Religious Speech as Resource. A Research Report

2.1 The Importance of the Local-parochial Community for the Social Effectiveness of Resource Preaching

If one looks at the social and cultural anthropological research on preaching cultures, especially in the Evangelical and non-European Christianities as well as in Islamic communities, it is first of all noticeable that preaching cultures are to a large extent negotiated as local cultures. Against the background of the research design of numerous social and cultural anthropological studies this is immediately plausible: Participant observation requires intensive personal relations established over long periods of time in particular places. Moreover, there is usually a kind of ‘zooming’, i. e. the increasing focus of forms of participation and observation on increasingly specific phenomena.^[28] For this reason, long-term field research often has a concrete temporal reference to specific places, persons, communities or networks that form the framework of the investigation. However, this fact is more than a response to a methodological decision. Rather, a decisive moment in the social efficacy of religious speech comes into play here – the respective sermon is delivered at a concrete place, at a concrete time, to concrete persons, in specific socio-cultural contexts. For Christian homiletics Leonora Tubbs Tisdale already some time ago raised this fact, framing it as a demand: “Good preaching not only requires its practitioners to become skilled biblical exegetes. It also requires them to become adept in ‘exegeting’ local congregations and their contexts.”^[29] Preaching is therefore an “act of constructing ‘local theology’ – that is, theology crafted for a very particular people in a particular time and place.”^[30] With this plea Tisdale does not aim – as one is inclined to assume spontaneously – at a provincialization of homiletics and thus also not at a sermon that makes objective truth claims for its local tradition and socio-cultural context. Instead Tisdale emphasizes “that preaching can be both local in its address and global in its vision, both fitting for a particular congregation of God’s people and faithful to a transformative gospel.”^[31] For: “Preaching needs to attend more carefully to cultural context in order that the gospel may be more clearly heard and understood by all sorts of people in all sorts of settings.”^[32]

Richard T. Antoun exemplified this perspective in a pioneering study on Islamic preaching, namely on the Jordanian village of Kufr al-Ma.^[33] From 1959 to 1967 Antount spent several stays in Kufr al-Ma. During this time he accompanied the local imam and preacher Shaykh Luqman (pseudonym)^[34] in order to reconstruct the role of the preacher in his local environment and the importance of this local environment for the authority and legitimacy of the sermon. In this way, he provides insights into the functioning and dynamics of a concrete local ResourceComplex. The study explicitly pursues three goals: First, the documentation of concrete Friday sermons (khuṭba) in this local context.^[35] Twenty-six sermons have been transcribed and translated by Antoun,^[36] and he has participated in a far greater number. Antoun describes the predominant content of these sermons as “ethical in intent”.^[37] By embedding the content analyses^[38] in the representation of local conditions such as the gradual changes in this social environment, Antoun works out how the preacher functions as a ‘cultural broker’. Thus, the second goal of the study is addressed. The essential point is “to analyze the process by which the Islamic message is handed down and interpreted by the culture broker (here the rural Muslim preacher) in his particular environment, the Jordanian village, and [...] to compare that process, however briefly, with similar processes outside both Jordan and the Muslim world. That process is ‘the social organization of tradition’ and involves the necessary selection from and interpretation of tradition.”^[39] The content analysis is integrated into the analysis of the dynamic interplay of official vs. popular religious traditions and the accommodation of tradition.^[40] In this sense, preaching is a phenomenon of ‘folk religion’^[41] and the place where ‘official’ religion and local religious practices – if one assumes with Antoun a bipolar relationship of both – come into exchange. The sermon is, among other “linking institutions and roles”^[42], of fundamental importance for local actors in socio-cultural processes of accommodation and transformation.

Whereas the first goal of the study can be characterized as documentary and the second goal is analytical, the third goal is described by Antoun as “humanistic and experiential”.^[43] For elaboration: “These sermons also provide meaning at the deepest experiential level from the side of both intellect and emotions. The Quranic verses, Traditions of the Prophet, and prayer formulae that lace the sermons together ‘are’ the ultimate reality for both the preacher and his listeners.”^[44]

