This thesis is essentially an ethnographic examination of the instrumentalist and functionalist reading of African evangelical Christianity that is prevalent in a section of Western scholarship. Thus, it sets out to achieve two primary objectives: to investigate, describe and analyse Christian theological and socio-political consciousness within the context of oil and conflict in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria from Baptist and Pentecostal perspectives; and to use the data to test the veracity of the prevalent account on African evangelical Christianity regarding social witness. This account is succinctly represented by Paul Gifford who claims, among other things, that such Christianity lacks social responsibility and is anti-development and a-political. In order to achieve these objectives, the thesis adopts approaches from practical theology, particularly the burgeoning field of congregational studies, with its focus on qualitative research, and African Christian Theology, with its emphasis on grassroots theology, or ‘theology from below’. Also, achieving these objectives requires an analysis and description of Nigeria’s political economy of oil and conflict, which forms the secondary goal of the study. Consequently, two local Baptist churches and a Pentecostal congregation were selected on theological, geographical, and pragmatic grounds. The thesis is in two parts. Part I, comprising Chapters One to Three, gives the background to the study. Chapter One is the introductory chapter. In Chapter Two an analysis of Gifford’s account of African evangelical and ‘fundamentalist’ Christianity is provided. Chapter Three identifies and critiques the prevalent perspectives on oil and conflict in Nigeria. Part II covered in Chapters Four to Eight comprises the core ethnographic data from the case studies and their description and analysis. Chapter Four is essentially a thick description of the three congregations. In Chapter Five the first set of theological themes from the case studies – God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit – are discussed. Also included in the chapter is their theology of prayer. Chapter Six focuses on the theme of ecclesiology and also addresses their perspective on Christian socio-political role, as well as their theology of conversion. Chapter Seven offers a detailed analysis and description of their experiences, response and understanding of oil and conflict. Chapter Eight, which is the concluding chapter, sets the research findings against Gifford’s claims and concludes that most of them are at variance with the reality in the three congregations. Possible explanations for this discrepancy are offered, as well as some implications the study has for the scholarship on African Christianity and for the three churches. The chapter also includes the description and proposal of a contextual political theology for the Niger Delta.

Between 1955 and 1984, the Reverend Robert Schuller’s Garden Grove Community Church in Orange County, California, blossomed into a ten-thousand-member congregation of regional and national prominence. Straddling the line between evangelical and mainline Protestantism, the church was emblematic of conservative American Christianity in the second half of the 20th century. Likewise, Orange County was the quintessential sprawling, decentralized, postindustrial suburban region. Garden Grove Community Church and Orange County grew together at an exponential rate in the postwar era. Through participation in the devotional, social, and organizational activities of the church, Schuller’s congregation actively constructed their personal and collective identities. They made meaning out of their suburban lives in ways that had long-term political and economic implications for the county, the region, and the country. The church offered cultural, spiritual, and ideological coherence to a community of corporate, white-collar transplants with few social roots. The substance of that coherence was a theology conflating Christianity with meritocracy and entrepreneurial individualism. The message resonated with “Sun Belt” suburbanites who benefited from systemic class- and race-based metropolitan inequality. Schuller’s message of self-reliance and personal achievement dovetailed with a national conservative repudiation of the public sector and collective responsibility that originated in the suburbs. This drive to eviscerate the American New Deal political order state was nearly unstoppable by the early 1980s, and it received theological aid from institutions like Garden Grove Community Church.

In this paper I intend to discuss the ways in which sex, sexuality, and the female body are treated in the discourse within the Evangelical movement, particularly with regard to teenaged and young girls. I will focus on the way young women are talked to about sex, and how they are socialized and educated to regard sexuality and gender. I will spend most of my time with the popular literature aimed at young women, analyzing the underlying theology and theory at work. I will extrapolate, through the use of the (admittedly limited) data regarding sexual activity among young Evangelicals, including but not limited to the age of first sex, and the rate of non-penetrative sex acts, the results of the current ethic, and how it is affecting the lives of young women in America. By the end of this paper I hope to be able to suggest an alternative ethic, one that is sex-positive while still leaving open the option to teach abstinent behavior.

