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Paper short abstract:

My paper discusses conversion in the Russian Baptist community. I focus on the process of unlearning the old ways of living and the way this facilitates the construction of ethical narratives. Such narratives are primarily manifested through gender order, family values, and sex.

Paper long abstract:

My paper discusses conversion in the Russian Baptist community. Russian Baptists are evangelicals, which means that they emphasize inerrancy and the literal reading of the Bible and the personal conversion of every believer (Bebbington 1989). Conversion is regarded as a process of growing in faith up to the point of total surrender to Christ, acknowledgement of one's sinful nature, and accepting Christ's atonement sacrifice on the cross.

During my fieldwork in the rehabilitation ministry for addicted people, I identified conversion as a process of interiorizing the text of the Bible (the Russian Synodal translation) as the language of not merely liturgy and worship, but also communication, thought, and reasoning. This is a life-long process, and the further one engages with this process, the stronger one is considered to be in faith.

Russian Baptist conversion is a multi-faceted phenomenon. I will discuss it from an ethical standpoint — as a process of unlearning the old ways of living. My current research focuses on gender order, family values, and sex as ethical affordances (Keane 2016) — moral potentialities that essentialize particular human experiences but do not strictly determine behavior. I will demonstrate how juxtapositions between the old ways and the new Christian life, as well as the process of unlearning sinful behavior, facilitate the construction of the Russian Baptist ethical narrative.

Bebbington, David. 1989. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. Baker Book House.

Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton University Press.