Fig. 1. Ron Luce, left, with teen audience members at an “Acquire the Fire” event in Amherst, Massachusetts, 2006. (Erik Jacobs/ The New York Times/ Redux Pictures)

The above photograph from The New York Times depicts two teen participants and Teen Mania founder Ron Luce at a September 2006 performance of “Acquire the Fire” in Amherst, Massachusetts. [1] Teen Mania Ministries is a Christian youth movement designed by Ron Luce, whom the Times describes as “a 45-year-old, mop-headed father of three with a [certificate] from the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard and the star power of an aging rock guitarist.” Luce and his organization argue that there has been a recent decline in “Bible-believing Christians” in America, and that America is becoming a progressively faithless nation. Luce sees teenagers as the next generation of evangelical Christians and aims to build a proactive army of believing teens. The keystone of the movement is “Acquire the Fire,” an increasingly popular three-day touring event that consists of flashy Christian rock music performances, motivational speeches, prayer, and a cleansing ritual in which teens write the evils of material culture on slips of paper that they drop into trash cans at front of the stage. Such a feverish spread of religious fervor suggests that this event works via the mechanics of contagion. Of interest to this essay is the consideration of “Acquire the Fire” as an [page 21] infected and contagious performance: How does “Acquire the Fire” use affect and theatricality to infect and transform the spectators and their surrounding world? To understand the relationships between affect, corporality, and materiality is to better understand how the power of affect can extend outside the theater, beyond the boundaries of an event’s spatial and temporal finitude. Through spectacular and ritual elements of live performance, “Acquire the Fire” translates affect into the visible and tangible to both enable and validate the experience of religious transformation.

The challenge of approaching such an issue is that it asks the inquirer to pin down and perpetually reexamine a recurring but ultimately ephemeral event. Although “Acquire the Fire” tours, the live performance is a finite experience for a given audience. However, the problem of ephemerality is by no means limited to “Acquire the Fire”; it is always a challenge for scholars of performance. It is possible, although very limiting, to think about a performance as a static and independent object removed from any context of spectatorship. More gratifying work is that which considers the experiential dimensions of performance – performance as something that affects and is affected. Such work can take the form of a recollection of the event: the researcher retraces tracks, recalling experience as an audience member or perhaps as a performer to the best of memory’s ability and making sense of it after the fact. More often, performance research is an extrapolation, an imagining of what the performance could have been (or, what is more dangerous, must have been) based on an artist’s sketchy blueprints, such as a script or a score. This argument reflects on the imprints performance leaves on the viewers and on their surrounding society by considering the dual role of materiality in performance: how performance employs the visible and tangible to create affect, and how affect is reawakened and affirmed through objects beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of the performance. It examines the remnants of experience – photographs, newspaper articles, websites, souvenirs – considering no object imbued with affective meaning unworthy of criticism. Indeed, to avert the critical gaze from the seemingly banal subjects of popular culture is to overlook the few fossils of affect. As an examination of “Acquire the Fire” reveals, materiality can be inextricable from affect.

“Acquire the Fire” rallies blend affect, ideology, and performance. Affect, according to Sylvan Tomkins, is a motivating force or desire that is invested in ideology. [2] He qualifies ideology as “any organized set of ideas about which human beings are at once both articulate and passionate and about which they are least certain.” [3] Tomkins identifies a particular doubt inherent in ideology. Behind the uncertainty inherent in ideology is a very private fear: a fear that what the ideologue holds most dear is fallacious. It is a fear the ideologue conceals with spectacular modes of expression to smother a latent threat. It is uncertainty that fuels affect as a motivation and passionate desire. Although deeply personal, an affect can be aroused by an object or image foreign to the viewer. To experience affect is to encounter an object or image and in turn the ideological meaning it embodies. In theatre, Aristotle claims that affect is stimulated by [page 22] dramatic action and purged in the process of performance. [4] It would seem that affect, located in feeling and cognizance, would be quite removed from the realm of the material. The stuff of theatre, after all, is costumes, set pieces and actors’ bodies. But, performance ismore than the sum of its parts. It is experienced and endures as affect, which performance stimulates, manipulates, and purges. To participate in these evangelical performance events is to purge both affect and ideological uncertainty.

