6

SPEAKING SAVES, SILENCE DAMNS

The Steering Tongue

As shown in the previous chapters, there are conspicuous differences between Nenets and Christian language ideologies. There have always been Christians who value silence highly, like Quakers (Bauman 1983), Benedictine monks (Bruce 2007), or Greek Orthodox (Lind 2021; see also MacCulloch 2013). But this is an institutionalized silence (usually categorized as “a spiritual practice”) that needs lots of explanatory words to introduce and not a habitus-like silence that is learned without too much verbal explanation and rather by example. Compared to Nenets’ universe that does not require many words, evangelicals live in a highly verbalized environment that leaves little space for the nonverbal. The one who converts to evangelical Christianity is supposed to speak oneself into a new person. However, this new kind of speaking also requires some restraint, as Christian ideology explicitly prescribes avoiding sinful speech and the talk of the world (see, e.g., S. Coleman 2007; Hovi 2016; Koosa 2016; Szuchewycz 1997; Strhan 2015, 69; Tarkka 2013, 127; Tomlinson 2009a). Let me give an ethnographic example.

On a chilly day in September 2006, Yegor’s family was making preparations around the tent for the coming busy period of autumn migrations toward winter pasturelands. Sitting on an unfinished transport sledge, Yegor was dissecting the head of a slaughtered reindeer so that Lida could prepare a “head stew.” This is one of the tastiest meals of all. After finishing the job, a knife in his right hand, he took the tongue into his left hand and said in Russian with a smile on his face, “There is a good tongue and there is a bad tongue [yazyk]. This tongue is good.” “But which one is bad?” I asked. “The one that chatters,” he replied with laughter. Then his look and tone turned serious, and he continued, “The tongue makes lots of sins and the tongue makes lots of good. That is why the tongue can be good and the tongue can be bad. The tongue blesses and the tongue damns. One needs always to choose a good one [tongue] that does not chatter [boltaet] too much. Of course, earlier we chattered more. When a person becomes a believer, then he already understands that this cannot be done anymore. When we did not believe, we spoke a lot, chattered [a lot].” “Is there indeed less chattering now?” I asked. “Of course, there is less now,” he quickly replied, then paused for a second and finished less enthusiastically, “A bit. Sometimes we do not yet understand what has been said. We do not understand. We must try to understand.”

Yegor went on by telling a story about a slave whose master sent him to buy the best food he could choose. The slave came back with a tongue. Then the master asked him to buy the worst food he knew to exist. The slave came back with a tongue once again.¹ Yegor still had the tongue of the reindeer in his hand, and he finished his exhortation with a biblical figurative example: “Though it is a small part, it steers the person. If the tongue is bad, it would lead the person badly. When the tongue is good, then it steers him well. It is a helm of a person. . . . It is the same on a ship. That is also written in the Bible” (see James 3).

Yegor’s description of the “pagans” who chatter excessively contradicts my account of the taciturn becoming talkative through conversion. From the Baptists’ normative point of view, my account is an inverse because it reverses the biblical logic that attributes to “pagans’” excessive and idle speaking. Yegor claimed that, among the nonconverts, sinning with the tongue, teasing others, and making rude jokes was widespread (maybe thinking of his own father, Sem Vesako, who jokingly mimicked Russians by being verbose and loud; see chap. 1). He painted a picture of “pagan” herders drinking and speaking all the time. Yegor admitted that he himself still had moments of misuse of his tongue. As we saw in the previous chapter, by singing an old song, his tongue took him back into his old personhood and made his relationship with God insecure for a moment.

To understand why there are contradictions or tensions between different views, I continue with the topic from the previous chapter and describe what it means to speak among the Baptists, whose language ideology is based on the principle of representationalism and intentionalism and not on that of magical words and entanglement with various human and nonhuman others—although with some significant exceptions, as we shall see. I also ask what speaking does or what words can do using some aspects of speech act theory by exploring how constative and performative dimensions in speech acts fit together and allow language to become the main channel of transformation in conversion.

Austin (1962, 146) argued that all speech acts both potentially convey meanings (are constative) and produce effects (are performative). Or as Butler (1993, 11) has put it, drawing on Austin and Derrida, “In philosophical terms, the constative claim is always to some degree performative” (see also Hollywood 2002).² By taking performativity as a matter of degree, I suggest that evangelical language acquires efficacy from its oscillation between a capacity to refer and a capacity to bring into being. Even if Baptists’ language ideology is focused on the constative dimension (describing or stating something that can be evaluated as true or false), Baptist speech can be highly performative (doing things in the world), having the potential to change oneself and others. All that is said can and should be evaluated as belonging on the side either of truth or of falsehood: when people speak truth as God’s children (Nuv ngatsekyq), they become channels for godly truth to produce effects in the world. For this reason, everything that a punryoda says must serve a purpose, which is to save one’s own and others’ souls, or at least not to create obstacles to one’s salvation. Thus, from the evangelicals’ perspective, any speech act is not only constative but also performative (in Austin’s terms, carrying illocutionary force), enabled by the omnipresence of the divine.

