Abstract:  Despite the wide diversity of Christians who identify as evangelical, one thing they tend to share, aside from certain basic theological commitments, is a fixation on notions of authority and discipline. Their stances toward discipline—whether framed as personal, social, or political—can vary dramatically, even within the same faith communities. Nonetheless, their rhetoric reconfigures predominantly circulating attitudes surrounding social order and racial ideologies in a uniquely South African political environment. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic research in Johannesburg and the Eastern Cape, I suggest that evangelicals' ambivalence toward the locus of authority in both religious and secular settings is a product of Protestant histories of the relationship between "church and state" as much as it is about responses to a sense of social disorder amidst post-apartheid uncertainties. Notwithstanding evangelicals' purported efforts to remain apolitical, the overlap between religious/theological disobedience and political/social rebellion presents "orthodox" Christianity as the best approach to stem perceived entropy and loss of control in everyday life, a theme echoed by preachers and congregants across different religious organizations. By drawing on widespread religious and conservative themes of proper structures of authority (as well as their foil, the sinful usurpation of authority, which they identify in political parties and "false prophets" alike), these evangelicals position faith as a solution to South Africa's unsettled racial and socioeconomic legacies while rejecting a strong "theocratic" model of religious governance. Their responses reveal questions of authority to be a contested space, as religious power bleeds into the domain of the secular, modernist state.

Bio: Doug Bafford is a sociocultural anthropologist at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, where he teaches courses in the anthropology of religion and legal anthropology. His research focuses on questions of religious and scientific knowledge production among communities that challenge dominant ideologies. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa and the United States with evangelical Christians, exploring how people who adopt a conservative religious framework understand and respond to prevailing social problems. This research involves qualitative analyses of diverse trends facing Christian communities, including the discourse of anti-racism, controversies over young-earth creationism, and anxieties about the global rise of Pentecostalism. More broadly, he has written about the changing post-apartheid religious landscape and the intersection of religion and science in everyday life. His current work considers the effects of culture and social transformation on transnational evangelical networks within southern Africa and beyond.

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