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Heaven Starts from Earth: Welfare, Theology, and Sect in Lebanon
Abstract
The structural and day-to-day regimes of precarity triggered and enhanced by the multipronged crises in Lebanon since 2019 have renewed the academic and public focus on sect-based infrastructures as substitutes for dysfunctional public sectors. My presentation engages critically with this focus on sect as social formation and lived experience, particularly in relation to social welfare. Based on a two-year ethnographic research at an Orthodox socio-medical center in Beirut, I investigate Christian practices of giving and forms of sociality shaped at the intersection of local theological models, sectarian practices, and community service. Along sect-based and humanitarian incentives, I argue that the center’s work and identity were defined by a call to civic and social activism grounded in Orthodox models where Heaven starts Earth. With genealogies in the twentieth century Antiochian revival (nahda), these models advocate an engagement with the divine through immersion into history and earthly affairs. In this frame, the center was the scene for Christian practice as embodied social responsibility. Orthodox tropes of service and fellowship were activated as part of a divine management (tadbir ilahi) that addressed tangible material needs during periods of moral and economic uncertainty. Nevertheless, the human-divine relationality shaped by these tropes intersected with sect-based sensibilities and class hierarchies, prompting a consideration of Orthodox activist models and sectarian allegiances beyond traditional divisions of sacred-secular and national-sectarian. Through its ethnographic and theological focus on Arab Orthodox practitioners, this presentation adds a critical dimension to the anthropology of Christianity, where the epistemological heritage of Protestantism can operate as normative. It opens a discussion on localized expressions of Christianity, as they are influenced by both global histories of colonialism and regional histories of inter-confessional relations. It also highlights the social life of theological concepts, as they were activated through the religious and social experiences of my interlocutors, shaped by religious institutions as regulatory structures, and reactive to the social realities of a country in crisis. Moreover, in my focus on religion at the intersection of aspirational theological models and precarious lives, I highlight the intersections of Orthodoxy as sect and as community of practice in Lebanon. This allows me to explore welfare practices along and beyond sectarian models of differentiation and postcolonial secular ideals of national unity.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
None