural values are mediated in schools linked with religious organizations. Several of these studies have been attentive to children’s agency and build on burgeoning scholarship exploring ‘lived religion’ which, as discussed in Chapter 1, has encouraged attention to marginalized perspectives—including those of ‘women, children, and other illiterates’ (McDannell 2011: 139)—and to how religion is lived and located in everyday spaces outside of the traditional scholarly focus on places of worship. Questions surrounding the interrelations of social class, neoliberalism, and religion are, however, yet to be fully explored.⁸ Sociologists of education have, in contrast, devoted extensive attention to the interrelations of neoliberalism and social class, arguing, for example, that the neoliberal market model emphasizing choice in education policy tends to favour middle-class parents (Ball 2003, Butler and Robson 2003, Ball and Vincent 2007, Crozier et al. 2008), and this can be related to the sense that: ⁷ See, for example, Halstead and McLaughlin 2005, Gardner et al. 2005, Allen and West 2009, 2011, Andrews and Johnes 2016, Clayton et al. 2018. ⁸ Exceptions include studies by Byrne and De Tona (2014) and Hemming and Roberts (2018).

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the middle classes . . . provide the ideal individual for neoliberal times, the person for whom life is a conscious, reflexive project of the self and to whom it may seem plausible that, barring accidents, the individual is primarily the author of what befalls them . . . [C]apitalism continuously undermines equality, and those with relative advantage—with more capital (of any kind)—are always in the best position to gain. (James et al. 2010: 631)

There is also an emerging body of literature exploring how neoliberal policies shape practices and everyday social relationships in academies and free schools (Kulz 2017, Pennacchia 2017). However, despite the prevalence of faith organizations in the development of academies, the question of religion has been absent in this literature. This chapter therefore speaks to these different debates through exploring how the interrelations between social class, neoliberalism, and evangelicalism shape everyday realities at the Riverside academies, while also revealing the significance of schooling in contemporary open evangelical understandings of ‘mission’. Schooling figures prominently in contemporary public and policy debates as a key means for enabling social mobility. In these debates, it is often imagined that working-class social mobility is possible through the acquisition of ‘sufficient dominant cultural capital in the form of middle-class-type attitudes and behaviours’ (Reay 2013: 666), rather than through increases in family income or parental education which have been demonstrated to have more effect on children’s educational outcomes. Urban schools are often constructed as particularly problematic within these narratives. In the setting of London, this bears the trace of the historical figuring of urban schools as sites for ‘the socialisation of the “unruly mob”’ (Hollingworth and Archer 2010: 585) and the effects of London’s increasing socio-economic polarization. Rising housing costs have largely driven out middle-income groups, resulting in a city of the rich and the poor, with the rich seeking out ‘the best schools’ and ‘work[ing] the education system by choosing fee-paying schools, high status selective schools or high-achieving comprehensive schools where there is a critical mass of children like their own’, feeding into ‘the pathologisation of many inner London state schools . . . which are often derided in the press as “sink schools” or “failing schools”’ (p. 586). Within the history of British Christianity, schooling was a key means through which middle-class evangelicals and nonconformist Christians— likewise in highly socio-economically polarized urban settings—sought to ‘save’ the children of the urban poor, and thus to influence the future of the nation by ‘civilizing’ the masses.⁹ These Victorian evangelicals, however, did

⁹ For discussion of denominational differences in churches’ sense of mission to educate the children of the poor, see Allen and West 2009: 473.

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not understand the schools they set up in terms of promoting social mobility so much as reinforcing a sense of knowing one’s place in society and inculcating virtues of deference, hard work, and sobriety. How then does this history of class differentiation underpinning evangelicals’ involvement in schooling relate to contemporary evangelicals? It is worth noting that each of the evangelical churches I spent time with had close relationships with local schools, representing different kinds of faith bodies’ involvements in educational provision.¹⁰ St George’s Church was closely linked with the Church of England voluntary-aided St George’s Primary School, which was originally founded in the early nineteenth century. As a voluntary-aided school, the majority of the school governors were appointed by the Church of England, including several members of St George’s Church, with the head teacher herself a regular church attendee. The admissions criteria gave preference to ‘baptised children living with parent or parents’ resident in the parish of St George’s whose parents are ‘practising members of a Christian church’,¹¹ although in practice many of the children were also of Muslim and other faith and non-religious backgrounds. As the following chapter will explore, church volunteers cultivated close relationships with the school in terms of running activities such as afterschool clubs and holiday clubs. St John’s was not officially linked with a school, however a number of the church staff were involved in setting up an independent fee-paying school,¹² with the chair of governors one of the St John’s clergy. This school, like St George’s, sought to maintain a Christian ethos. Its admissions policy stated that it welcomed children ‘from all backgrounds’ and that it was against the school’s Christian ethos to discriminate against prospective students ‘on the grounds of race, religion, gender or socioeconomic group’. As part of the admissions process, parents were interviewed, and during the interview were asked about their understanding and support of the school’s ‘aim and core values’. Riverside Secondary Academy is a free school set up in close association with Riverside Church, while Riverside Primary Academy was originally a community school that had recently converted to academy status while I was conducting fieldwork, sponsored by Riverside’s educational trust. Faith was not a factor in admissions, but the academies were designated as ‘schools of a religious character’ in relation to the emphasis that Andy (Riverside’s senior minister) and others involved in Riverside educational trust placed on a ‘core ¹⁰ See Dinham and Jackson 2012: 284–5 and Hemming 2015: 3–8 for a full discussion of the history of the different forms of faith involvement in educational provision. ¹¹ ‘Practising’ here is taken by the governors to mean attending church at least twice monthly for at least a full year, and ‘Christian’ taken to mean membership of churches ‘recognised by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland or the Evangelical Alliance’. ¹² Government figures from 2010 indicate that there are around 827 Christian or interdenominational independent schools out of around 2400 private schools (Hemming 2015: 6).

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Christian ethos’ as motivating their educational provision. In the prospectus for the primary and secondary academies, Andy explained this ethos as meaning that the Riverside academies are places where every individual is ‘included and valued’ and can achieve their fullest ‘God-given potential’. While each of these schools exemplifies differing relationships between evangelical churches and educational provision, I focus in what follows especially on Riverside in order to explore how some evangelicals’ moral ambitions in relation to schooling cut across the kind of traditional/progressive binary in relation to education that Fancourt outlined and are revealing of some evangelicals’ wider visions for society. Indeed, by considering both Riverside Primary and Secondary Academies, we see how in two schools linked with the same church, moral ideals associated with evangelicalism can contribute to two very differing school cultures. As an ethnographic case study, this analysis obviously cannot be generalized across all UK evangelicals’ involvements in education. However, exploring how class and neoliberal ideals were interwoven within the cultures of Riverside Church and academies adds to our knowledge of how particular evangelicals’ moral values can contribute implicitly to the cultural reproduction of class inequalities, against their own best intentions.¹³

RAGGED SCHOOLS AND RIVERSIDE ’ S EDUCATIONAL AMBITIONS In the study of US evangelicalism, class has received renewed attention, with scholars showing its salience for understanding evangelicals’ cultural and political engagements (e.g. Griffith 2004, Hendershot 2004, Luhr 2009, Marti 2010). However, somewhat less attention has been paid, as Omri Elisha notes, ‘to the fact that evangelicals who identify as “middle-class” wrestle selfconsciously with the implications of class status in relation to religious faith’ (2011: 121). Elisha explores middle-class evangelicals’ self-reflexive critiques as they both embrace promises of upward mobility while also ‘fixated on the moral pitfalls of consumerism, self-indulgence, and complacency that they fear go along with the so-called middle-class lifestyle’ (2011: 122). Riverside’s

¹³ Reay et al. describe their research on white, middle-class parents as ‘often like holding up a mirror to the self. We were confronted with our own culpability, failings, conceits, and selfdeceptions’ (2011: 167). My own experience in writing this chapter has been likewise, and I would emphasize that the educational dispositions I present in the context of Riverside Secondary closely mirror those inscribed within contemporary higher education in the UK, as it is shaped by the same broader political logics.

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church leaders were likewise predominantly middle-class, yet at least as pronounced as a critique of middle-class lifestyles was a desire to challenge social inequality and a sense of their moral duty as to work to improve the social, economic, and spiritual lives of less privileged others, both in the surrounding local area and in other global settings. This impulse bears traces of how middle-class Victorian evangelicals felt it their philanthropic duty to improve the lives of those around them in the city, an aspiration that often specifically related to the lives of the children. As Cunningham (1991) argues, the story of the children of the poor, and specifically the urban poor, has often been shaped as a romance. This begins with a changeless pre-industrial ‘once upon a time’ when children lived with their parents and contributed to the family economy, helping around the house and looking after younger siblings. The industrial revolution erupted like a cataclysmic force to provoke the crisis of the story . . . Children were torn away from their families. They were sold or stolen to become climbing boys, they were transported as parish apprentices from workhouses to the isolated cotton mills, they were forced by impoverished or idle parents to endure the long hours and harsh discipline of the factories, and they were exposed to the dark immorality of the coal mines. (Cunningham 1991: 8)

In this story, this was a crisis not just for the children, but for the nation: ‘How would God judge a civilization which treated its children in this way, and destroyed the sanctioned pieties of family life for the sake of profit? . . . But in the story, light was at hand’ (p. 9), embodied in the evangelical Lord Shaftesbury, ‘“the Moses who led the children of bondage into their Promised Land”’ (p. 9). Shaftesbury campaigned on behalf of climbing boys, factory children, and mineworkers, and ‘his capacious sympathy and his guilt-driven energy widened out to include the poor street children who were welcomed into his ragged schools, and whose ultimate rescue would depend on an army of charities and philanthropists’ (p. 9). Victorian evangelicals involved in the ragged school movement espoused a theology of mission and were competing for funds in the growing charitable marketplace against overseas missionaries. For these upper- and middle-class evangelicals, the ‘exotic other’ to be converted was constructed in terms of class, as we see in Shaftesbury’s description of the ragged child as both risky and morally at risk: It is a curious race of beings that these philanthropists have taken in and everyone who walks the streets of the metropolis must daily observe several members of the tribe—bold and pert, and dirty as London sparrows, but pale, feeble and sadly inferior to them, in plumpness of outline . . . Their appearance is wild, the matted hair, the disgusting filth that renders necessary a closer inspection before the flesh can be discerned between the rags which hang about it; and the barbarian freedom from all superintendence and restraint . . . Visit these regions in the

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summer, and you are overwhelmed by the exhalations; visit them in winter, and you are shocked by the spectacle of hundreds shivering in apparel that would be scanty in the tropics. (cited in Swain and Hillel 2010: 9)

In the ragged school movement, the ultimate goal was religious conversion, ‘fitting the child for a good Christian death’ (Swain and Hillel 2010: 10). This was inseparable from ideals to reform children as clean, deferential, prepared for work in service, as a means to maintain social order while the rest of Europe erupted in revolution (Swain and Hillel 2010: 8). If it were not for the influence of ragged schools, Shaftesbury claimed, ‘it would not have been possible for any government, with all its command of physical and military force, to have kept this country in order and subordination’, and, as the Ragged School Magazine put it, the schools cleared ‘the noxious exhalations from an unhealthy district’ by going ‘to the source of the evil, to the head of the springs which percolate through this marshy district, and by turning them into new channels . . . for the uses of mankind’ (both cited in Swain and Hillel 2010: 8). The expectation was that these reformed children would have a redemptive effect on their parents, ‘singing the hymns they had learned at school . . . [to] their drunken mothers, who are lingering in front of the gin-palace’ (cited in Swain and Hillel 2010: 10). Like these Victorian evangelicals, living in a society marked by heightened socio-economic polarization and working for the salvation of the children of the poor, so today Riverside is situated in a highly polarized area of London. As noted earlier, this socio-economic polarization has also contributed to a polarization of schools, as the rich colonize private schools or ‘work the system’ to ensure a place at ‘the best’ schools, contributing to the pathologization of other inner-city schools (Hollingworth and Archer 2010: 586). This divided inner-city context decisively shaped moral ambitions at Riverside. While the cultures of contemporary and Victorian evangelical churches in London are at some remove from each other, the Riverside church leaders nevertheless drew on the narrative of the Victorian evangelical ‘rescue’ of the children of the poor as a way of contextualizing their sense of mission today. Although schools run by churches (Anglican, Catholic, and nonconformist) were mostly originally created for the education of the poor, in recent years, faith schools have included a higher percentage of students from more affluent backgrounds (Allen and West 2009, Theos 2013).¹⁴ For the Riverside academies, this was not the case. The local education authority average for students eligible for free school meals in the borough was 34 per cent; Riverside ¹⁴ Different denominations have different understandings of mission in relation to this idea of educating the poor. The Catholic Education Service, for example, states that Catholic schools have ‘a particular duty to care for the poor and disadvantaged’ (Catholic Education Service 2003, cited in Allen and West 2009: 489).

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Secondary Academy had 42 per cent, and Riverside Primary Academy had 34 per cent.¹⁵ When I interviewed Miss Morris, Riverside Secondary’s head teacher, she also mentioned that 30 per cent of students had special educational needs, and 59 per cent were in receipt of the pupil premium. 20 per cent had child protection issues: ‘Not all are live,’ she said, ‘but there has been social services involvement with them at some stage, and many of them are live.’ The students were from a variety of religious and non-religious backgrounds, and there were no faith-based admissions criteria. Miss Morris also addressed the question of students’ race and ethnicity, telling me that 16 per cent of students were white English, 30 per cent black African, ‘and the rest are a real combination, there’s no other group that is strongly dominant . . . This mix is a great thing about being in London’. The teachers, in contrast, were all white British (predominantly white English). The education trust associated with Riverside Church sponsors Riverside Primary Academy and had set up Riverside Secondary as a new free school. As noted above, these initiatives have their origins in the expansion of neoliberal education policies under the Labour and subsequent Coalition and Conservative governments, which afforded new opportunities for faith organizations to provide welfare and education services. Although Riverside Church members articulated a critique within the church of how the then Coalition government’s austerity policies were exacerbating social inequalities, they also accepted the opportunities these afforded for their involvement in education and welfare. When questioned about whether this ran the risk of returning to the paternalism of the pre-welfare state while speaking at a theology conference, Andy said that in the local area around the church, ‘the welfare state hasn’t worked for people . . . in the Swann Estate. People have been left out.’ He said, ‘We shouldn’t just let the welfare state die’, but ‘there needs to be a new conversation with government about the role of organizations in providing services’. The church leaders at Riverside often described the building of Riverside Secondary Academy as part of a long-cherished dream for the church to be at ‘the centre of the local community’, and linked this to the romanticized history of Victorian evangelicals. In one sermon, Andy talked about how the eighteenth-century founders of the church felt a duty to found a school, and emphasized the importance of remembering this history: ‘If we don’t remember who we are, we won’t know who we should be.’ In another sermon, he talked about how, during the eighteenth century, ‘no poor kids went to school—only rich kids went to schools like Eton and Harrow’ and said that the first school the church members had founded was ‘called a “free school”, ¹⁵ The national average for England in the same year was 21 per cent. See https://www.gov. uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/266339/DFE-RR319.pdf (accessed 10 February 2015).

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because it was free’. He said these evangelical forerunners had founded thirteen schools, which met on Sundays: ‘People think of Sunday schools as being about Bible stories and stuff, but these were on Sundays because the children were working during the week, being chimney sweeps and that kind of thing’, and that following this, they founded four ‘ragged schools’. He said that these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicals ‘had a passion to bring education to the people’, and linked this with Riverside’s new free school, aligning their contemporary aspirations with those of the Victorian evangelicals, saying: ‘It’s going to be great because of us . . . We have to offer great wraparound care, a great education for these kids, a great coffee shop for their parents, a community bank, debt advice, community care, art clubs, football after school . . . time spent reading with the kids.’ Riverside’s aspirations to shape the lives of local children, and the continuities they described here with the ragged schools movement, were also evident in a Riverside Church forum prior to the secondary academy’s opening. Matt, in his thirties, who was leading the forum, began the meeting, which took place in the main church space after the Sunday morning service. He spoke to the approximately fifty people who had stayed after church from a microphone at the front. He said that as his work was in communications, he liked neat formulas, and his first slide, outlining the theme of the discussion, read ‘Riverside Church + Riverside Academy = ?’. The following slide articulated the ‘core values that the church stands for’, which included ‘inclusive’, ‘influential’, and ‘interdependent’, and he said, ‘I hope these are all familiar to you.’ Underneath these on the slide were the phrases: ‘Love God and Love your Neighbour’ and ‘The Shalom Adventure’, which he said were ‘central to all we’re doing—bringing peace and well-being to others’. The next slide displayed a series of concentric circles, with ‘God’ in the centre. Matt said: ‘Towards the centre here are people who are intimately connected with and who are trying to follow Jesus . . . we might think of that in terms of people who are here on Sundays’, while the circles moving outwards referred to those with ‘periodic connections’ to the church, and the outermost circle those with ‘no connection’. Matt said that they wanted to think about how these Riverside values might relate to what they would do in the new school in terms of ‘connecting with those in the community who might otherwise have no connection with us’, but emphasized ‘not that we’re trying to convert them’. He then put up a slide showing a historical drawing of the church and said, ‘Our church is on the site of where people did things that rocked.’ Again, aligning their contemporary moral ambitions with those of Victorian evangelicals, he said that in the nineteenth century, people in this church were very involved in the ragged schools movement from 1844 onwards, because ‘it was not good enough that the poor kids nearby didn’t have a good education. So what we’re doing with the school has a history behind it.’ His next slide included information about

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local schools, noting oversubscriptions for ‘good schools’ in the local area, and he mentioned a conversation with a mother from the church who had moved to a suburban area to get her son into a better school. He then put up a slide with some quotes from parents whose children had been accepted into Riverside Academy for the following year, one saying she was ‘absolutely ecstatic’ when she found out her child had been accepted, another saying ‘it sounds just like a private school’, and the final one, ‘it’s not just academic, but about caring for the whole child’. The ways in which those at the church spoke about Riverside Academy index an aspiration to ‘transform’ the lives of those around them, with selfconscious affinities with Victorian evangelicals’ efforts to ‘save’ the children of the poor. Cunningham (1991) unravels different interlocking narratives that shaped the historical story of the children of the poor, and he argues that ‘childhood’ became prioritized as a sphere of social action not just out a concern for children themselves, but driven by a desire for social betterment, with children perceived as the key to social advance and the future of the nation. This understanding of schooling as a privileged site for enabling wider social transformation also underpinned desires for Riverside Academy to provide a means of challenging unequal forms of political power. In a tour of the new academy building for church members, Andy said, ‘Today, members of our Cabinet only come from private and public schools, and that’s not right; we need to change that.’ The outworking of aspirations to change society through engaging with children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds has, however, shifted somewhat from Victorian ambitions. Although there are continuities with Victorian philanthropic enterprises, the articulated emphasis on ‘inclusion’ suggests a change in how class shapes British evangelicals’ engagements with children and young people over the twentieth century. Although evangelical engagements with youth from the later nineteenth century onwards aimed at engaging with children and young people from a range of social backgrounds, within a comparatively short time frame they became orientated primarily towards upper-middle-class children and young people. Pete Ward argues that a concern to cater to the upper middle classes shaped the development of evangelical organizations’ work with the young, with special services, for example, held in the upper classes’ drawing rooms, ‘strictly for the invited, for it was felt that parents would object if they found their children sitting beside “the rough and the ragged”’ (Ward 1996: 28–9). Ward argues that this focus on the children of the educated and wealthy shaped not just the style of youth work, but the culture of modern-day British evangelicalism, with the result that its white, male, post-war leaders were mostly from public school backgrounds. Their experiences of youthwork at school and university Christian unions shaped the cultural style they sought to recreate in their ministries, including an intense focus on trying to convert the children of the upper

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classes (p. 45). In the 1950s, some evangelicals attempted youth work in inner urban areas, although they tended however ‘to retreat to places where they could see a richer harvest’, investing ‘in urban ministry only if they can be sure that young people will come to faith’ (pp. 78–9). This was not often forthcoming. Riverside’s work with children and young people today demonstrates alternative aspirations. While many contemporary evangelicals’ engagements with children and young people are still shaped by a conversionist logic, and many focus primarily on middle-class children, there are also growing efforts across different evangelical constituencies to engage in different forms of ‘mission’, shaped by a consciousness of the exclusions perpetuated by evangelical culture’s dominant white middle-class culture (Elisha 2011, Strhan 2013, 2015, McKenzie 2017). Open evangelicals, for example, self-consciously distinguish their urban engagements from historical and other contemporary evangelicals’ desires for the religious conversion of non-Christians, articulating their desire not to ‘convert’ others but to ‘transform community’ in their local areas. Given how evangelicals’ historical work with ‘the children of the poor’ was shaped by class, how then does this relate to the practical realities of life at Riverside today?

BREAKING THE CLASS CEILING? One of the main values of Riverside Church was ‘inclusion’. When church members talked about ‘inclusion’, they talked about the social inclusion of those ‘socially excluded’ through categories of identity such as race, sexuality, disability, or social class, with a particular focus on the inclusion of LGBTQ groups who have historically been excluded from evangelical churches.¹⁶ In contrast with some evangelical schools, such as those following the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum, Riverside Academy self-consciously sought to recognize and promote equality in terms of gender and sexual orientation, and different religions through assemblies and religious education lessons.¹⁷ They also talked about ‘holistic inclusion’ in their aspirations for both the church and the school, and repeatedly emphasized that their vision ¹⁶ Skeggs notes that ‘social exclusion’ is a relatively new term in Britain, though used more regularly in the European Union. The use of ‘social inclusion’ discourse thus brings ‘Britain into an established continental European discourse, and an especially French focus on marginalization as detachment from the moral order of society, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon liberal view of marginalization as redistribution, of not commanding sufficient resources to survive in the market’ (Skeggs 2004b: 86). ¹⁷ St George’s Primary School was also awarded a Stonewall School Champion Award, given to schools tackling homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic bullying and celebrating diversity.

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was to ‘build inclusive communities’, where ‘everyone has hope, feels they matter, and is given the opportunity to achieve their potential’. The church located their links with Riverside Primary and Secondary Academies as central to achieving their aim. At Riverside Secondary, in practical terms, however, ‘inclusion’ most often meant, as one of the church’s children’s workers said to me, ‘access to employment’. Savage et al. (1992) have argued that middle-class formation involves a notion of the self in which the individual invests in storing up cultural assets for the future, and Skeggs argues that the ability to propertize culture, as having particular exchange values, has become increasingly central to how class is made (2004b). Such logics pervaded everyday life at Riverside Secondary. The school’s stated main aim for the children—in its promotional literature, and frequently articulated in assemblies—was that they would end up ‘in a great job of their choice, with great prospects’, and the teachers understood this to require building students’ ‘social and cultural capital’, as they told the children. The school invited business leaders from corporate accountancy and law firms, for example, to have weekly lunches with the children, while organizations such as the Royal Bank of Scotland and Intercontinental Hotels provided careers’ education every week from Year 7. In their lessons provided by Intercontinental Hotels, students were involved in a competition to market the hotel’s most expensive and difficult to sell suite (at £3000 per night), while in their lessons with RBS, they had to consider how they could get maximum profit from a £20 investment.¹⁸ At the school end-of-year awards evening, Miss Morris emphasized this sense of education as geared towards students’ employment: We all know what the purpose is of being here: our dream job . . . Our youngsters of twelve years old, they must have a dream job . . . it’s not a problem if it changes but they . . . must have one. So I don’t mind if the children, when they started with us in September, said, do you know what, I want to be a footballer, but by January they said, do you know what, I really want to be a lawyer within a Premier League football club, and then they go on and say, no do you know what, I want to go into designing aeroplanes. It doesn’t matter if the dream job changes but what’s really crucial is that there’s always a dream job.

This focus on aspiring to achieve a ‘dream job’ reflects broader changes in the educational landscape. As Reay comments, in the past, when education was about knowing your place in society, religion was the opium of the masses. Now that education has been reinvented as an aspirational project for the self, social mobility has taken its place and we are all supposed to aspire to becoming

¹⁸ Some members of Riverside Church were explicitly critical of ‘global corporates’ that they perceived as unethical, but I did not observe such critiques in the context of Riverside Secondary.

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doctors and lawyers, or even princesses, footballers, celebrities and billionaire entrepreneurs. (2013: 665–6)

In this aspirational society, achieving these ‘dream jobs’ is fiercely competitive, thus education requires fostering a competitive spirit and other ‘values’, which Riverside Academy seeks to develop, such as ‘scholarship’, ‘resilience’, and ‘aspiration’. As Miss Morris put it at the awards evening: Scholarship is about loving learning. Scholarship is also, frankly, about getting great GCSE results, getting those As and A stars. Scholarship is about getting great A levels, and . . . about going to those universities when you’re eighteen that you’ve been to this year. Scholarship is about you starting your first day at Oxford University, which so many of you love, or choosing Cambridge University . . . or choosing one of the London universities . . . Scholarship is about reaching that end goal.

The school aimed to inculcate an ethic of individual self-discipline, hard work, competition, and productivity that would enable students to reach this goal. In pervasive contemporary norms of learning, to learn entails working ‘on oneself, and to work on oneself is to accrue value, competitiveness and flexibility’ (Gerrard 2014: 868). Students were rewarded for good work or behaviour through receiving ‘merits’, which were celebrated in assemblies, with rewards given for achieving significant numbers of merits. Chatting at lunch with one boy, he mentioned that he had been to the local coffee shop that morning with Miss Morris. I asked if that was because he had received lots of merits. He nodded his head proudly. I asked if he thought anyone in Year 7 would get 150 merits, and he said the name of someone who already had, and so would be going to the Savoy Hotel for afternoon tea (the prize for achieving 150 merits). Riverside’s school day ran from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with little break time. Children were not allowed to talk in corridors or when entering or leaving the lunch hall, which was decorated with quotes reinforcing this ethic of selfdetermination, for example, Shakespeare’s ‘It is not in the stars to hold our destinies but ourselves.’ Cunningham describes how middle-class Protestants in the eighteenth century constructed the idleness of the poor as ‘the Parent of most Disorders in Society’ (1991: 24), motivating their establishment of working schools to give children some kind of industry. At Riverside, the legacies of Protestant attitudes towards work continue to shape a sensibility that children need to be formed as disciplined, productive, and industrious, but with an emphasis on unlimited personal ambition that was lacking in their historical predecessors’ engagements in forming children. Despite this, the children nevertheless found means of exercising ‘tactical interstitial agency’ (Oswell 2013) in this environment. For example, one boy told me how in their RE lesson that day they had been learning about why Christians celebrate Easter. He explained that their teacher had been reading a story from the Bible,

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and then one boy had disrupted the lesson by asking a question. I asked him what the question had been. ‘He asked what a virgin is,’ he said, ‘but he only asked her to make her say that word.’ Woven into this aspiration to affect these children’s lives was not only an emphasis on economic achievement, but also a distinctively white middleclass, private school ethos. The school borrowed elements of public school institutional culture, such as school houses. Each day began with silent individual reading in house groups, and at lunch, students sat on house tables, where they served each other food and were not allowed to start eating until everyone had been served. At the church one Sunday, Andy spoke of this as an achievement: ‘Some of the children didn’t even know how to use a knife and fork when they arrived at the school.’ Occasionally, the teachers had classical music playing quietly in the background and reminded students that they should be able to hear the music at all times. One lunchtime, Miss Morris reprimanded the whole dining hall because some students had been speaking to their friends on other tables. She said: ‘I want to see you have grown-up conversations with those sitting opposite or next to you, rather than behaving like children.’ The desire to improve students’ cultural capital extended beyond learning about news stories, to their learning to cook dishes such as risotto in ‘gastronomy’ lessons and their being given university-style tutorials by PhD students in subjects such as philosophy and history of art. There was also a very strong emphasis on ‘social responsibility’ as one of the main values of the school. When I chatted with students about what they thought the most important school value was, by far their most frequent reply was ‘inclusion’. The school leaders and church leaders also often talked about the importance of the idea of ‘community’ in terms that challenged the simultaneous emphasis on individual personal ambition. At the end-of-year awards evening, for example, Andy gave a talk in which he celebrated Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream speech’ as ‘probably the greatest speech ever given by any human being to a group of people’. He went on, ‘speaking as one Baptist minister to another, I’d like to say: Martin, it was the best speech that anybody has ever given in known history, but, I think WE’VE got a dream.’ This sense of the importance of collective rather than individual vision and action, and of an ethic of social responsibility, was reiterated at awards evenings and assemblies throughout the year, and students were given many opportunities to get practically involved in projects related to this ideal of social responsibility which they became very engaged with, such as fundraising for Riverside’s food bank or various forms of environmental action. Yet the focus on cultivating a self-driven ethic of hard work and personal ambition— accumulating social and cultural capital within themselves as a means to achieving ‘success’ in terms of a self-chosen ‘great career’—nevertheless had the effect of privileging a neoliberal norm of personhood.