Rooted in the fear of the future of Christianity in America, “Acquire the Fire” performances engender affect that is deeply invested in religious ideology. Teen Mania’s anxiety over the disappearance of Christian faith in America was fueled by recent controversial statistics that, if current trends continue, only four percent of American teens will remain “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. [5] This percentage is a sharp decline from 35 percent of baby boomers and an even sharper decline from the 65 percent of teens’ grandparents who fall in such a category. Luce blames commercial, material culture as the root cause of teenagers’ deviance from faith. Believing teens turn to his movement for support for their own convictions in a world they see as closed to their mode of being. Such faith is unpopular amongst their peers in school, and Luce’s organization offers a community in which conviction is central. The movement also lays out a “Battle Plan” that encourages the spread of evangelical Christian culture and ideology among teenagers. “Acquire the Fire” focuses the energies of the Teen Mania community on purging uncertainty and spreading ideology beyond the walls of the stadium.

The movement is an infectious one. Teen Mania’s regional “Acquire the Fire” rallies began in 1991. [6] By 2002, they drew between 5,000 and 10,000 teens per weekend. The 2002 national “Battle Cry” convention in Indianapolis, “Stand Up: The Invasion,” drew 45,000 participants. In 2006 and 2007, Teen Mania expanded to three “Battle Cry” conventions, which were held in San Francisco, California; Detroit, Michigan; and Bristow, Virginia. [7] 71,414 teens attended them. Although the movement has for the most part flown under the media radar, it has succeeded in attracting the attention of its target audience. Participation has steadily increased, suggesting that Teen Mania has made notable progress towards its goal of drawing teens away from material culture and towards a life of devotion.

The affective power of the infectious “Acquire the Fire” events is drawn from their spectacular dimension. While their motley structures and subject matter have their roots in American tent revivals and camp meetings of the 19th and early 20th centuries [8], [page 23] the visual lexicon through which ideas are communicated reflects a concern with and awareness of popular culture that causes the event to depart from comparable events in evangelical history. Luce aims to have a different song, skit or speech every five or six minutes, which is approximately the length of two music videos, to communicate “in a way that kids are used to receiving.” [9] The variety structure coupled with the trappings of MTV culture – pyrotechnics, saturated lighting, and massive glowing set pieces, to name a few examples – create a charged energy that is the conduit of the affect of spiritual transformation.

The event reflects a particular condition of spectatorship that responds to what the participants view as the fragmentation of contemporary religious life and the culture of excess that causes it. Because “Acquire the Fire” departs from evangelical performance tradition in this respect, it is necessary to look beyond the event’s immediate historical antecedents to understand how it operates. The politically charged variety shows popular in Europe during the early 20th century offer examples of how spectacular pastiche can transform audience members into more active viewers and citizens. These European phenomena are not historical precursors to “Acquire the Fire” but rather provide cultural lenses that help clarify the mechanisms of spectacular performance at work in the event – mechanisms for which its direct historical precursors cannot sufficiently account.

The structure of “Acquire the Fire” is similar to that of the variety show, and it is this similarity that heightens the presence of spectacle in the event. The variety show was a permutation of cabaret and was most popular in America and Europe between the turn of the century and World War II. These were motley performances, strings of diverse and often unrelated acts. Peter Jelavich describes the form in Berlin Cabaret: “As their name suggests, [variety shows] provided a ‘variety’ of unconnected and ‘specialized’ entertainments, primarily songs, acrobatic stunts, and animal acts, but also skits, magic tricks, tableaux, and even popular opera arias.” [10] According to the description of the event in The New York Times, the performance of “Acquire the Fire” (for the first two days) is a string of songs, prayers, and speeches. [11] The common quality of pastiche reveals an affinity between “Acquire the Fire” and the variety show. This affinity is rooted in similarities between the performances’ respective cultural contexts. Both performances respond to a particular condition of spectatorship. Jelavich describes this condition in the variety show:

The fragmentation and intensification of sense experience in everyday metropolitan life transformed the perceptual apparatus of modern urbanites to such an extent that they were no longer capable of that continuous reflection demanded by conventional drama. Stage presentations thus had to become as multiform and disjunct as the [page 24] presentation of everyday life in the streets, shops, and offices of the modern metropolis. [12]

