**Rowland Croucher**
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 Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 7:07 am Post subject: Have Pentecostalism, will Travel: Sarah Palin's Religion |
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From The Times Literary Supplement
September 17, 2008
Have Pentecostalism, will travel
How Sarah Palin's religion continues to evolve around the world
David Martin
In Western Europe, Christianity seems a fading residue. In the mid-1980s
embattled Maronites in Lebanon asked me if there were any Christian
equivalents of “Islamic revivalism” and I could only think of the United
States. A decade later, one might have pointed to the remarkable revival
of Eastern Orthodoxy. Even more remarkable, however, is the advance of
Christianity in the developing world, above all Africa, and the
displacement of Orthodoxy by Pentecostalism as the largest single sector
of Christianity after Catholicism. Yet just as we vaguely infer the role
of mainstream Christianity in Africa from the occasional media picture,
so our knowledge of Pentecostalism is limited to pictures of what
affects the large African diaspora in the “global north”, including Britain.
Pentecostalism is the contemporary religio-cultural phenomenon. It
claims the exuberant gifts of the Spirit originally manifested on the
first day of Pentecost as narrated in Acts 2, and it represents a global
indigenization of the original Methodist “enthusiasm” that mobilized
migrants in the Industrial Revolution. It creates autonomous social
capital for (say) a quarter of a billion migrants trekking to the
contemporary megacity. Mainstream Churches feel embarrassed and wary,
just as established Churches did faced with revival in
eighteenth-century Britain and later on the American frontier. The
favela of La Pintana, Santiago, Chile, which nobody visits but social
workers, Catholic priests and alcohol vendors, is honeycombed with tiny
Pentecostal churches. You find those churches, with hundreds of
different colourful names, anywhere from Manila to Accra and
Johannesburg to Seoul.
The importance of this strand of Christianity is underlined by the Sarah
Palin phenomenon. The electrifying effect of the Governor of Alaska on
the Republican Party, on the American presidential election, and on
white Evangelicals wary of John McCain, confounds assumptions about the
unimportance of the name on the bottom of the ticket. What Palin picks
up, for good or ill, is the sentiment of an America that sees itself as
authentically womanly and manly in a way often sniffily overlooked by
the “people of the plain” between Boston and Washington, who wouldn’t
know a moose if they saw one. Once, when I left Texas for Boston, I was
asked, “Why go there? Some of those people are no better than
Europeans”. Nor is the issue really one of religion versus science or
this-worldly concerns. If expectations of an end-time occupy one part of
the Pentecostal mind, another part takes out mortgages and plans for
retirement. “Pentecostals look for Eden with a satellite dish”, as one
commentator puts it.
What about the broader picture? It was the spread of Pentecostalism in
Latin America after 1960 that first attracted academic attention, though
more recently anthropologists have been scrambling to catch up with its
spread in sub-Saharan Africa about a decade later, as well as in south
India, the post-socialist ex-Soviet sphere, China and the Pacific Rim.
Perhaps it has been rather too easy for recent Neo-Pentecostal movements
of the American-influenced health-and-wealth variety to grab what
headlines there are, so allowing us to suppose Pentecostalism is just
the latest extension of the Western missionary movement. Yet even
Neo-Pentecostalism needs to be understood as a form of indigenous
appropriation. Both Asonzeh Ukah in A New Paradigm of Pentecostal Power
and Ogbu Kalu in African Pentecostalism: An introduction show how deeply
the gods are associated with the goods in the African religious imagination.
Pentecostalism of whatever variety was pre-adapted to Africa by its
fusion of white and black revivalist spirituality. Moreover, its fusion
of technological modernity with a lively sense of an inspirited world
and the demonic, lifted it across cultural barriers hitherto blocking
the advance of mainstream mission. That is as true of India and China as
it is of Africa. Whereas its Islamic rival represents the idea of a
common religious universe organically related to politics and territory,
Pentecostalism represents a decentralized form of voluntary organization
operating on an open, competitive market. From the Western ecumenical
viewpoint its infinite capacity for fission is deplorable and damaging,
but that is part of its adaptability and its inherent pluralism.
