CHRISTIANITY IN AFRICA From African Independent to ....pdf · 12 aug 2004 14:45 ar ar225-an33-19.tex ar225-an33-19.sgm latex2e(2002/01/18) p1: ibc christianity in africa 449 reconfigurations:

12 Aug 2004 14:45 AR AR225-AN33-19.tex AR225-AN33-19.sgm LaTeX2e(2002/01/18) P1: IBC10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143835

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2004. 33:447–74doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143835

Copyright c© 2004 by Annual Reviews. All rights reservedFirst published online as a Review in Advance on June 17, 2004

CHRISTIANITY IN AFRICA: From AfricanIndependent to Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches

Birgit MeyerResearch Centre Religion and Society, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam,The Netherlands; email: [email protected]

Key Words African Independent Churches, Pentecostalism, Africanization,globalization, public sphere

■ Abstract Taking as a point of departure Fernandez’s survey (1978), this reviewseeks to show how research on African Independent Churches (AICs) has been recon-figured by new approaches to the anthropology of Christianity in Africa, in general,and the recent salient popularity of Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches (PCCs) in par-ticular. If the adjectives “African” and “Independent” were once employed as markersof authentic, indigenous interpretations of Christianity, these terms proved to be in-creasingly problematic to capture the rise, spread, and phenomenal appeal of PCCsin Africa. Identifying three discursive frames—Christianity and “traditional religion,”Africa and “the wider world,” religion and politics—which organize(d) research onAICs and PCCs in the course of the past 25 years, this chapter critically reviews dis-cussions about “Africanization,” globalization and modernity, and the role of religionin the public sphere in postcolonial African societies.

INTRODUCTION

Ever since African Independent Churches became a central research focus foranthropologists in the 1960s, these churches have not only formed fascinatingresearch locations but also have been major sites for more general theoretical re-flection and innovation in anthropology. Classical works published in the 1960s and1970s (e.g., Fabian 1971, Jules-Rosette 1975, Peel 1968, Sundkler 1961 [1948])showed how African Independent Churches or movements instigated the develop-ment of alternatives to the then still dominant structural-functionalist paradigm,which failed to address “social change” in a theoretically adequate way (see alsoFabian 1981). As this vast interdisciplinary research field has been surveyed up tothe mid-1980s (Fernandez 1978, Ranger 1986; see also Jules-Rosette 1994), thisreview is confined to the past 25 years. It does not aim to present a comprehensivesurvey but seeks to highlight some major trends from an anthropological perspec-tive. In this period, the study of African Independent Churches (AICs), or, as someprefer to call them, African Indigenous Churches (e.g., Appiah-Kubi 1981) or

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African Initiated Churches (Anderson 2001), has been considerably reconfigured,empirically as well as theoretically. Nothing can better evoke what is at stake thanthe salience of the contrast between the familiar image of African prophets fromZionist, Nazarite, or Aladura churches, dressed in white gowns, carrying crosses,and going to pray in the bush, and the flamboyant leaders of the new mega-churches,who dress in the latest (African) fashion, drive nothing less than a Mercedez Benz,participate in the global Pentecostal jetset, broadcast the message through flashyTV and radio programs, and preach the Prosperity Gospel to their deprived andhitherto-hopeless born-again followers at home and in the diaspora (Marshall-Fratani 2001). Although it would be too simple to assume that the latter simplyreplaced the former, the emergence of these new figures suggests that the appropri-ation of Christianity in Africa has entered a new phase. If in the 1980s IndependentChurches were found to be attractive, by African Christians as well as researchers,above all because they seemed to offer a more “authentic,” Africanized version ofChristianity than do the presumably Western-oriented mainline churches, currentPentecostal-Charismatic Churches (PCCs) appear to derive their mass appeal atleast partly from propagating a “complete break with the past” (Meyer 1998a,Engelke 2004). Dissociating themselves from both mainline churches and AfricanIndependent, or as they call them, “Spiritual” Churches, the new PCCs promiseto link up their born-again believers with global circuits. Although PCCs gain anever-increasing number of followers, also from the older AICs, anthropologists—and, for that matter, missiologists and African theologians—have only recentlyand reluctantly started to study them. This hesitance, of course, stems from thefact that anthropologists, by the nature of their discipline, were usually attractedby cultural difference and authenticity, whereas religious scholars had a stronginterest in Africanization or “inculturation.” PCCs, with their intensive links totransnational circuits, in particular to American televangelists, and their enthu-siastic drive to proselytize nonbelievers (researchers included), were difficult toaccept as viable objects of study.