By looking at these three goals together, the study is able to show that it is precisely the multidimensionality of a local ResourceComplex that institutionalizes and legitimizes the effectiveness and authority of preaching: On the one hand, the strategic relevance of local knowledge authorizes the preacher to be a mediator between people’s Islam and government’s Islam. At the same time, however, the intimate knowledge of local family structures can also become a burden for the preacher. The local context proves to be ambivalent and is therefore strategically highly significant: “The community predicament involves the necessity of maintaining harmony among neighbors and kinsmen on whom one has been dependent in the past and will be dependent in the future.”^[45] At the time Antoun conducted his research legitimization by a special theological education was still of secondary importance.^[46] The need for such a theological education is part of a socio-religious transformation process that began in the late 1960 s and is thus also changing the resource of preaching.^[47]

At the same time, however, the local practice of preaching proves to be an interplay of the specific conditions of a local congregation and a normative and ritualized practice that is legitimized by the return to the sermons of the prophet. The Friday sermon is strictly formalized. Structure,^[48] form, place, language^[49] are highly regulated. Antoun emphasizes the importance of this fact for an appropriate understanding of local sermon cultures especially by drawing a comparison with the tradition of the so called American Folk Preacher.^[50] While there the emphasis is on the freedom of the listener in the ritual, “the Islamic khuṭba in Kufr al-Ma stands for ‘ritual order,’ as befitting a sermon whose main thrust is orthopraxy (i. e., norms governing day-to-day interpersonal relations between family members, kin, neighbors, and co-religionists, and including norms against community and social functionalism).”^[51]

Inspired by Antoun, Patrick Gaffney, member of the Catholic Missionary Congregation of the Holy Cross and ordained priest, also starts from the emphasized importance of local structures in his study on preaching in Egypt,^[52] when he evaluates the authority of preachers necessary for the social efficacy of preaching.^[53] “Thus in order to understand Islam in ‘local contexts’ the task must be to combine a recognition of immediate social spheres with those relationships of continuity that make for participation in a greater totality. This entails the description and analysis of key facets of what members of a given local community regard as its explicitly ‘Islamic’ elements within a larger framework of shifting social, ideological, political, and economic circumstances.”^[54] From November 1977 to August 1979, Gaffney was in Minya and investigated in particular the al-Fūlī mosque, a so-called government mosque (masjid ḥukūmī). The objects of this analysis are the sermons that were connected with the student uprising at the end of the 1970 s, including those that were delivered on the occasion of the visit of President Sadat in December 1978.^[55] In the following years, Gaffney returned there at regular intervals, as far as politically possible. In this way, he was able to evaluate the transformation of local ResourceComplexes in the context of political and social changes from a diachronic perspective.

Following Max Weber’s distinction of magician, priest and prophet, Gaffney distinguishes between three types of preacher, each with specific authority. On the one hand the figure of the saint or saints (walī/ walīya), whose knowledge is above all of an esoteric nature.^[56] Secondly, the figure of the ʿālim (scholar), whose knowledge is above all of a formalized nature and who gains authority through his formalized knowledge. Thirdly, the mujāhid (holy warrier) is mainly concerned with practice and for him practical knowledge has priority over theoretical knowledge, or rather the latter must always prove itself in practice.^[57] Only an approach based on multidimensionality can adequately reflect the difficult relations between preacher and congregation. “From the outset we have stressed that the role of the Islamic preacher in Egypt cannot be adequately described by any single model drawn from classical socioreligious theory.“^[58]

Thus, the local function of the preaching persons in and for the ResourceComplex of preaching cannot be grasped one-dimensionally and it is possibly precisely here that lines of conflict run. This can also be observed in other contexts. This fact is particularly helpful for a non-political understanding of the role of preachers in migrant communities. The Frankfurt anthropologist Susanne Schröter, for example, has reconstructed this for the German-speaking area using the example of thirteen Islamic communities in Wiesbaden.^[59] Time and again, this study emphasizes the central importance of religious speeches and speakers in these communities and that they represent an important resource. The speeches shape the specific identity of each community. A one-dimensional description, e. g. through a reductionist use of categories such as ‘fundamentalist’, is not able to capture the meaning and momentum of religious speech. For example, the majority of the members of the community who adhere to the Omar Ibnulkatab Mosque have a Berber-Moroccan background. When an imam from Morocco, who was very popular in the congregation, started to preach mainly about politics in a sermon, he was admonished by the local board. But the preacher replied only: “’I preach as I want to’. Then the local board member told him, ‘You cannot preach as you like. You must abide by the rules of the congregation here. We are not a political congregation, we are a religious congregation, and you only have to talk about religion, about character traits, about good character traits, about community service and so on, and not about politics. We do not want that and I will forbid that’.”^[60] The congregation decides on the adequate use of the resource ‘preaching’ (valorisation). For the resource ‘preaching’ refers to common values and shared knowledge, for example in the process of medialisation.^[61]