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This formation of self-reflexive, competitive, ‘successful’ students related more broadly to the effects of neoliberal practices in the marketization of education, in which institutions are also judged against these logics. While the norm of ‘inclusion’ was emphasized by the teachers and the church, at both the school’s awards evening and in church services, the fact that the school was heavily oversubscribed was remarked on primarily as a mark of the school’s ‘success’, rather than a cause for sadness at those who would be ‘excluded’ by this. Elisha (2011) describes how his conservative evangelical subjects’ critique of middle-class affluence reflected their internalized ambivalences about class. Riverside’s ambitions to transform the lives of children relates in a different way to the conflicting ways in which church members experience their classed and racialized identities. Occupying positions of relative cultural and political power, church leaders were also reflexively conscious of the social and spiritual injuries of class and race, and this animated their moral ambitions. While the everyday practices of the school appeared to reify the cultural dominance of white middle-class norms, as the metaphors of ‘social and cultural capital’ positioned the children’s own cultural knowledges as a ‘lack’ (Skeggs 2004a: 91), at the same time, the ultimate desire of church leaders and the teachers was to challenge social and racial inequality through creating greater social mobility for these children. Thus, Miss Morris emphasized she wanted there to be ‘no glass ceiling for the kids at this school’. As Riverside’s aspirations for ‘inclusion’ and ‘the transformation of the local community’ were translated in the setting of the school, they ended up looking very secular. While there were continuities with the emphasis on forming hard-working children in the ragged schools, the emphasis on personal success and aspiring to rise to pinnacles of political power and influence was a marked shift from the deferential attitudes the ragged schools aimed to inculcate. These aspirational ideals were something that most of the students had internalized. When I attended community lunches, students often spoke with me about what job they wanted to have when they were older. One girl said to me over lunch one day, ‘I’ve got lots of options. I could be a midwife, or a nurse, or a fashion designer.’ Another boy said he wanted to be an embryologist and a footballer. He explained, ‘I want to go to university first and do medicine so that I have a job after I’ve finished with the football.’ The girl sitting next to him, wearing a hijab, said that she wanted to do ‘something with art’, while the boy sitting opposite her said that he wanted to do ‘something in football’. Other students mentioned that their ideal jobs would be prime minister, football manager, lawyer (a popular choice following a school visit to the Royal Courts of Justice), primary schoolteacher, and car designer. ‘What did you want to be when you were our age?’ was something they also frequently asked me, and they questioned me about what being a sociologist was like, and whether I enjoyed my job.

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Most of the students told me that they liked their school and mentioned that they really appreciated ‘the chance to interact with other people’. One boy, Saifal, said to me at the end of Year 7 that he thought he had changed over his first year at the school: ‘I used to be fairly shy, but I’m much more confident now.’ Some students were conscious that their school day was long. Chatting with two girls, Lena and Natalia, Lena said that her previous school had finished at 3.30 p.m., whereas here it was 5 p.m. The conversation turned to TV, and Natalia commented that she watched ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’ but didn’t have time to watch much else, ‘because school finishes at five, then I go home, do my homework, have supper, and then there’s not much time to watch TV’. Several of them characterized the school as ‘strict’. When I asked one girl about whether the school was similar to her primary school, she said, ‘That was pretty strict too, so yeah. Like we weren’t allowed to talk in the corridors there either.’

CONCLUSION: NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF ‘M O R A L S E LV IN G’ Debates about whether the state should fund faith schools often suggest that faith schools pose a potential threat to liberal educational ideals of developing individual autonomy, rationality, and self-determination as they seek to inculcate religious beliefs and values, or they present faith schools as contributing to social segregation through admissions policies that select students on grounds of faith. At Riverside Secondary, in contrast, students were from a wide range of religious and non-religious backgrounds, and the ideal of self-determination was seen as a key ideal that should be developed in the students. Indeed, the moral ideals and convictions that Riverside sought to inculcate in the children were not conservative religious commitments but rather a Weberian sense of a duty to form oneself as a productive, selfgoverning subject who aspires to realize their ‘dream job’, a norm also pervading contemporary educational cultures. This ethos can be traced back to the legacies of the Protestant work ethic and to a pervasive neoliberal norm shaping the subjectivities of teachers and church members in their efforts to shape and enable children’s futures in ways that they saw as challenging existing social inequalities. Looking at evangelicals’ engagement in education through these lenses of neoliberalism and class affords a more nuanced picture of evangelicals’ desires and practical provision of educational services beyond simplistic stereotypes of all evangelicals as reactionary fundamentalists fearful that their children are at risk from a hostile secular society, or of faith schools as exacerbating forms of religious segregation. Their engagements with education

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are also revealing of their desires and aspirations for the future of society and how they imagine their role in working towards that in relation to their engagements with children. The narratives circulating at Riverside Church about their work with children can be seen as forming not only children but also the adults engaged with this work in specific ways. As Rebecca Allayari argues, people involved in charity work are engaged in ‘moral selving’, a process of ‘creating oneself as a more virtuous, and often more spiritual, person’ (cited in Elisha 2011: 132). For Riverside Church leaders, these aspirations were shaped through their reflexive awareness of the advantages afforded by their own situated, classed identities, and a sense of a duty to share these cultural resources with others. As Victorian evangelicals’ guilt-driven energies drove them to seek to save the children of the poor, so the energies, efforts, and resources expended by those at Riverside Church in setting up Riverside Secondary were also a means of actively seeking to improve society around them through challenging existing social inequalities, with schooling seen as the key to this process. Thus while their holding on to a distinctive sense of a Christian ethos might seem to place them in line with the traditionalists in terms of the place of religion in education that Fancourt described (2017), in reality their understanding of schooling as a means of building a better future was more in line with the ‘progressives’, demonstrating the complex ways in which religious ideals can be interwoven within contemporary educational landscapes. Although at times the ways those at Riverside Church spoke about the academy appeared to ‘other’ the urban children around them, this was held simultaneously with a strong desire to challenge the stigmatized representation of the poor. Andy, for example, appeared in public debates condemning Channel 4’s programme ‘Benefits Street’, and the church frequently reiterated that central to ‘community transformation’ is ‘doing things with people, rather than to or for them’. How might we understand these seeming contradictions? A number of scholars have argued that the liberal subject may be seen as fundamentally divided, animated by both rational, self-interested, and utilitarian impulses and by ‘various forms of disinterested love—charity, motherly love, benevolence, compassion’ (Feher 2009: 35). We might conceptualize neoliberal subjectivities as similarly divided. Andrea Muehlebach (2012) notes that much recent scholarship on neoliberalism has placed itself firmly in the Weberian and Foucauldian traditions of studying forms of self-formation through rational means to accrue virtues of work, thrift, and productivity. She argues that neoliberal market rationalities, however, also contribute to specific corollary effects, such as modes of other-orientation and fellow-feeling that exist in productive tension with the dominant ethic of calculative rationality. We might therefore understand neoliberalism as ‘a force that can contain its negation—the vision of a decommodified, disinterested life and of a moral community of human relationality and solidarity that stands opposed to

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alienation’ (Muehlebach 2012: 25). She argues that there is a morality that is intrinsic to what might appear as ‘immoral neoliberalism’, which although it appears to negate marketplace logics is emotionally integral to its functioning. Thus, within the neoliberal public realm ‘circulates both an opulence of material wealth and an opulence of good virtue; this public hinges both on aggressive acquisition and clean conscience’ (p. 27). Following Muehlebach, we might understand the privileging of middle-class norms of reflexive and productive self-formation—which shaped Riverside’s engagements with local children—as formed both by the classed background of Riverside Church leaders and prominent church members and also by neoliberal logics of accountability and measurement, which encourage faith-based organizations involved in welfare and education to be able to deliver clearly measurable outcomes (Dinham and Jackson 2012). The corollary of these entrepreneurial logics shaping their engagements in education is this simultaneous ‘opulence of virtue’ (Marx, cited in Muehlebach 2012: 23), a swelling of compassion and moral feeling for the children of the urban poor, comparable to that animating the Victorian evangelicals whose stories they retell. Both contemporary and Victorian evangelicals might therefore be seen as exhibiting ‘an oscillation between and mirror imaging of markets and morals, “reason” and sentiments’ (ibid.: 30). The interrelations between class and evangelicalism here thus contribute to particular moral aspirations for education, which have continuities with historical evangelicals’ engagements, but are also distinctively shaped by contemporary neoliberal education policies. Further research on how religion, class, and neoliberalism are interwoven within educational cultures has the potential to deepen insight into the ways in which religious organizations’ involvements in education are implicated in contesting or reproducing social inequalities, and the changing place of religion within schooling.

POSTSCRIPT: ADDRESSING THE L ANGUAGE OF CAPITAL While Riverside Secondary Academy seemed to perpetuate neoliberal norms, Riverside Primary Academy suggests an alternative way of thinking about social relationality. While Riverside Secondary Academy was from its inception bound up with the ethos of Riverside Church, Riverside Primary in contrast had a more ambivalent relationship with the church. When I interviewed the head teacher, Lou, she told me that they were already a successful school when the church approached them about becoming part of Riverside Hub, and the then head teacher had told them to ‘get lost’. She explained that the majority religious identification of children in their school was Muslim,

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with non-religious following that, and some Christians, with a handful of Buddhists and Hindus, ‘so why would we want to become a church school?’. She said that it took them over a year of consultation with the governors to decide that it would work for them. Lou said that in many senses their ethos was the same as it had been before they became part of Riverside, which was about wanting the best for every child, wanting them to be able to do their best, and to support the local community. She motioned to the Riverside logo that was on the strap of the lanyard she was wearing, saying ‘some of us don’t like these’. Riverside’s ‘core values’ were at times emphasized at Riverside Primary in similar terms to Riverside Secondary. When Andy gave an assembly at the school, he emphasized the importance of individual hard work and selfdiscipline, much as was the case at Riverside Secondary. He began the assembly with a magic trick which impressed the children, and then talked about how there is ‘no magic’ to getting what you want in life: ‘There is no magic to it, if you want to achieve something, you need to keep practising and working at it.’ He repeated this for emphasis, ‘There is nothing magic in life—only hard work and lots of practice.’ The teachers at Riverside Primary also privileged other dispositions too. For example, in assemblies in which children were commended for particular achievements, this included whole classes or groups of students being recognized for their care for the environment, and individual students were acknowledged for such things as ‘having fun at the school carnival, because that’s a really important thing to be able to do’. Riverside’s core value of ‘inclusion’ was emphasized, but this was primarily expressed in terms of an ethic of democratic relationships to be embodied in everyday school life, rather than the future-directed socio-economic ‘inclusion’ of achieving a ‘dream job’. This ethic was enacted in everyday mundane interactions in the school. As the children in the year group I was spending time with that morning arrived and sat in their places, they greeted their form teacher by his first name—‘Morning Jack’—with several girls and boys chatting with him about the football game that had been on television the previous night. The children then had their morning assembly. As they walked into the bright school hall and lined up in rows, they each placed their hands on the shoulders of the child in front of them before they sat down, a tactile gesture marking a sense of togetherness. Lou then said, ‘Good morning everyone’, and they all replied, ‘Good morning, Lou’, looking around at each others’ faces as they did so and all offering the greeting in sign language to symbolize the inclusion of those with disabilities. The theme for that morning’s assembly was ‘goodbyes’, as it was nearly the end of the school year. Lou said that she wanted their help in learning how to say goodbye in different languages. She asked which of them could say goodbye in Arabic. Lots of hands went up, and one boy answered, ‘Salaam Alaikum’. Lou asked for volunteers for some of the languages that children in the school spoke: Bengali, Portuguese, Yoruba,

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French, German, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Burmese, Mandarin. She had a go herself at saying some of the words, asking the children if she was pronouncing them correctly, with an Italian-speaking boy, Tomaso, helping her to say ‘arrivederci’ like an Italian. Lou asked one of the boys who had a Polish father and Portuguese mother how his father said ‘bye’, and he answered that his father says ‘bye’ in English. Throughout this discussion with the children, Lou emphasized that the children were helping her to learn and thanked them. She then said that some of the staff were leaving the school that year to go to new schools and new houses and asked the children for their suggestions about what might be nice ways to say ‘goodbye’, with the children suggesting things like writing cards for them. She affirmed each of their suggestions, saying that she had been teaching a long time and had a box with all the cards that she’d been given by children and parents over the years, ‘and it’s a very nice thing to be able to look at those sometimes’. She then asked everyone to close their eyes, which they did, and then, after a pause for silent reflection, said, ‘If you believe in God or Allah or some higher power, now would be a good time to ask them to help you to say “goodbye” well to the people you have been working with this year.’ While schools with a high percentage of students for whom English is a second language are often criticized in right-wing media with an antiimmigration tone, in this assembly we see recognition of how the children’s diverse ethnicities and cultural knowledges enabled them and Lou to learn from each other. The children at Riverside also recognized this ethic of inclusivity and equality as something they valued about the school. One girl, Emma, told me that the school emphasized that ‘it doesn’t matter what religion you are; if it’s a special day, we’ll talk about it, like Ramadan, if you’re a Muslim, or Jewish holidays’, and when I asked her about what she thought about the school rules, she said, ‘There are rules, but the rules are really good, like you can’t make fun of someone because of what religion you are. That makes you feel safe.’ The approach to social relationality embodied in this assembly can be contrasted with the assembly at Riverside Secondary at the opening of this chapter, in which the children were encouraged to watch the news to ‘improve their cultural capital’, and their own understandings about why they might watch the news were rejected in comparison with the teacher’s ‘correct’ understanding. While Bourdieu’s use of the language of ‘cultural’ and ‘social capital’ has been the subject of extensive critique, this has yet to permeate work on religion and class, where the terms tend to be used uncritically. Skeggs argues that while Bourdieu’s approach to class explains perfectly the middleclass and aspects of working-class inability to inhabit entitled dispositions (2004a: 90), it fails to account for what exceeds economic metaphorical models of capital in terms of exchange, investment, and accumulation. The language of ‘capital’, in both class analysis and in its circulation beyond this, privileges a

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property-owning model of subjectivity that can accumulate different forms of capital to itself. However, Skeggs argues that we need a language to ‘understand how those who cannot or do not want to make property out of their relations to others live and move through social space. It is not enough to represent them as lack or the negative experience of the dominant symbolic, for this always presents them in a zero sum game’, with the lack of knowledge or refusal to participate in middle-class cultures pathologized in terms of individual moral fault, ‘a failure to be enterprising or to be reflexive’ (p. 90). Skeggs therefore proposes that as well as the notion of capital, we should acknowledge forms of affect that are beyond the abstraction of metaphoric models of exchange. While the logic of capital reproduces the moral hierarchies and degradations of class, the concept ‘affect’ is, however, perhaps an insufficient theoretical redress, as it arguably still leaves little conceptual space to unfold the complexities of human subjectivities that we see in the conflicted moral ambitions of Riverside Church leaders. The limitations of the concepts of ‘capital’ and ‘affect’ raise questions about how we articulate the ontology of the social and how this shapes our thinking about class. As ‘one of the major mechanisms of global and national inequality, one that determines how we know and evaluate ourselves and others’ (Skeggs 2004b: 44), class matters in understanding the contemporary interrelations of religion and education and forms of religious upbringing, and it is important that we find analytical vocabularies that do not themselves further perpetuate existing inequalities in children’s lives. The way in which the children’s linguistic abilities were acknowledged and celebrated in this assembly at Riverside Primary accords with Jacques Rancière’s (1991) critique of Bourdieu. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière attacked Bourdieu for presuming the ignorance of his objects of study: ‘in the realm of education, the militant instructors in La Reproduction who need the legitimacy of the system’s authority to denounce the arbitrariness of that legitimacy; and the working-class students excluded from the bourgeois system of favors and privileges, who do not (and cannot) understand their exclusion’ (Ross 1991: xi). Rancière argues that in conceptualizing the social, we should not start from an axiom of inequality—even if this is the empirical reality we face and wish to challenge—but rather from an axiom of equality, so that in thinking about education, we should begin with a principle of the equality of intelligences, recognizing both the value of the knowledges that others have, as well as our own conditions of ignorance. Lou in many ways sought to embody this axiom of equality in her relationship with children at Riverside Primary, situating herself as learning from the children’s knowledge, and engaging the children in co-crafting the ethos of the school so that, for instance, they had a sense of ownership of the school rules. Such an axiom also invites interrogation of the pervasiveness of a master narrative of human life in terms of competition. As Lori Beaman puts it, ‘States have taken up the banner of

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competition, assessing citizen performance on their productivity and ability to perpetually increase it, all in relation to others who are struggling to do the same’ (2017a: 190). The social imaginaries at Riverside Primary invite us instead to reflect on alternative understandings of the social in terms of cooperation rather than competition and the survival of the fittest. This axiom of equality is also deeply rooted in evangelical traditions, underlying the sacralization of ‘inclusion’ and the moral drive to challenge social injustice that we see at Riverside, even if this is often expressed in neoliberal logics that are in tension with this ethic. Striving for a vocabulary with which to approach the interrelations of religion, education, and class that begins from an axiom of equality does not mean failing to recognize the injustices and inequalities caused by class, but rather acknowledges that the analytical languages we use are not separate from the worlds that we study and can play a part in perpetuating damaging social logics. Reflecting on the discussions of ‘cultural and social capital’ at Riverside Secondary, we might say, ‘A simile that has been absorbed into the forms of our language produces a false appearance which disquiets us. “But this isn’t how it is!”’ (Wittgenstein 2009: 53). Responding to the alternative social imaginaries performed at Riverside Primary invites further inquiry into the interrelations between religion, education, class, ethnicity, and race, and the ways in which these allow or foreclose children’s agency—both present and future—in particular ways. It also encourages us to question how we might understand social relations in ways that both acknowledge and yet also seek to think beyond the logic of capital and the privileging of the propertizing individual subject, attending more closely to alternative spaces of ethical agency being shaped by both children and adults.

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5 School Visitors INTRODUCTION During the period of my fieldwork, the National Secular Society published a report, ‘Evangelism in State Schools: The Role of External Visitors in Publicly Funded Education’ (2013), claiming that evangelical Christian groups intent on converting pupils were being allowed into state schools. This received media coverage, with the BBC citing the report stating that there had been ‘a marked increase in the number of parents contacting the National Secular Society with concerns about external visitors to schools exposing their children to unwelcome and wholly inappropriate religious evangelism and proselytization’.¹ The report argues that there is a growing problem of ‘publicly funded schools being targeted and exploited by evangelical groups as part of their missionary work to relay a particular set of beliefs to young people with the ultimate aim of conversion’ (National Secular Society 2013: 3), and that these external visitors to schools are ‘primarily concerned with evangelization rather than education’ (ibid.). The report states that against a backdrop of declining levels of religious affiliation and attendance in the UK, particularly among younger age cohorts, it is understandable that evangelical groups see targeting children as a priority. It cites the concerns of Scripture Union that ‘children and young people are under growing pressure to adopt secular values, with less than 5% having any regular contact with the church’ (ibid.: 16), and of a group called Christians and Sheffield Schools (CaSS), who state: ‘An American study found that nearly half of all people who become committed Christians did so before the age of 13 (43%), with 64% finding their faith before they were 18 . . . CaSS believes the small mustard seeds we plant in a child’s life are important’ (p. 7). The report claims that UK evangelicals are ‘imitating a model from the United States, largely orchestrated by the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), a worldwide organization “dedicated to seeing every child reached with the

¹ From http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-24491511 (accessed 9 May 2018).

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Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, discipled and established in a local church”’, and notes that in the US, such groups have successfully attempted ‘to use the public education system . . . to advance a fundamentalist agenda’ by exploring ‘a stealth strategy that relies on low visibility’ (ibid.).² The low priority given to RE and collective worship in many schools (Conroy et al. 2013) together with shortages of specialist RE teachers, the report states, provides ‘an ideal environment for evangelical groups to exploit’, as organizations such as ‘Assembly Angels can step in to help busy teachers with “meeting the standards set down by the government on collective Christian Worship and Religious Education”’ (Assembly Angels, cited in ibid.: 9). The material presented in the report appears to indicate that there is a growing clash between evangelical groups and schools’ educational aims. The report argues that by ‘disingenuously labelling their evangelism as “educational”, well-organised and often well-funded evangelical groups and individuals are able to pursue their missionary objectives to “bring children to Jesus” by providing schools with subjective and manipulative teaching resources, delivering lessons . . . and by preaching to pupils during school visits’ (ibid.). The ‘duplicity of their approach is perfectly illustrated’, the report states, by the following comments of a Christian schools worker: ‘We’d never ever got to grips with the relationship between education and evangelism. It’s the dark shadow in the closet of schools work. To the churches we talked evangelism. To the Head Teachers we talked education. We prayed the two would never meet’ (cited in ibid.). The report states that evangelical school visitors are teaching creationism, ‘inappropriate views on social and moral issues such as celibacy, abortion, and gender equality’, and presenting ‘ethical and moral issues, such as environmentalism, as uniquely Christian concepts’ (p. 12). As well as visiting schools, a number of Christian evangelical organizations are also, the report states, highlighting ‘school chaplaincy as a vital part of their plans to fulfil their aims in the future’, enabled by the freedom the academies programme affords. The report also expresses concern that evangelical groups ‘are not limiting themselves to lesson time or collective worship, they are also impinging on other academic or leisure activities: lunch times and after school activities (sometimes forming clubs), day trips, reflection days, whole mission weeks, and a “residential experience”’ (p. 10). To what extent is it the case, as the report claims (ibid.: 11), that there is ‘a growing and sophisticated movement, very much focused on exploiting the state education system “to go and make disciples of Jesus Christ among children”’? The report’s assertion of the steady growth of a ‘child evangelism movement’ that is ‘exploiting’ schools is difficult to ascertain on the basis of ² This is part of a wider media circulation of the idea of an increasing mobilization of evangelicals in the UK linked with conservative evangelicals in the US. For full discussion, see Walton et al. 2013.

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the data offered in the report, which is mainly based on online research focused on the self-presentation of a list of evangelical organizations on their websites, together with a very limited number³ of parents’ perspectives. Whether an evangelical presence in schools is expanding in the way the report suggests, there do in some cases appear to be growing tensions associated with evangelical visitors in schools. When I interviewed a children’s worker at a conservative evangelical church in the north of England, she spoke about how some of the parents from a local junior school had complained to the National Secular Society after members of the church had given a Christmas assembly, accusing them of being ‘hate preachers, misogynistic and homophobic’.⁴ When I asked her about the content of the assembly, she said that they had been dressed up as shepherds, retelling Luke chapter 2, ‘and we had the verse repeated through the assembly, where the angel says, “Don’t be afraid, I’m bringing a message of great joy for the people . . .” And we were saying it as a refrain, as shepherds, through the assembly, and it was up on the screen, and the kids started joining in . . . So the complaint was we were getting the children to say the verse, although we hadn’t said, “Say it”, they just joined in as we said it.’ She had also encountered a complaint when she was a children’s worker in another church. That church had been accused of misleading parents and children by using a Doctor Who image to promote a summer club they were running, entitled ‘Doctor Phew and the Tardisodes’, and encouraging children to ‘encounter the Ultimate Time Lord’. She said that she had asked local schools to distribute the postcards, and they’d been happy to do so, ‘like they give out sports clubs and music groups’, but someone who was ‘a rep for some humanist association . . . went to the press with this whole vulnerable children thing, that we were deceiving them’. She said the press were not very interested, ‘so they just ran an article saying someone had complained. But actually, it worked in our favour, it was just free advertising. But then the humanist went to the BBC, and they got in touch and talked about suing me.’ She said that the church asked a copyright lawyer to look at the case. The lawyer advised them that they hadn’t broken copyright as they had used an iStock image, but the BBC still wanted her to change the name of the club, saying, ‘Please don’t use the Doctor Who name for it . . . We just don’t know what you’re going to be doing, and we don’t want to be linked to anything religious.’ The children’s worker also ran after-school clubs and trips such as outings to bowling alleys for local children, which she said they occasionally advertised in assemblies, but she said that generally these were ³ The report states that there has been ‘a marked increase in the numbers of parents contacting the National Secular Society with concerns about external visitors to schools’, but does not give a number. The views of five individual parents are mentioned in the ‘Parents Perspectives’ section of the report, three of whom are based in Sheffield. ⁴ The church was still involved in delivering assemblies on a more regular basis at a number of other local schools.

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more advertised ‘through word of mouth . . . because we don’t just want schools thinking we’re going in to advertise or infiltrate, or whatever’. Despite the growing tensions suggested by the National Secular Society report, we know very little about external visits to schools made by evangelicals (or other religious organizations), or about evangelicals’ contemporary engagements with children and young people in spaces outside churches more broadly. In her study of the history and contemporary realities of the Sunday school movement and Christian youth work in England, Naomi Thompson notes that further research is needed to explore domains outside of churches, and ‘[i]n particular, schools work would be worth some consideration, as it has become a significant part of many paid Christian youth workers’ roles over recent decades’ (2018: 189). In comparison with the National Secular Society, Thompson presents Christian youth workers in schools in a more positive light, suggesting that this phenomenon bears the legacy of the origins of the Sunday school movement in terms of a desire for community engagement. Sunday schools, Thompson argues, were originally a radical movement, designed to meet working-class children’s needs for basic education.⁵ However, over time, as they became more attached to churches, Sunday schools began, Thompson argues, to withdraw from focusing on the needs of the local community, and by the 1960s what had begun as an outreach movement had become essentially childcare provision for parents attending churches. Thompson suggests that against this increasingly inwards-facing focus over the twentieth and early twenty-first century, churches’ schools work and other outreach activities ‘may represent churches engaging with (as opposed to withdrawing from) their communities’ (2018: 189). What then are the contemporary lived realities of evangelicals’ schools work? Is this work a means of converting children and young people or is it a form of community engagement? Against the backdrop of the kinds of tensions that the National Secular Society describe, what, in practice, do the relationships between evangelical organizations and churches, children, parents, and school staff look like in everyday life? This chapter explores the relationships that children’s workers developed with local schools, examining their visits to schools to deliver assemblies and the after-school, lunchtime, and holiday clubs that they fostered through their relationships with the schools. I focus here primarily on St George’s and Riverside, since St John’s did not work with local schools in this way. St John’s situated its work with children primarily in terms of nurturing children within families who attended church, speaking of ‘partnering with their parents’ in terms of focusing on ⁵ They met on Sundays because this was children’s only day off from work, and at the time faced opposition from churches for teaching on the Lord’s Day. As a means of picking up skills, especially reading, they were incredibly popular, and by the 1820s, as Cunningham notes, most working-class children were attending at some point in their childhood (2006: 131).

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teaching the Bible ‘within a loving Christian community’.⁶ However, it is worth noting that some members of the church were also involved in local ‘outreach’ work, in terms of linking children in local Bangladeshi families with English-speaking volunteers from the church who helped them with their homework on a regular basis.⁷ In what follows, I consider how those at St George’s and Riverside spoke about the aspirations underlying their work with schools and the everyday realities of these engagements and children’s experiences of them. I demonstrate that while St George’s saw the ultimate aim of their work with schools as both drawing children into the church and serving the local community, Riverside rejected any traditional proselytizing motivation, and saw their work as bound up with an ideal for ‘community transformation’, reflecting a shift in how some evangelical churches understand their place in wider British society. I argue that for both churches, their schools work occupied a significant place in how they understood their work with the local community, as children’s capacity to stand for the future enables churches to understand themselves as shaping the future through their engagements with schools.

ST GEORGE’ S: CULTIVATING RELATIONSHIPS During my fieldwork at St George’s, Katie, the children’s worker, used to lead an assembly at St George’s Primary School once a week. The children at the school were from a range of Christian, Muslim, and other religious and nonreligious backgrounds, with diverse ethnicities, including a high proportion of Arabic children. The assemblies followed broadly Christian themes such as ‘Fruits of the Spirit’ over the course of each half term, which were decided by the school, and Katie’s assemblies slotted in with other assemblies each week, with some of these also focusing on themes related to Islam or other faith perspectives. Katie’s assemblies followed the same pattern each week. On the stage at the front of the school hall, she would set up a small wooden shelf on the stage and cover it with a small purple and silver embroidered liturgical ⁶ This correlates with the Evangelical Alliance’s large-scale survey research on UK evangelicals, which considered engagements with children and youth, and found that there was, ‘despite regular activities in some places, a comparative lack of enthusiasm and commitment’ for working with ‘unchurched’ children and young people (White 2015: 128). ‘It does appear’, White notes, ‘that the primary interest and focus is on the children and young people within the Christian “fold” ’ (ibid.). ⁷ Other conservative evangelical churches I visited were more involved than St John’s in working with local schools. The children’s worker in the church in the north of England mentioned earlier, for example, delivered regular assemblies in a range of different local schools, and also ran after-school clubs and trips for local children, although, as noted above, she was cautious about how the links between church and school were perceived.

