The Global Context of Transnational Pentecostalism in Europe
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/ptcs.v9i1.35Keywords:
transnationalism, globalization, PentecostalismAbstract
The article contrasts the burgeoning Pentecostal movement of the global South with the relative secularity of the European context, both Western and Eastern, into which Pentecostal migrants move. It examines processes of globalization and theories, notably that of Eisenstadt, that relate recent religious revitalizations to globalization. It suggests that the negative characterizations of Pentecostalism in such theories stem in part from Eurocentric evolutionary conceptions of modernity built into Western secularization theory, and in part from a failure to appreciate the centrality of certain constitutive antinomies in Pentecostalism. The argument stresses the global and hybrid character of Pentecostalism, its combination of European and indigenous spirituality, and its paradoxical ability to be both traditional and hyper-modern, local and global. It relates these to other Pentecostal antinomies, and outlines the debates about how these paradoxes operate in Pentecostalism’s relation to capitalism, politics and modern identity. The secularization processes of the West are contrasted with the continuing “enchantment” of the global South. The distinctive patterns of religion and secularity of Western and Eastern Europe are outlined and contrasted with the non-territorial nature of the transnational diaspora Pentecostal churches in Europe.
References
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Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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— 2008. “The New Global Economy of Latin American Religion.” Paper delivered at the International Workshop on “New Directions of Religiosity, Religions and Virtual Global Communities”, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 14– 16 December .
Bauman, Z. 1992. “Soil, Blood and Identity.” Sociological Review 40: 675–701.
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Berger, P., G. Davie and E. Fokas. 2008. Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Bergunder, M. 2008. The South Indian Pentecostal Movement in the Twentieth Century. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Beyer, P. 1993. Religion and Globalization. London: Sage Publications.
Beyer, P. and L. Beaman (eds). 2007. Religion, Globalization and Culture. Leiden: Brill.
Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.
Campbell, C. 1987. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Casanova, J. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Coleman, S. 2000. The Globalization of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511488221
Comaroff, J., and J.L. Comaroff (eds). 1993. Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Post-Colonial Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Corten, A. 1999. Pentecostalism in Brazil: Emotion of the Poor and Theological Romanticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
— 2000. Diabolisation et mal politique: misère, religion et politique en Haïti. Paris: Karthala.
Davie, G. 2000. Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
— 2002. Europe: the Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith in the Modern World. London: Darton, Longman & Todd.
Dempster, M.W., B.D. Klaus and D. Petersen (eds). 1999. The Globalization of Pentecostalism: A Religion Made to Travel. Oxford: Regnum.
Eisenstadt, S.N. 1999. Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
— 2008. “Impacts of the New Virtual Religious Communities” and “Convergences/Divergences of religious Developments.” Papers delivered at the International Workshop on “New Directions of Religiosity, Religions and Virtual Global Communities”, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 14–16 December.
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Fitzgerald, T. 2007. Discourse on Civility and Barbarity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freston, P. 2001. Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511487705
Giddens, A. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Gifford, P. 2004. Ghana’s New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalising African Economy. London: Hurst.
Greeley, A. 2003. Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium: A Sociological Profile. London: Transaction.
Habermas, J. 2008. Between Naturalism and Religion. Cambridge: Polity.
Hann, C., and the “Civil Religion” Group (eds). 2006. The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and EastCentral Europe. Berlin: LIT Verlag.
Hervieu-Léger, D. 2000. Religion as a Chain of Memory, Cambridge: Polity.
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Jenkins, P. 2002. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Judt, T. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. London: Heinemann.
Lalive D’Epinay, C. 1969. Haven to the Masses: A Study of the Pentecostal Movement in Chile. London: Lutterworth.
Lehmann, D. 2008. “Religious Communities and the Creation of Social Capital.” Paper delivered at the International Workshop on “New Directions of Religiosity, Religions and Virtual Global Communities”, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 14–16 December.
Leustean, L.N. 2009. Orthodoxy and the Cold War: Religion and Political Power in Romania, 1947–65. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Maduro, O. 2007. “Religion and Exclusion/Marginalization: Globalized Pentecostalism among Hispanics in Newark, N.J.” In Beyer, P. and L. Beaman (eds). 2007. Religion, Globalization and Culture. Leiden: Brill, 355–74.
Martin, B. 1995. “New Mutations of the Protestant Ethic among Latin American Pentecostals.” Religion 25: 101–17. doi:10.1006/reli.1995.0011
— 2000. “From Pre- to Post-Modernity in Latin America: The Case of Pentecostalism.” In P. Heelas with D. Martin and P. Morris (eds), Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 102–46.
