Pentecostalism and Prosperity Theology: Symposium at Regent University

The end of 2010 through the beginning of 2011 have been among the busiest--and most productive--months of my academic life.  I've submitted articles, completed book chapters, reviewed several articles and textbooks, and prepared papers for various grants and conferences.  I've also finally completed my manuscript on worship and music in racially diverse churches (more on that in the coming months).

This afternoon, I'm in the midst of final preparations for a symposium happening for the next couple of days at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virgina.

Pentecostalism & Prosperity Symposium

The Socio-Economics of Global Renewal

Co-sponsored by the Schools of Undergraduate Studies and Divinity

Symposium schedule:

February 21, 2:00-5:30 pm, Library Auditorium

February 22, 2:00-5:30 pm, Library Auditorium

I'm thrilled to join this stimulating conversation.  How is Pentecostalism related to global economics?

The adaptability of Pentecostalism to the current economic system is certainly one of the most interesting aspects of the movement.  On Tuesday, I'll be talking about how prosperity theology connects with today's "individualization" and the rise of "self-culture." 

Hollywood Faith by Gerardo Marti

This is less of a theological exposition than an attempt to connect sociological dynamics of social change.  I attempt to draw out a connection between global economic dynamics and the very real circumstances of individuals, the social psychological "self," that is confronted with historically new challenges. It is an accentuation of an argument made in my Hollywood Faith book. 

If we step back, I think we can all agree that prosperity theology developed with the emergence of modern capitalism.  I believe it resonates with many people today because  the effect of globalized capitalism on  everyday life is experienced so broadly. As society changes, people find forms of religion that fit those changes.

Several theorists (who don't pay much attention to religion) tell us that the broader workforce today must master self-promotion for economic survival.  If we then turn to the place of religion in these changes, I note that much of the "work" of religious communities  has as their goal the supporting of a kind of “self” needed to live in the world today. The modern "self" today largely lives in context of work.  Being a wage-earner has become enormously important, more so than any other period in history.

When we appreciate the economic uncertainty of individuals in advanced capitalism, the emphasis on a vigorous, God-empowered self can be seen as a way to adapt to the demands for work today.

Image via Wikipedia

Healing Service

So what can appear to be an ego-oriented religion can work within a viable religious community.  In other words, prosperity theology can resonate with ambitious individuals who, in their experience, find their goals to be frustrating, systems overwhelming, yet gain great confidence in that God can, wants to, and (eventually) will use them to fulfill cosmic purposes as they at the same time achieve personal fulfillment in a world-affirming way.

In prosperity-oriented churches, individualism coexists with the general call for generosity and self-sacrifice because the individual is seen as the conduit by which God will accomplish his purposes on the earth.  The focus on the individual is not about individual self-promotion but about creating a platform as an ambassador of the kingdom of God to engage in activities that allow God to work in the world at large.

It is a win-win solution; God fulfills his missional purposes, and his people live prosperous, fulfilling lives.

My paper for the symposium lays out more detail on all these processes.  In addition, the symposium will encourage an active dialogue on how this argument is right/wrong, and surely provide many additional considerations.

If you're interested, the presentations will be live on the internet (see symposium website), and the papers will be collected into an edited volume in coming year. I'll post as things become available.

Hollywood Faith: Holiness, Prosperity, and Ambition in a Los Angeles Church - Book Review

Many thanks to Kathleen Hladky at Florida State University (her recent article) who provided a review of my book Hollywood Faith for the H-Pentecostalism thread of Humanities and Social Sciences (H-Net) Reviews Online, a powerful consortium of scholars attempting to provide timely updates of new research.

In the review, she concludes:

Throughout Hollywood Faith, Marti contributes to the study of Pentecostalism and contemporary Christianity by drawing attention to topics too often overlooked by scholars of religion: the relationship between religion and work, multiracial Christian congregations, and the Word of Faith movement.

Overall, her reading of my book shows great sensitivity to the layered themes on religion, economics, and race found there.

You can read the full review here.

Brazilian Evangelicals - New National Religion?

According to UK's Guardian, Brazil's evangelical churches are booming, but for all their marketing savvy they don't have the status of Catholicism.

A fascinating article from the UK pits Evangelicals versus Catholics in the battle for Brazil's religious self-identity. Pictures from the story show young, enthusiastic worshipers pouring their hearts out in worship.

This ain't your grandma's Sunday school.

The vibrancy of commitment seen here can be excused as being "Brazilian" - the Latin passion manifesting itself through worship. Except this same style of worship can be seen in the contemporary Evangelical churches in the American mid-west.

It's not an ethnic religion, but a charismatic worship that's being seen here.

Instead, we are seeing continued evidence of the Global South embracing forms of ecstatic Christianity. From the article:

In the past 20 years or so, Brazil, cited as the country with the biggest catholic population in the world, has witnessed a migration from Rome to the booming evangelical churches. According to IBGE (the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), the Catholic population in the country was 91.8% of the total in 1970. But the most recent survey, in 2000, revealed that the number of Catholics had fallen to 73. 8% with the number of evangelicals up from 5.2% to 15.6%.