Schröter is also able to show that the sermons serve to cultivate the culture and language of origin. For this reason, too, they have the function of creating and assuring identity. At the same time the congregations are integrated into a “transnational community”.^[62] This happens above all in the process of medialisation. The special value attributed to the resource ‘religious speech’ is also reflected in the fact that many congregations organise sermon events lasting several days and often invite Islamic star preachers (Internet, Youtube, television).^[63]

The sermons described by Schröter are integrated into a comprehensive setting of community events and community forms of religious communication, e. g. women’s breakfast events, youth centres, Muslim scouts, pastoral care. In this way, the multi-perspectivity of the ResourceComplex sermon is also clearly recognisable here and an isolated view of the sermon events is avoided by the resource concept.

Concerned with a deeper understanding of Christian preaching and congregation culture Peter Meyer applied this approach to local preaching practices.^[64] The empirical foundation of his study is formed by three sermons from urban regions of the USA in the summer of 2008 (American Baptist Church, United Church of Christ and Presbyterian Church)^[65] and three sermons from the 2009 Passion season, recorded in West German congregations.^[66] These sermons are placed in their congregational and socio-cultural context by means of 19 guideline-based interviews (with listeners and preachers), participatory observation and audio-visual analysis. As a phenomenon of spoken language, sermons are explicitly examined for their “life-world context of origin” (“lebensweltlichen Entstehungszusammenhang”).^[67] In other words, Mayer asks all those involved in the sermon about their individual experiences, biographical socialisation and corresponding imprints, local-congregational arrangements and implementation horizons, the guiding ideals of preaching and the expectations and attitudes associated with them. Thus, the sermon itself becomes understandable as “practice of lived religion”.^[68]

Of particular interest in our context are the socio-cultural differences between the German-speaking and the US-American congregations and sermon cultures that become apparent in the study. While in the German-speaking area the sermon is assigned to the sphere of the institutionalized church, i. e. a clearly defined functional area with limited reach,^[69] in US-American congregations, sermon is the expression of a specific social group to which the individual feels personally committed. The self-chosen, local congregation and not a large-scale institution ‘church’ is the frame of reference of the sermon. While in German parishes the person preaching is regarded as the professional representative of the religious institution ‘church’, to whom competence in dealing with old texts is attributed, in the US-American context the person preaching acts more as friend and partner. German listeners tend to keep a distance to religious forms and language games. Although the Bible is regarded as the formal norm of worship – a text must be preached about – it is at the same time distant from and alien to contemporary life. It must be professionally opened up for the present. US-American church members take the reference to biblical narratives and their linguistic gesture more for granted. ”Moments of high intensity of experience”^[70] are given preference over intellectual contents and the same goes for the narrative gesture of the sermon. And while in the German-speaking context the so-called political sermon is met with ambivalent perception, in the American context current socio-political relevance is naturally ascribed to the biblical text. According to Meyer, these (and other) culturally determined differences suggest that one should be careful about the transfer of homiletic concepts for the purpose of optimizing practice – “individual phenomena (such as the US sermon experienced as ‘eventful’) cannot be implemented like a piece of craftsmanship in another place”.^[71] Different cultural contexts cannot simply be ignored for homiletic theory building. They are, however, revealing for sermon research. Meyer’s study uses the example of local preaching to show the cultural, rhetorical and aesthetic logic of ResourceCultures and its significance for dealing with the resource ‘preaching’. This aspect is to be deepened in the following section.

2.2 The Importance of Cultural, Rhetorical and Aesthetic Traditions and Practices for Preaching as a ResourceComplex

The sermon is a cultural-aesthetic ResourceComplex combined with other aspects of cultural expression (literary, rhetorical, musical, media).^[72] Within research, this aspect is best tackled by reconstructing the performance of the sermon. Here it becomes particularly clear that the sermon is an interactive event. The congregation ‘co-preaches’ – through heckling, answers, singing etc. Hearing is an active process, not a passive experience.

