Pentecostal Discourse Research Articles

God’s Diplomats. How Pentecostal Mega-Church Pastors are Transforming African Foreign Policymaking

Last decade brought further increase in popularity and outreach of Pentecostal pastors-evangelists and the expansion of new mega-churches in Sub-Saharan Africa. Media savvy and marketing-skilled charismatic “holy men” perform multiple functions, including that of political actors, increasingly influential, and indispensable in the election cycles of multiple African states, most notably Anglophone ones. Recognising the pivotal role of Pentecostal constituencies, political players, such as candidates in presidential elections seek mega-church leaders’ blessings or a favourable political prophecy. State officials reciprocate with adopting policies which resonate with their message. This mutual relationship and mainstreaming of Pentecostal discourse affects the overall political culture of young, African democracies. As the new brand of Pentecostalism grows on economic deprivation and disillusionment with the state, it also begins to foster, not just metaphorically, an alternative order and set of values. This comes with religiously driven perceptions of pastors’ powers, which makes them seem potentially more effective and legitimate than secular, democratic leaders, and state institutions. Thanks to those credentials, as well as their widely developed networks, influential pastors begin to make inroads into African foreign policymaking. The process of officialising Pentecostal actors as quasi-diplomats as well as absorbing their ideas and modus operandi into the foreign policy arena seem to contradict advancement of professionalism and transparency in diplomacy as functions of state capabilities. However, in some contexts, growth of their powers and outreach may work in favour of increasing African agency.

‘Thou shalt not worship idols’

Classic ethnographic studies focusing on traditional chieftaincy in Ghana, West Africa, have revolved around issues such as succession rules, installation rituals, or competition for positions of power. However, becoming and being a chief in a predominantly Christian society, like present-day Ghana, has raised new kinds of concerns. Many churches, particularly those that belong to the Pentecostal-charismatic movement, reject traditional ritual life aimed at ancestors and other kinds of spirits as immoral. Since chiefs are fundamentally ritual leaders, who perform sacrifices on behalf of their communities, chieftaincy has assumed an increasingly negative character in Pentecostal discourses. In them chieftaincy is often equated with ‘idol worship’ and thus in direct conflict with the Ten Commandments. Ethical rules of ‘world religions’, such as the Ten Commandments, transcend particularity and their strength is based on an impression that they are applicable everywhere. As pointed out by Webb Keane, this requires mediation work that makes the rules transportable and gives them a potential to be re-contextualized in different places. The article looks at how different interpretations of religious rules are used by Ghanaian Christians and chiefs when debating the in/compatibility of traditional chieftaincy with Christianity. These debates are understood as a part of a process of historical and cultural recontextualization, that is, determining what the commandments mean in the particular time and place that they inhabit.

Traditional Romani Christianity vs Pentecostal and neo-Protestant Christianity: A grounded picture of religiosity and spirituality among the Roma in the twenty-first century in Slovakia

Through the example of specific locations settled by the Roma population in Slovakia, the study offers a grounded picture of Romani religiosity and spirituality in the twenty-first century. The author provides a brief overview of the analytical grasping of this phenomenon in the scientific community, as well as remarks on the seemingly neutral analytical terms used for the description of religiosity and spirituality among the Roma, which may contain clichés or be eventually culturally and intellectually colonialist. Based on multi-sited ethnographies in Slovakia, the author elucidates how traditional Romani Christianity is confronted with Pentecostal and neo-Protestant Christianity, which are considered non-traditional within the traditionally Roman Catholic Slovakia. To avoid scientific exotization of Romani religious culture, the author describes the main elements of traditional Romani Christianity based on the emic insights of non-Pentecostal Roma from various localities and through the lenses of the Pentecostal discourse (converts and pastors). She also mentions the fluid and postmodern features of Romani Christianity, which have preserved numerous traditional elements fluidly mixed with post-traditional and ultra-modern forms of spirituality and religiosity.

