Neither Jew nor Greek? Class, Ethnicity, and Race in the Pentecostal Movement in Africa

Abstract

Discussions about Pentecostalism often emphasize its pneumatic energy, its potential for crafting new selfhoods for believers, and how it privileges the rhetoric of power to produce miracles over actual practices, class, ethnicity, and race—all inexorably imbricated in how the movement performs “Holy Ghost power.” In Chap. 11, Ukah argues that the theological claim that God does not recognize flesh or human color is contradicted in practice when Pentecostal leaders and spiritual entrepreneurs privilege certain persons because of their skin color, origins, or financial buoyancy. In Africa, where prosperity Pentecostalism is popular and has attracted a large following, wealth and possession marks and separates the saved from the unsaved, the chosen from those marked for perdition in this life and the next. African Pentecostalism appropriates class, ethnicity, and race and imbricates them with new meanings and power.