Glosario de palabras recurrentes

Pete Ward’s proposal is made without any concrete observations of Evangelical life.

Indeed, he goes so far as to claim his proposed ecclesial countermovement of Liquid Church is an “imaginatory exercise.”¹⁰⁸ Milbank and Connolly also have no substantive account of lived Evangelical life to warrant their claims. There is a danger in the making of such imaginary accounts, to which, ironically, Pete Ward is attentive with his later work. A danger where “we are prone to a sleight of hand that appears to make social theory appear to be a description of social reality — which of course it is not.”¹⁰⁹ Ward seems to have fallen prey to this own sleight of hand. Accounts from social theory and/or theology must correlate with concrete lived realities if they are to attend to my research problem. It will not suffice to propose hydroponic ecclesiologies that are not rooted in social reality. Indeed, my intuition, subject to further work in this thesis, is that these imaginary ecclesiologies are epiphenomena of the pathogenic mechanism of commodification. The generating of more and more fanciful ideas of what church should be, is a manifestation of the very pathogenesis I am seeking to address.

So where have others made accounts — concrete accounts — from observations of Evangelical Christianity in its relationship to capitalism? Eve Poole provides an account of views by the Anglican church on recent forms of capitalism. Her account is partially

108 Pete Ward, Liquid Church, 3.

109 Pete Ward, “Introduction,” in Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, edited by Pete Ward (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 4.

28 attentive to the Evangelicalism within Anglicanism.¹¹⁰ Then there are specialist studies, such as the work of Stewart Davenport. He concentrates his account on the relationship of North American Evangelical Protestant Christians to capitalist markets between 1815 and 1860.¹¹¹ There are, in addition, some rather dated works like that of Craig Gay on earlier forms of capitalism.¹¹² A more recent work closer to Evangelicalism, but certainly not by self-identified Evangelicals, has been written by Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann, and John McKnight.¹¹³ There are also two Grove Booklets by Peter Heslem, one before the 2007 credit crunch and one as a response afterwards.¹¹⁴ The earlier of these sets issues of globalisation against an Evangelical biblical story. The latter explores faith and enterprise. This small foray is very limited and presages the need for more detailed accounts. Indeed, not only can award-winning books on Evangelicalism written by academics fail to define Evangelicalism, they can also be written on the cultural captivity of Evangelicals with scant reference to the forces of capitalism.¹¹⁵

It seems that accounts made by Evangelicals intramurally in order to understand Evangelicalism in relationship to capitalism, are rather rare. Capitalism may be the water that Evangelicals swim in and fail to notice, let alone question. There have been several works by those close to Evangelicalism who take Evangelicalism to task. But these works

110 Poole provides an account of Anglican theological assessments of late capitalism. However, her sources are useful for our account, in particular in highlighting the work of Peter Sedgwick. See Eve Poole, The Church and Capitalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

111 Stewart Davenport, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815–1860 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

112 Despite the title of his work, Craig Gay’s account is now somewhat dated and provides only a brief historical account of the development of capitalism and Evangelicalism, with a sociological reading of North American Evangelicals in their relationship to capitalism through the lens of democratic and republican politics, in reaction to the forces of secularisation in the mid-to later-20th century. His account is useful for us withregard to the interactions of Evangelicals within secular forces, but is limited by its specific US-centric political reading. We are looking for a much broader account of Evangelicals within the North Atlantic context and capitalism. See Craig M. Gay, With Liberty and Justice for Whom?: The Recent Evangelical Debate Over Capitalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991).

113 Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann, and John McKnight, An Other Kingdom: Departing Consumer Culture (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2016).

114 Peter S. Heslem, Globalization; Unravelling the New Capitalism (Cambridge: Grove Booklets, 2002), and Transforming Capitalism: Entrepreneurship and the Renewal of Thrift (Cambridge: Grove Booklets, 2010).

115 Soong-Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism, 50. Rah has one sole reference to the forces of capitalism in relationship with Evangelicalism.

29 often present a simplistic notion of the modern church being a capitulation to some monolithic notion of Christendom, and a call to ecclesiologies formed around social and cultural landscapes.¹¹⁶ Despite their claims of how the church has capitulated to culture, my intuition, subject to my research here, is that these works are themselves deeply flawed as expressions of accommodations to capitalism imaginations.

Some accounts made of Evangelicalism in its developments within broader cultural relationships are closer to my situation. One such account is from Guest, who has made a substantive study of Evangelicalism in its relationship to modern culture, including capitalism.¹¹⁷ He then built on that work to make a more specific account of Evangelicalism’s relationship with capitalism that was in part a rejoinder to Connolly’s work.¹¹⁸ In surveying the sources that Guest uses for his account, the lack of references to other accounts by Evangelicals of the relationship of capitalism to Evangelicalism is striking.¹¹⁹ Guest makes use of nearly 50 sources, none of which are accounts of the relationship between Evangelicalism and capitalism. Moreover, where his sources deal with the relationship of Christianity to capitalism, they do so from within a broader methodology of spirituality (or religion generally), and of cultural formation. Guest has one single source to account for the origins and development of the relationship of capitalism with Evangelicalism. That source is Weber’s, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.¹²⁰ And that is despite Guest asking us, as I have already observed, to note how Connolly relies too heavily on Weber’s account of the Protestant Work Ethic.¹²¹ Guest’s slightly earlier and more extensive work in providing an account of Evangelicalism and its relationship to contemporary culture, makes use of over 260

116 For example, see John Drane, The McDonaldisation of the Church (London: Darton, Longman

& Todd, 2000) and John Drane, After McDonaldisation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008).

117 Mathew Guest, Evangelical Identity and Contemporary Culture: A Congregational Study in Innovation (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007).

118 Guest, “Evangelicalism and Capitalism in Transatlantic Context.”

119 Ibid., 277–279.

120 Guest, Evangelical Identity and Contemporary Culture, 257.

121 Guest, “Evangelicalism and Capitalism in Transatlantic Context,” 261.

30 sources.¹²² These sources demonstrate a similar lack of accounts of how capitalism relates to Evangelicalism. Again, Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic is the sole account to understanding Evangelicals in relationship to capitalism.¹²³

Guest makes use of David Bebbington’s historical account of Evangelicalism.¹²⁴ He highlights that, whilst Bebbington’s account is expansive and extensive, it does not consider the relationship of Evangelicalism as it developed within capitalism. Bebbington himself is primarily concerned with Evangelicalism’s interactions with the Enlightenment, and goes so far as to dismiss the need to understand how Evangelicalism relates to capitalism.¹²⁵ Guest further claims that a complex and multifaceted exploration of the broader “social phenomena” of Evangelicalism is still yet to be made. For example, he notes a need for understanding the development of Evangelicalism in relation to the social anxieties of the new leisured and middle classes with emerging capitalist cultures.¹²⁶