Boredom Control. Religious Affective Strategies for Dealing with Emotional Drop-Outs.

From its very beginning, Christianity has been haunted by the possibility of boredom. People have been falling asleep in the Bible, the Desert Fathers were fighting the ‘noontime devil’ of acedia, and post-Reformation believers had trouble staying awake during long sermons (Jutte 2020). Arguably more so than ‘untruth’, heresy, or overt critique, boredom can be perceived as a threat, as it confronts religion with its possible irrelevance. It may even be viewed as a form of (potentially disruptive) minority stress, when it points at a lack of emotional involvement experienced by marginalized groups whose stories are not reflected in the shared narrative of the community. In this paper I investigate how, in the context of the Netherlands, boredom is negotiated and policed in public church discourse (online blogs, popular theological publications, media). Using critical discourse analysis informed by affect theory, I compare Evangelical, Reformed, mainstream Protestant and Roman Catholic discourses on boredom. I show how, depending on the affective repertoires dominant in these denominations, churches have at their disposal a wide range of strategies to contain, pacify and silence the experience of boredom. These include (but are not limited to) the use of a performative linguistic arsenal that imposes deeply felt experiences (e.g. ‘being radical’, ‘having a passion for Jesus’); acknowledging boredom only among youth and ignoring or ridiculing its presence among adults; and framing boredom as a personal failure of conversion, commitment, or of the grasping of the deeper essence of faith. I argue that while much of the Christian leadership in my sample is more or less consciously aware of the presence of boredom, the tools to address boredom in a constructive, transformative way are often lacking, and the opportunity to have meaningful conversations about justice, the shared narrative, and the theological value of boredom, are often lost.