In its origins, Pentecostalism was pre-adapted to multicultural
situations. So where and how did it originate? Religious origins are
always contentious, partly because they were fought over at the time
between rival innovators, and partly because stories about how it all
began include claims about the true line of descent and continuity.
Moreover, hostile historians stress lines of descent and modes of
operation that are in bad odour. It matters a great deal whether
Pentecostalism had black or white (even racist) origins, and whether it
originated mainly in the US or was multi-centred. It matters whether the
global carriers of its messages were cultural colonizers or emerged
“spontaneously” among indigenous peoples. Were Pentecostals poor and
disregarded, or were they ignorant and intolerant? Were they
participatory and mutually supportive, a kind of trade union of the
dispossessed, including women and a buried local intelligentsia, or
patriarchal authoritarians? Did they exhibit “agency” or inhibit it?
Pentecostalism has always been all of these contradictory things.
Sarah Palin’s recent attempts to play down aspects of her background
illustrate the ambivalence with which Pentecostals are often viewed,
even by fellow Evangelicals. Palin cannily identifies herself only as a
Christian in her biography on the National Governors’ Association
website. When pressed about her allegiances during an interview for Time
magazine in August, she gave an equivocal reply. “I was baptized
Catholic as a newborn and then my family started going to
non-denominational churches throughout our life”, she said. There was no
mention of her long-term association with the three-million-strong
Assemblies of God, one of North America’s largest Pentecostal groupings.
Observers see a ready explanation for such reticence. “Though
Pentecostals are diverse and rapidly mainstreaming themselves, the
public still perceives them as sectarian and uncompromising, and those
traits will not help Palin’s image”, according to Grant Wacker of Duke
University Divinity School. As a teenager, Palin was baptized for a
second time at the Wasilla Assembly of God in Alaska, which she and her
family attended until 2002. Two years later, her former pastor there, Ed
Kalnins, questioned whether supporters of John Kerry could go to heaven.
The Palins also worshipped with another Pentecostal group, Wasilla’s
Church on the Rock, and although they now belong to an independent and
more moderate body, Wasilla Bible Church, they retain strong links with
their former congregations.
In The Fire Spreads Randall J. Stephens gives a historical account of
the genesis of Pentecostalism in the USA, which treads delicately
through the contradictions. He provides a strikingly imaginative account
of riotous religious competition, above all in the American South. The
main source of Pentecostalism was the holiness tradition in Methodism,
which arrived in the American South from the North in the 1860s. There
it received a frosty welcome from the dominant Southern Methodists and
Southern Baptists, still smarting in the aftermath of the Civil War, and
it was not until the 1880s that local holiness leaders started to
emerge. Once Southerners embraced holiness they reshaped it to their
plain-folk, largely rural needs, and identified with the poor, even
though many key figures, black and white, held positions of authority in
both church and society. Like their populist contemporaries they
proclaimed the virtues of the simple Jeffersonian farmer, and some of
the Southern up-country folk who embraced holiness were antagonistic
equally to their denominations and to Southern culture in general.
This was a time when the tastes of Methodists in the urban middle and
upper classes of the wealthy New South often ran to Victorian Gothic and
pew rentals, as well as to costly apparel, theatregoing, smoking and
drinking. Rural Southern holiness advocates battled against what they
saw as over-sophistication and moral decay, and some of the more radical
preachers flaunted markers of difference and dissent. They disapproved,
for example, of coffee, pork and wearing neckties. Yet although these
attitudes were rooted in rural Southern values, holiness people reached
beyond the South. They represented a nationwide commitment, and their
views on gender, female ministry, race and class put them at odds with
Southern hierarchical traditions. They looked back, for example, to
Phoebe Palmer, the original mother of the holiness movement, who
believed that all the sanctified were endowed with both purity and
power. African–American holiness stalwarts likewise fostered nationwide
contacts. Naturally, they execrated the “peculiar institution” of
slavery, and many white holiness leaders agreed with them. The very
lively and fractious holiness press and holiness gatherings provided
liminal spaces where blacks and whites could interact, even though local
hostility was often powerful enough to hold back moves to integration.
