GEOMORFOLOGÍA HIDROLOGÍA FLORA FAUNA ARQUEOLOGÍA RESUMEN DE COMPONENTES

Before investigating Cavey’s reflexivity in his pastoral role, I will examine the significance of reflexivity for modern religiosity and its emergence in “role distance” and the “alienation effect” in an audience. The Emergent Church Movement displays a radical reflectivity towards its belief and practice, what has been called “a religious orientation built on a continual practice of deconstruction”

(Marti and Ganiel 2014:25). Marti and Ganiel see the Emerging Church Movement as an institutionalizing structure constantly deconstructed and reframed by “religious institutional entrepreneurs” who paradoxically seek to resist the institutionalization of their movement (see also Packard 2012). To deconstruct means to irritate and problematize conventional practices and paradigms by drawing attention to their contingent, if not arbitrary status. Put differently, Emerging Church leaders’ posture towards ministry can be characterized as “the intentional provocation of reflexivity” (Marti and Ganiel 2014:81).

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99 Marti and Ganiel quote one emerging church member who said their church offers “Christianity for people who don’t like Christianity” (2014:76). Emerging church participants are notoriously ambivalent about their Christian faith.

Giddens (1991) sees reflexivity as endemic to late modernity and its disembedding character.

Margaret Archer (2009) agrees that globalization facilitates the dynamics of reflexivity which creates

“more ‘problematic situations’ confronting more people everywhere and fewer and fewer suitable, habitual responses.” Reflexivity she defines as more than reflection on an object—its distinguishing feature is “the self-referential characteristic of ‘bending-back’ some thought upon the self, such that it takes the form of subject-object-subject.” It involves an internal conversation, an inner drama or

“musement” that can lead to some creative or novel course of action. Scholars who champion reflexivity write in tension with those who see only habitus at work (Pierre Bourdieu) and rational choice scholars who limit subjectivity to instrumental rationality. The reflexive agent is active, evaluating, and emotionally involved in a dynamic interplay with surrounding and partly internalized structures (Archer 2009:2,7,12).

This reflexivity has an equivalent in performance studies. Goffman’s notion of “role distance” offers one enduring example, defined as “actions which effectively convey some disdainful detachment of the performer from a role he is performing” (Goffman 1961:110). Goffman presents the example of a five-year-old child on the merry-go-round, who, unlike the younger children around him, takes an irreverent stance on the wooden horse, demonstrating to all that he is not caught up in the activity; this posture forms a psychosocial “wedge between the individual and his role, between doing and being” (1961:107-108). Role distance makes an appearance in the surgeon who sings off-colour tunes during the operation and the waitress who speaks of her music career—any instance where people suggest to their audience “I am not only what I appear to be” (Cohen 2004:117).

Although the discussion of acting roles turns attention towards the actor on stage, I want to include analysis of the audience’s response to this reflexivity, specifically a theatrical term called “the alienation effect.”¹⁰⁰ The notion of the “alienation effect” is attributed to playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), who developed the concept from Chinese theatre, defining it as "playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play” (Brecht 1964:91; Furman 1988; Brooker 1994; Biehl-Missal 2010). The original German word—

Verfremdungseffekt—has been variously translated as "alienation effect," "de-familiarization effect,"

or “distancing effect” or "estrangement effect" (Sargisson 2007). While the goal of conventional theatre performances was to draw the audience into a suspension of disbelief, such that they would

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100 I originally stumbled on this term in a creative but grammatically appalling electronic book on the charisma of Barack Obama (Bac 2013). Bac suggests Obama uses a form of alienation effect when he transitions from his visionary performance of the American Dream (made real in his own life) to attend to the mundane political issues of the day. She concludes that this strategy only partially worked for Obama; rather than mobilizing people for political action, the alienated audience often still retained strong emotional connections to the aspiring president’s charisma.

be “caught up” in the play (Stromberg 2009), Brecht’s goal was to disrupt the performance and prevent any such escape into illusion. He wanted to historicize the performance on stage, alert the audience to the political urgencies of the day and, as such, empower people to critical thought and political action (Brecht 1964:96; Sargisson 2007; Bissonette 2010). The goal is “stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them” (Thomson and Sacks 2007:191).

By turning the familiar and ordinary into the strange and unexpected, the audience becomes alienated from the character portrayed. The actor takes on a “double role”—as the character and themselves-as-actor at the same time, with both roles being accessible to the audience (Brecht 1964:143, 194). Brecht gives one everyday life example of the child whose mother has re-married, revealing the mother in a second role of another man’s wife. The taken-for-granted expectation is disappointed and made odd. Significantly, for my analysis of charisma, Brecht admitted the alienation effect did not motivate as much political action as he hoped; the audience still continued to emotionally attach and personally identify with the actor and the actor’s role (Gassner 1966;

McTeague 1994).

Always reflexive about its beliefs and practices, a post-evangelical dramaturgy strives for a performance that generates an alienation effect. The practices I examine here are not the equivalent of back stage sightings that reveal the hypocrisy of the leader (Joosse 2012), nor the legendary scandalous antics of American televangelists (Buddenbaum 2013). They are, however, the opposite of charismatic performances intended to suspend disbelief and cultivate naïve faith (Luhrmann 2012).

The events and rituals described here are intended to unsettle, but they unsettle in order to disabuse the audience of participation in a conventional evangelical performance, not with the intention of completely estranging their followers. They cultivate just enough alienation to disturb the evangelical visitor by establishing distance from right-wing evangelical stereotypes and thus reinvigorating the charismatic authority of Cavey.

How does a satirical counter-performance reinforce the charismatic bond? If it does not prompt attendees to leave, the disruption of the evangelical performance suggests something new and revolutionary that resonates with the already disaffected attendees and validates their disillusionment with religious institutions. Cavey narrates a crisis in Christian religion and offers a way out that engenders a sense of self-efficacy in participants’ lives (Madsen and Snow 1991). He effectively promises people they can be saved from the cultish, violence-endorsing, angry, legalistic, judgmental liabilities of right-wing evangelicalism and re-invent themselves in his gentle pacifist, irreligious image—echoing themes of irenic Canadian evangelicalism (Reimer 2003) in nostalgic hippie attire.

He calls them not to a conversion as much as a deconversion (Harrold 2006; Bielo 2011), in the name

of Jesus, who came to “shut down religion.”

In the terminology of Goffman (1961), like other emerging churches, this aspect of TMH reflects the “underlife” of institutional evangelicalism today (Marti and Ganiel 2014:27). Attendees do not escape institutional life, but they form their identity over against evangelical beliefs and practices because “selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull” of socialization (1961:320). Persons are “stance-taking entities,” says Goffman, who take up positions somewhere between identification with and opposition to institutions—a form of the reflexivity described by Archer (2009) above. In this case, people identify with Cavey, develop bonds of affection and loyalty to him while distancing themselves from wider evangelical culture.