The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism

1 Introduction ‘How will we know about God’s love if no-one tells us?’ said a small child in a video clip that Becky, one of the children’s workers at Riverside evangelical church, was playing at a meeting for the volunteers and church staff who helped with Kids Church1 one Thursday evening in May 2013. After a ‘bring and share’ supper of cheese, salad, sausage rolls, vegan flapjacks, and scones, Becky had turned the lights down to play a short film about churches’ ministry with children on her laptop. The film emphasized the importance of this ministry in a dechristianizing cultural context, stating that unless children have the opportunity to engage with faith, they would not end up going to church and will not end up as Christians. After the film had finished, Becky commented that she found its message ‘very powerful’, and said that she thought it was also important to think that what they did in Kids Church was about children ‘being disciples now’, and that by helping at Kids Church, ‘that’s our being disciples’. Jon, one of the children’s workers, added that children’s ministry is also important ‘because pretty much all the studies show that the majority of people come to faith before they’re eleven years old’. He repeated this to everyone for emphasis. Becky and Jon asked everyone to share their stories or experiences from Kids Church with each other. Gemma, a teaching assistant, began by commenting that one thing she had noticed recently was how very keen the children were to get out to Kids Church from the main church service, which, she said, ‘shows how much they feel it is their space’. Joy, the church’s Community Development Manager, said that she had got to know one girl from visiting Riverside Primary Academy (the local primary school linked with the church) who had been having ‘some issues’ at school, and had decided to come to Kids Church. Joy said that it was ‘amazing’ that from the first session, the girl ‘has been so happy there’, and that 1 ‘Kids Church’ was the term used at Riverside for their Sunday School. 2 this had made a difference not just to her, but also to her family. Becky commented that she was encouraged by a conversation she had with a mother at the church’s toddler’s group that week. She said that the mother had ‘got quite emotional’ talking to her, and that she had wanted to say how much it meant to her ‘that her children were learning about God in Kids Church, that she worried about passing her beliefs on to her children’, and so it meant a lot to her ‘that her kids were growing in faith through the church’. Becky told the volunteers that they shouldn’t underestimate how much the work they did at Kids Church means to the parents and emphasized again that this mother had been ‘pretty emotional’ when talking to her about this. Jon commented that he had been talking to a mother at the church who had been thinking about changing churches and had visited some other churches with her child. He said that this mother had asked her child what he thought of the other churches, and that he had replied, ‘I like my church’, referring to Riverside. Jon said he thought it was ‘pretty great’ that the children thought of Riverside as their church. At the end of the meeting, Becky introduced a time of prayer. The group closed their eyes and bowed their heads, and everyone said a prayer except me and a new volunteer. Alice, a young doctor, spoke quickly and fluently as she prayed, asking that God ‘would really be at work through his Holy Spirit in Kids Church in drawing the children to him’. Joy thanked God for what they could learn about him ‘through the children and through their innocence’, while Jon prayed that they ‘would never be satisfied. May we always be working to improve things, to make Kids Church better’. Children powerfully embody the future for adults, representing the possible futures or non-futures of a particular religious culture, and their involvement or non-involvement in religion can therefore provoke anxiety. The falling numbers of young people identifying with or practising religion across Europe (Bullivant 2018) can give those involved in working with children in churches a sense of the importance and urgency of their work, as we see 3 suggested in this meeting, as they seek to stem this flow. At the same time, as numbers of the avowedly non-religious continue to rise and non-religion comes to replace Christianity as the cultural default in the UK (Lee 2015, Woodhead 2017), religious institutions’ efforts to engage with and influence the lives of children, such as through their involvement in schooling, can also cause concern. Heated public debates about faith schools, for instance, often invoke fears of indoctrination, with ‘religion’ viewed as threatening the developing independence and freedom of the child, while concerns are also expressed about whether faith schools and religious child-raising practices exacerbate forms of religious and classbased social segregation. While the establishment and expansion of state-funded Islamic schools has been a particular cause for controversy in many Western nations, religious efforts to engage with children and education more broadly have also generated controversy, with evangelicals often also singled out as posing a potentially indoctrinatory threat to children or presented as extremist groups undermining ‘fundamental British Values’2 of freedom and tolerance. Contemporary debates about the relationship between children and religion reflect wider social changes that have, from the late 1960s onwards, repositioned childhood at the forefront of personal and political agendas, manifested, for example, in what the historian Raphael Samuel refers to as ‘the middle-class cult of childhood’ (1994: 93). Focus on children has intensified due to changes in family structure and demographic shifts to an ageing population, which have imbued the ‘priceless’ child with a unique scarcity value (Zelizer 1994). Complex, interwoven ideational currents have also sharpened this: the need to The UK government defines ‘fundamental British values’ as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and of no faith. Teachers in English schools have been required to promote these values since 2014, in initial response to the ‘Trojan Horse Affair’, when documents were leaked to the media alleging a plot to ‘Islamise’ twenty-one state-funded schools in Birmingham, although no evidence was found to support these accusations (Vincent and Hunter-Henin 2018, Holmwood and O’Toole 2019). 2 4 invest in futures seeming increasingly pressing; the repositioning of personhood as societies have moved away from traditional categories of identity; and the rapid pace of social and cultural change readjusting orientations towards time and mortality (James et al. 1998: 5). At the same time, Western modernization has increasingly emphasized the importance of providing children with freedoms and rights to lives of their own, celebrating norms of equality, mutual respect and autonomy between children and adults in the context of the family and elsewhere (Beck 1997, Giddens 1998, Oswell 2013). We are living in times marked by both a heightened concern for children – in which the care of children has come to take on a sacred status (Lynch 2012) – and a sense of childhood as under threat, with children seen as increasingly ‘confined, trapped indoors, cocooned by anxieties … and by increased pressures, demands and expectations’ (Thomson 2013: 1). These processes also affect religion, and as control over what happens to children has moved away from religious bodies and become concentrated in structures of state education, the media, or commercial interests, childhood is often a site of particular struggle, anxiety and controversy in relation to religion. In this wider context, this book explores the lived realities of how different evangelical churches seek to engage with children across the spaces of church, home, school and other informal educational settings, how children experience these forms of