AAR

Manuel A. Vasquez

REVIEW ESSAY

Tracking Global Evangelical Christianity

Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By Paul Freston. Cambridge University Press, 2001. 344 pages. $59.95. Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. Edited by Andr Corten and Ruth Marshall-Fratani. Indiana University Press, 2001. 311 pages. $22.95. The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel ofProsperity. By Simon Coleman. Cambridge University Press, 2000. 264 pages. $59.95. Pentecostalism and the Future of Christian Churches: Promises, Limitations, Challenges. By Richard Shaull and Waldo Csar. William B. Eerdmans, 2000. 236 pages. $25.00. EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS have always taken very seriously the Great CommissionJesus' injunction to "go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Mt. 28:19-20). At a time of widespread globalManuel A. Vasquez is an associate professor of religion at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-7410. Journal of the American Academy of Religion March 2003, Vol. 71, No. 1, pp. 157-173 2003 The American Academy of Religion

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ization and the crisis of secular modernity, it is not surprising that evangelical Christianity is experiencing rapid growth worldwide, particularly in the so-called Third World. At its most powerful, evangelical Christianity links radical personal renewal with a universal eschatological message and operates simultaneously at the local and global level through dense transnational networks of churches and the strategic use of mass media. Evangelical Christianity, thus, is not merely an example of how religious practices and institutions adapt creatively to globalization but rather is, in fact, a key conduit for globalizing processes usually associated with modernity. The four books reviewed here grapple with the polysemous character of contemporary evangelical Christianity. The books reflect a shift in Christianity's center of gravity from North to South, as transnational churches like the Brazilian neo-Pentecostal Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, with temples in England, Portugal, the United States, Mozambique, and South Africa, become the new key players. Except for Richard Shaull, the books' authors and editors are not based in the United States (and Shaull himself has spent much of his career in Latin America). This fact has important scholarly consequences. It makes it possible to move beyond the earlier emphasis on the U.S. role in spreading evangelical Christianity as part of a dominion theology or a global American culture (Brouwer, Gifford, and Rose; Diamond; Stoll;). Recent studies attend more to the variegated ways in which evangelical Christianity is localized and to the complex relations that these local embodiments sustain with global processes. Evangelical Christianity's multifarious expressions are best represented in Paul Freston's Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, a meticulously researched and well-written survey covering twenty-seven countries, chosen on the basis of variables such as the size of the evangelical population and the impact of evangelicals in national politics. Masterfully handling an impressive assortment of sources, ranging from direct observation and interviews with political and religious leaders to extensive bibliographic research, Freston has written an indispensable and timely book. Brazil, with the second-largest evangelical population in the world, receives an extended and detailed chapter. Freston also devotes chapters to Korea, where a "pentecostalized Presbyterianism" (62) has become a central player in mainstream politics, and Zambia, which former president Frederick Chiluba named as "a Christian Nation that will seek to be governed by the righteous principles of the word of God" (158). There is also a good chapter on Guatemala, contextualizing military dictator Efran Ros Montt's idiosyncratic use of the evangelical rhetoric of spiritual warfare in his brutal counterinsurgency campaign. Here Freston effectively shows that even in a context where the U.S. Christian Right had

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substantial influenceRos Montt belonged to Church of the Word (a.k.a. El Verbo), a mission of the California-based Gospel OutreachProtestants were divided. The book also includes helpful regional introductions and a thoughtful conclusion identifying general patterns and key issues in the study of evangelical politics in the Third World. One of the main benefits of Freston's cross-continental approach is the debunking of reductive and essentialist readings of evangelical Christianity. By showing how global evangelicalism is always subject to what he calls "local subversion" (286)a process of grassroots indigenization that results in the formation of hybrid doctrines, practices, and forms of organizationFreston undermines conspiracy theories, which see the spread of evangelical Christianity as simply part and parcel of American imperialism in the Third World. He writes that although "the American right does indeed try to use evangelical religion (and other religions) in its own interests . . . such activity cannot be assumed a priori to account for a great deal of what Third World actors actually do. The autonomy of Third World evangelicalism, or at least the autonomous appropriation of messages, should be assumed unless proved otherwise, and not vice versa" (284). By the same token, Freston cautions us not to equate the discourses and practices of church leaders with the religious and political behavior of rank-and-file evangelicals. This is particularly true given the tradition's tendency for decentralization and schism. In highlighting the worldwide heterogeneity of evangelical Christianity, Freston also rightly warns against privileging theology too much. All too often the assumption is made that all evangelicals share a deeply conservative and dualistic worldview that translates directly into either a totally apolitical otherworldliness or a quest for a postmillenarian Christian dominion. Others hypothesize on the basis of sweeping macrohistorical comparisons that, in the long-term, evangelical Christianity will produce in the Third World the same effects it has in Europe and North America, increasing religious and political pluralism and encouraging voluntarism, egalitarianism, and civic participation. Sociologist Peter Berger exemplifies this argument when he writes that evangelical Protestantism "promotes what Max Weber called the 'Protestant ethic'a morality singularly appropriate for people seeking to advance in the nascent stage of modern capitalism" (8). The spirit of this religion, Berger continues, expresses "unmistakably Anglo-Saxon traits, especially in its powerful combination of individualistic self-expression, egalitarianism (especially between men and women), and the capacity for creating voluntary associations. Thus it not only facilitates social mobility in developing market economies . . . but also facilitates actual or anticipated participation in the new global economy" (8).

