Introduction: From rupture to repair

Abstract

This special issue develops and expands the discussion about religious change within the anthropology of Christianity by introducing the analytic of ‘repair’ to complement ‘rupture’. Rupture has emerged in the last two decades as a framework for theorising ethnographic accounts of Christian conversion described in radical or absolute terms (e.g., Carroll, 2017; Daswani, 2011, 2015; Engelke, 2004, 2010; Handman, 2010; Haynes, 2012; Holbraad et al., 2019; Marshall, 2016; Meyer, 1998; Robbins, 2007). It has been highly productive in destabilising the anthropological propensity towards what Joel Robbins has called ‘continuity-thinking’—the tendency in the subject to undertheorise social and cultural change and overemphasise similarities between past and present (Robbins, 2007). The intention of this special issue contribution is not to challenge or undermine the importance of rupture as a tool for understanding religious conversion, Christian or otherwise, nor is it to question the heuristic value of it for the subject of anthropology more broadly. Instead, we propose the use of ‘repair’ here as a complementary and counterbalancing framework for understanding how Christians frame conversion and change, as well as an ethnographic instrument that encourages us to think beyond the continuity/discontinuity dynamic and towards other kinds of framings of change that humans appeal to in general.

In more concrete terms, repair facilitates anthropological thinking about the ways that people seek to restore a sense of wholeness—within themselves, their communities, with God(s) or the cosmos at large. This might be achieved by attempting to revisit and recreate a part of their history, or by imagining and effectuating a morally vindicated or spiritually complete future. These are not either/or categories, and cultural models of repair vary in the extent to which they are oriented towards visions of the past or of the future. A disposition towards repair can take place following efforts at discontinuity, although it can also operate independently of it and be pursued on its own terms, for its own sake (such as in the Jewish model of tikkun, or healing, for example). As with rupture, it is a category that has emerged primarily out of specific ethnographic contexts (represented in our own fieldwork sites and those of the other contributors), but takes on a life of its own as it generates new analytical models for understanding the way cultural discourses and practices are shaped by the religious framing of change as a kind of ‘repair’. In this way, the repair framework does not seek to supplant rupture, nor advocate a revival of attention towards continuity (e.g., Chua, 2012; Hann, 2007, 2014). It rather points at an orientation towards change that simultaneously evades and intersects with these two categories.

Repair goes beyond discontinuity in its recognition that rupture is rarely the end of the story. And when an invitation to undergo spiritual transformation is understood to be extended by a divine, benevolent being, its ultimate objective tends to be one of resolution that is effected through repair. The idiom of repair also highlights the way that time is conventionally experienced unidirectionally, as what is in the past has passed and what has broken cannot be unbroken—it can only be fixed. Religious and cultural traditions differ in the way they reckon with this truth: the Protestant fundamentalists explored in Joseph Webster's article denounce any changes to religious doctrine as heretical. As a result, they approach examples of dogmatic transformation as evidence of truth recovered or revived, rather than invented. On the other side of the spectrum, the philosophy behind the longstanding Japanese artistic practice of kintsugi, which involves mending broken objects in such a way that highlights cracks rather than disguising them, is an example of the celebration of transformation and repair. The beauty of the object is seen to be located in its ruptured history, recorded by fissures and fractures, rather than in an idealised state of perfection immortalised at the point at which it came into being. For Christians, the figure of Christ has also long served as a theological and aesthetic embodiment of the idea that from the broken can emerge the beautiful.

In fact, efforts at repair form the wellspring of much of human material culture and ritual life, especially when they connect to practices of mourning and healing. If the impulse to ‘make a complete break with the past’ often materialises as the act of iconoclasm, repair denotes the work undertaken to plaster over the cracks, or to replace one totem with another (Meyer, 1998). It encourages us to be attentive to acts of ‘doing’ as well as (dis/continuity-)‘thinking’, and the material lexicon of processes of change and recovery. By reflecting on the subtle differences between processes of preservation, conservation and restoration—to borrow language conventional in heritage studies—we can foster more ethnographic sensitivity to how our interlocutors mobilise these interlocking categories in experiencing and framing change. We also see the orientation towards repair lying behind theological discourses about redemption, revival, resurrection, forgiveness, atonement, hope and more—themes we will return to at greater length, in the latter part of this introduction.