The shift is accompanied by new methodologies of "doing church" similar to things we've seen in the United States. According to the article, "Rock concerts, fighting events and surfer rituals are some of the activities laid on by new churches that are garnering increasing numbers of followers."

But can we explain away this spiritual vitality by approaching it as savvy marketing?

I don't think so.

According to Antonio Flávio Pierucci, professor at the department of sociology of the University of São Paulo and a specialist in the sociology of religion, "the new Pentecostal churches [are good at] media and marketing..." BUT "analysing the statistical data shows that older evangelical churches have grown too."

For Pierucci, "It means that Catholicism is struggling against older Pentecostalism as well as the new varieties."

Pierucci says a key reason for churchgoers' change in allegiance is the development of the religious freedom, a process which began at the end of the 19th century. With the end of the empire and the advent of the republic in Brazil, the Roman Catholic church lost much of its power. And although the article does not explain how this works, Pierucci also states that the military dictatorship (1964-1984) also helped sow the seeds of the evangelical "boom".

We've got to look at the bundle of social changes that stimulate new religious developments. Media push and marketing "tricks" are simply not enough to sustain broad growth in any religious orientation.

And the new wave in Brazil is experiencing it's own challenge in how people understand the new movement. "It is really rare to find a student who is brave enough to say that he is a new Pentecostalist. There is still some prejudice."

"It is not just about class, but about the status of the new Pentecostalism."

Cynic to Sympathetic - Pentecostalism Moves Researcher to Look at the S Factor

Full disclosure: I have a good relationship with Don Miller, Firestone Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California and executive director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture, and he was a member of my dissertation committee.

Even so, Don's interview in the latest Books & Culture magazine is a fascinating look at how one social scientist negotiates his relationship between "empirical reality" and "spiritual reality."

In the course of conducting a sweeping study of Global Pentecostalism, Don Miller changed. He went from being cynical to a sympathetic in his analytical stance. In the process, he proposes that social scientists take into account the "S Factor" in studying religion.

In a recent interview, Don states:

At some point early on in the project, I felt that I made a turn in my own interpretation of what I was witnessing, from potentially writing a book that could have been debunking, maybe even cynical at points, to wanting to try to explain why Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the world.

At a purely personal, spiritual level, it had a profound effect on me.

My worldview actually changed in the process of the project, and I became much more open to the possibility that there are dimensions of reality that we normally exclude from a Western, scientific, Enlightenment perspective.

Don does not become uncritical, but rather carefully altered his stance to reflect more fully all aspects of what he believed he was observing.

Image by grytr via Flickr

Obviously, there were times when I felt there was manipulation going on, particularly in some of the "prosperity gospel" churches that we visited, even though we didn't actually study them. There were other instances where one could have a purely naturalistic explanation of something. But in the last chapter of Global Pentecostalism, picking up a hint from the opening chapter, Ted Yamamori and I write about something called "the S factor," the Spirit with a capital S.

We make the argument that if you exclude the Spirit from religion, and particularly Pentecostal religion, it may be difficult to explain many of the things that occur, or at least you have to go through mental gymnastics to explain certain phenomena.

This is not to exclude the role of social class, the role of race and ethnicity, the role of culture more generally, because these are factors that shape every experience. But there is this other dimension that needs to be considered.

Coming from a sociologist, this is a highly controversial statement. But Don is a good scholar and mixes all these considerations in an insightful way. His discussion of Prosperity gospel is a case in point:

...there is a certain element of the prosperity gospel that is oftentimes overlooked in negative critiques: the appeal of the prosperity gospel is to people who are poor and without hope. Prosperity gospel preachers give people hope; they give them a vision for changing their lives.

The negative side of the prosperity gospel is that it is sometimes founded solely on the magical belief that if you donate to this ministry, you will be rewarded a hundred times over.

On the other hand, if you are giving people hope, and if the solution does not produce change, there is the possibility that these individuals who have had their consciousness raised will turn to other alternatives, such as political means of changing their life circumstances. Sometimes these prosperity gospel preachers give sound advice because they tell individuals how to multiply their flock of sheep, of goats, of chickens, and save money.

One could cynically say that they are doing this purely out of self-interest—to enable people to give even more—but often the preachers are teaching their people the very rudiments of capitalism, giving them an opportunity to change their lives decisively for the better.

Furthermore, by avoiding alcohol, gambling, womanizing, and other such taboos, extremely poor people may eventually have surplus capital that they can in turn use to give better education to their children and provide better healthcare for their families, and all this, in turn, may lead to upward social mobility.

Image by D G Butcher via Flickr

Many scholars studying religion, because of their Marxist, psychoanalytic, or other deprivation theory leanings, can only see the compensatory elements of Pentecostal worship.

