Mediating Miracle Truth

This chapter focuses on the academically neglected area of miracles and their sustainability, not just because they characterize the effervescent qualities of Pentecostal conviction, but also because they illustrate its fragility. Using the research done on Kyrgyzstan's largest Pentecostal church, the Church of Jesus Christ, this chapter identifies the attractiveness of the Pentecostal message to those struggling with the vagaries of life in a former Soviet state. Miracles are central to this process, circulating through sermons and informal settings and allowing congregants to actively engage with questions of divine intervention and life transformation. However, they need to gain social and semiotic recognition as miracles first. Furthermore, the truth of miracles runs the risk of failure in those contexts where the miraculous is needed the most.

Mediating Culture

This chapter seeks to show that Pentecostal musicians struggle with both the potential gain and loss of charisma owing to the current mergers between P/e and electronic media, by drawing from the case of a renowned gospel singer, Elaine Martins. Not only have media technologies transformed and expanded the “reproduction of charisma,” but they have also generated controversies about the sincerity of the performers as converts and evangelists. To defend themselves in the face of the commercialization of the gospel music industry, singers integrate prayers and testimonies into their recordings and performances. This chapter thus underscores the need to take seriously the spiritual aesthetic of popular music and its technological (re)mediation, as well as the structural life conditions and cultural backgrounds of the people involved, in understanding the localization and globalization (what some call the “glocalization”) of P/e in settings such as Brazil.

Feminine Habitus

This chapter explores middle-class women's experiences and encounters with evangelicalism and patriarchy in South Korea, which is renowned for the phenomenal success of its evangelical churches. It focuses on a female, small-group culture to study the ways women become constituted as new feminine subjects through the development of a novel evangelical habitus—one that is constituted by new dispositions, both embodied and linguistic, and is developed through ritualized rhetorical, bodily, and spiritual practices. Through participation in cell groups, the chapter reveals how women sought healing for experiences of “intense domestic suffering,” notably when attempts at other solutions failed, such as psychotherapy or shamanistic intervention. Yet in spite of the empowered sense of self that many achieved through these therapeutic, charismatically oriented communities, women were still resubjugated to the structures of social and religious patriarchy.

Politics of Prayer

This chapter analyzes formations of citizenship among Guatemalan Pentecostals, notably in relation to a particular cause—the decriminalization of drugs. It recounts how this cause was championed by Harold Caballeros, a former foreign minister and one of Guatemala's leading Pentecostal politicians. This was an extension of the prayer campaigns he had led against drug trafficking in Guatemala. In this connection, churches such as the Guatemala City megachurch El Shaddai provide a body of literature that instructs members on how to win back the capital as well as the country from the Devil. Through field research, this chapter illustrates how interceding in a spiritual war was primarily enacted as a private and personal activity, with prayer sheets kept at bedsides and workplaces and in individual Bibles, rather than used in public spaces.

Politics of Sovereignty

This chapter explores how Pentecostal and evangelical movements are increasingly engaging in aspects of governance and partisan policy in Angola's public sphere, and how they are negotiating shifting developments and evolving state-sponsored religious policies. These developments raise the question of how such movements translate their transnational, universalizing ethos and narrative into specific, located engagements with national regimes. From the bottom-up perspective of anthropology, the “nationalization” of religion is anything but linear, as the complex field of P/e movements in this context reveals. Categories of foreignness and sovereignty, as well as economic value, intervene in the intersection of government and religious institutions in Angola.

Mediating Money

This chapter examines how Pentecostal and charismatic beliefs and practices regarding spiritual warfare entail a specific stance toward materiality. Most of the scholarship to date has centered on the human body as the main material form in which spiritual powers are held to reside, but this chapter seeks to explore the ways the battle against diabolic powers is fought through the handling of physical objects. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in south-central Tanzania, where P/e has experienced significant growth over the last three decades, this chapter provides a range of ethnographic sketches of how people pray over money to cleanse it from evil powers. Using the lens of the “anthropology of things,” the chapter argues that coins and bills constitute a particularly significant object of mediation and a pointer to how adherents of P/e believe they can influence the spiritual world to generate wealth and prosperity in miraculous ways.

Affect

This chapter argues that by concentrating on affect, we can think about language and embodiment together without privileging either term. To demonstrate, the chapter draws on eight years of ethnographic engagement with the Vineyard, a hybrid evangelical/Pentecostal California-originated church planting movement. Here, the chapter defines affect as “the intensities and energies found in a particular moment or object that has consequences on others.” It shows how affect serves to structure both linguistic and embodied performance and suggests that Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity has been particularly successful in using heightened levels of affect to expand, reinvigorate, and reconfigure individual and collective identities. Tracing the “lines of affect” would thus develop greater appreciation for the growth of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as a greater theoretical understanding of broader religiosities.

Personhood

This chapter draws on fieldwork on evangelical megachurches in Knoxville, Tennessee. Focusing on the social interactions and spiritual aspirations of a men's fellowship group, this chapter argues that these groups should not be read in solely individualistic terms, as only reinforcing Protestant ethics of self-discipline and self-actualization. As this ethnographic involvement in evangelicalism as a lived religion reveals, evangelicals are taught to become involved in the spiritual and emotional lives of others and to allow such involvement by others. This emphasis on what the chapter terms the “immersive sociality” of these relational networks and communities of practice thus challenges—without completely displacing—the long-standing popular and academic assumption that the values of evangelical theology are primarily individuating in their emphasis and effects.

Politics of Tradition

This chapter shows how the histories of Polynesian island nations are very much bound up with Christianity. The growth of charismatic movements in Polynesia, against a backdrop of rapid social change and transnational circulations between the island states and strong diasporic communities in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, has resulted in a type of “nonconformist liberation.” Polynesian youth are drawn to the more individuated understanding of moral consciousness, as well as the new possibilities for bodily movements and cultural expression such as dance. Thus, local culture, the chapter suggests, might in fact have a positive moral valency for contemporary Christians.

Orientations

This chapter concerns how Pentecostal believers evaluate, sustain, and create moral geographies of their inner selves, their surroundings, and the wider world in their charismatic practices. It explores these practices based on fieldwork conducted with migrants from Ghana in London, but also on research in transnational Pentecostal networks of Ghanaian-founded churches based in Berlin and Hamburg. While the focus is on how moral subject positions are created in this “simultaneously universal and deeply personal” movement, the chapter also emphasizes that Pentecostal practices are inevitably relational. Importantly, this chapter proposes that the question of rupture that dominated the anthropological literature for quite some time needs to be reformulated in light of the diversification of the Pentecostal scene; for young Ghanaian migrants born into born-again families, the challenge is how to preserve these moral boundaries.