This project studies the theological legacy of white evangelical purity culture (WEPC) and proposes a constructive Baptist practical theology of baptism in response. It foregrounds the activism and testimonies of Christian women to foment and intervene in white supremacist constructions of womanhood in the Female Moral Reform movement; to perpetuate and prevent racial violence in the lynching era through the deployment of a reimagined vision of sacred white womanhood; and to expand conceptions of the wounding legacies, persisting challenges, and alternative visions proposed by those harmed by WEPC. In the “afterlife” of white evangelical purity culture, baptism, conceived as a practice of solidarity, is a critical intervention to the persistent and problematic deformations of identity, salvation, and ecclesial formation. The project begins with analysis of the theopolitical history of WEPC and its founding frameworks and promises. It then turns to the Female Moral Reform movement, and particularly the activism and theological arguments of Sarah Grimké and a dissenting interlocutor in 1838, to illustrate how questions of womanhood, race, and women’s rights were forged in the context of institutional slavery. Next, this project engages the activism of Rebecca Felton, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, attends to the character de/formations deployed in women’s activism and rhetoric supportive of and against lynching, and argues that the uninterrogated sacred status of white womanhood prevents a full acknowledgement and dismantling of the regnant theological frameworks of WEPC. It then frames the online writing as testimonies to the wounding experiences in WEPC, offering an emergent tripartite framework of shame, misplaced blame, and silence to capture the impact of WEPC. Finally, drawing from the works of James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Ada María Isasi-Díaz and M. Shawn Copeland, it proposes a Baptist theology of baptism wherein baptism is revelatory rite that initiates solidarity in the service of a world that engenders the possibility of mutual liberation and human flourishing. This project contributes to the growing literature on WEPC by exposing the raced theological scaffolding that necessitate a transformation of core Christian practices. / 2022-12-09T00:00:00Z

As Latin American evangelical theologians awoke to dependency on the North in the post-war period, they set the trajectory for a new contextual brand of evangelical Christianity. Ecuadorian Protestant theologian C. René Padilla (b. 1932) coined the term misión integral (integral mission), which first appeared on a public stage in Lausanne at the influential International Congress on World Evangelization of 1974—signalling both the rise of leadership from the Global South and a wider turn toward holistic mission within the global Protestant evangelical community. The concept of misión integral is an understanding of Christian mission that synthesizes the pursuit of justice with the offer of salvation. Padilla utilized the kingdom of God as the central theological motif in this synthesis. The thesis explores the dynamic interplay between Padilla and the global evangelical networks that formed, developed, and diffused misión integral. This first critical study of Padilla is structured thematically in order to provide a more detailed focus on each stage of this process. Earlier studies have largely framed misión integral as responding to Catholic theologies of liberation, beginning in the late 1960s or early 1970s. In contrast, I demonstrate that the origins of misión integral are found within a cluster of political and social forces reshaping post-war Latin America: rural-urban migration flows, the resulting complications of urbanization, and the rapid expansion of the universities, where Marxist ideas of revolutionary change presented a growing appeal to students. When Padilla became convinced of the inadequacy of his received North American evangelical theology of mission to meet such challenges, he began a search for theological materials with which he could address the Latin American context. In doing so, he sought to widen the parameters of an evangelical understanding of Christian mission. Padilla’s response was not purely Latin American nor driven by exclusively Latin American concerns. However, Padilla’s theology developed through a multidirectional and international conversation with a wide variety of interlocutors. Padilla became a metaphorical sponge—appropriating new theological perspectives from his undergraduate and graduate studies at Wheaton College in Illinois, his doctoral work in New Testament at the University of Manchester, the Presbyterian missionary-statesman, John A. Mackay, and the holistic tradition of American women missionaries through his closest colleague and wife Catharine Feser Padilla. This thesis explores these multidirectional conversations that shaped the concept of integral mission, and in doing so provides a corrective to current historiography. The process of developing the contours of integral mission would continue over the next two decades in a further series of transnational theological conversations. Particularly important were those Padilla conducted with the Peruvian Baptist Samuel Escobar and the Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana (Latin American Theological Fraternity), the British Anglican John R. W. Stott and the global evangelical movement, and the Argentine Methodist José Míguez Bonino and the ecumenical movement. Padilla’s theological networks cut both ways— influencing him and diffusing his influence to a wider Christian constituency. In focusing on these interlocutors, this thesis provides an assessment of the nature of Padilla’s influence upon the growing acceptance of integral mission within global evangelicalism. Today, the language of integral mission is being increasingly adopted by evangelical mission and relief organizations, evangelical political activists, official congress declarations, and Protestant ecclesial movements around the world.