engagement, and the meanings and significance of childhood across different evangelical groups. Moving beyond simplistic portrayals of the evangelical indoctrination of children in which children are perceived as the passive receptors of religious belief, I argue for attention to be paid to the multiple registers and formations of children’s agency, addressing how both children and the idea of childhood act within religious life and engaging with the temporal, spatial, material and moral complexity of this (Oswell 2013). The book sets out a new, relational approach to the study of childhood and religion, which invites us to consider how particular forms of children’s agency are not given a priori but emerge through practices and forms of 5 relationship, how the figure of ‘the child’ exerts agency shaping the hopes, fears, and imaginations of adults, and how these processes enable or constrain children’s agency in lived experience. The study of evangelicalism has largely ignored the lives of children, reflecting a wider historic marginalization of children within the study of religion. Yet as children and childhood occupy an important place within evangelical imaginaries and practices, understanding the empirical realities of evangelicalism requires that children – and adults’ hopes and concerns in relation to them – are integrated more fully into research. As Priscilla Alderson puts it, ‘childhood, like adulthood, is not a discrete specialist topic to be flattened, sliced and squeezed into a distinct sub-sociology. Instead, children and adults exist and interact across practically all social concerns, and are understood through multidisciplinary research’ (2016). Focusing on children in relation to evangelicalism is, however, I argue, not only about understanding childhood, but opens up deeper understanding of the nature of evangelical lifeworlds, of what it is to be a parent, of what it is to educate, of the place of religion and religious-secular relations in public life, and of wider questions of personhood, temporality, the nature of authority and moral aspiration in the contemporary moment. Setting out an approach that explores the interrelations between the figure of the child, children’s agency, and how adult religious subjectivities are constructed in both imagined and practical relationships with children, this book aims to demonstrate the importance of studying children and childhood within the sociology of religion in order to enrich our understanding of the contemporary social realities of religion. Evangelicals, childhood and the changing religious landscape Over the past century and a half, public perceptions of evangelicals’ engagements with children – and of evangelicalism itself – have shifted radically. While the evangelical Lord Shaftesbury was romantically celebrated as leading ‘the children of bondage into their 6 Promised Land’ as he took up the cause of factory children and climbing boys and welcomed ‘poor children into his Ragged Schools’ (Cunningham 1991: 9), today evangelicals’ engagements with children in the UK are often regarded with ambivalence, and sometimes as cause for heightened public concern.3 This shift needs to be located within a wider landscape of religious change in Britain, a country in which Christianity remains deeply culturally embedded, but which is also becoming increasingly secular, non-religious and diverse in its religious profile at the same time (Davie 2015: xii). As formal religious participation has declined precipitously since the 1960s while affiliation to Christianity is falling, there has been a significant growth in the number of individuals claiming to have ‘no religion’ (Lee 2015, Woodhead 2017). The fastest-growing forms of religion are no longer those linked with established political power and prestige, but are more closely associated with minority groups, such as Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Pentecostals ‘forging new forms of identity and representation in British society’ (Woodhead 2012: 25). Claims that Britain is a secular nation fail to acknowledge the extent to which religion has remained embedded in aspects of culture, in institutions associated with government, in the educational system and in other aspects of public life, as a legacy of the historic and complex intertwining of the monarchy, the established churches, and the major public institutions (Johnson and Vanderbeck 2014: 11). In an increasingly religiously diverse society, a range of faith groups and leaders (including other Christian denominations besides the established churches) are also now often included within strategies of consultation seeking to enhance the inclusion of minority interests (ibid.). Religion thus became ‘something to be dealt with by consultations, legislation and policy’, with a distinction increasingly made between ‘socially useful “faith” initiatives, and dangerous forms of “religion” which put the claims of God above those of citizenship’ (Woodhead 2012: 2). 3 See, for example, BBC 2013, Independent 2013, Spielman 2018. 7 Alongside these changing modes of religious engagement with governance and policy, the growing salience of different forms of religion in the public sphere, together with its unavoidable prominence in global politics relayed across omnipresent news channels and social media, has often provoked strong reactions from secular groups and elites. Religion is now often viewed as ‘a “toxic brand”, prejudiced and illiberal at best, divisive and destructive at worst’ (Woodhead 2016: 258). Against this backdrop of longer-term religious decline and the growth of forms of non-religion, evangelicalism has become an increasingly prominent force within the Protestant churches. In the post-war era, as Linda Woodhead argues, evangelicalism’s social conservatism in terms of gender roles and the nuclear family resonated with the Christian ‘revival’ of the immediate post-war years, and as the post-war era continued, the more friendly, personal God known directly in Jesus Christ that evangelicalism emphasized ‘would eclipse the sterner God of civic tradition’ (2012: 13). The mood of national revival and Christian confidence of the 1950s was however replaced by a progressively more secular era (ibid.). Some commentators present this as a rapid process, with the repressive and puritanical ethos of Christian moral narratives overturned by the 1960s counter-culture and the ‘vigorous promulgation of new narratives which, with amazing suddenness, swept liberal culture: postcolonial narratives, feminism, gay liberation, the green movement and narratives of sexual freedom’ (Brown 2009: 232, see also Brown and Lynch 2012). Other historians (e.g. McLeod 2007) portray this shift as ‘more gradual than that, … in which the churches were willing partners rather than reactionary critics’ (Woodhead 2012: 13). Yet while much of mainstream Protestantism became increasingly liberalized, a subcultural perspective became dominant amongst evangelicalism, with evangelical worship songs from the 1980s onwards, for example, increasingly portraying followers of Christ using military imagery, as an army or stronghold against a prevailing culture of unbelief (Brown 8 and Lynch 2012: 341). Religious responses opposing liberalizing moral currents are often presented as ‘patriarchal protest movements’ against modernity (Riesebrodt 1998), and the strength of global evangelicalism is often explained in at least partly these terms. Conservative evangelical teachings on gender difference and emphasis on certain truths as revealed in the Bible has been portrayed as a response to a growing fluidity of meaning and existential anxieties, as traditional sources of authority and security are overturned through globalization and the extension of impersonal market forces across ever-greater areas of life (Strhan 2015: 8). Yet while norms of submission, the acceptance of religious and scriptural authority and the traditionalist re-inscription of gender difference prevalent in many evangelical churches grew increasingly countercultural, in other ways, evangelicalism