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cloth and place a wooden cross on this together with a candle in a round blue glass candle holder. The hall was always decorated with displays marking themes such as ‘Black History Month’ or ‘Journeys’, with gym ladders and benches pushed against one wall, stacks of plastic chairs against another, and the school dining area located to the side of the space. One child would be playing the piano as the children filed in, and the school’s expectation was that they would come into assembly in a calm, orderly way, and sit down quietly on the floor, legs crossed and sitting up straight, with teachers seated on chairs at the ends of the rows, and one boy in a wheelchair sitting at the side. An assembly one September morning followed the typical format. Once everyone was seated, Katie began by saying, ‘Let’s start by lighting our candle’, and asked if it was anyone’s birthday. When no one put their hand up, she said, ‘OK, so Year 6, you led the way in beautifully, let’s have someone from Year 6.’ The teacher selected a girl to come up and light the candle, which she did carefully. This was followed by a song. Two Year 6 boys operated the computer to project the slides, displaying lyrics and playing the music through speakers for the children to sing along to. The children generally sang the chosen song with enthusiasm. These were most often songs with no explicit reference to religion, emphasizing instead particular values, such as the importance of ‘community’ or working together collectively. Occasionally Christian songs such as ‘Kumbaya’ were used, which the children usually greeted with somewhat less enthusiasm. That morning, the song focused on healthy eating, with lyrics such as ‘What goes in, must come out/We must learn to respect our bodies’. After the song, Katie said that we would be carrying on looking at the theme of ‘feeding the world’. She spoke confidently and engagingly, only occasionally referring to her printed script, saying that ‘last week we looked at how God created the world and how amazing our world is, and how there should be enough in it for everyone. But there is one problem: greed. People are greedy.’ She told the children a story about two families: ‘the Havees and the Havenots. The Havees . . . look like they’ve got a lot of stuff—clothes, cars, house, boats, and money. And the Havenots have the clothes they are wearing.’ She went on, ‘It’s not bad to have stuff, but there was one problem with the Havees. They refused to share. They were greedy. Now every time you hear me say the word “Greedy” I want you guys to shout “BOO!”.’ She told a story about the Havenots asking the Havees for some help when they didn’t have enough food, but the Havees refused to help. The children booed loudly every time she said ‘Greedy’. Katie went on to reflect on the story, ‘Now this is quite a sad story, but it happens a lot of the time in our world. God gave enough food for everyone, but some people took more than their share, and left none for others.’ She said that this story reminded her of a story in the Bible and asked the children if they would help her by doing actions to go with the story. She held up a sheet of paper with a list of actions for them to do whenever she said any of the

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words in the story: ‘hungry’ (rub tummy and groan), ‘rain’ (pitter patter on the floor with fingers to sound like rain), ‘Elijah’ (repeat the word ‘Elijah’), and ‘ate’ (rub tummy and say ‘yum’). She then told a story of Elijah being hungry and a woman cooking for him even though she was hungry, and her flour and oil being miraculously replenished. The children performed the actions enthusiastically throughout. Katie engaged the children by asking them at several points what they thought would happen next. At the end of the story, she asked them, ‘Who do you think was filling up the jar and the jug?’ Several children raised their hands, and a girl wearing a hijab answered, ‘God’. Katie added, ‘He was so pleased that the woman was sharing everything that she had that he kept on giving her enough. Elijah and the woman and her boy ate bread and weren’t hungry all the time it didn’t rain. God designed us to share our things with other people.’ She went on, ‘Unfortunately many people in the world do not think this way, and people do not get treated equally around the world or even in this country. But I want you guys to think this week about how we can help other people around the world be treated equally, because that is what we are going to learn about next week.’ She said a short closing prayer, and the children, who had been sitting quietly throughout, bowed their heads as Katie said, ‘Dear God, thank you that you made each of us. Help us not to be greedy, but instead to share with each other all that we have. May we be able to help each other out in times of need.’ She invited the same Year 6 girl who lit the candle to come and blow it out. A teacher then directed the children in leaving the assembly, scolding some of them for not walking neatly in a straight line. Katie’s assemblies always followed this same pattern, and the teachings they focused on usually related to particular moral teachings, such as the importance of patience or caring for the environment, which she then situated in relation to a particular Bible story. She said that when teachers used Bible stories in assemblies, they tended to use ‘obvious ones’, and that ‘she liked to take a different angle’, for example, when they had looked at the story of Moses parting the Red Sea, she had looked at it ‘from the standpoint of Moses’ son, as he would have been about the same age as some of the children’. Over the course of just over a year observing these weekly assemblies, I did not see any assemblies on the kind of controversial moral issues that the National Secular Society report highlighted. As well as the assemblies, Katie also led a weekly lunchtime and after-school club, called ‘Glow’, a name the children had chosen themselves. These clubs were voluntary for the children, with about thirty-five children (out of a total of 250 children in the school) attending each week, the large majority being girls (of a range of ethnicities and religious and non-religious backgrounds). The clubs were held in the school hall, and during my fieldwork I accompanied Katie and helped her with the games she led. The children seemed very excited about the club each week. One week, as we were walking to the

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playground before the start of the club, four small girls literally screamed with excitement, ‘Is it Glow? Aaagh!!!’ I initially found their level of excitement surprising, and when I asked Katie about this, she said that she thought they were mostly excited about the prospect of being able to play inside, as they didn’t have any other lunchtime clubs. The club did not have any ‘Christian’ content or teachings: it was always a session of fifteen minutes of games, or occasionally drama activities, led by Katie, which all the children who attended seemed to enjoy. I asked Katie whether the children saw the clubs as a ‘church thing’. She replied that she thought for them it was ‘just a fun thing, but they would think of me as someone from the church’. Over the course of the year, I saw that for many of the children, the relationship they were able to develop with Katie probably also contributed to their excitement, as many appeared to value a relationship with an adult who was not a teacher. Chatting with her about this one morning, Katie commented how at the after-school club the previous afternoon, one boy had said to her, ‘Katie, can you be my mummy?’ Katie said that she had talked to him and said he already had a mummy, who she said she knows and is ‘really lovely’, and that the boy (who was from a South Asian background) had then said to her, ‘Can you be my white mummy?’ Katie’s aim through the assemblies and clubs was to build relationships with local children and their families through regular, long-term contact, and through these relationships for them to start wanting to come along to the more overtly ‘Christian’ Kids Church on Sundays. This did sometimes happen: there were a couple of fairly regular attendees at Kids Church, whose parents did not attend church themselves, who had requested to come along after going to the clubs at school. In addition to the assemblies, Katie also ran a week-long holiday club for local children, with letters about this for parents available in the school. The intentions for this were both to meet a practical need for childcare provision during school holidays and to offer the children ‘Christian teaching’, as Katie put it at a meeting for volunteers helping at the club. She said to the helpers at the meeting—all white women in their twenties and early thirties—that only a few of the children attending the club came to church, and that there would be a few Muslim children coming, and one Jewish child, but that most of them go to the church school, and so would be familiar with Christian input. In an emotional tone of voice, she told us that there was lots of excitement about the week, and that people in the church had had ‘prophecies about what God’s going to do during the week’. She said one person had ‘a picture of the children as being like flares sparking off in all different colours in a dark sky’, and that someone had stopped her in the street the other day to say that they had an image of the club as ‘sowing seeds that will grow in all different places’, and added that one mum of a girl who goes to the church had texted her to say that her daughter was more excited about the club than anything else.

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Katie explained to everyone that she wanted it to be ‘unapologetically a Christian week: the parents have signed up to a church-run week, and so there will be Christian teaching’. She said that in the group discussions ‘obviously it will need to be respectful and not pushy for children there who aren’t Christians, but at the same time, it should present a message that God loves us and helps us in difficult times’. She said that if any parents had any problems with that, they should be directed to her. She said in terms of how ‘Christian’ it would be, it would be ‘more full on than the assemblies, and less so than Kids Church’, and that ‘although most of the children go to church schools and so will have heard these things before, this is a really great opportunity for them to hear these things and meet Christians who are really living it out’. She said, ‘It’s just great to get them through the doors and into the church.’ Katie talked about how the other day she had been sitting in the square where the church was and chatting with a family, and they went into the church together, ‘and there was a sense that they were doing something naughty, which I thought was funny, because I just want them to feel like it’s their church’. She said that the little girl—who doesn’t come to church— then said that it was her church, because she goes to the school, which sometimes had services there, ‘so I said she was right, it is her church. And I just really want them to think that, that this is their space, where they can come, and people will listen to them.’ Katie explained the practical details for the week, which was themed around the idea of a ‘space journey’, with Jane and Sarah, two of the volunteers, commenting ‘it’s so exciting!’ as she talked through everything. Catrina, a volunteer who worked in the creative arts, explained the task that she was leading, involving the children building large rocket costumes. ‘There’s nothing especially spiritual about it’, she said, ‘but I don’t believe there’s a difference between the spiritual and the secular: it’s all spiritual.’ Katie said that she would be on the door to meet the parents at the start and end of each session, ‘as I see building relationships with the parents as central here’. Katie asked all the volunteers to pray for the families and the children, in particular that they would have a growing sense of excitement, ‘and for their relationships with each other and with us, and also for the sports coach, who is not a Christian’. Everyone shut their eyes and bowed their heads to pray, with most people there contributing spontaneous prayers, asking that the children would be ‘open to hearing about God’, and that ‘their families might be touched through what goes on’, that they would experience the church as a ‘safe and secure space’, that the week would be fun and that their relationships with each other would grow, that they would experience the week as a ‘week of stability in their lives’, and that through the week ‘people in the area will come back to St George’s’. Catrina described how she was thinking about an image of the children shining as stars, and said that she used the King James Version

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of the Bible, ‘so it sounds a bit antiquated, but I have an image of the children shining as stars in a crooked and perverse generation, and Lord, may their light just shine out brightly to those around them, that they might see your truth’. She also prayed that ‘if the time is ready’, then the children would ‘find you and turn to you’. Given the aspirations for the holiday club articulated at this meeting, there was in practice less ‘Christian teaching’ at the club than I had anticipated. Each day ran from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with the morning devoted to sports activities, held in the playground of St George’s School. The children then came down the road to the church, with some of the boys hurtling excitedly downstairs to the large open area under the main space of the church, where they had a lunch of sandwiches, crisps, and fruit, made by the volunteers. The Wednesday of the week was a typical session. The church volunteers and I each sat with one of the tables of children while they were having their lunch. Shadiah, a small Arabic girl, asked me if we could all play ‘the alphabet game’ we had played the previous day and suggested that the theme could be ‘animals’ (which involved each player in turn naming an animal for each letter of the alphabet), and the children on the table all seemed to enjoy this. After lunch, the children headed to a side room to watch some of Toy Story, sitting on sofas and cushions on the floor, with some of the smaller children settling themselves onto volunteers’ laps, while other volunteers cleared up after lunch. After this, we went into the main space where everyone sat on sofas. Katie had divided the children up into teams for the week, and she awarded points for how each team had done in their sports that morning. Some children were competitive about this, booing other teams when they were awarded points. The children then spent some time at their team tables making pictures of the solar system. I sat next to a boy called Ahmed, who asked me what planets were and how he should draw them, but most of the other children needed little help. The children then went to sit on the sofas again, barging into each other to nab the best spots. Each day of the week, Katie was telling a consecutive portion of the biblical story of Daniel to the children. That day’s instalment involved Daniel and his friends refusing to worship a large idol made by ‘King Neb’. The children were more attentive than the previous day, although a couple of boys were crawling on their stomachs towards the microphone Katie was speaking from. One of them, Cole (eight years old), tried to lift up the microphone base, and one of the helpers moved him away. The children then went to sit at their tables, and Katie and Jane divided up a large block of clay onto paper plates and asked the children to make rockets out of this, passing around a small model rocket for inspiration. ‘Miss, can you help me?’ Ahmed asked me, then several of the others at the table I was with also asked me for help, although some of the older children offered to help them too. The children in one of the younger groups were less focused on the task, and

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I could see Cole running around, throwing his clay on the wall. The children then played a team game involving an egg and spoon race, and then Katie gave them all cardboard masks of space men to colour in. At the end of the final session of the club on the Friday, after the children had been collected by their parents, the volunteers were sitting, tired, round a table, with mugs of tea, updating their Facebook statuses with photos from the week’s activities. I asked Katie if she needed help clearing things up. She said that we needed to move the large cardboard rockets the children had made, as the church’s weekly ‘homeless evening’ would be held in there the following evening, but that the cleaners would deal with everything else. Sarah, a postgraduate student, commented that during the club the previous year, Maddie, who had been running it, had read out rules for the club each day. Katie said that she hadn’t felt she needed to: ‘I’m not really a rules person, and the kids had a sense of where the boundaries were.’ She commented that several of the parents had said to her when collecting the children that they wanted to sign up for next year’s club and had asked her why they didn’t run it for two weeks. Through these activities, we see the clear missionary aspirations underlying how Katie and others at the church saw these engagements with the schools. Yet at the same time, they also saw the after-school and holiday clubs as playing an important role in how the church was ‘serving the local community’, which for the parents were practically very useful in providing holiday and after-school childcare, as demonstrated by their desire for the holiday club to run for two weeks.⁸ For the children, who were from a range of religious and non-religious backgrounds, while the assemblies were a routine part of their week, in much the same way as their other daily assemblies, the clubs afforded those who chose to attend spaces that they (or their parents, in the case of the holiday and after-school clubs) valued.⁹ For the children, one of the things that they seemed to like about these spaces, in comparison with the more disciplined everyday spaces of school, was the relative freedom they afforded. While in school, they were not allowed to run and were expected, for instance, to enter and leave assemblies in silence monitored by their teachers, in Glow and the holiday club they were afforded significantly more freedom to run about and express themselves in spaces that were usually highly regulated. ⁸ In the United States, a significant proportion of churches offer daycare facilities of different kinds. Edgell (2006: 135) notes that the Religion and Politics Survey found that 46 per cent of churchgoers were in congregations offering daycare. Edgell’s research found that most of the congregations offering these kinds of facilities are large (having more than 250 regular Sunday worshippers), and generally offer daycare to church members either exclusively or at reduced rates (ibid.). In contrast, the holiday clubs at St George’s were available to any local families, with no preferential rates for church members. ⁹ The holiday clubs further expanded in response to local demand after I had finished my period of fieldwork, running during half-term breaks as well as school holidays.

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RIVERSIDE: ‘ TRA NSFORMING COMMUN ITY’ Like Katie, staff at Riverside Church were involved in visiting the schools linked with the church and they also spoke about these activities in terms of building relationships with local families and children, although there was little explicit conversionist agenda here. Church staff gave assemblies on a much more occasional basis than at St George’s, although, in contrast with Katie’s assemblies, there was little explicit reference to Christian teachings. When Joy, for instance, Riverside’s Community Development Officer gave an assembly at Riverside Secondary Academy, there was no stated religious or moral message, and the focus of her assembly was music: she taught the children to sing a simple round a cappella, with the children enthusiastically stomping their feet and clapping in time with their singing, creating an atmosphere of joyful effervescence. The church’s children’s workers did not run regular lunchtime or after-school clubs at Riverside Primary, although Becky and Joy did go in on a regular basis for activities such as reading with individual children, and sometimes visited some of the children’s families, whom they had got to know through the church’s ‘Lift Off ’ holiday club. When I asked Lou, the head teacher about this, she said that Becky and Joy ‘know some of the difficult families very well’, but that Rob, Riverside’s children’s and families’ minister and, officially, the chaplain for both academies, ‘is not very present here, whatever he may tell you’. Although little present in Riverside Primary, Rob was more present in Riverside Secondary Academy, where he ran a weekly lunchtime club for Year 7 students, ‘Rise’, together with Jon and Naomi (both undergraduate ministry students on a placement with Riverside). Students at Riverside Secondary sat in ‘house’ tables for lunch, and each week two tables were allocated to go straight after lunch to spend the remainder of their lunch break—usually about ten minutes—in Rise. One of the early sessions I attended followed the usual format for these. As the other students were clearing up the dishes, the two selected tables filed into a room near the front of the school. Rob asked everyone to stand in a circle. The students were fairly chatty, and Rob said to them, ‘We don’t have the same rules in here as in lunch, but I do need you to be quiet when I am speaking, otherwise you can’t hear me.’ He said that they were going to play a game, and got out his smart phone. ‘Cool, that’s an iPhone 5,’ one of the boys said. Rob introduced a game of ‘name the artist and song title’ for five songs he played on his phone. Most of the students engaged enthusiastically, correctly guessing artists such as Rihanna and Miley Cyrus, and Rob named a girl who got three points as the winner. He then got them to stand in a circle again. A small eleven-year-old boy, Ryan, said, ‘I can’t believe I’m missing my break time for this.’ Rob said that it had been a bit rushed today, but that next time there would be more time for games. Ryan said, ‘I don’t want to be here,’ to

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which Rob responded, ‘Ryan, can you leave and wait outside for me.’ ‘Good, cos this is shit,’ Ryan commented on his way out. Naomi and I glanced at each other, but Rob did not register a response and instead addressed the other students with his message for that session. He asked them to put their hands up if they listened to songs that made them feel happy. He said that sometimes when we’re sad, we listen to sad songs, and sometimes when we’re happy, we listen to happy songs, but that ‘we can also affect our mood by changing our soundtrack’. He said, ‘Life can be a bit like that too’, and that we can affect the way we think about ourselves ‘by changing what voices we listen to, what they tell us about ourselves’. It was by that point time for the students to go to their afternoon lessons, and Rob told them to go straight to class. Ryan was waiting outside the room as everyone departed, and Rob sent him to Miss Morris, the head teacher. While students did not usually challenge church staff as directly as Ryan did, the format of these Rise sessions—consisting of a short game, followed by some kind of moral teaching or aim for ‘character development’—was the same over the course of the year, and I saw little excitement from students about Rise in contrast with the obvious enthusiasm that many of the children at St George’s had for Glow. Ryan’s comments are suggestive of the reason for this: in the course of a long school day at Riverside Secondary, the students had little free time and did not appreciate having this stripped from them in having to attend a ‘club’ they did not choose. Staff and volunteers from the church also organized a regular holiday club for children from Riverside Primary Academy, ‘Lift Off ’, which took place during half-term holidays. At a planning meeting for volunteers before the October Lift Off, Jon, who was leading the meeting with Becky, another of the church children’s leaders, explained the background to Lift Off. He said that it had been running for a few years and that sometimes they had run activities open to all children at Riverside Primary, and other times they specifically targeted children on free school meals, with the aim of helping the children ‘to know that they are valued and special’ and ‘for them to be able to do things in London that they otherwise might not be able to do’. Jon said that he had been talking with the head teacher about some of the issues facing some of the families in the school, and that these included depression, alcoholism, and social isolation, and that families ‘don’t necessarily know how to access services that are available to them’, ending up ‘more and more isolated’. Therefore, the aim of what they were doing in working with families was, he explained, ‘to provide a network of support the families wouldn’t have otherwise’, and that this year, Lift Off would be only for children entitled to free school meals, with Riverside providing funding. In contrast with Katie’s desire for there to be Christian teaching at the St George’s holiday clubs, Becky and Jon took it as a given that this would not be the case at Lift Off: Becky said to the volunteers that ‘although we can’t tell the kids that God loves them’, she

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hoped that God’s love ‘will just show through our actions and attitudes towards the kids’. The first Lift Off during my fieldwork, in the October half term, was loosely organized around ‘movies’, and the overall theme, Becky explained to the volunteers, was the question of ‘what is character, and how do we build character’. One main aim, Becky said, was to encourage the children to think over the course of the week ‘about who they are and who they want to become’, but another aim was also to develop relationships with the families ‘so that they know that the church is there to support them’. Becky and Jon ran through a risk assessment Jon had prepared for the week and through safeguarding policies and protocols, talking about things like being sensitive to the children’s needs, likes, and dislikes, and not using inappropriate language or physical contact. Jon explained to the volunteers that often the children want hugs, ‘but I tend to avoid that, and tell them that I can’t hug all the children’. Becky said that sometimes ‘if a kid comes up and hugs you, they are wanting affirmation, but we should try and keep our arms up high when hugging them’. Jon said that we should avoid being alone with the children, and that as a man he felt especially uncomfortable when children come and try and sit on his lap. He and Becky then talked through discipline policies and procedures for acting on anything the children might disclose to them that caused them concern. Reacting against the tone of this, Molly, one of the volunteers, said, ‘It’s almost like we’re spying on them.’ Lift Off was held each half term in the space of Riverside Primary or Secondary Academy, with outings during the course of the week. In the second Lift Off during my fieldwork, in the February half term, themed as ‘Lift Off Safari’, the children visited an activity centre run by a Christian organization in rural Kent. Becky divided the children into two groups by age, and two young white leaders from the centre explained the first activity of the day— climbing—and showed the children how to put on safety harnesses and helmets. The children seemed mostly to enjoy the climbing, although many were afraid at points, with one boy, Khalid, letting out small screams at points, and one girl, Erin, protesting once she was half way up the wall, ‘I can’t go any further. I want to come down.’ The leaders encouraged the children to do different challenges, such as climbing the wall blindfolded so that they would have to trust their friends telling them where to put their hands and feet. The afternoon was taken up with ‘team development tasks’. The instructors explained in authoritative tones how teamwork should involve things like listening to each other and communicating. As they spoke, I felt conscious of how they as posh, white, male, able-bodied, Christian instructors were positioned through this interaction as having a particular kind of moral authority so that they could explain what ‘good teamwork’ looked like to this group of BAME children selected because of their eligibility for free school meals. The tasks in this exercise involved things such as the children standing

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on a narrow plank and having to arrange themselves in alphabetical order. The children varied in their levels of engagement and there was a chastising tone to the instructor’s request for them to listen to each other. After one of the tasks, Jon told the children that they needed to listen more respectfully to the instructor. As I followed them around their tasks, one girl, Aisha, commented to me that she was not enjoying them. After the ‘team development tasks’, the children went inside briefly for a break and a fruit snack. As they were cleaning their muddy shoes before the next activity, Aisha said, ‘I hate nature! I hate it!’ Their final activity was ‘high ropes’. The children were again harnessed for this and had to climb up a very high ladder, then a pole, and then leap to catch a trapeze. As I watched them, I thought it looked frankly terrifying. Some of the children screamed and whimpered during the task. Khalid, when he was half way up, said, ‘I want to come down’, but the instructors encouraged him to keep going to the top. They were also encouraged to do a ‘spiderman’ descent on the rope, which involved descending upside down. The overall aim seemed to be about developing bravery in making the leap to the trapeze, and they were also encouraged to work together in team games on the ropes. The instructors gave the group a lift back to the train station in a minibus. One of them chatted to me as he drove. I asked if he’d grown up in this area. He replied that he went to boarding school in Oxfordshire. He spoke in both an evangelically inflected manner—saying, for example, that ‘the Lord has really provided for us’ in their finding new volunteers—and using corporate sector terminology, commenting that ‘there is a lot of turnover in this sector’, and talking about the ‘different packages’ that their centre could offer for residential visits. The following day, which was gorgeously sunny, began with vaguely safarithemed games (such as ‘lions vs. gazelles’ tag) in the playground, led by Jon. The children all seemed to enjoy these games and got very involved. We then headed inside for lunch (cheese, ham, tuna, or jam sandwiches, made by the church volunteers and children’s leaders at the start of the day, followed by fruit). Aisha’s parents brought delicious warm samosas for the volunteers. Becky instructed the children in how to clear up after lunch and then Jon addressed them about safety for their afternoon trip, which was a visit to the South Bank. He explained that this was ‘one of the top tourist destinations in London. Millions of people from all round the world visit every year, which means it will be busy.’ He asked the children what they needed to do to be safe, and they volunteered practical suggestions such as staying in pairs and listening to their leaders. Becky gave each child a slip of paper with her phone number and said that if they got lost, they should go into a shop and ask ‘an official person, not just anyone’ to call that number. Jon then explained that there would be challenges for different teams, and that they would also be given money to give to the street performers along the South Bank.

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When we got to the South Bank, we stood outside a French patisserie and I read out to the group that I was with the list of photographs that they had been asked to take by Becky and Jon for their ‘team challenge’, such as photos representing ‘diversity’. One boy, Tyler, pointed out the statue of Nelson Mandela which we were standing next to. Jon said that they could take a picture of this for one of their challenges, as ‘Nelson Mandela changed the way we think about diversity’, and he took a photo of the children gathered around the statue on his phone. We then walked to the riverside area, where tourists were thronging. A couple of children commented that they wished they had money to go on the carousel or to buy some popcorn. Tyler had his picture taken standing with a living statue. We watched a group of Ghanaian performers doing acrobatic and contortionist feats, which the children enjoyed, putting 10 pence coins in the dustbin lids passed around at the end of the performance. One of the girls, Leah, asked Jon hopefully whether he’d recorded the performance on his phone. We then went and sat in a grassy area, where the children ran down a slope excitedly and made a human pyramid for one of the team challenge photos, before moving on to watch another street performer. En route back to school, the children posed for photographs in front of an impressive graffiti wall. Jon asked them whether they had had fun. Tyler and Aisha said that they had, but Leah said, ‘No. What do you want, a medal?’, before adding that she actually did have fun. We arrived back at school at 3 p.m. The children in my group asked Jon what time they would be able to stay at school until, and Leah complained that she wanted to stay until later. The children all sat in their groups in the hall, and Becky gave out small prizes to some of them for good behaviour. Leah was the only child from the group I was with who wasn’t given a prize. Becky then put on the Lift Off theme tune, House of Pain’s ‘Jump Around’, and the children all jumped around to this enthusiastically. Becky thanked all the leaders and asked the children to thank them all while leaving, which they did, often accompanied by fist bumps, and the parents also said thank you. After the children had left, Becky asked the volunteers to head to the school staff room for a debrief, where she handed round custard creams and bourbon biscuits, while Lucia, one of the volunteers, made everyone mugs of tea and hot chocolate. Rob was leading the meeting and began by commenting on how great it had been to see ‘how much the kids’ behaviour has improved’ over the two years he’d been involved with Lift Off. Becky then asked everyone to share their highlights over the week. Jon said that his highlight was that on the train the previous day, some of the children had been talking about how they’d never been out of London and said that it was sad that this was the case, but also ‘great’ that they had the opportunity to take them out. Rob joked that one of his highlights was that when he was chatting with one of the staff from the activity centre the previous day, when he found out that Rob was a Christian,

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‘it was like he lapsed into this foreign language of all sorts of cheesy Christian jargon’. Becky asked everyone to talk about their groups. Most volunteers said that their groups were fine, although Lucia said that she was not used to dealing with ‘kids who answer back’ and she couldn’t imagine how they must have been two years ago if their behaviour had improved, as Rob had said. The group made jokes about Rob’s dancing skills as a gazelle, and then Jon said, jokingly, ‘Sorry to bring a downer on all of this, but can we close in prayer?’ He kicked off, thanking God that ‘the kids got to see the cultural value’ of things they could do in London. Drawing the prayers to a close, Rob said that he would share a reflection he’d written for the teachers at Riverside Secondary (as part of his role as chaplain) that he felt was appropriate here. He read out the two-minute reflection from his phone, beginning by talking about how lots of Christians have an ‘escapist theology, which is all about the promise of a better life in the hereafter’, but ‘what we’re about is transformation, a transformation from the ground up . . . every day sowing seeds for a better future . . . This is what gives us purpose, a buzz.’ Rob’s words can be seen as articulating the moral aspirations underpinning church staff and volunteers’ engagements with children through the clubs they run via Riverside Primary and Secondary Academies. In contrast with the desire to draw children and families to attend church through such activities at St George’s, at Riverside there was, as we will explore further in Chapter 7, a move away from an explicit evangelical conversionist agenda towards what we might see as a ‘transformationist’ imaginary. Within this, the church was understood as having particular moral resources to ‘transform’ children’s lives, for example, through encouraging reflection on their character or on their self-development. Those involved in this work, particularly in relation to Lift Off, understood this also in terms of their sharing cultural and practical resources with the children, such as their enabling children to see the ‘cultural value’ of activities in London or taking them outside of London. This positioning of the church as ‘giving’ these resources to the children was made pointedly clear when Jon emphasized in one of the Lift Off meetings that they should let the children know that the trips they were being taken on, for example to Madam Tussauds or London Zoo, ‘cost a lot of money’ and were therefore ‘treats’. This positioning of the church as sharing resources was interwoven with an emphasis on the idea that these were children in particular poverty and need that the church was helping. Rob emphasized at one of the Lift Off meetings that these were children whose family ‘can’t even afford lunch for them’. The othering of the children implicated in this line of thought was underscored when Lucia, one of the volunteers who’d brought her own children along to one of the Lift Offs, said to me, ‘It’s good for them to come, so they can see how lucky they are compared with these kids.’ In the years following my fieldwork, with increased reliance on food banks in the UK, Riverside has gone

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on to develop new initiatives in this area, by running lunch clubs, cookery classes, and mobile ‘lunch buses’ over the summer holidays for children. While those at Riverside positioned the children as in social, economic, and cultural need, we might however also discern what anthropologist Lisa Malkki describes in her study of international humanitarianism as ‘a coeval, copresent neediness on the other side, the neediness of the helper, the giver’ (2015: 8). Malkki argues that involvement in different kinds of humanitarian work makes it possible for people to feel ‘part of something other and bigger than themselves, to imagine themselves—through their own handwork and volunteer work—as members of a greater “community of generosity” and help’, and at the same time benefit from the social connections they experience through such work (p. 12). As Rob described their work at Riverside in seeking to bring about ‘transformation’ in the local community as ‘what gives us purpose’, so here we can also identify a need on the part of those involved in these engagements with children to be part of something greater than themselves, a ‘need to help’ (p. 3). Drawing on Alain Badiou, Malkki argues that a universal human subject is often split into a ‘passive and pathetic’ subject who suffers, and the active subject, ‘the one who identifies suffering and knows how to act’ (p. 7): on the side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on television screens. On the side of the benefactors, conscience and the imperative to intervene. And why does this splitting always assign the same roles to the same sides? Who cannot see that this ethics rests on misery . . . the world hides, behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man? (Badiou, cited in Malkki 2015: 7–8)

Within this splitting of the subject, the figure of the victim is often crystallized especially powerfully in the figure of the passive, suffering child, lacking in agency and interpellating the responsible adult who is called to help them. While recognizing the agency of the recipient of ‘aid’ is one way of combatting this splitting, Malkki argues that it is also important to acknowledge the neediness, weakness, and vulnerability of the ‘benefactor’ through attending to the ways in which they are themselves helped by their actions of generosity and giving (p. 8). In the case of those at Riverside, many of those involved in volunteering in projects such as Lift Off were, as described in the previous chapter, aware of their privilege as white and middle-class, and their volunteering or giving money to support activities like Lift Off provided a means for them to feel themselves as part of a larger community responding to the increasingly intense socio-economic inequality and child poverty in London and elsewhere in the UK. Yet while the vast majority of children who attended Lift Off did mostly seem to enjoy their time there and were reluctant to go home at the end of each day, it is worth noting that others occasionally questioned the extent of the practical difference made to local families by activities such as these. Whilst Lift Off was significant for how Riverside Church

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described itself at church services as involved in ‘community transformation’, one of the teachers I spoke with at Riverside Primary described Lift Off as ‘just peanuts [in comparison with their work in the school]—it’s just a few hours, three times a year, at half term, with only a few of the kids’.

CONCLUSION What do the different ways in which these churches engage with local schools reveal about the contemporary working out of evangelicalism in spaces outside of churches? At both St George’s and Riverside, volunteers and staff at the churches were involved in giving assemblies and running clubs as described in the National Secular Society’s report on ‘Evangelism in Schools’. Both churches saw these activities as means of building relationships with local children and families who did not go to church. In one sense, the pervasiveness of the emphasis on ‘building relationships’ and of ‘authentic relationships’ at both churches is suggestive of how ideals of relationality and ‘community’ become seen as goods in themselves within evangelical cultures. Yet at the same time, these relationships were also construed as having wider moral significance for the churches in terms of their engagement with secular society. At St George’s, in ‘backstage performances’ (Goffman 1959) such as praying with each other about this work, they articulated a narrative of their schools work both as a means of evangelism and of drawing children and families to the church and as a means of practically serving those in the local area through meeting needs for after-school and holiday childcare. They were therefore, in a sense, aiming to draw children to Christ, as in the National Secular Society report, although in practice the ways in which many of their activities such as Glow were experienced in everyday life had no obvious Christian teaching. At Riverside, in contrast, there were no descriptions of their schools work in terms of evangelism but instead a focus on seeing these engagements as part of the church’s work for ‘community transformation’. The ways in which Riverside staff took it for granted that they could not tell children that ‘God loves them’ indicates how their engagement in this schools work was shaped by their own secular sensibility that expressing religious views in interactions with children outside the church was inappropriate. This was also interwoven with a professionalized ethos shaping their encounters, leading them, for instance, to carry out a ‘debrief ’ at the end of each day of the holiday club and to hand out copies of detailed risk assessments to all volunteers. The particular emphasis at Riverside on the church as able to provide ‘character education’ for children indexes the history of British middle-class evangelicals’ othering of the ‘urban poor’. It is also suggestive of how ‘the moral’ can end up

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becoming one distinctive repository of ‘the religious’ in a wider secular context (Keane 2010). Attending to children’s practical agency and the ways in which this was either limited or enabled across different spaces, we see that children at times resisted the moralizing impulse of ‘building character’ at Riverside’s Rise club and some resented the fact that this stripped them of their free time, but that they enjoyed the lunchtime clubs run by St George’s or the holiday clubs, where play was a primary focus and in which their participation was their own choice. Attending to the lived realities of how religious organizations engage with children in spaces outside religious institutions opens up insight into a number of areas, revealing the ways in which children experience these interactions and the ways in which these initiatives respond to local needs. It also allows us to see the different desires and moral ambitions shaping adults’ engagement with this work and the everyday interrelations between the religious and the secular that are being shaped in these encounters. We might see those involved in schools work at both St George’s and Riverside as animated by their sense of the world as in need of salvation—understood in different ways in these two churches—and their sense of responsibility to work towards that salvation. At St George’s, salvation was primarily imagined in terms of a relationship with Jesus; at Riverside, it was imagined as a ‘community transformation’ for which those at the church are working. As individuals at both churches learnt through their participation in church to reflect on the idea of the Kingdom of God as at odds with the current realities of the earthly City, this shaped their subjectivities as divided or double, as they came to view their existence from two standpoints (Strhan 2015). This division of the evangelical subject contributes to evangelicals’ sense of their need to work towards their particular vision of salvation, shaped by their different imaginings of the Kingdom. Children’s capacity to stand for the future allows churches’ engagements with schools to hold a significant place in their thinking about how they as churches might work towards their imaginings of salvation, for example, in the picture articulated at both St George’s and Riverside of their holiday clubs as ‘sowing seeds for a better future’. The figure of the child here can be seen as embodying for adults ‘a principle of hope’ (Bloch 1995) that allows the adults involved in this work to regard themselves as agents of change, giving them, as Rob put it, ‘a sense of purpose’, while also meeting their own needs for social attachment and a sense of belonging to a larger community.

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6 Marking Times and Transitions INTRODUCTION One July afternoon, Becky, one of Riverside Church’s children’s workers, had arranged to meet up with two of the Year 6 children from Riverside Kids Church, Natalie and Malachi, who would be moving on to secondary school and to the church youth group, leaving Kids Church, from that September. I met Becky outside the Year 6 classroom at Riverside Primary. A bell rang to mark the end of school and the children headed outside. Natalie was wearing the school uniform of grey shorts and white polo shirt, accessorized with a black and white fabric headband. We headed towards the coffee shop near the school where we were meeting Malachi. When we got there, Becky asked Natalie what she would like. She spent a while choosing, before opting for hot chocolate with marshmallows. We sat at a table and Becky gave Natalie a copy of a book produced by Scripture Union called It’s Your Move: Your Guide to Moving to Secondary School. She asked Natalie to fill in a page of the book asking what she would miss about her old school, and about the scariest and best things about her new school. As she was writing her answers, Malachi arrived, dropped off by his mother, and Becky asked him to write down his answers to these questions while I got him another hot chocolate. Malachi attended a different primary school and was wearing a badge saying ‘captain’. Becky asked him what the badge meant, and he explained that he was ‘house captain’. Becky asked him the name of his house. ‘Luke’, he said, adding that the other houses were ‘Matthew, Mark, and John’. Becky and I laughed. Becky asked what he had to do as house captain. He replied that it meant going to meetings about sports day and the Christmas fair. Becky asked Natalie and Malachi what they would miss about their current schools. Malachi said he would miss the teachers. Becky noted that the book’s following page listed things that other children had said they would miss about their primary schools. Becky very much led the discussion, asking Natalie and Malachi to turn to particular pages in the book and to read things out. She asked them to look through some pages listing forty important things to think about when moving to secondary school, such as detentions, size, ‘zits’, and

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drugs, and to pick one thing from each page that they would like to talk about. They picked out tests/exams, detentions, arguments, zits, and size. Each point had a short paragraph devoted to it in the book and Becky asked them to read some of these aloud, for example, the paragraph about drugs. She asked if they ever heard anyone talking about drugs. Both said that they had, but that this was teachers rather than other students. Becky said that when she was at school, not many people used drugs, and that it was important for them to know that if anyone does offer them drugs, ‘it is fine to say “no”’. She also asked them to read out the sections on ‘boys (for girls)’ and ‘girls (for boys)’, which encouraged the boys to ‘try to get to know girls as your friends . . . Don’t worry about getting a girlfriend yet—there’s enough new stuff to get used to without that too!’ As they read these aloud, I felt conscious that this highly heteronormative framing was at odds both with the approach usually taken at Riverside Church and with how schools would generally cover these kinds of issues in sex and relationships education. Becky asked Natalie and Malachi whether people in their schools had boyfriends and girlfriends. When both shook their heads, she said smilingly, ‘I know that some people at Riverside Primary have boyfriends and girlfriends.’ She then asked Malachi to read out the paragraph about social media, which warned them that when online ‘people may not actually be who they seem to be’. Becky said that they needed to be careful about what they shared with others online and mentioned that she knew a teenager who told her that another teenage friend was being bullied on Snapchat. She asked Natalie and Malachi if they knew about this kind of thing. Both nodded, and Natalie said quietly, ‘It’s easier to bully people online, because you can say things that you wouldn’t say to someone face to face.’ Becky asked if they knew about staying safe online. Both nodded. She said that there were images online of ‘things you wouldn’t want to see, like people without many clothes on, or doing things with each other that you wouldn’t want to see’. Natalie and Malachi were quiet, giving the impression that they had heard this kind of warning before. Becky then asked Natalie and Malachi to turn to a page in the books with Psalm 139 written in a very contemporary translation. She asked Malachi to read a brief explanation from the bottom of the page explaining what a psalm is, and giving each of them a pen, she asked them to underline bits of the psalm they liked, and bits that surprised them in squiggly lines. Malachi was fidgety by this point and said he was hot after drinking the hot chocolate and asked what time it was. He and Natalie both nevertheless did as they were asked, munching on rice krispie cakes and muffins that Becky had bought as they selected parts of the text. Becky asked Malachi which bits of the psalm he liked. Malachi said that he liked the bit about how even if he soared on wings above the ocean, God would still be there. Becky then asked them to look at another page that showed some of the things that other children said they were going to miss from their primary school—listing

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‘friends’ and ‘fun stuff like discos’—and asked Malachi to read this aloud. Becky noted that there was a page in the book for them to get autographs from their friends when they left school and another page for photos of their friends. ‘I don’t need that,’ Malachi said. ‘We’re having a year book.’ Becky asked Natalie and Malachi if she could pray for them. They said yes, and closed their eyes. Becky said a short prayer, asking that they would know God was with them as they moved schools, and then she asked them if they could say a prayer for her brother when they got home, as he had had an accident that day in the factory where he worked, and was having an operation that evening. Both children picked up their bags ready to go, and Becky phoned Malachi’s mother to let her know we’d finished. ‘I’m looking forward to pizza this evening,’ Malachi said. I asked what they would be doing over the summer. Malachi said he was going to a PGL¹ camp, and Natalie said she was going to the Isle of Wight for a week. Natalie got out a box of brightly coloured elastic ‘loom bands’ to make a bracelet. Malachi asked if he could have some, and Natalie gave him a handful. Malachi’s mother arrived to collect him, and Natalie walked home by herself. After they had left, Becky commented that the book she had given them was produced for mainstream use in schools, ‘but I don’t know if the content means that most schools wouldn’t use it. It’s maybe too Christian? Even the things about “boys (for girls)” . . .’ She trailed off. In this interaction, we see a fairly mundane way in which adults at Riverside sought to mark and encourage children’s reflexivity about what is constructed as a significant transition in their lives as they move from primary school to secondary school, a passage often understood as representing the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence in contemporary Western societies. Within the history of the study of religion, coming of age and initiation rites have been extensively explored, while in school religious education lessons in England and Wales, children are typically taught about the significance of birth rituals such as baptism, brit milah, or Namakarana, and of coming of age rites such as bar or bat mitzvah, or confirmation across ‘world religions’. Yet during my fieldwork, I found that the performance of such conventional rituals was in practice relatively rare. This fact can be seen in the context both of a wider national decline in baptisms and confirmations in the post-war period² and of evangelical churches’ traditional aversion to ritual, cultivated by a historical legacy of the Protestant reformations and Puritan anti-ritualism (Keane 2007). At the same time, the rapid pace of change in pluralistic, mobile societies interrupts the idea of such rites more broadly. ¹ PGL is a secular organization providing school activity and holiday camps for children in the UK, established in 1957. ² See, for example, statistics demonstrating the overall decline in baptisms and dramatic drop in confirmations in the Church of England in the post-war period: http://www.brin.ac.uk/ figures/churches-and-churchgoers/church-of-england-baptisms-confirmation-sunday-school/ (accessed 13 August 2018).

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When the young may know more than their elders about many aspects of contemporary life, who is qualified to initiate? When personal autonomy and individual choice are celebrated in wider society, the very idea of ritual authorities or of submitting to the wisdom of one’s elders is challenged (Grimes 2000: 90), while at the same time, the very idea of adulthood is itself now something we cannot take for granted (Lee 2001). In his 1956 Haskell Lectures on the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, Mircea Eliade stated, ‘It has often been said that one of the characteristics of the modern world is the disappearance of any meaningful rites of initiation’ (1994: ix). Yet despite this wider decline in traditional rites of passage, St John’s, St George’s, and Riverside did continue to construct and mark particular times and transitions as significant in children’s lives. In what follows, I describe the marking of particular times and transitions in the children’s lives and consider what these reveal about how evangelical churches are responding to the shifting contemporary significance of rites of passage.

RITES OF P ASSAGE AND THEIR AFTERLIVES The classic anthropological understanding of rites of passage, as formulated by Arnold van Gennep, describes them as ‘ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined’ (1960: 3). Van Gennep’s approach theorized rites of passage using spatial metaphors, describing a rite as like a ‘domestic threshold or a frontier between two nations’, a place that is ‘neither here nor there’ but rather ‘betwixt and between’ (Grimes 2000: 6). For van Gennep, all rites of passage demonstrated a tripartite pattern of separation, transition, and incorporation, through which a transformation is effected, and while the term ‘rites of passage’ is usually used to refer to life cycle or life crisis rituals, van Gennep also included seasonal festivals, pilgrimages, territorial rituals, or any pattern of behaviour demonstrating this threefold pattern.³ All rites of passage, for van Gennep, were rooted in a notion of life being made up of transformations or passages: For groups, as well as for individuals, life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and rest, and then to begin acting again, but in a different way. And ³ Despite this emphasis, van Gennep mostly focused on rituals accompanying individuals’ life stage or status changes, with the consequence that the term ‘rite of passage’, as Turner notes, ‘has come to be used almost exclusively in connection with these “life crisis” rituals’ (Turner 1982: 24). Turner sought to revert to van Gennep’s broader sense ‘in regarding almost all types of rite has having the processual form of “passage” ’ (ibid.).

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there are always new thresholds to cross: the thresholds of summer and winter, of a season or a year, of a month or a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity and old age; the threshold of death and that of the afterlife—for those who believe in it. (Gennep 1960: 189–90)

Van Gennep’s threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation has been taken up widely in ritual theory, most famously by Victor Turner, who presented initiation as the definitive rite of passage, and one of its phases—the transition, or liminal stage—as definitive of all ritual (Grimes 2000: 122). For Turner, all genuine rituals were transformative, and he used the term ‘ceremony’ for rites that are merely performative rather than transformative. Building on van Gennep’s scheme, Turner was most interested in the first and second phases of ritual. In the first stage, separation, sacred space and time are distinguished from profane, and symbolic behaviour is introduced through which the ritual subjects become detached from their previous social statuses (Turner 1969: 94). In the second, liminal phase, the subjects are ‘ambiguous’, they are ‘neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’ (p. 95). The notion of rites of passage has been subject to criticism in subsequent years. Ritual studies scholar Ronald Grimes writes: It is time to go beyond rites of passage, exposing their limitations and questioning the model upon which they are based. In the West the model for all rites of passage (not just initiations) has been largely initiatory, dependent upon the themes and activities of men’s initiation: ordeals, secrecy, the promise of revelation, the hierarchy of elders and initiates, and so on. (2000: 336)

Grimes calls instead for attention to be given to moments of passage in life and an awareness of what rites—traditional and invented—are able to do. In what follows, I am concerned both with what we might see as traditional rites of passage—such as baptisms—and with the cultural afterlives of the notion of rites of passage in relation to rites surrounding birth, childhood, and transitions between childhood and adolescence.⁴ How, for example, do the ways in which particular moments and transitions in childhood are constructed relate to, carry, or reject the traces of older historical notions of rites of passage? The distinctiveness of children’s experiences of different rituals and rites of passage has begun to be explored through studies focusing on their experiences and anticipation of First Communion (Bales 2005) and the ‘as-if ’ quality of ⁴ Grimes notes that the term ‘initiation’ is overloaded, and it is useful to distinguish between rites of childhood (following birth but preceding entry into adolescence), adolescent initiations (effecting an exit from childhood and entry into adolescence), and adult initiations (which negotiate the passage from adolescence into early adulthood) (2000: 103). My analysis includes the first and second of these forms of rites.

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Shabbat and Seder rituals in Jewish free schools (Anderson 2011). Bales draws out the meanings that the children brought to First Communion as they ‘felt that they had to do these gestures right for Jesus’, and how the children created their own individual interpretations of the ritual as these ‘brought together their sensual experiences, intellectual understandings, and personal lives’ (2005: 6). Children’s engagement with rites also carries significant emotional resonances for adults in relation to them, and as such might be seen as offering windows into the complexities of relational and ‘family’ dynamics, ‘exhibit[ing] all the pathologies of family behavior but in a more focused way’ (Grimes 2000: 338). How, then, were different rites of passage and transitions marked at St John’s, St George’s, and Riverside?

S T J O H N’S The distaste for ritual permeating the history of evangelicalism shaped the ambiguous status of infant baptism at St John’s, which was the only distinctive rite surrounding birth or childhood that was performed here. The church practised infant baptisms in Sunday morning services, while also offering adults baptisms (usually in Sunday evening services) for those who preferred these. These baptisms followed an abridged version of the Church of England liturgy. The church was usually pretty full, as family and friends further swelled the already large congregation, usually distinguishable by being dressed in Sunday best, in contrast with the more casual attire of the Sunday morning regulars. The infants were sometimes dressed in family heirloom lace christening gowns, sometimes in smart outfits, and the baptisms were performed not at the medieval stone font near the church’s entrance but using a blue ceramic bowl—also used for distributing biscuits at the church’s lunch time meetings—filled with water on a table on the stage. One Sunday morning, David, the rector, welcomed everyone at the start of the service, and stated that ‘our theme this morning is rather a sombre one: God’s hostility to those who reject him’, demonstrating how the focus of services was little swayed by the inclusion of a baptism but continued to follow the decided pattern of preaching, working through particular books of the Bible one at a time. David’s welcome was followed by a traditional hymn, and he then invited the parents and godparents on to the stage for the baptism. Edward, the baby’s father, and Rachel, her mother, stood next to their older two children, holding baby Charlotte, wearing a white dress for the baptism. David said to the congregation that baptism is ‘just a sign and a symbol’, emphasizing that ‘we are washed clean only through Jesus’s death. Charlotte could be baptized one hundred times and it wouldn’t mean anything if she rejected the death of Jesus on her behalf.’

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The baptism followed the order printed on the service sheets. David invited the whole congregation to answer the questions that were addressed to the parents and godparents in the order of service, affirming their rejection of ‘the devil and all rebellion against God’, repentance of sin, and submission to ‘Christ as Lord’. When David picked Charlotte up to baptize her, she started to whimper, and then cried more vocally as he poured water over her head. ‘Quite right too,’ David joked. She stopped crying when David handed her back to Edward. There was little reference to Charlotte or the baptism throughout the rest of the service, although Pete, the curate who was preaching that morning, began his sermon by commenting that the text he was preaching about (a passage from Isaiah emphasizing the ‘wrath of the Lord’) might not seem the most obvious baptism text, but that he hoped that it would be relevant, and that Charlotte, when she was older, would be able to watch it ‘on iPad generation 6 or whatever’. He said that when bringing up his own children, it was helpful to teach them by looking at the example of others, ‘and this is what Isaiah is trying to do in this passage’. The anti-sacramental emphasis underscoring the ceremony—that the physical act of baptism effects no essential transformation in the baby—was reiterated in every infant baptism I saw. In another service, Pete led the baptism of baby Theo, and stated to the congregation that baptism doesn’t make a child a Christian: ‘It doesn’t wash away his sins, but the day that Theo trusts in the Lord, God will wash away all his sins.’ Reiterating this understanding, Pete asked Theo’s father why he wanted Theo to be baptized, and the father said to the congregation that ‘baptism doesn’t make you a Christian, but it shows a declaration of the desire to bring him [Theo] up in the faith, and the hope that one day . . . he will come to accept the faith himself ’. Following this service, I asked two church members I was sitting with, Hannah and Sam, about whether the choice to baptize infants or not is something that’s just left up to the parents. Hannah said that it was, because a lot of people come to the church from non-Anglican backgrounds. Richard said that he had previously gone to a Baptist church, and was baptized at the age of seventeen, before going to university. Hannah said that she and her husband had decided not to have their children baptized as babies, in order to let them make the choice for themselves, ‘because otherwise there isn’t anything for them to do, when they’re older, to show that they’ve made a commitment of faith for themselves’. She said that she was baptized when she was fourteen,⁵ and that because it had been such an important moment for her, she didn’t want to deny her children the opportunity of that. ‘It’s not because of any particular theological point,’ she added. I commented that I had been struck by the emphasis in the service that baptism doesn’t make you a ⁵ I did not see any younger teenagers baptized during my fieldwork: the baptisms I saw were either of infants or of young adults.

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Christian, and that it seemed designed to differentiate the ceremony from baptism in other Christian traditions. ‘Yes,’ Hannah said, adding, ‘they don’t have the line that they have in other Anglican services, “I sign you with the sign of the cross; do not be afraid to fight . . .”, which suggests that it is through the service that the child is a Christian.’ As Hannah’s comments indicate, the church—which was Anglican—did not practise confirmation. When I asked Deborah, another church member, about this, she said that she thought it was a shame that young people who’d been baptized as infants ‘don’t get to make an adult public declaration’. ‘There isn’t anything for teenagers and young adults like that?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she replied, commenting that while David was happy to do infant baptisms, ‘and stresses it’s just a symbol, he wouldn’t have the bishop coming and doing confirmations and conferring the Holy Spirit on people. Because that’s not right.’ In contrast with St George’s and Riverside, St John’s also did not draw on other seasonal rites of passage—such as Nativities—in which children played a central role. The only service for which children remained present for the whole duration during my fieldwork was the ‘all age carol service’, in which the children were invited to come and shake maracas, tambourines, and sleigh bells during the carols. In this service, the talk was given by the church’s youth worker, using props such as Christmas presents and a short sketch by two of the church staff to focus on the idea that ‘Christmas is all about grace’. The youth worker concluded his talk by telling the children that it doesn’t matter how young or old we are, ‘whether we’ve been to church lots or not at all . . . anyone can put their trust in Jesus and be rescued . . . We need to say sorry. Jesus will rescue us even though we’re bad.’ In other services, children were never present in church for the ritual of the Lord’s Supper (which was not a weekly occurrence), nor for what was constructed as the ritual high point of services: the sermon. The performance of infant baptisms crystallizes the ‘betwixt and between’ status of children at St John’s. While distancing these ceremonies from sacramental ritual, at the same time the performance nevertheless included ‘symbolic behavior [the pouring of water and the wearing of special clothes] . . . which represents the detachment of ritual subjects . . . from their previous social statuses’ (Turner 1982: 24). In Turner’s understanding of rites of passage, the liminal stage of the passage might be fleeting—as it would usually be considered in a baptism ceremony—or it can be extended indefinitely. At St John’s, the performance of a baptism explicitly pronounced the liminality of the child, which continued until the child was understood as making their own conscious commitment to ‘trust in the Lord’, although the end of this liminal status would not be formally marked through any particular public rite. While the infant in the ceremony of baptism had little agency, other than to cry in protest at the water being poured on her head, the church placed emphasis on the ideal of the agency of the older child or young adult being able to decide for themselves whether they

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want to follow this path (or face the ‘wrath of God’, as Pete’s sermon put it). At the same time, we might interpret the ritual of baptism here as one that is a rite of passage for the parents, in which their performance and public declaration of their desire to raise their children as Christians marks the transition to a new stage of being for them.

ST GEORGE’ S As at St John’s, some parents at St George’s chose to baptize their babies and young children, while others preferred to let them have the choice to be baptized when they were teenagers. Infant and child baptisms were performed more infrequently at St George’s than at St John’s due in part to the fact that the church would usually baptize a group of around five children together in one Sunday morning service. Preceding the baptisms one Sunday, there was the usual period of children’s songs, such as ‘God’s love is bigger than a burger’, and following these, a middle-aged male minister, Martin, invited the parents and godparents to come up to the front of the church, commenting to the congregation that some of the godparents were in New Zealand, but that they could see and hear what was going on via phone. There were five infants and children being baptized that morning, all under the age of two, two of whom were carried by their parents, wearing white christening gowns, the others in more everyday smart clothes. As at St John’s, baptisms were not carried out in the church’s stone font, but in a bowl of water on the stage, decorated with white flowers. The parents were all white and in their thirties and older, apart from those of one boy, whose mother was Japanese and father black British. Friends of the families photographed and filmed proceedings on their phones. The service followed the traditional Church of England liturgy, with reference to the devil omitted. As at St John’s, there was no giving of a lighted candle at the end of the service. After each child had been baptized, the minister asked the congregation to say to each child by name, ‘We welcome you’. Although St George’s promoted itself as ‘religion-free’ on its website, there was none of the distancing from sacramental ritual that pervaded St John’s, and little in the service that morning which felt like it might have been off-putting to those who didn’t attend church regularly, in contrast with the sermon about the wrath of God following Charlotte’s baptism at St John’s. There was a joyful atmosphere throughout, and in the Kids Church session following the baptism that morning, when the children were asked to list ‘happy things’, one girl added the baptism to her list (with other children listing such things as their friends or their football team winning).