Our emphasis in this special issue is on theorisings of change and repair that are born out of Christian and related theological traditions (e.g. Spiritualism). We hope it is already obvious that this is not because we think this to be the finest or the only place to learn about these categories. Nevertheless, we have found that these traditions' persistent preoccupation with the questions they raise reveal some things of the nature of these concepts that are useful for thinking about social, cultural and religious transformation within our discipline as a whole —not only within the anthropology of Christianity. In fact, our interest as authors in change as an anthropological heuristic originates just as much in our engagement with the discipline of theology and its insights on change. We have both undergone some study in theology that has left us with the impression that it often speaks to what is at stake anthropologically in these discussions, as well as to the Christian communities we as authors engage with ethnographically (American evangelicals and Nigerian Pentecostals). It is in both of these contexts that we have been struck by the ways that change is approached theologically as but one step—however disjunctive—in a much larger, holistic process of healing.

The theme of repair runs through the six articles that are included in this collection, which draw on fieldwork conducted in England (Jonathan Miles-Watson), Scotland (Joseph Webster) the US (J. Derrick Lemons), Australia (Matt Tomlinson) and Nigeria (Naomi Richman), as well as on a textual engagement with posthuman conceptions of change (Jon Bialecki). The two central questions that arise in these contributions, and in this introduction are as follows. How do individuals and communities—religious or secular—imagine, seek, narrate and fulfil processes of repair? How do people justify and reflect on notions of truth, returning, hope and healing in dealing with change?

Secondary to this, we also pose the following questions. What kinds of religious change that are not radical or rapid in nature matter to people? How do humans frame change-as-repair when it is experienced across space and place, such as in the act of pilgrimage, as well as time? What models of repair do we find at play in secularised theologies or new theologies that are genealogically related to Christianity, or other monotheistic religions? How do secular subjects imagine and experience change and, indeed, how does the loss of faith constitute a change of its own, setting into motion the impulse to repair? In the absence of canonical texts or ancient practices, what tropes, analogies and stories do those who lose their faith draw on to initiate repair and make meaning of change?

After presenting a brief synopsis of the anthropological discussion about rupture and the stakes involved, we dedicate space in the remainder of this introduction to spotlighting some theological resources on repair and change that we think are helpful in opening up new questions for the anthropology of Christianity and religion, and perhaps even the anthropologies of ethics, politics and freedom. We hope they also stimulate thinking on how anthropology itself is subject to change and has changed in its disciplinary lifetime, as well as where it might go in a world that sees itself captive to big changes that seem to be on a course of their own, and that often desperately require repair: ecological, epidemiological, technological, and a great deal more. We consider this timely not only within the trajectory of the conversation about change within the anthropology of Christianity, but also within society as a whole as we find ourselves emerging from the ruptures to social life we have experienced during the pandemic, and seek out repair, reconnection and renaissance within our own lives. We round off this introduction with a brief sketch of the collection of excellent articles included here, pointing to their links with the themes of change and repair.

The turn towards ‘rupture’ as a guiding framework for understanding how humans experience change in anthropology is directly connected to an empirical phenomenon: the rise of Pentecostal Christianities across the globe. This version of Christianity insists that those who convert make a radical break with their previous traditions and customs by starting a new life in Christ. It also centres on the expectation that there is a further ‘rupture’ to come in the (near) future, whereupon God's judgement will fall on humanity and Christ will be resurrected. Of course, ideas of ‘rupture’ are not absent from other forms of Christianity, and are especially present in its Protestant offshoots. And yet, Pentecostalism seems to lend a particularly uncompromising emphasis on the necessity of leaving the past behind and becoming ‘reborn’, or ‘born again’ in order to be saved. In many cultural contexts, this manifests as a repudiation of traditional indigenous beliefs and practices, often in the form of iconoclasm, which are recast as pagan and even demonic.