chimed well with cultural trends emerging over this period. As Grace Davie notes, late modern currents such as an emphasis on expressivism, self-awareness and reflexivity may be seen as aids rather than barriers to the evangelical movement, especially in its charismatic expressions (2015: 143). At the same time, the entrepreneurial ethos and emphasis on the individual (situated within tight social networks of family and faith) resonated well with the Thatcher era and beyond, in which evangelicalism was one of the fastest growing forms of religion in the UK (Woodhead 2012: 19). It is difficult to ascertain the precise number of evangelicals in the UK today, with estimates varying widely according to different forms of measurement and identification used (Smith 2015: 17). However, they make up an increasing proportion of church-goers in the UK (forty per cent according to the 2005 English Church Census, Brierley 2006: 51), spread across a variety of denominations, including roughly a third belonging to the Church of England (Smith and Woodhead 2018: 210). The only large-scale survey data on evangelicals in the UK derives from the ‘21st Century Evangelicals’ research programme, carried out by the Evangelical Alliance since 2010. The data from the 2016 panel survey for this programme 9 suggests that the majority identify as ‘white British’ (ninety-three per cent of the sample),4 with an older population (fifty-eight per cent having been born before 1960, thirty-two per cent in the 1960s or 1970s, and only ten per cent since 1980) (Smith and Woodhead 2018: 210). The evangelicals surveyed in the programme were predominantly middle to upper class, with the 2012 survey revealing seventy per cent with a university degree and forty-one per cent with postgraduate qualifications, probably reflecting the socio-economic profile of evangelicals in Britain more generally (Smith and Woodhead 2018: 211). The term ‘evangelical’ is broad, and scholars – as well as evangelicals themselves – disagree about the question of definition. I use ‘evangelical’ in what follows to refer, following David Bebbington, to the tradition existing in Britain since the 1730s, marked by characteristics of conversionism, Biblicism, activism and crucicentrism (Bebbington 1989: 3). I use the term ‘conservative evangelical’ for the tradition emerging within British evangelicalism following a rift with liberal evangelicals in the 1920s, with differing estimates of the Bible a central point of tension (pp. 181-228). I use ‘charismatic’ to refer here to those evangelicals who place an emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit and practice spiritual gifts, but retain their membership in older, established congregations, rather than participating in Pentecostal or neo-Pentecostal churches (Coleman and Hackett 2015: 9). I use ‘open evangelical’ to describe a culture united in dissatisfaction with dominant evangelical culture’s focus on personal salvation and propositional beliefs, critiquing conservative evangelical teachings on gender, sexuality, and the exclusivity of salvation in Christ. They have close links with – and many describe themselves as part of – the ‘emerging Church/emerging evangelical’ movement (Bielo 2011, Engelke 2013, Marti and Ganiel 2014). However, Smith notes however that BAME groups may be under-represented in the sample, because while a high proportion of such groups may in many ways be evangelical in terms of their theology, they may not themselves self-identify as ‘evangelical’, and are more likely to use the term ‘Pentecostal’ (2015: 21). 4 10 understanding what it means to be ‘evangelical’ today means holding each these definitions loosely, and examining the range of people and organizations who claim these terms for themselves, exploring both what they share and points of difference and tension, and the ways in which the meanings of these terms can shift over time. It is worth noting that it is the more theologically conservative forms of evangelicalism that are often the most culturally prominent, in the UK and elsewhere. These groups have acquired a media and public significance greater than their numbers through, as Brown and Lynch comment (2012: 341), generating conflicts within religious institutions (e.g. over LGBTQ clergy, same-sex marriage and women’s ordination in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion5), and through their participation in particular forms of religious activism and protest in public life. It is more conservative forms of evangelicalism that especially generate media attention because of the tendency of news media to be drawn to stories which frame social life is terms of conflict and controversy (Brown and Lynch 2012: 341). This situation, however, skews wider public perceptions of contemporary evangelicalism, leading to stereotypes of evangelicals as reactionary fundamentalists who feel themselves increasingly oppressed and marginalized by a hostile, secular state, and fails to appreciate the diversity of those who identify as ‘evangelical’. In the decade following the financial crisis, some evangelicals’ social activism in responding to poverty and social need has also captured public attention, such as their engagement in food banks or the initiatives to address financial exclusion set in motion by the Archbishop of Canterbury – whose background is charismatic evangelical – following his well-publicized critique of the payday loans company Wonga. However, it is worth noting that in media portrayals of these kinds of social engagement, churches’ and individuals’ ‘evangelicalism’ is rarely mentioned. 5 See discussion in Brittain and McKinnon (2018). 11 Seeking to move beyond well-worn stereotypes of evangelicals, this book uses ‘childhood’ as a lens through which to explore the contemporary realities of evangelicals’ lives and concerns. While tensions related to gender and sexuality have frequently commanded the attention of sociologists of religion, parent-child relations and understandings of the family are also a fundamental aspect of wider social changes in relation to religion and have thus far received relatively little empirical attention (in contrast with the burgeoning literature on religion in the public sphere). At the same time, focusing on how evangelicals seek to engage with children allows insight into the lived realities of the relationship between religion and education. A side-effect of neoliberal and postwelfarist policies has been the increased opportunities afforded for faith groups in educational provision (Dinham and Jackson 2012), and it is thus not surprising that faith-based schooling has attracted growing scholarly attention over the past decade or so.6 However much of this data has been either theoretical or based on quantitative analysis, and we know relatively little about how religion and the secular are located and negotiated within the mundane micropractices of everyday school life, or about what the links between schools and religious institutions look like in practical terms. Focus on the lived realities of how evangelicals engage with children and the agency of childhood across church, school and home life also opens onto broader questions surrounding the place of religion in modernity. Popular cultural conceptions of ‘childhood’, ‘education’ and ‘adulthood’ bear the traces of emancipatory Enlightenment ideals, in which what it is to be an adult and what it is to be educated are held to entail the development of individual autonomy and self-determination. Concepts of freedom, self-determination, and tolerance acquired a new centrality in visions of social progress as Enlightenment thinkers See, for example, Halstead and McLaughlin 2005, Gardner et al. 2005, Allen and West 2009, 2011, Andrews and Johnes 2016, Clayton et al. 2018. 