Holiness preachers grew frustrated with denominational authorities that
saw them as dangerous religious tramps, and they challenged a culture
they regarded as going to hell in a handcart. Increasingly, they drew on
English as well as American sources, notably the Holy Ghost Empowerment
movement associated with the annual Keswick Convention beginning in
1875, and the dispensationalist and pre-millennial views of the Plymouth
Brethren. Just as holiness had originated in the urban North before
moving south, so did millennialism, and far from fostering passivity it
unleashed furious energy, in religion if not in politics. Several
fledgling denominations emerged, each seeking to restore the one, true,
sanctified Church of God. End-time expectation also generated a search
for those gifts of the Spirit, such as divine healing and the
fire-baptism promised in John’s Gospel, believed to presage an imminent
Second Coming. The stage was set for Pentecostalism, for the tongues of
fire, and for the premonitory patter of the “latter rain” before the
final harvest.
One outbreak of tongues of fire was associated with Charles Parham in
Topeka, Kansas, in 1901, and another with a black holiness preacher,
William Seymour, in 1906. Seymour sparked off wildly enthusiastic
multiethnic and interracial manifestations, including speaking in
tongues, at Azusa St, Los Angeles. The West Coast enthusiasm rapidly
spread back to the South, fanned by a furore in the press. Southern
holiness people either provided a conduit for Pentecostalism or
disdained its unfettered worship style, for example fast-paced
spirituals quite unlike the old Evangelical hymns. Just as the original
Methodists in England and Pietists in Germany had disrupted their
established Churches, and the holiness offshoots of Methodism had
criticized staid denominational authorities for losing their original
fire, so the holiness movement found itself outflanked by
Pentecostalism. The rest of Randall Stephens’s book is given over to the
way many white stalwarts of Pentecost transformed themselves after the
Second World War from social and religious pariahs into middle-class
Republicans. This familiar sequence of volcanic eruption and cooling off
illustrates yet again Max Weber’s notions of bureaucratization and the
routinization of charisma.
Michael Bergunder’s The South Indian Pentecostal Movement in the
Twentieth Century picks up where Randall Stephens’s history breaks off.
He offers an initial discussion of how far Pentecostal origins were
really multi-centred, given the Indian and other revivals prior to, or
parallel with, the events in Los Angeles. He argues it was the (mainly
Anglo-American) Evangelical mission movement, for example in England the
Keswick convention and the China Inland Mission, that laid down the
global trails followed by Pentecostalism. There was already a vast and
vague international network in place, serviced by itinerant preachers,
who expected signs and wonders. Moreover, those who entertained
immediate millennial expectations felt the need first to carry their
witness to all nations, for which the gift of tongues seemed
providentially provided. As Allan Anderson has shown in his Spreading
Fires, missionaries travelling to China and Japan were dumbfounded to
find they still needed to learn the local languages, as well as
frustrated by the delay of the end-time. Nevertheless, an extraordinary
network of communication emerged through letters and journals,
sustaining the forward thrust of the movement and creating a global
“imagined community”.
In one crucial respect the Indian South was like the American South,
because the expansion of an egalitarian movement powered by universally
available charisms ran into layers of earlier Christianity attuned to
caste, notably among the high-caste Thomas Christians, some of whom had
become Plymouth Brethren before converting to Pentecostalism. On the
other hand most converts were low caste, and inevitably the sometime
Thomas Christians assumed the right to lead.
Pentecostalism becomes, as Bergunder points out, what local people make
of it. The (then) Ceylon Pentecostal Mission, emerging in Kerala in the
mid-1920s, came under indigenous leadership, and had several distinctive
characteristics: it was centralized, it straightforwardly rejected
Western medicine, and its full-time workers, Sisters and Brothers alike,
sold their property and adopted celibacy. The Indian Pentecostal Church,
which broke away from it, was also indigenously led, and became the
strongest Pentecostal church in Kerala, much stronger than the Western
mission Churches.
