Tim Farron, Conservative Evangelicalism and the public sphere

Tim Farron resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats last week saying that he felt it was no longer possible to reconcile his faith and his leadership. Here Anna Strhan explores her recent research on Evangelical Christians finding that a deeper understanding of the nuances and varieties of contemporary evangelicalism in the UK is needed

I want there to be no glass ceiling: Evangelicals’ Engagements with Class, Education, and Urban Childhoods

While class has been an enduring focus for sociologists of education, there has been little focus on the interrelations between class, religion, and education, despite widespread public anxieties about faith schools potentially encouraging both social class segregation and religious separatism, which have become more pronounced as the expansion of free schools and academies in England has increased opportunities for religious bodies’ engagement in educational provision. This article explores the importance of class in relation to the intersections of religion and education through examining how an ‘open evangelical’ church engages with children in schools linked with it, drawing on eighteen months’ ethnographic fieldwork with the church, its linked schools, and other informal educational activities run by the church. Through analyzing the everyday practices through which evangelical leaders seek to affect children’s lives and how they speak about their involvements with children, the article reveals the significance of class in this context, providing insight into how evangelicals’ primary aspiration in this setting is for children’s ‘upward mobility’, as their ambitions are shaped through middle-class, entrepreneurial norms, in which developing a neoliberal ethic of individual self-discipline and ‘productivity’ is privileged. Through focusing on the ‘othering’ of the urban poor in these discourses, the article adds to our knowledge of the complex interrelations between evangelicalism and class, and deepens understanding of how secular neoliberal norms become interwoven with an alternative evangelical moral project of forming the self

Discipleship and desire : conservative evangelicals, coherence and the moral lives of the metropolis

This thesis is an ethnographic study of the everyday religious lives of conservative evangelical Christians in London. Conservative evangelicalism has attracted increased public attention in recent years as a number of Christian groups have become increasingly visible in arguing that Christians are being marginalized in British society as their lifestyles are threatened by universalizing processes associated with modernization. Seeking to move beyond simplistic stereotypes of evangelicals that arise from polarizing media narratives, I explore how members of a large conservative evangelical congregation experience and fmd ways of negotiating concerns, uncertainties and human frailties that shape social life more broadly. My central argument is that their experience of God as coherent and transcendent, mediated through word-based practices, both responds to and intensifies their consciousness of internal moral fragmentation, binding them more closely in their sense of dependence on God and each other. Situated in debates about subjectivity and modernity in the sociology of religion, the anthropology of Christianity and urban theory, I analyse how conservative evangelicals faith is patterned through their being shaped as modern, urban subjects according to nonns of interaction internalized outside the church and their development of moral and temporal orientations that rub against these. Their self-identification as 'aliens and strangers in this world thus, I argue, both articulates and constructs a desire to be different within the metropolitan contexts they inhabit, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their habituated modes of practice, hopes and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world. I demonstrate how focusing on both their embodied, word-based practices and their experience of the personality of God helps develop understanding of this form of religious intersubjectivity and its social effects, and argue that this approach opens up new avenues for understanding evangelicalism, lived religion and everyday ethical practice

Matters of Life and Death

What is the significance of the concepts of ‘life’ and ‘death’ for different religious and non-religious groups? This chapter aims to draw out deeper understanding of practices of connection and separation between religious and non-religious groups through examining affinities between how different Christian and non-religious groups engage with notions of ‘life’ and ‘death’, drawing on qualitative sociological research. Although questions of life and death might appear perennial concerns for religion, I explore here the particular contemporary significance of ideas of ‘life’ and ‘death’ within the moral landscapes of different religious and non-religious groups. The chapter considers the significance of the idea of ‘life’ for an ‘open’ evangelical church, the Sunday Assembly, and the School of Life, and practices of reflecting on ‘death’ in Death Cafés, drawing this together with Georg Simmel’s writing on life and its interrelations with death. I conclude by suggesting that attending to modes of practical engagement with ideas of ‘life’ and ‘death’ across these different religious and non-religious groups, rather than focusing solely on the propositional content of beliefs about life and death, opens up opportunities for reflection on common existential grounds of experience, moving beyond assumptions that relations between these groups are necessarily antagonistic

'Bringing me more than I contain': Levinas, ethical subjectivity and the infinite demands of education

Emmanuel Levinas' s reorientation of ethics as preceding ontology and his radical\ud presentation of responsibility, justice, consciousness and knowledge are of clear\ud relevance for education. It is therefore not surprising that in the last decade we have\ud seen a number of studies ofLevinas by educational theorists.\ud Much of this work has focused on Levinas's relevance for issues of ethics, social\ud justice, multiculturalism and moral education. This thesis draws on this previous\ud research, but aims to take educational readings of Levinas in another direction\ud through considering how his presentation of discourse, language and subjectivity, as\ud dependent on an infinite ethical demand, troubles several dominant orientations\ud within educational discourse that treat education in ways that can become totalising\ud and instrumentalist.\ud I begin by offering a philosophical analysis of how Levinas describes the scene of\ud teaching and the nature of subjectivity. I then interrogate how this reading of Levinas\ud disturbs some current understandings of education: first, the way that, within\ud liberalism, education can be conceived instrumentally as the site for the development\ud of a certain kind of individual (a rationally autonomous chooser, etc.), and second, the\ud way that neoliberal educational ideologies have privileged managerialism,\ud performance and the market, with Religious Education providing a case study of the\ud implications of Levinas's interruption. I then consider how this leads to new\ud understandings of community and political subjectivity within education.\ud In this way, I explore how responding to Levinas, and reading his work together with\ud criticisms addressed by Badiou and others, leads us not just to a richer vision of the\ud meaning of education, but also to a more motivating understanding of the ethical\ud subjectivity of both students and teachers, which is dependent on a deepening and anarchic\ud responsibility, and which invites us to work for a better education extending\ud beyond the straight line ofthe law

Matters of Life and Death

What is the significance of the concepts of ‘life’ and ‘death’ for different religious and non-religious groups? This chapter aims to draw out deeper understanding of practices of connection and separation between religious and non-religious groups through examining affinities between how different Christian and non-religious groups engage with notions of ‘life’ and ‘death’, drawing on qualitative sociological research. Although questions of life and death might appear perennial concerns for religion, I explore here the particular contemporary significance of ideas of ‘life’ and ‘death’ within the moral landscapes of different religious and non-religious groups. The chapter considers the significance of the idea of ‘life’ for an ‘open’ evangelical church, the Sunday Assembly, and the School of Life, and practices of reflecting on ‘death’ in Death Cafés, drawing this together with Georg Simmel’s writing on life and its interrelations with death. I conclude by suggesting that attending to modes of practical engagement with ideas of ‘life’ and ‘death’ across these different religious and non-religious groups, rather than focusing solely on the propositional content of beliefs about life and death, opens up opportunities for reflection on common existential grounds of experience, moving beyond assumptions that relations between these groups are necessarily antagonistic

Latour, Prepositions and the Instauration of Secularism

Bruno Latour's understanding of different modes of existence as given through prepositions offers a new approach to researching "secularism," taking forward attention paid in recent scholarship to its historically contingent formation by bringing into clearer focus the dynamics of its relational and material mediations. Examining the contemporary instauration of secularism in conservative evangelical experience, I show how this approach offers a new orientation to studying secularism that allows attention to both its history and its material effects on practice. This shows how Latour's speculative realism extends and provides a bridge between both discursive analysis of religion and secularism and the recent turn towards materiality in empirical study of religion