The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Australia
Local Congregants and a Global Spiritual Network
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jasr.37074Keywords:
spiritual capital, material religion, assemblages, networks, migrationAbstract
The Brazilian megachurch, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), has a global network of branches. Its Australian headquarters is a dynamic spiritual space where ideas, people, material culture and spirits are exchanged from across the globe. This article follows the journey of a single vial of oil to illustrate the global flows that take place through the UCKG Australia. With each stop the vial accrues spiritual capital before its final destination. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research, I argue that the UCKG’s global networks allow congregants access to, and enables them to pass on, spiritual capital thus providing personal agency to overcome life difficulties via supernatural means. Through this vial’s journey, I will show how global religious practices are locally lived and highlight the local spiritual significance of globally mobile religious material culture.
References
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2014 Remitting Wealth, Reciprocating Health? The ‘Travel’ of the Land from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal. American Ethnologist 41(2): 261–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12074
Anderson, Robert M. 1979 Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism. Oxford University Press, New York.
Appadurai, Arjun 1996 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London.
Basu, Paul, and Simon Coleman 2008 Introduction: Migrant Worlds, Material Cultures. Mobilities 3(3): 313–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100802376753
Castells, Manuel 1996 The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Cambridge, MA.
Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de 1998 [1996] Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3): 469–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034157
2004 Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation. Tipiti 2: 3–22.
2014 [2009] Cannibal Metaphysics. Univocal Publishing, Minneapolis.
Cunningham, Hilary 2004 Nations Rebound?: Crossing Borders in a Gated Globe. Identities 11(3): 329–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/10702890490493527
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari 1987 [1980] A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Dengah, H. J. François 2017 Being Part of the Nação: Examining Costly Religious Rituals in a Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal Church. Ethos 45(1): 48–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12154
Freston, Paul 1995 Pentecostalism in Brazil: A Brief History. Religion 25: 119–33. https://doi.org/10.1006/reli.1995.0012
1999 Neo-Pentecostalisn in Brazil: Problems of Definition and the Struggle for Hegemony. Social Science Archives of Religions 105: 145–62. https://doi.org/10.3406/assr.1999.1082
2005 The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God: A Brazilian Church Finds Success in Southern Africa. Journal of Religion in Africa, New Dimensions in the Study of Pentecostalism 35(1): 33–65. https://doi.org/10.1163/1570066052995816
Glick Schiller, Nina, and Noel B. Salazar 2012 Regimes of Mobility across the Globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39(2): 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.723253
Hage, Ghassan 2009 Waiting out the Crisis: On Stuckedness and Governmentality. In Waiting, edited by Ghassan Hage, 97–106. Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria.
Hannerz, Ulf 1996 Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. Routledge, London and New York.
Hazard, Sonia 2013 The Material Turn in the Study of Religion. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 4: 58–78.
Holbraad, Martin 2007 The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, again). In Thinking through Things: Theorising Artifacts Ethnographically, edited by Amira Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell, 189–225. Routledge, London.
2012 Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Houtman, Dick, and Birgit Meyer 2012 Introduction: Material Religion—How Things Matter. In Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, edited by Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer, 1–21. Fordham University Press, New York.
Kramer, Eric W. 2001 Possessing Faith: Commodification, Religious Subjectivity, and Collectivity in a Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal Church. PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, Chicago.
2002 Making Global Faith Universal: Media and a Brazilian Prosperity Movement. Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3(1): 21–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/01438300208567181
Lash, Scott, and John Urry 1994 Economies of Signs and Space. SAGE, London.
Latour, Bruno 1987 Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
1999 A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans. In Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, by Bruno Latour, 174–215. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
2005 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
2013 [2012] An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
2014 Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History 45: 1–18.
Lehmann, David 1996 Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America. Polity Press, Oxford.
Levitt, Peggy, and Nina Glick Schiller 2004 Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society. International Migration Review 38(3): 1002–1039. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x
Lima, Diana 2012 Prosperity and Masculinity: Neopentecostal Men in Rio de Janeiro. Ethnos 77(3): 372–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.609942
Macedo, Edir 2013 Nada A Perder 2. Planeta do Brazil, São Paulo.
Mafra, Clara, Claudia Swatowiski and Camila Sampaio 2013 Edir Macedo’s Pastoral Project: A Globally Integrated Pentecostal Network. In The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, edited by Cristina Rocha and Manuel Vásquez, 45–67. Brill, Leiden.
Mariano, Ricardo 1995 Neopentecostalismo: os Pentecostais estão mudando. Master’s thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo.
1999 Neopentecostais. Sociologia do novo Pentecostalismo no Brasil. Edições Loyola, São Paulo.
Meyer, Birgit 2012 Mediation and the Genesis of Presence: Towards a Material Approach to Religion. Universities Utrecht, Faculteit geesteswetenschappen, Utrecht.