Bergunder traces the growth of Pentecostalism in other regions beside
Kerala, including the growth of regional Churches and of Churches with a
powerful local influence, for example in Madras. He also charts the
arrival in the 1980s of expansive “faith” (or health-and-wealth)
Churches operating in cinemas and concert halls. In Andhra Pradesh, some
Churches were established by expatriate Indians returned from the USA:
clearly the flow of influence in the contemporary world runs in every
possible direction. Whatever the profusion of independent Churches, run
by rivalrous captains of religious industry, there was also a grassroots
ecumenism “in the Spirit” fostered by itinerant evangelists, including
women, by pastors’ fellowships, and by large rallies. All over the
world, from Guatemala and Brazil to Korea and South Africa, big rallies
encourage the faithful to believe they count for something. One woman
evangelist, Sarah Navroji, became famous for the composition of Tamil
hymns in the style of popular film music, and these soon reached
virtually every Christian home. Like their Methodist forebears,
Pentecostals sang their message in a contemporary idiom, often in
prolonged sessions that sounded like holy rock concerts.
If caste was a barrier, there was much in Indian Christian culture, and
in Indian culture generally, that resonated with Pentecostalism, notably
healing miracles, “leadings” in the Spirit, invoking the holy name,
ecstatic possession, exorcism, and the aura attaching to fasting, prayer
and holiness. At the same time, Pentecostalism also appealed because its
exuberant use of a modern technology came with a Western guarantee.
Pentecostals were not examples of what E. M. Forster called “poor
chattering Christianity” but spirit-filled people ready to bestow
powerful blessings, to offer healing to the poor lacking access to
modern medicine, and to confront head-on malignant and demonic forces.
Bergunder analyses many eloquent personal testimonies of spiritual
rebirth where addictions are converted into aversions, and where chronic
frustration and the weight of cumulative malignancy find release in
exuberant joy. None of the researchers who has collected such
testimonies doubts their authenticity, including the prominent accounts
of healings, though, as Bergunder properly warns, interpretation is
another matter. Harold Bloom, who is not perhaps prone to humility,
confessed he felt humbled by the intensity of urgent prayer and praise
in the Pentecostal assembly, and this is clearly at the heart of what
makes Pentecostalism tick. Bergunder also comments that although females
are denied leadership as pastors, they have much scope for taking up
authoritative roles, particularly in prophecy.
Asonzeh Ukah’s study of the Redeemed Christian Church of God is
specifically focused on the arrival of prosperity teaching in Africa.
The RCCG is one of the most successful and controversial of the new
mega-churches, in part because it combines the organizational format of
an international corporation with an ethos rooted in Yoruba tradition.
Ukah brings out its extraordinary ability to fuse deep local roots in an
African spirituality based on healing, protection against malign powers,
prognostication, trance and visionary dreams, with a modern go-getting
organization promoting itself through every marketing device. He also
traces the emergence of the RCCG from a very different and much smaller
body, the God’s Glory Church, nurtured in the traditions of the Aladura
Church known as the Eternal Sacred Order of Cherubim and Seraphim (Mount
Zion) in Lagos.
The God’s Glory Church was founded in 1952 by a semi-literate prophet
and healer, Josiah Olufemi Akindayomi, who rigorously enforced an
ascetic regime which made no collections, eschewed politics, forbade
jewellery, and excluded people associated with corrupt professions, like
the military, the police and purveyors of alcohol. By contrast, the
RCCG, as re-founded in the 1980s by a university teacher of mathematics,
Enoch Adeboye, sought out the rich and powerful, as well as youthful
cadres on university campuses such as are described in Matthews Ojo’s
The End-Time Army (2006). The RCCG made a much-criticized entry into the
political arena in 1999 in support of President Obasanjo; and it
negotiated numerous deals with “partners” in the socio-economic elite.
Josiah was Moses and Enoch was Joshua, and the succession passed from
the one to the other just as Elijah’s mantle fell on Elisha.
