evangelical spirituality is based on an ‘affective piety’ (p. 20) which privileges the believer’s own felt experience, all the more so when that experience builds on well-known biblical narratives or popular cultural forms. The relevant...
moreevangelical spirituality is based on an ‘affective piety’ (p. 20) which privileges the believer’s own felt experience, all the more so when that experience builds on well-known biblical narratives or popular cultural forms. The relevant analytical question, then, is what emotions and affects these performances create in their evangelical audiences, and how they do so. While belief is of course important, Stevenson understands belief as part of each individual’s ‘embodied schema’ (p. 28) that allow them to make cognitive and affective sense of their experiences and the world around them. It is affective resonance, not doctrinal exactitude, which gives these performances their spiritual force. This method requires Stevenson to attempt to understand these performances from spectators’ perspectives with a maximum of empathy and a minimum of judgement. This is not so different to Bert O. States’s self-positioning in ‘the theatre seat in [his] mind’s eye’, even if Stevenson’s pew is decidedly less cushy than States’s chair. It is the customary means by which theatre scholars of a phenomenological bent (or even a semiotic one) approach their material, and by following in a tradition familiar to performance scholars, Stevenson expands the field on which our discipline works. This emotional generosity and suspension of judgement is a wise and necessary decision. Stevenson’s goal is understanding, not critique; her book does not seek to fight battles within the ‘current culture wars’ (p. 82) even when aspects of her subject matter (such as its antisemitism or homophobia) disturb her. Evangelical Christianity is a foreign subculture to most liberal-leaning theatre and performance scholars, and one they are likely to stereotype negatively, though not without a certain quasiOrientalist fascination steeped in what Stevenson, following Ann Pellegrini, calls ‘affect envy’ (p. 237). However, like many phenomenological approaches, Stevenson’s focus on the affect and experience of her performances can make the political and economic structures that have shaped those performances hard to see. For instance, Stevenson frequently describes the ways in which evangelical performances are strengthened by their reference or relationship to mass models of cultural production, such as the use of the sounds and tropes of popular culture in megachurch worship. She also mentions how evangelical performative practices appeal to political controversies (such as between the teaching of evolution and creationism) in order to strengthen an affect of noble resistance. But these factors could work in the other direction as well. It may be the individualistic pattern of cultural consumption or a particular political agenda that helps determine which affects these performances aim at, or how they do so. If, as she convincingly argues, evangelicism is a major contributor to the embodied schema of American self-understanding, might these performances not just borrow from mass culture but contribute to it as well? To some extent, Stevenson addresses this concern in her coda, in which she relates her notion of evangelical dramaturgy to the political tactics of the Tea Party. This section is both fascinating and frustratingly brief; it will hopefully provide a spur for further work. Stevenson points out that the seemingly individualistic, personal, and grassroots Tea Party movement is in fact set up and underwritten by the Koch brothers and other wealthy donors with a political agenda. The museums, theme parks, performances, and megachurches she describes also have economic and political links to businesses, publishers, major international ministries such as the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and political pressure groups. I would have liked to read more about how these links shape the workings of evangelical dramaturgy. There are moments of this – such as the technological and organisations sophistication of megachurches and the re-embrace of the antisemitism of passion plays after the success of Gibson’s film – but this is not a theme that Stevenson pursues systematically. Evangelicism may privilege individual affect, but that does not mean that scholarly study must do the same. It may be unfair of me, though, to ask this excellent book to shift its focus. With her thorough and precise analysis, Stevenson has offered us an insight into the affective workings of an important mode of performance that we ought to know more about than we do.