The Religion and Public Life lecture series presents public conversations that expand on current theories and spur debate about religion and secularism, considering the range of secularisms and institutionalizations of religion in Europe, the US, and other parts of the world. Lectures in the series examine specific approaches to how something called “religion” is manifest in public life, and cover timely topics including law, museums and cultural institutions, education and health provisions, politics/diplomacy, prisons, and protest and social movements.
Evangelical Truth and Apocalyptic Politics
With an eye to our times of "alternative facts", creeping authoritarianism, new forms of hyper-partisanship and a growing fear of "the end", this talk will consider how an exploration of evangelical truth and contemporary apocalypticism among evangelicals in the US and Africa can help us think about the current crisis of liberal democracy and the limits of liberal political thought. Evangelical truth is 'veridictive', carrying an ontological and ethico-political force that seeks to transform the subject and the world. Coupled with an apocalyptic expectation of the destruction of the world as it is, and the ushering in of the 'new Kingdom", its model of evangelical truth and time has surprising echoes today outside the domain of evangelical Christian practice.
Ruth Marshall received her DPhil in Politics from Oxford University, and joined both the Department for the Study of Religion and Political Science in 2008, after having spent 8 years living and researching in West Africa. She is the author of Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (U. Chicago Press, 2009) and numerous scholarly articles on the study of the political implications of Pentecostalism and postcolonial politics in West Africa. Her research and teaching are interdisciplinary, drawing on critical theory, political science, political philosophy, study of religion, anthropology, African and postcolonial studies. In 2013-14 she was a Faculty Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute.