Under Conviction

While situating my ethnographic fieldwork at Mars Hill Church of Seattle from 2006–2008, this paper examines how processes of corporatization and militarization were structurally embedded through the circulation of fear, shame, and paranoia in the virtual, visual, and visceral networking of Pastor Mark Driscoll's posture in voice. Specifically, this paper examines teaching on biblical masculinity in tandem with Mars Hill's promotion of a militarized and sexualized visual culture as a methodology of cultural politics that conflated freedom and control while bodily recruiting evangelical ‘citizen-soldiers’ into everyday spiritual warfare on mission to expand the church's empire. I argue this ethos of battle readiness manifested through the felt reality of emergent threat signals an affective political economy conscripting U.S. citizen-soldiers through cultural politics writ large to participate in the ongoing ‘global’ war on terror ‘at home.’ By reassessing the political valences of ‘conviction’ in terms of ‘gut feeling’ which signals desires simultaneously biological and social that can be suggested and manipulated through the affective priming of mood and atmosphere, this paper examines the bodily affects and political effects of conviction as resonant across spaces deemed religious and secular to index and critique intersecting aims of Evangelical and U.S. Empire amplifying biopolitical control in the name of freedom

Aesthetics · Art · Empire · Ethos · Militarism · Militarization · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law