Sam Victor
I am a social anthropologist (M.Sc., Université de Montréal; Ph.D., University of Cambridge) interested in ethics, value conflict, and intellectual authority. Ethnographically, I'm attracted to situations where people find themselves pulled between polarizing commitments. My projects so far have focused on evangelical Christians in the US and in Quebec. I'm currently a FRQ-SC Post-doctoral Research Fellow and Course Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University.
My PhD dissertation is now a book manuscript tentatively titled “After Fundamentalism: Faith, Facts, and Intellectual Authority at Heart Ridge Church”. It follows evangelical Christians in Nashville, Tennessee who reject biblical literalism but still struggle to let go of its moralized habits of thought as they reconcile long-held religious beliefs with new ethical and political commitments. Drawing on their daily life experiences as well as debates over church reforms, the book illuminates the central moral dilemma facing American evangelicals today: how to reclaim intellectual credibility from the grips of religious fundamentalism. It reveals a process of historical and social reconstruction taking place within evangelicalism post-pandemic and offers a new approach for undertanding how communities manage ethical ambiguity when trusted intellectual authorities become destabilized.
I'm currently working on a postdoctoral project with Hillary Kaell at McGill University (FRQ-SC Fellowship in Anthropology, 2024-2025). We are looking at a network of evangelical social entrepreneurs who transform historic church buildings into secular “community hubs”. Based on an ethnographic case study in Montreal of these religious actors’ attempts to promote the value of sacred spaces in the context of state secularism (laïcité), we are charting a path through anthropological theories about the evolving relationship between religion, heritage, and capitalism. The project is part of a wider multidisciplinary and interuniversity collaboration on urban religion in Quebec between scholars in theology, geography, and sociology (https://murel.openum.ca/).
Supervisors: Bob W. White (Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal), Géraldine Mossière (Institut d'études religieuses, Hillary Kaell (School of Religious Studies and Department of Anthropology, McGill University), Joel Robbins (Department of Social Anthropology, and University of Cambridge)
Address: Montreal, Canada
My PhD dissertation is now a book manuscript tentatively titled “After Fundamentalism: Faith, Facts, and Intellectual Authority at Heart Ridge Church”. It follows evangelical Christians in Nashville, Tennessee who reject biblical literalism but still struggle to let go of its moralized habits of thought as they reconcile long-held religious beliefs with new ethical and political commitments. Drawing on their daily life experiences as well as debates over church reforms, the book illuminates the central moral dilemma facing American evangelicals today: how to reclaim intellectual credibility from the grips of religious fundamentalism. It reveals a process of historical and social reconstruction taking place within evangelicalism post-pandemic and offers a new approach for undertanding how communities manage ethical ambiguity when trusted intellectual authorities become destabilized.
I'm currently working on a postdoctoral project with Hillary Kaell at McGill University (FRQ-SC Fellowship in Anthropology, 2024-2025). We are looking at a network of evangelical social entrepreneurs who transform historic church buildings into secular “community hubs”. Based on an ethnographic case study in Montreal of these religious actors’ attempts to promote the value of sacred spaces in the context of state secularism (laïcité), we are charting a path through anthropological theories about the evolving relationship between religion, heritage, and capitalism. The project is part of a wider multidisciplinary and interuniversity collaboration on urban religion in Quebec between scholars in theology, geography, and sociology (https://murel.openum.ca/).
Supervisors: Bob W. White (Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal), Géraldine Mossière (Institut d'études religieuses, Hillary Kaell (School of Religious Studies and Department of Anthropology, McGill University), Joel Robbins (Department of Social Anthropology, and University of Cambridge)
Address: Montreal, Canada
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Journal Articles by Sam Victor
This essay proposes a moral epistemological explanation for many US evangelicals’ growing unease about proselytizing. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at a church in Nashville, Tennessee, it highlights how a particular kind of epistemological certainty became a driving value of evangelical biblicism when early nineteenth-century evangelicals attempted to apply the precepts of inductive science to textual interpretation. Members of the church I studied routinely express regret about this historical entanglement, which they blame for their denomination’s dogmatic and ultimately unsuccessful fixation on persuading other people to believe the exact same things as they do. Against ‘proselytizing’ driven by ‘the desire to be right’, my interlocutors are trying to develop a practical social ethics whose explicitly biblical inspiration, they hope, will motivate others to want to become Christians. I show thatas an analytic, religious suasion makes concepts like ‘proselytizing’ and ‘evangelism’ ethnographic again by sending them back to the field where our interlocutors themselves define and critique them. Doing this allows us to better grasp nuances in evangelicals’ own evolving ideologies and practices for making their religion intelligible to themselves and others.
Nous observons que les visions sur l'idée de vivre avec la différence, soit avec les non-chrétiens, s’expriment comme une tension fragile entre les valeurs concurrentielles de leur vision de l’hospitalité, qui est à la fois évangélique et pluraliste. Plutôt que d’identifier les changements entrepris par les membres comme étant l’émergence d’une disposition cosmopolite, nous soutenons que cette ambivalence morale est un aspect constitutif d’un savoir distinct sur l’éthique des relations sociales en contexte pluriel. En ce sens, cet article propose une remise en question du caractère normatif du cosmopolitisme en tant que barème moral de la pensée pluraliste dans les conceptualisations anthropologiques de la cohabitation interculturelle.
En conclusion, nous proposons qu’afin de mieux comprendre les discours religieux sur l’éthique des relations sociales en contexte pluriel, les chercheurs se questionnent sur l’influence de la pensée cosmopolite sur le cadre conceptuel de la convivialité et envisagent un engagement plus profond avec le travail intellectuel et éthique de nos interlocuteurs, qui va au-delà de la notion d’incommensurabilité des valeurs.