The fragmentation of spectatorial identity in Jelavich’s “modern metropolis” is strikingly similar to that in Luce and Teen Mania’s popular culture, a world fragmented by the absence of spiritual wholeness and constructed by the “commercial machine.” [13] Teen Mania’s “Battle Cry” website is a virtual repository for information and ideology concerning the “crisis” of faith in commercially-saturated culture against which the “Acquire the Fire” performance is positioned. Its mini-documentaries reflect the notion of a “fragmentation of sense experience” through technology and media. In particular, they reflect an acute consciousness of the primacy of television in shaping the perceptive apparatus of teenagers. For example, the brief video featured on the page about “Acquire the Fire” events begins with a television frame to catch the eye of the adolescent browser. [14] Another page on the “Battle Cry” website reflects a similar notion of “intensification of sense experience” in modern youth culture, stating that “today’s teens are being attacked by popular culture like no other generation,” and that they see “on average 14,000 sexual scenes and references each year.” [15] Again, television is a primary agent of spectatorial change. Sense perception in youth culture, according to this account, is intensified in the sense that it has been hijacked and refocused by an outside force: that of commercial popular culture. The pervasiveness of sex in every form of pop culture threatens the Christian teenager’s pious heart – the vulnerable, impressionable organ of affect that is the link between the human body and the divine presence. That this condition is a product of the “commercial machine” indicates a certain metaphorical materiality – this condition as product/object – inherent in both the culture in question and in the performance that mirrors it. The variety structure of “Acquire the Fire” responds to a mode of perception produced by commercial culture that these designers of evangelical performance believe to be prevalent among their target audience.

What is of interest is not merely the similarity of structure between Ron Luce’s evangelical extravaganza and variety shows but the theatrical possibilities to which this performance becomes open when tapping into a variety spirit. In his manifesto, “The Variety Theatre,” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti describes his Futurist Variety Theatre as a mode of performance that exalts the use of astonishment in rousing the audience from passive, deadened spectatorship. [16] Although it is unlikely that Ron Luce has any intention of gluing audience members to their seats (or paying for subsequent damage done to teenagers’ Abercrombie jeans at the door), “Acquire the Fire” espouses the affect of astonishment to an end not so dissimilar to that of Marinetti’s Variety Theatre: to awaken the spectator in the process of performance. “The Variety Theatre is alone in seeking the audience’s collaboration. It doesn’t remain static like a stupid voyeur, but joins noisily in [page 25] the action, in the singing, accompanying of the orchestra, communicating with actors in surprising actions and bizarre dialogues.” [17] This description bears a likeness to “Acquire the Fire,” as portrayed in The New York Times: “For the next two days, the teenagers in the arena pogoed to Christian bands, pledged to lead their friends to Christ and sang an anthem with the chorus, ‘We won’t be silent.’ Hundreds streamed down the aisles for the altar call and knelt in front of the stage, some weeping openly as they prayed to give their lives to God.” Not only does the variety spirit awaken the spectator; it also mobilizes such an awakening as a contagion: “And because the audience cooperates in this way with the actors’ fantasy, the action develops simultaneously on the stage, in the boxes, and in the orchestra. It continues to the end of the performance, among the battalions of fans.” [18] Contagion in Futurist theater as well as in “Acquire the Fire” takes two forms: bodily change and affective spread. A variety spirit empowers this evangelical performance to rouse the spectator and incite the infectious spread of spiritual awakening.

By embracing a variety spirit, the performance operates within the realm of the spectacular. In the Futurist Variety Theatre, spectacle is built upon the parody and satire of high culture, against which this mode of performance is positioned. “The Variety Theatre destroys the Solemn, the Sacred, the Serious, and the Sublime in Art with a capital A. It cooperates in the Futurist destruction of immortal masterworks, plagiarizing them, parodying them, making them look commonplace by stripping them of their solemn apparatus as if they were mere attractions.” [19] In “Acquire the Fire,” spectacle is built upon the appropriation of popular culture in performance, particularly in the use of rock music numbers. Rock, which is central to popular youth culture, is appropriated by evangelical Christian performance and recontextualized as a marker of evangelical Christian youth subculture. Akin to parody, recontextualization here defuses the potentially anti-Christian dimensions of the form by removing it from the context of popular culture – a culture that Luce and his followers believe is opposed to their own. Dick Hebdige argues that a subculture conveys its style through objects that have been “consciously constructed” to communicate ideas central to the subculture and to differentiate those chosen objects from their normative counterparts. [20] Hebdige borrows Claude Levi-Strauss’ concept of bricolage to describe the transformation of an object’s meaning and the subsequent creation of discourse by placing the object in a different context, or using the object in a new way. [21] This idea of bricolage can be adapted for the discussion of theatre: not only can the material objects involved in performances in popular culture be recontextualized within evangelical “Acquire the Fire” events; performance can also lend itself to recontextualization as a subcultural signifier. “Acquire the Fire” not only uses rock music, it also uses the theatrical performance practices of rock music. Photographs of the event’s bands taken by The New York Times and by audience members depict saturated lights illuminating trendy minimalist backdrops and [page 26] an enormous glowing cross. [22] Functioning similarly to parody in the Variety Theatre, such a transformation of an object through appropriation and stylization in “Acquire the Fire” elevates the performance into the realm of spectacle, fueling the energy of contagion.