This chapter seeks to highlight not only the shift from AICs to PCCs as newfoci of empirical study but also the conceptual transformations to which it gaverise. In the first section, I show how anthropologists’ understanding of AICschanged in relation to new approaches in the study of Christianity in Africa. Iargue that PCCs’ spectacular rise raises important theoretical questions and ren-ders the adjectives “African” and “Independent” increasingly problematic. Threesubsequent sections place particular emphasis on discursive contexts that havebeen major frames organizing research in the period under review: (a) the re-lationship between Christianity and “traditional religion” and the question ofAfricanization; (b) the relationship between Africa and “the wider world” and thequestion of globalization; and (c) the relationship between religion and politicsand the question of religion in the public sphere. My main concern is to showhow these frames have been reconfigured in the period under review, and in par-ticular by current research on PCCs, and to indicate fruitful avenues for furtherresearch.


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RECONFIGURATIONS: FROM AFRICAN INDEPENDENTTO PENTECOSTAL-CHARISMATIC CHURCHES

Fernandez’s earlier overview (1978) in the Annual Review of Anthropology marksthe transition in the study of AICs or movements from a focus on typologies andtaxonomies and crisis cults to a more critical-reflexive and ethnographic approach.Critiquing earlier socio-structural as well as the Marxist-inspired approaches thatwere en vogue in the 1970s (e.g., Van Binsbergen 1977, 1981), Fernandez arguedthat researchers’ analytical terms and concepts tended to impose Western cate-gories on rather than revealing much about these movements: “My point is, and Ithink it is a very anthropological one, our real enlightenment lies not in the appli-cation of imageless ideas exported from the West, but in beginning with Africanimages and by careful method learning what they imply—what is embedded inthem” (Fernandez 1978, p. 215). Calling for the study of these movements at agrassroots level, he expressed his support of the “new historiography” representedby Terence Ranger cum suis (Ranger & Kimambo 1972). He sought to stimulateanthropologists to study African religious imaginations by striving to discern theirinherent “argument of images,” that is, the way in which people face deprivationand achieve revitalization by redeploying “primary images of body and household,field and forest life” (Fernandez 1978, p. 228). His own work on the emergenceof the syncretist Bwiti religion among the Fang (Gabon) (1982, see also 1986) isa magisterial example of this approach, which had a major impact on subsequentresearch and was a matter of much debate (Fernandez 1990; Schoffeleers 1986;Werbner 1985, 1990).

If Fernandez made a strong plea for semantic or symbolic ethnography to replacesocial-structuralist approaches, in the Introduction to their influential collectionVan Binsbergen & Schoffeleers (1985) argued for the necessity to integrate bothof these as a precondition for a better understanding of religious movements inAfrica. As the contributions to their collection clearly document, since the mid-1980s both strands have certainly come closer together. This quest for integrationalso stood central in two ground-breaking monographs: Jean Comaroff’s Body ofPower, Spirit of Resistance (1985) and Karen Fields’s Revival and Rebellion inColonial Central Africa (1985). Both works, in their own manner, offer insightinto African religious practices and symbolic universes on the basis of detailedempirical research and explore the relationship between religion and politics in anew imaginative way, without reducing the former to the latter or maintaining aDurkheimian view of religion as underpinning societal order (see also Werbner1985). Examining the ways in which the British colonial administration perceivedoutbreaks of Watchtower activities in Malawi and Zambia in the first three decadesof the twentieth century as a major political threat, Fields showed how baptism,speaking in tongues, prophecy, and healing actually operated as effective politicaltools. Her work challenges the often-implicit distinction between religion and thesecular, which assumes that politics and religion essentially belong to separatespheres, and it shows that such a separation did not exist in colonial Central