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Without discounting these potential outcomes, Freston calls for more empirical research: "We need to know what is actually happening before we jump to conclusions about what it all means. Before anything else, we need to become immersed in the specificities of the religious and political fields, and the interactions between them, in each national context" (281). For Freston, Evangelical organisation, religious location and socio-political location are more often important for understanding its politics than is evangelical theology. Theology is important, but as one factor amongst many which may affect evangelical politics in any given context. A study of political behaviour must start out from realism about the actual situation of the churches and the political possibilities and dangers inherent in each context. Size, social and ethnic composition, position relative to other confessions, internal church structures and conflicts, the sociological "type" (church, sect, denomination) of each group, the degree of legitimacy in relation to national myths, the presence or absence (and nature) of international connectionsall these constrain political possibility and affect behaviour. Talk of "evangelical politics" globally must never lose sight of the fact that local church reality has been very determinant in actual performance. (282) The question arises, then, If evangelical Christianity is so diverse, so context-sensitive, can we make any metalocal claims about it? What enables Freston's own comparative approach? If it is important not to essentialize evangelical Christianity, it is also crucial to avoid falling into an "extreme anthropological relativism" (Freston: 287). In order to avoid these twin dangers, Freston suggests that we develop a "meso-approach" to evangelical Christianity, focusing on churches as dynamically evolving institutions, negotiating their entry and operation vis--vis other religious and secular institutions in particular historical settings. This approach reveals that the closer evangelical Christians get to power, the more likely it is that they will adopt a global pan-Protestant identity, whose gospel of health and wealth bears a strong elective affinity to triumphalistic neoliberal capitalism. If the stress in Freston's work falls on national specificities, Andr Corten and Ruth Marshall-Fratani's edited volume entitled Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America seeks to elucidate the central characteristics of the Pentecostal imaginaire (1). The contributors to this edited volume recognize the danger of making simplistic generalizations about Pentecostalism, which is now the most dynamic sector of evangelical Christianity. In their introduction, Corten and Marshall-Fratani, for example, acknowledge that the label "transnational Pentecostalism" is an analytical abstraction (4). Unlike Freston,