In his account of the tongue, Yegor offered a description, which is a constative dimension. He retrieved from scriptures the truth to persuade his listeners. It was a kind of witnessing (cf. Bielo 2009, 113–34), a verbal activity to convey truthful statements about different uses of the tongue. In addition, there is a performative dimension. Yegor’s account about the good and bad tongue was not only a predicative description of the world but also a tool that helped transform his listeners and his own self, enabling to fix the self—if only for a moment—into secure fellowship with God. Most importantly, he demonstrated his own obedience to the right discourse, and by this act of obedience, his “inner man” (Ephesians 3:16; see also Ob osvyaschenii 2006, 18) was to become firmer in belief. His tongue was what made the difference in his endeavor to anchor his interiority and become saved.

The oscillation of constative and performative dimensions can be seen also in the following statement by missionary Pavel, which he made when he had invited me to his home to ask about my project (see chap. 3). He told me that it would be impossible to describe the believers’ spiritual life in a “scientific way” (nauchno) because the spiritual cannot be described for the sake of description. One can only be engaged, be immersed in it, to serve God’s purpose, or be against it.³ As Harding (2000) has masterfully demonstrated in her ethnography of American evangelicals, in the universe of believers, there is no place for neutral information. Likewise, new language ideology among Baptist herders implies that all speaking must have a good purpose.⁴

On another occasion, when discussing how people should use their words, Yegor quoted a phrase from Matthew: “For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned” (12:37). As he confessed, in the scene with a reindeer tongue, it was not that easy always to stay on the right track. By the time of this speech event, he had been a Baptist for four years. It was no longer alcohol that he fought against but his own tongue, excessive laughter, and outbursts of anger that needed correction (see chap. 7). He knew he had to get his tongue right—without it, there was no hope of having a pure heart and a saved soul. As he said, the helm was the means to save the ship and, with it, what was inside.

The reindeer tongue in his hand, Yegor began his explanation about the vices and virtues of a tongue in a joking mode, pretty much in the way nonconverts liked to joke. Note the sudden shift to a serious mode, which can be read as a shift in his discursive subject position and ontological perspective (see chap. 7). When explaining what a good and bad tongue was, he—with the help of the Holy Spirit—was performing a right kind of speech act that let God’s words out into the world. As on many other occasions, when speaking of God, his voice and his posture slightly changed. This was a speech act from God as well as a speech act directed to God. I see this move as part of the hard work he had been doing over the years as a born-again person, even if he struggled to maintain this for longer than limited periods. And a large part of this hard work had been learning the new language.

To be saved, one is pulled into the world of words, as one is called to listen, speak, and read abundantly. Believers pray, promise, repent, witness, read the Bible aloud and silently, quote or retell passages by heart, teach, and comment on one another and on the unsaved. Among all speech acts, prayers are seen as especially important. Yegor once said, “Times when we do not pray, this is very bad. One has to pray all the time. One who believes and prays a lot will be saved.” Justification by faith and its evidencing expression in prayer is a simple recipe that most Baptist Nenets believe to be efficacious for unbroken communion with God and salvation. Furthermore, in this human-cum-divine community, praying for forgiveness allows one to undo or repair consequences of one’s unfortunate, unforeseen, or unintended acts, especially when benefiting from hindsight or from others’ evaluative comments.

Unlike humans’ words, God’s utterances are perfect performatives, as he does things with words. Almost every believer in the tundra can say by heart the beginning of the Bible and the beginning of John’s gospel where God’s cosmic words are said to have created the universe from nothing. This pertains to the past as much as to the future. Believers keep repeating that all that God has said in the Bible is a promise that will be fulfilled, and not a single word of God remains without a corresponding act in the world. God’s word, like a judge’s verdict, is a deed, a perfect kind of performative that needs no conditions (Austin’s “felicitous or not,” 1962, 22) to take action on the world. An omnipresent God does not require the right context, because he himself is the context. However, a believer’s words can succeed only when conditions are right, which is granted by God’s presence inside.

Not all Protestants reason in this way and claim to entertain such an intimate relationship with God. Keane argues that for most Protestants, divine agency has been treated “as an assumed background against which the person acts” (2007, 208–9n6). Likewise, he says in his analysis on Calvinist ideology, “It is not for humans to speculate about the purpose of a transcendent being” (2007, 2n2, 145; see also Miyazaki 2000; Tomlinson 2009b, 184–205). While for Indonesian Calvinists, the divine presence is largely symbolic, for Russian and Nenets Baptists, the purpose of a transcendent being is not to remain a mere “background” but to assume the position of ultimate source of agency. For them, God, with his intentions, is knowable as he is claimed to be present in their lives through the acts of the Holy Spirit, the divine word, and miraculous deeds.⁵

Nenets converts argue that each spoken word in the world is overheard by God (who is a “higher superaddressee” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s [1986, 126] theory of the text). There is no place where believers could speak without God hearing what is said, or even thinking without God knowing what is thought. By representing (quoting, retelling) God’s words, they render their own words efficacious and their selves renewed. Baptists assert that the Holy Spirit had made them pray and utter the concrete words. Or as some believers said, “God moves lips and puts words in the heart of a believer.” Here is a strong circular logic by which God speaks to himself through believers whose role is to be perfect channels. This circle must be kept uninterrupted. All behavior (including one’s speech) is thus about a complete submission to the agency of God, the erasure of all actions derived from human willfulness (except acts of obedience that are not fully of human origin either, as ultimately only God deserves praise for these). Yet converts are taught that they should not attribute to spoken words any power on their own, as Nenets old-timers would.

