How do you compare theologies...ethnographically?

‘I’ve seen you’, she said.

‘I’ve seen your work and I’ve got some things to say about it’.

This was how my interview with Khadija started in the back of a quiet café in downtown Newark, near Rutgers University. A local artist, Khadija is a Puerto Rican convert to Islam and the mother of a son killed by gang violence. In the café, she sits across from me with a mug clutched in her hands. She radiates energy and warmth, wrapped in layers of vibrant, colorful clothing. Setting her coffee cup down, she looks me directly in the eyes and said, ‘My husband said about you, “Oh, he’s probably just another crazy missionary trying to convert us”. And I said, “Ok, let’s see who this crazy person is”. And then we listened to your sermons for hours. I’m grateful that you’re here, to interview me, to talk to us, to help tell our story. That way, they can know we are just like anybody else, it just happens that we speak Spanish and we are Muslim’.

Khadija’s exchange with me– an ordained Lutheran pastor, theologian, and ethnographer – was marked by an array of intersecting identities and experiences. While our encounter was one where my work in the pulpit opened up a conversation, there was the latent possibility that my work could have harmed Khadija, stalled or stopped the conversation, or caused some other insurmountable issue in the midst of my research in the neighborhood where she lives, works, and prays. Over several years of ethnographic fieldwork, my relationship with Muslims, like Khadija, has not only brought insight in my academic research, but also influenced my theology and work in inter-religious engagement.

This, in turn, raised questions about the relation between ethnography and theology and what role ethnographic encounter might play in the dialogue and encounter between religions.

In this essay, I review and analyze three books:

1. Tastes of the Divine: Hindu and Christian Theologies of Emotion, by Michelle Voss Roberts

2. Untouchable Bodies, Resistance, and Liberation: a Comparative Theology of Divine Possessions, by Joshua Samuel

3. Theologising with the Sacred ‘Prostitutes’ of South India: Towards an Indecent Dalit Theology, by Eve Rebecca Parker

Each compares Christian and Hindu traditions in South Asian context. I examine them in order to address two interrelated questions:

• are we beginning to see an ethnographic turn in comparative theology?

• if so, what might that mean for both ethnographic theology and comparative theology?

The result, I hope, are some fresh reflections on ethnographic and comparative theology that will better serve a world increasingly marked by diversity, difference, and interreligious encounters. Encounters not unlike the one where Khadija ‘saw me’ and I, in turn, came to ‘see her’ and walk away marked, changed, and seeing my own theology and sociality in a new way through the process.

Thank you, to the editors at the journal Ecclesial Practices, especially Editor-in-Chief Henk de Roest. I appreciated their attention to detail through this process and the anonymous reviewers helpful feedback. I would also like to thank members of the “Ecclesial Practices Unit” at the American Academy of Religion, who encouraged me to pursue this project.

Making Ethnography More Familiar, Theology More Strange: Ethnographic Theology as Theological Practice

In summer 2019, I had the opportunity to lead a “Cultural Anthropology in Christian Perspective” seminar with graduate students at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. 

Our goal was to explore the frames and tools of cultural anthropology and their usefulness in ministerial and congregational contexts. Students not only immersed themselves in anthropological literature, but also got their hands dirty with ethnographic fieldwork. The students explored various topics via participant observation—from conference presentations on “creation science” to the “killing fields of Cambodia,” from the quotidian camaraderie of a local barbershop to the blurred lines of “online baptism.” 

Whether it was critically evaluating anthropological theories or discerning the methodological assumptions inherent in both ethnography and theology, our goal was the same: to make the strange more familiar and the familiar more strange.

This, I told the cohort, was the goal of ethnographic research. As pastors and theologians tasked with carefully and critically considering how an ethnographic lens might help us fulfill our vocations, we came to appreciate that as the work of ethnography became more familiar, it was the work of theology that became more strange.

In a recently published article with Concordia Journal (Summer 2021), I extend the discussions in that seminar and reflect on how applying the perspectives, postures, and practices of ethnography might help academic theologians and pastors better understand the world we live in and better discern the varieties of theology and culture within our congregations, communities, and denominations. 

I introduce “ethnography as theological practice” to help pastors and theologians more holistically understand the diverse, overlapping, and sometimes contradicting religious experiences and perspectives of our congregations, communities, and church bodies.