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though, they believe that this conceptual construct points to a global set of discourses and practices that share a close family resemblance, a constellation of tropes and narratives that constitute coherent notions of time, space, and agency that can be articulated with local variations. Freston is right to emphasize the fact that evangelical Christianity, and Pentecostalism in particular, is not primarily about building orthodox theology in the sense of a codified, systematic canon. Pentecostalism is fundamentally a lived religion, whose ethos and cosmos are embodied in the renewed body of the believer and inscribed in the spaces of everyday life as territory reclaimed for the glory of God. The contributors to Between Babel and Pentecost, however, make a good case that theology does matter in understanding the diverse ways in which Pentecostalism responds to the local changes generated by globalization. For all the nuances of his approach, Freston tends to view evangelical politics in instrumental terms, concluding that "on the whole, rather than being ideological, much evangelical politics has shown a calculated caution based on the desire to maximise benefits" (294). In contrast, focusing on some of the same countries in Latin America and Africa, contributors to Corten and Marshall-Fratani's volume argue that the Pentecostal imaginaire plays a determining role in the forging of collective and individual identities in an increasingly deterritorialized world with permeable national borders. The best chapters in Between Babel and Pentecost show the links between Pentecostal narratives and the widespread social dislocation experienced by poor rural migrants in large cities in the Third World and by diasporic communities in European cities. For instance, Brazilian sociologist Waldo Csar finds in Pentecostalism a "language which blends what is immanent in the world with the transcendental; the 'experience of the sacred' reveals itself in concrete situation in everyday life.... This intermingling of the transcendental and the quotidian in Pentecostalism has the immediate effect of giving plausibility to the hostile world in which the poor live" (in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 27). Csar attributes Pentecostalism's emphasis on language and oral performance to a narrative horizon that originated in the dispersion of languages at Babel and culminates with the melding together of multiple human languages under sacred speech (glossolalia) in Pentecost. As Csar puts it: "Whereas the tower of Babel created confusion and the dispersion of nations, Pentecost announces the possibility of a new unity among people. This unity, which transcends linguistic differences and gives communal value to the individual emotional experience, transforms Pentecostalism into the greatest expression of religious communication" (in Corten and MarshallFratani: 31-32). In other words, because contemporary Pentecostals see themselves as working out the implications of the pneumatic event that

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gave rise to the early Christian community, their horizons are unavoidably transnational and global. However, this cosmopolitan regard is cut down to size, manifested most poignantly in the charismata, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which link the divine with the body and daily life, exorcizing the demons of alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, and domestic violence. In his illuminating chapter on the success of Pentecostalism in the face of globalization, anthropologist Andr Droogers also finds that there is "a certain 'narrative compulsion' felt by Pentecostals" (in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 46), as they are compelled to share with others their testimonies of conversion. These testimonies evince "Pentecostalism's capacity for the paradoxical combination of opposite characteristics.... There is an eschatological, even apocalyptic, tendency in Pentecostalism. Pentecostals live in expectation of the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. They also hold a long-term view of human history, although there is no question of postponing the treatment of affliction in the anticipation of that moment" (Droogers, in Corten and MarshallFratani: 48). Other paradoxes include the "simultaneous presence of spontaneity and control, or of individual expression and social conformity" (Droogers, in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 48), and the juxtaposition of the antistructural egalitarianism of the Holy Spirit and hierarchal patriarchalism. In addition, Pentecostals have a tensile relation vis--vis the world, which they must at turns avoid and at turns save. In a world in which rapid flows of people, goods, capital, and ideas disrupt our takenfor-granted cognitive maps, these paradoxes give Pentecostalism great flexibility, allowing it to stress different aspects of its imaginaire in response to local conditions. Whether we are talking about reconstructing the self besieged by a chaotic world, or providing a "place where the believer can feel 'at home,' meet fellow believers, and make converts" (Droogers, in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 54), or embedding the believer in transnational communities of the elect and in the universal salvific project of the Kingdom of God, there are "internal religious characteristics in Pentecostalism" (Droogers, in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 59) that make it resonate in a globalized world. Drawing from fieldwork in Nigeria, Marshall-Fratani demonstrates how Pentecostalism's internal religious characteristics are disseminated globally through media technology. Here she draws from the work of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. According to Appadurai, one of the central features of the current episode of globalization involves "mediascapes": "Mediascapes refer both to the distribution of electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film-production studios), which are now available