For anthropologists, their Pentecostal interlocutors' insistence on an experience of rupture has posed certain explanatory challenges.¹ After all, it has now been widely observed that the discipline has generally tended towards cultural explanations that assume a logic of continuity (Robbins, 2007). Think of Max Gluckman's ‘rituals of rebellion’, for example, a classical functionalist theory that situates ritual acts, including those that transcend the ‘norm’, as serving to ultimately reproduce and secure the social status quo (Gluckman, 1954). Or consider Victor Turner's account of ritual—developed out of Arnold Van Gennep's linear framework of separation, liminality, and reintegration—where ritual was seen as a process through which social changes and events can be consolidated and absorbed in order to reaffirm and reinforce structural stability (Turner, 1977; Van Gennep, 1960). Edmund Leach, another scholar of this school and generation, recognised that this was an ‘anti-historical’ approach, unable to properly account for social and cultural transformation, but admitted that he and his peers ‘do not know how to fit historical materials into our framework’ (Leach, 1965, pp. 282–283).

It was this lingering problem that the turn to rupture, albeit arriving some decades later, sought to address head on. Culture in anthropology, as Joel Robbins (2007, p. 10) put it, was seen as something that ‘comes from yesterday, is reproduced today, and shapes tomorrow’. What anthropology needed—not only to make meaningful sense of Pentecostalism, but to better understand social and cultural change in general—were analytical models of ‘cultural discontinuity’ instead (Robbins, 2007, p. 17; see also Robbins, 2003; Meyer, 1998). Christian converts did not simply perceive themselves to have undergone radical interruptions of the self, whilst retaining ‘some enduring cultural structure that persists underneath all the surface changes’ (Robbins, 2007, p. 10); such an interpretation perhaps betrayed more of the anthropologist's own cynicism about the prospect of change than the actual subjective experience of her interlocutors. By making accounts of discontinuity more analytically central, anthropology might not only be better equipped to understand the phenomenon of Pentecostalism—it might be well placed to produce more sophisticated theorising about the nature of social, cultural and religious transformation in general.

‘Rupture’ by now has become a well established and productive theoretical framing in the anthropology of Christianity, and it is no longer reserved exclusively for the study of Christian nor religious persons. Discontinuity has, to some extent, become naturalised as a category and taken on a conceptual life of its own, embedding itself within the discipline's lexicon and being widely applied in ethnographic contexts distant from where it began. But at this point, rupture's success puts it at risk of becoming the main, if not the only, focal point for thinking about religious change, foreclosing the scope of theorising about it and its various manifestations a little prematurely. As Naomi Haynes has recently suggested, ‘there are moments when it feels like rupture has run out of new things to tell us’, because ‘there are only so many ways to make the point that conversion entails rupture on some fronts, continuity on others’ (Haynes, 2020, p. 58). ‘Discontinuity’, in other words—with born again conversion imagined as its zenith—is but one approach for analysing religious change. Even within Christianity, as one author writing in this journal recently put it, ‘rupture is but one temporal mode’ (McDougall, 2020, p. 204). As mentioned before, our purpose here emerges out of an impulse to explore which stones lie unturned in the quest to understand the phenomena of religious change. We hence offer the analytic of ‘repair’ in this special issue as a way of pointing to other forms of religious and cultural change that elude and escape the ‘continuity’–‘rupture’ dynamic. Repair, we suggest, is another, particular type of change, and one that often (but not always) accompanies or follows on from rupture.

Theology has so far proved to be a major resource for anthropologists keen to hone the idiom of rupture into an effective tool for the theoretical analysis of religious and cultural change. After all, theology is dedicated to making sense of the nature of God and his action in and on the world. It therefore takes it as a given that there is such a thing as real, meaningful change, and that divine power is usually at its source—be that through creating the universe, producing miracles or, on a more microscopic level, inspiring personal transformation in individual lives. Theological categories that are concerned with change and repair, like redemption, forgiveness and resurrection, can also ‘lead us back to the actor's categories in question’, categories that are at risk of slipping into the background as the rather rarefied terms of ‘rupture’ and ‘discontinuity’ become ever domesticated in anthropological discussions on change (Robbins, 2020, pp. 42–43).

Repair and its cousins—revival, return, repentance, and so on—have the potential to become one set of concepts to evade this problem, as they are simultaneously offered by interlocutors, indexed by theologians and put to work by anthropologists. Repair also highlights the ways that looking to theology can bring into focus more and different religious framings of change. To that end, here we dip our toes into some Christian theological reflections about change and repair, considering what was at stake in these debates and how they speak to what is at stake, today, for anthropologists interested in questions of change. We start with Jewish and proto-Christian discussions about the differences between creation and transformation, and then track with broad brushstrokes the evolution of Christian thinking about two of the key modalities of change, suffering and hope, before finally sketching our theoretical understanding of repair and the ways it presents itself in this ethnographic collection, as both an inversion, as well as an outgrowth of rupture.