God’s words are known from the Bible. Nenets Baptists who have just become readers have been introduced to a tradition of literalism, according to which a word is imagined to have a true natural meaning and people are supposed to use words at their face value. They are not expected to discuss the contextual pragmatic or rhetoric qualities of words (Crapanzano 2000) or to speak of human words as creative force. In Bakhtinian terms, Baptist ideologists imagine language to be functioning straightforwardly as a “direct, unmediated discourse [slovo in Russian] directed exclusively toward its referential object, as an expression of the speaker’s ultimate semantic authority” (Bakhtin 1984, 199). This is not to say that parables would be read literally and that sermons would not entail metaphors, but figurative reading is just another kind of literalism. It works on an assumption that there is only one interpretation behind parables that reflects the divine intention.⁶

Literalist ideology has a great potential to fix meanings in the world. Everything that is not fixed, in the eyes of the born-again Christians, resembles a lie. This is a lesson that is easy to prove by pointing at the bearers of orality. Recall that Ivan used to make disapproving remarks about old Nenets songs and tales (see chap. 5). He argued, among other things, that these were not “true” because they were constantly changing. He spoke about the “confusion” people had before they knew the Bible: “They knew a bit but they did not understand.” By “knowing,” Ivan meant that some people, like his grandfather Mikul, were aware that there was the heavenly God (sky deity Num), but he did not know about his son, Jesus, and the resurrection. He also argued that people in the tundra confused St. Nicholas with Christ. “Idolatry and the divine became confused; everything was put into one pot,” Ivan said. To my question asking how people knew at all of God before the current revelation, Ivan gave me two explanations. First, ancestors had heard from Orthodox priests and Izhma Komi herders some dos and don’ts. Second, Nenets had some knowledge retained from early times when they “still lived in the Middle East,” as all peoples once did: after leaving the area, they had gotten things hopelessly wrong because all the transmission was oral, and mistakes piled up. The true revelation, in Ivan’s words, had arrived to the tundra for the first time only today.

The Baptism of Yegor and Lida

Baptists emphasize that human words gain their efficacy from one’s sincerity—as if speech externalizes inner thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. If one stops being sincere, this will have severe consequences, as this deficiency is visible to God. Sincerity can take different forms. Anthropologists have shown that ritual is the site where sincerity loses its significance, as its publicly binding nature eradicates the necessity for the match between one’s thoughts, words, and acts. Protestants are well aware of the problem, as they consider rituals to be vulnerable to insincerities (Keane 2007, 185). Nevertheless, evangelicals still require formats in which one’s public commitment to particular statements and actions could be read by others regardless of one’s intimate thoughts or feelings.⁷ Roy Rappaport (1999) argues that to undergo a ritual is to commit to the effects of it regardless of one’s personal motivations, or as Lambek (2010b, 45) comments, “The participants performing or undergoing a ritual demonstrate to others and to themselves their acceptance of both its message and its form. They do so whether or not they ‘believe’ in any specific propositions associated with it; hence the outward, public consequences prevail irrespective of the inner states of the participants. This evades the problem of recursiveness inherent to theories of intentionality, as well as the instability of subjectivity” (see also 2015a, 22–23; van der Veer 2006, 11). Lambek (2010b, 45) continues that one’s sincerity, or what one “believes,” is in some sense irrelevant: “I can pray effectively, for example, without being certain that I believe in God, that I want to do so, or that prayer is the means to address God; I can successfully ask for forgiveness without feeling particularly contrite.” What really matters, it seems, is one’s commitment to the public criteria of the ritual. Or, to return to Iriko’s conversion—even if others may have doubts over Iriko’s sincerity, he is identified as a Christian in the eyes of church members around him once he has burned his idols and undergone baptism (however, this may change if others judge Iriko when he does not back up his new status in action, see chap. 4).

And yet, when listening to the evangelical Christians, we learn that one’s intentions determine the efficacy of the event that would determine one’s fate beyond this life. As all-seeing God oversees the ritual events, this gives it all the necessary felicity conditions, and if one is insincere, uncertain, or doubtful in a ritual, then it is void in God’s eyes (cf. Prokhorov 2013, 105). Evangelical logic seems to consider this kind of vulnerability of the human condition, and this is why it stresses that God can change the person from outside and turn him or her into a sincere believer. In this sense, one’s sincerity is always a possibility, even if it is missing at the very moment of performing a ritual. Or, to put it in more mundane terms, as Lambek (2015a, 188) writes, “We only ‘catch up with ourselves,’ come to realize that we do indeed mean what we say (or intend what we do), after the fact, in light of felicitous performances.”⁸ This kind of learning process is part of Baptist procedures. To discuss how “speaking Baptist” in rituals produces sincere believers and how the tension emerges in the ethical language of converts, I shall return to the opening scene of the introduction and give some more details about the baptism of Yegor and Lida.