Public Lecture: What hath ethnography to do with religion journalism?

Diversity and difference continue to pose a pronounced challenge to the public understanding of religion.

For decades, both religion scholars and journalists have striven to address religious pluralism and advance religious literacy through a range of critical research and explanatory reporting. One shared aspect between them has been the use of immersive techniques in order to offer more nuanced, contextual, and longform narratives of the miscellany of religious traditions.

On the one hand, ethnographers of religion have produced textured analyses of religious individuals, socialities, rituals, and material cultures, further refining and complicating our understanding of what “religion” is and how it is lived in particular places. On the other hand, some religion newswriters are afforded the opportunity to take deep dives into religious actors’ lives and contexts and tell their stories in popular fashion via features, podcasts, and video stories.

Despite their differences, qualitative religious studies scholarship and religion journalism have more in common than usually acknowledged.

As part of the series "Erfurt Monday Lectures: New Topics in Religious Studies” at the University of Erfurt, I will share some insights and reflections as both an ethnographer and a journalist and how my research and reporting on religion has led me to explore questions related to the ethics, norms, and aesthetics of both fields and how they might work together to shine light on how religion and spirituality function in the lives of religious actors and socialities in a diverse array of locales and from multiple points of view.

The event will be Monday, 21 June 2021 at 5:00 pm Central European Time (11:00 am EDT/8:00 PDT). You can learn more about the event HERE, register ahead of time via e-mail, or simply attend the event at the link below (requires WebEx software).

If you have any questions, be sure to reach out to me as well: k.chitwood@fu-berlin.de.

A pilgrim's progress - an ethnographic perspective on evangelical Holy Land tours

“Casting our eyes to the right, lo! like a flash of lightning the oft-mentioned and oft-to-be-mentioned holy city of Jerusalem shone forth...the pilgrim, or stranger who had never seen Jerusalem could not but...beheld with our eyes the long-desired holy city, we straightaway dismounted from our asses and greeted the holy city, bowing our faces to the earth.”

— Felix Fabri, German pilgrim, 1480

As holy as Holy Land pilgrimages are, they are also, concomitantly, very human affairs. The humans who make these journeys make meaning of them as well. They move through these spaces with bodies that have sore feet, smell the incense, bump into fellow pilgrims, and get sunburnt on an archaeological dig. They craft their own narratives and share their own perspectives through photos and stories. There is also, on every trip, conflict and miscommunication. Indeed, as important as the holy sites of a pilgrimage are, equally so are the human sites which seek, explore, and interact with them. 

I recently accompanied a group of evangelical Lutherans on a Holy Land tour with the group Educon Travel (read about their "7 Principles of Christian Travel"). Along the way I enjoyed participating, leading devotions and studies, and also observing the group as we "walked where Jesus walked."

To assist my understanding of the human phenomenon of pilgrimage to the Holy Land I read two books: R. D. Kernohan's The Road to Zion: Travelers to Palestine and the Land of Israel for historical perspective and Hillary Kaell's (Assistant Professor of Religion at Concordia University Montreal), Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage for an ethnographic lens. 

Pilgrimage to the "Holy Land" has a long history. The first recorded pilgrim to the Holy Land was a bishop named Mileto, who hailed from Sardis in Asia Minor. His journey occurred around 160 C.E. and Christian historian Eusebius, writing in the 4th-century, shared that Bishop Mileto visited those locales “where the Scriptures had been preached and fulfilled." Others such as the anonymous Bordeaux Pilgrim, the excitable Egeria (a.k.a. Etheria), the Roman widow Paula, and German friar Felix Fabri left journals that recount their adventures and experiences in the footsteps of the Bible. 

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Journeying through the "Holy Land" -- shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims of all stripes -- some pilgrims struggle with the encounter with variant rituals, beliefs, and bodily practices. Others join in. PHOTO: Ken Chitwood

Yet, it wasn't until after the end of the Six Day War that the throngs of modern pilgrims began to flock to Israel and Palestine. Kernohan shares that "one result of the Israeli conquest was a decisive victory in the battle for pilgrims and tourists. Probably more Christian visitors have come to the Holy Land in the [latter half of the 20th-century] than at any other time in history." (149)

Indeed, since the 1950s, millions of U.S. Christians have traveled to the Holy Land to visit places in Israel and the Palestinian territories associated with Jesus’s life and death. Millions of others come from Africa and Asia, Russia and Europe, Latin America and Oceania. 

