Spectacle and the Staging of Power in Brazilian Neo-Pentecostalism

Abstract

New technologies of communication and a reconfigured global, political, and economic system at the turn of the twenty-first century undoubtedly alter the conditions and contexts in which religions have traditionally operated. In Brazil, urbanization, the retrenchment of the state, and the consolidation of a society of mass consumption are also part of this changing landscape, as are the social exclusion and violence that have intensified and accompanied this process. Secularization, including that of the Brazilian state, proceeds unabated, and the ranks of those without swell with every decade. More than the issue of its relevance to modern life, however, religion in contemporary Brazil contends with the problem of communication in a thoroughly media-dominated society. Over the past two decades, television in Brazil has emerged as an innovative arena for religious entrepreneurship and, in the slow erosion of Roman Catholicism as the dominant faith, is helping redefine the role and significance of religion in the public realm. This article foregrounds the drama and discourse of exorcism in Brazilian Pentecostal churches against the changing landscape of religious institutions and globalized social transformations. Along with the rise of religious broadcasting, exorcism, a thriving practice in many of the newer Pentecostal Christian denominations that preach a gospel of prosperity promising instant wealth and health, has gained importance in many churches. As spectacle and visible display, exorcism links ideas about self-transformation and empowerment with the universe of popular religious discourse. At the same time, the staging of power through this proselytic medium draws on and reworks a set of images that grounds Christian selfhood in the enactment of material and territorial connections of the church to the Holy Land. Exorcism is part of a broader project of evoking the universal transhistorical and deterritorialized power of Christian dominion in terms that speak directly to local cultural