But in my experience, this worship is something that empowers people and doesn't simply compensate. An even more nuanced interpretation might be that in order for people to be empowered, they need, in fact, to be comforted. So, by compensation I mean feeling that someone, namely God, is caring for you, that you can trust that your life has a destiny and purpose that is beyond your own imagination. Dynamic worship, singing, all-night prayer meetings, and fasting: these are things that give a power and discipline to one's vision and enable people to attempt the seemingly impossible.

More on Don's understanding of Pentecostalism is found in Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement, written with Ted Yamamori.

The full interview quoted here is available online.

Finally, The Center for Religion and Civic Culture is just now launching a multi-million dollar research initiative on Charismatic and Pentecostal religion.

Evangelicalism and Democracy in Latin America

Evangelicalism is a world-wide phenomenon. Some of the most interesting happenings relate to the relationship between religion, economics, and politics in the Global South. Toward gaining a better understanding, I found a brief book review of new research put together in the recently published edited volume by my friend Paul Freston.

Religion in the Global South

Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America (Series: Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in the Global South)

Paul is simply brilliant and seems to know more about economics, religion, and politics in the Global South than anyone on the planet. This book, part of a series at Oxford, bring his expertise along others by drawing together case studies from Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, and Brazil.

According to the review, the book contains "a thorough introduction by the editor and a well-rounded conclusion by scholar of Latin American religion and politics Daniel Levine place the case studies in a broader perspective."

One insight from the book:

"The experiences of evangelicals are markedly different from country to country, yet the overall impression is not of a religious community suddenly appearing out of a Catholic/communist vacuum, but rather of an assortment of religious forms playing a larger role in public discourse (whether among the grassroots or political elites) because of increased opportunities after the Cold War."

-- E. M. Mazur, Virginia Wesleyan College, CHOICE Reviews, January 2009.

Watch for more research on evangelicalism and its consequences in the Global South.

More New Research on the Global South

Research on the Global South is challenging, often requiring more money, specific language skills, and a phenomenal amount cooperation by local governments and church ministries. Yet it's drawing some of the best scholars to take up the challenge.

While I'm at it, here are two other books I enjoyed reading this year on evangelicalism and pentecostalism in the Global South:

Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement

Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism

Other articles

• UN Says Latin American & Caribbean Economic Growth to Slow in 2009

Blood and Fire - Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church

A new book focused on "godly love" is now available from Margaret Poloma (sociology) and Ralph Hood, Jr. (psychology). This one is worth a close look. Poloma and Hood are excellent scholars who are deeply and consistently sensitive to the realities of personal religious faith in all their writings.


A book-length study of religion that combines insights from both sociology and psychology is truly rare. And one that focuses on "love" even more so.

Poloma and Hood are not only warm and personable (I've had the pleasure of meeting both of them at conferences), they are also seasoned scholars who regularly pursue through their research interesting questions of religious vitality. This new book,

Blood and Fire: Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church

is a welcome addition to their body of work and to the literature on religion as a whole. The book comes from the hands of true experts on Pentecostalism.

Here's a description from the New York University Press website:

What does it mean to live out the theology presented in the Great Commandment to love God above all and to love your neighbor as yourself? In Blood and Fire, Poloma and Hood explore how understandings of godly love function to empower believers. Though godly love may begin as a perceived relationship between God and a person, it is made manifest as social behavior among people.

Blood and Fire offers a deep ethnographic portrait of a charismatic church and its faith-based ministry, illuminating how religiously motivated social service makes use of beliefs about the nature of God's love.....

Blood and Fire argues that godly love— the relationship between perceived divine love and human response— is at the heart of the vision of emerging churches, and that it is essential to understand this dynamic if one is to understand the ongoing reinvention of American Protestantism in the twenty-first century.

The book comes highly recommended. Here are two pre-publication reviews:

This is an exceptional book in that it tells the story of the failure of a faith-based movement rather than its success. In a richly textured narrative, the authors describe the limitations of religious charisma when it confronts the harsh reality of a business-minded board that requires accountability. This book is fascinating reading for anyone who wants to understand the interplay between spirit and flesh, vision and economic reality.
—Donald E. Miller, Executive Director, Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California

Blood and Fire not only illuminates the group Poloma and Hood examine but provides students of new religious movements with a virtual treasure trove of data for analysis--from concrete examples of the pitfalls of founding, organizing, and maintaining a new religious movement to the demonstration of the `precariousness of charismatic leadership.’ A must read for anyone interested in new religious movements and what one might call engaged evangelical Christianity.
--Susan M. Setta, Chair, Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University

About the Authors:

Margaret Poloma is Professor Emeritus at the University of Akron. She has authored many books, including Main Street Mystics,The Assemblies of God at the Crossroads, and The Charismatic Movement.

Ralph Hood, Jr., is Professor of Psychology, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. He is the co-author of The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism; The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach; and Measures of Religiosity; and editor of The Handbook of Religious Experience.