How do Christian accounts of time contribute to anthropological theory?
Christianity has a salient temporality. Slotted between the death and future rebirth of Christ, but also situated, on an individual level, between past sin and future redemption, as well as standing at the junction between old and new beliefs through conversion, the religion promotes a particular interplay between past, present, and future. These temporal disjunctions, discontinuities, inconsistencies, however, illuminate and reveal complex realities pertaining to domains located beyond the walls of the church, such as family, relationality, ethical positioning, or personhood.
This essay will ask how Christian accounts of time contribute to anthropological theory by focusing on how Christians’ (notably converts) attitudes to and sense of time interacts, influences, and relates to other aspects of their lives. It will first look at the interconnections between Christianity and kinship. It will then concentrate on the mutuality between identity, belonging, and Christianity. Lastly, it will assess how, and the extent to which, Christian time manipulates morality and ethics.
One of the appeals of Christianity lies in its potential for interconnectivity. Indeed, in subscribing to Christian ideals and beliefs, individuals’ vision of the future relationality is recalibrated; from one of kin-based relations, to one based on religious affinity. Anthropological interest in Christianity largely focuses on conversion to it. Meyer (1998) for instance focuses on Pentecostal Christian converts in Ghana, underlining how, while other groups in society, including Catholic and Protestant mission churches, attempt to creatively reconcile new and old ideas, bridging the gap between local tradition and modern novelty, pentecostalists stand in opposition to this. Indeed, she notes that instead they ‘emphasise the ‘global’ character of this variant of Christianity and the need to break from local traditions’. Rupture, she argues, is a central tenet of Pentecostal vision, with ‘time’ as an epistemological category enabling pentecostalists to ‘draw a rift between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘now’ and ‘then’, ‘modern’ and ‘tradition’, [and] ‘God’ and the ‘Devil’’. She contends that there are two levels at which individuals must rupture from the past: the immediate past – i.e., past versions of the self – and the distant past – i.e., the ancestral past. Pentecostal notions of deliverance from the immediate past refer to the ‘life time of a person prior to his or her becoming born again’, whereby a person has to actively renounce all past sinful attitudes. For instance, a Pentecostal convert must have repudiated a catalogue of morally wrong attitudes including anti-social attitudes such as ‘anger, hatred and criminal acts’, sexual practices consisting of ‘pornography, masturbation, homosexuality, incest, rape or bestiality’, inadequate personal behaviour comprising of ‘secrecy, prejudice, indiscipline, green and corruption’, psychological troubles such as ‘anxiety, inferiority complex, heaviness of spirit, and grief’, but also ‘acute poverty’. What is more, born again Christians must reject spirits held responsible for all sinful attitudes through obeyance to the Holy Spirit, possession of their souls, incessant prayer, and a good Christian fellowship attendance. Yet, this self-betterment and cleansing which results in deliverance from the immediate past must exist in tandem with measures allowing for the deliverance from the ancestral past – that is the life of their parents, grand-parents, and great grand-parents. In fact, Ghanaian families are believed to suffer from ancestral curses, that born again believers are not immediately free from, resulting in individuals being punished for ‘sins committed by any of these three preceding generations’. Thus, there is a belief in causality between instances where, in some families, all males become alcoholic or die early on, or in others, members never proposer despite their hard-working tendencies, and the forging of a blood oath between a family member and a satanic force. Hence, missionary adage stresses the importance of breaking with the past in order to not carry generational misfortune and legacies of past sins, making sure that, in making a complete break with the past, Ghanaian coverts are not serving the Devil anymore. Yet, Meyer importantly states that while this allows for a diabolization of traditional religion in representing it as a matter of the ‘past’, which born again Christians are expected to ‘leave behind’, traditional religion and kin networks enmeshed in it are actually ‘quite alive in the present’ and thought about frequently. She stresses that the rupture required in pentecostalist ideology of ‘breaking with the past’ is ‘difficult to achieve fully once and for all’. Indeed, pentecostalists continuously think about the past and ‘keep on breaking all sorts of ties revealed through remembrance’. Meyer posits that the Pentecostal emphasis on rupture serves as a ‘temporalizing strategy … a ‘denial of coevalness’ … through which persons with whom one actually shares