Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream by Tony Tian-Ren Lin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream by Tony Tian-Ren Lin Justin Michael Doran Tony Tian-Ren Lin, Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) The intersection of immigration, economic life, and charismatic Christianity has never felt so vital to understanding America as it does in the wake of 2020. Political coalitions have been reforged by the powerful popular response to these issues and these communities. And yet scholars and journalists have worked with a paucity of serious inquiries into the communities at the center of this whirlwind: Latin American immigrants to the United States whose Christian devotion has come to mediate the fraught promises of economic prosperity. Tony Tian-Ren Lin's book, Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream, provides this much-needed detail. The study includes deep, qualitative research into three Spanish-speaking congregations in Virginia, California, and New York, bringing them into a single analysis of, as Lin calls them, "Prosperity Gospel Latinos." The reverend Lin immigrated from Argentina and received his doctorate in the sociology of religion, making his insight into these communities both methodologically rigorous and sensitive to the faith of his subjects. The idea that drives Lin's analysis is that "Prosperity Gospel Pentecostal" theology enables Latinos in the United States to experience the meaningful arc of the American Dream despite confronting the serious barriers to realizing it in their lives. Or as Lin puts it, "it keeps [End Page 119] the American dream alive, even when everything around them feels like an American myth or even nightmare" (17). The book is part of the new Where Religion Lives series by University of North Carolina Press, which has the stated goal of publishing accessibly written ethnographies from the discipline of religious studies. It is easy to see why Lin's book was published in the series, as it is exceptionally clear in both prose and argumentation. The book proceeds thematically around the animating, titular argument. It begins with an outline of the three churches and the communities cultivated by their prosperity practices. It then decodes the theological logic operating within these churches, especially those beliefs particular to the prosperity gospel. The following chapter explains how church members come to convert to this Christian devotion, and the final chapter describes the social (particularly the familial) structure that emerges from this devotion. In addition to being well-organized as an ethnography, Lin consistently roots his analysis in human stories that remind the reader that these religious structures are inhabited by real people living complex lives. The second and third chapters of the work (on theology and conversion) are both good candidates for assigning to students, as they would allow real conversation about the meaning this movement has in American society. As an ethnographic study, Prosperity Gospel Latinos and their American Dream is thoroughly humane. That is, Tony Lin treats his subjects compassionately and writes about them seriously. As the most indispensable element of any systematic study of a community, we should regard this work as a success. As a work of scholarship, the book succumbs to several pitfalls of ethnographic studies. Qualitative studies in the sociology of religion occasionally neglect rigorous historical background on the movements that appear in the context of their research, and that is the case here. There is only a cursory historical introduction to the Pentecostal movement that leans toward the synthesizing overviews of Harvey Cox and away from the detailed work of scholars such as Grant Wacker or Cecil Robeck. There are essential gestures to the most important scholars of Latino Pentecostalism—Gastón Espinosa, Daniel Ramirez, Arlene Sánchez-Walsh—but no extended engagement with the questions posed by those scholars. Instead, this is a book engaged with a narrower subset of scholarship within the sociology of religion. Lin's choice of conversation partners has clearly shaped the study—an informant given the pseudonym Gerardo seems like a nod to Gerardo Martí, whose influence is apparent in both the general feel of this study and a back cover blurb. Martí is the author of lucid qualitative studies of multiethnic churches as seen, for example, in A Mosaic of...