Can Evangelicals Be Pluralist? The Moral Dimensions of ‘Conviviality’ in Nashville
While research mobilizing the concept of ‘conviviality’ tends to focus on the pragmatic aspects of intercultural interactions, I explore the concept’s underlying moral dimensions and its affinity with cosmopolitan discourses. Based on ethnographic research in Nashville, Tennessee, I focus on the members of an evangelical church that is in the process of reimagining its outreach to religious others. By questioning the ethics of traditional proselytism, they encourage a principle of interpersonal mutuality and the development of common civic objectives. I observed that my respondents’ ideas of shared life with others are situated in a fragile tension between competing values within their vision of hospitality that might be understood as at once evangelical and pluralistic. Rather than conceptualizing these changes as an emergent cosmopolitan disposition, I argue that this moral tension is in fact a constitutive element of a distinct form of knowledge about the ethics of relationships in pluralistic contexts. In this way, this article challenges the normative character of cosmopolitanism as the moral telos of pluralist thinking in anthropological theorizing about intercultural cohabitation. In conclusion, I suggest that in order to better understand religious discourses on the ethics of social relations in pluralistic settings, we should question the cosmopolitan connotations of the conviviality concept and engage in a more robust engagement with the intellectual and ethical work of our interlocutors, and one that thinks beyond the idea of the incommensurability of values.