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As seasonal rites, Christingle services had a prominent place on St George’s calendar, with Katie, the church’s children’s worker, beginning preparations in September and rehearsals for the children beginning in earnest in November. Although Christingle services originated from the Moravian Church in the eighteenth century, the first Christingle service was not held in the Church of England until 1968 (Podmore 2005). However, their popularity is growing, evoking—like Christmas markets and stollen—a distinctively northern European inflected nostalgia. The Christingle service at St George’s was a mix of the traditional and the contemporary. The church was decorated with evergreen foliage and red berries, with lighted candles on the brass chandeliers, a large Christmas tree with red, white, and gold decorations, red ribbon, and fir cones dotted around, and the lights around the church were dimmed so that the candles and white fairy lights provided a warm glow in the darkened space. When I arrived before the service, a very professional-sounding choir of around fifty singers were rehearsing, directed by a young woman with peroxide blonde and pink hair, accompanied by a large band, including violins and brass instruments. The Kids Church helpers were a hive of activity, setting up microphones and props ready for the performance and helping the children into their costumes, which had been labelled for each child at the dress rehearsal the previous day. I helped make tinsel crowns for the smaller children who were playing angels. One boy, Sam, didn’t want to put on his angel outfit, and his mother tried to persuade him, but each time she tried to put the outfit on, he took it off. The church was very full, with a racially diverse congregation, although there was an overall majority of white adults, with many local families who did not regularly attend church on Sundays there that morning. The first song, ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’, began with an acoustic guitar solo and was sung by the choir, followed by ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. After the first solo verse, the congregation joined in the singing as the children from Kids Church and the pre-school church group processed from the back to the front of the church, hand in hand in pairs. The performance began with four children from Kids Church acting out a contemporary family having a conversation, with the dad asking the children what they would like for Christmas, and saying, as a means of introducing the rest of the performance: ‘Woah, wait a minute. That’s a very long list. Do you remember the very special present that God gave us? . . . Okay, sit down, let me tell you . . .’ The choir then sang ‘Joy to the World’ and this was followed by a recording, which had been filmed a couple of weekends previously by a Kids Church volunteer who worked as a film director, of children from the church playing the role of angels auditioning for ‘Heaven’s Got Talent’. This looked, unsurprisingly, very professional, and elicited lots of laughs and ‘aahs’ when the children were edited to look especially cute. When Ronal, a boy I was sitting next to, saw himself on the screen, he smiled broadly and looked proud. There followed a more traditional

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Nativity sequence, albeit with contemporary touches, such as when Mark, playing Joseph, said to Lily, playing Mary, that they had to go to Bethlehem, she added, ‘We best be staying in a posh hotel.’ The service then followed this interweaving of traditional Nativity story, Christmas carols, short pre-recorded clips of the children, and a contemporary family discussing ‘the meaning of Christmas’, with the children all going up onto the stage together to draw this section of the performance to a close. When they were all in place, with the angels, shepherds, and kings standing around Joseph and Mary and the manger with a toy baby in it, lots of parents took photos of the scene on their phones, the tinsel in the angels’ costumes glistening in the spotlights. The children sang ‘Away in a Manger’, with the congregation joining in after the first verse. This was followed by a song called ‘Love Shone Down’, extensively rehearsed in Kids Church in the weeks beforehand, and the children performed the actions they had learnt enthusiastically and confidently. The congregation watched them with smiling faces, many of them filming the song on their phones, as the children sang ‘And love shone down, over the hills and down in the valleys . . .’, articulating an interpretation of the Christmas story as primarily about the idea of love. The vicar, James, thanked the children to loud applause from the congregation and said that there would now be Christingles to collect. ‘Airline-style stewards’, he explained, would direct people to collect the Christingles, and he asked that children under the age of eight be accompanied by ‘a responsible adult’. The children and adults all processed up as directed to collect their Christingles from the front of the church, with music playing in the background (both popular Christmas songs and Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’). Many adults took photographs of their children holding their Christingles, decorated with sweets and red ribbons, and the already festive atmosphere of the church felt intensified through the glowing candles and the smell of oranges. When everyone was back at their seats, holding their lighted Christingles, there followed another carol, ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’. Then James addressed everyone briefly, saying that the sweets on the Christingles represent the ‘great and wonderful things that God has given us. But the world is not always sweetness and light; there is darkness in the world. The candle represents that: that Jesus came to be the light in the darkness. How he did that is represented by the ribbon, which represents his life and death for us. That’s what we believe here.’ He asked everyone to blow out their candles at this point. Four young teenage girls from Youth Church then came up to the front to lead the prayers. By this point, some of the younger children were bored and had started running around the church as they often did at the start of Sunday services, while other children were standing on chairs next to their parents to get a better view. The first girl prayed for those by themselves at Christmas, ‘may they know how much you love them’, while the next girl prayed for those

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affected by the recent typhoon in the Philippines. Joe’s sister, Bethany, went last. She, unlike the other girls, spoke without any notes, with her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. She began to pray the Lord’s Prayer, but as she said the words, she stumbled over them and it became clear she couldn’t remember the following line at one point. There was an awkward silence, then the words were projected onto the screens, and everyone joined in with a palpable sense of relief. The service ended with ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, followed by what was marked in the programme as the choir singing ‘80s Medley’, including The Pogues’s ‘Fairytale of New York’, Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’, and Band Aid’s ‘Feed the World’. A few children danced spontaneously in front of the stage, and with the smell of mulled wine and mince pies beginning to permeate the room, it all felt very festive. Following the service, children and parents chatted, while some children ran around, clutching mince pies and bags of chocolate buttons that had been taped under each of the seats. The Christingle service can be seen as a rite of passage according to van Gennep’s broad conception. Turner comments that in contrast with initiation rites, which tend to ‘humble people before permanently elevating them’, seasonal rites ‘elevate those of low status transiently before returning them to their permanent humbleness’ (1982: 25). While the service was marked off as distinctive from normal church services through the festive church decorations, lighting, children’s costumes, presence of a choir, and the absence of the usual features of services at St George’s (such as a sermon or period of charismatic singing), it was the role played by the children that most set the service apart. While, as discussed in Chapter 2, children were visibly prominent in the opening section of Sunday services, the Christingle was unique in their speaking to address the whole congregation, in their writing and leading the prayers, and in their remaining with the congregation for the entirety of the service. The liminality of the celebration was expressed in this reversal of typical roles. Turner describes how liminal phenomena create experiences of communitas, ‘a “moment in and out of time,” and in and out of secular social structure, which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond’ (1969: 96). The joyful collective effervescence of the children and adults singing together regularly punctuating the service can be seen as creating this sense of communitas, while the shared embodied act of processing to receive a lighted Christingle and sitting reflecting on the idea of light being offered in the world’s darkness situated both the children and adults as part of a communion who were receiving this symbol. As a seasonal rite of passage, the ceremony marked both the calendrical passing of time and seasons and a sense of continuity with past traditions, even if in the case of Christingles, their performance is a relatively recent innovation in the UK. The filming of particular moments in the service suggests the way

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in which the service was significant for the adults as much as for the children, and implies another temporal aspect. The nostalgic construction of the service—drawing on both familiar elements such as the Nativity and the particular 1980s cultural references through the choice of songs—would for many of the adults there have evoked the past of their own childhood experiences of Christmas. Their desire to capture the images and singing of the children might be interpreted as a response to this passing of time, as they sought to create an archive of special moments in their children’s lives to be able to look back on in the future. At the same time, the children’s participation in the service might be interpreted as materializing the sacred for the adults in relation to them (Orsi 2005), enabling the adults to participate in this ritual in a way that seemed to them more meaningful than if children had not played their part. In relation to other rites of passage, the clergy at St George’s, like those at St John’s, had an aversion to confirmation. However, unlike at St John’s, children were often present for Communion services in the church and were allowed to receive Communion at any age (although, as we will see, this was not the case at St George’s Primary School). When I asked Katie and Alex, one of the curates, about this, Katie said, ‘There’s no lower age limit—all of them are welcome. It’s up to their parents. We’ve had kids as young as two receiving.’ She turned to Alex to confirm this, ‘Alex, kids can have Communion at any age at church, can’t they?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘we don’t believe in confirmations’, though adding that they did perform confirmations sometimes.⁶ The church leaders did, however, mark the passage from primary school to secondary school for children at St George’s Primary School, with a formal ‘school service’ led by one of the clergy. Before the service, I helped Katie put stickers in books called ‘The Move’ (about moving up to secondary school) for each of the Year 6 children. Each sticker had the child’s name, and said that the book was ‘from Katie, Alex, Maddie and all the staff at St George’s’. The stage in the school hall was decorated with a black fabric backdrop which had ‘THE BIG MOVE’ in large yellow letters. Alex—in his thirties—was wearing skinny jeans and a black clerical shirt, to which he fastened on a dog collar after arriving at the school a couple of minutes before the service. The service was forty-five minutes long, and although Katie said that it was open to parents as well as teachers, the only adults there were the teachers, Katie, Alex, the chair of governors, and me. The service began with a song called ‘I give thanks’. Following this, Katie and I performed a puppet sketch she had written—she had asked me beforehand if I would help her with this— in which my puppet was planting a seed to ‘grow more love and joy’, and Katie’s puppet explained that ‘love and joy are fruits of the spirit’ and that ‘all ⁶ As at St John’s, the church performed baptisms for young adults and older teenagers who had not been baptized when younger as a public declaration of faith.

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you have to do to get them is to ask God for them’. The children laughed at the puppets’ discussions with each other. Alex then invited six Year 6 children to come and read out prayers they had written. They stood in a row at the front, and some of the rest of the children bowed their heads as they said the prayers, but most didn’t. The children’s prayers included asking for help for those affected by the conflicts in Syria and Egypt and those who were ill. They also offered thanks for their teachers and their time at the school—‘we have loved every minute of it’, one girl said as she read out her notes—and for role models ‘like Andy Murray, who show us what we can achieve with hard work and dedication and believing anything is possible’. After another song, four more Year 6 children came and gave the Bible reading, each reading a few verses about the ‘fruits of the spirit’ from the book of Galatians. Alex then gave a short talk about ‘the fruits of the spirit’, with his usual confident, informal manner, using an orange as a prop. His main emphasis was the idea that God wants to give the gifts of love and joy, and ‘wants the fruits to grow really big’. The children mostly sat fairly still and looked attentive throughout. After another song, Alex led an informalized version of the Church of England Communion liturgy. The words for this were projected onto the screen at the front, and the children mostly all joined in where ‘all’ was indicated in the liturgy for them to read out particular responses. For example, at one point Alex read out, ‘Why should we love God?’, and the children read out the response from the screen, ‘Because he loves us, and through Jesus he shows us what love is.’ Alex held up and blessed the ‘bread’ (thin liturgical wafers) and ‘wine’ (grape juice), and then said that adults and anyone in Year 6 and above ‘who normally receives Communion in their own church is welcome to come up, and if you would like to receive a blessing, you can come up too’. At this point, a girl began playing a violin solo, and then a small number of adults and a handful of children moved to stand in a row at the front of the hall to receive Communion. Alex and Katie passed round the bread and wine, as these individuals stood with bowed heads. The vast majority of the children in the hall, however, were spectators, sitting in silence as this took place. Alex then asked the head teacher to come up to the front, as they had some books to give out to the Year 6s about moving up to secondary school. The head teacher read out the name of each of the Year 6 children. They came up in turn and Alex handed each their book. The children remained standing in a row at the front after receiving their books, and Alex asked everyone to give them a round of applause. They then sat down again, and Alex said a short closing prayer, asking for God’s blessing on the Year 6 children, and on everyone else there. A Communion service—here marking the children’s leaving primary school—might often be seen as a paradigmatic ritual of religious belonging, which can be interpreted according to van Gennep’s tripartite model. As Abby Day describes in her study of Anglican laywomen, the confession and prayers

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are part of the separation phase, while moving to the altar and receiving the bread and wine mark the liminal stage and communitas, while the sitting together in silence following this is the third stage (2017: 123–4). Day suggests that the communitas the Anglican women she studied experienced was different from a Durkheimian collective effervescence, and was primarily an experience of ‘comradeship’, in which they moved ‘as “one body”, together experiencing the destruction of their old, sinful self and the reformation in the new, forgiven, divinely graced self ’ (p. 124). The performance of the service at St George’s can be seen as indicating the church leaders’ desire to normalize a particular faith perspective through encouraging the children all to repeat the words of the liturgy, through the puppet show seeking to make the biblical teaching accessible and enjoyable for the children, and through Alex’s talk aiming to encourage the children to see themselves as addressed by the message of the Galatians passage. However, in practice, while the children’s silence during the receiving of the Communion indicated the extent to which they respected the formality of the ritual (or had been habituated to sitting silently for services such as assemblies), the fact that so few children participated in this central aspect indicates how some traditional liturgical rituals can construct a boundary of exclusion between those situated by the ritual as within and those outside the community. The fact that the majority of those present located themselves as outside of the ‘body of Christ’ suggests how rituals and rites of passage in which there is a more explicit performance of institutional religious authority—embodied in Alex in this service—fail to resonate with children (and adults) who have not been habituated to these rituals over time. In contrast, the ritual creativity of the Christingle, blending contemporary cultural references, traditional festive elements, nostalgic popular culture, with children playing central roles, and in which a simple symbolic meaning was articulated, enabled the service to have a broader appeal for both children and adults in relation to them.

RIVERSIDE Formally Baptist, Riverside did not baptize children or infants, although they did perform thanksgiving ceremonies for babies in Sunday morning services. Introducing a thanksgiving service for one baby, Joshua, Andy, Riverside’s senior minister, said to the congregation that being a Christian is not just about going to church, but it did mean belonging to a ‘community where everyone is different, where we don’t all agree, and people have different opinions and persuasions, but in which we all grow together out of that diversity. If being a Christian is about becoming the best possible version of yourself, you need a community to do that.’ He said to the congregation—with

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the children present rather than in Kids Church—that their role was ‘to help them [Joshua’s parents] write on that empty page and teach him about life and faith’. He asked the parents a series of questions in front of the congregation, such as ‘Do you accept the joys and responsibilities of caring for Joshua . . . helping him to grow in confidence and a sense of self-worth?’ and ‘Do you commit to bring Joshua up in a Christian community, through your life and example, as well as your words?’ He then asked similar questions of Joshua’s grandparents and asked the congregation to affirm their own part in nurturing Joshua and his family in his upbringing. Through this series of questions, the symbolism of the handing on of traditions and the idea of the future of a particular religious culture embodied in Joshua’s tiny body was conveyed, but with none of the baptismal imagery of being reborn. Children were sometimes present for Communion services, and, as at St George’s, it was up to the parents at what age the children should receive bread and wine. In contrast with Alex, as priest, offering the sacrament of Communion in the leaving service at St George’s, at Riverside different members of the congregation introduced this aspect of the service, which did not follow a set liturgy. In one service, the young man leading the service, Tim, invited the congregation to dip their bread into honey as a symbol that the ‘story Jesus invites us into is the sweetest, most exquisite thing’. In another service, Jon led the Communion, and spoke about how Jesus had taken the bread during the Last Supper and said, ‘This is my body’ and the wine and said ‘This is my blood’, and then said that ‘Christians all round the world join together in celebrating Communion’. He invited the congregation to come and take bread and wine from four tables centrally positioned in the church, and said that to remind us of the idea of joining with Christians all round the world, ‘we have breads from all round the world at the four stations’. He pointed out that one of the stations also had gluten-free bread, and that all the wine was non-alcoholic. Adults and children slowly and silently made their way to the tables and tore off small pieces of bread and took small glasses of grape juice back to their seats, where they drank these. After this, the children went out to Kids Church, where Becky, one of the leaders, asked if any of them had had Communion before. Most of them said that they had. Emma said that she had had it in her previous church, ‘but it was different’. Becky asked her how it had been different. Emma replied, ‘It was more boring.’ Becky asked them if they knew what they were remembering when they had Communion. One girl, Gebra, said ‘Jesus’, while another said ‘Moses’. Dylan said in an authoritative tone, ‘We’re doing it because Jesus said at the Last Supper, “This wine is my Spirit.”’ Becky said that the bread and the juice are ‘special, a way of thinking about Jesus. They aren’t just like any old bread and juice that we might just start eating because we’re hungry in the middle of the service.’ She said that when she was growing up, children weren’t allowed Communion in her church and that she used to feel jealous of the

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adults. In another service, Becky asked the children before they went for Communion who had been for Communion before, and what they thought of it. ‘It was pretty cool, actually,’ Mason replied. ‘In what way?’ Becky asked. ‘Well,’ Mason replied, ‘you got to have the wine, which was Jesus’ blood, and the bread, which was his bones.’ Becky asked them what they thought about during the service, and Natalie (Mason’s older sister) said that she prayed and thought about Jesus. In this setting, in contrast with the leaving service at St George’s, in which many of the children were not used to participating in this kind of public ritual, the children here appeared to enjoy participating in the ritual of Communion, and in the act of eating and drinking together enacted a sense of communitas with each other in the church and of continuity with the shared past of their faith. As a Baptist church, there was no practice of confirmation, however there were two other somewhat contrasting ways in which particular passages in the children’s lives were marked. Each year, the church arranged a trip for children from Kids Church to a weekend camp organized by a large evangelical youth organization. The camp, held in the grounds of a boarding school in the south-east of England over a sunny July weekend, was attended by approximately a thousand people, and was aimed at children and young people aged between eight and fifteen. The weekend included games, rides, films, swimming, football, and a talent contest. The children all seemed to very much enjoy the weekend. When I was chatting with a group of older girls from the church, one said, ‘This is the most fun I’ve ever had. Whenever I go away with my family, my mum and dad are always like, “Do this, don’t do that,” whereas here I can just do whatever I like.’ Their enjoyment was also clear on the Saturday evening, when two of the girls from Kids Church, Tania and Emma (both nine years old), had made the final of the camp’s talent contest with their dance to Ant and Dec’s ‘Let’s Get Ready to Rumble’. They were the first act in the second half, and when they’d gone up on to the stage, to applause from the approximately four hundred people gathered in the large tent, Tania whispered something to the young pastor, Ben, who was introducing each act. Ben said that Tania had a message for everyone. Tania then said to everyone, ‘I go to Kids Church, where we play games and learn about God and Becky is the leader.’ She went on, ‘I used to feel nervous about things, but Becky really helped me, and Becky is now my best friend.’ Tania and Emma then performed their dance. They did not win—the winner was a guitarplaying teenager—but before the announcement, Becky said to Tania and Emma that whatever happened, she was proud of them. On the way back to our tents, Tania was crying, and I asked her what was wrong. ‘I’m crying because I’m so happy,’ she said. The weekend also included meetings for the children, who were divided into a younger and an older age group, led by youth pastors. I went along with the children from Kids Church and their leaders to the meetings aimed at

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children and young people aged ten and above. These meetings, held in a very large tent, typically included games involving volunteers from the audience, charismatic worship songs, and a talk from one of the pastors, followed by more songs. On the Saturday evening, the pastor giving the talk, Ben, spoke about how he had grown up in a Christian home, and that he had become a Christian when he was ten years old. He said that what he was about to say might be ‘the most important thing you ever hear’. He began by talking about sin, which he said ‘is a word with a lot of baggage, but just means selfishness’. He asked anyone who thought they’d never been selfish to put their hand up. Only one boy in the room did. He then said that God created us and loves us like a father, ‘but that he would never force himself on us, and we have turned away from him’. He asked the audience what the word for betraying a king or queen is. One child volunteered ‘treason’. Ben then asked what the punishment for treason is. ‘Death,’ answered another child. Ben said that we all deserve to die for our treason, ‘but because God loves us and wants to save us, he sent his son, who was God himself, who had never committed treason, to take on that punishment, so that we might not have to suffer it. He took our place.’ Ben then invited the band to come back up to the front. Before they started playing softly, he said that there might be some people there who had never thought of themselves as Christians, and others there who ‘maybe have already made that decision, but other things have got in the way’. He asked everyone to bow their heads. Pretty much everyone in the tent did so. He then prayed a short evangelical ‘altar call’ type prayer, but with everyone remaining seated, heads bowed. At the end of this, he asked those who ‘prayed the prayer to look up and look at me’. He paused, then asked those who had looked up to go outside and find their youth leaders to pray with them ‘as these guys are going to be the people who will support you in the weeks and months ahead’. Five of the children from Riverside went outside with Naomi, a church ministry student who was on a placement with Riverside working with children and young people, to indicate that they had ‘prayed the prayer’, while three stayed in the tent with their other leader, Joe. After about five minutes, the group who had gone outside with Naomi came back inside, and we all walked back to our group’s tents. I was expecting—perhaps following my own teenage experience of evangelical altar calls—the children to be in a heightened state of emotion, but it wasn’t like that. I asked Tyler—who’d gone outside with Naomi—what he thought of the meeting. ‘It was a bit long,’ he said, and when I asked Chloe, who’d stayed inside, what she thought, she said she found Ben ‘a bit jumpy, like he’ll start saying something, and then move onto something else’. The following morning’s meeting followed the same format and following his talk, Ben again invited everyone there to pray another prayer of commitment, expressed in personal terms about ‘wanting to give my life to Jesus’ and

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saying, ‘yes, Lord, I want you to be King in my life’. After this, he said that he would like anyone ‘who prayed that prayer to stand up’, and said that if he wasn’t standing up already he would stand up. A lot of the children in the tent, including all those from Riverside, stood up. He then asked those who ‘have made this commitment for the first time to put their hands up and to go outside and pray with your youth leaders’. Most of those from Riverside put their hands up and headed outside with Naomi. Chatting about this later that morning, four of the girls who had stood up and gone outside said that they were already Christians beforehand, but they’d wanted to stand up so that they could have particular moments to remember as times when they had expressed a definite commitment in their faith. The invitation to the children in those meetings to demonstrate that they had ‘prayed the prayer’ drew on the evangelical tradition of altar calls, in which individuals are invited to demonstrate that they have made a commitment to Christ through walking forward publicly to the altar at the front of a church. While the children were not asked to move to the front of the tent, the embodied performance of demonstrating that they had prayed a prayer of commitment through looking or standing up and then praying with their church leaders nevertheless drew on the same logic of creating the sense of a key moment of commitment, which was often within the history of evangelicalism seen as a transformational, liminal moment in which the individual was ‘born again’ or received the Holy Spirit. I had never seen altar calls performed at Riverside, which was perhaps unsurprising, as altar calls conform to a traditional evangelical dualistic theology of the saved/unsaved and of the doctrine of atonement that those at Riverside sought to distance themselves from. Watching those moments in the tent, I’d been reminded of the use of altar calls during my teenage experience of evangelicalism and had felt viscerally uncomfortable. As it is more doctrinally conservative evangelical organizations that have the resources to organize large-scale events such as this and church leaders at Riverside want to give children the opportunity to attend an evangelical camp, much as they had themselves experienced in their youth, these more traditional evangelical rites become possibilities for these children in a way in which they are not present in the space of the church. Yet in the children’s own interpretation of their participation in the ritual, their gesture of commitment did not represent the transformation of being ‘born again’ or ‘becoming a Christian’, as Ben, the speaker had presented it that morning, but more their own choosing to mark a moment they could look back on when they had expressed their own commitment to their faith. As at St George’s, the passage from primary to secondary school was also marked as a significant transition in the children’s lives. In contrast with the service at St George’s, their leaving assembly was led not by church staff or teachers, but by the Year 6 children themselves. The children in the other year groups sat on the floor, while parents and several of the Riverside

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Church staff were sitting on chairs at the back of the hall. The O’Jays’ ‘Love Train’ was playing over the stereo, and the atmosphere was celebratory as some of the children sang along to the music while they sat ready to watch the assembly. The room was decorated with brightly coloured posters the Year 6 children had made depicting London and the different parts of the world they or their families had come from. The Year 6 children and their teacher had decided that their assembly would focus on the children talking about their preparations for their ‘prom’—the party the school was organizing to mark their leaving the school, borrowing from the US idea of a high school prom. The assembly opened with the Year 6 children standing in the four corners of the hall, performing staged conversations about their plans for their ‘prom’, speaking about how they were going to ‘represent everyone and everyone’s backgrounds in the prom’. ‘But no soul music,’ one of them said, ‘it’s not the 1970s!’ The children spoke about their different cultural backgrounds, discussing the food, music, and dancing they could include in the prom from each of their family’s cultural background. Children wearing T-shirts with Jamaican flags, for instance, drummed on steel drums while other children danced to this, while others danced and sang songs in languages other than English, from countries including Somalia, Poland, Albania, Italy, Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, and China. At the end of the assembly, all the Year 6 children came together in the middle of the hall and talked about how their prom would include things ‘from each of our cultures, and it will be the best graduation prom ever’. They then danced and sang along again to ‘Love Train’. Visibly moved by the assembly, the head teacher, Lou, thanked the children for their assembly and the pictures they had made for the hall, saying, ‘You’ve made a utopian vision of a society where everyone can come together and learn from each other.’ As the children and adults left the assembly, shimmying along to ‘Love Train’, I felt uplifted by the assembly, yet also a sense of sadness. As I wrote up my fieldnotes, I tried to reflect on my emotion. Was it bound up with this ritual marking the children’s leaving primary school? The fact that in watching children move on to new things and toward adulthood we see time pass so visibly, glimpsing our own now-passed childhoods and the horizon of the possible futures toward which these children are moving? Or was it to do with the moral vision these children expressed? The ethics of pluralism they enacted, and the uncertain political future of these children’s lives? As the past decade of ongoing economic crisis and the rise of exclusionary nationalisms have induced feelings of anxiety, shock, and horror for many, it is easy to understand a shift to a catastrophic structure of feeling, which, as John Urry notes (2016: 35), has shaped a large body of work in the social sciences sounding apocalyptic notes about the potential collapse of human societies. However, perhaps the current time calls, as Naomi Klein

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argues in No Is Not Enough, for forms of ‘utopian dreaming’—not only seeking to understand the world we do not want but trying to map the one we want instead (2017: 233). In heeding this call, one task for sociologists of religion is not only to attend to themes of conflict and the demarcation of boundaries between groups in religiously pluralist settings, but also to explore the ways in which particular imaginings of ethical life are enacted in the everyday, for example, the ways in which in ordinary interactions, relationships across forms of religious difference work well and offer a vision of ethical coexistence. Anthropologists Adam Seligman and Robert Weller argue that rituals can create a ‘subjunctive space, a shared “could be” that constructs individuals in relation to others’, linking ‘entities, times, and spaces’ and providing a ‘way to live in a plural and hence also deeply ambiguous universe’ (2012: 93). Rituals provide a way of structuring our experience of time. Through the predictable temporal repetition of rituals such as birthdays, calendrical festivals, weekly services, ‘[o]ne could even say that they create time in the sense of defining a shared social convention to understand its flows’, creating ‘a sense of shared pasts and futures, which is so critical to feelings of community’ (p. 77). What Lou described as the children’s creation of a ‘utopian vision of a society’ might also be seen as their performance of an ‘as-if ’ world, a subjunctive possibility, a way of living well together that they created and enacted in this ritual marking their leaving school. Seligman and Weller argue that human life is characterized by a tension between the tendency to construct boundaries, categories, and notational forms that create a sense of order and the ability to live with ambiguity and the limits of our knowledge. They situate rituals as performative acts which allow us to accept and play with the inherent ambiguity of the world, in contrast with the emphasis on sincerity, authenticity, and a ‘search for wholeness and totality’ (p. 97) that they see as characteristic of fundamentalist forms of religion, and as emerging as a result of the pervasiveness of Protestant Christianity in the shaping of modernity and contemporary culture (Seligman et al. 2008: 9). This distinction, however, creates a bifurcated understanding of religion and ritual that fails to represent the complexities of how rites of passage were being performed and recreated in children’s everyday lives at Riverside. While the children’s performance of the prayer of committing their lives to Christ might, for instance, seem paradigmatic of the kind of ‘sincere’ religiosity that Seligman and Weller reject, the children’s own interpretation of their performance suggests that for them the very performativity of the act was important, that it was less about a ‘fundamentalist’ desire—as Seligman and Weller situate fundamentalism—to create a clear boundary between inside and outside but more about binding that particular moment to their future, consciously creating a memory of their commitment to be able to look back on. At the same time, the children’s creative representation of their prom, while a playful mode of performance,

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can be seen as expressing both sincerity and a possibility for what it means to live well together in a pluralist setting.

CO NCLUSION In Western societies, we are perhaps living through something of a transitional moment in relation to rites of passage, as traditional religious rites of passage are for many no longer meaningful or desirable. What does a rite of passage look like or mean in the contemporary world? Discussing initiation rites, Grimes argues that we lack ‘authentic and compelling rites’ (2000: 91). Of course, rites of passage do not simply disappear. The forms of initiation, for example, that do take place in Western industrial societies have, as David Yamane argues, been rendered ‘more diffuse, haphazard, individualized and even sometimes only imaginary’ by the ‘centrifugal forces of modernity’ (2014: 8). As some traditional religious rites of passage, such as confirmation ceremonies, are declining or disappearing in the UK, what alternative forms do initiatory impulses take today? As traditional ritual authorities and structures are questionable in an age that so values the ideal of personal autonomy, and as we want to choose the kinds of social groups we belong to, will we see new forms of self- or peer-initiation (Grimes 2000: 90, 100)? In what ways will societies and groups continue to construct and mark particular moments of transition, and how will religious institutions engage with these changes? In the UK, while churches have historically performed rites of passage services both for those who do and do not attend church regularly but who usually have some sense of Christian cultural connection, will such rites continue to hold meaning in a de-Christianizing cultural context? If not, how should churches respond? These are important questions for churches to engage with. Attending to how particular rites of passage and moments of transition in children’s lives were performed at St John’s, St George’s, and Riverside reveals how churches are responding to this transitional moment. Church leaders in these churches continue to draw on traditional rites and rituals, while often also demonstrating ritual creativity in their marking of other moments of transition that resonate with wider social constructions of the life course, such as the move from primary to secondary school. As rituals offer insight into both the dynamics of relationality and moral values and visions, we see these somewhat differently worked out at each of the churches. Despite the antiritualistic language at St John’s, the infant baptism services there—as at St George’s—can be seen as in many senses conventional rituals that defined and drew together past, present, and future through the performance of the ceremony, and in doing so helped create a sense of a community extending

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both backwards and forwards in time. This was a community in which the boundaries of inside/outside, saved/unsaved were clearly demarcated, although the present reality of the child in relation to this dichotomy of salvation was constructed as liminal and uncertain, dependent on the future autonomy of the child. This same anti-ritualistic impulse also permeated St George’s to a certain extent, with their self-identification as ‘religion-free’ and rejection of confirmation. Yet their performance of rites such as infant baptism, Christingle services, and Communion to mark children’s leaving school also utilized traditional forms of ritual. In the Christingle and infant baptism services, we see a desire on the part of church leaders to make these as inclusive as possible for those who do not attend church, blending nostalgic elements of traditional religious ritual and contemporary cultural references. However, in the case of the Communion marking the children’s leaving St George’s Primary School, the performance of a traditional liturgical ritual that might be seen as seeking to create a shared sense of Christian cultural identity in the school did not resonate with the majority of children there, who remained spectators for this aspect of the service. The rituals at Riverside were also marked by this desire for inclusivity, for example, through including the children in Communion and in the children’s own central role in their assembly marking their leaving school. While this was not a traditional religious rite of passage, its atmosphere of joyful effervescence created a sense of communitas that had wider resonance than the more traditional Anglican liturgy used to mark this passage towards adulthood at St George’s. The celebration of a pluralist society embodied in this assembly might, on one level, seem at odds with the evangelical ritual of commitment performed by many of the children at the camp they attended. However, attending to the children’s own interpretation of this performance reveals that for them it was less about participating in a dualistic theological demarcation of the saved/unsaved, and more about their desire to create a moment they could look back on in which they were conscious of their faith commitment. While all the rituals considered here can be seen as revealing deeply held values, it was those in which a simple moral vision was expressed—the idea of ‘love shining down’ or of a society in which ‘everyone can come together and learn from each other’—that held a broader appeal, inclusive of those who did not regularly attend church, than those rituals which focused more on demarcating the boundaries of inside/outside. Turner describes social life, for both individuals and groups, as ‘a type of dialectical process that involves successive experience of high and low, communitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, equality and inequality’ (1969: 97). Despite the wider social turn away from traditional institutional rites of passage surrounding birth and childhood, we see at each of three churches an ongoing desire to mark particular passages in this

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dialectical process, such that at St John’s members of the congregation expressed a sense of regret about the fact that, for many young people, there was no public rite marking their ‘adult’ commitment in the church. In attending to children’s own participation in these rites, although they often played a marginal part in many rituals in everyday church life, when they were afforded agency to play their own significant roles in the performance of rituals, they usually did so enthusiastically, and brought to these moments their own distinctive creativity, meanings, and enjoyment.

