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Sensational Devotion
Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First-Century America
By Jill Stevenson The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2013 University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11873-1
CHAPTER 1
Embodied Belief, Affective Piety, and Evangelical Dramaturgy
The performative genres I study in this book both reflect and engender religious belief. I argue that they accomplish this, in great measure, through what I call evangelical dramaturgy, a system of performative tactics designed to manipulate the physical, rhythmic encounter between user and medium. As Simon Shepherd contends, because performances are
gatherings of bodies as much as minds. ... Effects are produced in the spectator simply as a result of materially sharing the space with the performance. Many of these effects, bypassing the intellect, are felt in the body and work powerfully to shape a spectator's sense of the performance.
Rhythm is a fundamental way that performances produce these effects, with the actor's body generating particularly powerful rhythms; "a play's rhythm works on an audience. It does so through the agency of the performer body rhythm which stimulates response in audience bodies."
However, a variety of other performative elements also produce rhythms: the stage space and environment surrounding the spectators, material props, costumes and set pieces, lighting and soundscape, staging and textual choices, and the spectators' own bodies. All of these components enter the performance frame rhythmically, impacting the aesthetic texture of the performance experience and, thus, the meaning spectators derive from that experience. Consequently, Shepherd argues that when a spectator arrives at a performance, his or her body arrives "in a more or less heightened state of openness to rhythmic possibility. And in this state of openness it is confronted by the play's own rhythms." Moreover, spectators have their own bodily rhythms, which may be "confirmed or drawn into a new rhythm by the play." In this respect, as Shepherd asserts, rhythm constitutes "the agency whereby a play may negotiate with its audience an affirmation of or deviation from the rhythmic experience of their everyday lives." Evangelical dramaturgy's overarching goal is to shape this rhythmic point of contact between performative event and believer-user so that it supports certain ideologies and cultivates particular religious beliefs.
Evangelical dramaturgy is therefore founded upon the principle that live performances are rhythmic experiences and that this rhythmic dimension helps performances function as powerful religious tools. Yet, this dramaturgical system also recognizes that many genres generate rhythms and, therefore, users may also approach these other performative forms as they do live performances — with bodies prepared for and expecting rhythmic engagement.
I have suggested elsewhere that late medieval devotional culture acknowledged this characteristic of religious media, with certain extant examples still revealing the creator's attention to rhythm. For example, in order to make their ideas more accessible to lay readers, some medieval writers employed rhythmic devices to integrate "secular" elements into devotional texts. We find this in Robert Mannyng of Brunne's Handlyng Synne, an early fourteenth-century penitential manual written for laypeople that tackles complicated theological issues, in particular those concerning the nature of the Eucharist. As Jennifer Garrison explains, although this text urges lay readers "to contemplate the paradoxical inaccessibility of Christ," Mannyng chooses to deliver this message through a highly accessible vernacular narrative form. Not only did writing the manual in English affirm the importance of lay salvation and of the vital role that theological education played in that salvation, but Garrison argues that this choice also suggests that Mannyng recognized English as the "language of narrative" and wanted to use this specific association to his pedagogical advantage.
As Garrison explains, Handlyng Synne begins with a prologue in which Mannyng "laments that the laity are unknowingly falling into sin for two distinct reasons: doctrinal texts are not widely available in the vernacular, and laypeople prefer entertaining tales to sermons." He aims to remedy this situation, not only "by interspersing penitential doctrine with entertaining exempla" but also by using "rymys" (rhymes) like those employed in narrative. Therefore, rather than requiring the laity to "renounce their old habits, such as storytelling," the narrative form of Handlyng Synne instead encourages them "to integrate greater piety into the practices in which they already engage." In this way, Mannyng hopes to "compete with popular forms of entertainment."
Garrison's analysis of this manual focuses primarily on the appropriation of entertaining exempla, but I am interested in Mannyng's use of "rymys," a device that implies he was not focused exclusively on generic content and structure. By using rhymes, Mannyng borrows a kinaesthetic element from vernacular narrative; in the service of devotional efficacy, he invigorates sacred content by appropriating a familiar, secular, and popular rhythmic program. That program is composed of not only the text's sounded rhymes but also the actual encounter between those uttered sounds and the listener/reader, a rhythmic encounter that produces certain kinaesthetic effects. I propose that such borrowing acknowledges that a genre generates valuable meaning through the user's felt experience of its rhythmic features. As Shepherd writes, "the mobilization of bodily value is ideologically more successful because it produces responses that are felt rather than discussed." Mannyng uses "rymys" to embed his religious ideology into the lay reader/listener's body.