— 2010 (forthcoming) in Beaumont, J., Molendijk, A., and Jedan, C., (eds.), The Postsecular City. Leiden: Brill.
Martin, D. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell.
— 2002. Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell.
Maxwell, D. 1999. Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe. A Social History of the Hwesa People c.1870s1990s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
— 2006. African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement. Oxford: James Currey.
Meyer, B. 1998. “‘Make a Complete Break with the Past’: Memory and Post-colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostal discourse.” Journal of Religion in Africa 28.3: 316–49.
— 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe of Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
— 2007. “Pentecostalism and Neo-liberal Capitalism. Faith, Prosperity and Vision in African Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches.” Journal for the Study of Religion 20.2: 5–28.
— 2008a. “Pentecostalism and Globalization.” Paper presented at the GloPent-conference, University of Heidelberg, 1 February.
— “Religious and Secular, ‘Spiritual’ and ‘Physical’ in Ghana.” In Courtney Bender and Ann Taves (eds), What Matters: Ethnographies of Value in a Not so Secular Age (forthcoming, Columbia University Press).
Peel, J.D.Y. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Ritzer, G. 2004. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, rev. edn.
Robertson, R. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage Publications.
— 2007. “Global Millennialism: A Post-mortem on Secularization.” In Beyer, P. and L. Beaman (eds). 2007. Religion, Globalization and Culture. Leiden: Brill, 9–34.
Smilde, D. 2007. Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Soothill, J. E. 2007. Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power: Charismatic Christianity in Ghana. Leiden, Brill. doi:10.1163/ej.9789004157897.i-264
Stephens, R. J. 2008. The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tanase, L.D. 2008. Pluralisation Religieuse et Société en Roumanie. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
— 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thurfjell, D. 2009. “Pentecostalism and the Roma: Cultural Compatibility and Ethnogenesis.” In D. Westerlund (ed.), Global Pentecostalism: Encounters with Other Religious Traditions. London and New York: I.B. Tauris: 179–92.
Wanner, C. 2007. Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Weber, M. 1965. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Allen and Unwin (first published in German 1905).
Anderson, A. and E. Tang (eds). 2005. Asian and Pentecostal: The Charismatic Face of Christianity in Asia. Oxford: Regnum.
Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bastian, J.-P. 1986. Breve Historia del Protestantismo en América Latina. Mexico City: CUPSA.
— 2008. “The New Global Economy of Latin American Religion.” Paper delivered at the International Workshop on “New Directions of Religiosity, Religions and Virtual Global Communities”, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 14– 16 December .
Bauman, Z. 1992. “Soil, Blood and Identity.” Sociological Review 40: 675–701.
— 1998. “Postmodern Religion?” In P. Heelas with D. Martin and P. Morris (eds), Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 55–78.
Berger, P., G. Davie and E. Fokas. 2008. Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Bergunder, M. 2008. The South Indian Pentecostal Movement in the Twentieth Century. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Beyer, P. 1993. Religion and Globalization. London: Sage Publications.
Beyer, P. and L. Beaman (eds). 2007. Religion, Globalization and Culture. Leiden: Brill.
Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.
Campbell, C. 1987. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Casanova, J. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Coleman, S. 2000. The Globalization of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511488221
Comaroff, J., and J.L. Comaroff (eds). 1993. Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Post-Colonial Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Corten, A. 1999. Pentecostalism in Brazil: Emotion of the Poor and Theological Romanticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
— 2000. Diabolisation et mal politique: misère, religion et politique en Haïti. Paris: Karthala.
Davie, G. 2000. Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
— 2002. Europe: the Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith in the Modern World. London: Darton, Longman & Todd.
Dempster, M.W., B.D. Klaus and D. Petersen (eds). 1999. The Globalization of Pentecostalism: A Religion Made to Travel. Oxford: Regnum.
Eisenstadt, S.N. 1999. Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
— 2008. “Impacts of the New Virtual Religious Communities” and “Convergences/Divergences of religious Developments.” Papers delivered at the International Workshop on “New Directions of Religiosity, Religions and Virtual Global Communities”, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 14–16 December.
Etherington, N. (ed.). 2005. Missions and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fitzgerald, T. 2007. Discourse on Civility and Barbarity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freston, P. 2001. Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511487705
Giddens, A. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Gifford, P. 2004. Ghana’s New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalising African Economy. London: Hurst.