time and space are represented as backward, as not deserving a place in the modern world and as hindering one from becoming fully born again and modern’ (emphasis mine). Catechist of the EPC ‘of Ghana’ Brempong succinctly outline how Christians view the devil’s power over blood ties. He asserts that ‘as long as you belong to that clan, to that family, and you don’t belong to Jesus Christ, the Devil has control though you may not serve the Devil. But he may have control over you indirectly. And he will cause you to serve him indirectly, but you may not know’. Consequently, during exorcisms, exorcists always ask the afflicted person about their family, followed by praying to ‘break the link of communications which comes from the family. We break it first. We break that link. Then the Devil can never supply people to come and take away that person’. Meyer contends that the symbolic cutting of people’s family ties enables the deliverance procedure by subverting the bonds created and protected by ‘the collective worship of particular gods as well as the bonds between relatives’, setting Pentecostalism apart. As a matter of fact, she emphasises that whereas traditionally the fight against evil is largely focused on ‘the restoration of bonds between people’, Christian deliverance ‘basically unties them’, in the aim of turning individuals into independent persons unaffected by family relations; thus, free from the past and able to progress. As such, Pentecostalism brings together two contradictory notions of identity, with, on the one hand, persons being represented as products of their past, and, on the other, ‘identity is regarded as impeding the achievement of the ideal person who is fully in control of [themselves]’. Meyer underscores that, through remembrance, the ‘past’ identity is ‘constructed in terms of links with others: a person is represented as part and parcel of a chain of generations and a web of kinship relations’. Here, as Lambek (1996) echoes, memory is a ‘culturally mediated expression of the temporal dimension of experience, in particular social commitments and identifications’. Yet, while memory can be understood to be an act of identity building, the Meyer highlights that the identity shaped through remembrance is a ‘negative identity, one from which one wishes to escape, and which originates in a ‘past’ that a person has to control in order not to be haunted by it’; Christian identities are malleable and novel ones are not built on memory per say but instead on the ‘rejection of all the link revealed by it’, and emphasises the ‘independent, moderns, individual who does not need to find positive roots in ‘the past’ in order to be guided on the way towards the future’. Accordingly, Christian accounts of time – notably their inclination towards the future, a future which comes at the cost of the past – reveal the interplay between memory, kinship, belonging, and identity. That repudiating past selves and ‘mak[ing] a clean break from the past’ is, in practice, rather difficult for individuals, attests to the multifaceted nature of identity and self; looking to the future is always informed by the past, thus making the study of rupture and discontinuity a particularly fruitful area of study.
Time is an important contributor to conceptions of identity. Time structures the everyday and shapes how people might relate to each other, to themselves, and to higher powers such as God. In her analysis of the expansive present in the Zambian Copperbelt, Haynes (2020), reveals how time in Pentecostal imaginaries models identity and affects belonging. This parallels Marshall’ (2009) claim that ‘while on one hand the Born-Again [i.e., Pentecostal] project is concerned with how to guarantee eternal life in the hereafter, it finds its principle force through the staging of a claim for justice and a demand for ‘life more abundant’ in the here and now’. Haynes explicates this in her observation of a Pentecostal sermon wherein Pastor Kufuna expressed to his audience that he was not content with the knowledge that he would be ‘blessed’ after he died and went to heaven; instead, he stated ‘I don’t want my ‘pie in the sky’, I want my pie now! That heaven, and future salvation and redemption, is not so much of a concern to believers on the Copperbelt, influences and shapes their everyday insofar as this anchoring in the here and now leads to particular desires and self-fashioning projects. Bana Chimwemwe, one of Haynes informants, told a story of a near death experience which involved narrow avoidance of an accident by the minibus she was travelling on. Interestingly, however, her harrowing description of events led her to reflect on what might have happened had she not been so fortunate, resulting in an unexpected statement: ‘you know, if I had died in that crash and gone to heaven, I would have asked god to send me back to earth. There are too many things that I’m waiting for here … so much I still haven’t received … I still haven’t gotten remarried, don’t have a house, or a car, or nice clothes. Thus time and perceptions of it interact with people’s sense of self and fashions behavioural inclinations.
