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Over the past two decades, dark and apocalyptic tones have come to dominate many areas of social and cultural theory. This chapter argues that understanding social life calls not only for focus on the darkness of our current times but also for bringing the question of the good to the centre of social science inquiry as a way of studying the workings of aspirational and imaginative endeavours in people’s lives. Drawing on the history of social theory and a rapidly growing interest in morality, ethics and values within and beyond the social sciences, we present the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social and cultural life.

This chapter examines moral threads interwoven in the thoughts and actions of conservative evangelicals in relation to the place of money in their lives. I argue that as well as a calculative ethic shaped by modes of economic value, we also see a desire for a value beyond value, in which the good is imagined in relation to a transcendent grace that both exceeds and vaolorizes capitalist regimes. Approaching conservative evangelicals through the lens of the good moves us beyond the ‘othering’ of nonliberal religious movements, while also inviting attention to contradictions and eruptions that evade the logic of capital.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of the everyday religious lives of conservative evangelical Christians in London. Conservative evangelicalism has attracted increased public attention in recent years as a number of Christian groups have become increasingly visible in arguing that Christians are being marginalized in British society as their lifestyles are threatened by universalizing processes associated with modernization. Seeking to move beyond simplistic stereotypes of evangelicals that arise from polarizing media narratives, I explore how members of a large conservative evangelical congregation experience and fmd ways of negotiating concerns, uncertainties and human frailties that shape\ud social life more broadly. My central argument is that their experience of God as coherent and transcendent, mediated through word-based practices, both responds to and intensifies their consciousness of internal moral fragmentation, binding them more closely in their sense of dependence on God and each other. Situated in debates about subjectivity and modernity in the sociology of religion, the anthropology of Christianity and urban theory, I analyse how conservative evangelicals faith is patterned through their being shaped as modern, urban subjects according to nonns of interaction internalized outside the church and their development of moral and temporal orientations that rub against these. Their self-identification as 'aliens and strangers in this world thus, I argue, both articulates and constructs a desire to be different within the metropolitan contexts they inhabit, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their habituated modes of practice, hopes and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world. I demonstrate how focusing on both their embodied, word-based practices and their experience of the personality of God helps develop understanding of this form of religious intersubjectivity and its social effects, and\ud argue that this approach opens up new avenues for understanding evangelicalism, lived religion and everyday ethical practice.

This article examines how non-religious children experience acts of collective worship and prayer in primary school settings and analyses how they negotiate religion and their non-religious identities in these events. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork examining non-religious childhoods and collective worship in three English primary schools, the authors explore how non-religious children demonstrate their agency when confronted with particular boundaries and concepts related to religion and non-religion in school contexts. Attending to the experiences, perspectives, and practices of non-religious children adds to our understanding of the varieties of non-religion, which has to date largely focused on elite, adult populations. Focusing on non-religious children’s experiences of prayer reveals how these children did not experience tensions between praying to God and their non-religious identities and articulated their own interpretations of these practices, deepening understanding of the lived realities of non-religious cultures and identities.

This article examines the interplay of different processes of cultural and subjective fragmentation experienced by conservative evangelical Anglicans, based on an ethnographic study of a congregation in central London. The author focuses on the evangelistic speaking practices of members of this church to explore how individuals negotiate contradictory norms of interaction as they move through different city spaces, and considers their response to tensions created by the demands of their workplace and their religious lives. Drawing on Georg Simmel's 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', the author argues that their faith provides a sense of coherence and unity that responds to experiences of cultural fragmentation characteristic of everyday life in the city, while simultaneously leading to a specific consciousness of moral fragmentation that is inherent to conservative evangelicalism.

What is the significance of the concepts of ‘life’ and ‘death’ for different religious and non-religious groups? This chapter aims to draw out deeper understanding of practices of connection and separation between religious and non-religious groups through examining affinities between how different Christian and non-religious groups engage with notions of ‘life’ and ‘death’, drawing on qualitative sociological research. Although questions of life and death might appear perennial concerns for religion, I explore here the particular contemporary significance of ideas of ‘life’ and ‘death’ within the moral landscapes of different religious and non-religious groups. The chapter considers the significance of the idea of ‘life’ for an ‘open’ evangelical church, the Sunday Assembly, and the School of Life, and practices of reflecting on ‘death’ in Death Cafés, drawing this together with Georg Simmel’s writing on life and its interrelations with death. I conclude by suggesting that attending to modes of practical engagement with ideas of ‘life’ and ‘death’ across these different religious and non-religious groups, rather than focusing solely on the propositional content of beliefs about life and death, opens up opportunities for reflection on common existential grounds of experience, moving beyond assumptions that relations between these groups are necessarily antagonistic.