In particular the tradition of the so called American folk preacher, addressed by Antoun, is used again and again in this context to describe cultural, local and denominational differences that are reflected in the preaching performance. Bruce A. Rosenberg referred to this already in 1970 in his often quoted study on the USA: “Most northern Presbyterians [...] think that nearly all preaching is from a prepared text, while just as many southern Baptists must assume that all sermons are delivered directly by their pastor without any manuscript at all.”^[73] The unscripted sermon contains, for example, parts that are repeatedly sung, either by the preacher and/or the congregation.^[74] “The quality of the congregation appears to have a great effect upon the sermon, influencing the preacher’s timing, his involvement in his delivery, and sometimes even the length of the performance.”^[75] Accordingly, sermon analysis cannot be limited to an analysis of the printed text or the word heard. Rather, it must be supplemented by musicological and theatrical perspectives, for example, questions of melody (here: pentatonic),^[76] rhythm – “perhaps the most important aspect of the preacher’s musical art” –,^[77] the description of the call-and-response style, questions of harmony, form and improvisational style. The preparation of a sermon, in turn, serves less the preparation of a manuscript, nor the literary-rhetorical consultation with religious and theological authorities, but rather aims entirely at the moment of execution – “the moment of composition is the performance”.^[78] If oral expression and ritual performance are so central to the sermon, then individual talent and personal charisma become an essential aspect of the ResourceComplex of preaching. In the religious self-image of preachers this is often interpreted as divine legitimation and authorization.^[79]

This significance of the sermons’ own cultural logics and therefore the plurality of ResourceCultures has recently and repeatedly been introduced into the international, Christian-ecumenical discourse on the relevance of the sermon in different Christianities, aiming at sketches of a cross-cultural homiletics.^[80]

In the most recent research on the popularity and effectiveness of Islamic sermons, the aspects of interaction, performance and musicality described above also occupy a prominent position.

For example, Julian Millie spent nearly two years researching the sermon as an oral practice in Bandung (West Java).^[81] In contrast to the above-mentioned works (Antoun and Gaffney), he is exclusively concerned with the dissemination of the sermon outside the mosque. He investigates the phenomenon that preachers^[82] are invited to numerous social and societal events to preach there (family occasions, rites de passage up to internal company motivation training). According to Millie, this embeddedness of the sermons in pluralistic everyday practices is due to a specific connection between two goals: On the one hand the passing on of traditional religious knowledge and corresponding moral attitudes and on the other hand entertainment – “Islamic oratory appears as a pious activity that is also enjoyable.”^[83] Accordingly, one can observe “synergies being created between preaching traditions and contemporary culture industries.”^[84]

This is a good example of the character of sermons as a ResourceAssemblage, since here elements from different contexts – preaching and culture industries – come together and yet form a new, albeit heterogeneous, unit. The effectiveness and popularity of sermons lies precisely in the strategic connection “of cultural materials and references within the knowledge of [the] audiences.”^[85] In this way, the sermon affects “by mobilizing many voices, languages, and registers, and by calling upon many genres of verbal performance, not all of them religious”.^[86] This includes singing and reciting Quranic verses, storytelling in local dialects, the use of a special, local-regionally used youth language (gaul), humorous interludes, “songs from the popular charts”,^[87] interaction with the listeners^[88] such as the “responsive loop”^[89] and the targeted use of body language (body movement). Millie calls this sermon style “multivoiced” due to the combination of various elements.^[90]

In addition, there have always been and still are preachers who do not incorporate much of popular media cultural styles into their preaching, but rather – for the sake of valorizing the content – cultivate an ‘official’ style of speech.^[91] According to Millie, this “turn to diversity in religious communication” can be observed since the 1970 s.^[92]

Millie compares the two styles and types of preaching outlined above in detail using two exemplary preachers (Kyai Haji Al-Jauhari and Shiddiy Amien).^[93] The comparison focuses on three aspects: Firstly, the “generic variation, meaning the intertextuality and polyphony generated by orator’s use of languages, dialects, registers, speech act types, performance genres, ways of speaking, existing texts, and discursive structures”. Secondly, “the preachers’ skillful deployment of affective strategies” and thirdly, “the reflexivity that enables preachers to establish sympathetic dialogue with their listeners.”^[94] What seems decisive to us is that these two concepts of popular and official preaching are kept apart by their respective images of the listener.

