“Preaching in the Streets of Sodom: Revival, Apocalypse, and Contagion”
My project is an ethnography of street preaching in the United States, focusing primarily on the San Francisco Bay Area. Inspired by the itinerant and open-air preachers of American history, street preachers spread the gospel on street corners, at bus stops, and on subways in an attempt to inspire the next Christian revival and warn the public of the impending apocalypse. Recently, a self-identified street preaching community has emerged, represented by an elastic network of regional and national associations, including Street and Open Air Preachers of America (or SOAPA) and The National Street Preachers Conference. The effectiveness of this style of evangelism relies on an often-aggressive juxtaposition between the “street” and the “preaching,” or between the context of the performance and the performance itself. These revivalists and doomsayers preach in locations that allow preachers and audiences alike to dramatize the perceived boundaries between Christianity and secularism. The San Francisco Bay Area has lent itself easily to the dramatization of moral difference. In the mid-nineteenth century, the first street preacher in the rapidly expanding mining settlement of San Francisco called it a “land of gold and crime,” while street preachers today often refer to the city as San Fran and Gomorrah. While San Francisco is widely perceived as a secular city, it has historically been a site of religious experimentation and, paradoxically, a dangerous and alluring destination for conservative Christian evangelists who engage with the city as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. My project asks how the spectacle of street preaching connects established themes in the study of North American Christianity—such as revivalism and apocalypticism—with emerging questions about secularism, public space, and religious sound.
Conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, my project also explores the relationships among religion, cities, and contagion through an examination of Christian and secular economies of contagion. Preachers often describe Christian revival as a fire that spreads through churches, cities, and nations. Since the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, many preachers have also described the spread of sin—especially sexual sin—through logics of proximity and metaphors of infection. Over the course of the pandemic, questions about the contagious nature of sin and salvation have preoccupied street preachers as they continue to preach during state lockdown orders. Conspiracy theories about the virus, masks mandates, and church lockdowns quickly spread through the street preaching community and the pandemic became an unmistakable sign of the end-times. As a result, many street preachers frame state restrictions designed to slow the spread of COVID-19 as an attempt to criminalize the spread of the gospel, which would, in turn, facilitate the spread of sin. Conservative Christians, like government officials and health professionals, have developed their own understandings of the boundaries of nations, cities, and bodies, as well as the kinds of things that move through these boundaries, such as spirits, sins, and viruses. My project outlines the well-established theologies of contagion that helped nurse conspiracy theories about COVID-19, asking how these theologies shape complicated economies of contagion in which religious, political, and medical authorities clash over Christian practices of circulation.
