Abstract: Enslaved Africans and Creoles in the French colony of Saint-Domingue are said to have gathered at a nighttime meeting at a place called Bois Caïman in what was both political rally and religious ceremony, weeks before the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The slave ceremony is known in Haitian history as a religio-political event and used frequently as a source of inspiration by nationalists, but in the 1990s, neo-evangelicals rewrote the story of the famous ceremony as a “blood pact with Satan.” This essay traces the social links and biblical logics that gave rise first to the historical record, and then to the neo-evangelical rewriting of this iconic moment. It argues that the confluence of the bicentennial of the Haitian Revolution with the political contest around President Aristide’s policies, the growth of the neo-evangelical Spiritual Mapping movement, and of the Internet, produced a new form of mythmaking, in which neo-evangelicals re-signified key symbols of the event—an oath to a divine force, blood sacrifice, a tree, and group unity—from the mythical grammar of Haitian nationalism to that of neo-evangelical Christianity. In the many ironies of this clash between the political afterlife of a slave uprising with the political afterlife of biblical scripture, Haiti becomes a nation held in captivity, and Satan becomes the colonial power who must be overthrown.
Naumescu, Vlad (2011) “The Case for Religious Transmission: Time and Transmission in the Anthropology of Christianity”
May 7, 2012Abstract
Acknowledging the growing interest in issues of religious transmission, this article reviews two promising yet contradictory approaches to religion that could be described as historicist and universalist. It offers an alternative view premised on their convergence in a pragmatic approach that can link the material, contextual, and institutional dimensions of transmission with corresponding cognitive, perceptive, and emotional processes. This perspective recognizes the historicity of religious transmission and its cognitive underpinnings while attending to the materiality of its semiotic forms. The article focuses on the relationship between time and transmission in recent ethnographies of Christianity that show how Christian temporalities influence perceptions of social continuity or rupture and individuals’ becoming in history. Within this frame, it examines the case of Old Believers, an apocalyptic movement that emerged out of a schism in seventeenth-century Russian Orthodoxy, to indicate how a pragmatic approach works in practice.
McGovern, Mike (2012) “Turning the Clock Back or Breaking with the Past?: Charismatic Temporality and Elite Politics in Côte d’Ivoire and the United States”
May 4, 2012Abstract
The article explores the forms of punctuated time that characterize evangelical discourse in both Côte d’Ivoire and the United States. It compares forms of punctuated time that not only form the basis of End Times theology in both places, but have also served as the basis of important lobbying networks. Though evangelical politics in each place has different roots, both are linked by populist anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric. Most importantly, I argue, the shared structure of eschataological temporality shapes the elective affinities that brought together such strange bedfellows as Pat Robertson and Laurent Gbagbo.
Jones, Graham (2012) “Magic with a Message: The Poetics of Christian Conjuring”
May 4, 2012Abstract
This article examines the performance practices of U.S. gospel magicians, evangelical Christians who convey religious messages with conjuring tricks. Emphatically denying that they possess supernatural powers and scrupulously avoiding effects that resemble biblical miracles, they take pains to present their tricks as unambiguously skillful performances intended to entertain, uplift, and instruct. When patterned on a Christian motif, otherwise self-referential magic tricks constitute a versatile signifying medium. Addressing the poetics of gospel magic in the setting of instructional workshops, this analysis explores a variety of ways performers utilize iconic resemblances between conjuring effects and Christian referents to produce complex and evocative expressions of faith. At the same time, they carefully manage signifiers of virtuosic agency that are intrinsic to the efficacy of gospel magic performance, but that also threaten to undermine their Christian message.
