Revivalism as Carnival

There is a certain carnival characteristic of the phenomenon of revivalism that hearkens back to 19th Century big tent revivals – at least as they present themselves now.  There is an infusion of capital entrepreneurship and a caricatured, if not jaded, focus on the plight of the individual.  The preoccupation with seeing and hearing "signs and wonders", those acts of physical instantiations that appear to suspend the known laws of physics, as evidence of not only the presence of God, but the favor of God in a certain context.

Why this is true is inextricably linked to the notions of the grotesque and the sublime, a connection which I have argued here.  But beyond the sublimation of social and cognitive boundaries that lends a religious experience some palpable contact with a wholly other sacred reality, the notion of the revival has a more clear and determinative structure of behavior that is clearly reminiscent of the structure of experience that the carnival reinforces – that is a parading of the grotesque for the purposes of entertainment through subversive parody.

While this may cast cynicism into the forays of healing and revivalism, the connects are clear and the boundary re-organizations purposes of both are identical.  As I have argued:

[6] The grotesque proceeds from an ordered structure of experience when opposing or differentiated terms are combined in a way that unifies terms that ought to be differentiated, and differentiates terms that ought to remain unified.  In short, the grotesque is an often radical disturbance of an ordered structure of experience.

However, this carries with it the same quality of the infusion of any sacred reality into the normative structures of human experience.  Thus, we must differentiate this disturbance of order from that of the carnival wherein Bakhtin defines the notion of the grotesque.  For Bakhtin, the carnival uses the grotesque as a means to parody and mock those in power.  In this way entertainment was infused with a political aim to restructure assumed socio-cultural boundaries.

For today's revivalism, there is a definitive sense in which the hegemony of a scientific discourse and legitimation of knowledge is parodied and blurred with the presentation of evidence of healing.  Moreover, as those outcasts of society are brought forth and made central to the event as the very embodiment of this evidence, the subversive element is revealed.  The process of parading the outcast, all with a fully tattoo-sleeved self-proclaimed miracle worker, is common enough.  But the event in discussion now can be seen clearly enough in this clip:

The question is if this subversive element as a social construct is not, in the end, more of the actual embodiment of the revival than the supposed object – the power of God – in the midst of human experience.  Self and social aggrandizement use the invisible presence of God as a means to restructure boundaries, and re-define the grotesque.  Why else would the miraculous need to be put on display in such a spectacle if not to meet the aim of sectarian self-aggrandizement in order to meet the ultimate goal? The true aim is thus but to re-define and shore up socio-cultural boundaries against a world that overall looks at such spectacle as the mere marketing of the absurd to the disenfranchised and the grotesque.

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