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7 Living with Mess INTRODUCTION I had arranged to meet Rob, the children’s and families’ minister at Riverside, at the church’s ‘coffee shop’—which was how the main space of the church was arranged during the week—to plan my research with them one snowy morning early on in my fieldwork. Rob, in his mid-thirties, wearing a hoodie and jeans, bought me a latte, introducing me to the coffee shop’s manager, and we went to sit at one of the tables. We chatted about the implications of using Riverside as a fieldsite for looking at the place of children in contemporary evangelicalism, and when I mentioned I would also be writing about other evangelical churches, he jokingly referred to conservative evangelicals as ‘the enemy’. Rob talked me through Riverside’s different activities with children and young people, and mentioned that over the past eighteen months since he’d been working there, there’d been ‘a huge growth in the number of children and families here’. He said, ‘I’m not wanting to suggest that’s because of me, but we’ve been able to put on a lot more activities, and we also had a great student with us.’¹ The first activity Rob mentioned was Messy Sundays, one aspect of which was Family Space, where, he said, families look at Bible stories, sing, and do craft activities together, meeting in the primary school linked with the church. He said that many of the families who went to that don’t go to church and might find the idea of ‘church’ off-putting, but that it was important to think of Family Space as a ‘congregation in itself . . . rather than thinking of what goes on in the church building as more important, the real stuff ’. He said, ‘We don’t make boundaries between inside and outside’ and added that he would be preaching about this at the coming Sunday’s evening service, on the theme of Communion. He said that Communion in the Last Supper narratives is ‘a table that everyone’s invited to come and eat at. Jesus doesn’t make distinctions . . . Everything we do, in the school, in the church and outside, ¹ Both Riverside and St George’s had students on ministry degrees working with them on placements as part of their degrees.

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it’s all church.’ He talked through the other activities that were part of Messy Sundays, such as Family Kitchen, where he said people learn how to cook healthy dinners—‘that’s part of being church too’. He commented that my research would be interesting for them, in terms of getting insight into ‘things like, we say that we’re not trying to convert people, so it’ll be interesting to see whether we actually secretly do still want to convert people’. He asked what had shaped my interest in this field, and I talked about my teenage involvement with and subsequent path away from evangelicalism shaping my initial interest, and he commented that he’d a fairly conservative evangelical upbringing, from which he had learnt ‘the value of self-reflection’, which is ‘something I try to pass on’. As I mulled over our meeting on the tube home, I reflected on how different this idea of Messy Sundays was from the emphasis on order I’d observed at St John’s, where I’d been struck by the pervasiveness of a desire for order and coherence, within church, self, society, and family life. At Riverside, this idea of mess reached beyond Messy Sundays, underlying how the church leaders talked about their institutional identity. In one sermon, Andy highlighted that the church’s logo was ‘messy—it represents inclusion, that everyone’s in, even if they don’t know it, even if they never come here, they’re still included’. The idea of mess was also used to describe other events, such as Messy Nativity. This emphasis on mess also resonated at St George’s, with its promotional materials describing the church as ‘messy’.² How might we understand this contemporary significance of mess? Recent studies seeking to understand the growing political polarization across Europe and North America—embodied in support and opposition for Trump and Brexit—have suggested that cultural values are at least as significant as personal political circumstances in defining the political times in which we live (e.g. Haidt 2016, Kaufmann 2016).³ Jonathan Haidt argues (2012) that while both conservatives and ‘liberals’⁴ value principles of caring, fairness, and freedom, conservatives place greater value on obedience to and respect for authority, while liberals place greater value on originality and novelty. This can be characterized as a cultural difference between those who prefer order ² This idea of mess also has a longer ecclesiastical history. Michael Ramsey, for example, described the Anglican Church as marked by ‘its incompleteness, with the tension and travail in its soul. It is clumsy and untidy, it baffles neatness and logic’ (cited in Bayes 2013: 109). ³ Kaufmann (2016) demonstrates that rather than income, the most statistically significant differentiator between both people who voted for Trump and those who voted for Brexit and those who did not was their answer to the question, ‘Is it more important for a child to be considerate or well-mannered?’ Kaufmann notes that for social and moral psychologists, ‘the term “considerate” taps other-directed emotions while “well-mannered” is about respect for authority’ (Kaufmann 2016). ⁴ Haidt uses the terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ and ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ to describe these groups. The political polarization in the UK embodied in support for and opposition to Europe, however, cuts across traditional left/right political labels.

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and stability and feel threatened by diversity in a period of rapid social change and those who embrace novelty and difference. To what extent can we see Riverside’s turn to mess in relation to a wider polarization between those who prefer order and those who prefer novelty? Haidt (2012) notes that these increasingly stark divisions between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ play a role in religious as well as political cultures. In a study of narratives collected from liberal and conservative Christians about their faith and moral beliefs, conservatives ‘underscored deep feelings about respect for authority, allegiance to one’s group, and purity of the self, whereas liberals emphasized their deep feelings regarding human suffering and social fairness’ (McAdams, cited in Haidt 2012: 328–9). The embrace of mess at Riverside is, I will suggest, bound up with an ethic of responsiveness to suffering and a preference for novelty, which represents something of a shift within British evangelicalism away from a primary impulse towards order and coherence. In what follows, I describe the everyday realities of Messy Sundays at Riverside and draw this together with Emmanuel Levinas’s writing on ethics and Hannah Arendt’s writing on natality to reveal how this idea of mess can be understood as expressing shifting ethical orientations within contemporary evangelicalism.

MESSING UP CHURCH The idea of Messy Sundays at Riverside draws on what has become known in the UK and beyond as Messy Church. Messy Church has grown since 2004 as a global brand for informal activity and worship sessions primarily aimed at children and young families, with a series of publications, resources, conferences, and training events available. Its website describes how the first Messy Church: began in 2004 when a group at St Wilfrid’s in Cowplain near Portsmouth were frustrated because, as a church, they were hardly reaching any children with God’s story . . . They had creative people in the church, and the area needed as much community-building as possible, being a rather featureless suburb. There was a lot of sympathy towards church in general but the church wasn’t offering anything that really gripped the imagination of local families.⁵

One of the founder members of this original group, Lucy Moore, describes Messy Church as ‘fundamentally about people just coming in all their mess and with their messy lives and their messy families and just coming to God as

⁵ http://www.messychurch.org.uk/story-so-far (accessed 7 January 2016).

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they are and seeing what a Christian community is all about’.⁶ The basic pattern of Messy Church consists of an activity session related to a particular biblical teaching theme, with a meal and time for play and social interaction. In many ways, Messy Church is a response to declining numbers attending church, as its founders realized that conventional church services and Sunday schools were not attractive to those who do not attend church and wanted to find ways of creating spaces that were inclusive of children. Messy Church therefore ‘does not follow the old pattern of congregational life based upon strict boundaries and a formal hierarchy’ (Baker et al. 2015: 28). Although it claims a heritage and resources from Christian traditions, it has a more ‘flat or immanent’ structure, with sessions run by groups of parents or volunteers within the church rather than by church leaders, and involves a crossing of denominational boundaries (ibid.). At Riverside, several of these ideas pervaded Messy Sundays, although, as I will describe, there were also differences that emerged over time. The volunteer who organized Riverside’s Messy Sundays was Jenny, a secondary school teacher who also played keyboards in the church band. She told me that Messy Sundays had been running for about five years at Riverside and had originally been on Saturdays, and had been ‘much more like a conventional Sunday school, with the expectation that people who came would know about Christianity’. She said that hadn’t worked very well, so they had stopped that about three years earlier and re-launched it in its current format on Sundays. The first Family Space session I went to was fairly typical. The session was organized with several volunteers from the Sunday morning congregation— mostly in their twenties and thirties—helping out. After the Sunday morning service, we had a quick lunch of pizza in the school dining area while Jenny spoke about the plans for that afternoon. The main theme for the session, she said, was the idea of ‘looking for God, and thinking about where we might find God’. The activities were loosely planned around this theme, such as a creative writing station set up at a table with a passage from the Sermon on the Mount sellotaped on, with an explanation sheet stating that the passage is about ‘looking for God’ and suggesting writing a story or poem about someone looking for and finding something. One of the volunteers commented that the school had new computers by the entrance that they ought to be careful of, so Becky, one of the students working with the church on a placement, made an ‘out of bounds’ sign for that area. Jenny then prayed a short prayer, thanking God for all the families who came to Messy Sundays, praying that they would have fun and that it would be a space where they could learn more about God. There was a hum of activity setting everything up before the families started arriving. Jenny asked me to cut out some leaf shapes for the prayer station,

⁶ http://www.messychurch.org.uk/about-messy-church (accessed 7 January 2016).

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explaining that for this, people could colour in a leaf and write a prayer on it, and then take it to the prayer room. While I cut these out, Gebra, whom I knew from Kids Church, came and sat with me and together we cut out the leaves and chatted about a book she had been reading about sharks. I then went to help Naomi, a youth ministry student on a placement with Riverside, who was setting up an activity station for making peppermint creams. Naomi was interested in my research, and as we chatted, she said that Messy Sundays were really important in understanding how Riverside works with children in the wider community. She explained that their intention was for Messy Sundays to be a space where the families can ‘really receive’—where they could come along ‘and activities are put on for them’, adding that for many local families, things like craft materials would seem expensive. She said that many local families might not have much chance to spend time together if they were working, and so Messy Sundays was also about providing them with ‘the space to be together as a family’. I sat with Naomi at her peppermint cream-making stall as families started arriving from 3 p.m. I recognized about a third of the children—who all appeared to be primary school age or younger—from Kids Church. The children decorated small cardboard boxes at one activity station and then came to us to make peppermint creams to put in them. Some of the children knew Naomi from Riverside’s toddlers’ group and ran up and hugged her when they saw her. Between people visiting the table, I chatted with Naomi about her degree, and she mentioned that she really enjoyed mentoring. She said that young people in urban settings can have ‘really complicated lives’ as ‘everything is changing around them . . . though some of that is also to do with being young people’, and added, ‘It’s great to be able to provide a sense of security and stability in their lives.’ As we chatted, the families—about thirty children and adults in all—were milling around from station to station. In front of Naomi and my table, Jon, one of the other placement students, was leading a ten-pin bowling station, with a soft ball and empty milk containers filled with water, which the children seemed to be enjoying. Another station that involved painting and glittering more empty milk cartons was also lively. Around 4.20 p.m. Jenny announced that there was a treasure hunt in the playground. Most of the children ran outside. When they came back in, Jenny asked everyone to sit in a circle at one end of the hall. She then addressed everyone, saying that today they had been ‘thinking about looking for things and finding them, looking for things in the playground, and . . . in particular thinking about what it means to look for God—which is a kind of strange idea in some ways’. At this point, Jon came in from the other end of the room, with thick black-rimmed comedy glasses on, acting out looking for God under the tables and on the ceiling. Jenny asked everyone, ‘Where might we help Jon to find God?’ One of the children answered, ‘You’ll need an aeroplane.’ ‘That’s an

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interesting idea,’ Jenny said, ‘what do the rest of you think? Where might we find God?’ One of the girls said, ‘When we’re quiet and think about him’, and another girl volunteered, ‘When we pray to him.’ Emma (a Kids Church regular) said, ‘With people who have died. My grandfather died and he’s gone to be with God in a better place.’ Jenny said that she thought that what the two girls had said about ‘finding God in quiet places is helpful’ and said we might spend ‘a short amount of time, just about thirty seconds, being quiet and thinking about where we might find God in our lives’. There was quiet for a couple of seconds, then Emma asked, ‘Can we go to the prayer room for this?’ Jenny said yes. About twelve children went with Becky to the prayer room. After about thirty seconds, Jenny signalled the end of the time of quiet by saying a short prayer, asking that we might ‘find ways to look for God’, and thanking God for the time together that afternoon. Everyone then went through to the dining area off the side of the hall, where two volunteers, Sam and Joe, were serving food: baked pasta with cheese and tomato sauce, salad, and garlic bread, and everyone sat together at the school dining tables for this shared meal. Towards the end, Jenny put a decorated piggy bank by the door and said that if anyone would like to make a contribution of £1 per meal to cover costs for food, that would be very welcome. She mentioned that there would be a Family Kitchen Messy Sundays the following week. The families headed off, and it took about forty minutes to clear up afterwards—scrubbing paint and glitter off the floors—so that the school was ready for Monday morning. This was a fairly typical Messy Sunday in the early part of my fieldwork. Over time, however, the format changed in a subtle but significant way. The reasons for this were articulated in a meeting for Messy Sundays volunteers one Thursday evening. Eleven of the helpers were there. We sat on comfy chairs in the main space of the church, with hot drinks and biscuits baked by one of the volunteers. Rob chaired the meeting, jokingly impersonating the style of Riverside’s Sunday services as he said that our guest speakers for that evening were Jenny and Becky, and asking us to give a round of applause for each. Jenny, wearing a hoodie with her school’s logo and black skinny jeans, thanked everyone for coming, and said it was great to have everyone there to plan ahead for the coming year. She showed some slides with pictures from Messy Sundays over the previous year, with lots of smiling children and adults playing games, with cakes and crafts the children had made. Her next slide was a spider diagram with ‘Building relationships within the local community by connecting families through creativity, fun, food, and an exploration of faith’ in the centre, and ‘Messy Sundays’, ‘Family Space’, ‘Family Kitchen’, and ‘Family Film’ branching off this. She said that both Family Kitchen and Family Space had been ‘great ways of really building relationships with families in the local area, between the church and those families, and providing a space for those families to get to know each other . . . And also

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for developing relationships within the family, about giving parents and children the time to have fun and creativity and food together.’ She then handed over to Becky. Becky said that she and Jenny had wanted to do the ‘God slots’ they’d been doing at the end of Messy Sundays, based on the format of Messy Church having some Bible teaching in them, and that they had wanted to be open and honest with everyone about the reasons they were doing this. She said that now, however, they had come to feel ‘the God slot jars. We don’t feel comfortable doing it. Lots of the families who come to Messy Sundays aren’t Christian—we’ve had several Muslim families, and some of them have been put off by that and have been once and not come back after that.’ Jenny continued this line of thought: ‘It just felt like we weren’t being completely honest about who we were—like we were getting them in, and then once they were all there, they had to listen to that.’ Becky said she had been chatting with some of the parents at the church and they felt that they would ‘like to be doing more exploring faith together as a family’ in a way that wasn’t happening at Family Space, that some of them had said to her that they ‘don’t feel confident in their parenting as Christians, and would like to be able to think about how to discuss faith with their kids’. She said that the idea they had come up with was having a different kind of space in addition to those they already had, which would be focused on the ‘exploring faith’ angle, and therefore they were planning ‘to get rid of the God slot completely in “Family Craft”, as we’re now calling Family Space’. The group chewed over these ideas in smaller groups, before feeding back to everyone, generally sounding enthusiastic. Rob had some closing words to wrap up the meeting just before 8.30 p.m. He said that what the group were doing in terms of making decisions together that evening was ‘really great’, and that the Messy Sundays team were one of ‘the most engaged parts of the hub’, and that over the years that Messy Sundays had been running, ‘we’re making a really positive difference to families in our community’. He said that what the church was doing with families ‘is something really new and exciting in terms of what it means to engage with our local community and trying out new ways of articulating what it means to be church’. He prayed a short closing prayer, praying for ‘building our relationships with local families’ and asking God that ‘we would be really authentic in our friendships with these families’. The shift that we might see here underlying the development of Messy Sundays at Riverside points to a number of social and cultural changes. British evangelicalism has had a long history of prioritizing work with children and young people (Ward 1996) shaped by a sense of urgency about the possible futures or non-futures of evangelicalism and Christianity more broadly. But this sense of urgency has arguably sharpened as childhood itself has become, in many senses, a sacralized form in contemporary societies (Zelizer 1994).

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This sense of a need for churches to find better ways of engaging with children might be seen as underpinning the original development of Messy Church, with ‘the God slot’ carrying the legacy of conversionist evangelical impulses. We can see, however, self-conscious moves away from that legacy of evangelicalism at Riverside, for instance, in Rob’s emphasis that they were not aiming to convert anyone. Riverside members often articulated a sense that it was important to listen to and respond to the needs of those in their local community rather than seeking to impose their own moral vision on others: a frequently repeated slogan was the idea of doing things ‘with people, rather than for or to them’. This discomfort with historical evangelical missionary impulses can then be seen in the Messy Sundays team’s move away from ‘the God slot’. While on one level, this shift within Messy Sundays might be seen as a pragmatic self-secularization shaped by wider social processes of secularization, it might also be seen as revealing changing modes of ethical engagement that are permeating diffusely within evangelical cultures, representing particular contemporary theological transitions. In a study of a Salvation Army Centre in the south-west of England providing facilities for people with dependency problems, Andrew Williams (2015) identified new expressions of Christianity as emerging, involving the ‘de-capitalisation of one’s own truth claims and embracing theologies of common grace’ (cited in Baker et al. 2015: 149). Many of the Christian staff at this drugs rehabilitation centre were willing, Williams argues, to experiment in ‘how to be church in the community—with homeless people—outside the four walls of a church building’ (cited in ibid.). This experiment also entailed reformulating the epistemological bases of belief, bound up with ‘a concession that absolute truth cannot be known in any epistemological way leads to a more dialogical expression of faith-sharing premised on a culture of assurance of practice rather than conviction of right belief ’ (cited in ibid.). The emphasis on mess and move away from conversionist impulses is perhaps likewise part of a reformulation of belief taking place at Riverside, involving a self-conscious move away from dialectical logics of self and other and a turn towards immanent practices of creating connections and relations. The self-consciousness with which members of Riverside articulated ideas of ‘messiness’ and of moving beyond inside/outside boundaries reflected the fact that many at Riverside had come from more conservative evangelical traditions. They were, therefore, conscious of their sense of distance from the more traditional evangelical emphasis on hierarchical order and a desire for coherence within church, self, society, and the family. We saw, for example, in Chapter 3, how David, the rector of St John’s, promoted a hierarchical understanding of relationships within the family: ‘So God rules, he’s delegated his authority to the head of the family. And then the father, and the mother under the headship of the man, are in authority over the children, who are to obey.’

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David described this hierarchical ordering of family relationships as a working out of ‘the redeemed community, restored order, with the anarchy of Genesis 3 now, under Christ, put back in its proper place and overturned’.⁷ This desire at St John’s for hierarchical order within church, society, and the family might be seen as both related to an ethos shaped by the white, male, public-school educated backgrounds of British conservative evangelicalism’s key leaders and as expressing an existential longing for order and coherence. As discussed in my earlier study of conservative evangelicals (Strhan 2015), social scientists have often portrayed evangelicalism as offering a response to the messiness of modernity by holding out a promise of certainty, predicated on an understanding of revelation as an event out of time which anchors meaning in an order and coherence beyond the self. At St John’s, faith did hold out the promise of an overarching order. Through their engagement in the church, church members learnt to interpret the world around them and themselves through a binary moral language of sin/holiness. Thus they learnt to read the city around them as lost and in need of salvation, contrasted with the future transcendent City of God that would radiate the kind of ‘restored order’ that David described, and motivating their conversionist impulse to seek to save those ‘others’ around them whom they saw as otherwise headed for eternal damnation. This traditional evangelical background—which was present in the personal histories of many of those at Riverside—might be seen as helping shape the consciousness of those at Riverside of how their moral and spiritual sensibilities sat in tension with this. One phrase repeated so frequently at Riverside that church members often joked about it was ‘I’ve been on a journey.’ This can be seen as demonstrating their sense of the significant shifts in their faith perspectives over time. A minister at a church linked with Riverside articulated this idea in a blog post, describing himself as a ‘recovering dualist’. In this, he wrote: I believe underlying the evangelical understanding of God and ‘others’ is a deepseated dualism . . . This dualism leads to a colonial attitude towards the way the evangelical church approaches ‘others’ . . . My belief is that the majority of evangelicals operate in a kind of Platonic conception of the world as Ideal and Real . . . According to this well ingrained way of thinking, all earthly things are intrinsically inferior to the unseen spiritual. So there is, for instance, a very dualistic way of distinguishing between the evangelical/Christian ‘us’ (saved, sanctified, believers); and ‘them’ (the unsaved, those of other faiths, the sinners). This dichotomy of salvation has traditionally been part of a sovereignty paradigm. The threat of exclusion from the company of the sanctified, puts ‘us’ in to a position of power, of declaring the orthodoxy . . .

⁷ Discussed in Strhan 2016a.

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A dualistic mind-set is conveniently easy: with a clear us and them divide, ‘we’ know who ‘we’ are, and where ‘we’ are. It’s also very much a warfare mentality which not only appropriates violent imagery for the way it approaches discussion of the issues, but also posits the idea of opposing sides in a battle, ranged against one another. ‘Powers of darkness’ almost equal to, and diametrically opposed to ‘powers of good’—God and Satan juxtaposed against one another as opposing commanders, and this played out on earth between people of faith and the heathen.⁸

We might see members of Riverside as likewise ‘recovering dualists’, and as working out that out in their experiments with mess. For example, as already mentioned in Chapter 2, Rob, who came from a more conservative evangelical background, said ‘Churches often focus on trying to get people to believe certain things, as if that’s what being a Christian is about.’ One of the things they wanted to do at Riverside, he said, was to set up ‘a new kind of church for kids that meets during the week rather than on Sundays, that isn’t like normal church—where kids can come with questions . . . It’ll be about looking at Jesus, and saying that we think he shows us the best way of life, but that it doesn’t matter what you think about things like the deity.’ In one sermon, Andy, Riverside’s senior minister, expressed a similar idea and said that Jesus ‘never asked anyone to become a Christian’, and that ‘part of the church’s problem is that it has been addicted to counting people in or out, Christian or not’. He said that it might be helpful to ban the term ‘Christian’, and instead to think about ‘following Jesus day by day, doing what he did, rather than counting people in or out’. While members of Riverside emphasized this notion of mess, their theology might, however, be seen as far from messy, but rather as offering a coherent vision of what it means to be a church that embraces change and an openness to the other. Their embrace of mess emerged from both the lived realities of activities such as Messy Church moving beyond more traditional forms of ecclesiastical order, but their theological reflections on messiness were at the same time part of an impulse to order their emerging beliefs and values in ways that foregrounded inclusivity, creativity, and an ethic of pluralism. Riverside’s theological reflections also entailed a different eschatological and temporal orientation from conservative evangelicals. The Kingdom of God that conservative evangelicals sought to form themselves as becoming oriented towards was a future eschatological kingdom beyond place, which was bound up with their orientation towards the world in terms of a conversionist missionary logic. The vision of a heavenly city articulated at Riverside was a self-conscious move away from imaginings of a future

⁸ https://simoncross.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/god-and-the-dualist-imagination-part-1-usothers/ (accessed 7 January 2016).

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transcendent future City of God towards an idea that they strove to realize within the immanent frame. The vision articulated here was self-consciously celebratory of the local area. In a sermon one Sunday evening, Andy said that his vision for church involvement in the local community was about ‘360degree life—economic, spiritual, social, political’. He then read a section of Chapter 21 of the book of Revelation, describing the vision of a new Jerusalem and the idea of the dwelling of God being with men, and God wiping away every tear. He asked, ‘If that’s what the future looks like, how do we work to make that happen now?’ His next slide had some mocked-up visuals of imaginary news stories, for example, a BBC news story describing their local area as ‘the best place to live in the UK’, with an image of a group of smiling children in school uniforms in a circular embrace. He then read out a poem written for anniversary celebrations of the church’s founding, drawing on this Revelation passage but in language celebrating a particular sense of urban diversity, describing people from all races and classes playing and laughing together, with children foregrounded in the opening line of the poem. After reading the poem, he asked the congregation to reflect on what Riverside had achieved, listing the tons of food they had collected for their food bank, the children from the local area who came to the holiday clubs they run, the mentoring schemes they had set up for local young people who end up repeatedly in A&E. And members of Riverside were very actively involved in these and other forms of social action, in ways resonating with Ernst Bloch’s description of hope as requiring ‘people who throw themselves into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong’ (Bloch 1995: 4). Like the adults, the children at Riverside also expressed a sense of the Kingdom of God as both a possibility to be enacted in the everyday and a horizon of possibility to be realized. One Sunday morning, the children were asked by Gemma, the group’s leader, what they thought the Kingdom of God was like and to draw their ideas. Malachi drew a picture of two people, and when I asked him what this was, he replied, ‘Two people helping each other’. Natalie said that her image was of people ‘being kind to each other’. Their understanding of everyday acts of kindness as the Kingdom of God might perhaps be seen as a way of finding modes of transcendence and wonder in everyday, immanent life. The ways in which the idea of ‘life’ figured at Riverside can be connected with this immanent turn. Both Riverside and St George’s named their small group study and discussion meetings ‘life courses’, with ‘life resources’ the name for the teaching resources used within these. Members of both Riverside and St George’s also frequently spoke about ‘doing life’ with each other. When I asked what ‘doing life’ meant, informants told me it was about seeing faith as not just about being in church or reading the Bible, but as something found in everyday moments of relationality, hanging out with each other and doing very mundane things together, implying a sense of ‘building community’

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through these interactions. Maddie expressed this sensibility in a sermon at St George’s: we need to choose as members of the church to open up our lives to people . . . just be open to the possibility of inviting people around, of talking to people, of having conversations, of doing life together, a general thing, come to the gathering things . . . Then there’s a little connection made and it’s a little bit like a spider’s web—there’s connection and connection and connection, and the whole thing grows a bit stronger.

While this celebration of ‘life’ and the idea of ‘doing life’ can be seen as an act of distancing from a traditional evangelical emphasis on life after death, it might also be seen as a means of locating forms of transcendence, enchantment, and wonder in everyday, immanent life, rather than locating transcendence in some other-worldly realm. In one sense these shifts in evangelical thought and practice represent a fragmentation of evangelical culture, as ‘open’ evangelicals seek to define themselves against more conservative forms of evangelicalism, much as Marti and Ganiel have argued is the case with ‘Emerging Christianity’ (2014). I want to suggest that within this shift we can also discern an ethical orientation that is both a sacralization of the everyday and an embrace of the idea of the new. Michael Lambek suggests that historically ethics has been closely related to the domain of religion, and that ‘through religion, the ordinary is transcended, and ethics intellectualized, materialized, or transcendentalized’ (2010: 2–3). Yet, at Riverside we might see the turn to mess as enacting a move away from transcending this-worldly concerns towards finding the transcendent within immanent life and of inhabiting a mode of ethical responsiveness. Reading the work of Levinas on ethics together with Arendt on natality helps to draw this out.

N ATALITY, NEWNESS, AND THE IMMANENT TRANSCENDENT The contemporary political era, as discussed above, has been seen as marked by a cultural and political polarization between those who prefer order and those who prefer novelty and diversity. While this divide is also increasingly crystallizing within contemporary evangelical cultures, it might also be seen as expressing a longer-term distinction between ethical sensibilities that exercised Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas, as both were driven to rethink the fundamental categories of human thought and existence after the experience of National Socialism. Levinas’s work is dominated by one far-reaching theme: that ethics, not ontology, is first philosophy. In Western thought from Aristotle onwards,

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Levinas argues, knowledge has been seen in terms of knowledge of beings, of what is, and ethics has been taken as depending on knowledge: to know a singular thing is to know it as belonging to a universal category. Within this framework, knowledge is an activity which makes present—re-presents— being to thought (Levinas 1989: 76). Knowledge here ‘seizes hold of its object. It possesses it’ (Levinas 1990: 8), it ‘appropriates and grasps the otherness of the known’ (1989: 76). Levinas argues that the entire Western philosophical tradition has been founded on this gesture of appropriation and grasping. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas draws a contrast between a totalizing orientation of appropriation and mastery and an infinite ethical relation. Levinas’s central argument here is that if our relations with others are conceived of in terms of comprehension, recognition, or equality, then insofar as this mode of relationality aims to bring the other within the domain of my understanding, it is totalizing, violently subsuming the other’s individuality under a law of the Same. This idea of taking over the other, and the endless capacities of Western thought to do this, extends beyond the horizons Levinas identified. Robert Eaglestone notes that colonial projects have been based on this logic of ‘annexation, of conquering, which means consuming otherness and revising it as “sameness”’ (Eaglestone 2010: 64). Levinas’s thought ‘is a way of exposing, from within, the colonial and “omnivorous” powers of Western thought’ (ibid.). This finds echoes in the discomfort of the ‘recovering dualist’ mentioned above with how dominant evangelical ways of knowing are likewise premised on, as he describes, ‘a colonial attitude towards the way the evangelical church approaches “other”’, as part of a ‘sovereignty paradigm’ in which ‘“we” know who “we” are, and where “we” are’. The ways in which those at Riverside were seeking to move away from this dualist orientation can be interpreted in the light of the alternative understanding of the human as fundamentally ethical that Levinas offers us in contrast to this totalizing mode of relationality. Seeking to shift our thinking about what it is to be human, Levinas suggests that subjectivity begins not from knowledge, but from ethics,⁹ which arises from the fact of our responsivity to the address of another. Levinas describes the ethical relation between self and other as a relation of responsibility to the other, taking place in language. Having language depends on the precondition of my having responded in peace to the other’s address to me. Describing this responsivity/responsibility to the other’s address as the condition of language and the condition of subjectivity, Levinas anchors the structure of thought and

⁹ Levinas uses the term ‘ethics’ not in a traditional sense as a code of morality or moral decision-making, or meta-ethical examination. Diane Perpich (2008) discusses the relation between Levinas’s ethics and more traditional ethical enterprises.