The affect produced by the spectacular theatre of attractions in evangelical performance exceeds astonishment; it is an affect of shock, which facilitates religious contagion by altering the material body. In “Montage of Attractions,” Sergei Eisenstein describes attractions and their use in theatre:

An attraction (in relation to the theatre) is any aggressive aspect of the theatre; that is, any element of the theatre that subjects the spectator to a sensual or psychological impact, experimentally regulated and mathematically calculated to produce in him certain emotional shocks which, when placed in their proper sequence within the totality of the production, become the only means that enable the spectator to perceive the ideological side of what is being demonstrated – the ultimate ideological conclusion. (The means of cognition – “through the living play of passions” – apply specifically to the theatre.) [23]

In a similar vein as Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty [24], Eisenstein describes the ability of the theatre of attraction to render the spectator susceptible to the ideologies embodied in performance. Just as an open wound renders the flesh vulnerable to infection, the rupture of passive, dulled and complacent perception renders the spectator vulnerable to ideology. As Artaud would agree, it is only through shock – through this extreme rupture – that spectators can access the performance’s ideology and thereby become participators in the performance. Empowerment of the spectator/participant can only occur by weakening the previous passive mode of perception.

While spectacle makes ideological contagion possible by weakening the buffering system of passive cognizance, it is through ritual that the participant first makes contact with infectious ideology. Central to ritual is the notion of practice, as a ritual is conventionally thought of as a set of repeatable symbolic actions. [25] In The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, David Morgan states that “practice is [page 27] far more constitutive of belief than creedal affirmation is.” [26] According to Morgan, belief is the active affirmation of divine truth through practice. Thus, it is through ritualistic practice that the believer conjures the divine presence, which assumes the form of affect. In “Acquire the Fire,” the most striking ritual is its climactic closing:

Mr. Luce led the crowd in an exercise in which they wrote on scraps of paper all the negative cultural influences, brand names, products and television shows that they planned to excise from their lives. Again they streamed down the aisles, this time to throw away the “cultural garbage.”
Trash cans filled with folded pieces of paper on which the teenagers had scribbled things like Ryan Seacrest, Louis Vuitton, “Gilmore Girls,” “Days of Our Lives,” Iron Maiden, Harry Potter, “need for a boyfriend” and “my perfect teeth obsession.” One had written in tiny letters: “fornication.” [27]

Objects are at the center of this ritual practice. Indeed, material goods are inextricable from the practice of religion, as Colleen McDannell argues in Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America: “Experiencing the physical dimension of religion helps bring about religious values, norms, behaviors, and attitudes.” [28] Moreover, such objects cultivate both personal and communal senses of spirituality: “Religious goods not only bind people to the sacred, they bind people to each other.” [29] While McDannell describes objects that are kept, cherished and integrated into the lives of the possessors, “Acquire the Fire” reveals how discarded objects can acquire religious meaning and facilitate religious practice. Participants “activate” the object, to borrow McDannell’s term, but discard it in order to transfer the religious meaning to their own bodies. The process of purging is also a process of acquisition: teens replace material desires with the Spirit. In being activated, the object becomes a carrier of spontaneous communitas and infects the participant who contacts it.

