It is this second disavowal that draws the thin line between evangelical and anthropological ethnography, and it was probably the way in which my fundamental Baptist project muddied that line that so agitated my colleagues. Harry West’s colleagues asked him repeatedly whether or not he “believed” in the sorcery he studied, and all of us who examine religious topics are scrutinized for any evidence that our interpretative maneuvers were inappropriately contaminated by our close encounter with religious others. But in my case, the obligation to construe my native culture as “equally valid” contradicted the disavowal of evangelicalism hidden in that obligation, and, I now think, made it harder to construe my project—and me—as properly secular.
Still, even though I was occasionally caught in fundamental Baptist-like experiences I was always more thoroughly caught, both in the field and when writing about fundamental Baptists, in an anthropological drive for an interpretative ascendency that was secular and secularizing. I tried to do so in ways that troubled the terms of modern secular hegemony, but, nonetheless, I (re)made fundamental Baptists and their world in terms of an intellectual vision that was specifically secular. I (re)produced them as objects of a secular gaze and myself as a secular subject, and I added a drop to the ocean of American secularity. We like to think of that ocean as naturally occurring, but it’s not. The secular world we swim in is produced by millions of little practices, and the anthropological ethnographic act is one of them.
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