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subjectivity in this ethical relation to the other who always remains ultimately transcendent, as my relation with the other always ‘overflows comprehension’ (Levinas 1996: 6). Levinas describes this ethical relation with the other ‘where invocation is not preceded by comprehension’ as something we might call ‘religion’ (pp. 7–8). He emphasizes that in using the term ‘religion’, this is not a matter of religious experience, but is a condition of responsibility that is present as a possibility to be realized in every interaction, ‘at once given to us and in society with us’ (ibid.). This ethics is there in the most mundane of interactions, ‘even the simple, “After you, sir” . . . [This is] not the limit case of solidarity, but the condition for all solidarity’ (1981: 117). For Levinas, the possibility of society depends not on truth or knowledge, but on this condition of responsibility. Levinas’s two modes of relationality suggest a means of thinking through how, at Riverside, we see a shift away from the totalizing orientation interwoven in the conservative evangelical desire for order and dualist moral boundaries that situate the self in a relation of sovereignty over the other. In emphasizing the idea of responding to the needs of those around them, rejecting the conversionism implied in ‘the God slot’ at Messy Sundays, there was instead a desire to move towards the kind of ethical orientation to which Levinas seeks to draw our attention. This ethic was articulated one Sunday evening at Riverside. Leading the service, a young schoolteacher, Annie, began with a slide with the motto ‘Live and let others live’. She asked the congregation to chat with their neighbours about what they thought about this as a motto for life, and what their own motto might be. Her following slide had the same words, but with an Indian swastika symbol, and she asked the congregation if anyone knew the tradition it came from. No one answered, so she gave a hint: ‘The principle of non-harm to other living things is called ahimsa.’ A middle-aged man said, ‘Is it Jain?’ Annie said that this was correct, and that Jains are not only vegetarian, but some also wear masks to avoid eating animals and don’t eat root vegetables because pulling them up out of the ground can disturb other creatures. She said, ‘To us, this might seem unusual, but it’s actually really admirable. They really live out their ethical beliefs.’ She then led the congregation in a short meditation, reading out the words of a Jain prayer and Psalm 8 quietly, with a Chopin nocturne playing in the background. A graduate student, Jody, gave the talk that evening. She spoke about the food laws in Leviticus and said that ‘the blood that was in the Leviticus passage represented life, and so prohibitions about eating food with blood in it were about teaching the value of life’. She said that reflecting on this had not made her a vegetarian, but it had made her ‘think about what it means to me that God gives all life, including the lives of all those around the world we will never meet. We are all interconnected.’ She said that in Leviticus, God was trying to teach people ‘to be really humane, to look after the poor, those at the margins’ and that this

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had also made her think about the animals who get to her plate and to reflect on and change her meat-eating practices, for instance, by reducing her intake of meat, emphasizing several times while speaking, ‘I don’t want to be on a soapbox like I have it all sorted.’ This acknowledgement of the depth of our connectedness to and responsibility for all others might be read as a shift towards the ethics of responsibility that Levinas sought to illuminate, even if Levinas did not himself emphasize responsibility towards non-human lives. However, the particular emphasis on life, together with the celebration of newness and ‘new ways of being church’ articulated at Riverside, adds a further dimension to this. Arendt’s idea of natality¹⁰ helps to draw this out. For Arendt, natality is what gives our lives the condition of possibility, opening up a character of ‘startling unexpectedness [that] is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins’ (1996: 178). Grace Jantzen notes that Arendt’s favourite text, which she cited in her dissertation and returned to in several books, was from Augustine’s City of God: ‘Initium ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nemo fuit’ (‘That a beginning might be made, man was created, before whom nobody was’) (Arendt 1996: 147). In The Life of the Mind, Arendt commented that this passage shows that the human capacity for beginning is rooted in natality, rather than in any attempt to make something out of nothing (1978 II: 84; Jantzen 1998: 145). For Arendt, as for Levinas, a new symbolic imaginary was necessary in response to the death-dealing totalitarian regimes she had experienced, which eliminated the singularity and irreplaceability of humans, dehumanizing them as mere ‘masses’ such that they could be killed by the state with impunity (Jantzen 1998: 147). Arendt’s concept of humans as natals was a means of emphasizing the uniqueness of each individual in response: ‘with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world’ (1958: 147). Arendt’s focus on natality was bound up with her emphasis on love and care for this world and her desire to show the seriousness of the harm perpetuated by ‘world-denying’ actions.¹¹ Interwoven within her stress on natality was an attention to the interconnectedness of humans: our uniqueness as natals is interwoven through the web of relationships and in the shared world into which we are born. In contrast with philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre who emphasized the loneliness of mortals ‘thrown into existence’, Arendt draws attention, as Jantzen notes, to ‘the whole web of life’ into which each unique natal enters. This is a ‘web of human relationships which is, as it were, woven by the deeds and words of innumerable persons, by the

¹⁰ I am indebted here to Grace Jantzen’s (1998) presentation of Arendt’s ideas of natality, and how they might be drawn together with Levinas’s work. ¹¹ As Betz (1992: 389) notes, Arendt had wanted to call The Human Condition by the title Amor Mundi.

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living as well as by the dead’ (Arendt 1987: 40). Jantzen suggests that an obsession with death has shaped a philosophical—and, I would suggest, an evangelical—preoccupation with transcendent other worlds. By contrast: taking birth as the centre of our imaginary will direct our attention to this world, to our connection, through the maternal continuum, with all others who have been born . . . This connectedness with all others, while allowing for great diversity, can therefore be recognised as the material basis of ethical responsiveness, a responsiveness which must be grounded in the imaginary and worked out in symbolic and social structures. (Jantzen 1998: 150)

Perhaps we can see within the unfolding of Messy Church over time and the language of mess a shift towards such an imaginary. While the language of natality was not used explicitly, there was at Riverside a hope that something new might be born evoked in their desires for new ways of being church and for new encounters with others. Here ethical possibilities were suggested by their concern with everyday acts such as cooking and eating together— replacing a ‘God slot’—born out of a responsivity to those they were engaging with in the local area. This was less about finding a transcendent vantage point from which to understand the meaning of life, and more about finding the transcendent within the everyday. Simmel describes how Rembrandt’s paintings vividly evoke this illumination of everyday life: ‘Light does not come from outside (such light would inevitably fall unevenly); rather, in order to illuminate its ordinariness, from within, shining through equally in each path that leads from the core of life to life’s appearances’ (2005: 116). While theorists of secularity and secularization (e.g. Berger 1969, Taylor 2007) have argued that cultural and religious plurality contributes to a loss of transcendence, instead at Riverside we see how urban plurality can contribute to a relocation of the transcendent to immanent, everyday life.

CONCLUSIO N: S HIFTIN G WORLD VIEWS AND THE APORIA OF COMMUNITY While contemporary political divides across Europe and North America appear increasingly polarized around cultural preferences for authority and order versus novelty and originality, we can also find this distinction in contemporary evangelical orientations towards order and mess, which find expression in different engagements with children. At Riverside, there is a shift away from what Levinas describes as a totalizing logic in which others are measured, identified, and appropriated by my categories. Instead we see a desire to acknowledge the other in ways that seek to interrupt established

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evangelical categories of identity such as Christian/non-Christian, Church/ world, us/them, inside/outside. While Levinas presents the totalizing mode of relationality as unethical, I do not wish to demonize conservative evangelicalism or to romanticize Messy Church or Riverside. The logic of ‘inclusion’ in Riverside’s vision of building ‘inclusive communities’ might be taken as still signifying a stance of superiority. Here the idea of the church carries resonances of the normalized universalist conception of community into which others are ‘included’, whether or not they know this. This expresses a wider tendency in contexts where it is the majoritarian religion for Christianity to be seen as expressing a universal message that transcends its own boundaries. As Lori Beaman puts it, ‘Christianity’s tendency to imagine itself as representative of everyone, even when they themselves do not find themselves adequately or at all represented, pushes coercively towards a universal from which no one is exempt, and from which no one can exempt herself ’ (2017a: 64). At the same time, limits to the ideal of inclusivity are suggested through the ways casual remarks at Riverside indicated moral boundaries that excluded specific others, such as conservative evangelicals or Conservative politicians. In the service led by Annie, the congregation were given the opportunity to suggest particular moral issues that they would like to cover in future services, and the first point raised by a middle-aged member of the congregation, Dave, was ‘why right-wing politicians are of the devil’. We have also explored in preceding chapters how a desire to challenge social injustice could also be held alongside practices and ways of talking that had the effect of ‘othering’ local urban children and their families. These tensions in the moral threads running through the actions of those at Riverside indicate the aporia of the idea of community: how the desire to create community, however inclusively articulated, always runs the risk of exclusion as any community has to express itself as a ‘we’ who articulate their identities in relation to particular others (Bhambra 2013, Strhan 2016b). These tensions between totality and infinity, as Levinas expresses it, and between order and novelty, are perhaps revealing of a deeper fissure within the human subject in modernity. The distinction between Apollonian dimensions of control, order, and rationalization and Dionysian tendencies towards spontaneity might be seen as a tension running throughout modernity, catching the attention of such thinkers as Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, and Elias (Mellor and Shilling 1997: 13). Bryan Turner argues that American fundamentalism can be seen as ‘a struggle between two conceptions of the self—the Kantian ascetic and disciplined self, and the expressive-affective mobile self. The first is the direct descendent of Protestant asceticism and the second is a distortion of the expressive self of the conversionist sects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (2011: 81). I do not wish to suggest that any of the churches I studied should be seen as fundamentalist (although this is often how

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conservative evangelicalism is portrayed), but Riverside’s emphasis on mess might be seen as a reaction against the conservative evangelical emphasis on order and as bearing the imprint of the charismatic evangelical emphasis on spontaneity. While the politics of diverse evangelical constituencies in the UK cannot be clearly mapped in terms support for or opposition to Brexit¹² or rigid ‘right’ or ‘left’ orientations, we can nevertheless see members of Riverside’s distinction from conservative evangelical groups as expressing a wider polarization of cultural values that also defines our contemporary political era. Attending to the social and cultural conditions that create and intensify particular orientations towards ideas of order, novelty, and mess—and to the modes of relationality these orientations encourage or foreclose—is important for deepening understanding of how different forms of ethical life and value are formed and lived in the everyday. In the study of evangelicalism, attending to engagements with ideas of mess, order, and coherence has the potential to deepen understanding of the different ways in which evangelical groups respond to fluid, rapidly changing experiences of social life. Focusing on these engagements also deepens understanding of how particular groups construct the limits of knowledge and certainty and enact modes of difference and belonging, and of the conditions that allow these to change. As those at Riverside acknowledged how their own moral sensibilities and practices of engaging with others were changing, this shift provides insight into religious and moral change as it happens (see also Marti 2017). In her study of the religious and non-religious world views of sea turtle rescue volunteers, Beaman argues that we are seeing ‘an emerging worldview’ which is ‘more inclusive and recognizes interdependence, based on both scientific evidence and an ethic of respect that invokes a reformulated understanding of equality . . . Engagement is layered and fluid. Relations are respectful, imbued with humility and focused on connection’ (Beaman 2017b: 25–6). This ‘world without edges’ (ibid.), as Beaman describes it, is presented by William Connolly as ‘a world of becoming’, a stance which challenges ‘the quest for eternal salvation and the possibility of human mastery over nature’ (Connolly 2011: 10). As scholarly attention is being drawn to the place of religion (including evangelicalism) in exclusionary populist nationalisms, it is also important to explore the forms of religiosity within emerging alternative world views that seek to stem this flow.

¹² Smith and Woodhead (2018) examine how support for Brexit relates to Anglicanism and evangelicalism, and demonstrate that while white evangelicals and regular churchgoers in the US are overwhelmingly politically conservative and were likely to support Trump, in contrast, English evangelicals and more regular churchgoers were less likely to support Brexit than ‘cool’ Anglicans (who identify as Anglican but do not demonstrate other indicators of religiosity, such as frequent church attendance).

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Children themselves perhaps often embody this world of becoming. We saw in Chapter 2 how children often problematized exclusionary dualist logics of evangelical ‘us’ and non-evangelical ‘other’ and articulated an ethics of responsivity and desire for newness evoked by Arendt and Levinas. When I interviewed ten-year-old Dylan, he said that for him, faith in everyday life meant ‘meeting new people, being very kind’, and he said that the opposite of living out his faith would be ‘hurting people’. This is not to say that children do not also create moments of conflict, tension, and hostility (Ipgrave 2012, Oliver and Candappa 2003, Hemming et al. 2018). However, they may often be open to accepting modes of difference and otherness that many adults find harder, as they have little investment in preserving the kinds of religio-political boundaries of distinctiveness that are often defended by religious and political elites. A study of primary school children’s friendships in super-diverse classrooms found that children were aware of cultural diversity and recognized difference, forming close friendships with those from different ethnic groups to themselves, and interpreting ‘social diversity, including ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity, as a given and very much part of everyday social life’ (Iqbal et al. 2016: 8). Counter to suggestions that children do not see social difference due to their ‘“innocent”, unformed nature’, Iqbal et al. found that children were able to ‘participate across difference in proto-skilled ways, to generally mix competently and without major tensions or frequent recourse to racialization and othering’, viewing diversity as an ordinary aspect of life (p. 13). The ways in which children work out these modes of coexistence and see forms of religious and non-religious difference as a ‘non-event’ (Beaman 2017a) deserves further exploration. Turning the ethnographic lens inwards, we might also ask what these shifting ethical orientations mean for our conceptual frameworks and for scholarly impulses to categorize the social world in a spirit of intellectual hygiene. In reflecting on the conceptual significance of the idea of mess, it is worth noting how William James distinguished his approach to philosophy from dominant approaches: [P]hilosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle; and whether these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures, the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility. Those of you who are accustomed to the classical constructions of reality may be excused if your first reaction upon it be absolute contempt—a shrug of the shoulders as if such ideas were unworthy of explicit refutation. But one must have lived some time with a system to appreciate its merits. (James 2004: 52–3)

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The ways in which we engage with and construct ideas of order and mess in our conceptual schemes also enact a particular ethical engagement. I am not wanting to suggest that disorder and mess are moral goods: to be able to think about social life requires concepts that render ‘slice[s] of chaos available for thought’ (Hallward 2006: 141). Rather, responding to my informants’ emerging social imaginaries invites reflection on what it means to understand and communicate about the social world in ways that both allow us to describe how expressions of moral life shift and turn and embody this ethics of responsivity. In the sociology of religion, this might challenge certain tendencies towards firmly locating and categorizing particular religious others, and instead encourages forms of research that allow spaces of uncertainty and an openness to engaging the life of the other (Das 2010: 397). Such work is perhaps increasingly demanding in contexts of increasing cultural and political polarization, but precisely in such times, it is a vital task.

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Conclusion In February 2018, I arranged to meet up with Katie at St George’s to catch up and so that I could fill her in on my progress in writing this book. When she arrived, looking stylish as ever in a grey jacket and scarf with skinny jeans, we hugged and then headed downstairs into the large room under the main church space, which had new fairy lights hanging from the ceiling and ‘WELCOME’ in neon lights over the door. She made us both cappuccinos at the coffee machine with barista-style precision. I showed her some photos of my fifteen-month-old son on my phone and commented on the amount of children’s stuff (baby walkers, toys, and so on) that had been set up in the space. These were for a new after-school club, Street Dance, she explained, which she said was ‘incredibly popular’, and aimed at primary school children. She said that she was now the church’s ‘community pastor’, and that she had a new children’s worker working with her because their work ‘with children and local families just kept growing’, and so they had needed to take on an extra member of staff. Looking around at all the kit set up for the after-school club— with a toddlers’ area and an area for Street Dance—as a parent myself now, I could appreciate the popularity of a space like this with local parents. Katie asked whether my son was at nursery. When I said that he was, she said that she thought that nursery is ‘good for children socially’ and that they enjoy it. She mentioned a girl whose mother had felt guilty about sending her to the school breakfast club every morning and so Katie had asked the girl what she thought about breakfast club, and Katie said she had replied, ‘I love breakfast club. I get to have breakfast with my best friends five days a week.’ Katie asked about my maternity leave, and when I commented that my husband and I had each taken six months’ shared parental leave, she said, ‘That is such a great thing. I love the idea of shared parental leave.’ We took our coffees with us to sit on a sofa, and I talked through the main ideas and content of each of the chapters of this book (some of which I had already sent her in draft form before my maternity leave). When talking about the chapter on mess, I commented that I had focused on the contrast between the open and conservative evangelical churches I had studied, and she said that she thought St George’s would definitely be closer to embracing ideas

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of mess and messiness. I asked whether she agreed overall with my analysis, and she said, ‘It sounds like you’ve got everything pretty much spot on.’ We chatted about how members of the church had experienced the Brexit vote, and she said, ‘It was quite a painful time, and it was something that was mentioned in sermons. Definitely most people here would have been proRemain, though there are one or two people in the church who I know did vote for Brexit, so you do have to be careful what you say sometimes.’ She said the church had been anti-Trump, and there had been a sermon series on Trump, with titles such as ‘Welcome to the Resistance’ and ‘Demonstrate’. I asked her whether things had changed much in terms of their work with children since my fieldwork. ‘Street Dance is probably the biggest new thing,’ she said, and mentioned that they had also started ‘movie night’, which took place every six weeks, from 5 to 7 p.m., with a film for children shown in the main church space, with pizza, popcorn, and juice, and wine and cheese for parents downstairs. She said that in Kids Church they were now averaging forty children a week, with sixty regulars they see over the course of a month, coming every two to three weeks. Before our meeting, I had noticed that St George’s had recently set up an LGBTQ group. I asked Katie what the church’s current position was on LGBTQ issues, commenting that the morning after the first same-sex marriages had taken place in England and Wales in March 2014, I had asked James, the vicar, about his thoughts on same-sex marriage, and that he hadn’t exactly answered that question, but had talked about how the pastoral advice he would give about same-sex relationships had changed over time, and that he now thought the church should be at the forefront of standing up for gay rights. I said that it hadn’t, however, been entirely clear to me at the time whether the church took a particular line on homosexuality, in contrast with St John’s, whose leaders taught that same-sex relationships were sinful, and with Riverside, which was supportive of same-sex relationships and marriage. Katie said that things had changed, and about a year ago they had had a baptism at the church, and ‘one guy, who is actually my housemate, came out as gay’. She said that some people in the church already knew he was gay and others didn’t, and that God ‘really spoke’ to James and he gave a sermon on inclusivity in which he made it clear that ‘if you look in the Bible, Jesus really welcomes everyone. And that’s what he said in his talk.’ Katie said that James had in his talk explicitly rejected the ‘love the sin, hate the sinner’ stance that some evangelical churches take in relation to homosexuality, ‘because if you’re gay, that’s just about the most hurtful thing anyone could say to you’. She said that since James’s talk, the church had experienced ‘a massive growth’ in the numbers of LGBTQ people coming to the church, and they had set up a LGBTQ group at the church. Katie’s alarm went off on her phone to remind her to collect a couple of children from St George’s School to bring them to the after-school club. We

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carried on chatting as we headed over to the school. She said that she was going forward for ordination, and was interested to learn more from my research about other churches’ perspectives. She said that longer term she wanted to stay at St George’s as community pastor, and that being ordained would just be a way of making official the work that she was already doing. The school was busy with children being collected, with lots of Muslim mothers wearing headscarves, reflecting the demographic of the local area. As we walked through the playground with the two children Katie was meeting to collect their scooters, they chatted animatedly with her about how their day had been, with Katie saying ‘hi’ to lots of other children and parents as we walked, and it struck me how embedded she seemed within this community. Back in the church, the children went off to play with their friends. There were about thirty children at the after-school club, and as Katie and I chatted about the club, she exuded a sense of pride in the space she had created for children and the local community to gather. I asked if the church was still running the holiday clubs, and she said that they were, and that they had introduced a new half-term club so that they now ran something every half term or holiday. Saying goodbye, Katie and I hugged again, and as I headed off, I reflected that I had found it moving in a way I hadn’t expected coming back to St George’s. I wondered whether this was perhaps because returning after a break heightened my awareness of time passing, as it crystallized how life had moved on for Katie, for the church, and for me. Chatting with Katie about my son and my imminent move from London to York made me aware of how my own life had changed since the period of my fieldwork. My experience of becoming a mother had also made me more acutely conscious of the practical appeal of many of the things St George’s offered in terms of ‘combatting social isolation’ for new parents—as Maddie had put it at a talk during my fieldwork—such as babies’ and toddlers’ groups, as well as after-school and holiday clubs. But I was also struck, talking with Katie about individual children from Kids Church, that they were growing up and were now teenagers in Youth Church. Katie had herself also moved on in this time, taking on a more senior position in the church and going forward for ordination, and the work that the church was doing with children had further expanded in the three years following my fieldwork. I considered the fact that with Katie’s new title, St George’s and Riverside both now had dedicated positions for staff engaging with the ‘community’, for whom work with children, schools, and families played a central role, whereas St John’s did not have a comparable identified focus on ‘the local community’, but instead had staff whose role was to engage with adults who worked near the church.¹ ¹ This seemed a particular facet of St John’s geographical location, with other conservative evangelical churches I visited not necessarily having a ‘community pastor’, but having staff whose focus was working with local children and families.

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The following day, I listened to a recording of the sermon by James on inclusivity that Katie had highlighted. James began by discussing the inclusion of the Gentiles in the book of Acts, and how some of Jesus’s disciples had struggled with this idea. He spoke about Peter’s vision in Acts 10 of a sheet of animals—including non-kosher animals—being lowered from heaven and his hearing a voice telling him, ‘Do not call anything impure that God has called clean.’ James asked the congregation whether there are contemporary parallels to this: ‘How about a vision of a fully-stocked bar being lowered at a Southern Baptist Convention in Texas with the instruction that everyone present was to come to the bar and get a drink? . . . What about the command to be part of a majority non-white congregation? What about the command to be part of a working-class congregation, or a congregation led by a woman?’ He said that the Jewish Peter eating with the Gentile Cornelius in Acts and recognition of the Gentiles as ‘new believers . . . represents an epic movement of the Jews and Gentiles towards one another because of the new reality that Jesus has inaugurated’, and went on: Let’s bash the Baptists again. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 . . . at least in part to allow Baptists in the southern States to uphold the astonishing notion that they could own slaves while simultaneously sending missionaries to Africa to preach the gospel. Now this is one amongst many examples of how hard the church has found it to embrace the full implications of the gospel, especially in relation to race, class, and sex. Indeed, it seems that every human grouping seems to identify at least one other grouping as being not equal to themselves.

James said, echoing the Acts passage, that the church ‘dare not call common or unclean what God in Christ is willing to call clean. And I suggest that that excludes no one.’ He said that at St George’s this continues ‘to have implications for our recognition of female leaders and leaders of different racial and ethnic backgrounds’. He said that they wanted to ensure that they had equal numbers of women leading services, leading worship, and speaking in the church, and that they had accomplished in overall terms 50/50 across the board . . . Now I don’t think we’ve done as well with people from different ethnic backgrounds. We are very much thinking about that. We are looking for people all the time who would like to speak, lead worship, lead services etc. . . . And we do need to keep going with that, because that has not been a strength, I just want to acknowledge it.

He went on: but I want to say this morning . . . I’ve come to the conclusion that this is God’s implications for our inclusion of gay people. Now I’ve been on a long journey, as have many other Christian leaders concerning this issue . . . I’ve found myself increasingly unable to get over the problem that the gay community feels

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alienated from the church . . . Saying that we ‘love the sinner but hate the sin’ does not work in a context in which neither the gay community nor anybody outside the church thinks that gay identity is a sin. In fact, what it does is it accentuates the hurt and alienation.

He discussed how Paul in the New Testament often ‘played fast and loose with principles’ for the sake of pragmatism, and said that he felt he was following Paul in taking this line in relation to homosexuality: I now find myself incapable of saying ‘I love you, but I don’t accept your definition of yourself ’, a definition by the way that everybody else does accept . . . My personal view is that we will come to see these passages [biblical passages condemning same-sex sexual relations] in the same way that we now see some teaching about slaves, women, relationships between the sexes, as culturally related and not for today. That’s what I think will happen; churches like ours will do that.

He linked this change to education: It’s partly because of education. So, for example, my children, who have generally followed Maddie and I in our understanding of the faith, could never understand a more conservative view in relation to homosexuality. And it’s partly because from primary school onwards, they’ve been taught the co-equal nature of all people in respect to sexual identity. And so I think this is a horse that’s bolted, and I think there’s a great opportunity for us to show genuine love to a group of people who feel that we hate them.

He spoke about how the evangelical church had largely shifted its position to be inclusive of those who are divorced and to accept the preaching of women over the past fifteen to twenty years, and said that the church would likewise become fully inclusive in relation to homosexuality: ‘That’s not God, that’s my opinion . . . From an apologetic perspective, I’m sure you would agree that the church needs to lose its homophobic reputation . . . Of course, we could also do with losing any racist, classist, or sexist reputation as well.’ He closed by saying that he thought some in the congregation would find this all very obvious, but others would find this ‘as challenging as the Gentile issue was for Peter. But I think this is a struggle we’re compelled to engage in in the name of love.’ * * * It is apt to conclude this book with a scene that alludes to how children can contribute to social and religious change. While during James’s sermon, children would not have been present to hear him speak but rather at Kids Church, it is nevertheless striking that in his talk, his own children and their education figured in his delineation of how and why evangelical churches would come to move away from conservative evangelical teachings on homosexuality. In this narrative, it was taken for granted that children have agency in the sense of holding their own moral positions independent of their parents’ views—which indeed challenged those views and encouraged them to realize

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that, as James put it, ‘this is a horse that’s bolted’. This sermon reveals how children can and do form their own theological and moral conclusions, and that the process of listening to their voices can play a role in shaping the ethical direction of religious institutions more broadly. Children and childhood have historically been neglected within the sociology of religion and within the study of religion. My aim in this book has been to demonstrate that understanding the contemporary social realities of religion demands that we attend to children and childhood. Examining the ways in which those at St George’s, Riverside, and St John’s sought to engage with children has offered insight into how childhood is constructed within evangelicalism, and the ways in which children are afforded or denied particular forms of agency. Attending to the figure of the child, however, is not only important for our understanding of children and childhood, but shifts and deepens our understanding of social life more broadly. Examining how those at Riverside, St George’s, and St John’s engaged with children across the spaces of church, school, family life, and local community is revealing of the changing forms and ethical orientations of evangelicalism, the contested place of faith in public life, and churches’ hopes for their place in a society that is increasingly detached from institutional religion. The different sites of encounter I have explored in this book, in which the question of what a child is (or should be) is in question, are of potential relevance for understanding the place and significance of children within a range of religious lifeworlds. And the questions that have emerged from these sites—addressing what it is to seek to form a person, the contested nature of authority in relation to parenting, the moral ambitions of faith groups in engaging with education, the marking of times and transitions, and normative conceptions of order and disorder—are of broader relevance for the sociology of religion beyond the study of evangelicalism. Likewise, the relational approach to childhood and religion developed here might be taken up across a variety of religious contexts, encouraging further attention to the ways in which children’s agency is not given a priori but emerges through particular practices and forms of relationality, how the figure of the child shapes the hopes, fears, and imaginations of adults, and how adult religious subjectivities are often constructed in both imagined and practical relationships with children. Attending to the question of childhood in relation to contemporary evangelicalism is revealing of the strikingly different theological, cultural, and moral assumptions underpinning the groups explored in this book. Those at Riverside saw their work with schools and local children in terms of a moral ambition to challenge social inequalities and bring about ‘community transformation’, drawing on narratives of how Victorian evangelicals in the past had challenged poverty through working with children. At St George’s, work with children was understood both as a means of drawing children and families into the church and of responding to the needs of the local

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community. Underpinning both these aims was a moral vision of developing better qualities of relationship, embodied in the idea of intimate relationality with God, within families, and within the church, and of developing reflexive autonomy. These were ideals that also resonated at Riverside, with their focus on ‘intimacy’ and ‘interdependence’, and on faith as ‘becoming the best version of yourself ’. At St John’s, work with children was generally understood less in terms of transforming society, which was understood as ‘career[ing] away from its Christian heritage’ (Strhan 2015: 8) and as increasingly hostile towards conservative evangelical faith. The main focus at St John’s in its work with children was to bring up the children of those who attended church to ultimately ‘put their hope in God’.² Yet at the same time, this upbringing was also imagined as having wider moral significance in a cultural context rapidly spiralling away from faith, as the church encouraged parents to ensure that their children learnt norms of obedience that, as David put it, cut ‘right across the trend of much of our culture’ which has ‘enthroned a child’s individual rights above that of their God-given duty to their parents’. Within a narrative of declinism, the church was presented as a moral ‘display cabinet’ for the rest of society in terms of the adult–child relationships it sought to foster, ‘a radical countercultural example, old and young, different backgrounds . . . meeting together in rightly ordered relationships and radiating what it looks like to belong to the Lord Jesus Christ’. These radically different forms of religious orientation raise the question of whether the term ‘evangelical’ is still useful analytically. The fragmentation and diversity of contemporary evangelicalism(s) has become a growing focus of both scholarly and public attention in recent years, particularly in the United States (e.g. Griswold 2018, Kuruvilla 2018). It is certainly easy to highlight the differences between St John’s, St George’s, and Riverside. However, given the ongoing circulation of the term in both public and religious life, it is important to map the prevailing meanings and significance of what it is to be evangelical for the range of groups who identify as ‘evangelical’ and to monitor the changes in these meanings over time. When I interviewed one of the church staff at Riverside about why the church used the word ‘evangelical’ in its self-identification when other evangelicals disputed Riverside’s evangelical identity, she said that she and Andy emphasized that evangelicalism: needs to be a good news . . . So what does good news look like? Some people have said that’s the gospel message which is ‘you are a sinner’, all of that, whereas the good news of Jesus was the gift of life in all its forms—spiritually, emotionally,

² This contrasts somewhat with other conservative evangelical churches I visited, several of which were involved in many similar activities to St George’s, for example, visiting schools and running after-school clubs through which—the hope was—local children and families would be drawn towards attending church.