Nevertheless, Enoch claims an independent charisma, based on direct
communication through dreams with God, whose vicar on earth he claims to be.
This shift was facilitated by the regress of post-Civil War Nigeria
towards a kleptocratic and electorally corrupt state, and by the mass
unemployment brought about by neo-liberal reforms. The national hopes of
a frustrated new middle class shifted from politics to religion, so that
the RCCG (and similar bodies, like the Deeper Life Bible Church and
Winners Chapel) represented a venture in the autonomous creation of
social capital, providing an all-embracing environment with educational
and health facilities for members in return for their investment in
sacred bonds, divinely guaranteed. The resemblance to the Japanese
neo-Buddhist “New Religions”, for example, the religio-political
conglomerate Komeito, is striking. That, too, took over and “developed”
an unworldly ascetic and monastic group.
In the RCCG, the traditional belief whereby one enters into a covenant
with celestial powers-that-be, has fused with the more upbeat elements
in the Hebrew Bible, whereby the righteous shall not want for bread, to
create what may well be called an Afro-Jewish amalgam, and one with an
element of Christian Zionism. The contribution of the New Testament lies
in a reading of the teaching and practice of Jesus stressing prolonged
prayer, fasting, healing and exorcism (or deliverance). Jesus, as one
mega-church formulation has it, is the “Winner Man”. He became poor for
our sakes that we might become, literally, rich. After all, as Adeboye
puts it, citing his own frustrating experience of poverty, who among us
actually wants to be poor? Science, of a sort, also plays its role,
particularly in the creation of what Adeboye called “model parishes”,
because these are experiments for empirically adjusting to market needs,
assisted on the organizational side by some expedient sacred maths: for
example, seventy people were invited to give God, via his ministers, 10
million naira each, in exchange for survival to threescore years and
ten. Some of the most pressing needs are to be found among women, either
because of the travails of childbirth far from modern health clinics, or
on account of barrenness. Indeed, this kind of venture in the creation
of social capital, of which there are hundreds all over the developing
world, also acts as a protective trade union for women, especially in
its stress on mutuality in a stable monogamous family. At the same time,
the organizational role of powerful women as pastors and as executives
largely derives from being married to powerful men. Just as the Revd Dr
Adeboye is General Overseer and baba, or Daddy, so his wife is also a
pastor and a “Mother in Israel”. The idea of the Big Man in traditional
society is linked to the idea of the First Lady.
The title General Overseer is apt, given that the RCCG is a huge
conglomerate engaged in mass economic mobilization and linked to, or
operating, media enterprises, an insurance company, and community banks,
such as the massive Haggai Community Bank. It offers the widest
imaginable range of blessed assurance and sacred protection against all
the assaults of the Devil, which are excoriated in detail without
over-precise identification of his local agents. Like many other
mega-churches, it runs a business school to equip those inspired to defy
the “spirit of poverty”. The RCCG even encourages the imitation of
Adeboye as a source of sacred radiation, and like Moses facing
disobedience in the wilderness, he exercises salutary powers of reproof.
Adeboye is also the chief actor in the choreography of worship during
the monthly Holy Ghost Night held in the Redemption camp, a
10-square-kilometre site with an auditorium seating half a million
people. The Redemption Camp is a pre-emptive territorial strike
establishing a colony of heaven to be expanded to all Nigeria and
eventually the world. This is explicitly the Mecca of the RCCG, while
the personal office of Adeboye is its Vatican. A faith that once
transcended locality goes back to the land and the elect nation, while a
Church that gloried, with Zechariah, in “the day of small things”,
rejoices in the arrival of the big-time as well as the end-time.