Initially, three people had come forward for baptism at this time—Yegor and Lida (whose oldest, unmarried son, Ngarka, was already baptized) and an older woman whose husband, who was unwilling to convert, had recently died. The night before the baptism, the church congregants gathered for an examination of the candidates to assess the sincerity of their wish and their readiness to live the life of a born-again. Nonmembers, including me, were not permitted entry. Most people graduate from this test of merit and faith, but not everyone is successful: potential converts may be rejected if, for example, they are ignorant of the main doctrines, incapable of conforming to Baptist values by failing to renounce vodka, or still keep khekheq.

Yegor had wanted to be baptized several years earlier, but the members of the congregation had then deemed him unready. This time, however, he had abstained from drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, playing cards, and singing old songs for some time. He was now also able to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of the doctrine and perform a prayer of repentance. Lida, his school-educated wife, understood somewhat better the teachings presented in Russian and had less to do with alcohol or idols. Only half a year earlier, Yegor had participated in drinking parties. Under pressure from his Baptist children and missionaries, he decided to make another attempt to get things straight. He finally gave in under the pressure and burned his great-great-great-grandfather Yarki’s soul-image (ngytarma), passed down to him through his patrilineage from the nineteenth century. He had now become “free” from the dependence of the statue, or, as he said, “the attachment to Satan through this idol,” and was thus considered to have passed his probationary period successfully.

The following day, the church members were told not to eat throughout the day, as collective fasting was planned to make people closer to God and thus the appeal more powerful (cf. Prokhorov 2013, 316–17). Words gain an extra force by such bodily acts, the meanings of which are carefully explained to everyone. The cool and rainy Sunday morning of August 4 started with a service at which Pavel explained the significance of the act of baptism. He stressed that this was an act of promising good conscience to God (obeshchanie Bogu dobroy sovesti) and that it was a death of the old self and birth of the new. Yegor and Lida were ready to pledge themselves as loyal children to their new (heavenly) father, Num—as they now called the only God when speaking Nenets.

Wearing their reindeer parkas, the congregants walked together to a nearby lake chosen for water baptism. Pavel explained that true believers are baptized only as adults (a common practice from the age of fourteen years onward) in natural water reservoirs and by full immersion. All other forms like sprinkling or pouring water on the head or even full immersion indoors were said to go against God’s will. Pavel and the candidates wore white nurses’ gowns they had obtained from a hospital. Rain was drizzling, and the temperature was around five degrees Celsius, a perfect summer day for grazing reindeer but not so much for the shivering participants of the rite.

Yegor walked first to Pavel, who stood in water up to his chest. The presbyter raised his arm above Yegor’s head and asked in Russian: “Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?” Yegor replied in Russian, “I believe.” Pavel continued, “By the command of the Lord and by your faith, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”⁹ Yegor replied, “Amen.” Then Pavel immersed Yegor fully into the water, sliding him backward. Lida followed, frightened stiff by the cold water for a moment, and continued to Pavel. The same words and movements were repeated (see figs. 6.1 and 6.2).

There are several aspects I want to draw attention to in this short, ritualized question-answer format. First, these are relatively rare moments in Baptist speech practices, when words have a fixed character and participants of the dialogue have no freedom to choose their words. Not surprisingly, this kind of fixedness is needed, especially at the most crucial life-changing rituals. These few sentences can be seen as authoritative words par excellence, as they cannot be changed; they can only be used (Bakhtin 1981). They enact a kind of “Law of the Father” in Lacanian terms, contradicting the Baptist ideal, which stresses spontaneous speaking that mirrors words of one’s own making coming from inside.

Figure 6.1. Pavel baptizing Yegor by immersing him in the cold tundra lake, August 2002.

This question-answer format also illustrates that Baptists combine freely what comes from the Bible. Their language ideology takes words as meaningful units that can be easily removed from their context without fear of misrepresenting God’s intentions. Linguistic anthropologists call this process of the free shifting of chunks of discourse “entextualization,” which means that “texts” can be taken from a particular context and inserted into new contexts (Bauman and Briggs 1990). The first question Pavel presented was a modified quotation from Acts (8:37) in which the baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch was described. Though most contemporary versions of the Bible have omitted this passage, as it has been proved to be a “later” insertion, the Russian Synodal translation, which is the text the Baptists in Russia use, contains it. The Baptists, who rely on the Russian Orthodox exegetical work (but give no credit to this fact), avoid all questions of philological scholarship and take their version of the Bible as inerrant. Biblical criticism has therefore no importance whatsoever (Prokhorov 2013, 221; 294–302; see also Bennett 2011; Bielo 2009; Crapanzano 2000; Malley 2004; Sibgatullina 2020).¹⁰

Figure 6.2. Pavel baptizing Lida, August 2002.