Meyer, Birgit, David Morgan, Crispin Paine and S. Brent Plate 2015 Material Religion’s First Decade. Material Religion 10(1): 105–110. https://doi.org/10.2752/175183414X13909887177628
Mora, Cristina G. 2008 Marketing the ‘Health and Wealth Gospel’ across National Borders: Evidence from Brazil and the United States. Poetics 36: 404–420. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2008.06.008
Nolin, Catherine 2004 Spatializing the Immobility of Guatemalan Transnationalism in Canada. Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 29(57-58): 267–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2004.10816859
Openshaw, Kathleen 2018 I am Universal: Transnational Material Networks of Spiritual Capital in the Australian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. PhD dissertation, Western Sydney University, Australia.
Oro, Ari Pedro, and Pablo Semán 2001 Brazilian Pentecostalism Crosses National Borders. In Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America, edited by André Corten and Ruth Marshall-Fratani, 181–95. Hurst & Company, London.
Plate, S. Brent 2014 A History of Religion in 5½ Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to its Senses. Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Premawardhana, Devaka 2012 Transformational Tithing: Sacrifice and Reciprocity in a Neo-Pentecostal Church. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 15: 85–109. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2012.15.4.85
Rocha, Cristina 2013 Transnational Pentecostal Connections: An Australian Megachurch and a Brazilian Church in Australia. PentecoStudies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Research on the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements 12(1): 62–82. https://doi.org/10.1558/ptcs.v12i1.62
2017a John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing. Oxford University Press, New York.
2017b ‘The Come to Brazil Effect’: Young Brazilians’ Fascination with Hillsong. In The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon the Waters, edited by Tanya Riches and Tom Wagner, 125–41. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Rockefeller, Stuart A. 2011 Flow. Current Anthropology 52(4): 557–78.
Shamir, Ronen 2005 Without Borders? Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime. Sociological Theory 23(2): 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0735-2751.2005.00250.x
Sheller, Mimi 2016 Uneven Mobility Futures: A Foucauldian Approach. Mobilities 11(1): 15–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2015.1097038
Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry 2006 The New Mobilities Paradigm. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38(2): 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268
Turner, Bryan S. 2007 The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility. European Journal of Social Theory 10(2): 287–304. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431007077807
UCKG UK n.d. A Little Help to Boost Your Faith. Online: https://www.uckg.org/anointing-oil/ (accessed April 7, 2018).
van de Kamp, Linda 2016a Violent Conversion: Brazilian Pentecostalism and Urban Women in Mozambique. Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, Suffolk, Rochester, NY.
2016b Introduction: Religious Circulation in Transatlantic Africa. Africa Diaspora 9(1-2): 1–13.
van Wyk, Ilana 2014 The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa: A Church of Strangers. Cambridge University Press, New York.
2015 Prosperity and the Work of Luck in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, South Africa. Critical African Studies 7(3): 262–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2015.1050216
2014 Remitting Wealth, Reciprocating Health? The ‘Travel’ of the Land from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal. American Ethnologist 41(2): 261–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12074
Anderson, Robert M. 1979 Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism. Oxford University Press, New York.
Appadurai, Arjun 1996 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London.
Basu, Paul, and Simon Coleman 2008 Introduction: Migrant Worlds, Material Cultures. Mobilities 3(3): 313–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100802376753
Castells, Manuel 1996 The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Cambridge, MA.
Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de 1998 [1996] Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3): 469–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034157
2004 Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation. Tipiti 2: 3–22.
2014 [2009] Cannibal Metaphysics. Univocal Publishing, Minneapolis.
Cunningham, Hilary 2004 Nations Rebound?: Crossing Borders in a Gated Globe. Identities 11(3): 329–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/10702890490493527
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari 1987 [1980] A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Dengah, H. J. François 2017 Being Part of the Nação: Examining Costly Religious Rituals in a Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal Church. Ethos 45(1): 48–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12154
Freston, Paul 1995 Pentecostalism in Brazil: A Brief History. Religion 25: 119–33. https://doi.org/10.1006/reli.1995.0012
1999 Neo-Pentecostalisn in Brazil: Problems of Definition and the Struggle for Hegemony. Social Science Archives of Religions 105: 145–62. https://doi.org/10.3406/assr.1999.1082
2005 The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God: A Brazilian Church Finds Success in Southern Africa. Journal of Religion in Africa, New Dimensions in the Study of Pentecostalism 35(1): 33–65. https://doi.org/10.1163/1570066052995816
Glick Schiller, Nina, and Noel B. Salazar 2012 Regimes of Mobility across the Globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39(2): 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.723253
Hage, Ghassan 2009 Waiting out the Crisis: On Stuckedness and Governmentality. In Waiting, edited by Ghassan Hage, 97–106. Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria.
Hannerz, Ulf 1996 Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. Routledge, London and New York.
Hazard, Sonia 2013 The Material Turn in the Study of Religion. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 4: 58–78.
Holbraad, Martin 2007 The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, again). In Thinking through Things: Theorising Artifacts Ethnographically, edited by Amira Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell, 189–225. Routledge, London.