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to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by these media" (35). These media provide "large and complex repertoires of images . . . narrative-based accounts of strips of reality [that] offer to those who experience and transform them... a series of elements (such as characters, plots, textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives" (Appadurai: 35). Marshall-Fratani argues that Pentecostalism is a key player in these mediascapes, providing recentering and reordering scripts to Africans dislocated by globalization. She writes that "it is not so much the individualism of Pentecostal conversion which leads to the creation of modern subjects, but the ways in which its projection on a global scale of images, discourses and ideas about renewal, change and salvation opens up possibilities for local actors to incorporate these into their everyday lives" (in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 89). In this context, churches become sites where the universal message of deliverance and healing is staged locally, showplaces where global scripts are performed, reenacted, and, in the process, amended so that they can be once again circulated through mediascapes for other local churches to use. Along the same lines, in a provocative essay on Pentecostalism in Costa Rica, Jean-Pierre Bastan argues that "by managing at the same time to root themselves in 'archaic' traditional religiosity through the practice of healings and exorcisms, and to use hypermodern musical and media techniques to their own profit, Pentecostal movements have become a hybrid form of religiosity" (in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 178-179). Bastan uses cultural theorist Nstor Garca Canclini's reading of hybridity: the juxtaposition of hitherto distinctive codes, times, and spaces, deterritorialized by accelerating global flows. Because of its hybrid characterits high degree of improvisation,flexibility,and adaptabilityPentecostalism is extremely competitive in increasingly transnational religious markets. Because in the Americas this transnationalism occurs in the context of growing religious pluralism, Bastan contends, it "is informed by a market logic which, by creating a competitive environment, forces religious agents and organizations to innovate unceasingly, in order to stimulate demand. The resort to the most modern means of communication has become a privileged instrument to achieve this" (in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 179). All this demonstrates that Pentecostalism cannot be categorized as an antimodern, fundamentalist movement. As Dutch anthropologist Rijk van Dijk writes in an excellent chapter on Ghanaian Pentecostals, Pentecostalism "is very much the product of transnational and transcultural modernity; its doctrines and its 'crusade' slogans demand a complete break with the past" (in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 219). In the process of conversion the believer breaks with everything that has kept him or her in

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the bondage of sin, including tradition and his or her past. In particular, by being born again, the Pentecostal repudiates local kinship relations and the moral economythe ancestral cursesthat sustains them. As van Dijk puts it: "Deliverance appears to emphasise a form of individuality whereby, on the level of both the immediate past and the longue dure, ties are being cut. There is a constant sealing off from those influences, circles and family ties that would make the individual prone to evil" (in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 226). Often this deliverance takes place at "international breakings" (van Dijk, in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 227), prayer in camps at which people are brought to Ghana from abroad. Especially for young men with few possibilities for socioeconomic mobility, the transnational linkages built by churches in Ghana and among the Ghanaian diaspora provide an invaluable resource. Van Dijk notes: "Prayer camps introduce the person to transnational and transcultural relations as an emergent stranger; as somebody detached from the bonds with the family, as protected from witchcraft and envy emanating from that circle of relatives and therefore unconstrained in the attempts to 'make it to the West,' to 'get papers' and to become prosperous" (in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 228). This affirmation of individuality against corporatism seems prima facie to fit neatly into the narrative of modernization and secularization, confirming Berger's Weberian hypothesis that as part of cultural globalization, evangelical Protestantism contributes to individuation: all sectors of the emerging global culture enhance the independence of the individual over against tradition and collectivity. For people caught in the early stages of the modernization process, there is above all a new sense of open possibilities and an aspiration for greater freedomthe sense of burden usually comes later. Thus the emerging global culture is attractive to all those who value the individuation they have already experienced and aspire to an even greater realization of it. (9) However, in another paradox, van Dijk shows that in diasporic Pentecostalism the process of "subjectivation," to use Foucault, is not unidirectional. For when the Ghanaian immigrant finally makes it to the West, there is reaffirmation of corporatism and social conformity, as "church members are expected to define their identities in terms of what is shared by the leader" (van Dijk, in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 229). Among Ghanaians in the Netherlands, van Dijk notices an "attachment to the Pentecostal leader as a mode of interacting with the Dutch society" (in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 231). The leader becomes a kind of totemic principle that glues the Ghanaian community in a foreign land and an "embodiment of a 'corridor'" back to Ghana: "Through the embodiment