Greeley, A. 2003. Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium: A Sociological Profile. London: Transaction.
Habermas, J. 2008. Between Naturalism and Religion. Cambridge: Polity.
Hann, C., and the “Civil Religion” Group (eds). 2006. The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and EastCentral Europe. Berlin: LIT Verlag.
Hervieu-Léger, D. 2000. Religion as a Chain of Memory, Cambridge: Polity.
— 2008a. “Religious Individualism, Modern Individualism and Self-Fulfillment: A Few Reflections on the Origins of Contemporary Religious Individualism.” In E. Barker (ed.), The Centrality of Religion in Social Life: Essays in Honour of James A. Beckford. Aldershot: Ashgate, 29–40.
— 2008b. “Dynamics of Ultramodern Religiosity and New Forms of Religious Spatiality.” Paper delivered at the International Workshop on “New Directions of Religiosity, Religions and Virtual Global Communities”, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 14–16 December.
Jenkins, P. 2002. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Judt, T. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. London: Heinemann.
Lalive D’Epinay, C. 1969. Haven to the Masses: A Study of the Pentecostal Movement in Chile. London: Lutterworth.
Lehmann, D. 2008. “Religious Communities and the Creation of Social Capital.” Paper delivered at the International Workshop on “New Directions of Religiosity, Religions and Virtual Global Communities”, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 14–16 December.
Leustean, L.N. 2009. Orthodoxy and the Cold War: Religion and Political Power in Romania, 1947–65. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Maduro, O. 2007. “Religion and Exclusion/Marginalization: Globalized Pentecostalism among Hispanics in Newark, N.J.” In Beyer, P. and L. Beaman (eds). 2007. Religion, Globalization and Culture. Leiden: Brill, 355–74.
Martin, B. 1995. “New Mutations of the Protestant Ethic among Latin American Pentecostals.” Religion 25: 101–17. doi:10.1006/reli.1995.0011
— 2000. “From Pre- to Post-Modernity in Latin America: The Case of Pentecostalism.” In P. Heelas with D. Martin and P. Morris (eds), Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 102–46.
— 2010 (forthcoming) in Beaumont, J., Molendijk, A., and Jedan, C., (eds.), The Postsecular City. Leiden: Brill.
Martin, D. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell.
— 2002. Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwell.
Maxwell, D. 1999. Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe. A Social History of the Hwesa People c.1870s1990s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
— 2006. African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement. Oxford: James Currey.
Meyer, B. 1998. “‘Make a Complete Break with the Past’: Memory and Post-colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostal discourse.” Journal of Religion in Africa 28.3: 316–49.
— 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe of Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
— 2007. “Pentecostalism and Neo-liberal Capitalism. Faith, Prosperity and Vision in African Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches.” Journal for the Study of Religion 20.2: 5–28.
— 2008a. “Pentecostalism and Globalization.” Paper presented at the GloPent-conference, University of Heidelberg, 1 February.
— “Religious and Secular, ‘Spiritual’ and ‘Physical’ in Ghana.” In Courtney Bender and Ann Taves (eds), What Matters: Ethnographies of Value in a Not so Secular Age (forthcoming, Columbia University Press).
Peel, J.D.Y. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Ritzer, G. 2004. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, rev. edn.
Robertson, R. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage Publications.
— 2007. “Global Millennialism: A Post-mortem on Secularization.” In Beyer, P. and L. Beaman (eds). 2007. Religion, Globalization and Culture. Leiden: Brill, 9–34.
Smilde, D. 2007. Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Soothill, J. E. 2007. Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power: Charismatic Christianity in Ghana. Leiden, Brill. doi:10.1163/ej.9789004157897.i-264
Stephens, R. J. 2008. The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tanase, L.D. 2008. Pluralisation Religieuse et Société en Roumanie. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
— 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thurfjell, D. 2009. “Pentecostalism and the Roma: Cultural Compatibility and Ethnogenesis.” In D. Westerlund (ed.), Global Pentecostalism: Encounters with Other Religious Traditions. London and New York: I.B. Tauris: 179–92.
Wanner, C. 2007. Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Weber, M. 1965. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Allen and Unwin (first published in German 1905).
Published
2010-06-04
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Martin, B. (2010). The Global Context of Transnational Pentecostalism in Europe. PentecoStudies, 9(1), 35-55. https://doi.org/10.1558/ptcs.v9i1.35