Change, at least in the history of Christian theology, has not only been aligned with temporal rupture in the way anthropologists have more recently come to approach the topic. It exists in an asymmetrical relation to a number of different concepts and is situated in a variety of heuristic frameworks. It has, for example, been seen as the manifestation of divine action, as the source of suffering, as the outworking of desire, and as the site of hope and healing. This list is hardly exhaustive, but points to the ambivalent space in which ‘change’ has been located in this set of traditions.

What has, however, remained constant throughout Christianity's history is its commitment to the possibility of spiritual transformation—both in the lives of individuals and in the universal human condition. This we see evidenced in the Catholic and Protestant teachings on original sin, atonement and redemption, to name but a few. The original transformative paradigm for Christians and Jews alike is widely attributed to the Genesis account in the Torah (Hebrew Bible), where God creates the universe ex nihilo—out of nothing. In actual fact, the text itself abstractly describes the cosmos as created out of a kind of formless emptiness, and a shapeless, formless liquid (‘face of the deep’/ ‘face of the waters’):

However, over the centuries, the philosophical tension presupposed by the claim that primordial matter existed—a threat to the ontological primacy of the divine being—tipped the scales in favour of a reading of the text that privileged the Creator above the created (Anderson, 2017, p. 16). The treatment of change that subsequently emerged victorious was the ex nihilo doctrine, and its relative uniqueness in relation to other creation myths lies in the fact that it does not describe life or matter as transformed in the way that the potter fashions their wares out of the uniform substance of clay, but rather accounts for the existence of the ‘clay’, or in this case the liquid (matter/life/energy), in the first place. To be more precise, even the use of the word ‘change’ in relation to God's operations within this tradition has probably become a bit of a misnomer.

The metaphysical distinction this eventually gave birth to within classical western philosophical theology was between the contingent and the necessary. Change is something that affects the sorts of things that are contingent—and this must necessarily be so—whereas only that which is ‘necessary’ can create, that is, make something out of nothing. Perhaps the difficulty that anthropologists have, therefore, had in this area is not so much with the Christian idea of change but with creation ex nihilo, for it seems to presuppose a transcendent agent, a necessary being virtually unthinkable for a science so embedded in secularity, or captive to an ‘immanent frame’ (Kapferer, 2001; Stewart, 2001; Taylor, 2007). This is then just one way in which the science of anthropology still seems to be anchored in a Newtonian vision of the universe: it takes it as a given, albeit unconsciously, that on an ontological level the stuff of life itself—matter, energy, however you wish to think about it—cannot be created or destroyed. It merely undergoes endless cycles of shaping and reshaping.

Another way that the discipline appears to remain wedded to western science's mechanistic paradigm is in its historic reliance on a strong inductive principle, which derives from the empiricist observation that human beings value order and grasp at predictability, actively working to reproduce cultural understandings and social arrangements. This approach in anthropology emerged as the product of a set of not only intellectual commitments, but ethical ones too. As Michael Lambek (2012) points out, much of the ‘progressive’ work of anthropology over the 20th century has been to ‘show the order, logic, ethical consistency, meaningfulness, and beauty in what seemed to the majority of Europeans and North Americans to be exotic or uninteresting, primitive, backward, disorderly …’—a textbook example being Evans Pritchard's writings on witchcraft, for instance (Evans Prichard, 1937; Lambek, 2012). But behind this noble aim, once again lies a remnant of the ancient Jewish/Christian idea that there is some kind of natural order to the universe, a telos towards which it inevitably inclines. This idea was used in these monotheistic traditions to challenge the Hellenistic and Near Eastern assumption that the world was chaotic and potentially evil, and which became the foundational epistemological postulate behind the rise of the natural sciences and, ultimately, the successive social sciences.

