Watt, David Harrington. Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 165 pages. ISBN: 978-0-19-506834-4.

Ethnography is the study of human societies, a favorite tool of cultural anthropologists who seek to understand a community holistically rather than studying the constituent parts of that society. Ethnographers seek to directly experience a community without having to rely on the mediation of written texts. Historians relish archives and typically give short shrift to ethnography. But in Bible-Carrying Christians, David Harrington Watt used ethnography as a historical tool of analysis. Ethnography was a problematic tool for Watt since it required that he attempt to experience evangelicalism as if he were a member of our culture. Watt described his desire to “see things about the world that [he] could not see if [he] had not had them.” He sought a “space between belief and disbelief” so that he can understand our beliefs without embracing them himself. This was no small task for Watt, a self-described socialist, feminist, post-structuralist Quaker. ((David Harrington Watt, Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), vi, 6; Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 412-453. Of course Watt was unable to completely escape mediated texts since his act of writing a book created another such text. Reading his book meant that I, like every other reader, mediated that text. Mediation is unavoidable.))

Watt believed that ethnography could mitigate the problem of selection. When historians go to the archives for research they have to rely upon texts that are mediated by their authors, which are then mediated again by their readers. Furthermore, archival research is dependent upon the materials selected by cultural winners, those with “enough power to get their ideas into print.” Fieldwork and personal experience were Watt’s methods of attempting to avoid mediation and a selective filter. But despite all his precautions, Watt acknowledged the impossibility of a truly “neutral perspective.” Every historian brings suppositions and cultural baggage with them when they approach a topic. Historians often attempt to remove themselves from their writing by adopting a third person language and an neutral tone. We like to think that we are removing bias by avoiding self-reference, but usually all that we accomplish is obfuscation. Rather than being transparent, we instead force our readers to guess at our backgrounds and motives. But by providing a short autobiography, Watt tries to make his worldview apparent to the reader. Throughout his analysis Watt draws from his personal background, teaching the reader as much about himself as about the Bible-Carrying Christians he studied. ((Watt, 6-7, 29-33.))

Watt provides a brief background of Philadelphia, the city where all three congregations are located. Watt approached this survey of the city by clipping local newspaper articles for several scrapbooks. He attempted to understand religion in Philadelphia in the manner an ordinary Philadelphian might have, by reading the daily paper and participating weekly in religious services. Watt chose his title Bible-Carrying Christians because although the three congregations might not have identified themselves as evangelicals or conservative Protestants, all three frequently invoked the same formula: “Well the Bible says….” Each congregation has its own chapter, first an independent, fundamentalist Baptist church pastored by a graduate of Bob Jones University, then a progressive Mennonite fellowship, and finally a multi-ethnic branch of the Church of Christ. ((Ibid., 5, 11. The title is also a clever riff on the phrase “card-carrying communists.”))

Watt wanted to examine “power relations” within the three churches. Specifically, he looked for instances of asymmetrical power flows, where the power in a relationship is not shared equally. Watt found what he was looking because all three churches had distinct gender roles and shared a common distaste for homosexuality. Even though Watt did not sympathize with Bible-carrying Christians’ opposition to homosexuality and feminism, he avoided the dismissive attitude toward evangelicals often adopted by historians. As Watt noted, left-leaning academics try to avoid “patronizing observations” about “’primitive people’, ‘the natives’, and ‘the orientals,” but he believed that historians are all too ready to apply a double standard when it comes to groups for whom they feel no sympathy. As a post-structuralist, Watt wrote of his distrust of academics “who have been deeply influenced by the European Enlightenment” and only give due diligence to groups or ideas that validate their own “ways of looking at the world.” Watt’s method allowed him to overlook some of his personal presuppositions so that by the end of his fieldwork he no longer viewed Bible-carrying Christians as a dangerous “other.” ((Ibid., 5, 24, 29, 115. The idea that relationships, especially sexual relationships, are about power can be traced to Michel Foucault.))

Evangelicals should read Bible-Carrying Christians in order to understand how we come across to others. We may not agree with Watt’s conclusions, but his analysis is brutally honest. Bible-Carrying Christians is a quick read (165 pages) and although published by an academic press it is written in an engaging style that is friendly to lay readers.