Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches Jon Bialecki Omri Elisha , Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 276 pp. It would be factually accurate to describe Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches, the first ethnographic monograph by Omri Elisha, as a single book. After all, it takes on a single problematic—that of politically and theologically conservative American Evangelicals who feel compelled to engage in a form of voluntaristic social work usually associated with the sort of "social gospel" movements normally connected with liberal, mainline denominations. It does so in a single site—Knoxville, Tennessee—and it is contained within a single volume. However, when considering the merits of this work, and what it has to tell us about the current state and potential future directions of the contemporary anthropology of Christianity, it is probably best to consider this to be two separate books, or better yet (given that the religious nature of the topic) it is profitable to think of this as a volume capable of being given both an exoteric and esoteric reading. The exoteric reading might be called the privileged one; it certainly is what stands out in sharp relief during the initial reading of the book. It is, like all good ethnography, a nuanced snapshot of particularly situated people struggling to work through a particular problem: in this case, the problem is that of how to practice and campaign for Christian charity in an age that is ideologically and structurally neoliberal. Though these individuals may not be humanists in the classic sense of the word, the portrait drawn of them by Elisha certainly is, a sketch of persons who function as much as full characters as they do as exemplars of larger socio-cultural trends. This is particularly the case in the moments when the ethnographic description attends to the way people struggle with the [End Page 973] painful antinomies of their religious and economic situation, as well as to their attempts to overcome it through various forms of what might have been called "consciousness raising" had it occurred in a different milieu. Elisha's informants are caught in the snares of an ethical individualism, a petit bourgeoisie consumerist quietism, and a salvation economy skeptical of the social and the institutional; despite this, Elisha depicts a handful of "morally ambitious" individuals who struggle to extricate both themselves and their fellow megachurch believers. This ambition impels them into a different creative and agentive mode of interacting with those they consider the poor and the oppressed, imagined as the proper objects of Christian charity and concern. If such a movement were to come to its completion, Elisha's informants contend, it would augur a real revival, completely transforming their city in ways that even they find difficult to articulate. Working against class type, and struggling to bridge racialized economic divides, this is a study of people engaged in a particular kind of moral involution, attempting to overcome the very forces that shape and limit their subjectification. At the exoteric level, this book would be compelling for those interested in contemporary charity and gift economies, those interested in the subjective shape of neoliberalism in the contemporary world, or those who attend to social movements. The second, esoteric reading of this book lies not at the level of expressed content, but the formal decisions made by the author in framing his ethnographic object. What is of interest here is Elisha's choice to think through his wider object, a recognizable "Bible Belt" evangelical Christianity, as a multiplicity, while not falling into what Joel Robbins (2003:193) has called "an object dissolving critique." Here, instead of being either epiphenomenon or essence, Christianity is a series of open, differentiating potentialities; the direction of charitable practices designed to address and denature structural forms of inequality are always present in the form of Southern Evangelism that Elisha documents, but it is not always actualized, and frequently not actualized on the same form. This means that Elisha also has to make use of an analytics of different speeds, intensities, durations, and thresholds, as well as of different attractors that...