Hoover and Umaña patriarchadicy as the foundational myth of Pentecostalism in Chile (1910–1964)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This research seeks to elucidate the role of two historical figures of Chilean Pentecostalism, W. C. Hoover and Manuel Umaña, in the construction of patriarchadicy as the foundational and pervasive ideology of Pentecostalism. Our theoretical approach is based on the structuralist constructivism of Berger and Bourdieu. Berger allows us to consider religion from the standpoint of theodicy and Bourdieu from that of masculine dominance. Both of them have allowed us to generate a new conceptual proposal, which we have called patriarchadicy: an ideology vindicating the superiority of men and the inferiority of women as religious leaders. According to it, man’s physical strength is interwoven with the moral strength of woman; man’s moral weakness, with the physical weakness of woman. Thus, the socio-ecclesiastico-familial organicism is reinvented to generate an assumed ontological complementarity of man-head-leader and idoneous woman-hand-helpmeet. Our methodology has included a review of the two institutional publications, Chile Pentecostal: (1910–1927) and its second period (1933–1979), and Fuego de Pentecostés (1928–2019).