6 12 sought to move beyond what they saw as the destructive legacy of obedience to earlier social and political institutions and the religious orders that legitimated them, and ideas of collective belonging became oriented around the nation-state rather than the churches. A secular-liberal vision of an ideal society of autonomous actors (Seligman 2014: 14) became over time closely linked with understandings of Enlightenment modernity as the ‘autonomous adversary of “revealed religion”’ (Rose 1995: 127). If the path to Enlightenment or modernity was perceived to be about becoming determined by one’s own mind, this was often seen at odds with a religious ethic of submission to a divine Other. While religion had remained central for many Enlightenment thinkers, they also advocated a stronger separation of religion and the state. As Calhoun et al. argue, many preferred a ‘reasonable’ religion, as John Locke put it, opposing excessive ‘enthusiasm’. They sensed a need to think of religion as a social construct that was potentially limited and controllable – something, in brief, that could be dominated by a different way of thinking. This new way of thinking was characterized by reason and secular ideals. (2011: 7) This Enlightenment vision worked its way out in Euro-American contexts in different configurations of the relations between education and religion.7 However, the Enlightenment emphasis on autonomy also shaped modern understandings of education as concerned with the progressive development of autonomy. In this narrative, children are implicitly heteronomous, to be developed into autonomous, rational citizens through education and Adam B. Seligman’s excellent Religious Education and the Challenge of Pluralism (2014) provides a comparative analysis of religious education and state policies towards religious education across seven different countries and in the European Union as a whole. 7 13 child-raising practices. Many Enlightenment advocates of autonomy were also pioneers of educational theories that have been enormously influential in shaping dominant theories of education. Kant, for example, emphasized the idea of education as about the formation of the rational, autonomous subject, and he saw the moral subject as one who is free to obey the dictates of reason without being affected by anything else, rejecting heteronomy as ‘the source of all spurious principles of morality’ (Kant 1998: 47). Children, in Kant’s view, were not yet capable of submitting to the dictates of reason, and the educator’s role was therefore to lead them towards reason and autonomy (Strhan 2012: 84). Religion seemed in these wider narratives to stand for all that ‘secular modernity’ was supposed to have left behind, with children and infants understood as not yet capable of determining their own minds. It is thus easy to see why religious child-raising practices and religious institutions’ involvement in education can become subject to contestation, prompting fears that children’s developing independence, freedom and autonomy are under threat. Political theorist Matthew Clayton, for instance, argues that in accounts of liberal legitimacy, infant baptism is an illegitimate practice, as a non-voluntary enrolment of a child into a ‘particular comprehensive doctrine’, which violates the principle of autonomy (2006: 88), while Richard Dawkins, arguing that it was ‘preposterous to speak of “Christian children” or “Muslim children” (2015), states that labelling children as religious ‘negates the ideal, held by all decent educationists, that children should be taught to think for themselves’. However, by attending to the specific modalities of children’s agency, including how norms of self-determination are promoted within some evangelical churches and in schools linked with them, this book challenges simplistic notions of religion as fundamentally opposed to ideals of autonomy that still abound in many debates about education. The picture that emerges reveals how while some evangelicals emphasize norms of submission, other aspects of evangelicals’ work with 14 children are shaped by broader contemporary ideational currents and processes, such as neoliberalism, individualization and an emphasis on reflexivity. Attending to how ideas of autonomy and agency are implicated in evangelical constructions of the child, the book argues that the ways in which some conservative evangelicals understand childhood today enacts a narrative of declinism, in which a dechristianizing British society is understood to be in a downward moral and cultural spiral. Within this narrative, my conservative evangelical interlocutors describe themselves as increasingly countercultural, moving against the grain of pervasive norms of individual agency and autonomy as they prioritize norms of submission and obedience not only for their children, but also in family life and in how individuals should relate to God. At odds with this, charismatic and open evangelicals’ engagements with children are increasingly shaped by wider democratizing cultural norms that seek to allow children to ‘be themselves’, and for adults to learn from the ‘wisdom’ and ‘innocence’ of children. My interlocutors in these churches express their desires for children to be regarded as equal to adults in the church, although the children themselves do not necessarily experience this to be the case. Across all these evangelical lifeworlds however, engagements with children become laden with moral meanings for adults, as the figure of the child within each embodies not only the possible futures of evangelicalism but also their hopes to engage with and influence the future of British society. Researching Evangelicals and Childhood My initial plan for this research was to focus on childhood in relation to conservative evangelicalism. My previous research had been an ethnographic study of how conservative evangelicals negotiated their faith – including their countercultural teachings on gender, sexuality, and other religions – across different urban spaces, revealing the processes through 15 which they learnt to understand themselves as an alienated minority in contemporary British society. Although the book based on this research (Strhan 2015) did not focus on children or childhood, questions surrounding child-rearing and religious socialization frequently arose during my fieldwork. I became increasingly aware of how childhood seemed to be a site of anxiety for some conservative evangelicals, reflected in the emergence of church-run parenting courses, and evangelicals’ visibility in highly publicized national campaigns on issues such as the sexualization of childhood and sex education. These initiatives were attracting wider public attention, generating criticism both of the rise of a politicallyinfluential conservative Christian movement, with links to generous donors in the United States and fears about the effects of religiously separatist child-raising practices. My intention was therefore to open up understanding not only of the contemporary significance of childhood within evangelicalism but also how ‘religious’ subjects are formed in ‘secular’ times and the changing place of children within this. When I began to investigate possible fieldsites for this research, however, I soon discovered that the ways in which other churches were engaging with children also illuminated important questions about childhood, evangelicalism and the contemporary nature of children’s formation. Since there had been so little empirical research into childhood and/or children’s lives in relation to evangelicalism, I decided to broaden my focus to include charismatic and open evangelicals to add to the small but growing literature on childhood and religion, using ethnography to enable insight to the everyday practices shaping children’s experiences and the concerns of adults in relation to them. Ethnography has become a privileged method in the sociological study of children’s lives and culture. James and Prout argue that ethnography has a particular part to play in attending to children as social actors in their own right, allowing them ‘a more direct voice in the production of sociological data’ than is possible through surveys or experimental styles of 16 research, and enabling insight into how children play particular roles and to ‘the meanings that they themselves attach to their lives’ (1997: 4-5). In relation to the study of religion and childhood, Robert Orsi highlights the practical issues that might seem to be involved in carrying out fieldwork with children, asking: ‘Is it possible to know their religious worlds from the inside? How can adults be present in such conversations without being overwhelming?’ (cited in Bales 2005: 54). Yet, as Bales notes, these concerns about what it is to know another’s world and the power dynamics implicated in forms of research apply to all ethnographic research. I decided to use ethnography in this research not only because it allows us to hear children’s voices more directly, but because it also enables insight into the subtleties of how people – both adults and children – move and act across different times and spaces, such as how the church and school spaces afford different ways of speaking, acting and locating religion, each shaped by their own institutional cultures. This book draws primarily on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with three evangelical churches, which I call ‘Riverside’ (open evangelical), ‘St George’s’ (charismatic evangelical), and ‘St John’s’ (conservative evangelical). I had already amassed a significant amount of relevant data during my research with the conservative evangelical ‘St John’s’ over nineteen months’ ethnographic fieldwork there (February 2010-August 2011). I therefore decided to conduct secondary data analysis of this material8 and supplement this data with further fieldsite visits, interviews and observations where there were specific issues or questions I wanted to investigate further in relation to children’s experiences. This then enabled me to extend the scope of the research through conducting new ethnographic This comprised 777 single-spaced typed pages of detailed fieldnotes, together with transcripts of formal, open-ended interviews with thirty-one church members, and of sermons and talks given in the church during this period. 8 17 research with a charismatic evangelical church, ‘St George’s’, and an open evangelical congregation, ‘Riverside’, between January 2013 and June 2015.9 I chose to approach Riverside and St George’s because, like St John’s, they were each regarded as important and influential representatives of their style of evangelicalism. Each church had close links with other prominent doctrinally-similar evangelical churches and leaders across different global contexts (especially the US) and were regarded by other evangelical churches of their type as leading the way in areas of theological controversy. David, the rector of St John’s emphasized to me that in his view, a key feature of St John’s was its ‘church planting and pioneering agenda’, and St George’s likewise had a programme of ‘church planting’. Riverside was not involved in church planting in the same way, but was developing a national network of churches, and, like St John’s, hosted regular national conferences and events examining particular theological issues, aimed at other church leaders. All three are large churches, located in central London: St John’s the largest, with three Sunday services each averaging about five hundred in attendance; St George’s attracting around two hundred to each of its two Sunday services, and Riverside also drawing around two hundred to its Sunday morning service, and around fifty to its Sunday evening service. I make no claims as to their national representativeness as churches, but rather aim to draw out similarities and differences between their respective cultures that provide insight into the varied textures and moral rhythms of contemporary evangelicalism, and how this relates to their processes of engaging with children. However, it is worth noting that while evangelicalism has often flourished in suburban and rural settings, in the contemporary UK, 9 I conducted the majority of my fieldwork with Riverside between January 2013 and October 2014, and with St George’s, between March 2013 and June 2015. The greater length of time I spent with St George’s was in part due to my regular participation in Kids Church (as an extra adult present) being helpful to the church. This form of ongoing immersion in the everyday ‘duties’ of church life enriched the depth of this research, but also made leaving difficult (Day 2017: 16). 18 urban settings – and specifically London – are of strategic importance for understanding the potential futures of evangelicalism. In the twenty-first century, Greater London is the only county to have witnessed an overall increase in church attendance (Brierley 2006) and is home to twenty-three percent of evangelical churchgoers and fifty-seven per cent of all churchgoers aged twenty to twenty-nine (p. 249-50).10 Ethnographic comparisons of conservative and progressive religious groups are rare. Therefore conducting fieldwork across different evangelical churches appealed for theoretical reasons, drawing attention to ‘unexpected parallels between the groups while also casting subtle differences between them into clearer relief’ (Braunstein 2017: 13) and affording insight into how each negotiated their position in relation to wider cultural, social and political contexts. Comparison is, as Michael Herzfeld suggests, useful as a heuristic device and it is important to recognize that the process of comparison takes place not only across fieldsites, but also in relation to the ethnographer’s own professional and personal trajectory (2001: 262). Here, it is worth underscoring that the fact I conducted fieldwork with St John’s before I began fieldwork with Riverside and St George’s meant that I was perhaps more struck than others with less immersion in conservative evangelicalism would have been by differences between these churches and St John’s. I was, for instance, conscious of how some members of St George’s and Riverside at times ‘othered’ conservative evangelicals, as those at St John’s had also distinguished themselves from charismatics (Strhan 2015: 185). Yet I also observed fluidity across these groups, with some individuals who had previously been at With more resources, it would have been useful to also include a black majority congregation in this research. However the time-intensive nature of fieldwork meant including a fourth church was beyond the comparative scope (and funding) of this project. It is worth noting that while many black majority churches may be evangelical in terms of their theology, they are more likely to identify as Pentecostal rather than evangelical (Smith 2015: 21). 10 19 St John’s now regular attendees at St George’s, while a couple of individuals also simultaneously attended morning services at Riverside and evening services at St George’s. My own personal history was also relevant to the process of comparison. My decision to begin researching evangelicals can, as I have discussed elsewhere (2015: 25) be linked to my teenage involvement in and subsequent path away from the charismatic evangelical movement. This teenage experience of evangelicalism in part motivated my initial desire to understand the social and cultural effects of evangelicalism better. But it is also worth noting that my own personal experience meant that I was especially struck by how attitudes to issues such as women’s leadership in the church and the acceptance of LGBTQ identities and samesex relationships at St George’s were shifting rapidly away from the more conservative teachings I had encountered in the late 1990s. These are themes I explore in the later chapters of this book. All three churches were located in inner urban areas of heightened socio-economic polarization and this shaped their congregational dynamics in somewhat different ways. The congregation of St John’s was predominantly (but not exclusively) white, affluent, educated and middle-class, with a high proportion of students, single graduates in their twenties and thirties, and married couples and young families with children, with many of its members working in fields such as law, finance, medicine and teaching. There was a relatively low proportion of teenage children, as a