It is no coincidence that the act of touching is integral to this affect-producing ritual. In Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes the relationship between emotion and physical contact:

a particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions. But the same double meaning, tactile plus emotional, is already there in the single word “touching”; equally it’s internal to the word “feeling.” I am also encouraged in this association by the dubious epithet, “touchy-feely,” with its implication that even to talk about affect virtually amounts to cutaneous contact. [30]

[page 28] A hand touches a pen, which touches paper, leaving ink that touches and signifies a previous touch. Touch transfers emotions – loathing of current surroundings, desire of salvation – onto a slip of paper, which the participant holds in his hand as he slowly proceeds down the aisle of the stadium and drops it in a trash can in front of the stage. There are many layers of metaphor at work in this ritual, beyond the greater metaphorical act of renouncing commercial culture. Through touch, a material object is imbued with negative emotions. Letting go of the object is the antithesis or, to borrow from Peggy Phelan, the “disappearance” of touch. [31] Through that loss of contact, the object acquires meaning as an embodiment of negative emotions and phenomena, and generates recovery (salvation) through belief – belief generated through practice and experienced as affect. “‘Lord Jesus,’ Mr. Luce prayed into the microphone as the teenagers dropped their notes into the trash, ‘I strip off the identity of the world, and this morning I clothe myself with Christ, with his lifestyle. That’s what I want to be known for.’” [32] Belief too is an affect intimately felt: the touch of material clothing to the skin is replaced by the touch of Christ, a divine presence that envelops the believer. According to Luce, belief as affect is intimate, cutaneous contact. Affect is inseparable from contact; its contagiousness is predicated upon it.

This intimacy of contact and affect is starkly juxtaposed with the communal setting of the ritual. Nevertheless, contact is as essential to the ritual of ideological contagion on the scale of communal experience as it is on the scale of private intimacy. Morgan describes the imperativeness of bodies in the transmission of belief:

belief does not happen without a body. Even when it happens in the discursive form of a proposition, it must be uttered by one person to another. By someone in the presence of a company of people, or argued, circulated, collected, studies, and taught in print. The material culture of religion is the physical domain of belief. [33]

Although the purpose of the purgative ritual in “Acquire the Fire” is to disavow material culture, the material plays a vital role in its deployment. Indeed, ideology is only contagious if it infects other people; although negative emotions are confined within and expelled via the slips of paper, the ideology of salvation through such purification spreads from body to body – which are material objects, themselves. Here, it is useful to return to the image from The New York Times: an image portraying contact between two bodies (Luce and the participant) and the display of affect that contact and the subsequent infection of ideology generate. Ideological contagion is predicated on touch; it is thereby also predicated on communal experience and materiality.

Cutaneous contact is not the only medium of contagion. Words from a preacher or other religious performer’s mouth can infect the audience member just as a sneeze can transmit a cold from the infected to the healthy. The material body of the performer can [page 29] infect through immaterial means. In Performing the Word, Jana Childers (with the aid of Amos Wilder) describes how this performer facilitates and encourages the process of infection:

The poet-theologian Amos Wilder says that going to church should be like “approaching an open volcano where the world is molten and hearts are sifted. The altar is like a third rail that spatters sparks; the sanctuary is like the chamber next to an atomic oven: there are invisible rays and you leave your watch outside.” Presumably, preaching should be something like this too – or at least should participate in the process. [34]

Religious ideology is both communicative and communicable. The performing body is a liminal body: it is the fleshly inter-space between infection and lack of infection, between “the presence” and its absence. It is its proximity to the “open volcano” that renders the performing body contagious. In thinking about the theatrical possibilities of the evangelical Christian performer, it is useful to depart for a moment from “Acquire the Fire” to consider a song from a musical revue, For Heaven’s Sake! The 1963 revue describes the contemporary human condition as one crippled by hubris and idolatry. Indeed, the ideology coded in this revue complements that of “Acquire the Fire”. Helen Kromer’s lyrics to “The Word” elucidate the relationship between the performer, the word/“the Word,” and the audience.

I open my mouth to speak
And the word is there,
Formed by the lips, the tongue,
The organ of voice. Formed by the brain,
Transmitting the word
By breath.

I open my mouth to speak
And the word is there,
Caught by the organ of hearing, the ear,
Transmitting the thought to the brain
Through the Word.

Just so do we communicate –
You and I: the thought
From one mind leaping to another,
Given shape and form and substance,
So that we know and are known
Through the Word. [35]

[page 30] The religious performer imbues words, which are as invisible and intangible as the air an audience breathes, with affect. Words infected become “the Word”; carrying contagion, these words escape from the performing body and infect the listener. The performing body is an embodiment of “the Word” – “the Word” enclosed in flesh – and a material apparatus that transmits it invisibly across a void of space into the bodies of the audience. These lyrics also illuminate an object-like quality in a word: “I open my mouth to speak / And the word is there.” The word can be felt and seen. It can be formed, transmitted, and caught; it dissolves in the ear, infecting the brain with divine meaning and filling the listener’s body with a holy presence. Body and word function materially to create the infectious affect of salvation within performance.