What is missing in this type of study is documentation of the return
people receive for their investment of time and money. The testimonies
of grassroots participants in mega-churches all over the world suggest
they are not dupes, but derive genuine “uplift” in several ways,
including social mobility and economic betterment. Sarah Palin’s
irruption on the national stage is an ample demonstration of the potency
of this principle in America. It also emerges, for example, in David
Maxwell’s African Gifts of the Spirit (2007), a study of an expansive
Zimbabwean Church with similar characteristics, and likewise full of
national and black pride in a similar context of civil war and chronic
insecurity. There is more comparative work waiting to be done on
“Pentecostalite” bodies – Ukah’s useful term – worldwide, from the
Yoruba-founded Embassy of God in Kiev to the Universal Church of the
Kingdom of God in Brazil, and La Luz del Mundo, in Mexico, with its
fantastic Aztec-looking Jerusalem temple, and its schools and health
facilities situated in a semi-autonomous sector of Guadalajara. La Luz,
like the God’s Glory Church, weeps as part of its worship and, like the
RCCG, displays the flags of all the nations where its “spiritual
conquistadores” have established bases.
In his helpful foreword to Ukah’s book, John Peel underlines how RCCG
practices go back to the African ethos of Aladura. A highly spiritual
faith, claiming to be guided solely by the Bible, once more comes to
value tangible sacred objects. For example, it has been divinely
revealed to Adeboye that he should wear three shirts for a period of
time so that some of his own anointing should be transferred to them. He
places one of the shirts in a bath of oil, and members use the bath to
anoint themselves on the head, mouth and hand to bring healing and
prosperity. Maybe we should not be too surprised when we remember what
Western people will do to touch and possess the cast-offs of celebrities.
Ogbu Kalu’s African Pentecostalism covers the wider Nigerian and African
picture. Kalu reminds us that mega-churches comprise only one, largely
urban, version of Pentecostalism and he criticizes approaches that focus
solely on the instrumental functions of Pentecostalism, dismiss it as
lacking in agency, or treat it as an extension of the American
electronic Church rather than an emanation of African spirituality. Kalu
has reservations about the kind of “inculturation” sought by mainstream
bodies and about a Western critique of Pentecostalism as
“fundamentalist” when it is better understood as reviving the spiritual
gifts of the New Testament.
Kalu discusses the Pentecostal understanding of gender, which in at
least one variant manifests itself in bodies like the Agbala Daniel
Church founded by Archbishop Dorcas Olayinka, and the Water of the Rock
Church founded by Stella Ajisebutu. He also analyses Pentecostal rivalry
with Islam, an important issue, especially in northern Nigeria where an
active Pentecostal presence easily stimulates a violent response. This
is where the original pacifism of Pentecostals has been amended. Once
you have taken a slap on both cheeks you can respond in kind: two slaps
and you’re in. Sarah Palin has famously likened herself to a pitbull.
Kalu concludes with an account of the reverse flow of African
Christianity to Europe and North America, and of missions from “south”
to “south” which dramatically illustrate how closely a mobile faith like
Pentecostalism corresponds to a global flow of “goods” and messages
anywhere and everywhere. Those who gathered at the great missionary
conference in Edinburgh in 1910 could never have imagined the relevance
of events in Azusa St four years earlier for their enterprise.
Randall J. Stephens
THE FIRE SPREADS
Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South
393pp. Harvard University Press. £18.95 (US $27.95).
978 0 674 02672 8
Michael Bergunder
THE SOUTH INDIAN PENTECOSTAL MOVEMENT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
380pp. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Paperback, $40.
978 0 8028 2734 0
Asonzeh Ukah
A NEW PARADIGM OF PENTECOSTAL POWER
A study of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Nigeria
410pp. Africa World Press Inc. Paperback, £29.99 (US $34.95).
978 1 59221 621 5
Ogbu Kalu
AFRICAN PENTECOSTALISM
An introduction
359pp. Oxford University Press. £54 (US $99); paperback £13.99 (US $24.95).
978 0 19 534000 6
David Martin is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of
Economics, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Religious Studies
at Liverpool Hope University. His books include Pentecostalism: The
world their parish, 2001, and Does Christianity Cause War?, 1997.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/
the_tls/article4772737.ece
or http://tinyurl.com/3o5yvh
--
Shalom/Salaam/Pax! Rowland Croucher
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/ (20,000 articles 4000 humor)
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