Like Handlyng Synne, the contemporary evangelical genres I analyze in this book also communicate important meaning through their rhythmic dimensions. Evangelical dramaturgy is therefore a system of strategies aimed at situating users/readers/spectators within kinaesthetically constructed encounters that will promote specific embodied beliefs. By beginning my analysis with a medieval example, I wish to demonstrate that evangelical dramaturgy's attention to the sensual, rhythmic contact between user and devotional medium has roots in an affective religious tradition that worked, and oftentimes worked very well, for many people. Religious objects, spaces, events, and performances in the Middle Ages functioned effectively not only because they communicated doctrine in accessible ways and gave the laity greater agency over their piety, although both of these functions were certainly important, but also because they supplied believers with devotional encounters that fulfilled their needs, and in doing so, as I will argue, helped resolve their problems. By making things happen for the devotee, these genres, in turn, made belief. The same is true of evangelical performative media today.
Naturalized Phenomenology and Embodied Belief
Dramaturgy is a slippery term, but I am inspired by Cathy Turner and Synne K. Behrndt's multivalent definition that suggests dramaturgy not only is brought to a play and thus has an end point, but that dramaturgy continues to emerge and develop as the play changes with each performance encounter.
It would seem that dramaturgy may not be inherent in the play text, but may be produced and shaped through the work of a particular company, reflecting the process and production conditions that impinge on it. It will also be shaped by the audience, by its responses and what it brings to the work. Dramaturgy is therefore produced through a dialogue between the play and a particular community of people in a particular time and place.
This definition is especially relevant to my examination of evangelical media because it reminds us to consider not just the philosophy (or theology) that undergirds a form's creation and design, but also the principles that spectators bring to the artwork, as well as the ways that each live encounter between audience member and performance impacts the work. This definition encompasses the horizon of expectations that impinge upon a work during its creation, production, and ongoing reception. Understood in this way, dramaturgy helps us recognize the many different elements that contribute to a religious mode of performance.
Moreover, Turner and Behrndt encourage us to expand the applications of this term beyond drama and theater:
If "dramaturgy" is a word we use when we discuss structural, compositional and contextual principles of a work, and the ideas and narratives that drive these principles, it may have applications beyond drama or indeed, the theatre. ... Dramaturgy can, in fact, be considered as a term for many kinds of "cultural assemblage."
In this project I use the term evangelical dramaturgy to interrogate all kinds of genres, not strictly theater. Across these various evangelical cultural assemblages, I identify recurrent material, aesthetic, compositional, and experiential principles and ideologies, similarities that, I argue, reflect a shared dramaturgy.
The term dramaturgy also reminds us that the relationships between text/performance/audience are inherently unstable; evangelical dramaturgy's performative strategies are only attempts to orient the dynamics of that relationship in certain directions, but the results are never guaranteed. Consequently, while exploring how, where, when, and why each genre deploys evangelical dramaturgical strategies, and identifying certain consistencies across these examples, I will also note the productive tension between the doctrine or ideology each genre aims to promote and the individual's live experience of the form itself. Cognitive theory offers us valuable ways to examine this tension and, thus, to critically analyze how religious belief might shape each spectator's unique experience of a mode of performance.
As I noted in the Introduction, cognitive theory draws upon empirical evidence of bodily response to investigate perception and processes of meaning-making. Because cognitive theory and phenomenology share certain guiding concepts and foundational principles, scholars like Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi, and Evan Thompson have integrated these two theoretical approaches in productive ways. Such work, sometimes called "naturalized phenomenology" or "neurophenomenology," proposes "that biology and phenomenology can stand in a mutually enlightening, explanatory relation." These approaches maintain that "phenomenology needs to be able to understand and interpret its investigations in relation to those of biology and mind science." Rather than universalizing claims about perception or meaning formation, naturalized phenomenology integrates empirical evidence from cognitive science into a phenomenological framework that acknowledges the body's unique role in forming conceptual knowledge.