Further, Christian time frames understandings of morality. Exemplar of this is Chua’s (2012) exploration of conversion, continuity, and moral dilemmas among Christian Bidayuhs in Malaysian Borneo, revealing the juxtaposed nature of identity and belonging. In Bidayuh villages, pre-Christian times, moral behaviours were seen to be upholders of social coherence and harmony. Indeed, Chua asserts that ‘people [would] not only weigh up the repercussions of their actions against an imagined social whole bug also mull over whether those actions would be in concord with prevailing opinion’. Chiefly, morality was understood not as an individual behaviour but rather as a relationally individual behaviour. Chua writes that ‘if one of adat’s professed aims is to keep a vague notion of the social cool and harmonious, a potent mechanism for ensuring that it does do so is the social itself. The locus of moral action is less the individual qua individual than it is the individual as a social being’. Chua argues that conversion came from a place of social cohesion rather than firm belief, suggesting that ‘as the Christian population grew, more people converted precisely to ensure the maintenance of those social ties and routines’ (emphasis mine). Yet, conversion added additional moral layers to individuals’ lives. In fact, in the past, ‘contravening adat by not doing the patut thing basically meant upsetting the social balance and coolness of the world. Today, however, doing something wrong also entails a betrayal of that relationship of love between humans and God … from being ‘horizontally’ responsible to their social peers … Christian Bidayuhs now also have to deal with a ‘vertical set of relations: with God … and Satan’. But, while most Bidayuh converts agree that the telos of following Christianity is to get to heaven, most achieve this goal ‘not by acting on their own but by acting as one household on earth and taking care of each other … individuals may be the salvific units of Christianity … but salvation itself is seen as a collective project to be performed on earth’ (emphasis mine). Rather than structure their lives in anticipation of something better, Christian Bidayuhs configure their lives around the here and now, into ‘translating their loving relationship with God into love for the people around them’. Exemplar of this is Chua’s interaction with a friend of hers in which she tried to explain the practice of giving something up for Lent, a concept with contradicted her own understanding of it, mapped on the local church’s depiction of it as a time where Christians are encouraged to ‘go out and perform good deeds in the community, such as visiting and feeding the poor and the sick’. Concealed in this discrepancy is the variability of Christianity and the multiplicity of identity. Chua maintains that for most of her acquaintances, being a good Christian is ‘synonymous with being a good social person: one who constantly does the patut thing, contributes to social wellbeing, and avoids the glare of collective disapproval that generates feelings of [shame]’. She argues that, interestingly, pre-Christian adat-based models of morality evolve in tandem with Christian models of morality. Indeed, she highlights that while Christianity introduced a ‘model of moral personhood centred on love, sin, and individual responsibility’, somewhere in time, it ‘merged with one that drew inspiration from, dovetailed with, and ultimately elaborated existing notions of morality as a socially grounded and socially sanctioned sphere’. Hence, the interplay between past and present morality feeds into understandings of belonging – to not only the present moral precepts but also prior ones; to not only present fellow Christians but also previous webs of relationality – and identity – with new conceptions of right and wrong and understandings of the self construed via alterity. Navigating the plurality of expectations however can be a complex task, notably given the inescapable interconnectedness of past, present, and future.