Of course, in anthropology, allegiance to the principle that human life is fundamentally rationally and morally ordered did not last forever—a cynicism towards the systematic nature of scientific readings of the world and the rise of the ‘post-’ schools of thought (post-structuralism, post-modernism, post-colonialism, and so on) reflected a changing tone of reflexivity and growing scepticism towards this underlying orderly vision of natural and human affairs in the latter part of the 20th century (see also Sahlins, 1996; Scott, 2005). And yet, as much as anthropology has sought to document with infinite curiosity the wide ranging origin myths of different cultures, and found inspiration in a non-linear, Foucauldian treatment of history, it seems that its explanatory methods still, to some extent, remain grounded in this genealogical intellectual ancestry.

The emergence of the category of ‘rupture’ has gone some way to puncture this framing of causation in the discussion of religious change—even if anthropologists have, in any case, long protested that the laws that govern human social life are far messier than those that oversee the natural world, and recoil at the thought of producing cross-categorical definitions, typologies and rules. But the discipline's ties to a particular rationalistic and deterministic framing of reality, albeit through a secularised lens, goes some way to explain why, as Bruce Kapferer (2001, p. 342) has put it, ‘old theories never seem to die’ in the subject—however much they come under fire (for a more recent reflection on the secularism of anthropology, see Furani & Robbins, 2021).

All this is not to suggest that anthropologists need to accept the existence of a transcendent being who has authored an ordered universe in order to understand change. But it does point to further ways that the discipline has inherited certain categories and categorical distinctions from the western/European/monotheistic philosophical traditions in the first place—ones that place contingency and necessity, transformation and creation, natural order and chaos in opposition to one another, and take these oppositions as a given (Cannell, 2005).

Early Christian meditations on change emerged out of an attempt to reckon with an idea of an immutable God who somehow became a human that lived and died on the cross. By the time of Augustine, the classical Greek doctrines of divine immutability and impassibility were merged and firmly aligned with perfection. But this philosophical move was itself far from perfect, given that the scriptures consistently attested to God's mercurial nature—making decisions, becoming impatient, and even grieving and hurting. In an intellectual culture so heavily influenced by Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, this apparent contradiction was no trivial technicality; to change was to suffer—something a supreme God simply could not do.

Humanity's susceptibility to change was seen to derive from its embodied condition, something which Christian philosophers turned over and over in reckoning with the claim that Jesus was the ‘Word made flesh’ (John 1:14). They walked a tightrope between asserting his divine intransience and securing his humanity, a condition for his soteriological facility. Gregory Nazianzen, for example, a 4th century patristic writer, wrote that Christ, in becoming a human, ‘bore our weakness, humbled himself to the point [of assuming] our lump, became poor in this flesh and earthly tabernacle for us, felt distress and suffered pain [‘malakisthēnai’] for us that we might become rich in divinity’ (On Love of the Poor, Oration 14.15). But those thinkers deemed to have overly emphasised Jesus' changing and suffering nature were branded heretics (e.g., Arius), as were those who elevated his mortal body to being merely phantasmic or illusory (e.g., Valentinus, Marcion).²

Many centuries later, some of the outworkings of Christian thought and practice began to place the previously incontestable axiom that God was immutable and impassible back on the table and open to negotiation. Process theology, feminist and ecological theologies, as well as the Restored Gospel (aka Mormon) tradition, have, for example, taken the possibility of divine change far more seriously (Christ, 2003; Edwards, 2019; Hartshorne, 1948; Whitehead, 1929). And, in the wake of the modern world wars, and especially the emergence of liberation theologies, the model of suffering offered by the image of Jesus dying on the cross became more widely celebrated as a beacon of emotional strength than a knotty intellectual problem (Berdyaev, 1939; Cone, 1975; De Unamuno, 1954; Moltmann, 1981).

Some German 20th century dogmaticians like Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann and Eberhard Jüngel meditated extenseively on the themes of disruption and interruption, promise and hope (Barth, 1956; Jüngel, 2014; Moltmann, 1967). The branch of theology known as eschatology is filled with reflections on related concepts like faith, anticipation, yearning and expectation. It calls into question the philosophical axiom that ‘hope’ cannot be directed at what is impossible, by inviting us to question what we know to be possible, in the first place. What is under debate here is not just the claim that God can make the impossible possible, breaking his own ‘laws of nature’ like in the Humean definition of a miracle, but rather that divine power transcends the epistemic limits of what we can conceive as possible, or impossible, altogether. In tandem, anthropological studies of different cultural framings of change can also serve to challenge and open up our epistemological parameters of what we take to be natural, or possible. Here we find a place where questions about the frontiers of creaturely knowledge confront theologians and anthropologists in a strikingly similar way, linking their two projects together.

