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ABSTRACT
A personal relationship with God is central to Evangelical belief. It unfolds as believers interpret internal sensations as coming from outside—from God. How does the formulaic design of testimonies present the audience with a personal relationship with God as a pursuit that is both feasible and deeply desirable? Analyzing the discursive rules structuring the appearance of emotion in the most popular testimonies on the online platform of Christianity Today reveals that such texts expertly present a microcosm in which the experience of reading mirrors the trajectory toward belief writers describe. To read a testimony from start to finish, readers must choose to tolerate the unfamiliar: that is, feel emotions that specifically belong in an Evangelical frame. Online written testimony relies on compelling storytelling to move readers, making them practise what it feels like to hand over part of one’s own story to God.
Acknowledgments
I thank the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary Religion for their helpful comments and editor Elisabeth Arweck for her work in guiding this article through the publication process. I am also very grateful to Birgit Meyer, under whose expert supervision I wrote the first version of this essay as a first-year MA student, and to Simon Coleman for his thoughtful guidance at a later stage.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. On narrative and witnessing, see also Molina Roa Citation2009; Ingram Citation1989; Long Citation2004. On testimony and (mass) media or products, see Wright Citation1989; Hendershot Citation2010. On bodily demonstrations, see Gerber Citation2009; Mazer Citation1994.
2. I will not make explicit the comparison between testimonial discourse and ‘selling’ discourses, although the overlap is very interesting (see also Peck Citation1993).
3. For a careful consideration of the congruity between spaces and bodily intensities, see Reckwitz Citation2012.
4. While some web sites do sort the testimonies submitted to them—“Precious Testimonies” boasts topics ranging from “Trapped in the Occult” to “Caught up in Porn/Sexual Lust”—and seem to edit these texts, they generally do not differentiate between testimonies or designate some as ‘proper’ and others as un-testimony-like or strange.
5. While Coleman’s fieldwork took place among prosperity Christians, he asserts that his analysis holds up for (conservative) Evangelicalism more generally, turning to the history of Protestantism to excavate similar lines of thinking.
6. Of course, the hand-washing metaphor has specific biblical connotations. The expression is not so much associated with actual hand-washing as with Pontius Pilate’s abandonment of Jesus. That works well for the situation Cease describes and his use of the expression immediately conjures up a particular physical unrest: moving from emptiness to the hands, far from the center of the body, back to the chest, in which something is moving, while simultaneously being ‘drawn’ toward something (by an outside presence), and so on.
7. For this study, I read dozens of testimonies. While I do not think I came any closer to being a believer (let alone to developing a personal relationship with God), I did find that it is almost impossible to begin reading a testimony and not finish it. No matter how much they all resemble each other, testimonies immediately set up a loop that must be closed, so that I found reading them to completion, in order to let the story unfold the way it is meant to unfold, strangely satisfying. The design of testimonial texts invites and sustains such prolonged engagement.
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Suzanne van Geuns
Suzanne van Geuns is in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests revolve around the way the internet lays claim to in its users’ daily lives and, more specifically, how that position is leveraged in making certain futures appear both desirable and attainable. She is currently working on an ethnographic investigation of three different fields of online right-wing world-making: white nationalism, anti-feminism, and conservative Christian women’s blogging. CORRESPONDENCE: Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George Street, Floor 3, Toronto, Ontario M5R 2M8, Canada.