“Embodying Evangelical: Progressive White Evangelicals, Racial-Ethnic Otherness, and the Narrative Redemption of Evangelicalism”

This paper begins by considering contested definitions of “evangelical” in the context of the 2016 US presidential election.  I focus on progressive White evangelical activists who voiced their opposition to vast White evangelical support for the Trump-Pence ticket.  These activists sought to publicly define faithful evangelicalism as a commitment to social justice highly attuned to embodied forms of identity and difference.  I demonstrate this through close readings of popular books by one such activist, Shane Claiborne, arguing that Claiborne constructs an alternative to right-wing White evangelicalism through narrative depictions of racial-ethnic otherness.  He writes his definition of evangelicalism through recurring stories about the embodied experiences of his Black and Brown neighbors.  I contend that Claiborne exercises in this way a definitional freedom and narrative license fraught with contradiction.  His stories criticize a normative White perspective in mainstream US evangelicalism and also narratively reproduce a similar norm.