Every year, during the month of October, hundreds of Christian churches throughout the United States open the doors of their Hell House to surrounding communities. Hell Houses are Christian haunted houses designed to literally scare the Hell out of visitors so they will accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. In the place of vampires or zombies, Hell Houses portray the sins Satan is mostly likely to tempt teenagers to commit. Scenes include young girls receiving abortions, young men believing lies that they were born gay, and careless individuals drinking and driving. As para-theatrical performances, Hell Houses lead guests from one vignette to the next until they reach Heaven and Hell to show the eternal consequences of one's behavior. A Hell House is a medium of proselytization. Believers within the larger USAmerican Evangelical Christian community organize these events to facilitate the conversion of others. In this thesis, I explore how the use of Hell Houses and other mediums of proselytization are justified within religious-based communities through the implementation of what I refer to as a discourse of neutrality. According to religious-based communities because mediums of proselytization simply convey spiritual truth and reality to those outside of the community, they depict "how things really are." However, I argue that the use of each medium both reflects a perception of reality and contributes to the creation of that reality. Describing and discussing the mediums as "neutral" to the processes of creating reality and meaning generates an authoritative power to legitimately define the politics and boundaries of the religious community's identity. Furthermore, it masks the role each medium plays in the creation of reality as well as the tensions within the community to authoritatively define the "Evangelical Christian" identity. In this thesis, I explore Hell Houses as mediums of proselytization where Evangelical Christians perform their identity politics. To conduct this analysis, I examine how other mediums of proselytization associated with Hell Houses (i.e., the physical body, conversation-based evangelism, and the Internet) each depend upon their own discourse of neutrality to thrive in the community. Because each medium is seen as neutral, those who champion its usage garner an authoritative legitimacy to define the community's identity and Christianity along the lines of reality as informed by the supposedly neutral medium. Here, I detail the dynamics of the tensions within a significant and complex religious group in contemporary America and how performative practices within the community inform its identity politics.

The war between the Peruvian state and the Maoist Shining Path rebels began in the Department of Ayacucho, an area with a majority of indigenous Quechua- speaking peasant villages. After twenty years of violence (1980-2000), this region of South America’s Andes began a critical period of demilitarization, refugee resettlement, and reconciliation. In this transition, the rebuilding of villages devastated by the war raises critical questions about indigenous autonomy, citizenship, and the role of international human rights initiatives in local reconciliation. I examine the tensions between interventions by national and transnational organizations, and the insecurities that continue to define everyday life in villages like Wiracocha - a newly resurrected community that was in the heart of the war zone.1 Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in this village and ten months of comparative fieldwork in villages across the Ayacucho region and in the city of Huamanga, my research shows that villagers were often at odds with the aid and interventions offered to them from the outside. I focus on the complicated nature of village war history, paying attention to the initial sympathy with Shining Path and the village's later decision to join the counterinsurgency. In Ayacucho, memory has itself become a site of struggle that reveals as much about present-day conflict, ambivalences, and insecurities of neoliberal Peru as it does about the actual history 1 Wiracocha is a pseudonym that I am using in order to maintain subject confidentiality. of the war. Villagers sometimes oppose official memory projects and humanitarian initiatives - including Peru's Truth Commission - that that they see at odds with their own visions and agendas. Finally, I examine the less predictable ways that villagers have redefined what it means to be Andean, including: the maintenance of village militarization, a return to hard-handed customary justice and the adoption of bornagain Christianity as a new form of moral order and social solidarity. / Dissertation

Almost daily emotional worship pours from a warehouse-sized evangelical church in the small rural community of Santa Cruz, Costa Rica. Within twenty years an evangelical presence has gone from virtually non-existent to standing alongside the Catholic Church in the area’s religious landscape. Scenarios like this are going on throughout Latin America as evangelical faith has become firmly rooted in the region. In this thesis I provide another ethnographic research context to the growing body of literature focused on Pentecostalism/evangelicalism in Latin America. Like others addressing this dynamic, I explore the factors and motivations that lead people to become evangelical. I approach these questions with particular emphasis on the characteristics of evangelical faith as it is constructed and practiced during church services. Through participant observation during church services and interviews with practicing evangelicals in and around Santa Cruz, I highlight the relationship between the characteristics of an evangelical faith and the factors and motivations that lead people to seek it. To be religiously active in the manner of my informants requires deep commitment and is not a faith adopted and practiced lightly. Those who become evangelical and sustain the demanding practice are likely to seek it for spiritual solutions to difficult life situations.

Almost daily emotional worship pours from a warehouse-sized evangelical church in the small rural community of Santa Cruz, Costa Rica. Within twenty years an evangelical presence has gone from virtually non-existent to standing alongside the Catholic Church in the area’s religious landscape. Scenarios like this are going on throughout Latin America as evangelical faith has become firmly rooted in the region. In this thesis I provide another ethnographic research context to the growing body of literature focused on Pentecostalism/evangelicalism in Latin America. Like others addressing this dynamic, I explore the factors and motivations that lead people to become evangelical. I approach these questions with particular emphasis on the characteristics of evangelical faith as it is constructed and practiced during church services. Through participant observation during church services and interviews with practicing evangelicals in and around Santa Cruz, I highlight the relationship between the characteristics of an evangelical faith and the factors and motivations that lead people to seek it. To be religiously active in the manner of my informants requires deep commitment and is not a faith adopted and practiced lightly. Those who become evangelical and sustain the demanding practice are likely to seek it for spiritual solutions to difficult life situations.

No description available.