What is particularly fascinating about “Acquire the Fire” is that it posits that affect as an infection that can reside in the body and society of the participant long after the performance is over; dormant affect can be reawakened through material means, such as souvenirs and websites. Lauren Sandler, author of Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, says of these teenage Christians: “This generation is not about church. They always say, ‘We take our faith outside the four walls.’” [36] But can such extraneous objects still be considered within the purviews of the performance event? In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Peggy Phelan describes the inherent ephemeral quality of performance:

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance. [37]

Archival material and other representative remnants of performance may metonymically refer to the event but is not equivalent to it. Such an object is “a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present.” [38] In the case of “Acquire the Fire,” that memory is the rupture of passive consciousness and the subsequent affect of salvation. The material traces of this performance serve to make present a past feeling of salvation, validating affect’s authenticity through repetition and location in the immediate and tangible object. These objects, real and virtual, satisfy the desire to relive the affect of salvation; indeed, the material imprint of performance “rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered.” [39] Phelan discusses the subject in the psychoanalytic sense; here, the subject is specifically the self touched by the divine. Like Calle’s descriptions of lost paintings, the trappings of “Acquire the Fire” “constitute their continuing ‘presence’ – in this case, a holy ‘presence.’” [40] Phelan [page 31] continues, “The descriptions remind us how loss acquires meaning and generates recovery – not only of and for the object, but for the one who remembers.” [41] “Acquire the Fire” as an ephemeral performance acquires holy meaning (indeed, “the Fire”) and generates the recovery of salvation. Not only is the event recovered through memory; this recovery is also proof of the authenticity of salvation previously experienced as an ephemeral affect. The material culture of “Acquire the Fire” mobilizes affect and grants it the possibility of longevity.

It is after the performance ends that this affect becomes most powerful. For the “Acquire the Fire” participant, the experience of affect becomes credible only when authenticated – when affirmed through reawakening. Transformations that are visible in his society are proof of his own inner transformation. Such proof is as material as the negative cultural objects it aims to excise. “Outside the arena in Amherst, the teenagers at Mr. Luce’s ‘Acquire the Fire’ extravaganza mobbed the tables hawking T-shirts and CD’s stamped: ‘Branded by God.’ Mr. Luce’s strategy is to replace MTV’s wares with those of an alternative Christian culture, so teenagers will link their identity to Christ and not to the latest flesh-baring pop star.” [42] Proof of affect is a visible and tangible object. It can be held or worn. Object and person are “Branded by God”; the object is a material indicator of the viewer’s visual and spiritual transformation. Morgan explains that it is this visual culture that yields the social relations and networks that facilitate the social change Luce’s movement intends to create.

Belief is shared in imaginary and visual practice, which commonly acts as a fulcrum for such rudimentary forms of association and social organization as family, clan, ethnic and racial affiliations, and the elective associations of religious belief in modern societies. Visual culture can be a powerful part of the shared apparatus of memory, national citizenship, and the socialization of young and old converts. Religions and their visual cultures configure social relations, over time and space and between one life-world and another. [43]

For the participants of “Acquire the Fire,” souvenirs such as CDs create a sense of community through memory. Listening to a recording of songs performed on the tour can rekindle the affect of salvation. Other aspects of visual culture can function similarly. For example, websites such as Teen Mania’s homepage, Webshots, MySpace, and Xanga are virtual repositories of photographs, sound clips, and blog entries. Affect lives in the participant in the form of memory, which can be reawakened through the material. As teen participant Eric Soto put it, “The fire doesn’t die once you leave the stadium. But it’s a challenge to keep it burning.” [44] Visual culture spurs memory and affirms an ephemeral experience of affect.

[page 32] The configuration of social relations through the visual culture of evangelical performance mobilizes and empowers affect. In “Acquire the Fire,” objects that embody affect help teens derive solidarity through the creation of a subculture. Objects mirror the teens’ transformation. Like the use of rock concert performance conventions during the performance of “Acquire the Fire,” material souvenirs and other aspects of visual culture (such as websites) are very similar to their counterparts in commercial culture they try to erase. A pseudo-documentary video clip on Teen Mania’s website illustrates the relationship between commercial material culture and this Christian material culture:

[The image is bordered by a television frame. The “screen” is snowy; when it clears, “Marketing to Teens: A PGS Documentary” can be read.]

