The Politics Of Sunday Worship: Millennials, Voice, & Performance

Abstract

This thesis examines evangelical worship as performance in the broadest sense, drawing both on close ethnographic observations of Sunday services in the Twin Cities as well as historical analyses of similar communities throughout the US. Specifically, I am interested in “new” forms of worship—playing indie rock in services, casual sermon deliveries, and hipster coffee aesthetics—which are often taken as signs of inclusiveness. I argue, on the contrary, that, in practice, these signs attract and maintain more exclusive congregations of white, churched, educated millennials. Drawing on research in ethnomusicology, performance, religious, and critical race studies, this thesis develops a flexible model to explore how congregants constitute boundaries between the secular and religious and shift in response to social, political, and economic trajectories. These boundaries complicate ways in which the individual worshipper and the congregation negotiate their aesthetic and theological concerns. This thesis focuses on the sociological conditions of church communities in urban spaces of the Twin Cities. These conditions provide a broad look into how exclusive whiteness is organized, performed, and practiced in services. This project also considers voices—the pastor’s voice, the worship band’s voice, and congregant’s voices—as technologies for binding membership. Here, voices lead in services to teach, pray, preach, and sing. I analyze performances of “welcome” before, during, and after services as ritual methods for attracting and maintain very particular kinds of church members. Ultimately performances of the secular in services reveal congregants’ lived religious theology and ritual priorities.