Public discussions about religion and freedom often turn on the question of whether a particular religious identity is or is not oppressive to the individual. Yet, as anthropologists have long shown, people tend to see in their religious commitments the means for liberation and self-mastery, even (or perhaps especially) when those commitments also entail significant restrictions on personal autonomy. In order to untangle this apparent paradox we must critically examine what “freedom” and related terms such as "liberty" mean contextually, and not assume that a perhaps too narrow definition of the term predicated on Western liberal values and perspective is the norm. The papers in this panel draw on original ethnographic research with Evangelical Christians in Zimbabwe and the United States, Orthodox Christians in Greece, and Muslims in India to challenge familiar concepts and expand our understanding of what it means to be free.
Residents of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, sometimes recount a familiar postcolonial experience of being “independent but not free”. Within this context, a group of Baptist Christians in the city are engaged in their own debates about the nature of freedom as a spiritual and ethical reality. Their religious account challenges a reigning liberal and Eurocentric view of freedom in some scholarship and public discourse, which presumes that freedom is the capacity to choose between alternatives.
Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork with a network of middle-class Baptist Christians, I show how Zimbabwean Baptists develop alternative visions of freedom through the urgency of their daily moral deliberations as religious practitioners. Adhering to a normative, relational freedom, their accounts enliven critiques of freedom as individual choice. By invoking both Augustinian theology and an ethic of ubuntu, their religious visions of freedom shed critical light on current discourses about the nature of postcolonial freedoms.
This paper examines how young Muslim women in Delhi create ethical responses to Hindu majoritarian politics through Islamic healing sessions, challenging liberal anthropological understanding of freedom. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnography, I analyze how participants of these sessions cultivate religious and affective practices that both acknowledge their marginalization and challenge its exclusionary logic. Extending Mbembe's "entangled temporalities," I introduce "affective temporality" to theorize how women create alternative experiences of temporal belongingness by invoking metaphysical sameness through expressions like "kyā farq hai?" (what's the difference?). Through collective spiritual practices, these women momentarily suspend the Hindu nationalist temporal order that positions them as perpetual outsiders. This study reconceptualizes freedom not as linear progression toward secular liberalism but as a temporal practice of interruption that generates what Elizabeth Povinelli terms "otherwise temporalities," revealing how subaltern subjects can destabilize the politics of difference through religious self-formation.
This paper examines one key aspect of liberal freedom—intellectual autonomy—by exploring how members of an evangelical church in Tennessee responded to a doctrinal shift allowing women in leadership. The debate over women’s leadership exacerbated tensions between competing epistemic virtues, forcing members to confront the limits of their own interpretive authority and the role of social influences in shaping their beliefs. Their tradition emphasizes strict adherence to a divinely ordained pattern for church governance, which they believe can be objectively determined through logical biblical analysis. This means that women who feel called to leadership must challenge not only patriarchal cultural norms but also a long-standing skepticism toward personal religious experiences that contradict verses considered to be "facts of the Bible." This case shows that ideas about freedom are not just political or moral debates—they are also deeply tied to how people decide what counts as true knowledge.
Scattered throughout the urban landscape of Athens, Greece, church-run neighborhood soup kitchens offer pious Orthodox Athenians a place to care for their community and self. In these spaces, the work of cooking for and serving the needy is seen as both a deeply obligatory act of mutual care and a free practice that brings about a loving kingdom of God. The ways that individual practitioners conceived of their carework thus did not align with Western liberal principles of individualism, autonomy, or freedom. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork and critical attention to theology, I argue that this distinction is the direct result of Orthodox theological ethics which claim that true freedom occurs when one recognizes and acts on the essential relatedness of God and all creation.
| Candace Lukasik | c.lukasik@msstate.edu | View |