“Biting the hand that feeds them? The case of Ghanaian Pentecostal discourse on ‘breaking from the past’”

ABSTRACT Ghanaian Pentecostal pastor-prophets encourage their members to break away from the ancestral past which is projected as a vessel of demonic operations responsible for mishaps in society. Yet traditional priestly actors have challenged the notion that indigenous religious imaginations and ritual spaces are a crucial platform where power and recognition are contested by some pastor-prophets. As such, these traditional priests have particularly warned pastor-prophets to desist from oppugning traditional religion or face exposure of their underground dealings with the traditionalists. In this paper, I reflect on confrontations between traditional priestly actors and neo-Pentecostal pastor-prophets in Ghana, arguing that such confrontations are a function of a power struggle as to who the ‘Big Men’ are in contemporary Ghanaian society. To understanding these confrontations, I contend further that there is the need to interrogate the differing points of continuity and disjuncture between these two traditions.

Protestant evangelical pilgrimages: hagiography, supernatural influence, and spiritual mapping

ABSTRACT Christian pilgrimage sites can be separated into three broad categories: Biblical sites (e.g. Jerusalem, Ephesus, Patmos, and other locations where significant events happen in the Biblical narratives); older Catholic and Anglican sites whose importance has been established over a long history of many centuries (e.g. the Vatican, Lourdes, Canterbury); and lastly, newer sites associated with more recently established Protestant denominations and groups such as Methodism, Lutheranism, Pentecostalism, and others. With a shorter history and lacking either the Biblical significance or the political or national dimension of Catholicism and Anglicanism, other Protestant sites can be considered “popular” or “excentric” sites. These construct their significance through strategies relying on evangelical and Pentecostal discourses and meanings, particularly the construction of great spiritual figures who wield supernatural and invisible influence over history and society. These constructions propose a Spiritual Mapping that is superimposed onto historical and political events, creating an alternative significance for touristic purposes. This paper examines two sites for Protestant evangelical pilgrimages, centered on the figures of John Wesley and Rees Howells, that demonstrate this touristic construction of protestant hagiography, supernatural influence, and Spiritual Mapping.

God is Big in Africa: Pentecostal Mega Churches and a Changing Religious Landscape

This Outlook paper reflects on the adjective “mega,” in contemporary African Pentecostal discourses. This is a version of Pentecostalism that holds that not only is God a big God but that everythin...

Wolfgang Vondey’s Structure for Systematic Pentecostal Theology

Wolfgang Vondey’s Pentecostal Theology: Living the Full Gospel is a tour de force in Pentecostal systematic theology. It is also the most articulate statement of the fivefold gospel’s power to explain the impulses of past Pentecostal spirituality and its constructive potential for future Pentecostal discourse. Combining both traditional and innovative systematic loci, Vondey’s project shows great promise for the enterprise of christologically oriented narrative theology. One looming question is whether the christocentrism of the full gospel can bear adequate witness to some of the details of Spirit christology. That is, can the full gospel, with its emphasis on Jesus actively bestowing the Holy Spirit on creatures, give proper place to Jesus passively receiving the Holy Spirit from the Father, without the full gospel’s structure undergoing fundamental transformation? While some ambiguities remain in Vondey’s attempts to employ both the full gospel and elements of Spirit christology in the same theological paradigm, he takes long strides towards integrating these two themes that have often competed with each other for space in Pentecostal theology.

Of Polluted Spirits and Compromised Identity: Pentecostal Depictions of Causality and the Repositioning of Human Agency in Cameroon

Thanks to the mass media, specifically television, Pentecostal discourses involving polluted human spirits and defective human agency are captured and disseminated in audio-visual form in Cameroon. These representations are about evil spirits residing in, as well as corrupting, the personality of innocent individuals. Victims of evil spirits are portrayed as colonized vessels incapable of exercising agency without the intervention of an all-powerful pastor. In this article, I expose the ways in which these representations of malevolent forces – that are strongly connected to aspects of African non-church religious beliefs – influence conversations between viewers, particularly to the extent that they express doubt about whether these forces really do affect people’s agency. The narratives doubting human agency as described in this article draw from Emmanuel TV representations of causality. This is further grounded in Cameroonians’ desire to align their spirits with benevolent forces through the intervention of pastor TB Joshua.

