Diagramming the Will: Ethics and Prayer, Text, and Politics

ABSTRACT

Framing prayer as an ethical exercise that operates on a recalcitrant will, this essay examines both this practice in the Vineyard, an American Neocharismatic church, and texts written by Vineyard pastors for the purposes of instructing believers in how to engage in prayer. It argues that the same abstract play of forces can be identified in both these areas. But that does not mean the two areas are identical. While prayer as a practice is marked by a certain indetermination about how and in what ways prayer is effective, instructional material about prayer are shown to be much more exacting. However, different choices among pastors in how they situate prayer is shown to have specific political effects; it also suggests some of the benefits for an anthropology of ethics in being careful to disarticulate ethical practice from texts describing means to properly engage in ethical practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Neocharismatic christianity
• prayer
• ethics
• will
• politics

Notes

1. This should not be thought of as a diagram in the classical structuralist sense, but more along the lines of relations capable of being expressed in pictorial form, though not reducible to pictorial form (cf. Gell 1999).