For the listeners, however, the participation in such different ResourceCultures of the sermon enables them to experience themselves as being equally connected to tradition and modernity, as being part of local-regional and national contexts. The listeners are present in ‘two bodies’: “The regional focus signals a distinction between two different listening subjects: a media consumer attuned to norms of national publicness and one engaged in daily undertaking of an embodied nature. Many Bandung Muslims feel comfortable embodying both subjectivities but are aware of the differences between them.”^[95]

In order to grasp the social dimension of preaching, in our sense the efficacy of the resource, sermon styles cannot therefore be described without taking into account the specific cultural practices of the listeners. Preachers have to “engage with the cultural competencies of his listeners.”^[96] It is only in this way that community is constructed by the preaching event. Millie describes this process as “embodied sociability”^[97] or “embodied participation” due to the performative character of the sermons.^[98]

In his recently published study, Max Stille also examines this performative-aesthetic logic of sermons.^[99] Like Millie, he does not focus on the strictly formalized and also linguistically ritualized Friday sermons, but rather takes a look at the sermon gatherings that are extremely popular in Bangladesh (oẏāj māhfil/waʿẓ maḥfil/waz mahfils/sermon gatherings).^[100] His contribution can be seen as a good example for describing such sermon gatherings as ResourceComplexes. These are a visible and audible practice of public religious life, usually based on the meteorological calendar. This means that the meetings, which sometimes last up to six hours, usually take place in winter and not during the monsoon season. They are mainly organised by local committees. Often there are several preachers, the most important one at the end. The focus of Stille’s research is the special poetics of these speech events. To this end he uses the term ‘genre’ – “genres as open systems of texts, defined by multiple and varied criteria, which can be formal, structural, or thematic.”^[101] He focuses on the emotionality of the sermon. This is also staged here by turning the listeners into co-performers:^[102] by means of questions, to which the listeners answer, by increasing the volume of the answer, by incorporating gestures etc.: “Preacher and audience are equally responsible for a successful performance.”^[103]

The aim of the study is thus – on the basis of the waz mahfils – to evaluate the aesthetic-literary and historical situation of sermons as a specific genre of religious communication. For this purpose, “key linguistic and narratological features of the sermons” are analyzed.^[104] Among the linguistic features are the so-called code switching – each of the languages used (Bengali, Urdu, Farsi, Rohingya, English, Arabic) has a specific function –, the (re-)citation of Quranic verses as well as aphorisms and poems in other languages (e. g. Urdu) and translations: “Translation is part of the preachers’ poetic prose and evolves dynamically over the course of the sermon. Preachers build upon and shape the language perception, competency and connoisseurship of the listeners”.^[105] The main part of the sermon consists of narratives, both about the Prophet, Islamic saints and everyday events of the listeners. “By including such narratives, the preacher’s speech during the sermon is always related to another act of telling, such as hagiography or the transmission of the word of God to the early Muslim community.”^[106] At the same time, the narratives serve as a moral guide, because they offer role models to the listeners.^[107] In addition to these linguistic and narratological aspects, there is also the musical aspect, especially the melodicity of the sermon. “The melodic voice is crucial to explain the deep interrelation of religious, bodily and emotional experience in waz mahfils.”^[108] The analysis of the so-called “prose chanting”^[109] identifies the voice, rhythm and dynamics as constitutive for the sermon and its sociality. “For the collective experiences of sermon congregations, their sonic dimension is by far the most important. Synchronization of emotional experience is achieved through rhythmic patterns of communication between preacher and audience.”^[110]

In this way, the sermon becomes part of popular culture and “shapes subjectivities and ways of imagining and embodying community.”^[111]

Through the medialization and globalization of certain popular cultural patterns, individual preachers then can become significant beyond the local area. The growing diaspora of Bengali-speaking people also promotes this process. The “diaspora draws on long-established cultural resources: the travelling preacher not only mediates between the religious texts and their interpretation and relation to the listeners’ horizon, but is also a mediator between regions and classes.”^[112] In the sense of our concept, the diaspora becomes an essential aspect of the ResourceAssemblage of preaching, which dynamizes and culturally transforms the resource.

Charles Hirschkind reconstructed this connection of local cultural, rhetorical, and aesthetic practices with medialization phenomena and the resulting growing public influence of sermons in an influential study on cassette sermons in Egypt.^[113] Both, Millie and Stille, refer to this work, both in agreement and disagreement. Fifteen years ago, this study was the starting point for perceiving Islamic sermons in particular as a resource for the transformation of societies, and not only to focus on their negative image, which builds on the suspicion of fundamentalism. It is based on several months’ stays in Cairo from 1994 to 1997.