The power of submission: Self and community in Fijian Pentecostal discourse

Pentecostal Christianity can lead to moral tensions by advocating the impossible goal of freeing the interior self from social entanglements. But many Pentecostals see no tension between self and community. The Harvest Ministry, an independent Fijian Pentecostal church, encourages people to develop the interior self by submitting to a hierarchical church. This construction frees successful urban professionals from some social pressures and defines them as good Fijians committed to community above self with a special cultural ability to succeed in world Christianity and free enterprise. Constructing the self as embedded in a corporate community is a strategy most likely to appeal to those seeking access to a world community. [Pentecostalism, Christianity, individualism, dividuality, Fiji]

The Ambivalent Autonomy of Mobile “Pocăiți” between Vicovu de Sus, Romania and Turin, Italy after 1989

AbstractIntra-EU labour migration literature is fairly limited within migration studies and it has seldom considered migrants' embodied experiences and processes of subjectivation as a constitutive element of translocal economic transformations. The present paper focuses on the popular economies enacted by a segment of the migrant working class moving from Vicovu de Sus in Suceava district, Romania to Turin, Italy after 1989 as entangled in the production of “neoliberalism from below” (Gago, 2015). Mobilizing oral histories collected during an ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2012 and 2013, I will present some aspects related to the fields ofproductionandreproductionwithin the movements of migrants belonging to a pentecostal community affiliated to theCultul Penticostal – Biserica lui Dumnezeu Apostolică. Pentecostalism is here understood as a performative regime of truth and practices (Foucault, 1987; Marshall, 2009), through which migrant bodies perform processes of subjectivation to actively “inhabit” the borders of the State and Capital. Bukovinean pentecostal discourse, through an entrepreneurial drive, a cultural shift towards material prosperity and a strict gendered division of labour, seems to have fostered the creation of a self-organized translocal community whose economic practices obey/re-enact rather than escape/re-signify the dynamics of exploitation and dispossession proper of Romania's peripheral incorporation into contemporary global regimes of production, accumulation and division of labour.

Interaction between Pentecostals and local authorities in Russia: challenging secularity from below

ABSTRACTCertain researchers have maintained that the resurgence of religion in the Russian Federation is part of a process of desecularisation ‘from above’, following years of forced secularisation. This article postulates that, despite their status as members of what is considered a nontraditional religion, foreign to the Russian soil, Russian Pentecostal churches are actively engaged in a challenge to secularity but ‘from below’. I explore this hypothesis through the examination of three Pentecostal modes of action: social partnership, political partnership and global networking. Based on a qualitative, empirical study, this paper finds that the Pentecostal movement has forged close ties on a local and regional level with public authorities and that, through necessity and mutually overlapping interests, a certain cooperation and even complicity has developed between these local authorities and the organisations linked to the churches, thus facilitating the integration of specifically Pentecostal discourse into certain public structures. The study further shows that local and regional authorities have adopted globalised social work praxes territorialised by Pentecostals in an attempt to associate the current authoritarian regime with perceived forms of global modernity. At the same time I argue that the participation of the Pentecostal movement in a process of desecularisation is not an intentional outcome projected by the Russian regime but rather the consequence of economic and social urgency against a backdrop of a policy of New Public Management. I conclude that, due to the constantly shifting and often-arbitrary legal framework in which Pentecostals must operate in Russia today, the partnerships cultivated by the Pentecostal movement may prove to be unsustainable in the long term.

