Words for Relocation: New Monasticism, White Evangelicalism, and Stories in Search of Social and Racial Justice

Abstract

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of New Monasticism, a contemporary movement with particular appeal among progressive White evangelical Protestants in the US. For the past two decades, popular New Monastic figures have contested prevailing assumptions about evangelical identity, becoming key players in a complicated antiracist critique of a conservative White evangelical establishment. New Monastics seek to embody their critique through daily commitments to social and racial justice. Practicing what they call “relocation to the abandoned places of empire,” a defining characteristic of their movement, New Monastic leaders have established intentional communities in under-resourced urban neighborhoods and worked to build relationships across longstanding racial and economic divides. And they publish firsthand accounts of this work. Their blog posts, articles, and books detail their experiences as White evangelicals who have left insular White spaces to live permanently in predominantly non-White communities. Through close readings of these primary sources and my original fieldwork with New Monastic authors and affiliated leaders, this dissertation builds an extended narrative analysis of New Monasticism’s relocation stories. I find that there is a critical tension in this movement’s words for relocation. New Monastic stories about geographical relocation have a narrative countermotion at their center. They relay the spatial movement of New Monastics into new neighborhoods by translating these neighborhoods and their occupants—moving them narratively—into the storytelling language and frameworks of New Monasticism. Utilizing academic debates on ethnography, theories of Whiteness, and scholarship on Christology, my project analyzes the narrative power that White New Monastics exercise over the people they meet in the places to which they relocate. I argue that this power reasserts some of the same forms of privilege my research participants seek to renounce in their stories of relocation. My project also briefly explores the ways that New Monastic authors actively struggle with this reassertion of privilege in their most recent work.