Questions abound? Why do they come/go? Why do they come in such numbers? How do they react to the encounter with other religions and customs there? What's the cost -- financially, personally, culturally, politically? How do they interpret the trip before, during, and after? How do they cope with the dissonance between dream and reality? How do they seek out "the holy thing behind the seemingly holy place?" (Kernohand, 154) How do they wrestle with the juxtaposition of sanctity and commercialism in simultaneity? How do they collate through politics and particular personages who are want to share their opinion on Palestinians and Israelis and Muslims and Americans and more? What links are there between home and away, pilgrimage and every day life? 

Considering why the influx today, Kaell chose to analyze how the growth of mass-market evangelical pilgrimages emerged out of changes in U.S. Christian theology and culture over the last sixty or so years, including the growth of the small group movement, the development of an entire industry of Christian leisure travel, and changes in Jewish-Christian relations.  

Essentially, Kaell boils all the questions above into one -- what does it mean for 21st-century U.S. Christians to return to "the source" - in her words "walk where Jesus walked" - in the context of their everyday faith? 

Kaell drew on five years of participant observation and interviews with pilgrims before, during, and after their pilgrimages. She tracked Catholics and evangelicals, but for the purposes of this blog we will focus on her findings about evangelicals. 

What she discovered was that the pilgrimage is a hybrid harmony between holy and human, divine and mundane. The journey that pilgrims take, and the interpretations that they give to their experiences are tied to the ordinary, the everyday, and their roles, rituals, and realities at "home." Not only do pilgrims grapple with the tension between the material and the mystical, commodification and religious control, the home and the "Holy Land" during their journey, but also betwixt and between places like Apache Junction, AZ and the Arab Quarter in Jerusalem. 

“This book shows us how Holy Land pilgrimage is embedded in the everyday lives of pilgrims, before and after their trip. But it also does much more. We learn how the Holy Land occupies a powerful place in the American religious imagination, and examine what it means to be Protestant or Catholic in an age of contested modernity.”

— Simon Coleman, University of Toronto

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A pilgrim's feet caked in the mud from the Jordan River, near "Bethany Beyond the Jordan" where Jesus was said to have been baptized. PHOTO: Ken Chitwood

I found Kaell's reflections to be eerily prescient. Frequently, as I read the book on the bus or in my room at night I would laugh out loud as I recollected a moment from the day that passed that proved a perfect illustration for a perspective that she offered. 

For example, Kaell was discussing how the "image of Israelis as American-style pioneers persists today, which, by contrast, means that Palestinians can be construed as dangerous 'Indian' interlopers." (Loc. 872) That day, I'd not only heard our tour guide refer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one of "cowboys vs. Indians," but had heard one of my fellow travelers talk about Jordan as "the Wild West." 

To me, this not only illustrated how guides are "conscious of their unique opportunity to shape the group's outlook...therefore [spending] significant time promoting their political/theological ideologies" (Loc. 1002) but that "spiritual interest in Palestine, including the Christian interest in the tradition of pilgrimage, will [remain] one of the constant factors" in this ever-changing situation. (Kernohan, 158) Knowing that U.S. Christian perspectives matter in the Middle East -- both politically and poetically -- it is important therefore for groups of pilgrims to be intentional about their engagement with such issues, taking in both sides and hearing divers perspectives from Jews, Christians, and Muslims who live in that context every day. 

On that point, I was also drawn to the interstices of U.S. Christians' encounters with other religions. Christian pilgrims struggle with multiple religious "others" in the context of contested space in the "Holy Land." From the Orthodox jostling for their moment to grace the spot where Jesus was born to the Roman Catholics who booted us out of the wedding chapel at Cana to the adhan, or "Muslim call to prayer" rousing us to wake in the mornings, many pilgrims struggle with denominational and confessional fault lines. Mostly, pilgrims feel that their experience is the authentic one. After all, Muslims weren't here in Jesus' day -- why should they distract us now? Catholic and Orthodox Christians are all about rituals, I will stick with my private, personal, evangelical piety. Copts? I have no clue what to do with them. I feel for them as martyrs at the hands of ISIS, but I would condemn them as heretics if they got in my way. To be sure, evangelical pilgrims vie for space in the Old City and at the Church of the Holy Nativity and draw on centuries of battles to wrest control of the "Holy Land" from "infidels" (Muslims), "schismatics" (the Orthodox), and "legalists" (Catholics) to stake their claim.  