significant number of families with children ended up moving out to more suburban churches, and those with teenage children who did stay at St John’s were often wealthy enough to send their children to fee-paying schools. The membership of St George’s was also young, with a high proportion of students and professionals working in the creative arts, media and new technology industries. Although many of children at St George’s were from white, middle-class families, the church also had a significant proportion of children (and of its adult membership) from a diverse range of 20 ethnic and national backgrounds, including Nigerian, Rwandan, South African, Chinese, Brazilian, Japanese and Polish. Although there were certainly well-heeled members of St George’s, the overall culture of the church was not ‘posh’ middle-class as it was at St John’s (see Strhan 2015: 15), with emphasis instead placed on the idea of the church as ‘creative’. A few of the children attended fee-paying schools, but the majority did not. Riverside’s membership was diverse in terms of ethnicity and social class, with the majority of those attending services living in the local area surrounding the church, in contrast with both St John’s and St George’s, which both drew a significant proportion of their membership from further afield in London. Many of Riverside’s most prominent members (who were involved in leading services, speaking in various capacities at the front of the church and leading work with children) were young, white, and middle-class, and tended to work in the public or third sector or in Christian ministry. It is worth noting, however, that Riverside’s church leadership, in contrast with St John’s and St George’s, had largely not been educated at elite universities, and although the majority were white, there were also BAME leaders. Those who attended church services were from a more diverse range of social class and ethnic backgrounds, working in a range of fields (including politics, education, catering, and the civil service), with some currently unemployed, and a small handful of regular attendees either homeless or living in temporary hostel accommodation. My fieldwork with the children also made me aware of how several of the families at Riverside were affected by the impact of economic recession and austerity policies, with children sometimes saying prayers telling God that they needed money in their houses because the previous week they ‘couldn’t buy a lot of shopping so the fridge was nearly empty’. Only a small minority of children and local families were white and middle-class, with the majority from African, Afro-Caribbean, Latin American, white-working class, and mixed heritage backgrounds. 21 St John’s and St George’s are both Anglican, while Riverside is Baptist. St John’s however did not have an easy relationship with the Church of England, and was closely linked with the Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON), a movement which grew out of transnational alliances that had developed since the mid-1990s in opposition to the growing acceptance of homosexual relationships in some Anglican provinces (GAFCON 2009, Sadgrove et al. 2010, Brittain and McKinnon 2018) and was critical of liberalism within the Anglican Communion more broadly. As is typical of GAFCON-supporting churches, St John’s opposed same sex relationships and the ordination of LGBTQ bishops in the Anglican Communion. The church was also representative of the conservative evangelical wing of the Church of England in opposing women bishops and not accepting the ordained ministry of women in the Church. St George’s had an easier relationship with the Church of England, but placed little overt emphasis on its Anglican identity, describing the church as ‘religion-free’ and trying to ‘do church’ in a way that is accessible to ‘everyone, whatever your experience of church and whatever you believe’. While the ordained ministers at St George’s were men, the church supported the ordination of women and sought to encourage the participation of more women in leadership roles in the church and more BAME leaders, acknowledging that their current staff leadership team did not reflect the diversity of the congregation in this sense. The only time I ever saw a minister at either St John’s or St George’s in clerical dress was when Alex, the curate, wore a clerical shirt and dog collar, with black skinny jeans, to lead occasional services at St George’s Primary School. Riverside’s formal affiliation was Baptist, although this was rarely explicitly alluded to, except at infant thanksgiving services or adult baptisms. Members of the congregation had previously attended a range of other churches, including other evangelical churches, Anglican, and Roman Catholic churches. Riverside encouraged the leadership of women in 22 the church, supported same-sex marriage and had established an LGBTQI group in the church shortly before I began conducting fieldwork. During my fieldwork with Riverside and St George’s, I spent time following church staff who worked with children (e.g. children’s workers) in order to gain insight into the range of ways in which these churches were engaging with children and to build relationships with children and their families over time. I carried out participant observation every Sunday at church services and Sunday School/Kids Church, alternating each week between Riverside and St George’s. Over half these Sundays also involved attending additional activities organized for children or their families, such as Messy Church or Family Kitchen at Riverside, or a monthly lunch and Bible study group for single mothers at St George’s. To get to know parents and to gain insight into the everyday rhythms of life at both these churches beyond the specific activities involving children, I also attended a range of other activities over the course of fieldwork. These included a toddlers’ group and groups and seminars for parents, a weekly small group for church members, some Sunday evening services (for which I volunteered on the coffee rota), and a range of other events the churches organized, such as local community fairs and public debates. I also carried out fieldwork in the schools linked with both churches, following the children’s workers in their engagements with local schools in order to gain insight into what the links between churches and schools looked like in practice. This included attending weekly assemblies and lunch time clubs at St George’s and weekly lunch time clubs at Riverside, and two week-long holiday clubs run by each church. I also went along to two annual weekend trips to a large camp, organized by a national evangelical youth organization, attended by members of Riverside’s Kids Church with their leaders. The children I worked with were aged between six and eleven years old, although I also carried out fieldwork with Year 7 children (aged 11-12) at Riverside Secondary 23 Academy, since the establishment of this school was important to how the church understood its relationships with local children and families, and I draw on this fieldwork in Chapters 4 and 5. My decision to focus on this period of ‘middle childhood’ was in order to address the neglect of this particular age range within the growing literature on religion and youth (Scourfield et al. 2013: 18). During my fieldwork with St John’s, I attended two services every Sunday (morning and evening), participated in two small Bible study groups on a weekly basis, volunteered on the coffee rota, helped prepare and serve food at ‘guest events’, attended mid-week lunch time services, went on a ‘church family’ weekend away conference. I was also often invited to church members’ homes for suppers or Sunday lunch, and met up with people for tea or coffee, in cafes or at their workplaces. Through this immersion in the church, I had regular contact with a range of parents in the church and got to know some of their children. My overall focus in this fieldwork was the difference that faith made to the everyday lives of church members, and the question of what it