Brahinsky, Josh (2012) “Pentecostal Body Logics: Cultivating a Modern Sensorium”
May 4, 2012Abstract
Pentecostals put intensive study into bodies, texts, practices and their interrelationships so as to effectively cultivate a sensory culture – sensorium – and invite authoritative religious experience. This ethnographic study follows a Pentecostal sensorium from its crucial institutionalization in early Assemblies of God practice to more contemporary manifestations at Bethany University and among the Promise Keepers. It traces the historical mutations of what I call the body logics – or portable sensory dynamics – that are central to Pentecostal pedagogies of conversion and commitment, especially in their relatively easy transposition to new contexts and ambivalent but productive relationship to modern secularity. Further, it argues that religiously inflected sensory aptitudes, and perhaps even mind-body dynamics, emerge through a process of careful cultivation and nurturance.
Vincett, et al. “Young People and Performance Christianity in Scotland”
April 30, 2012Abstract: Based upon qualitative research in Glasgow, Scotland, this article examines transformations in religious identity and practices of young socially and economically included Christians, aged 16–27. The authors argue that young people’s religiosity has been shaped by large-scale social trends in the West, including secularisation and pluralisation. They argue that these influences have promoted a religiosity that de-emphasises propositional belief systems in favour of what they call ‘performance Christianity’, which highlights religious action in the everyday or secular, combined with a discourse of authenticity and a pluralistic approach to institutions and religious spaces. Finally, the authors consider the ways in which young people’s performance Christianity destabilises traditional ideas about belief and what it means to be Christian.
Roeland, et al. “Can We Dance In This Place?”
April 30, 2012Abstract: This article describes the developments of the EO Youth Day, a Dutch Christian mass event that attracts thousands of young people every year. It is argued that in the course of time, the EO Youth Day has changed from a modest and sober event characterized by a Calvinist outlook to an expressive ‘hip’ event with an evangelical swing. This change becomes especially visible when the first versions of the EO Youth Day in the 1970s are compared with more recent ones—a comparison we shall make in this article. Central to this change is the way the body is addressed and referred to in what we call the ‘forms of embodiment’ offered at the EO Youth Day. Evidence for this is provided by an explorative empirical study of four EO Youth Days—those organized in 1977, 1987, 1999, and 2008.
Togarasei “Mediating the Gospel”
April 30, 2012Abstract: This article discusses how Pentecostal churches in Botswana and Zimbabwe have appropriated media technologies in their worship. It identifies which media technologies are used by the churches and considers how they are used, the theological justifications for this appropriation, and the effects of this appropriation on the Christian faith. Media technologies discussed include radio, television, the Internet, e-mail, mobile phones, and various print media. The article concludes that Pentecostal churches have fully embraced media technology, in contrast to churches like the African Independent Churches that consider such technologies as trivializing Christianity. The article argues that media technologies have allowed Pentecostal churches in Botswana and Zimbabwe to spread the gospel faster and wider. Possible negative effects of media technology appropriation, such as the commodification of the Christian religion, are also discussed.
Lewis, “Touloutoutou and Tet Mare Churches”
April 25, 2012Lewis, Bertin M. Jr. 2012. Touloutoutou and Tet Mare Churches: Language, Class and Protestantism in the Haitian Diaspora of the Bahamas. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 41(1): 1-15.
Abstract: Within Haiti’s growing transnational Protestant community, there are different types of churches and adherents that practice traditional forms of Protestant Christianity (such as the Adventist, Methodist and Baptist faiths) and Pentecostal/Charismatic forms of Protestant Christianity. Using Michèle Lamont’s work on symbolic boundaries, I explore how Haitian Protestants living in New Providence, Bahamas, differentiate these two major Haitian Protestant church cultures through the use of denigrating terms about differing religious traditions. Churches which practice traditional forms of Haitian Protestantism, for example, are sometimes called touloutoutou churches. Churches where Pentecostal/Charismatic forms of Haitian Protestantism are practiced are sometimes referred to as tet mare churches by some Haitian Protestants. In addition, practitioners’ descriptions reflect issues of social class and contested notions of Christian authenticity among Haitian Protestants in the Bahamas.