While Millie’s focus is on the analysis of a situational group of listeners, i. e. the concrete preaching event and thus the heterogeneity of the listeners, Hirschkind shows how a common ethos of preachers and listeners is created through the sermon. Listeners and preachers are connected by the presupposed and intended agreement to ethically develop their own person and society. The sermons are “part of a complex ethical and political project”^[114] which aims at “social responsibility, pious comportment, and devotional practice”.^[115] In the sense of our concept of resources, one could also see in this the values which the participants in the sermon adhere to.

Basically, it is about a religious revival and renewal. In many Islamic countries, the cassette sermons were of central importance for this, because often TV and radio are subject to state control, cassettes (‘small-media’) became important for the distribution of sermons. “These media were one of the major factors contributing to the emergence of a Muslim counter-public relatively untouched by state control and organized according to transnational communication patterns.”^[116] There are two reasons for this strong impact: accessibility and easy reproducibility. According to Hirschkind, a decentralized counter-public has also emerged in Egypt.^[117] Because sermons serve the (self-)formation of ethical subjects,^[118] listening is a religious activity, or more precisely: a practice of self-empowerment, as Hirschkind argues following Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. The responsibility for the success of the sermon and thus for the processes of value creation and valorization therefore always lies with the listener, not only with the preacher. The listener is held to change his moral-ethical behaviour. The hierarchy between listeners and preachers becomes more fluid due to the medium. Modern mass communication and social disciplining are intertwined. The cassette sermons are derived from classical sermons, because they have developed from the Friday sermons but also transformed themselves taking up impulses from pop culture. They “combine classical sermon elements with languages and narrative forms rooted in such diverse genres as modern political oratory, television dramas, radio news broadcasts, and cinematic montage.”^[119] The latter in particular also leads to a visualization of rhetoric. “Instead of citing texts, [the preacher] presents scenes of speech, scenes crafted through a continuous shifting between direct and indirect discourse, between narrative and impersonation.”^[120] In summary, Hirschkind speaks of “rhetorical innovations”,^[121] to which the cassette sermons owe their popularity and impact. The sermons also serve as entertainment.^[122]

Cassette sermons cannot trace their claim of authority back to any institutional legitimatization. This is why the significance of the preacher is heightened in the process of medialisation. “As a media personality speaking within the space and time defined by cassette media practices, [the preacher’s] discourse cannot be authorized by the institutions of the mosque and the Friday sermon”.^[123] Hirschkind exemplifies this by referring to the blind preacher Shaykh Abd al-Hamid Kishk. He “has the status of a virtuoso performer”,^[124] because of his “rhetoric of visual realism and a style of representation deeply indebted to cinematic technique”.^[125]

Overall, the cassette sermons succeed in integrating “modes of attention and styles of consumption”.^[126] They are interwoven with modern consumer society and its patterns of reception as well as with fundamental aesthetic-cultural logics. This is an example of the importance of concrete socio-cultural dynamics, which on the one hand shape the sermon as a resource, but on the other hand are also influenced by this resource. This interplay is often decisive for the popularity of certain resources.

This aspect, as must be pointed out in conclusion, is time and again also brought to the fore when explaining the success of Evangelical preachers. So Uta Andrea Balbier has in several texts pointed to the market conformity of Billy Graham’s early sermons and sermon performances, which was essential for his initial successes. “Graham’s mission was characterized on one side by a highly traditional message combining conservative values and a fundamentalist theology and, on the other side, by his modern revival techniques, his use of mass media, and his appearance as an American, suburban, middle-class consumer.”^[127] It was thanks to this that Graham was received and met with acceptance in the 1950 s in German-speaking countries and in the local churches with their longing for a re-Christianization. Graham’s culture of preaching and religion at this time was linked to the adoption of the US-American consumer model. “Graham embodied the idea that religiosity and a generous 1950 s consumer lifestyle were compatible. At a time when German Christians’ kitchen appliances were changing as quickly as their travel culture, Graham reconciled their faith with the new world of consumption.”^[128]

With the transformation of West German consumer orientation and the establishment of an anti-American attitude (especially in connection with the Vietnam War), this acceptance waned: an example of how socio-cultural dynamics also have an impact on the valuation of resources.

To the same extent, therefore, that cultural patterns are globalized, styles of preaching are also globalized, without, of course, the connection to local contexts being dissolved.