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Africa, colonial officials’ claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Questioningthe very basis on which the (in practice untenable) distinction between religionand politics thrives, Fields was able to show that religion was a continuouslycontested part of the ideology of colonial modernity. Similarly, in her exploration ofTshidi’s material and symbolic struggle in the South African–Botswana borderlandto act on the global and national forces that shape their lives, Comaroff argued forthe necessity to focus on colonial encounters between Western and local forces.She thus integrated “what Fernandez calls the imageless concepts of mode ofproduction, class formation and underdevelopment with a profound explorationof the argument of images in Tshidi Zionism” (Ranger 1986, p. 12). Althoughshe only engaged with Fernandez’s approach in passing (Comaroff 1985, p. 170),she clearly moved beyond his rather narrow understanding of ethnography asbeing geared to African cultural and symbolic repertoires and the essentializingopposition between Africa and the West on which it thrives. In so doing she laidthe base for her and John Comaroff’s later work (1991, 1997), which reframed theproject of ethnography as not merely a thorough study of the Other but as a detailedinvestigation of the zones of contact between Africa and the West. Central to thisinvestigation stand the material, social, and cultural possibilities and constraintsarticulated in the “long conversations” between Western missionaries, traders,and administrators and local people, which took off in colonial times and havecontinued ever since.

The studies by Fields and Comaroff also signal a growing awareness of theneed to situate AICs in a broader historical, social, and cultural frame. As Rangerexplained in his sophisticated overview, the treatment of Independent churches,missionary Christianity, and traditional religion in isolation from each other was“artificial and distorting” (1986, p. 49). He stresses that the study of AICs tended todraw too strong a contrast with traditional religion, and to misrepresent the formeras the sole suitable laboratory for social change, whereas the latter was perceived asstatic and hence merely a nostalgic point of reference doomed to disappear (Ranger1993). Ranger also argues that an exclusive focus on AICs implies a far too rigidcontrast between presumably more “authentic” AICs and Westernized mainlinechurches perceived as the ideological superstructure of colonialism and hence asfamiliar and not worthy of anthropological study (Ranger 1987). This contrast, heshows, was challenged by the fact that religious revival movements occurred inmainline churches at the grassroots level (e.g., MacGaffey 1983), whereas AICsexperienced processes of institutionalization and routinization, in the course ofwhich “pastors” started to assume a more important role than did the prophetswho had initially broken away from mission churches (e.g., Probst 1989).

The realization that it is fruitful for anthropologists to focus on Christianity, oreven religion, in Africa as a dynamic field, in which so-called AICs, mission, ormainline churches and traditional religion are in ongoing exchange, conflict, anddialogue with each other, changed the ways in which anthropology and Africantheology constructed their research object. In the aftermath of a large conferenceorganized in Jos (Nigeria) in 1975, which resulted in the famous Christianity in



Independent Africa (Fashole-Luke et al. 1978), the scope of research graduallybroadened from the study of AICs to the history and anthropology of Christianityin Africa [e.g., James & Johnson 1988, Spear & Kimambu 1999; see also Hastings’(2000) perceptive overview]. Most notable in the field of history are the accountsby Hastings (1979, 1995), Isichei (1995), and Sundkler & Steed (2000), whichtake as a point of departure African agency (see also Gray 1990, Maxwell 1997,Salaome 1996). As mission or mainline churches were no longer considered solelythe domain of theologians and missiologists (Beidelman 1982, Etherington 1983),they became a new study object for anthropologists and historians (Comaroff &Comaroff 1991, 1997; Etherington 1996; Landau 1995; Meyer 1999; Peel 1990,1995; Pels 1999; Ross & Bredecamp 1995; Ter Haar 1992). These historical-anthropological works do not take for granted the mission of Western-derivedchurches, but instead explore them with the same historical and ethnographicvigor as so-called AICs. The question of how to account for African evangelists’own narratives and agency without neglecting the Western part in the encounternor reinscribing colonial power claims to the history of Christianity in Africa gaverise to much debate (Peel 1995, Comaroff & Comaroff 1997).