[A pastiche of images of popular culture flashes across the screen.] So is there anywhere the commercial machine won’t go? [A teen wearing a gas mask] Is it leaving any room for kids to create a culture of their own? [Times Square; a teen listening to music; Will Smith] All eyes are on the teens. [Teen boy playing with Game Boy; two teen girls looking at a display window of a clothing store] They know they’re being watched. [Hand holding a TV remote; teen girl surfing the web on a laptop]

[In a room filled with television monitors and computers, A trendy-dressing adult male speaks, and an older, well-dressed man sits smugly and silently in the background] “If you wear it; listen to it, watch it, play it, eat it, learn it, it has become a part of you – it probably started with us.”

[Teen girl reads Cosmo Girl] Where did you get your style? [Attractive male movie star flirts with two female costars. Camera zooms in on his beverage, “Rockstar,” and cuts to a discontent black teen drinking the same beverage] Where did you get your taste? [Three suburban white male teens posture in front of a cinema. The marquis reads: “Gangsta Life IV”] Where did you get your flava? Are you submerged in pop culture? [One teen answers his cell phone; cut to ATF logo; cut to footage of ATF rock concert] Get the answers while you discover God, surrounded by thousands of other soldiers. [45]

Teen Mania transforms the “commercial machine’s” marketing apparatus into its own. Indeed, both cultures are “marketing to teens.” A similar process of recontextualization occurs in the realm of tangible objects. Returning to Hebdige’s lens of subcultural style, the standard wares of the rock concert are appropriated by the evangelical event and transformed through visual stylization to become markers of a subculture. Hebdige explains, “We are intrigued by the most mundane objects…[which] take on a symbolic dimension, becoming a form of stigmata, tokens of a self-imposed exile.” [46] Thus, the t-shirts depicted in the photograph from The New York Times are particularly striking: the [page 33] image of an electrical outlet printed on the garment is a stigmatic representation of contact with the presence. Once touched, the participant becomes an open and viable source of the electric affect of salvation. He embodies communicable affect, and he has the t-shirt to prove it. “Acquire the Fire” objects differ from Hebdige’s examples, because they have been transformed through the process of performance to become receptacles of affect and acquire their meaning. The objects are imbued with both subcultural and personal meaning, and those meanings are dependent on one another.

Additionally, these objects function communicatively. “Apparently, the strategy [of replacing MTV’s wares with those of an alternative Christian culture] can show results. In Chicago, Eric Soto said he returned from the stadium event in Detroit in the spring to find that other teenagers in the hallways were also wearing ‘Acquire the Fire’ T-shirts. ‘You were there? You’re a Christian?’ he said the young people would say to one another.” [47] T-shirts advertise an otherwise invisible allegiance and create a sense of community and solidarity among members of this youth culture. Materiality creates the possibility of affect’s longevity by affirming the authenticity of the experience after the performance is over, preserving the memory in something material, and creating enduring social networks around those objects.

The power of affect in “Acquire the Fire” suggests how performance as a transformative event can create enduring change. This event reveals the crucial role of materiality in empowering affect within and beyond the confines of performance. The use of spectacle in this performance mobilizes visual attractions to shock participants, shattering their passive mode of perception and rendering them susceptible to infectious ideology. Through the use of tangible objects in ritual, the participants make contact with the infection. Evangelical ideology spreads from body to body with urgency, fueled by the fear that secular commercial culture will dissolve this Christian practice. Archival material and souvenirs enable affect not only to survive, but also to grow and spread beyond the spatial and temporal confines of performance. Affect motivates and mobilizes ideology, in that affect engenders and spreads ideology. In other words, it is affect that renders ideology contagious. Although affect itself is not material, it derives its ideological meaning and transformative power from that which is visible and tangible.

Works Cited

Amanpour, Christiane. “Teen Christians Campaign against Pop Culture.” 23 Aug. 2007.  <www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/22/gw.teen.christians/index.html>.

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958.

Battle Cry. “Homepage.” Teen Mania Ministries. Dec. 2006. <http://battlecry.com>.

---. “BattleCry in the New York Times.” Dec. 2006. <http://battlecry.com/pages/nytimesarticle1.php>.

[page 34]---. “Acquire the Fire Events.” Teen Mania Ministries. Dec. 2006. <http://battlecry.com/pages/atf.php>. 

