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Thanks John.. Helpul... Of course there is a lot more to be said about the social construction of "race" and other identities... I Hope it's Ok to post here a longish (edited) extract from my Temple Tract on Transatlantic Evangelicalism.. where I try to spell out some of my understandings about it. So here goes..

My theoretical framework draws on Henri Tajfel's theories of social identities in social psychology and Fredrik Barth's (1969) anthropological work on ethnic groups and boundaries. According to Turner et al. (1979), in-group / out-group relations are shaped by a threefold process of social categorisation, social identification and social comparison. Persons sort other individuals into social categories, using labels and stereotypes available within the culture and then identify the self with a particular category which is considered as “us” or the in-group. They then make comparisons with other categories who are regarded as “them” or out-groups. As people spend more time in social networks with the in-group, they develop an identity, cultures, rituals and boundaries which give some measure of ontological reality to the social group. Barth describes the same phenomenon and gives examples of how particular markers can become salient in defining the boundaries of particular social groupings, determining who will be included or excluded. There is a tendency among any in-group towards “othering” people who are different from themselves by highlighting a boundary marker.

In reality, the picture is complex as identity categories overlap and change over time. In the UK until about 1970 scholarly and popular discourse had seen “race” in terms of skin colour; in the 1970s culture and ethnicity became more useful. By the 1980s as Muslims came to see their belonging to the global ummah as a primary identity, religion gained a new importance and was recognized by governments as a useful additional social category for equalities and security policy and in official statistics. This redefined the conceptual space in which religious identities, including western Christianity and evangelicalism could be discussed as “faith communities” and identity groups in a religiously plural society.

Identities can also look different from an outsider's viewpoint, and can be more or less salient in different contexts. The perspective already discussed above suggests that identity work is the process by which an individual manages various elements to constitute a unique personal identity and engages in social relationships in accordance with them. However, at the same time, people face many externally determined constraints. Wealth or poverty, postcode lotteries, citizenship rules, educational achievement or lack of it, observable skin colour or physical appearance, health or disability or membership of a particular family or local community can prevent people from achieving all that they would wish. Some elements of identity are therefore ascribed by others rather than achieved or constructed ourselves. In this more complete account identities are not so much personal as social constructions, based on a synthesis of structure and agency effects, with feedback loops and the exercise of reflexivity as proposed in Anthony Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration.

Social categorisation takes place in several different dimensions leading to a nested and hierarchical structure of identity groups in contemporary society. This overlapping of identity elements is referred to by social scientists as “intersectionality” and is increasingly mobilised politically to highlight injustices against minority groups, for example in the multiple levels of discrimination which will impact the life of a black, working class, disabled woman.

Nearly forty years ago I wrote about religious identity formation in terms of ethnic groups and boundaries, alongside religious values, beliefs and customs (Smith, 1983 Christian Ethnics in which I argued from the Bible and sociological literature against the homogeneous unit principle. ). In contemporary faith-community politics, visible markers of clothing, such as the turban, the niqab or the wearing of a crucifix can serve a boundary marking function, either as an assertion of identity on the part of an individual, or as an ascription by outside observers. A wide-ranging theoretical account of religious identity issues can be found in Pnina Werbner’s article (2010). All this leads me to value Tariq Modood's (1998, 2019)  arguments against essentialism. We should for example avoid statements such as “all Muslims are X”, and refrain from outsider judgments, such as “the intrinsic nature of Islam is violent”, without appropriate listening to a range of voices from within the Muslim community. These are useful principles we can apply for our consideration of evangelical identities.

Smith (1983) also suggested that practices of bilingualism and linguistic code switching or mixing was an indicator of the fluidity and hybridity of social identity.

More recently, I reviewed the complex issues around racism and ethnic identity in the UK and the position of the Christian churches in relation to it (Smith, 2018a The Revenge of the Racists https://drive.google.com/file/d/14L3MGark4_xwuVxK3XQ8Mj2KQygE7RtX/view?usp=sharing

), while Chris Baker (2016) has written about the hybrid church in the city. There are inevitably other intersectional aspects of identity for evangelical Christians which I do not have space to cover in this paper—the most obvious being gender (Baillie, 2001; Aune, 2006, 2008a, 2008b; Gaddini, 2019). One could argue that evangelicals—with their historic commitment to Biblical truth, precise exposition of particular verses, and systematic theology expressed in statements of doctrine—are wedded to the notion of clear boundary markers defining the community of true believers. If so, they are likely to find the notion of hybridity in the church and blurred encounters with the world intrinsically problematic (Reader, 2016).

The reference to the full piece is Trans-Atlantic Evangelicalism: Toxic, Fragmented or Redeemable? (2020)

Greg Smith

or at https://drive.google.com/file/d/14cJ6XwAiT4TK9DkgVcE7BI6rURBlpx1P/view?usp=sharing

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