Although many anthropological studies focus on plural religious fields, tak-ing into account dissenting voices and conflicts (Middleton 1983, Schoffeleers1985, 1994; Werbner 1989; Maxwell 1999a; Meyer 1999), most publications stillconcentrate on a single movement or organization (see Spear & Kimambo 1999,Blakely et al. 1994). A more elaborate engagement with Islam as part of thesefields is still very scarce (but see Peel 2003, Sanneh 1996), though this shortcom-ing has been signaled by several authors (Maxwell 1997, p. 147; Hastings 2000,p. 42). Strangely, the term Independent remains current even after scholars broad-ened their research focus and questioned the usefulness of the opposition betweenWestern missionary concepts and practices and their indigenous appropriation inAICs. Maxwell (1999b) notes that Christian independency, originally a colonialterm to designate Christian movements lacking white supervision, does not makesense in the postcolonial era. The use of a supposedly neutral terminology, initiallyemployed to mark the difference between “authentic” AICs and “foreign” missionchurches, fails to acknowledge the interrelatedness of these supposedly differentkinds of organizations.

The study of AICs was reconfigured not only by researchers’ awareness thatthese churches were part of a broader field, but also by the salient popularity ofnew PCCs from the 1970s onward. Initially, these African-founded, yet globallyoriented, PCCs were not regarded as suitable objects of anthropological study be-cause of their presumed link with Western conservatives and fundamentalists. Thislink intrigued Gifford (1987, 1991), prompting him to conduct his early research onthe influence of European and American evangelists on PCCs in Southern Africa(see also Arntsen 1997). According to the latest edition of the World ChristianEncyclopedia (Barrett 2001, see also Anderson 2001), in 2000 there were 83 mil-lion Independents and 126 million Pentecostal-charismatics in Africa. Althoughthese categories partially overlap, the figures exceed earlier projections by far. If


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Christianity appears to be on the wane in (Northern) Europe (and thus seemedto offer a prime case in favor of the secularization thesis), a new global brand ofPentecostalism thrives in Africa, Latin America, and Asia (Corten 1997, Droogers2001, Freston 1998, Jenkins 2002, Lehman 2001, Martin 2002, Poewe 1994).

The Wold Christian Encyclopedia’s confusion about the use of categories suchas AIC and PCC shows how difficult it is to capture with adequate terms the di-versity of Christianity in Africa. If for good conceptual reasons (Fabian 1981)anthropologists pleaded to use “movement” rather than “church,” African Chris-tians seemed to prefer the latter term, presumably because of its more solid, officialconnotations. In describing themselves and others, they tend to adopt categoriessuch as mission or mainline church, AIC or PCC. AICs, in particular, increasinglycame under attack by the fast-growing PCCs (both in terms of membership andsheer number), which were founded by and organized around the personality of acharismatic African leader and remained institutionally independent from, thoughthey had strong links to, Western Pentecostal churches. To view the popularityof Pentecostalism as an entirely new phenomenon would be mistaken. AlthoughPentecostal churches, such as the Assemblies of God or the Apostolic Church,played a role in the African Christian scene since the 1920s, scholars did not drawa strong distinction between these churches and AICs until around 1990. SouthernAfrican AICs especially developed typical Pentecostal features such as glossolalia(Daneel 1970, Sundkler 1961) and scholars took them as paradigmatic of AfricanPentecostalism (Cox 1994a,b). At the same time, many AICs straddled the typolog-ical divide and recast themselves as Pentecostal churches (Meyer 1999, Maxwell2001, Ukah 2003a). What is new is the fact that the hitherto blurred typologicaldistinction between AICs and Pentecostal churches became increasingly polarizedin the course of PCCs’ massive expansion.

Therefore, scholars should not take for granted these classifications, but insteadunderstand them as part and parcel of a politics of self-representation. Pente-costal rhetoric about the disappearance of AICs notwithstanding, these churchespersist and attract followers and researchers (Adogame 2000, Dozon 1995). Es-pecially in South Africa, Zionist Churches still have a mass appeal (M. Fraehm-Arp, unpublished manuscript; Gunnner 2002; Kiernan 1992, 1994; Niehaus et al.2001), although growth of PCCs is on the rise (M. Fraehm Arp, P. Germond &I. Niehaus, personal communication)—an issue that calls for detailed future re-search. More in general, quite similar to AICs, PCCs stress the importance ofthe Holy Spirit above biblical doctrines and provide room for prophetism, dreamsand visions, speaking in tongues, prayer healing, and deliverance from evil spirits.The attraction of charismatic Pentecostalism throughout Africa is not confinedto PCCs, but also materializes in prayer groups in the confines of establishedProtestant Churches, the charismatic renewal in the Roman Catholic Church, andnondenominational fellowships that born-again Christians attend without leav-ing their churches (Asamoah-Gyadu 1997, Ayuk 2002, Meyer 1999, Ojo 1988,Ter Haar 1992, Milingo 1984). Therefore, a crude distinction between AICs,PCCs, and mainline churches is as problematic as the earlier “taxonomic games”