meant to be a parent and the everyday realities of bringing up children were frequent themes that arose in the course of exploring this question. I discussed the development of this project on childhood with several members of the congregation and church leaders, and interviewed several children’s workers during this initial period of fieldwork. Where there were specific issues I wanted to explore more fully subsequently, I carried out further interviews with parents and children and those involved in children’s work at St John’s. I also carried out short periods of observation at two further conservative evangelical churches and interviews at three further conservative evangelical churches in different areas of the UK to get a sense of how the modes of practice I was seeing at St John’s related to other conservative evangelical congregations. To get a feel for how my fieldwork with St George’s related to other charismatic churches, I also interviewed adults involved in children’s work at three other charismatic evangelical churches and attended a 24 national conference about children’s ministry organized by the Kingsway Trust (which was also attended by those involved in children’s ministry at Riverside). I carried out thirty-one formal, open-ended interviews during my initial period of fieldwork with St John’s, and was expecting to carry out a similar number of interviews at St George’s and Riverside. In practice, while I did carry out interviews with twenty-two children and twelve adults as part of this project, I found that the more informal, casual conversations I had with children and adults about my research in the everyday course of my fieldwork, together with my observations of informants’ modes of practice and interaction, provided more valuable insights about the everyday realities of how these churches engaged with children. In particular, this allowed the children to express their voices in their own social context and afforded them more freedom in the production of data, such as allowing them to write notes or draw pictures for me or express their opinions directly to my digital voice recorder, as and when they often wanted to. Throughout my fieldwork, I kept a detailed fieldnote diary, which I completed in a notebook during the day and typed up later in the day or evening or the following morning. These fieldnotes included detailed descriptions of specific encounters and records of event, conversations and interactions that had occurred, and my own reflections on and emotional reactions to these events.11 I also collected many hundreds of pages of print and digital materials, such as Kids Church and Sunday School plans, assembly scripts, flyers, newsletters, and training materials that circulated during the groups during the period of fieldwork, and recorded and transcribed relevant sermons and talks in each of the churches. Full ethical approval was obtained through the University of Kent, and ethical issues were taken seriously. Standard ethical procedures were followed in relation to ensuring the Overall, these fieldnotes collected between January 2013 and June 2015 comprised 666,376 words, in addition to the 557,958 words of fieldnotes produced during my original period of fieldwork at St John’s. 11 25 informed consent, privacy, confidentiality, and avoidance of harm of adult participants. Within ethnography, the negotiation of ethical issues is an ongoing, relational process over time, and I was conscious of the importance of maintaining an ethics ‘embedded in a continuous awareness of your participants, your relationship to others throughout the process, and how you choose to commit accounts to paper’ (Kulz 2017: 32). The same ethical issues also arise in research with children. However, there were further considerations which needed to be addressed sensitively, including ensuring that children were able to give consent through presenting information about the project to them in child-friendly language, and confirming children’s consent by parental and school consent, as well as church leaders’ consent (Alderson and Morrow 2011, Allerton 2016). Children were given opportunities to choose their own pseudonyms, although because of their often imaginative choices (e.g. ‘Burger’), I have sometimes replaced these with alternatives. Church and school safeguarding procedures were always followed. The names of the churches and all individuals here are pseudonyms, except the speakers at the public events described in Chapter 1. I was fortunate that each of the churches’ openness to newcomers helped me gain entry to their groups relatively easily. When initially visiting each church, individuals I sat next to offered to put me in touch with church leaders, who were each, in turn, very willing to host a researcher. Participant observation at St George’s and Riverside was undertaken from the role of a Kids Church/Sunday School helper, and within this role, I worked together with and following guidance from other church volunteers to facilitate activities such as discussions and games (both in Kids Church sessions and in the holiday, lunchtime and after school clubs they ran), but did not lead teaching activities or prayers. In my fieldwork with schools, when I was not accompanying the children’s workers, I undertook participant observation from the role of classroom assistant, which allowed me insight not only into formal lesson times but also other informal spaces. Within child-centred research, the idea of 26 the researcher adopting the ‘least-adult’ role has been very influential. In practice, it was impossible to rid myself of adult status (Bales 2005, Shillitoe 2018). However, I found that because the children had relaxed, friendly relations with the churches’ children’s workers, whom they perceived not as teachers but as other adults who were concerned for them and were especially interested in their lives, this mode of interaction shaped how the children expected to relate to me. For example, the desire of the younger children in the primary schools to include me in their games and discussions during lunch and play time suggested that they perceived my role there as different from their teachers. Across all the fieldwork settings I spent time in, I treated both my own engagements with children and adults and their responses to me as data relevant for understanding the formation of their identities and their different modes of relationality. It is worth noting that my own religious identity was something that my interlocutors at St John’s were interested in but those at St George’s and Riverside only very rarely inquired about. My having had a liberal Anglican upbringing, and teenage immersion in and subsequent path away from evangelicalism (while retaining a commitment to an Anglican identity) positioned me as ‘other’ for those at St John’s, but not at St George’s or Riverside, where, as I explore in Chapter 7, there was a self-conscious movement away from a traditional evangelical emphasis on adjudicating clearly-demarcated theological and moral boundaries of inside/outside. I should underscore that none of the children (in any of the fieldsites) ever asked about my religious identity or beliefs, but they did ask lots of questions about aspects of my identity that they were more interested in, such as gender (‘are you a tomboy, Anna?’), or national identity (‘Are you Italian?’, ‘Where are you from?’, ‘What is your country?’). They also often crossed boundaries that adults carefully observe (Allerton 2016: 8), such as asking personal questions about my appearance or crossing physical boundaries (pinching my cheeks affectionately or clambering over me to get to a favoured spot on a sofa). 