In his discussion of Jüngel's notion of ‘interruption’ as a potential ‘category’ of ‘anthropological theory’, Robbins points out that, for this theologian, Christian truth ‘interrupts in order to heal’ (Robbins, 2020, p. 50; cf. Jüngel, 2014, p. 81). What the rupture/continuity framework overlooks, Robbins therefore suggests, is the importance of the ‘possibility of future salvation’ that is already bound up in the call to break with the past. Without this sense of optimism, and trust in the certainty of divine redemption, there is little to differentiate radical change that is traumatic and despairing from the kinds of transformation that are ‘positive in relation to the future’ (p. 52).

For some theologians and philosophers, that is what hope is. Unlike belief, hope has trust in the possibility of an indeterminate good as its object. A reorientation towards hope and healing and away from all the talk of ‘rupture’ in the anthropology of religious change also dovetails with the impulse behind the fledging ‘anthropology of the good’, an antidote to the discipline's well-tracked penchant for ‘dark’ subjects (Ortner, 2016; Robbins, 2013). It could also be taken as an extension of the anthropology of hope, which has explored how people work at revelatory and future-oriented projects (Appadurai, 2013; Crapanzano, 2003; Hage, 2003; Miyazaki, 2004).

More recently, Christian theology has come to approach the question of change by exploring the theme of desire and its transformations within the subject. This interest emerges from two recognitions, at least: first, that at its most basic, to desire something is to wish for change; and, second, that desire has been closely linked to the notions of sin and death from the very beginning of the Christian record. Of course, this includes sexual desire—which at least from the outside, seems to be where the battle for Christian souls is lost and won. But from a Christian theological perspective, ‘desire is more fundamental than sex’, as Sarah Coakley puts it, in an effort to turn Freud on his head (Coakley, 2013, p. 10). What is so often experienced as erotic longing or indeed other kinds of yearning (be it for consumptive goods, peer approval, and so on) is misplaced. It is really misdirected desire for God, a being for whom desire ‘signifies no lack’, and whose desire is made manifest in the ultimate free gift, the gift of grace (Coakley, 2013, p. 10; on the ‘free gift’ in anthropology see Laidlaw, 2000; and for a recent exploration of ‘anthropologies of grace’, see Edwards & McIvor, 2022).

This brings us back full circle to our key theme of repair, which connects the essays offered here—the observation that the rupture and repair often serve as two sides of the same coin— and part of a wider existential drive towards healing that is so central to many religious traditions. Social and cultural change, especially rupturous change, can produce the demand for the reintegration of the self with the self, the community, God or the cosmos. This manifests in a drive for preservation and restoration, that is, the hope that things do not end in ‘rupture’. Rupture is in a sense episodic, discrete and kairotic, whereas repair is processual and gradual. Amongst Christians and Jews, the popular lexicon of repentance is that of a ‘turning around’. A common thread (especially prominent in Christian existential and German idealist thought) is that the self is grounded in the God in which it originates, but in order to fully become itself it must return to its original resting place, that is, to God. But we see this pattern at play outside of the Reformed Christian and Jewish traditions too; in Islam, for instance, a commonly used idiom for conversion is that of a ‘coming home’.

As much as Christians highlight the ‘newness’ of their lives in Christ, in other modes of reflection they also talk of religious truth as something they have rediscovered or revived. The experience is often described using the language of retrieval, where the ‘new’ is really the excavation of an ancient gnosis. Note how so many of these English words—repair, repentance, return, retrieval, rediscovery, revival and so on—all carry the Latin prefix re, to go ‘back’. Repair itself comes from the Latin re (back) and parare (make ready/prepare). Here we are also reminded of a classic Christian framing of time as something that collapses past, present and future into each other, and the eschaton as ‘already/not yet’ realised (for more see Pannenberg, 1970). Robbins' informants, as many anthropologists of Christianity will recollect from their own, can date when the revival took off in Papua New Guinea, but not when it fizzled out. The implication is that being a Christian means inhabiting an ever-present state of renewal, an ‘expansive present’—until, at least, the second coming, when things will truly become new again (Haynes, 2020; Robbins, 2001).

