Neopentecostalism, Marketing, and New Technologies of Self

Chapter 5 explores the instrumentality of South America’s megachurches, with particular emphasis on how they have translated global Pentecostal doctrines, most notably the near-magical tropes of church growth and of prosperity gospel, to address culturally specific concerns within the larger context of late modernity and neoliberalism. The churches’ tropes of evangelization, church growth, education, improved family dynamics, and other capacity-building techniques, often framed in religious language and methods, can and often do provide believers with what I call “new technologies of self” that help them cope in a secular world that they philosophically abjure. In particular, the Brazilian megadenomination Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus uses modern R&D strategies to position itself in a given spiritual marketplace, as evinced here by a case study in the church’s work among Spanish-speaking immigrants in the United States.

Finding the Seeds of the Word

Chapter 1 takes a close look at Christianity’s most recent effort to engage local culture directly, inculturation theology, which began as a top-down approach to tame syncretism into a controlled orthodoxy that was respectful of culture, but which in recent decades has evolved into a generative bottom-up method of “making theology” in a way that affirms local beliefs and conditions in ways that are, at the very least, parallel to Christianity and sometimes fully compatible with it. Inculturation is an approach to religion and culture that is unique in that it is a Christian approach with an unusual willingness to seek out and consciously learn from other spiritual traditions.

Earthquakes, Trauma, and Celestial Remedies

Chapter 4 examines the effects of trauma on religion, both as a spiritual refugee and as a source of conflict and encounter between competing cosmological epistemologies. It pursues this through an examination of Pentecostalism in Haiti, where many thousands of Haitians flocked to churches in the aftermath of the catastrophic earthquake of January 2010. Many Haitians used these spaces as spiritual safe sites from which they could begin to cope with psychological and physical trauma. At the same time, Haiti’s Pentecostal spiritual warriors, placing blame for the earthquake and its many other historical woes on Haiti’s Vodou religion, declared “celestial war” on Haiti’s native religion, setting off an embodied turf war for Haiti’s soul.

Turning to the Dark Side

Chapter 3 deals with the dark side of Spiritual Warfare by examining the noncanonical popular saints and witches whose supernatural powers some Mexicans seek out for illegal activities or for the kinds of transactions that they believe fall on the other side of the Manichaean divide between good and evil—a repost to contemporary challenges that both draws from and innovates from traditional popular religiosity. It is only natural that we include both here, since they regularly meet on the battlefield of spiritual contestation, as Pentecostal practices such as Spiritual Warfare resignify social problems, conflict, and often “traditional” cultural as literally demonic in origin.

Epilogue

This is the summing up of this major themes of this book, which situates World Christianity in Latin America with a series of case studies. It has explored vernacular herumanutics and cultural “reclamation” of Christianity from its European vestigates, the spirit-filled aspects of Latin American religion that involve Spiritual Warfare on one side and indigenous or occult evocations on another; it examines these interactions even more closely in the observing how Haitians interpret trauma from a religious perspective, and it concludes with a discussion of neopentecostal megachurches and new technologies of self. This epilogue returns to some of the questions posed introduction about how new Christianities in Latin America interact with modernity for better and for worse. It also emphasizes how vernacular Latin American Christianity blends the novel with the numinous, the sacred with materiality, community values with consumerist greed, traditional cosmovision with global religious networks, neoliberal capitalism with magic, saints with criminals, so long as the faithful retain an unwavering belief in supremacy and divine power.

Tricksters, Gods, and Global Pentecostalism in Almolonga, Guatemala

Chapter 2 visits the Guatemalan village of Almolonga, a K’iche’ Maya town known throughout the region both as the “food basket of Central America” and the “city of miracles” due to its high economic productivity and overall prosperity. Residents of Almolonga, who are overwhelmingly Pentecostals, attribute their success to the global Pentecostal practice of Spiritual Warfare. In return for casting out the demons and pre-Hispanic idols that controlled their town and reclaiming it in the name of Jesus, Alamogueños believe that God has transformed their village beyond measure, building a religious modernity that both reified their local Maya habitus even as it directly repudiates key elements for their traditional identity.

Introduction

This work is a historically infused study of the intersection of local encounters with global religion (Christianity) in Latin America. Using a mixture of deep archival research and ethnographic methods, this book discusses how everyday people inscribe supernormal spirit power (in a variety of guises) with the ability to provide alternative sources of authority and validate “otros saberes” (other knowledges or epistemologies) within the context of specific cultures to bring about ...