Preaching to Convert by Fletcher John;

Author:Fletcher, John; [Fletcher, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Preaching to the Converted

Like the Museum's initial displays, nothing in this final section of the tour would likely convince someone not already a believer operating from a strong young-earth worldview. Earlier, I described the Creation Museum as preaching to the converted, drawing again on Tim Miller and David Román's rejuvenation of this phrase. Responding to the “preaching to the converted” criticism often leveled at queer artists (i.e., that they perform exclusively for LGBT audiences), Miller and Román point out that the charge dismissively and inaccurately homogenizes an audience of “the converted” into passive receptacles for whatever propaganda the preacher/performer wishes to feed them. Using Miller's own interactive performance practice as an example, they argue that all performance, and especially community-based performance, is more complicated than the one-way model of speaker/hearer suggests. In cases where a community of spectators attends a performance that purports to be by, for, and about people and viewpoints of their own community, audience/performer interactions take on a heightened charge, with audience members constantly checking a performance's presentation of the community's identity and beliefs with their own understandings of those beliefs.52

Miller and Román's reminder about the heterogeneity even of “converted” audiences takes on special relevance in relation to the Museum's engagement with evangelical culture. I should first reiterate the diversity of fundamentalist, evangelical, and creationist communities that patronize the Museum.53 AiG presents but one sermon among many others, one specific alignment of creationism, evangelism, and Bible-believing among a smorgasbord of other theologies. As evangelical culture typically flourishes outside of the regulatory structure of formal denominations, and thus beyond the purview of unifying (and border-defining) creeds, evangelicals are used to encountering and evaluating for themselves multiple, overlapping, and conflicting messages. Such instability, however, only underlines the need for and utility of preaching to the converted. Miller and Román argue that conversion isn't a one-time event. “If ‘the converted’ exist,” they write, “then ‘the converted’ needs to be understood as a dynamic assembly that both individually and communally enters the space of performance to sustain that conversion.”54 Miller and Román offer “preaching to the converted” as a productive, even necessary activist tactic, a practice of reminding members of the activist community (in this case, Bible-believing evangelicals) of the content and stakes of their struggle, re-energizing them with new strategies and renewed passion.

Evangelicals hardly need a reminder about the power of preaching to the converted, of course: as their own saying attests, “You preach to the choir to get them to sing.” Evangelicals affirm that every human has an innate sense of God and God's law; this existential given in fact forms the basis of communicative bridges across presuppositional divides in apologetics. Worldview analysts, however, acknowledge that a comprehensive, fully articulated worldview doesn't come into being on its own, nor can Christians maintain their worldview's integrity without frequent renewal. In this sense, seeing the Creation Museum as a kind of activist preaching to the converted reframes my reading of its motto: “Prepare to believe.” The focus, I find, is not on belief per se but on preparation.

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