Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between the body and the Holy Spirit, and how, given the nature of salvation, American Evangelical Christians manage manage contentious notions of the human.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the Christian body as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, and asks how American Evangelicals manage the imagined physicality of being 'saved.' In the American Bible Belt, Conservative Evangelical Christians understand salvation as a moment of complete spiritual change. That change is embodied, as the Holy Spirit enters the physical person, but not entirely bodily. The Holy Spirit changes a person's soul, and grants a new body after death, but the living body of the Christian remains a problematic site. This generates internal contention between the sinful desires of the body (often called 'the flesh') and the moral spiritual guidance of the indwelling Holy Spirit, as the individual strives to participate in a collective Christian ethic. Boundaries between the human and the non-human become complicated as distinctions between individual agency and 'the will of God' are obscured. In similar ways, Christians maintain intangible boundaries between the living and the dead, as non-Christians are sometimes referred to as 'walking corpses.' Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in the southern US state of Arkansas, I argue that for the Conservative Evangelical, the Holy Spirit problematizes what it means to be human, for 'lost' and 'saved' people alike.