Reimagining What’s Next in the Study of Christianity
Professor Heather Mellquist Lehto, MTS ’11, is a cultural anthropologist whose work attends to the intersections of technology, religion, and kinship in South Korea and the United States. She is one of two Yang Visiting Scholars in World Christianity at HDS during the 2022-23 academic year.
Below, Professor Mellquist Lehto shares her insights on how hope can be found through anthropology, how South Korea is an ideal place for exploring religion and technology, and why HDS is uniquely supportive of a wide range of pursuits within the study of religion.
Countless Ways to Build a Life
I grew up in a semi-rural area in central Ohio, and have no doubt that this shaped me in ways that led me to be an anthropologist of religion. Christianity was so foundational to that social environment in explicit and implicit ways. So, as I was learning to navigate the world as a young person, I was drawn to reflecting deeply on religion’s role in society, and this would lead me to study the social science of religion in college.
As an undergraduate at Wellesley College, I fully embraced the liberal arts model. I double-majored in religious studies and mathematics, and outside of the classroom, I was a varsity athlete and a musician. This variety of activities was incredibly enriching, and I decided that I wanted to continue to cultivate this after college. I never wanted my days to become neatly arranged according to the artificial categories that often carve up our lives—as if the intellectual, the artistic, the physical, the spiritual, or the practical were mutually exclusive or static. I have always felt the most fulfilled when I can bring my various capacities to bear in my work.
When I began at HDS in 2009, I was hoping to find a way to carry that interdisciplinarity into my advanced training and career. Here, I learned about anthropology and was taken by it. In a way that is similar to the field of religious studies, the discipline of anthropology is really dynamic in terms of topic, theory, and method. I appreciated how anthropologists wrote about human life in all its complexity. Most importantly, I think reading anthropology gave me a more hopeful disposition toward the world because it reminded me that there are countless possible ways to build a life. It was HDS and Harvard professors like Michael Jackson, Marla Frederick, and Aisha Beliso-de Jesus that introduced me to this field and prepared me to pursue a PhD in anthropology at UC Berkeley.
HDS Impact Inside, Outside the Classroom
My time in the MTS program at HDS was transformative, both professionally and personally. It was here that I was able to clarify my interests and begin to study anthropology and technology studies. It was through conversations with fellow students that I clarified my own religious commitments and was baptized by the late Rev. Peter Gomes at Memorial Church. I even met my spouse at the School’s Oktoberfest!
In other words, I have known HDS to be a place that is uniquely supportive of a wide range of pursuits. So, working here as a visiting scholar, it has been important to me that I support students with their own, unique endeavors. I designed my seminar this semester with the diversity of HDS in mind, and I kept flexibility in the schedule so that I could respond to the interests of the particular students who would enroll.
For example, early on my students expressed interest in discussing research methods, so I gave greater attention to this throughout the term, and I arranged for a visit with the research librarians to discuss what archival materials would be most pertinent to our study. Many of my students are writing research articles for their final papers, but some have designed alternative projects that are more aligned with their career or vocational goals. One student is creating a library research guide on women in missions, for example, and another is composing an anthology related to world Christianity.
My experience at HDS has helped me to hit the ground running with my writing. Of course, the research and library resources here are second-to-none! But, when making the decision to return to campus, I knew that it’s the people who make HDS what it is. I have enjoyed reconnecting with my former professors and meeting new colleagues. My research has already benefitted from conversations with faculty and students here.
Following the Research
Reading the work of Max Weber first ignited my interest in what he calls “the interaction of material and ideal interests.” It gave me a model for thinking about my scholarly interests, in both religious studies and the field of science and technology studies. Thanks to the flexibility that the HDS master of theological studies degree program offers, I was able to study both while at the Divinity School through cross-registration at MIT.
By the time I began my doctoral program in 2011, I thought that a good entry to researching religion and technology would be the recent transformation of American megachurches into “multisite churches.” Multisite churches are single congregations that meet at multiple campuses, often by recording the service at one location and broadcasting to geographically dispersed church buildings.
Multisite churches are now very common, especially after the pandemic. At that time, however, they were still relatively new and controversial in the United States. The use of broadcast technologies raised several questions for congregations at that time, such as: Does the meaning of community and congregation change when spread across geographic distance? How does streaming affect the authority of the pastor? How might this model reshape religious and social landscapes across the world?
It was while I was exploring this change in American religion through pilot research in 2012 that I read in a footnote stating that South Korean churches had been building multisite churches since the 1980s. While the multisite church model appeared new and controversial in the U.S., Christians had, in fact, been working on this for decades in other parts of the world. So, I thought that it would be appropriate to learn from the experience of those congregations in Korea. I began to learn Korean at that point, and I was lucky enough to earn several research grants that enabled me to live and research in Seoul for much of the last decade. In hindsight, I realize that South Korea is an ideal site in which to explore religion and technology, but as it happened, I came to these topics and field sites almost serendipitously by simply following the research.
