“The crusade is the vision”: branding charisma in a global pentecostal ministry

Abstract

This paper explores the rhetorical properties of mass-mediated revival spectacles staged by Reinhard Bonnke, a German-born evangelist who has long worked in Sub-Saharan Africa and claims to have converted millions of Africans to Christianity. The swooping pans of these massive African crusades, which form the establishing shots in proselytic videos, model Bonnke's particular Pentecostal visual ideology. In doing so, these images bear material witness to Bonnke's reputation as a global, itinerant missionary-preacher. Stills extracted from video footage condense the transformative energy of the event into portable icons which, recirculated as book inserts, posters and Website banners, work as identifying logos for his ministry. Bonnke's particular success, we argue, lies in the ways that the visual reconstitutes the charismatic core of Pentecostalism in connection with his development of a “brand scenario” that works both to distinguish his ministry within the corporate Christian world and to foster the growth of corporate Christianity as capitalist enterprise. This convergence of branding and theology provides a compelling example of how moving image, graphic image and word-text work together intertextually to promote a visual pedagogy that is at once distinctive and familiar to Charismatics worldwide: a disciplining of vision toward Pentecostal ideas, objects and histories.