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Pilgrims jostle for photos and feelings with other Christians bumping their way to the place of Jesus' birth at the Church of the Holy Nativity. PHOTO: Ken Chitwood

It was difficult, nigh impossible, to interject any grand opportunities to share my insight and background from, and in, religious studies during the trip. While there were those who asked sincere questions of Muslims and Druze, Copts and Zionist Jews I could barely get a word in before my inquirers interjected with their own perspectives and interpretations informed by their own news consumption, e-mail discussions, and experiences from home. Granted, I too was headstrong with my views and opinions as I listened to our tour guide woefully represent Muslims and express what was to me an errant perspective on the religion and the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Just as my compatriots were not to be moved, I too remained recalcitrant. Negatively, this meant that divisions were doubled-down and fault lines morphed into fissures. Positively, for some, the trip came to exemplify and perhaps positively reinforce, recent shifts toward ecumenism and pluralism.

As Kaell noted, ne'er did we let this boil over into full blown conflict. This trip was far too expensive and important to let interfaith rivalries or political opinions ruin our time. After all, this is a "holy" trip...even though other humans are unfortunately on our buses, in Bethlehem, and in our bedrooms. 

Related to the point above about transporting our previous perspectives from home into our experience on the pilgrimage, Kaell concludes by discussing various dualities throughout the book - particularly those between domestic relationships at home and global experience traveling to and in the Holy Land. Insightfully, she shows how each pilgrimage derives its power and relevance from the interaction and tension between the two.

Just as their trip through Jesus' backyard is significantly shaped by their home life, so too upon their return the "Holy Land" is remembered, reordered, and reconstructed "according to the subjective interpretations and cultural expectations" of home. Likewise, pilgrims use their encounters and experiences in the "Holy Land" to decode their spiritual lives back in the U.S. They are forced to reimagine their spiritual struggles, feelings, and physical encounters in the context of the domus. In the interplay between before and after, over there and right here at home, both places are reinterpreted and reshaped. Pilgrims often find that just as they struggled to find the holy in the "Holy Land" -- as ruins disappointed, churches were too busy, and some experiences too commercialized for their liking -- so too they strive to find the holy at home. Just as the numinous evaded their reach in the places where Jesus was himself was they find it hard to brush up against him in their church, in their small group, or in their daily life. 

“...the Holy Land pilgrimage is not religious in spite of its commercial or touristic or global nature. It is powerful precisely because participants engage with defining characteristics of Christian modernity through the juxtaposition of these dualities: the dynamic tension between material evidence and transcendent divinity, the intersection of commoditization and religious authority, the interplay between domestic relationships and global experience. American Christians navigate these categorizations and ways of being every day, of course, but the intentional nature of “walking where Jesus walked” brings them into heightened relief. It is the extra-ordinary nature of this “trip of a lifetime” that makes it such a good experience to think with—for American Christians and for the scholars who study them.”

— Hillary Kaell

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Pilgrims struggle with commercialization and pluralism on their journey, juxtaposed against holy sites of Christian lore. They take this tension home with them. PHOTO: Ken Chitwood

In this way, pilgrimage simply serves as the microcosm of the mundane, as a journey into the everyday, but in a far away place. As a parallel to the odyssey of lived piety at home it can often leave pilgrims more frustrated than illuminated. Yet, at its best, this voyage can turn us into regular religious site-seers who turn their senses to appreciate the divine intimations that percolate in the everyday. If truth be told, not only are pilgrimages of this sort an encounter with the divine, the religious "other," a potent political situation, or crotchety companions, these peregrinations are engagements with our own spiritual selves in relation to the world we live in -- near and far, local and global, at home and in the "Holy Land." 

With that said, this gives us an opportunity to learn that our world is evermore one of compressed space and time, where the global and the local interact and intermesh on regular occasions, and there may not be as much difference as we thought between home and the "Holy Land." On the negative side, we may be unhappy to discover that the divine evades us on our pilgrimage. From the glass-half-full perspective, we may find that the sacred, in all its multifarious manifestations, was waiting for us back at home.