2012 Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Houtman, Dick, and Birgit Meyer 2012 Introduction: Material Religion—How Things Matter. In Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, edited by Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer, 1–21. Fordham University Press, New York.
Kramer, Eric W. 2001 Possessing Faith: Commodification, Religious Subjectivity, and Collectivity in a Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal Church. PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, Chicago.
2002 Making Global Faith Universal: Media and a Brazilian Prosperity Movement. Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3(1): 21–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/01438300208567181
Lash, Scott, and John Urry 1994 Economies of Signs and Space. SAGE, London.
Latour, Bruno 1987 Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
1999 A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans. In Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, by Bruno Latour, 174–215. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
2005 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
2013 [2012] An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
2014 Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History 45: 1–18.
Lehmann, David 1996 Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America. Polity Press, Oxford.
Levitt, Peggy, and Nina Glick Schiller 2004 Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society. International Migration Review 38(3): 1002–1039. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x
Lima, Diana 2012 Prosperity and Masculinity: Neopentecostal Men in Rio de Janeiro. Ethnos 77(3): 372–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.609942
Macedo, Edir 2013 Nada A Perder 2. Planeta do Brazil, São Paulo.
Mafra, Clara, Claudia Swatowiski and Camila Sampaio 2013 Edir Macedo’s Pastoral Project: A Globally Integrated Pentecostal Network. In The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, edited by Cristina Rocha and Manuel Vásquez, 45–67. Brill, Leiden.
Mariano, Ricardo 1995 Neopentecostalismo: os Pentecostais estão mudando. Master’s thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo.
1999 Neopentecostais. Sociologia do novo Pentecostalismo no Brasil. Edições Loyola, São Paulo.
Meyer, Birgit 2012 Mediation and the Genesis of Presence: Towards a Material Approach to Religion. Universities Utrecht, Faculteit geesteswetenschappen, Utrecht.
Meyer, Birgit, David Morgan, Crispin Paine and S. Brent Plate 2015 Material Religion’s First Decade. Material Religion 10(1): 105–110. https://doi.org/10.2752/175183414X13909887177628
Mora, Cristina G. 2008 Marketing the ‘Health and Wealth Gospel’ across National Borders: Evidence from Brazil and the United States. Poetics 36: 404–420. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2008.06.008
Nolin, Catherine 2004 Spatializing the Immobility of Guatemalan Transnationalism in Canada. Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 29(57-58): 267–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2004.10816859
Openshaw, Kathleen 2018 I am Universal: Transnational Material Networks of Spiritual Capital in the Australian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. PhD dissertation, Western Sydney University, Australia.
Oro, Ari Pedro, and Pablo Semán 2001 Brazilian Pentecostalism Crosses National Borders. In Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America, edited by André Corten and Ruth Marshall-Fratani, 181–95. Hurst & Company, London.
Plate, S. Brent 2014 A History of Religion in 5½ Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to its Senses. Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Premawardhana, Devaka 2012 Transformational Tithing: Sacrifice and Reciprocity in a Neo-Pentecostal Church. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 15: 85–109. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2012.15.4.85
Rocha, Cristina 2013 Transnational Pentecostal Connections: An Australian Megachurch and a Brazilian Church in Australia. PentecoStudies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Research on the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements 12(1): 62–82. https://doi.org/10.1558/ptcs.v12i1.62
2017a John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing. Oxford University Press, New York.
2017b ‘The Come to Brazil Effect’: Young Brazilians’ Fascination with Hillsong. In The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon the Waters, edited by Tanya Riches and Tom Wagner, 125–41. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Rockefeller, Stuart A. 2011 Flow. Current Anthropology 52(4): 557–78.
Shamir, Ronen 2005 Without Borders? Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime. Sociological Theory 23(2): 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0735-2751.2005.00250.x
Sheller, Mimi 2016 Uneven Mobility Futures: A Foucauldian Approach. Mobilities 11(1): 15–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2015.1097038
Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry 2006 The New Mobilities Paradigm. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38(2): 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268
Turner, Bryan S. 2007 The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility. European Journal of Social Theory 10(2): 287–304. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431007077807
UCKG UK n.d. A Little Help to Boost Your Faith. Online: https://www.uckg.org/anointing-oil/ (accessed April 7, 2018).
van de Kamp, Linda 2016a Violent Conversion: Brazilian Pentecostalism and Urban Women in Mozambique. Boydell & Brewer, Woodbridge, Suffolk, Rochester, NY.
2016b Introduction: Religious Circulation in Transatlantic Africa. Africa Diaspora 9(1-2): 1–13.
van Wyk, Ilana 2014 The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa: A Church of Strangers. Cambridge University Press, New York.
2015 Prosperity and the Work of Luck in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, South Africa. Critical African Studies 7(3): 262–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2015.1050216
Published
2019-11-06
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Section
Articles
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Equinox Publishing Ltd.
How to Cite
Openshaw, K. (2019). The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Australia: Local Congregants and a Global Spiritual Network. Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, 32(1), 27-48. https://doi.org/10.1558/jasr.37074
