Lydia Bean

Graduate Student in Sociology

Biographical Note

Lydia Bean received her BA in Spanish and Music from Austin College, a small liberal arts school in Sherman, Texas. During college, she helped found Friends of Justice, a multiracial grassroots coalition that fought to overturn a poorly-managed drug sting that arrested 16% of her town's Black adults. This inspired her to look for better tools to understand the complex social processes she had just observed (and helped create.) She discovered that the people who did this kind of research were called sociologists, and so she set out to become one. Lydia's dissertation compares the politics of evangelical Christian identity in the United States and Canada, based on ethnographic observation in four Baptist and Pentecostal congregations in Hamilton, Ontario and Buffalo, New York.

09/29/2008

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests

Religion and public life, culture, leadership in civic organizations, political sociology, race and ethnicity, qualitative and comparative methods, contemporary theory

Previous Degrees

M.A., Harvard University 2006, B.A. (summa cum laude), Austin College, 2002

Qualifying Paper Title

"Trashy People and Upstanding Citizens: Cultural Models of Citizenship in Local Governance." Approved January 2006

Prospectus Title

Evangelical Churches and Public Life in Canada and the United States

Committee

Jason Kaufman, Theda Skocpol, Nancy Ammerman

Abstract

Since the 1970s, evangelical Christians have vigorously entered the public sphere in both Canada and the United States. How do local congregations sustain this strong connection between religion and politics? Existing research claims that this connection between religion and politics is produced by the "top-down" influence of political preaching, Christian Right interest groups, social movements, and party mobilization. I argue that this connection is also produced from the "bottom-up" by subcultural identity, by the ways that evangelical Christians map their place within a complex social and political landscape. While evangelicals in these two countries have equally conservative moral beliefs, they have very different ways of making sense of the tension between their moral values and their increasingly secular, diverse countries. Understanding the construction of subcultural identity helps explain why religious participation shapes political preferences in some contexts but not others. I draw on in-depth observation in four congregations and 60 interviews with laypeople to show how evangelical congregations in the US and Canada construct subcultural identity. I elaborate the implications of this argument for scholarly debates on tolerance and civic engagement, the relationship between Christianity and Islam, and the link between moral and economic conservatism.

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Contact

617-496-5794 (FAX)

543 William James Hall
33 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138