Minoritization and Pluralization

The emergence of Pentecostalism on the Brazilian scene has raised new questions about the way religion relates to the definition of a “people,” how religious minorities can be politically and legally integrated into the mainstream of national identity, and to what degree the state-religion relation is constitutive of society in a context of increasing sociocultural, religious, and political pluralization. The argument draws on the concept of minoritization proposed by William Connolly, against the background of Laclau’s problematic of the formation of a people as a hegemonic actor. An analysis of Pentecostal discourse on “the public” and “the people” reveals that Pentecostalism minoritized itself in response to perceived exclusion and this accentuated pluralization within it. An unintended effect of this logic was the fluidity of the boundary between sacred and profane, religious and secular. In a context of growing cultural, social, and political pluralization, these discursive practices have the potential to lead either to the aggiornamento of Pentecostalism or to the regressive closing of a populist right-wing discourse. A emergência pentecostal na cena pública brasileira tem colocado novas questões quanto à forma como a religião se relaciona à definição de um “povo,” como as minorias religiosas podem ser politica e legalmente integradas ao filão principal da identidade nacional, e em que medida a relação entre religião e estado é constitutiva da sociedade, num contexto de crescente pluralização socio-cultural, religiosa e política. O argumento desenvolve-se em torno do conceito de minoritização proposto por William Connolly, com base na problemática laclauniana da formação do povo como ator hegemônico. Uma análise do discurso pentecostal sobre “o público” e “o povo” revela que os pentecostais minoritizaram-se em resposta a uma percepção de exclusão e que a minoritização acentua a pluralização no interior do pentecostalismo. Um efeito não-pretendido dessa lógica é a fluidificação da fronteira entre sagrado e profano, religioso e secular. Num contexto de crescente pluralização cultural, social e política, essas práticas discursivas têm o potencial de aprofundarem o aggiornamento do pentecostalismo ou de seu fechamento regressivo num discurso populista de direita.

Pentecostalism, Political Masculinity and Citizenship

Africa has become a key site of masculinity politics, that is, of mobilisations and struggles where masculine gender is made a principal theme and subjected to change. Pentecostalism is widely considered to present a particular form of masculinity politics in contemporary African societies. Scholarship on African Pentecostal masculinities has mainly centred around the thesis of the domestication of men, focusing on changes in domestic spheres and in marital and intimate relations. Through an analysis of a sermon series preached by a prominent Zambian Pentecostal pastor, this article demonstrates that Pentecostal discourse on adult, middle- to upper-class masculinity is also highly concerned with men’s roles in sociopolitical spheres. It argues that in this case study the construction of a born-again masculinity is part of the broader Pentecostal political project of national redemption, which in Zambia has particular significance in light of the country constitutionally being a Christian nation. Hence the article examines how this construction of Pentecostal masculinity relates to broader notions of religious, political and gendered citizenship.

Ontological (in)Security and African Pentecostalism in Ireland

ABSTRACTThe last number of years has seen the mushrooming of African Pentecostal churches, especially Prosperity Gospel churches, in the post-recession industrial landscapes of Ireland. This article aims to explore the growth of African Pentecostalism in Ireland from both the perspective of embodied and affective religious experience and the conditions for the possibility of those religious experiences. This article is based on several years of ethnographic research among African Pentecostals in Ireland. It attends especially to the sensorious forms of worship and the Jesus walks that Pentecostals organise to transform the Irish symbolic landscape. Drawing on recent anthropological theory, the article draws out the contradictions, doubts, boundaries and limitations perceived and lived in totalising Pentecostal discourses and practices. Here, we develop the concept of ontological (in)security in order to theorise these doubts and limitations as well as the power of contemporary Pentecostalism in late modernity.

Perspectives on Pentecostalism and Socio-Economic Transformation

In this multiple book review I discuss four recent publications on the subject of Pentecostal Christianity, all of which address the public significance of contemporary Pentecostalism in different global contexts. I place a particular focus on the ways that these texts address the question of the capacity of Pentecostal discourses and practices to transform social and economic realities.

The Street is Free: Identity and Politics among Evangelicals in Chile

Chilean Evangelicals, like their peers elsewhere in Latin America, have striven for over a century to be recognised by state and society. They have achieved a number of advances, but feel that this is not yet enough. This article examines the practice most used by Evangelicals to affirm their identity: street preaching. In the drama of street preaching they mobilise and express their identity, including their political identity. Their preaching involves traditional themes of Pentecostal discourse: the saved versus the lost, and the offer of a better life that can be obtained by joining the ranks of this religious movement.

