Joel Robbins (University of
California San Diego)
Engaged Disbelief: Problematics of
Detachment in Christianity and in the Anthropology of Christianity
Christianity, like perhaps all the
monotheistic faiths, is as much a religion of enjoined disbelief as it is one
of faith. Adherents are required
either not to believe in, or to distance themselves from, entities other than
God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit that those around them might consider to be
gods or creative spiritual forces.
In many kinds of Christianity, such enjoined disbelief leads to
practices of what we might call “engaged detachment” - practices by means of
which people regularly work to display their disbelief or lack of faith in
various spiritual entities, and to distance themselves from them, even as in
doing so they create marked kinds of relationships with them and with people
with whom they share their disbeliefs.
This paper explores practices of engaged detachment among Pentecostals,
looking both at the techniques by which they create distance and the kinds of
relations of closeness they enable.
Having done this, the paper takes up an unwanted detachment or
estrangement that anthropologists often experience in relation to the
Pentecostals they study because they do not share beliefs with them. Anthropologists frequently discuss such
detachment as a problem in their fieldwork, and suggest that it follows from
the centrality of belief to Pentecostal identity. If Pentecostals feel that beliefs are much more central to
their lives than the rituals in which they are expressed – and if
anthropologists cannot share these beliefs - can anthropologists participate in
the ritual lives of Pentecostals without duplicity? This paper considers the extent to which this worry might be
addressed by focusing on the enjoined disbeliefs anthropologists often share
with Pentecostals, rather than by worrying over the beliefs they do not
share. Anthropologists could then
come to better understand the Pentecostal technique of forming community around
shared detachments.
