A Pentecostal Modernity? Response to Charles Taylor’s “A Catholic Modernity?”

Abstract

Abstract There are somewhere between 200 million and 600 million Pentecostal/ Charismatic Christians in the world today. Most of them live in the “majority world,” and two thirds are women. Pentecostals are proud of being modern and frequently boast of it. Yet “Pentecostal modernity” is not a straightforward clone of the intellectual and political history of Europe and the North Atlantic. It contains paradoxical elements that can be plausibly interpreted as evidence of purposefully moral selectiveness by Pentecostals among the items in the “modern” cultural program. They in effect help to “heal the wounds of modernity.” This account of Pentecostal modernity also seeks to show that in two particular respects Pentecostal modernity might be considered a “correction” of Charles Taylor’s western model of modernity: in regarding human flourishing as spiritually sanctioned; and in retaining a porous model of the self, vertically open to possession by the Spirit or by forces of evil, and horizontally open by retaining some “dividual” characteristics of embeddedness with others.