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This chapter examines Pentecostal or charismatic Christianity, which constituted the most vibrant features of the Christian landscape in Latin America and Africa, as well as in many parts of Asia, Oceania, and eastern Europe. The global Pentecostal movement throughout the twentieth century drew its most numerous adherents from the ranks of the poor, in a variety of urban and rural contexts. But as the century proceeded, it became apparent that this was not a faith for the poor alone, but rather a religious chameleon that had an extraordinary capacity to adapt itself to a wide range of social and economic contexts and ecclesiastical traditions. Pentecostalism has found a home amidst prosperous business families in Seoul or Singapore as well as among the favela dwellers of São Paulo or the Dalits of South India. The respective histories of Pentecostal culture in Ghana and Brazil both reveal a gradual but incomplete shift in style from the modest aspirations to social respectability and economic improvement characteristic of the Apostolic churches in Ghana or the Assembléia de Deus in Brazil to the sophisticated middle-class materiality and exhibitionist style typical of modern Ghanaian neo-Pentecostal churches or of the third-wave metropolitan churches in Brazil.

This chapter explores how the process of reevaluating one's past and reaching for a future beyond a clear ethnoracial definition is played out among the thousands of ordinary working-class Indians in Chatsworth and elsewhere who convert to Pentecostal Christianity. These conversions, which have gathered significant force since 1994, reflect a desire for respectability and purity, but even more so a powerful attempt to find a religious identity that seems both intelligible and in tune with the culture of the larger South Africa society. The chapter considers how these church communities, among many other things, negotiate new forms of inclusion and embody a promise of being both included in the new nation and global yet decidedly and conspicuously nonpolitical.

This chapter observes and interprets new forms of independent Pentecostal Christianity emerging in Ghana, West Africa. The new churches emphasize faith healing, a prosperity gospel, and deliverance from demons. Some of the pastors have become prominent on local media outlets with their own television and radio programs, and in some cases, broadcasting stations. One group established a private university. These groups compete and contend with more traditional churches, but some have begun to shift toward more classically Christian approaches to social ministry and personal spirituality. The current popularity of prosperity gospel teaching suggests that materialism and an instrumental approach to religion may be integral to African traditional values and worldviews.

Religious people and their religions are not always harmonized. Scholars have long noted two faces of religious practice, one corresponding to an “official” set of beliefs and actions taught in texts, maintained by institutions, and communicated by specialists; the other is a “folk” form of religion pursued by ordinary people in everyday life. This chapter applies a dual-process model of cognition to the problem of “divergent religion,” arguing that how religious people think and act is directly linked to the way the brain processes religious concepts. Evidence drawn from social psychology and comparative religion suggests that religious concepts can proceed along two contrasting mental pathways to differing affect. This account of cognitive processing provides a new way of understanding duplicitous forms of religious thought, explaining common episodes of religious change (e.g., doctrinal and ritual innovation, syncretism, conversion, and the formation of new religions), and mapping an important set of selective forces at work on the content and stability of religious systems. Pentecostal Christianity and Theravada Buddhism provide case studies.

What are miracles as social phenomena, and what lessons do they have for anthropology? This chapter starts the inquiry into these questions by introducing both the Vineyard, and the wider Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition is sprang from. This chapter also frames the miracle as a response to a problem of divine withdrawal and absence. It also introduces the notion that the miracle as effectuating in both individuals and institutions, and that the plasticity exhibited by the miracle can be a tool for thinking through Christian variation without falling into the trap of an anthropological nominalism.

This chapter argues that by concentrating on affect, we can think about language and embodiment together without privileging either term. To demonstrate, the chapter draws on eight years of ethnographic engagement with the Vineyard, a hybrid evangelical/Pentecostal California-originated church planting movement. Here, the chapter defines affect as “the intensities and energies found in a particular moment or object that has consequences on others.” It shows how affect serves to structure both linguistic and embodied performance and suggests that Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity has been particularly successful in using heightened levels of affect to expand, reinvigorate, and reconfigure individual and collective identities. Tracing the “lines of affect” would thus develop greater appreciation for the growth of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as a greater theoretical understanding of broader religiosities.