---. “Magnitude of the Crisis.” Teen Mania Ministries. Dec. 2006. <http://battlecry.com/pages/magnitude.php>.

Childers, Jana. Performing the Word. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998.

Demos, E. Virginia, ed. Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Sylvan S. Tomkins. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “Montage of Attractions: For ‘Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman.’” The Drama Review: TDR 18.1 (Mar. 1974): 77–85.

Goodstein, Laurie. “Fearing the Loss of Teenagers, Evangelicals Turn Up the Fire.” The New York Times. 6 Oct. 2006: A1+.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge, 1987.

Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Cabaret. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Levy, Evan. “When God Is Cool.” Time Magazine. 13 May 2002. Dec. 2006. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,235456,00.html?iid=chix-sphere>.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “The Variety Theatre.” Futurist Performance. Michael Kirby and Victoria Nes Kirby, eds. New York: PAJ Publications, 1986. 179–186.

McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Morgan, David. The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Webshots: “Acquire the Fire.” Dec. 2006. <http://travel.webshots.com/album/460202353SZZdcN>.

---. “Acquire the Fire – Mar. 2006.” Dec. 2006. <http://news.webshots.com/album/548620651nXvNkl>.

Endnotes

1. This photograph originally illustrated an article by Laurie Goodstein, “Fearing the Loss of Teenagers, Evangelicals Turn Up the Fire,” The New York Times, 6 Oct. 2006, A1+. Reprinted with permission.
2. E. Virginia Demos, ed., Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Sylvan S. Tomkins (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995) 27.
3. Demos 28, 111.
4. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (New York: Penguin Books, 1996).
5. Goodstein A1.
6. Levy, Evan. “When God Is Cool.” Time Magazine. 13 May 2002. Dec. 2006. <http://www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,235456,00.html?iid=chix-sphere>.
7. Amanpour, Christiane. “Teen Christians Campaign against Pop Culture.” 23 Aug. 2007.  Dec. 2006.  <www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/22/gw.teen.christians/index.html>.
8. For further reading on the history of camp meetings and tent revivals in America, see Dickinson Bruce, And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp Meeting Religion, 1800 – 1845 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974); John Lander, Itinerant Temples: Tent Methodism, 1814 – 1832 (Waynesboro: Paternoster Press, 2003); and Patsy Sims, Can Somebody Shout Amen! (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).
9. Levy online.
10. Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) 20.
11. Goodstein A1.
12. Jelavich 24.
13. Battle Cry, “Acquire the Fire Events,” Teen Mania Ministries, Dec. 2006 <http://battlecry.com/pages/atf.php>.
14. Ibid.
15. Battle Cry, “Magnitude of the Crisis,” Teen Mania Ministries, Dec. 2006 <http://battlecry.com/pages/ magnitude.php>.
16. Marinetti 179, 181.
17. Marinetti 181.
18. Marinetti 181.
19. Marinetti 183.
20. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1987) 100–101.
21. Hebdige 102–106.
22. Goodstein A1+; Webshots: “Acquire the Fire,” Dec. 2006 <http://travel.webshots.com/album/460202353SZZdcN>.  and “Acquire the Fire – Mar. 2006,” Dec. 2006, <http://news.webshots.com/album/548620651nXvNkl>.
23. Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions: For ‘Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman,’” 77–85.
24. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958).
25. “Performances consist of twice-behaved, coded, transmittable behaviors. This twice-behaved behavior is generated by interactions between ritual and play. In fact, one definition of performance may be: Ritualized behavior conditioned/permeated by play. Rituals are a way people remember. Rituals are memories in action, encoded into actions.” Richard Schechner, “Ritual,” Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002) 45.
26. David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 7.
27. Goodstein A20.
28. Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) 2.
29. McDannell 45.
30. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) 17.
31. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1996) 146.
32. Goodstein A20.
33. Morgan 8.
34. Childers, Jana, Performing the Word (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998) 17.
    
35. From For Heaven’s Sake: A Musical Revue. Book and Lyrics by Helen Kromer, Music by Frederick Silver. Boston: Baker’s Plays, 1963. Quoted in Childers 144–145.
36. Goodstein A20.
37. Phelan 146.
38. Ibid.
39. Phelan 147.
40. Phelan 146.
41. Phelan 147.
42. Goodstein A20.
43. Morgan 9.
44. Goodstein A20.
45. Battle Cry, “Acquire the Fire Events.”
46. Hebdige 2.
47. Goodstein A20.