Awkward Enthusiasts

Chapter 5 presents one of the first partial analyses of the Sunday Assembly in Berlin, that is, attempts by secular humanists to create congregations and regular assemblies for singing together and listening to inspiring talks. These “atheist churches” have not been very successful in Germany and this chapter seeks to understand why this is so by examining the practices of enthusiasm invited by the congregations. Comparing the Sunday Assembly to the brand “School of Life,” which had similar beginnings, the analysis suggests that the reticence of Sunday Assembly participants in Germany is due to a lack of practice in the emotional style, which is closer to Charismatic than to mainline Protestant performance.

Emotional Ideologies

Chapter 1 argues that there are two dominant strands of emotion theory in Germany in the modern period, one of “Enlightened,” one of “Romantic” character, which exist side by side and are mobilized in sometimes paradoxical ways. These heuristic categories aim to organize the vast stores of knowledge about emotions, and what implications it has for judgments about emotional practice. They are philosophical and aesthetic traditions which intertwine with emotional styles and theological orientations, and both underlie the development of psychology as a natural-science discourse in the mid-nineteenth century. By virtue of the influence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy and social theory, they still undergird scholarly and everyday discourse on emotions and conviction to this day, even beyond the strictly German context. This argument is built on an analysis of emotion concepts stored in German encyclopedias from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, which document shifts in the location of “real” emotion as well as normative stances on what “real” emotion is. Understanding the historical trajectory of knowledge about emotion more generally helps situate the analysis of debates on enthusiasm in the following chapters.

Styles of Sincerity

Chapter 4 deals with whether emotions are real in the sense of “genuine,” drawing on historical and ethnographic material to discuss social processes of assessing sincerity. The way enthusiasm is performed plays a role in whether it is perceived as sincere (and thus believable), which in turns depends on emotional norms, very often unarticulated and therefore more of an aesthetic judgment. It explores the overlap between enthusiasm and sentimentalism as concepts and asks what kind of work these concepts do in discrediting actors and their convictions. Charismatics are accused of sentimentalism, enjoying the feeling of the feeling too much, whereas mainline Lutherans are viewed as “going through the motions” without any real feeling behind them. This chapter argues that these groups have different styles of sincerity, and that the conflict over whether the emotions of the “other” group are genuine allows us to see more clearly how sincerity must be analyzed as a performance, not as a state of mind. These performances are informed by both the Enlightened and Romantic ideologies in complex ways that are somewhat unexpected and inform sincere speech in contexts beyond the religious, such as TED talks and other inspirational rhetoric.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter makes that case that the concept of “enthusiasm” presented in this study might be useful as an analytical term, to be applied in further study beyond the confines of the religious context. Conviction about something always enlists the body and emotions for its maintenance and reinvigoration, which is to say that it is always also enthusiastic—but this enthusiasm takes on different styles due to a combination of ideology (what emotions are and how they work) and taste or preference, which is linked to social context. Observing that a reactivated reticence toward political emotion in Germany in response to the rise in right-wing populism reprises many of the patterns from debates over religious enthusiasm from previous centuries, the chapter reflects on the relations between a number of terms which, in binary constellations, find themselves on the other side of “rationality,” which has led us to think of them as naturally grouped together: emotion, belief, religion, and—recalling Weber—charisma, enchantment, presence. The chapter suggests that enthusiasm is one of these terms, one that captures how conviction enchants people.

Free to Follow the Feeling

Chapter 3 argues for the materiality of emotional practice, even when emotion is conceived of as immaterial or “immediate” experience. Emotions are especially important mediators of experience for Protestants because they can be conceived of as immaterial. Drawing on ethnographic studies of mainline and Charismatic church communities, this chapter shows that styles of enthusiastic practice (Enlightened, Romantic) make a difference as to what emotions are taken seriously. Emotions count as evidence in different ways for each: “depth” indicates for mainstream, liberal Protestants a real emotion, one that is in the immaterial part of the self, whereas for the Charismatics, “intensity” provides evidence, i.e. the material force of bodily movements and sensations counts as real. Their “belief” is framed as “knowledge”: they are certain. Rather appalled at this claim, the liberal Protestants engage in an emotional practice of doubt, which they view as essential to maintaining personal autonomy, even as they subscribe to conviction. Doubt is, however, also a material practice, dependent on a specific way of doing enthusiasm.

Safeguarding Interiority

Following Chapter 1’s exploration of knowledge about emotions, Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine how this plays out in practice. Chapter 2 looks at reactions to religious enthusiasm in nineteenth-century Germany to understand the demand for an interiorizing emotional practice. Starting with an examination of how the term Schwärmerei early in this period is redefined to create a kind of “proper,” inward religious experience, the chapter then focuses on the debates around how that interiority is to be accomplished. The emotional practices of evangelical revivals, the so-called “Protestant sects” and new forms of Methodism making their way across the Atlantic engender fascinated repulsion among liberal Protestant and scientific observers, but the focus in this chapter is on the deep and rather complex concern about them in the clerical press. German Lutheran pastors, unlike their more secular contemporaries, seek to maintain the possibility that the Holy Spirit can enter the heart, but view the exaltations of the “sects” as too exterior and superficial, and thus potentially dangerous. Harking back to older discourses, they fear such practices of enthusiasm can endanger the very institution of the Church.

Introduction

The Introduction introduces the term “enthusiasm” and outlines the argument of the book as a whole, as well as the historical and ethnographic methods employed in the study. An understanding of enthusiasm not as a discrete emotion (like “happiness” or “anger”) but as a complex emotional practice is explained with the help of practice theory. This theory rejects the common understanding that emotions are inner states which are displayed or expressed, making a clear distinction between the “inner” subject and the “outer” social forms, often viewed as repressive of “true” emotion. Here, the primacy of interiority becomes the object of historical study, not its premise; it appears as a specific understanding of how emotion works which some actors strive to reproduce in their practice. Adopting an understanding of emotion as practice, because it is counterintuitive, opens up the possibility to question past and current understandings of emotions and how they work, and allows us to analyze the ethical consequences of dominant theories of emotion. This conceptualization is linked to discussions of belief and conviction as material practices in religious studies and compared (and contrasted) to approaches from affect theory.