This chapter explores pneumatology in relation to liberation theology within the context of the Pentecostalism. It first considers the emergence of pneumatology in black theology before discussing the gap between the African American Church's worship, service, prophetic-liberative social consciousness, and the underdevelopment of pneumatology in major scholarly projects. It then stresses the importance of a critical pneumatological discourse for renewing the Spirit within Afro-Pentecostalism. In particular, it calls for a pneumatology that moves the locus of discussion from narrow sectarian interests to those of the worldwide Christian communion. It suggests that serious theological reflection on and re-working of major themes within Afro-Pentecostal Christianity can not only enrich the Pentecostal tradition but also allow those within the movement to make contributions, which can benefit the broader church.

This concluding chapter reflects on the historical trajectory of the anthropology of Christianity and how this book in particular is situated between its history. Once again the chapter delves into how this anthropology has transitioned from an upstart intellectual movement to an established subfield in its own right, at the same time marking a key category in the anthropology of Christianity—that of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity (P/c), which lumps together those genealogically linked forms of the faith that emphasize the availability of gifts of the Holy Spirit to all believers. This chapter thus dwells on the previous chapters' analyses of both evangelical and P/c Christianity and in particular expounds on the new directions some of these studies have taken.

In this chapter, the long-standing equation of obeah and science in the anglophone Caribbean reframes the story of modernity. The chapter shows how regnant ideas of both science and religion promise to rationalize invisible forces and make a break with the past by battling “superstition” or “witchcraft” in Trinidad. While science and religion attained coherence by uniting against a common enemy of racialized and gendered false belief, my interlocutors saw this alleged enemy (“obeah”) as a synonym for science itself. Rather than dispelling invisible forces, they asserted that science pointed toward the occult and hidden nature of power in the world. These hidden powers were epitomized by the internet, illicit trafficking networks, and obeah. This chapter shows how these occult forces of modernity revise the terms through which non-Western practices have been included in or excluded from the category “science.” Rather than eccentric assertions, I show how my interlocutors' conceptions resonate with central themes in the history and philosophy of science.

This chapter presents the findings from a case study of Abundant Life, a multiethnic, multinational, charismatic/Pentecostal congregation in Limerick City. It provides a history of the congregation, including growth fed by immigration, and argues that Abundant Life can be considered an example of extra-institutional religion because of how its people define themselves in opposition to the Irish Catholic Church. It also analyses how Abundant Life is negotiating immigration and ethnic diversity. There are remarkably harmonious relationships between native Irish and immigrants, which were built in large part on a leadership model in which one ethnic group does not hold significantly more power than others—although challenges remained when it came to building cross-cultural relationships. It argues that Abundant Life negotiates diversity more effectively than traditional congregations and denominations. It may be better placed to contribute to socio-political transformations, and to model reconciliation between groups, than traditional religious institutions.

This chapter presents the findings from a case study of Jesus Centre, Dublin, a parish of the charismatic/Pentecostal, Nigerian-based Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG). It includes a history of Jesus Centre, and explores how it has created an extra-institutional space where people’s everyday beliefs and practices are contrasted to Irish Catholicism. This is seen in how people spoke about evangelism, their interactions with other churches, and promoting healing from clerical sexual abuse scandals. It argues that Jesus Centre both complements and challenges Ireland’s traditional institutional churches because it is a space where many have experienced personal transformation, and because its increasing interactions with other church and secular groups make it poised to contribute to wider transformations. Because Jesus Centre is not caught up in the sectarianism of the island’s past, they may have unique contributions to make to reconciliation.

This and the following chapter describe Pentecostal Christianity’s practices and effects in the slum. This chapter describes how a church is normally viewed as depending on the charismatic appeal of the pastor who runs it and who engages in intense competition with other pastors to maintain high levels of pastoral care to retain his flock. Yet this pastor-centric view of slum Pentecostal churches overlooks a component of Christian activity that is central to maintaining the congregation—the prayer networks run and managed by lay women. These networks create and reproduce intense affective relations that displace the culpability women otherwise feel for their own misfortune as the result of the moral fault lines described in chapter 3.

The final substantive chapter describes the content of the message of Christianity in the slum, and it explores how people receive and participate actively in the interpretation of that message. The church sermons—mostly indirectly, but nevertheless, unmistakably—provide a seering critique of caste people’s injustice and promise revolutionary deliverance. At the same time, the slum churches introduce microsocial technologies that serve to improve both relations between husbands and wives and those between women and their creditors.