Paper short abstract:

This paper shows that a post-secular approach can render visible religious communities hitherto unnoticed by ethnographic research, such as evangelical Palestinian Christians, and contribute to a fuller understanding of these and thus the anthropologies of the three monotheistic religions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper challenges the employment of religious identities merely as social and cultural markers in the context of the Middle East. By framing research on evangelical Palestinian Christians in a post-secular approach (e.g. Fountain 2013), this paper argues that taking seriously the ontological projects of the monotheistic religions in their own right provides a richer explorations of these, and opens a fruitful discourse between the anthropology of Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

The case study of a biennial conference organised by Palestinian evangelicals challenges the understanding of Palestinian Christianity to date: 'Christ at the Checkpoint', dubbed an "evangelical intifada" (Awad 2014), is a call to both Western and Palestinian evangelicals to engage critically with their biblical understanding of Israel/Palestine and their resulting ethical and political commitment. The conference positions evangelical Palestinians firmly as part of the larger Palestinian struggle, but also as part of global, mostly pro-Israel, Christian Zionist evangelicalism, which views the very existence of Palestinian evangelicals as an anomaly in their exegesis of the Old Testament. By highlighting the ontological fault lines within evangelicalism in Israel/Palestine and abroad, Palestinian evangelical Christians seek to create a discourse around appropriate political and ethical commitments on the basis of their faith.