If we look more closely at an extensive use of quotations in sermons as chunks of discourse, we see that the fixed words are not alien to the concept of spontaneity among the Baptists. The quotation practice of the Baptists is overwhelming in all spoken and written forms of language. Freely taking passages out of contexts is what gives the Baptists’ speech not only its sense of authenticity and authority but also its flexibility. Pavel encouraged herders to memorize passages “which they liked most” and to use them at every convenient moment. And Yegor and some other Nenets Baptists did that often. For example, Andrei’s favorite was “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast” from Proverbs (12:10).

If we look at the semantic (constative, locutionary) side of this baptismal speech event, we see an inherent tension in the concept of belief. Anthropologists have repeatedly stressed that there is a difference between “to believe in” and “to believe that.” The first means trust, certainty, and commitment toward the one that is believed in; the second is giving assent to a fact or proposition (Asad 1993; Pouillon 1982; Robbins 2007a, 2020; Ruel 1997; Smith 1998). It is worth noticing here that Pavel’s question (“Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?”) is propositional (“believe that”). With his reply, Yegor aligned himself with something that was entirely experience distant. His answer “I believe” is best to be taken as pledging himself to God, claiming publicly the existence of God and trust in him, thus tying up both constative and performative dimensions. Belief is first and above all about alignment with propositional statements—in everyday life also with one’s outer appearances, such as clothing and hairstyle, or disciplinary practices, such as kneeling before lunch—and taking responsibility for these claims. But as we shall see further below, in the evangelicals’ morality and ethics, responsibility must be aligned with “right” feelings as well.

Not all manage the ritual as well as Yegor did. On a different occasion, I witnessed the baptism of Pukhutsya in the Pentecostal church in Vorkuta. The Pentecostals’ first question is the same as the Baptists’. Unlike the latter, they also ask a second question, which is “Do you promise to serve God with a pure and good conscience?” Pukhutsya had been taught to reply to the first “I believe” and to the second “I promise.” Despite earlier lengthy instructions by the presbyter, Pukhutsya, who knew almost no Russian, mixed up the order of two answers, which she gave in Nenets. Her daughter Tikynye, who was near the baptismal pool, translated her mother’s incorrect replies to Russian not verbatim but as the script required. Russian participants did not notice, and the validity of ritual was never questioned.

What is significant here is that the relationship of Yegor’s, Lida’s, and Pukhutsya’s words to their inner intentions becomes uncertain, as the event was ritualized. Let us take another look at sincerity in ritual. Humphrey and Laidlaw have argued that ritualization starts where intentions do not change the course of prescribed actions. “Ritualization involves the modification—an attenuation but not elimination—of the normal intentionality of human action,” they argue (2007, 256; see also 1994). Certainly, we can see this happening in the cases of baptism above. One could say that this goes against a general endeavor of the Baptists, whose language ideology is built on the idea of sincerity—imagined as a total correspondence of interiority and exteriority that is expressed through language, as “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling” (Trilling 1972, 2; see also Keane 2007; Pickett 2017; Rabinow 2008, 76–78). Furthermore, this departs from the logic according to which intentions could be fully given in advance, which are there to be expressed—that is, externalized. One could say that a public act of alignment of words and inner thoughts is what is expected in the Baptists’ practices. Ideally, a person going through baptism must direct all attention and intentionality (“right thoughts”) toward the act. However, the act of ritual in its fixity cannot guarantee the full alignment. As we saw in the case of Yegor, he had no other choice than to align his statements with authoritative discourse.

As only God has access to others’ minds, humans must consider the “opacity of other minds” (Robbins and Rumsey 2008; see chap. 5) and must admit the impossibility of complete transparency of one’s thoughts and sentiments. Being aware of the problem of insincere language, Protestants have fought against the potential mismatch of intention and semiotic form since the early days of the Reformation. For the Baptists, there have always been two simultaneous forces at work. First, all fixed rituals, verbal or nonverbal (breaking of bread, laying on of hands, etc.), required lots of explanation beforehand. Bearing this in mind, lengthy readings, quotations, preaching, and question-answer sessions were performed to prevent the collapse of meaning (Tomlinson and Engelke 2006). Second, to avoid a threatening gap between one’s words and their meaning, believers were told to invoke the presence of the Holy Spirit through prayer (see chap. 4). As believers say, without the presence of the Holy Spirit, one cannot understand God’s Word, even if one understands the meanings of words in the Bible.

Let us return to the scene of baptism to discuss how sincere Baptist speech and emotion is learned. After Lida, Yegor, and Pavel came out of the water, they were hidden behind large blankets, where they put on dry clothes, then the congregants said prayers of thanks and sang joyful hymns from the “Baptism” section of the hymnal. Then everybody moved to the tent of Yegor’s unbaptized mother, Granny Marina, where a postbaptismal service was about to start. Before the beginning, Yegor came to me, rubbed his chest with his right hand, a wide smile on his face, and said, “I can feel that my heart is filled with joy.”¹¹ For the born-again person, this feeling is an embodied sign that the Holy Spirit is actively at work in a person (cf. Robbins et al. 2014). Yegor, who was learning how to read signs not only around himself but also in himself and how to express these to others, had reached the next level, where the Holy Spirit was dwelling in him more firmly than ever. He could call himself “born-again” in the sense that is described by Jesus to Nicodemus in one of the most often-quoted passages (John 3:3) among the Baptists. And most importantly, he made sure that others would know that his inner state conformed to the outward ritual.