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of the corridor, the spiritual coverage provided by the Pentecostal leaders in the diaspora refers back to the location where the desire for transnational travel actually originated" (van Dijk, in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 231). Thus, individuality is accompanied by "dividuality" (van Dijk, in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 229) and the break from tradition and local ties by a recovery of memory and collective national identity abroad. This, in turn, leads to the creation of particularistic collective identities that challenge the supposedly cosmopolitan pluralism of modern European societies. As a group, the chapters in Between Babel and Pentecost add to the complex picture of evangelical Christianity already sketched by Freston, but they do so by focusing on the internal logic and historical evolution of this religious tradition. In this evolution Corten and Marshall-Fratani detect a momentous shift from '"speaking in tongues' and the retreat from 'the world' which characterized early Pentecostalism" toward a new wave in post-1980s Pentecostalism that emphasizes the miracles of prosperity and "divine healing" (understood in the broadest sense of alleviating the causes of suffering, be they physical, financial, spiritual or social) and "global spiritual warfare." It is with this shift that we see the enormous growth of transnational networks, the privileging of transnational connections and experiences in the operation and symbolism of local organisations, and the embracing by converts of the representation of a transnational Pentecostal community. (6) In The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity anthropologist Simon Coleman, of the University of Durham, offers a full-fledged analysis of the gospel of health and wealth, focusing on the case of Word of Life (Livets Ord), a transnational charismatic Christian group with headquarters in Uppsala, Sweden. Word of Life is part of what is known as the Faith Movement, which had its immediate origins in the United States in the teachings of Oral Roberts, Gordon Lindsay, T. L. Osborn, and others, who saw revival and conversion as inextricably tied to healing, well-being, and financial prosperity. These teachings were refined by Kenneth Hagin, a former Baptist and Assemblies of God minister from Texas. Hagin set up in the late 1960s a media-sawy ministry in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which included a Bible training center that attracted would-be pastors throughout the United States and the world. Ulf Ekman, the founder of Word of Life, studied at Hagin's center in the early 1980s. From its foundation in 1983, Word of Life has grown rapidly, boasting the largest church in Europe (with capacity for 4,000 people) and the largest Bible school on the Continent (with more than six thousand graduates). In addition to educational institutions ranging from a Christian nursery to a university, the ministry produces books, audiocassettes, and television programs in vari-

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ous languages. Word of Life conducts missionary activities throughout Europe and has subsidiary ministries in Moscow, Tirana (Albania), and Brno (the Czech Republic). By focusing on an independent transnational ministry like Word of Life, Coleman demonstrates that when tracing the connections between evangelical Christianity and globalization, scholars need to go beyond ethnographic analyses of particular congregations and institutional studies of national religious dynamics. These two approaches presuppose the existence of territorialized and self-contained social and cultural units, unaffected by the deterritorializing forces of globalization. Instead, Coleman proposes to examine "the workings of a globally dispersed charismatic network from the viewpoint of one its more notable points. Within the network as a whole, there exists an internal market involving the production and consumption of particular goods as well as the promotion of highly mobile preachers who circulate between numerous, widely distributed workshops and conferences" (13). On the surface, Word of Life appears as a straightforward transplantation of a U.S. variety of conservative and pro-capitalist evangelical Christianity to the godless, secular, and socialist Swedish society. This, in fact, has been the reading of the local media, politicians, and intelligentsia. However, Coleman shows that Word of Life appropriates a strong "discourse of spiritualized nationalism whereby entrepreneurial, conservative Protestant values are presented as essentially Swedish" (16). In imagining Sweden as a Christian nation, Word of Life appeals to a strong doctrine of manifest destiny, in which Sweden becomes a country especially blessed by God and charged with the Great Commission. The irony is that, in contrast to the case in the United States, this discourse of spiritualized nationalism does not resonate with mainstream constructions of Swedish identity. Thus, Word of Life simultaneously terrritorializes itself, grounding its mission in a contested idea of nation, and deterritorializes itself, plugging into a global project of evangelization that transcends national borders. Within this framework, the nation retains some importance as a "conveniently bounded moral community" but only as part of a "wider system of transnational practices" (Coleman: 225). In other words, while national peculiarities shape Word of Life, "any national territory is only a small part of an infinitely wider whole" (Coleman: 229). This is why, in distinction to Freston and Corten and Marshall-Fratani, Coleman argues, particularly in the case of the gospel of health and wealth, for a focus on "a global landscape of faith... not made up of purely discrete landmarks. The boundaries between groups, despite their self-identification as independent units, are permanently breached by flows of people, consumer goods, resources and images. Part of my point is that we cannot view such

