Évènements

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in and about the influential but controversial Danish protestant movement Tidehverv, this paper explores certain ethical and political conundrums that arise from seeking to live a life according to a Kierkegaard-inspired theological orientation I call “fundamentalist existentialism", whose abiding ethical imperative may be formulated as the injunction never to be pious. To make this argument, I first compare Tidehverv to other Protestant movements in the Denmark and the US, which is followed by an attempt to pin down this rather peculiar variant of Protestant theology. In the two ethnographic accounts that follow, I draw on key instances from my participation in some recent Tidehverv summer meetings, as well as on interviews with and/or key texts and sermons by leading Tidehverv figures and their sources of inspiration, notably Luther and Kierkegaard. In making this analysis, the objective is to lay some of the ground for what might in the futu re turn into a bigger comparative project on vernacular political-theology in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe. In more theoretical terms, the ambition is to contribute to two overlapping and increasingly influential subfields of anthropology, namely the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of Christianity.