Being born again is imagined to be an event that usually precedes the rite of baptism, having clearly recognizable features. Andrei’s daughter Vera said that she felt that she was born again one day when she was fourteen. When I asked her what this experience was like, she described how she suddenly realized that the eternal life was what mattered most from then on. It was both an emotional and intellectual transformation. Suddenly, her heart was at peace and full of joy. It was the sense of being certain of the divine presence that took her over: “When I pray or read the Bible, I feel that God is near to me. When I read, inside me there is ‘Forgive others.’” Vera explained that keeping this closeness becomes the main goal of a punryoda. This state could be sustained only through speech practices, reading, and following the rules for renewing one’s commitment. Occasionally it required orchestrated bodily movements such as kneeling, closing eyes, and kissing as well.

The main element in the postbaptismal service is the laying on of hands on the freshly baptized, followed by the Lord’s Supper (see fig. 6.4). In his sermon, Pavel read a passage from Acts (8:14–17) and explained how the apostles Peter and John laid hands on the Samaritans to mediate the Holy Spirit into them. Pavel said, “God wanted to show that he wanted to save all the people. Both Jews and Samaritans. Also Russians, Nenets, Estonians. All the people. . . . Laying on of hands unites us with the Holy Spirit; this mediates God’s blessing.” He named all the names of the unsaved present, including me. As we saw in the previous chapter, for Nenets, naming itself had potentially a cunning power to injure and bind.

In the following sermon, Pavel instructed Yegor and Lida in what to ask God for. Pavel said, “Yesterday, we heard from Yegor that his heart was afraid that it [living as a believer] may turn out to be too difficult. Ask the Lord to be faithful to him, ask courage and strength to remain certain.” Yegor then started his prayer in Russian, which was slow and full of pauses, as if he was struggling to find the right words:

Figure 6.3. Baptist missionaries and Nenets converts singing hymns, August 2002.

After Yegor’s and Lida’s prayers, Pavel laid his hands above their heads and started his prayer in a loud and clear voice. His intonation moved like rolling waves: “You Lord saw how difficult they came to you. You saw how the enemy did not want to release them. Today you gave victory to their heart. Today is a joyful day for us as for them. They came to your, God’s family. They gave the promise to you to serve you from a pure heart. And you saw it today. We here were witnesses of that. Be praised that you continue building the church. You love the Nenets people by saving them.”

Figure 6.4. Pavel performing the laying on of hands for Lida and Yegor, August 2002.

Then he went on representing more specifically Yegor’s prayer in his prayer, doing that more smoothly and elegantly while correcting some of Yegor’s dysfluencies: “Bless dear brother Yegor, give him strength. Let his heart be filled with the Holy Spirit. You have always responded to his prayers, listen to them now also and listen to our prayers. Turn him into a forceful Christian so that he can win against evil. You know that he struggles leading his heart. Give him the strength. With your strength he can defeat everything that he meets on his path.”

As we see, praying is more than representation of one’s inner thoughts, worries, and wishes, as it has embodied results. This is a spiritual embodiment that Yegor characterized to me in this way: “When a person prays, the Holy Spirit grows inside. The other, the bad side of the person then shrinks. . . . And this person who does not pray, his thoughts are sly.” He needed external help to reform his own desires, thoughts, and speech, especially knowing that he committed minor sins with his tongue every day. For this reason alone, he had to purify himself through prayers as often as possible. This, again, required the right perspective and proper words (see chap. 7).

Authority and Disciplined Spontaneity

As we know from Austin’s account, recognizing authority is a necessary constituent of performativity. Nenets converts saw in Pavel a person who was full of the Spirit, certainly more than any of them (maybe the closest to him among the Nenets was Andrei, the Nenets’ ordained pastor). With his God-given authority, he commented on what was right and what was not. He spoke in the name of God using extensively reported speech and quotations. He explained that a prayer had to be relevant to the context (a theme of a sermon, a ritual at a hand, a concern shared). He insisted that one needed to learn to pray in the way it was pleasing to God.

In church performance, authority is bracketed in a specific context that privileges the pastor (Besnier 1995, 154–60). To have full control, all the prayers in Nenets had to be translated into Russian when missionaries were present. It was not enough that God heard them. For instance, Pavel explained once to a Nenets man who had finished his prayer that he should not have asked in his petition forgiveness for the sins committed in the past life, as he had been born again and forgiven his earlier sins already. Feeling themselves a bit lost in this new exercise, converts tried hard to imitate the way the missionary prayed. Pavel had assumed the position of an external commentator whose authority was perceived as almost indisputable because he knew God’s ways better than others. Pavel took some of his—to use Niko Besnier’s (1995, 158) phrase—“sermonic authority” into spheres other than strictly church issues, making comments on social relations or on raising children. I almost never saw any dodging of Pavel’s authoritative claims by the Nenets congregants, except a few times. Once when he called for regular brushing of one’s teeth, Andrei reacted, “Where does it say in the Bible that one ought to brush teeth?” Although the converted Nenets had accepted Christianity, they had to submit to an alien ritual form as the only right one; in some minor matters, they still negotiated the extent of the authority. Pavel had not assumed the position of a moral exemplar (Humphrey 1997) whose personal ways—commented on sometimes critically as lutsa ways—would have been admired uncritically.