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flows as somehow 'additions' to essentially Swedish, or North American, or Nigerian, organisations" (236). As we have seen above, Between Babel and Pentecost introduces the useful notion of imaginaire to understand what Droogers calls the "diversity in unity and the unity in diversity" (in Corten and Marshall-Fratani: 43) that constitutes Pentecostalism. In The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity, Coleman deepens this analysis considerably by borrowing Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus: a system of durable embodied dispositions that generates practices and categories of perception/cognition adjusted to the person's social location. According to Coleman, Word of Life cultivates and reinforces a globalizing charismatic habitus. Coleman writes: "Charismatics construct an attitude towards the global circumstance that is composed of specific aesthetic and embodied elements as well as conscious thought. Much of this attitude is deliberately orchestrated, especially by leading preachers, but much of it emerges more implicitly out of forms of worship and evangelization" (51). Word of Life inculcates its global habitus through what Coleman calls "narrative emplacement," "dramatisation," "internalisation," and "externalisation" (118). Narrative emplacement refers to the construction of evangelical identity by placing oneself within a story of sin and redemption that is part of God's plan. Through narrative emplacement the believer comes to see his or her life history as intersecting with Christian eschatology, which is "translocal and transhistorical" (Coleman: 124). Dramatization, in turn, is the ritual enactment of biblical texts: "The Bible is not only Scripture, but equivalent to the script of a play, with roles adopted by those who take its words to heart" (Coleman: 126). Thus, the Bible becomes a timeless, universal repository of "stories that can be applied directly and indexically to the self, encouraging the believer to take a particular form of action, remain firm in the faith, discover the reason for a particular event and so on" (Coleman: 126). Internalization takes this dynamic a step beyond: The text is not just performed by the believer; it becomes embodied in the believer, who is now the arena where the cosmic struggle between God and Satan takes place. The body becomes a hermeneutic artifact, the outer sign of either sinfulness and brokenness or redemption. As Coleman puts it, "The body in this charismatic culture indicates and exemplifies divine favour [;] illnessa state of bodily imperfectionbecomes a problem of faith as well as a physical condition" (130). This accounts for the image of Jesus Christ as a bodybuilder, which occupies a central place in Word of Life's original building. For Word of Life followers, the body is literally a temple, "a sign that humans themselves have the capacity to act as microcosms for the divine" (Coleman: 145). With this we come to externali-

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zation, "the deployment of language as a performative force in order to change physical, social and material circumstances" (Coleman: 118). Word of Life discourses and practices "materialise the sacred not only within themselves . . . but also in their immediate environments" (Coleman: 152), particularly in the lived spaces the group builds. The strong, muscular Jesus not only is a model for healthy and prosperous believers but also is a trope for Word of Life's successful and rapidly expanding ministry, which is materialized in the large well-equipped temples. For Word of Life, "the spatial order of the construction echoes the ideal charismatic body not only in its strength and capacity for further development, but also in its attempts to remove all barriers to seeing, hearing, 'receiving' and broadcasting a single Truth with utmost clarity" (Coleman: 157). The aesthetic of the bodybuilder illustrates most clearly Coleman's claim that Word of Life inculcates a global habitus. The body of the individual believer and the congregation as Jesus' body are turned toward the outside, becoming a spectacle. They are given an "expansive agency" that stands for a ministry capable of overcoming any obstacle (Coleman: 187207). The world becomes the stage where the believer and the group flex their muscles through the use of global media. Proselytizing, thus, proceeds by equating faith and conversion with the commodities of health, power, youth, progress, and wealth. In Coleman's own words: The Word is projected into the world through speech and writing, but also through less obviously discursive means. Experiencing the self as both a receptacle for and a transmitter of generic power; perceiving congruences between an aesthetic of spiritual self-development and the constant growth inherent in divinely ordained language and money; constructing social action not only as "dramatised" exemplification of biblical precedent, but also as a resource to be commodified, replicated and reconsumed in electronic media; all these elements of evangelical practice contribute to globalising processes that can only be understood through an appreciation of the ritual forms and ideological assumptions of charismatic Christianity. (233) As compelling as the case of the Word of Life is, we should be cautious not to assume that it represents the whole, or even the most dynamic sectors, of global evangelical Christianity. At the risk of stating the obvious, empowerment has vastly different connotations among the urban poor in Brazil than among affluent Swedes. The late Richard Shaull, a professor emeritus of ecumenics at Princeton Theological Seminary, and Waldo Csar, also a contributor to Between Babel and Pentecost, drive this point home in Pentecostalism and the Future of Christian Churches. More than any of the other authors mentioned here, Shaull and Csar make a

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concerted effort to understand from within the reasons why poor people (in this case Brazilians) are attracted to Pentecostal churches like the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, with its widespread practices of exorcism and of linking tithing with divine cures. The results are revelatory. Indeed, one of the book's main virtues is that we get to hear the voices of ordinary people recounting their dramatic histories of conversion. Although Shaull and Csar do not expressly state it, their reading of the rapid growth of Pentecostalism challenges the "social pathology model," which is still favored by many social scientists. For instance, anthropologists Jean Comaroff, who has written insightful studies about Christianity and social change in Africa with John Comaroff, argues that there is a connection between the spirit of neoliberal capitalism, with its simultaneous commodification of the life world and its "alchemic techniques [that] defy reason in promising unnaturally large profits to yield wealth without production, value without effort" (23), and the proliferation of "occult economies" (19). As people face an increasingly baffling world, marked by "the sense of impossibility, even despair, that comes from being left out of the promise of prosperity, from having to look in on the global economy of desire from its immiserated exteriors" (Comaroff: 25), they search for compensators, for the vicarious gratification offered by the mass media and neo-Pentecostal movements. Thus, neo-Pentecostal churches function as contemporary cargo cults and chiliastic movements, which fulfill a neoliberal urge for a "privatized millennium, a personalized rather than a communal sense of rebirth; in this, the messianic meets the magical" (Comaroff: 24). Moreover, people attribute the breakdown of the community and family produced by the transition of capitalism from a centralized Fordist regime to decentered, flexible production to "arcane forces" beyond their control. Thus the current obsession with witchcraft and with demons and evil spirits that must be cast out. This line of analysis is, of course, not new; it has its roots in Marx's notion of the fetishism of commodities. Although analyses of this kind undoubtedly shed light on elective affinities between the evangelical Christian ethos and the spirit of late capitalism, they carry a strong reductionist bias. Even those who rely on economistic language (with notions like religious monopolies and commodities) to study religion, such as rational choice theorists, refrain from reducing the dynamics of religious markets to the logics of capitalism. Shaull and Csar are keenly aware of the damage wrought by neoliberal capitalism on the Brazilian poor. In fact, they would agree with Comaroff that much of Pentecostalism's appeal among poor people in Brazil has to do with its capacity to deal effectively with the challenges of everyday life.

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Shaull writes in his section of Pentecostalism and the Future of Christian Churches that the poor are consumed by a preoccupation with making it through each day.... At the same time, the most basic forms of life in the communitythe family, local neighborhoods, social, economic, and political structuresare becoming unglued, leaving masses of poor people in both rural and peripheral urban areas without stable work, medical care, or opportunities for education, in a situation of almost total abandonment, without any supportive extended family and community. (116) Under these conditions, poor Brazilians seek to reconstruct human life at the most basic level. They "are seeking for power to heal sick minds and bodies, to reorganize broken lives, to overcome addition to alcohol or drugs, to give them a sense of their own identity and worth, and to help them overcome feelings of impotence, experience a taste of joy, and look to the future with hope" (Shaull and Csar: 116). In contrast to Comaroff, however, Shaull and Csar argue that conversions to Pentecostalism are not primarily due to false consciousness. It is not a case of religion as "opiate of the masses." While aware of socioeconomic determinants, Shaull and Csar stress poor people's creative agency, seeing in Pentecostalism a positive vehicle through which poor Brazilians are rebuilding self, family, and community. In Cesar's words, "Converts to Pentecostalism may have found a way of overcoming the dayto-day hazards of the poor," a way to carve out "new spaces of life" in the midst of anomie and suffering (65-78). The penetration of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer and the intense personal relation with Jesus, who experienced the starkest forms of human suffering and yet triumphed, helps the Pentecostal to transmute the spirit-numbing routines of everyday life. In Pentecostalism, religion is an "instrument of the survival-transcendence relation" (Shaull and Csar: 34), where the act of survival and affirmation of the integrity of self and family in the midst of marginality becomes a miracle itself. Lest all of this sound too abstract and naive, Shaull and Csar show through the vivid personal testimonies of the believers how estranged young men lost in a world of drugs and violence have experienced liberation through the asceticism and intimacy offered by Pentecostalism and how women gain voice and curb the destructive excesses of machismo through Pentecostal churches. In these cases, Pentecostalism offers an incipient form of sociality, built from the bottom up, to counter neoliberalism's rampant and destructive Hobbesian individualism. In Pentecostalism we may have "the re[-]creation of life in community from its very foundation. If this is the case, then the poorest and most excluded