This last section will focus on morality and its translation into ethical practice by exploring Daswani’s (2013) account of rupture as an ethical practice in Ghanaian Pentecostalism. Ethics and ethical practice operates in a sort of limbo between Pentecostalist Christians past life, infused with a set of moral practices and beliefs, and their Born-Again lives, where they are expected to shed all past moral beliefs to focus on novel understandings of morality in accordance with Christian principles. Yet, Daswani observes that this ideal is often the locus of dynamic interplay between past and present, insofar as ‘being obedient to church norms does not exclude reflecting on how to blend new Pentecostal ideas with those of the recent past’. In adhering to shared codes of Pentecostal Christian practice and agreeing on what it means to be a virtuous Christian, believers are nonetheless faced with situations in which ‘doing the right thing … is not clear and the correct answers are not straightforward’. Daswani illustrates the ambiguity of ethical boundaries through Kofi, a Ghanaian CoP pastor, who had invited a Nigerian pastor to visit during a weeklong thanksgiving celebration in 2003. This Nigerian pastor asked church attendees to bring a handful of sand to the celebration – the sand representing their ongoing connections to their ancestral land. This sand, according to the Nigerian pastor, was to be held in their hands during prayer, so that these prayers would help sever ‘all ties to their ancestral hometowns and to the witchcraft spirits preventing them from fulfilling their destinies’. Kofi got in trouble with church authority who wanted to know why he asked a Nigerian pastor to come without consulting them, about the use of the sand, and, most importantly, they expected him to reveal the ‘truth’ about his beliefs regarding salvation. Dasawi observes that this situation in fact captures the ‘problem of ethical life as emerging out of a personal responsibility to others, set apart from church authority’. Indeed, it reveals that, in his decision to go against church rules, Kofi ‘applied judgment’, as an ethical subject. Insofar as his life extends beyond church walls, Kofi had to confront the dilemma at hand; ‘while the church values promote a shared concept of rupture as complete once one is born again … ethical practice entails finding the appropriate convergence between acceptable and unacceptable forms of religious practice, balancing different values that might seem incompatible with each other’. Rupture thus appears to be ambivalent in its realisation. Indeed, while Kofi never made reference to sin in a traditional context, CoP leaders expressed worry at the reality that Pentecostal Christians continued to see sin traditionally, as ‘always returning and not completely washed away by the experience of being born again’. Here, the boundaries of belief are ambiguous since at once Kofi had ‘no doubt that one’s rupture is complete once he is born again’ but also held that ‘prayers against witchcraft and the use of sand were necessary in cases in which ordinary prayer did not work’. Similarly, Kofi had recourse to the help of traditional spirituality when his wife was sick and passed a threshold at which Kofi thought ordinary prayer could not help. This disrupts the ideal of rupture as total however insofar as if rupture is accomplished, in theory Kofi ‘need not take [spirits] seriously or depend on another person for deliverance, relegating Jesus to a secondary status’. Dasawni shows that his actions were not informed by a fundamental lack of belief or faith in Christianity but rather they were situational and contextual. Indeed, he writes that ‘[Kofi’s] wife’s illness as well as the failure of a theological position set out by those senior to him allowed him to make a moral judgment regarding other ways of combining transcendental theology with the materialistic enterprise of prayer’. This ties into Lambek’s (2000) claim that ethical practice as moral judgment should not be interpreted ‘simply [as] and act of commission or an acceptance of obligation [but as including] the reasoning behind choosing to [act or accept] and the reasoning that determines how to balance one’s multiple and possibly conflicting commitments’. Echoing Lambek’s (2010) concept of the ‘vectoral qualities’ of culture, where, ‘in real life, practices impinge on one another, and judgment must be exercised continuously’ between ‘incommensurable or competing claims and within different social roles and responsibilities’ , Daswani suggests that a ‘multivalent approach’ allows for an understanding of Pentecostal rupture as an ethical practice, a generative process that considers the complementary dynamics between the openness, and hence, indeterminacy, of any situation, the situated agent’s response … and the processes of subjectification involved in generating continuity with authorities forms of practice’.
To conclude, focusing on time, disjuncture, discontinuity, rupture, enables a recognition of Christianity’s multiplicity, variability, and malleability, and allows for an exploration of interfaces at which these are revealed – such as kinship, identity, belonging, morality, and ethics – and the novel contributions such a focus offers the discipline of anthropology. Christian accounts of time further expose the salient temporality of the religion and the complexity vis a vis relations to others, the self, and God, hidden behind straightforward ideals of ruptures and renewal, discarding of the past and embracing of the present and future.
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