Pavel insisted that it would be a mistake to see him or other missionaries as acting from themselves. Through his heteroglottic voice he presented himself as a mediator of the distant and truthful knowledge (“the power of words is nothing other than the delegated power of the spokesperson,” Bourdieu 1991, 107, his italics).¹² Pavel explained to me that he saw evangelical work like Jesus’s and the apostles’—that is, to sow the field with good seeds (i.e., words) and wait for what would happen. “It is not we who put pressure on a person. We wait for what God does inside the person’s heart. Our job is to sow the field with seeds. But how they grow, we do not know. We only know that they grow as potatoes or wheat grow,” he said. When somebody decided to repent, they argued that God had grown his Word in this person. Vata’s initial mimetic speech and later silence as a refusal to engage in the new relationship is an instance where the good soil for an unknown reason turns into barren ground.

In contrast to the Russian Orthodox, evangelical converts must become fluent in words that circulate. Bakhtin’s (1981, 293) concept of authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse in the novel are good concepts to think with here. He describes the process of making another’s word one’s own like this: “The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention” (see also Harding 2000, 59, 289). He further writes, “When verbal disciplines are taught in school, two basic modes are recognized for the appropriation and transmission—simultaneously—of another’s words (a text, a rule, a model): ‘reciting by heart’ and ‘retelling in one’s own words’” (Bakhtin 1981, 341). The first corresponds to authoritative discourse, while the latter is internally persuasive discourse. Bakhtin explains that “the authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. Its authority was already acknowledged in the past. It is a prior discourse” (342, his italics).

The Word of God Nenets converts are immersed into serves as an authoritative word that cannot be changed and can only be learned and used; it is monologic. However, all spoken language is dialogic, as Bakhtin (1984, 183) stresses: “Language lives only in the dialogic interaction of those who make use of it” (cf. Mauss 2003, 32–37). By internalizing the language of the others, also that of God from the Bible, converts are called to actively construe the significance and relevance of the text through a dialogic process. As any God-talk is witnessing, it is in a dialogue with various voices, real or imagined. Harding (2000, 34–35) phrased a matching description in her analysis of evangelical conversion, “Witnessing is rhetorical in two senses, namely, as an argument about the transformation of self that lost souls must undergo, and as a method of bringing about that change in those who listen to it. Fundamental Baptist witnessing is not just a monologue that constitutes its speaker as a culturally specific person; it is also a dialogue that reconstitutes its listeners.”

Baptists’ language is thus a language of ethical transformation of high personal relevance. Bruno Latour (2005, 28) has argued that religious speech is a specific “regime of enunciation.” Religious talk is not there to transport information but to transport persons. As when a lover says “I love you,” it is not about giving new information but asserting and renewing commitment. Thus, love-talk produces lovers as God-talk produces believers—that is, lovers of God. Baptists are concerned with the efficacy of the language, the correct tonality, the capacity to renew the relationship or to represent (make present anew) the closeness of God. As Latour (2005) says (borrowing from speech act theorists without acknowledging it), for love-talk to have effect, it must meet felicity conditions that surround the speech with all its extralinguistic aspects. As lovers test each others’ statements of love by “smiles, sighs, silences, hugs, gestures, gaze, postures” (30), so do the believers who need the right tone. However, in the interaction with God—at least in an ordinary sense of interaction—there is a deep asymmetry or nonmutuality, as one gets no reaction, at least not immediately, to the expressed intimate sentiments that would otherwise shape the dialogue in a face-to-face situation. Love-talk offers thus only an incomplete comparison with God-talk, as the latter usually fails to produce such intimacy as love-talk can produce between two people who mirror each other. And yet, both love-talk and God-talk have a capacity to change the speaker’s sense of self when one hears oneself saying affectionate statements. Furthermore, they both demonstrate to the other people around one’s deep involvement with and commitment to the addressee (cf. Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 266–68).¹³

As discussed in the previous chapter, Nenets converts do not show the same degree of verbal eagerness and emotionality as Russian believers in the city. Therefore, the extent and intensity of Christian verbalization is a real challenge to earlier or “traditional” use of language among Nenets and their usual self-reserve and taciturnity. In numerous situations, I observed how—when praying or speaking on biblical matters—Nenets punryodaq struggled to cope with this emphasis on verbalism and emotion in Baptism (as in Pentecostalism, with its particular focus on speaking in tongues, see chap. 4). Rather, appearing not to enjoy public speaking or perhaps afraid of saying the wrong thing, some men and almost all women kept their prayers short and formulaic. In the following example, on his tundra trip, Pavel addressed the Nenets about the way believers should act and speak.