27 Book Aims and Outline Overall, the book aims both to situate childhood as an important area of study in the sociology of religion and to spark a long overdue conversation about how we should approach childhood within this field, both theoretically and methodologically. The chapters that follow can be seen as a mapping exercise, identifying and examining particular sites of encounter or spaces of ‘sociation’ (Simmel 1964) in which the question of what a child is (or should be) is in play. The questions addressed in relation to each space of encounter – surrounding what it is to learn a (religious) form of life, the contested nature of authority in relation to parenting, the moral ambitions of religious institutions in engaging with both schooling and informal educational spaces, the marking of times of transition, and normative conceptions of order and disorder – are of wider relevance beyond evangelicalism for the study of children in a broad range of religious contexts. The book sets out and is underpinned by a relational approach to the study of children and religion that aims not only to address the particular modalities of children’s agency and the ways in which this is afforded or constrained in particular settings, but also to demonstrate the ways in which ‘childhood’ is significant in shaping the lives, hopes, concerns, and desires of adults in religious contexts. Threaded throughout the volume is the central question of the meaning and significance of the figure of the child, and the differing ways in which this is articulated, imagined, experienced and contested within and beyond contemporary evangelicalism. Rather than providing a comparative focus on each of conservative, charismatic and open evangelicalism in every chapter, I zero in on particular ethnographic examples and theoretical issues that are revealing of the spaces, times, and meanings of childhood in relation to evangelicalism, and are of wider analytical significance in understanding the location of religion in contemporary society. The chapters address the techniques through 28 which evangelicals seek to form children as believers within the space of church, cultures of parenting, evangelical organizations’ provision of state-funded schooling, churches’ practical modes of engaging with schools and other informal activities for children such as holiday and after-school clubs, and the practical marking of time and transitions in children’s lives. Chapter 1 reviews dominant theoretical approaches to the study of childhood and religion and critically assesses the understandings of childhood and religion they index, situating these in relation to two different approaches taken to children’s agency in wider Childhood Studies. The chapter then examines different understandings of children’s agency in conservative and charismatic evangelicalism through comparing two different national events focused on childhood. Turning to the space of churches, Chapter 2 explores the practices through which adults sought to form children as subjects able to ‘engage with God’ in Sunday School and Kids Churches and the ways in which the children responded to these practices. Focusing on the desired formation of children provides insight into the morally-charged ideals of personhood articulated in each church, and draws out the particular emphasis on biblical literacy and ideals of submission to God expressed in conservative evangelicals’ work with children in comparison with the emphasis on ideals of friendship with Jesus that is privileged at St George’s and Riverside. I argue that despite these differences, the techniques of formation used in each church aims to shape the children as reflexive individuals, able to reflect on their actions in the light of church teachings. Chapter 3 takes as its ethnographic focus ideals and practices of ‘parenting’ by examining the normative constructions of parenthood articulated at parenting classes run by St John’s and St George’s, in which the parent-child relationship and its relationship with wider social norms was in question. The chapter explores how leaders at St John’s situated their ideals of children’s obedience to the father and understanding of children as inherently sinful as countercultural and outlines the techniques of parenting that were encouraged here. I 29 then describe how, in contrast, ideas about parenting at St George’s drew on psychoanalytic literature and encouraged parents to learn from secular expertise on parenting and consider how these differing ways of understanding what it is to be a parent are shaped by processes of individualization, and open onto wider questions about the agency of the child, human agency and the social and existential order. Turning to evangelicals’ engagements with children in education, Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the lived interrelations between the churches and the schools that are linked with them. Chapter 4 focuses on the relations between Riverside Church and the local schools it is involved in running, situating this in relation to broader debates about faith schools, neoliberalism and social class in relation to education. The chapter examines how members of Riverside church described the moral and religious significance of their engagement with these schools, drawing on a romanticized narrative of evangelicals’ historic work with the children of the urban poor. The chapter demonstrates how these schools are of central moral significance for the church’s aspiration to affect both the local area and wider British society, and explores how the ways in which those at Riverside talk about the work of these schools at times enacts moralizing power relations that are simultaneously held in tension with their inclusivist aspirations and self-understanding. Against the backdrop of public concerns raised about the role of external evangelical visitors in state-funded schools, Chapter 5 examines the mundane realities of the relationships that children’s workers and volunteers from the churches developed with local schools. Focusing on the visits made by children’s workers to deliver assemblies, and the after-school, lunch-time and holiday clubs they ran, this chapter considers how children’s agency was either limited or enabled across these different spaces. Examining how the adults involved in these engagements with children spoke about the moral significance of their work, I argue that these kinds of engagement offered adults a 30 sense of meaning and hope, allowing them to understand themselves as agents of change at a time when the public sphere often seems unwieldy and beyond individuals’ control. Living through times in which traditional religious rites of passage are in question in Western societies, Chapter 6 focuses on what rites of passage in relation to childhood looked like at each of the three churches and examines how particular moments of transition were being constructed and marked in children’s lives. The chapter explores the different ways in which those at St John’s, St George’s, and Riverside engaged with traditional rites of passage such as infant baptism and often demonstrated ritual creativity in their marking of other moments of transition, such as the move from primary to secondary school, and examines how these rites reveal different understandings of children’s agency. Through ethnographic focus on Riverside’s ‘Messy Church’, which was aimed at local children and families, Chapter 7 turns to examine shifting ethical currents within conservative, charismatic and open evangelical cultures. Considering the contemporary significance of ideas of ‘mess’ and ‘messiness’ at Riverside and St George’s, the chapter argues that this turn to ‘mess’ at both churches is shaped by both a strategy of differentiation from conservative evangelicalism – which emphasizes a desire for hierarchical order within church, self, and society – and by an ethics of responsiveness to the everyday needs of those in their local area, marked by heightened socio-economic polarization. How groups engage with ideas of ‘order’ and ‘mess’, I suggest, is significant for understanding how different groups respond to fragmented experiences of social life, and how they enact modes of difference and belonging in the contemporary moment. The conclusion draws together the book’s key findings and contributions and reflects on the importance of attending to the agency of children in deepening our understanding of religion in the contemporary world.