Quiet beauty: problems of agency and appearance in evangelical Christianity

Abstract

How does the cultivation of beauty interact with agency? In this article the author discusses the religious value of beauty for conservative evangelical Christians in the English town of Brighton. Building on the anthropological approach to art and agency developed by Alfred Gell, the author considers the manner in which the everyday of bodies, relationships and personal testimonies become implicated in a deferential semiotics in which meaning resides in the self but is not owned by it. Through this work, women engage with an on-going project of visibility and objectification that is often tenuous and difficult but is nevertheless compelling, as they seek to mediate the agency of God.

Key Words:

• anthropology
• gender
• Christianity
• mediation
• art
• agency
• beauty

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Simon Coleman for providing typically generous and insightful commentary on an earlier draft of this piece. Thanks go also to Gordon Lynch, Abby Day and other members of the Religious Studies department at the University of Kent for their engagement and feedback. This article was revised following some very helpful guidance from four anonymous reviewers for this journal, and I am most grateful to them and to the editors for their attention to this piece. But the most important thanks go as always to the members of the churches I worked with, whose kindness and reflection has made my work possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹This theological position is summarised in the CBMW's Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, first published in 1988. A great many of my informants explicitly agreed with this doctrine, and books and other teaching materials authored by complementarian writers were a popular reference point for teaching on gender issues in these churches. For a summary of the content of this teaching, and alternative views within evangelical Christianity, see the work of John P. Bartkowski (2001) and also Sally Gallagher (2003, 56). It should be noted that there is a significant overlap between Complementarian and Calvinist theology. Most of the Christian individuals and ministries that I encountered that upheld complementarian theology also explicitly described themselves as Calvinist. This theological leaning may well reinforce the deferred sense of agency described in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

The research on which this article is based was conducted at the University of Sussex and supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) under Grant ES/F020252/1. I am not aware of any potential financial conflict of interest arising from this work.

Notes on contributors

Anna Stewart

Anna Stewart is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kent.