Mark Johnson, in particular, has argued for a redefined aesthetics that blends cognitive science with traditional phenomenology "in order to provide an enriched view of human meaning-making." Johnson's work is founded on the principle that "we are born into the world as creatures of the flesh, and it is through our bodily perceptions, movements, emotions, and feelings that meaning becomes possible and takes the form it does ... What and how anything is meaningful to us is shaped by our specific form of incarnation." In order to move away from a purely linguistic model of meaning construction, Johnson uses the term embodied schema to analyze "embodied patterns of meaningfully organized experience (such as structures of bodily movements and perceptual interactions)." Embodied schemata are unconscious maps that emerge as part of our meaningful interactions with things outside of us. They are "that portion of the entire perceptual cycle which is internal to the perceiver, modifiable by experience, and somehow specific to what is being perceived." As Johnson notes, embodied schemata "are not just templates for conceptualizing past experience" and constructing meaning from that experience, but they also constitute "plans for interacting with objects and persons. They give expectations and anticipations that influence our interactions with our environment" (original emphasis). In short, an embodied schema is an internal, physical memory that may influence future activity and meaning creation. Concepts like this one allow us to investigate understanding as each individual's unique way of "being in a world."
Naturalized phenomenology therefore provides us with tools for critically analyzing how we make meaning out of our individualized rhythmic encounters with events, objects, spaces, and other phenomena. As Tobin Nellhaus reminds us, communication practices have cognitive effects because they generate embodied schemata that establish epistemological and ontological assumptions. Consequently, the embodied practices that are most closely connected to how we obtain knowledge of the world also impact how we subsequently develop knowledge. Like all social groups, evangelical Christians use and deploy modes of communication that will serve their unique needs and priorities. Each of the genres I study in this book represents a communication practice that utilizes a combination of "the visual, the body, objects, experience, and rituals," resources that, Stewart Hoover argues, "have long been repressed in the American (particularly the Protestant) context" but that have grown increasingly popular among today's evangelical Christians. Consequently, the genres I analyze are not only reactions against a long-standing repression of the somatic and material within mainline U.S. Protestant devotion, but, as modes of knowledge acquisition, they also instantiate and reinforce a certain epistemology within users' bodies. I contend that evangelicals may seek out communication practices that engage the entire spectrum of their senses not only because, as Hoover notes, they "address hungers and needs not met by conventional religious practice," but also because these practices affirm evangelical beliefs about the legitimacy and efficacy of certain modes of knowledge acquisition. In particular, these genres reinforce the evangelical emphasis on immediate, personal experience as a trustworthy, even superior, source of religious knowledge. A concept like "embodied schema" can help us analyze how evangelical dramaturgy's strategies work on and through the user's body to accomplish this goal.
Evangelical Dramaturgy: Popular Media, Resonance, and Commodification
I will spend the remainder of this chapter outlining the key methods and goals of evangelical dramaturgy. The first tactic is one that I have touched upon already: reappropriating "secular," familiar, and often popular cultural forms — such as paperback thrillers, museums, theme parks, and sports stadiums — for sacred purposes. As I noted in the Introduction, rather than shunning new media, evangelicals, and especially those in the United States, have repeatedly embraced such innovations as opportunities to create novel devotional vehicles. This strategy lowers the barriers to entry for new users by packaging theology in a nonthreatening, accessible form.
For example, in some respects the Left Behind book series is a modern-day equivalent of Mannyng's Handlyng Synne — a complicated theological system delivered to lay readers through a familiar, highly accessible, rhythmic program. This twelve-book series, written by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, is based upon the End Times account described in the New Testament book of Revelation. The authors published the first volume in 1995, and the series has since sold over sixty-three million copies, a number that includes the Left Behind "Kids Series." Each of the last six books in the adult series reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2000 and 2002, Cloud Ten Pictures released film versions of the first two books, both starring Kirk Cameron. A third installation, coproduced with Sony Entertainment, appeared in 2005 and starred Cameron and Louis Gossett Jr. According to an October 2010 press release, Cloud Ten was planning a fourth installment to begin production in late 2011. However, that film is currently on hold because "Cloud Ten has agreed to allow Dr. LaHaye the opportunity to make a Left Behind film. ... If Dr. LaHaye does not go forward with his plans to produce a Left Behind movie, then Cloud Ten will resume development of the next Left Behind film."
Before coauthoring the series, Jenkins was already an established writer with many Christian-themed books to his credit. In addition, he helped Reverend Billy Graham write his autobiography, Just as I Am, and he also owns the Christian Writers Guild, an organization that "aims to train tomorrow's professional Christian writers." Although LaHaye has also written several books, publicity materials usually describe him as the theologian behind the Left Behind series. LaHaye is the founder and president of Tim LaHaye Ministries and the founder of the PreTrib Research Center. The biblical interpretation offered by the Left Behind books is founded in pre-tribulation End Times theology. The series has even spawned "The Left Behind Prophecy Club," described online as "a website and newsletter to help you understand how current events may actually relate to End Times prophecy."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sensational Devotion by Jill Stevenson. Copyright © 2013 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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