Pavel tried hard to urge converts to become more articulate and vocal.¹⁴ He was convinced that there was lots of educational work to do before the Nenets would become the same as others (i.e., Russian veruyushchie). Pavel did not call for actions to be freely chosen, but he called for people to totally submit and let the Holy Spirit work inside. In other words, one must not hinder what wants—as the discourse defines—to come out from one’s interior. Pavel’s is a paradoxical call for a controlled spontaneity: Nenets converts must repudiate old ways and subsume themselves under the control of God, missionaries, and fellow believers and—most importantly—work on the self. In this way, the divine other, human other, and “I” are all bound in an entangled network of control, each on different premises.

But is disciplined spontaneity a logical or practical impossibility? In her discussion of the women of the Islamic piety movement, Saba Mahmood (2005) has argued that learned ritual behavior becomes spontaneous. She writes that “the enactment of conventional gestures and behaviors devolves upon the spontaneous expression of well-rehearsed emotions and individual intentions, thereby directing attention to how one learns to express ‘spontaneously’ the ‘right attitudes’” (129, her italics; see also Hirschkind 2006; Simon 2009). She argues that the opposition between spontaneity and convention in anthropological discussion is drawn on a Cartesian distinction of “the inner life of individuals and their outward expressions” (129n18). However, as Laidlaw (2014) reminds us, this kind of pious practice should not be seen as a form of unthinking but rather a conscious work on oneself that creates new skills and dispositions. Ethical transformation starts from trying to speak a new language that contains description of oneself as a particular kind of person (not a “pagan” but a person loyal to God’s will) who has certain emotions (e.g., joy, peace), thinks and speaks in a right manner, and does certain things (e.g., prays, behaves, and dresses like a believer). This practice creates the potential to acquire intellectual, embodied, and emotional skills to act and speak as a committed believer, which matches the expectations of others to whom one is supposed to give an account of oneself. As Tim Jenkins (2013, 70–71) aptly notes about evangelical Christians, “A disciplined tongue is the means of making the self.”

Evangelical Magic

In evangelicals’ language ideology, as we have seen, the main emphasis is on representing what one has inside. But despite the widespread ideology of representationalism and intentionalism, there is also a place for what we could call a magic use of signs. Stanley Tambiah (1990, 7) argues in his genealogical account of magic that “the Bible accepts the reality and efficacy of pagan magic.” Take the belief, widespread among Christians, that mentioning the name of Jesus has power to drive away Satan (Cameron 1991, 47). What gives these words efficacy? What makes this magic different from Nenets magic?

Unlike the Calvinists on Sumba who deny the automatic efficacy of words (Keane 2007, 70), Baptists in Russia implicitly accept the idea of automatism in certain situations. Accounts of believing prisoners from the Soviet period abound with descriptions of how attempts to silence God’s words failed. These accounts present as their favorite incidents in the cases in which atheists unwittingly quoted God’s words—for example, when writing on a confiscation order the title of a religious painting, such as God is our refuge and strength. . . . Therefore we shall not fear . . . though the waters roar (Vins 1989, 9–13; the quote is from Psalms 46:1–3). Taken out of their initial context, God’s words gain a quality of magical efficacy, as quoting the scriptures in an official document, as any form of witnessing, would invoke his presence and create real effects in the world.

However, in other contexts, missionaries still warn that having God’s name in the mouth in the wrong context (e.g., nonserious language) can have unwanted consequences. Probably the best example of automatic language—separated from intentions—is when a born-again person blasphemes against the Holy Spirit. There the human words take on a force mechanically. This is said to be the only sin that God does not forgive (with the reference to Mark 3:28–29). Boyko, one of the leading Baptists of the Soviet period, describes how, when he was in the Gulag camp of Khalmer-Yu (the village north of Vorkuta where Independents came to trade, see chap. 1), he thought for a moment that he had blasphemed the Holy Spirit (pokhulil Dukha Svyatogo) with an unwilling utterance (“In Christ Satan”). He only later realized that he never said that—this sensation was Satan’s trick who made him feel he had blasphemed God (Boyko 2006, 31).¹⁵

Converts in the tundra have also come to stress the dangers of uncontrolled self-expression. Consider this example. Nenets presbyter Andrei described how, in an Orthodox church, his grandfather’s third wife had made a promise that changed her life for worse:

For Andrei, the words of promise were powerful in themselves, as they tie a person to outside agents (as has often been noted about Nenets).¹⁶ Therefore, a promise that is given as if unintentionally or not fully understood still counts as a promise that results in responsibility regardless of one’s thoughts or motives. As we see, the automatic efficacy of words can take various forms in believers’ thinking. In the end, one’s intentions, speech, and moral character remain in a volatile and unpredictable relationship with each other.

To sum up, there are both continuous and discontinuous elements present in old and new understandings of speech and silence. Remember that Yegor’s daily worry was to get his tongue (and heart and soul) right. He used the Bible and praying to master his tongue. And yet, as in his preconversion life, he still had to beware the power of words. The main shift was that he, like other believers, had become preoccupied with his inner self and the signs it exteriorized.

In the next chapter, I shall look more closely at the intricate link between evangelical language and personhood and how Nenets Baptist converts are involved in ethical self-transformation. The chapter deals with the challenge Lambek (2015a, xi) has described like this: “What it means to live in a world with ideals, rules, or criteria that cannot be met completely or consistently.”