Epiphenomenal suasion: Jehovah's Witnesses and the politics of preaching against the state

Abstract

AbstractThe individual is the conventional way religious change is figured when considering ‘conversion’. This essay argues this is rooted in the soteriological focus of Christian evangelism and shifts what are typically taken to be the objects of change to view them as agents of change. As an example of this, the essay compares two ethnographic examples of Jehovah's Witnesses’ evangelism: the ways that Witnesses preach with mobile literature carts; and the way three Witnesses ‘preached’ at an academic conference in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. In order to make sense of these examples, it is necessary to unpack the theopolitical context underlying the common suasive strategy, and doing so is revealing in both instances of different objects and agents of evangelism, allowing for a comparison that explores how causality and agency are distributed in Witness preaching work. This leads to a consideration of the ways Witnesses’ public evangelism subtly preaches against the state as a process of ‘vindicating the name of God’.