How Technology Shapes an Understanding—and Experience—of Christianity
I’m currently finishing a book manuscript and continuing research into a second project, as well.
My book manuscript is titled “Holy Infrastructure.” It is an ethnography of some of the first and largest transnational multisite churches in the world, giving particular attention to how technologies are used and understood in this context.
The manuscript draws on two years of transnational ethnographic field research in Seoul and in Koreatown, Los Angeles, to illustrate the interrelation of technology and Korean Christianity in two main ways.
First, my work reveals how the concept of technology helps to shape an understanding and experience of Christianity for both pastors and congregants. After the Korean War, Christianity came to be understood as a facet of modernity itself, and Protestantism’s rapid spread in the late twentieth century seemed to confirm its place as a major complement to economic development.
Since the early 2000s, however, that growth has stagnated, and megachurches have increasingly come under public criticism. Now that the role of Christianity in the imagined future of South Korea is less clear, my work documents how Christian communities seek to resolve perceived threats to social and religious authority by aligning themselves with technological futures in both word and practice.
Second, my work reveals how the technological instruments used in multisite churches—including projectors, screens, social media applications, and architectural engineering—both inform and are informed by Christian theology and religious practice.
For example, one chapter details how transnational video streaming undergirds shifting theological understandings of contact and community, such that screens are said to transmit healing touches, and community becomes increasingly defined in terms of seeing and being seen.
In contrast to studies that focus on religion in terms of belief, I demonstrate that Christian life in these transnational churches is principally about, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “the coordination of the soul, the eye, and the hand.” Alternatively, in the words of Korean Christians, it is a matter of creating and maintaining “holy infrastructures” [kŏrukhan inp'ŭra] through their bodies, actions, and the objects of their practice.
Like the transnational churches themselves, holy infrastructures cut across presumed national and social domains, and the term “holy infrastructure” serves as a useful analytic for the ways in which Christian practitioners challenge common categorial distinctions, such as secular/religious, material/spiritual, and human/non-human.
My newer research branches off of the research I did for the first book on megachurches. As I was exploring how people create and sustain communities through various media technologies, I repeatedly observed how the skin was a medium fundamental to sociality, spirituality, and one’s sense of self. This is because the skin is one of the most important thresholds in human life, constituting a boundary of one’s body, as well as a means for relation to others.
Inspired by the Korean/Japanese term “skinship”—or homosocial intimacy cemented through physical contact—this project explores how relationality changes as conceptions of the skin are informed by religious traditions, conceptions of race and gender, public health projects, new digital technologies, and the booming Korean cosmetics industry.
Lasting Impact of Research and Teaching
In the broadest sense, I want my research and my teaching to help people to stretch their understandings of how human life is and may be otherwise under different conditions.
In my writing, I bring what I’ve learned from my ethnographic research to interrogate the assumptions within existing scholarship. For example, American churches are often credited with leading the recent global transformation of megachurches into franchise-like multisite churches, but in fact, American megachurches became multisite by following the Korean churches featured in my study.
Tracing megachurch practices through their transnational histories, I hope that my work challenges the American exceptionalism within certain accounts of megachurches and demonstrates how scholars might present marginalized Christianities differently by adopting a broader understanding of what “world Christianity” is and where it may be observed.
I would hope that my writing on “holy infrastructure” would bring people to reflect on the way that infrastructure is discussed both in social theory and in broader public conversations about things like infrastructure funding. The term “infrastructure” is so capacious, which has been useful for many people, such as American politicians who recently attempted to classify things like elder-care as critical infrastructure.
But I also have my concerns about the ways that “infrastructure” is deployed so broadly. It’s worth noting that framing everything—including human life—as “infrastructural” promotes instrumental thinking. Imagined as infrastructure, then, a person may be valued primarily for what he/she/they does, rather than what he/she/they is. This benefits collective projects, but it does not accommodate claims about a person’s worth beyond one’s utility to produce larger social “goods.”
I hope that my teaching would also offer tools for students to analyze the world as it is so that they may imagine how the world might be otherwise. I think that the course I taught at HDS this semester reflects that. Titled “The Worlds of World Christianity,” the first thing that the class offered was an introduction to “World Christianity”—a topic that is receiving increased interest and investment.
But we also made a point to interrogate what the adjective “World” may be doing when it distinguishes the field from the more traditional “Christian studies.” This is a critical move, but it is also meant as a constructive one. By de-naturalizing this term, I encouraged students to think about how they could make this conversation work for them and their particular interests—whether they intend to pursue further scholarship, public service, or ministry.
Advice to Yang Scholar Applicants
Be bold and creative in your application. In my view, the recent interest and investment in this field offer an opportunity to reimagine what is next in the academic study of Christianity. Even if you do not necessarily imagine yourself to be working within world Christianity as it exists now, your work could be exactly what is needed to move the conversation in exciting new directions.
Editor’s note: The Yang Visiting Scholars in World Christianity application for 2023-24 is now open! Visit the program webpage to learn more. The deadline to apply is January 6, 2023.