Sorcellerie en milieu urbain amplifieé par les pentecôtismes camerounais

Once considered as a “rural” phenomenon, issues pertaining to the occult have, at the height of globalization, become an “urban” problem. Witchcraft is particularly invoked to designate success; to provide information on individual and collective misfortunes, justifying battles against fetishes, misfortune, bad genies and all kinds of evil spirits leading to poverty, unemployment, bad luck or (a state of) being possessed. Increasingly since the nineties, the city has become the stage for Pentecostal effervescence. Preacher-healers have settled predominately in urban areas and play a crucial role in the reconstruction of sorcery’s collective imagery, updating magical-religious systems of reference; rehabilitating exorcism and devotion in matters of deliverance. Religious and magical justifications have become regular features of urban acts and behaviours. In this context, witchcraft distinguishes itself as a response to urban life and could even be one of its founding elements. What are its urban markers? How does it express itself in contemporary urban life? Using an in situ approach, active observation and semi-structured interviews – this research examines, from an ethnographical perspective, urban witchcraft as amplified by a Pentecostal discourse vector of anti-witchcraft violence.

Dealing with Local Satanic Technology: Deliverance Rhetoric in the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries

ABSTRACT The 1980s and 1990s, an era of ‘oil doom’ and successive military dictatorship, marked a political and socio-economic watershed in the history of the Nigerian polity. Concomitant with this phase of abysmal collapse of social, economic, and political institutions was an unprecedented resurgence and rapid proliferation of new religious movements, particularly new Christian movements with Pentecostal and charismatic persuasions. In the wake of political crises and failing economies, religious communities also provided significant channels for expressions of frustration as well as avenues where claims as an alternative source of problem-resolution were negotiated and legitimized. This paper explores how this religious development marked a significant turning point in the history of Christianity in Nigeria; with its religious geography assuming a more complex and diversified posture through Pentecostal/charismatic forms of Christianity. One main thrust of African Pentecostal religiosity is the preponderance of deliverance and spiritual warfare rituals in their cosmological tradition. Using the example of the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries (MFM) founded in Lagos in the 1980s, the paper examines its demographic expansion, its belief in, and appropriation of, spiritual warfare and deliverance rituals in Africa and the African diaspora. It shows how the MFM, through its preoccupation with the epistemology of demons and the extensive appropriation of warfare rhetoric, has carved out a niche for itself in African Pentecostal discourse in both local and global contexts.

Learning to Prosper by Wrestling and by Negotiation: Jacob and Esau in Contemporary African Pentecostal Hermeneutics

Pentecostalism in Africa has evolved as different streams characterized by particular modes of articulating the Christian message. The older independent churches were known for their emphasis on healing and prophecy and the classical Pentecostals talked much about speaking in tongues and holiness. Although these themes are present in contemporary Pentecostal discourse the new churches are best known for their messages of empowerment and prosperity that are meant to address the aspirations of Africa’s upwardly mobile youth. Using the writings of two of the movements most influential leaders from Ghana, this article discusses the ways in which the story of the Patriarchs, especially Jacob, has been reinterpreted to fit into the message of upward mobility and the principles that are meant to lead up to it. It is argued here that although the authors did not intend to misapply Scripture, by reinterpreting the schemes of Jacob in terms of the principles of success, they fail to take account of the element of ‘grace’ which is able to turn the worst of sinners into saints. Jacob did not succeed because he applied the principles of success but because God touched him with his grace during the time of wrestling with the angel.

Male Headship as Male Agency: An Alternative Understanding of a ‘Patriarchal’ African Pentecostal Discourse on Masculinity

In some Christian circles in Africa, male headship is a defining notion of masculinity. The central question in this article is how discourses on masculinity that affirm male headship can be understood. A review of recent scholarship on masculinities and religion shows that male headship is often interpreted in terms of male dominance. However, a case study of sermons in a Zambian Pentecostal church shows that discourse on male headship can be far more complex and can even contribute to a transformation of masculinities. The main argument is that a monolithic concept of patriarchy hinders a nuanced analysis of the meaning and function of male headship in local contexts. The suggestion is that in some contexts, male headship can be understood in terms of agency.