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mentally, physically, vocationally, the whole thing. I want people to know . . . that offer of life in Jesus, I want them to experience that . . . I’m so passionate about Jesus and so passionate about this kind of God . . . that shows me why we should be doing education, why immigration—, and fighting for our students, why all that is important. For me, that’s being evangelical.

Her comments, while drawing attention to her awareness of how other evangelicals interpret ‘the gospel’ differently, highlight her understanding of evangelicalism as being about ‘a good news’ that shapes an impetus to seek to change the world according to this vision. Despite the differences between the churches explored in this book, this theological logic of engagement with the world, where the world is understood to be in need of salvation, shapes a sense of moral responsibility to seek to work towards that salvation, albeit understood in very different ways across the churches. While these utopian and transcendental elements in the evangelical imaginary can encourage a sense of disappointment in the immanent social and political order (Strhan 2015: 210), they can also create conditions of possibility for particular forms of hope to appear and flourish. The importance of cultivating ‘hope’ was emphasized at all three churches. While at St John’s this was primarily in relation to hope for a future transcendent City of God beyond the immanent frame, at Riverside and St George’s the language of hope was articulated in relation to desires to bring about a better world in the here and now. For example, Jim Wallis, an evangelical writer and activist from the US who visited Riverside during my fieldwork, gave a talk one evening about ‘serving the common good’. He spoke about disrupting supply chains where money from selling minerals for making mobile phones ‘ends up in the hands of warlords’, and challenged those listening: ‘If you believe that when we make decisions that can change the world, that will change the world . . . Hope means believing in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change.’ At St George’s, Maddie likewise described the church as a ‘people of hope. We’re not going to give up, but we are going to do what we can do make a difference.’ Living through times of rapid social, cultural, and political change, as the public sphere seems unwieldy and beyond individuals’ control and the future both difficult to understand and master from the background, ‘the power of youth grows’ (Beck 1997: 165). When the world seems recalcitrant to change, engaging with children and shaping their lives becomes an especially potent means of imagining oneself as changing the world. Thus, while the different projects that the churches engaged in, such as running holiday clubs and afterschool clubs, were often a practical means of supporting those in the local areas surrounding the churches, they were also often especially meaningful for the adults who were engaged with them. Whilst the ways in which the adults spoke about these projects often situated the children they were working with as in need of their help, it is also important to acknowledge how these projects

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also arose from these adults’ own needs. By working with children and understanding themselves as thereby agents of transformation or salvation, these different engagements in many ways responded to these adults’ need to have a sense that they were bringing ‘good news’, building a better world, and responding to conditions of increasing social and cultural inequality, exacerbated under conditions of continuing economic crisis, that often feel overwhelmingly beyond individual control. While this figuration of children as emotive symbols of the future of humanity might appear universal, it is perhaps also bound up with the Christian (and post-Christian secular) rendering of time ‘in a linear . . . way. Each new dot in the line is an opportunity for self-improvement, and for the improvement of others, for bettering “the world”’ (Malkki 2015: 96). At the same time, children’s involvement or non-involvement in religion could be a source of particular anxiety for adults, as children uniquely offer ‘embodied access to the inchoate possibilities of [a] culture’s future’ (Orsi 2005: 78) and thus represent the possible futures or non-futures of different forms of faith in their being and their becoming. Tim, one of the church staff at Riverside, said in a talk one evening that faith had to be ‘fixed into the bones of the young’, otherwise it was ‘just one generation from extinction’. And this phrase—‘one generation from extinction’—was also used in sermons at St John’s, evoking the potential fragility of the ‘chain of memory’ (Hervieu-Léger 2000) on which each religious culture hangs. These orientations towards the future are also to do with how the past and lost potentialities are experienced and constructed in particular ways. For some conservative evangelicals, their desires for the formation of children and concerns about parent–child relationships are bound up not only with their practical desire for the ‘salvation’ of their children, but also with their own perception of a Christian culture passing into the chaos of a lost potentiality, as they experience a sense of becoming ‘out of step’ with narratives of a progressive universalizing freedom. There were occasionally tinges of this nostalgic construction of a Christian past in how those at St George’s spoke about their work with children, for example, as they described their toddlers’ groups and holiday clubs as a means through which local families would ‘come back’ to the church. However, the language of ‘hope’ was a much more frequent refrain both here and at Riverside as each church both sought to bring children up in their form of faith and at the same time reimagined ways of engaging with children in the local community and experimented with new ways of ‘being church’, as Rob put it. As the number of children and young people attending churches and identifying as Christian continues to fall dramatically in the UK and across Europe (Voas 2018, Bullivant 2018), churches such as St George’s—which is seeing a growth in the number of children attending—are in the process of moving away from staking out moral boundaries of distinctiveness separating the church from society towards

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instead seeking to develop effective engagements with children and families and striving to find new ways to support their local community. Addressing the affective authority of children as suffering subjects and ‘seers of truth’ in humanitarian efforts, Lisa Malkki notes how moralized, sentimentalized constructions of children as embodiments of the future, of innocence and purity, efface the autonomy and lived experiences of actual children. Children, she writes, ‘are neither blank slates nor bundles of pure humanity; they are persons with histories’ (2015: 96). Malkki argues that representations of children as innocent, pure bearers of the conscience of humanity depoliticize actual children: Anne Frank, Zlata Filipovic, Irma Hadzimuratovic, Sadako Sasaki, Samantha Smith, Katya Lycheva, Kim Phuc (the famously photographed young Vietnamese girl whose body was burned by American napalm), and Malala Yousufzai have all stood there and touched the hearts of millions—perhaps momentarily. The trouble is that, from this pedestal, it is nearly impossible for actual children to act in the world as effective political, historical subjects. They are set apart by adults in an infantile utopian dimension that is freely celebrated and almost as freely ignored. They are called upon to speak for mankind and ritually miniaturized into silence. They are made the mere. All this could be otherwise. (Malkki 2015: 100)

This stripping of the child as the bearer of experience and knowledge also takes place within the realm of religion. Addressing the Roman Catholic sex abuse crisis, Robert Orsi argues that the hollowing out of the child’s agency through the adult’s projection of either a ‘holy innocent’ or a ‘demon child’ is found widely across different forms of American religious life, as well as in New Age and pagan groups. He notes that the idea of children as innately spiritual has tended to figure in liberal imaginings, while the view of the child as in need of adult religious authority and protection has tended to hold more conservative religious imaginations, although in popular practice there is considerable fluidity, because ‘they are shadows of each other, the holy child and the demon child chasing each other across the American Christian landscape’ (Orsi 2017: 352). Orsi argues that the holy innocent narrative denies children the full range of their emotions and experiences and suggests that the problem underlying the Roman Catholic sex abuse crisis was not celibacy or liberalism, ‘but the unstable presence/absence of children in a religious and political culture that denies them the full complexity of their experience and renders them porous to adult need and desire’ (Orsi 2017: 354). He argues that in response to the crisis, we need ‘to find ways of making children more authentically and autonomously present in contemporary Christian contexts and of genuinely protecting them’. He suggests that such protection must mean genuinely protecting their autonomy, rather than just putting in guard safety measures

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that only constrain children further under adult authority and protection’ (ibid.). By doing so: It may be possible to stop the endlessly spinning modern Christian dialectic of children’s absence/presence by opening a space in Christian contexts for real children with lives not constrained by adult fantasies (of children’s innate spirituality and holiness), grief (for a lost golden age of innocence), fear (of children), or desire (for children). This calls for a new season of honoring children in their fullness and complexity of their real lives in the circumstances of the present and in their autonomy. (Orsi 2017: 354)

Attending to the agency of children and enabling their voices to be heard requires examining both how specific figurations of childhood and religion can enable or constrain the agency of children in particular ways and what these multiple modalities of agency mean in lived experience for actual children. Following Malkki, it also invites us to question the depoliticization of children and consider what it would mean to take their voices—as both political and religious actors—seriously within the study of religion. Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1993) drew attention to how through telling stories from a different perspective and including those who have been excluded, we change our understanding of history. This is not a matter of the ontology of voice, of what it is to speak, but rather about the conditions through which one is enabled to speak, and invites our attention to the question of where, when, and how children speak today. One Sunday morning at Riverside, the children and leaders in Kids Church had each written down a list of things that were important to them. Jon, one of the leaders, had written ‘generosity’ and ‘social justice’ as two of his chosen terms. Malachi looked at these, and then said that he thought that social justice and generosity were the same thing. Jon disagreed, saying that ‘social justice is about where there are inequalities that should be made better, but generosity is about my giving what’s mine to help others’. The children were quiet, seeming to mull this over, and then Dylan spoke, suggesting that there was an inequality inherent within this idea of generosity: ‘but if you have more money that would mean you could be more generous to others’. Implicit in Dylan’s comment, I would argue, was a questioning of a notion of ownership and ‘mineness’ underlying Jon’s idea of generosity—and, one could add, of ideas of philanthropy or charity more broadly—that reifies social inequalities. Reflecting on this discussion later while writing up my fieldnotes, I considered how open the children had been in this conversation. While Malachi and Dylan had disagreed with Jon, at the same time they wanted to explore the relationship between these moral and political ideals, and their questioning of often taken-for-granted concepts opened up important ethical questions about the nature of generosity and justice. This questioning, for me, resonated with the image Malachi had drawn in another Kids Church session of his

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understanding of the Kingdom of God as ‘two people helping each other’. Theirs was a political and moral understanding and challenge to the ‘othering’ often implicit in how many churches imagine their generosity to particular others, and demonstrated their interweaving of the personal and the political, much as James’s children’s rejection of conservative evangelical positions on LGBTQ teachings was a political, moral, and theological challenge to the views of older evangelical generations. Listening to the voices of children in the course of writing this book, I was struck by how they, in their everyday experiences, interactions, and understandings, often provided insight into the ways in which people live their lives well together beyond approaches to religion that highlight difference or attempt to manage religious diversity through top-down solutions.³ When I described what ‘sociological’ meant to one of the children at Riverside in terms of understanding how societies work, he said, ‘Do you mean it’s about helping people to get on better?’ Our work should be about helping people to get on better, and one part of this work is about exploring the spaces and places in which people already live well together, and children’s voices may often play an important but overlooked role within this. I acknowledge that this line of thought about children is perhaps itself shaped by the kinds of construction of the figure of the child explored within this book. Yet while it is tempting—and justifiable—to feel disappointment or despair at many political events unfolding around us in the contemporary moment, listening to the voices of children offers grounds for hope that they can and will play a role in making a more just world.

³ See Beaman 2014.

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Index 21st Century Evangelicals research programme 6–7 affect 99, 132 agency 3–4, 10, 51, 52, 102, 161–2, 202–3, 208 conceptualizing children’s agency 30–5 evangelical figurations of the child 35–41 locating childhood in the study of religion 26–30 as a major concern 26 study of religion and the agency of children 23–47 tactical interstitial agency 45–6, 59, 124–5 Alderson, Priscilla 4 Allayari, Rebecca 128 Anglican Mainstream 36–7, 36n Arendt, Hannah 180, 189, 192–3 The Life of the Mind 192 attachment 96–103 Augustine, City of God 192 Aune, Kristin 86–7 autonomy 9–10 autonomous coping strategies 103–4 Badiou, Alain 151 Bales, S. R. 12, 159 baptism 10, 156, 159–62, 175–6 Bartkowski, J. P. 82, 86 Bauman, Zygmunt 75, 103, 104 Beaman, Lori 132–3, 194, 195 Bebbington, David 7 Beck-Gernsheim, E. 79 Beck, U. 79, 80 Bengston, Vern 83–4 Bible 63, 66, 88 Acts 201 Ephesians 56 family reading of 94 Genesis 42, 186 Hebrews 56 Isaiah 38 John’s gospel 77 Leviticus 191–2 Mark’s gospel 38 Paul’s letter to the Ephesians 91 Revelation 65, 188 Zephaniah 64–5 Bloch, Ernst 188 body pedagogics 50–1 Bourdieu, P. 131, 132 Bowlby, John 97

Brexit 195, 199 British values 3, 3n, 39, 101, 112 Brown, C. 7 Browning, Don: Children and Childhood in American Religions 28 Bunge, Marcia: Child in Christian Thought 28 Burkeman, Oliver 104 Butler, Judith 38 Calhoun, C. 9 Cameron, David 81, 112 capital 129–33 Castañeda, Claudia 33 Cavell, Stanley 53 Certeau, Michel de 45 Chalke, Steve 88 How to Succeed as a Parent 78, 79 charismatic evangelicals 7, 10, 14 baptism 162, 176 Christmas 163–6 Communion 167–8 friendship with God and others 54–61 links with schools 115, 138–44, 152, 153 parenting 96–103, 106–7 rites and rituals 162–8, 176 Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF) 134–5 childhood and children 3–4, 121, 203 being/becoming dichotomy 30–1, 71 capacity to embody the future 80 childhood studies 29, 31–3 conceptualizing children’s agency 30–5 evangelical figurations of the child 35–44 and evangelicalism in a changing religious landscape 4–10 full Christian personhood 66–7 increasing autonomy of children 83, 94 locating childhood in the study of religion 26–30 nature/culture dichotomy 30–1, 50 obedience 10, 83, 85, 86, 91–2, 204 portrayal of children as innocents 207–8 researching evangelicals and childhood 11–19 sexualization of children 11, 40–1 sociology of 31–2 view of children as inherently sinful 83, 89–90, 106 Christian Institute 39

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Index

Christianity 5, 76–7, 114–15, 174, 185, 194 Christians and Sheffield Schools (CaSS) 134 Christmas 161, 163–6 Church and Childhood 28 church planting 12 Clayton, Matthew 10 cognitive development 27–8, 98 Coles, Robert: The Spiritual Life of Children 28 Communion 158–9, 161, 166, 167–8, 169–70, 176, 178 community transformation 138, 145–52, 153, 203–4 competition 132–3 Connolly, William 195 conservative evangelicals 7–8, 10, 11, 13, 73, 75, 206 baptism 159–62, 175–6 desire for hierarchical order 185–6 Kingdom of God, view of 187–8 learning to hear God 62–7 links with schools 115, 137–8 parenting 88–96, 106, 185–6 rites and rituals 159–62, 175–6 corporal punishment 85, 93, 93n, 101–2 Craib, Ian 103, 104 cultural capital 109, 125 Cunningham, H. 35, 117, 121, 124 Cusk, Rachel: A Life’s Work 79 Das, Veena 53 Davie, Grace 6 Dawkins, Richard 10 Day, Abby 167–8 declinism 10, 204 Deleuze, G. 32, 33 discipline 99–102 Dobson, James: Dare to Discipline 85–6 Douglas, S. J. 84 dualism 186–7, 190 Eaglestone, Robert 190 Edgell, Penny 82 education and schools 108–33 academies, establishment of 111–12 addressing the language of capital 129–33 admissions policies 115–16 assemblies 108–9, 130–3, 138–40, 145, 172–5 education geared towards students’ employment 123–4 faith schools 2, 8, 109–10, 112, 112n, 127 free schools 111, 112 inclusion 121, 122–7, 130–1, 133 moving from primary to secondary school 154–6, 166–8, 172–5

neoliberalism and the contradictions of moral selving 127–9 neoliberalism, faith schools and social class 110–16 neoliberal policies 109, 110 place of religion in schools, debate on 110–11, 113 ragged schools and Riverside’s educational ambitions 116–22 relationship with religion 8 rewards 124 social responsibility 125 urban schools 114–15 white middle-class, private school ethos 125 see also school visitors Eliade, Mircea 157 Elisha, O. 126 Ellison, C. G. 82, 86 embodiment 50–1, 74 emotion 55, 75 emotional dysregulation 98–9 Enlightenment 9 ethics 51, 52–3, 189 ethical issues in research 18 of responsibility 189–92 ethnography 11–12, 30 Evangelical Alliance 87 evangelicalism: as a cause of concern in education 109–10, 134–7 and childhood in a changing religious landscape 4–10 definition 7 evangelical, contemporary use of the term 204–5 figurations of the child 35–44 growth of 5–7, 13 media representations of 7–8 moving away from conversionist impulses 184–5 politics of diverse evangelical communities 195 researching evangelicals and childhood 11–19 stereotypes 8 study of 4 Faircloth, Charlotte 79 faith schools 2, 8, 109–10, 127 and neoliberalism and social class 110–16 families 8, 36 building relationships with 183–4 democratization of 80–1 and secularization 83, 84 see also parents and parenthood Fancourt, Nigel 110–11, 128

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Index formation of children: core values of intimacy (with God) and inclusion 67–73, 74–5 friendship with God and others 54–61 learning to hear God 62–7 pure relationships 75 relational approach to children and religion 49–54 Foucault, M. 32, 33, 37, 52–3, 76 ‘Technologies of the Self ’ 51 France-Williams, A.: Ordinary Mum: Extraordinary Mission: Sharing God’s Love in Everyday Life 103 French, J. 103 Freud, Sigmund 41 friendship: church as a community space 60–1 with God 54–61 with non-Christians 61, 72–3 Gallagher, S. K. 94 games 59–60, 63 Ganiel, G. 189 generosity 208–9 Gennep, Arnold van 157–8, 165, 167 Giddens, A. 30, 31, 32, 74–5, 80 Gilligan, Carol: In a Different Voice 208 Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON) 15 God 43 core values of intimacy (with God) and inclusion 67–73, 74–5 and friendship 54–61 learning to hear God 62–7 Green, Sophie 97, 98 Grimes, Ronald 158, 175 Hadot, Pierre 51 Haidt, Jonathan 179, 180 Hand-in-Hand Children’s and Family Ministry Conference 41–4 Hardman, Charlotte: Children in New Religions 28 Harris, Susan 83–4 Hemming, Peter 113 Hervièu-Léger, Daniele 83 Herzfeld, Michael 13 Hetz, Olga 98, 99 hope 67, 80, 98, 153, 188, 204, 205, 206 Hope Ministries 42 humanitarianism 151 humour 60 inclusion 67–73, 121, 122–7, 130, 133, 179, 194, 201–2 individualization 10, 75, 80, 83 reflexive individualism 76

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intimacy 36, 80, 96–103 with God 54–5, 67–73, 74–5 Iqbal, H. 196 Jain 191 James, Allison 11, 27–8, 31 Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood 30 James, William 196 Jantzen, Grace 192–3 Jesus 43 and children 38–9, 45 tempted by Satan 56–7, 58 Kant, I. 9–10 Kincaid, James 40–1 Kingdom of God 187–8, 209 Klein, Naomi: No Is Not Enough 173–4 Knausgaard, Karl Ove 80 knowledge 32, 33, 190 Lambek, Michael 52–3, 189 language 53, 190 of capital 129–33 Lasch, Christopher: The Minimal Self 81 Latour, Bruno 34 Lee, E. 79 Levinas, Emmanuel 180, 189–92, 194 Totality and Infinity 190 LGBTQ people 14, 15, 67, 72, 122, 199, 201–2, 209 liberationism 37 life, notion of 188–9 Lofton, K. 84 Lynch, G. 7 McCarthy, Mary: The Group 82 McGlothlin, B. 102–3 Madge, N. 73 Mahmood, Saba 51 Malkki, Lisa 151, 207 Marti, G. 189 Mellor, Philip 50–1, 77 memory verses 55, 56, 57, 64 Messy Sundays (Riverside) 178–97, 198–9 Family Space 178–9, 181–3, 183–4 ‘God slots’ 184–5, 191, 193 Kingdom of God 187–8 messing up church 180–9 natality, newness and the immanent transcendent 189–93 shifting world views and the Aporia of community 193–7 metaphysics of presence 32 Michaels, M. W. 84 Miller-McLemore, Bonnie J. 28 Moore, Lucy 180–1

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230 morality 52 moral selving 127–9 More, Hannah 35–6 Morgan, Patricia 37 Muehlebach, Andrea 128–9 Muslims 5, 29, 73, 112 natality 192–3 National Secular Society 109 ‘Evangelism in State Schools: The Role of External Visitors in Publicly Funded Education’ 134–6, 137, 252 neoliberalism 10, 109, 110 and the contradictions of moral selving 127–9 and faith schools 110–16 non-religion 2, 5 obedience 10, 83, 85, 86, 91–2, 204 Omri, Elisha 116 open evangelicals 7, 10 Communion 169–70, 176 inclusion 67–73, 122–7, 130 intimacy (with God) 67–73 links with schools 110, 119–21, 123, 126, 128, 129–30, 145–52, 152–3 rites and rituals 168–75, 176 thanksgiving services for babies 168–9 weekend camps 170–2 see also Messy Sundays (Riverside) Orsi, Robert 11, 207–8 Oswell, David 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 47, 80–1, 94 othering 150–1, 152, 194, 196, 209 parents and parenthood 1–2, 78–107, 106 authoritarian parenting 85–7, 90, 106–7 authority and instruction at St John’s 88–96 autonomous coping strategies 103–4 as a cause of social problems 81 co-regulated affect 99 corporal punishment 85, 93, 93n, 101–2 as determining the future 105 discipline 99–102 everyday concerns 93 faith in parenting cultures 83–7 faith not fear 89 fathers 86–7, 90, 92, 95–6, 102 grace-centred parenting 89 intensification of parenting 79, 79n, 81–2, 95 intimacy, attachment and emotional security at St George’s 96–103 mothers 82, 90, 92, 102–3 obedience 10, 83, 85, 86, 91–2, 204

Index parent-child relations 80–1, 82–3, 94, 106–7, 185–6 parenting advice 78, 81–2, 88–9, 104 parenting, use of the term 78–9 school expectations 101 single parents 93–4 studies focusing on the United States 85–6, 106 Pentecostals 5, 7 play 59–60, 63 political ontology 31 power 32–3, 51, 76 prayer 2, 48–9, 59, 64, 70–1, 74, 167, 171–2 Prout, Alan 11, 27–8, 30, 31–2, 50 pure relationships 75 Puritans 81–2 Putney, Norella 83–4 Quartz (online magazine) 84 Qvortrup, Jens 31 Ramaekers, Stefan 104 Rancière, J.: The Ignorant Schoolmaster 132 Reay, D. 123–4 reflexivity 10, 46, 49 reflexive individualism 76 reflexive responsibility 109 relationality 34–5, 45, 190, 191, 194, 203 relational approach to children and religion 49–54 social relationality 129–33 religion changing landscape of 4–10 children and religion, relational approach to 49–54 children’s agency and the study of religion 23–47 church as a community space 60–1 conceptualizing children’s agency 30–5 core values of intimacy (with God) and inclusion 67–73, 74–5 evangelical figurations of the child 35–44 friendship with God and others 54–61 learning to hear God 62–7 locating childhood in the study of religion 26–30 as personal choice 73 place of, in modernity 8–9 relationship with education 8 religious embodiment 50–1, 74 sociology of 34 view of, as a threat 2–3, 5, 10 religious nurture 29 religious transmission 28, 29, 83–4 Ridgely, Susan 85–6

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Index rites and rituals 156–7 altar calls 171–2 baptism 10, 156, 159–62, 175–6 Christingle 163–6 Christmas 161, 163–6, 168 Communion 158–9, 161, 166, 167, 169–70, 176 communitas 165, 168, 170, 176 confirmation 161, 166, 170 initiation 156, 157, 158, 165, 175 moving from primary to secondary school 154–6, 166–8, 172–5 rites of passage and their afterlives 157–9, 175 Riverside (open evangelical) 168–75 St George’s (charismatic evangelical) 162–8 St John’s (conservative evangelical) 159–62 thanksgiving services for babies 168–9 weekend camps 170–2 Riverside academies 108–9, 115–16 assemblies 108–9, 130–3 educational ambitions 116–22 education geared towards students’ employment 123–4 inclusion 122–7, 130–1, 133 neoliberalism and the contradictions of moral selving 127–9 rewards 124 Riverside Primary Academy 129–31, 132–3, 145 school visitors social responsibility values 125 white middle-class, private school ethos 125 Riverside (open evangelical) 1–2, 12–13, 48–9, 73, 116–17, 204, 208–9 activities 16 affiliation 15 altar calls 171–2 Communion 169–70 Everyone is Important activity 67–73 inclusion 122–7 involvement with Riverside Academies 110, 119–21, 123, 126, 128, 129–30, 145–52 membership 14–15 rites and rituals 168–75, 176 thanksgiving services for babies 168–9 Vision Statement and Mission 71 weekend camps 170–2 see also Messy Sundays (Riverside) Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 35 Sachs, Rebecca 59–60 Salter, James: Light Years 80

231

salvation 153, 205, 206 Salvation Army 185 same-sex relationships 14, 15, 67, 199 Samuel, Raphael 3 Satan 56–7, 58 Savage, M. 123 scapegoating 72 school visitors 134–53 assemblies 138–40 concern about evangelical visitors 134–7 holiday clubs 141–4, 146–50 lunchtime/after-school clubs 140–1, 145–6 Riverside, transforming community 145–52, 152–3 St George’s, cultivating relationships 138–44 Scourfield, J. 28 Muslim Childhood 29 Scripture Union 134 It’s Your Move: Your Guide to Moving to Secondary School 154–6 secularism 5, 6 and changing family structures 83, 84 secular modernity 10 self 194 forming a divided self 77 moral selving 127–9 self-determination 127 self-formation 52, 76, 129 self-realization 67, 75 technologies of 51–2 Seligman, Adam 174 sex education 11, 37, 38, 39–40, 93 Shaftesbury, Lord 4, 117, 118 shame 98–9 Shilling, Chris 50–1, 77 Sikhs 5 Simmel, Georg 34, 193 sin 43, 44 Skeggs, B. 123, 131–2 Smith, Christian: National Study of Youth and Religion 28 social class 110–16, 131–2 middle-class 14, 67, 93, 105, 109, 113–14, 116–17, 121–2, 123, 125 social exclusion 122, 122n, 132 socialization 29 social mobility 114–15, 121 social responsibility 125 sociology: of childhood 31–2 of religion 34 Something to Celebrate (Anglican report) 87 songs 54, 139, 145–6 spiritual gifts 75–6

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Index

Spock, Benjamin 85 Starshine Music Ministries 42 St George’s (charismatic evangelical) 12–13, 73, 198–9, 203–4 activities 16 affiliation 15 baptism 162, 176 Christingle 163, 168 church as a community space 60–1 Communion 167–8 friendship with non-Christians 61 gift activity book and questionnaire 75–6 links with schools 115, 138–44, 152, 153, 200 membership 14 parenting 83, 96–103, 106–7 rites and rituals 162–8, 176 sword of the Spirit activity 55–61 St George’s Primary School 115, 138–44 St John’s (conservative evangelical) 12–13, 73, 200, 204 activities 16–17 affiliation 15 baptism 159–62, 175–6 desire for hierarchical order 185–6 learning to hear God 62–7 links with schools 115, 137–8 membership 14 parenting 83, 88–96, 106, 185–6 rites and rituals 159–62, 175–6 sense of separation between church and world 64–5 Strathern, Marilyn 46 structuration theory 30 subjectivity 190–1 Suissa, Judith 104 Sunday School movement 137

temptation 56–7, 58 Thacker, S.: Hope for the Weary Mom Devotional 102–3 theology 28 Thompson, Naomi 137 The Throne Room (guided meditation) 23, 24–5 Turner, Bryan 194 Turner, Rachel 42–3, 44 Parenting Children for a Life of Purpose 43, 102 Turner, Victor 158, 161, 165, 176 Urry, John 173 Valentine, Kylie 51 visuality 63–4 Ward, Pete 36, 87, 121 weak ontology 34 well-being 38 Weller, Robert 174 Wesley, John 35 Where Did You Pick That Up? meeting 36–41, 44 Wilcox, W. Bradford 83, 86, 95 Williams, Andrew 185 Williams, Rowan 112 Wittgenstein, L. 53 women 14, 15, 62n, 73, 201 Woodhead, Linda 5 Wordsworth, William 35 Wuthnow, Robert: Growing Up Religious 28 Xu, X. H. 86 youth work 121–2, 137