Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnography of a messianic fundamentalist congregation in Northern Ireland, this paper develops a comparative perspective with earlier research on spiritual seekers, exploring intersections between forms of religiosity, political attitudes, and social trajectories.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on my most recent ethnographic research on a messianic and fundamentalist congregation in Northern Ireland (“Ahava”), as well as on the religious and political networks in which it is embedded. This case study forms part of a broader fundamentalist counterculture, both at regional and transnational levels, and thus provides an interesting entry point for analysing logics of commitment and forms of political mobilisation. This ethnography has also enabled the development of a comparative perspective. Indeed, in my earlier research on “spiritual seekers”, I focused on social actors who believed in progress understood as self-transformation—that is, an individualised mode of engagement that seemed largely disconnected from politics and collective action. By contrast, the Ahava case confronted me with individuals holding premillennial prophetic views of the Second Coming, convinced of the imminence and inevitability of an apocalyptic end of the world, for whom progress appears futile, if not counterproductive. And yet, at a time when commitments and collective affiliations are widely perceived as eroding in Euro-American societies, these fundamentalists seem to embody some of the last remaining activists, mobilising both around religious goals and through fervent engagement in a re-enchanted political sphere. The comparison thus brings into focus intersections between forms of religiosity, political attitudes, and social trajectories, which this paper seeks to analyse.