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can be the primary agents of such reconstruction, whether or not they perceive their struggle in this way" (Shaull and Csar: 230). Pentecostalism is contributing to the creation of a more human and more just society [in] the formation of new types of extended families, initiatives in the informal economy on the part of individuals and groups that could point the way to alternatives to the present economic system, initiatives of young gang leaders toward reconciliation and toward the creation of work for their members, the formation of groups of Evangelicals in the worst slums and in prisons in which their members help each other to survive in the midst of violence and work to diminish it. (Shaull and Csar: 230) Shaull and Cesar's arguments are important. In the context of radical dislocations generated by globalization, particularly in its economic form, and of precarious and disorderly democratic transitions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, evangelical Christianity is indeed a valuable indigenous resource to reweave the torn social fabric, building moral, civil agents and bonds of solidarity and reciprocity (Peterson, Vasquez, and Williams). Shaull and Csar, however, go further: Pentecostalism does not just carry the foundations of an alternative social order, but it also is a "new way of being Christian and living in the world" (xiii). It points to a "new theological paradigm" (Shaull and Csar: 120), a new way of encountering the sacred in the here and now and of experiencing transcendence within immanence. It then behooves Catholics and mainline Protestants concerned with liberation to accompany, support, and learn from poor Pentecostals. It is true that historic churches must abandon polemical rejections of evangelical Christianity (John Paul II, for example, has occasionally referred to Pentecostal "sects" as "ravening wolves" that "prey" on "poor and simple folk") and enter into ecumenical dialogue. However, there is a danger in eschatologizing any religious movement. In the 1970s and 1980s Catholic base communities were considered as the seeds of a new church and society. These expectations weighed heavily on the struggles of progressive Catholic activists and eventually contributed to widespread disillusionment in the face of a conservative turn in the Vatican and the deepening of the structural inequalities that the base communities sought to address as part of the project of building the reign of God (Vasquez). It may be impossible for liberationist theologians not to read eschatology into humble and fallible human projects, particularly in an age when the crisis of grand narratives, including Utopian ones, cries out for prophetic voices. Nevertheless, eschatologizing Pentecostalism may make it difficult for us to grasp the multifarious, paradoxical, and often contradictory

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character of this movement. Essentializing evangelical Christianity, albeit in a positive way, recapitulates precisely the mistake that Freston criticizes. Evangelical Christianity, and Pentecostalism in particular, represents a challenge for all of us because it destabilizes all the modernist dichotomies that have defined the field of religious studies, including tradition versus modernity, sacred versus profane, community versus society, agency versus structure, base versus superstructure, religion versus politics, domination versus resistance, local versus global, and the universal versus the particular. In view of the complexity and heterogeneity involved, we need to approach evangelical Christianity through truly interdisciplinary perspectives and self-reflexive standpoints aware of the multiple levels of analysis involved, including the personal, familial, communal, national, transnational, and global. As postmodernists would argue, we cannot have equal or privileged access to all these levels and produce a definitive metanarrative on evangelical Christianity. We can, however, strive toward fallible and situated yet empirically rich studies of evangelical Christianity. We must be aware of the level of analysis that we deploy, always remembering that no level of analysis is self-contained and, thus, always seeking to elucidate open-ended linkages with other levels. Depending on how and where we approach evangelical Christianity, we obtain partial but still valuable pictures of this variegated tradition. In showing us the multiple inflections of global evangelical Christianity, the books reviewed here point toward the complex roles religion plays vis--vis the current episode of globalization.

REFERENCES
Appadurai, Arjun Modernity at Large: The Cultural Dimensions of Global1996 ization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berger, Peter L. "Introduction: The Cultural Dynamics of Globaliza2002 tion." In Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World, 1-16. Ed. by Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington. New York: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge 1977 University Press. Brouwer, Steve, Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian FunPaul Gifford, damentalism. New York: Routledge. and Susan D. Rose 1996

Vasquez: Tracking Global Evangelical Christianity Comaroff, Jean 2001 "Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming." In Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, 1-56. Ed. by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff. Durham: Duke University Press. Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right. Boston: South End Press.

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Diamond, Sarah 1989 Peterson, Anna, Manuel A. Vasquez, and Philip Williams 2001 Stoll, David 1990 Vasquez, Manuel A. 1998

"Introduction: Christianity and Social Change in the Shadow of Globalization." In Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas, 1-22. Ed. by Anna Peterson, Manuel A. Vasquez, and Philip Williams. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Is Latin America Turning ProtestantiBerkeley: University of California Press. The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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