As a whole, the collection of articles presented here shifts the discussion about change away from religious conversion and the rupture/continuity debate. The Australian Journal of Anthropology (TAJA) is a fitting home for it as the journal has facilitated some of the major contributions to the discussion about rupture in the anthropology of Christianity in the last decade, as well as efforts to bring anthropology into conversation with theology. A special issue edited by Macdonald and Falck (2020) pushed the envelope of the discussion on discontinuity, calling for ‘more nuanced approaches’ for grasping ‘the complex dialectics between culture and Christianity at work’ (2020, p. 134). The specific regional focus of that collection was on ethnotheologies in Pacific Christian cultures, including Catholic ones. In 2013, another special issue edited by Philip Fountain and Sin Wen Lau responded to Robbins' challenge for anthropologists to pursue a dialogue with theology. It successfully developed a ‘deeper and more meaningful conversation’ between the disciplines by examining the relationship between the religious and the secular within anthropology, as well as the ways that theology has so far informed, and could potentially inform, anthropology in the future (2013, p. 228). This special issue sits firmly within this trajectory of conversation, refreshing the scope of what can be considered change and offering some new directions.

Lemons' paper is the first in our collection. It looks for answers to why powerful evangelical leaders backed Donald Trump's candidacy and explores the role of social pressure in influencing processes of religious change. Indeed, what better captures the modern fantasy of the return to an idealised past than the ‘make America great again’ slogan, perhaps the ultimate manifesto of repair? For Webster, there is scope for anthropology to learn about change by attending to the way it is conceived theologically, and in particular, critiqued theologically. Doctrinal change is anathema to Protestant fundamentalist groups because the Word of God is eternal and fixed, and so the inevitability of change is necessarily always framed in the language of ‘recovery’, ‘return’ and ‘reformation’; never, in other words, as ‘innovation’.

The ways that people experience spiritual transformation as a mode of repair and rediscovery emerges in Richman's exploration of a group of Nigerian Pentecostals, whose drive to ‘break with the past’ is but one moment in a longer journey of spiritual reinscription into a lineage of Christian heritage that is reclaimed as proudly African. In asking what happens ‘after rupture’, she discovers that these Pentecostals—some of whom now belong to a second or third generation—experience their Christian identity not strictly speaking as ‘new’, but as the recapturing of a lost Christian narrative. It is one that they, as Africans, have as much of a claim to as their western counterparts. In Canberra, Australia, Tomlinson encounters female mediums whose discovery of Spiritualism is experienced as something of a reawakening, a revealing of a truth that was somehow already known to them. His article also presses us to think not only about change outside of the confines of the major world religions, but also how change operates and is experienced at the level of not only the individual but the institution, which produces its own particular set of dynamics.

This kind of duality—of rupture and repair—is also picked up by Miles-Watson, as he takes us on the newly restored pilgrimage trails around County Durham. His paper considers the way that religious traditions appropriate space, and especially the natural world, to counterbalance the trauma that can be caused by moments of abrupt discontinuity. Led by a variety of ‘stakeholders’ including the local tourist board, the rehabilitation of what were, at one time, Christian spiritual pathways encourages us to think about modes of change beyond formally religious spaces and the way they bleed into secular ones. Bialecki's article takes us further still away from change in a classically religious framework by exploring posthumanist imaginings of time. In the work of the sci-fi author H. P. Lovecraft, Bialecki seeks out visions of radical alterity and future that evade the kinds of eschatological framings that underpin even the most secularised of apocalypticisms and millenarianisms with which we are most familiar. Finally, Simon Coleman offers us in his afterword a panoramic yet simultaneously meticulous treatment of the discussion on change not only within this special issue, but as it has evolved within anthropology and its disciplinary conversational partners (history, especially) over the last few decades.

In exploring framings of healing and repair in their respective ethnographic contexts, this special issue invites anthropologists to take a more granular approach to religious change and the diversity of its iterations. We do not, in short, actively seek out a transformative ‘rupture’ to the discussion of religious change within anthropology. Instead, we highlight the complementarity of repair and rupture, both as religious processes (where the former might proceed from the latter), and as theoretical framings of use to the anthropologist.