Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity

Die Studie untersucht das Verhältnis von Pentekostalismus und Politik in den Philippinen. Dafür werden zuerst Diskurse und Figuren mit nationaler Ausstrahlung beschrieben – erstmalig auch solche, die von der Forschung bislang ignoriert wurden, wie die einflussreichen Kreise um den Pfingstbischof und Präsidentschaftskandidaten Villanueva. Sodann wird ihre Rezeption in einer Mittelschichtsstadt im mittleren Süden des Landes analysiert, wodurch die Rolle lokaler Hegemonieverhältnisse bei der Artikulation pentekostaler Politik deutlich wird. Ein Fokus liegt auf den Debatten zu den Nationalwahlen von 2004 und 2010 und zum Reproduktionsgesundheitsgesetz.

Die konsequente Berücksichtigung der Verflechtung von globalen, nationalen und lokalen Diskursen macht politische Rationalitäten sichtbar, für die der Forschungsblick bisher verstellt war. So lässt sich entgegen der verbreiteten Annahme, dass die Pfingstbewegung weltflüchtig, religiös intolerant und sozialpolitisch insensibel sei, zeigen, dass diese Klischees schon ab den 1980ern innerpentekostal problematisiert und in den 2000ern Parteiallianzen mit marxistisch-leninistischen und islamistischen Gruppen gebildet wurden. Dies ermöglicht nicht nur neue Perspektiven auf die Religions- und Politikgeschichte des Landes, sondern auch auf die allgemeinen Zusammenhang von Religion, kollektive Identitätsbildung und Populismus.

This essay is about a group of neo-Pentecostal evangelists who decided to represent their church in the New York Dance Parade, which they regarded as an opportunity to promote worship as the true purpose of art and engage in spiritual warfare. Their participation was predicated on a distinction between “performance” and “ministry,” privileging the latter. I argue that upholding this distinction in the immersive context of a secular festival required a process of intensive ritualization, involving physical and spiritual preparations and symbolic boundary maintenance. I further argue that anthropological perspectives on such instances of public religion should seek to account for how ritual forms produce and are shaped by the effects of what I call proximation, a condition of “closeness” between categories of activity otherwise regarded as separate and autonomous (e.g., religion and the arts). The concept is a means to explore how religious ministries are influenced by ostensibly external factors and the need to manage them, and by the various opportunities, tensions, and moral associations that arise when ritual strategies evoke comparisons with secular genres and domains. The proximations of religion highlight the ethnographic significance of ideal-typical categories and spheres, including their potential to intersect, which is a byproduct of how they have been differentiated.

The questions asked in this chapter are: how is “responsibility” imagined within the Pentecostal world? How does this relate to notions of personhood and sociality? As such, my chapter contributes to the questions asked in the introduction of this volume by paying attention to the role that the politics of responsibility play in subjectivation processes. I draw on observations in church groups, interviews with Pentecostal subjects and evangelizers, and an analysis of Pentecostal popular culture, especially my research with CINARC, an evangelizing television acting company in Kinshasa. The main argument is that responsibility within the Pentecostal community is allocated to both external agents and to the individual, yet in differentiated ways. Crucial in “becoming responsible” is the process of the “moral movement” (Fernandez 1979) one makes in order to become a Christian subject. This implies taking up one’s responsibilities. Responsibility then relates to making choices in one’s social world, choosing with whom to hang out, in particular choosing Christian in one’s social environment. This selection depends on an awareness of others’ social lifeworlds, an awareness of these other’s personal pasts, ànd one’s intention and readiness to submit to the Holy Spirit. The production of this awareness draws on various techniques of subjectivation that are central in the Pentecostal world. I will first discuss these techniques and the influence of external actors on one’s social and spiritual well-being. Then, I move on to the role of confessions, soul healing and deliverance rituals in the construction of responsible, Christian subjects. Finally, I explore the depiction of responsibility and the moral movement in one of Cinarc’s evangelizing television serials, Dilemma (produced and broadcast on a weekly basis during June-September 2005 on a local TV station), in order to show how the Pentecostal understanding of responsibility also steers practices of punishment and resolution.

The official origins of the Catholic Charismatic renewal can be traced to Duquesne University (Pittsburgh, PA), in 1967, when a group of Catholics was baptized in the Holy Spirit. The movement soon spread to theUniversity of Notre Dame (South Bend, IN) and Michigan State University(East Lansing, MI), and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI), all of which became centres of the expanding renewal. While the Catholic hierarchy initially distanced itself, this approach was later superseded by the legitimization of the movement, which was achieved due to the work of Cardinal Léon Joseph Suenens’s mediation between the CatholicCharismatic renewal and the Vatican, and eventually by the centralizing effort pursued by Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes and the Pontifical Council for the Laity. The aim of this paper is to reflect on what happened to the Catholic Charismatic movement from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, how it developed as it moved geographically from the United States to the world, and how it was transformed by passing through Rome.

This chapter summarizes the core ideas found in our book "New Religions as Global Cultures," in which we explore the complex relationship between global cultures and new religions--specifically how new religions selectively combine aspects of many traditions to create new cultures. To illustrate our case, we examine the European origins and American development of new religions, as well as the Asian and African response to new religions.

À Kinshasa, les films provenant du Nigéria constituent un genre très populaire. L’auteure
montre que le triangle entre migration, religion et libéralisation des médias est relié
dialectiquement au surgissement d’un nouvel imaginaire social et moral, lequel, à son
tour, a facilité la réception des films « nollywoodiens » à Kinshasa. Les films importés
du Nigéria sont devenus des objets encastrés dans le christianisme charismatique.
Semblable insertion dans les cultures audiovisuelles prend forme selon les structures
locales d’autorité et de pouvoir, et en particulier selon la nouvelle position d’autorité
des pasteurs charismatiques. La plupart de ces nouveaux leaders chrétiens ont acquis
ce statut du fait, à la fois, de leur proximité à la culture chrétienne nigériane. Ainsi,
l’auteure montre comment la migration et le renouveau chrétien ont transformé, à
Kinshasa, le monde des médias locaux de façons diverses et inédites.