distinguishing types of AICs, which has been critiqued by Fernandez (1978) andFabian (1981). Nevertheless, the PCCs of the 1990s are characterized by a distinctform, in terms of scale, organization, theology, and religious practice, and thisdistinct form warrants investigators seeing them as a new phenomenon (Corten &Marshall Fratani 2001; M. Fraehm-Arp, unpublished manuscript; Gifford 1998).Although they should not be approached as a monolithic entity—fission seemsto be intrinsic to Pentecostalism and hence a broad spectrum of PCCs with dif-ferences in doctrinal emphasis and style exists throughout Africa (Martin 2002,p. 176)—they clearly share a number of significant family resemblances.

Because there has been little systematic, comparative research on PCCs indifferent African countries (but see Gifford 1998), it is not easy for anthropolo-gists to explain why PCCs arose earlier and on a more massive scale in Britishex-colonies, such as Ghana and Nigeria. The rise of PCCs depends at least inpart on a plural religious arena and the existence of AICs, against which PCCsdefine themselves. Important historical factors to be considered concern differ-ences between religious cultures in Anglophone and Francophone ex-colonies andthe extent to which states endorse or reject religious pluralism (Barrett 1968),as well as the predominance of Islam. Conversely, the fact that PCCs eventuallydid become increasingly popular in several francophone countries such as Togo,Benin, and Cameroon, whose Catholic elites for long distrusted Pentecostalismfor “tending to draw its adherents into a mainly Protestant, U.S.-oriented, anglo-sphere” (J. Peel, personal correspondence), also calls for explanation. As Konings(2003) suggests in accounting for the long-term absence and yet the recent rise ofPCCs in Cameroon (2003), political liberalization, resulting from implementationof International Monetary Fund–instigated forms of good governance and democ-ratization, forms a key condition for PCCs’ successful manifestation and massivemobilization of followers (see also Laurent 2001a, Mayrargue 2001).

What is distinctly new about PCCs is their propagation of the Prosperity Gospeland their strong global inclination. Their names, which often refer to the church’saspired “international” or “global” (out)reach, highlight PCCs’ aim to develop andmaintain international branches in other African countries and the West, and todeploy notions of identity and belonging that deliberately reach beyond Africa. Inthis sense, PCCs are a global phenomenon that calls for comparison with similarchurches in other parts of the world, most notably South America. As is shownin more detail below, much current research on PCCs explores the personal, cul-tural, political, social, and economic dimensions of being born-again, as well asthe ways in which the upsurge of these churches is related to the crisis of the post-colonial nation-state, transnationalism and diasporic culture, the rise of neo-liberal“millennial capitalism” (Comaroff & Comaroff 2001), and mass-mediated popularculture.

If Fernandez (1978) could still state that religious movements (in any casethose like Bwiti), though giving “evidence of a successful adaptation to the mod-ern world,” “remain community enterprises within, resisting modernization in thecapitalist sense” (p. 217), obviously current Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches do


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not engage in this type of resistance and, on the contrary, even seem to eagerlyembrace capitalism. Such empirical shifts demand new theory and, against thebackdrop of the fact that many churches act on a transnational scale, new methods.Thus, within a span of 25 years, Fernandez’s plea to turn to African imagery as aprerequisite for a true understanding of AICs collided with the realization that thecondition for understanding Pentecostalism’s appeal and impact lies in moving be-yond, or at least problematizing, “African” and “Independent” as taken-for-grantedcategories (Appiah 1992, Mudimbe 1988). Whereas Fernandez’s point to conductan ethnographic study of African religious imaginations may have been well takenat the time, it proved to be problematic in the long run because of the rather es-sentializing understanding of the attribute “African” on which it depends. Theseemingly “un-African,” globally inclined PCCs challenge the usefulness of thenotion of “African” as a marker of cultural difference and call for a reformulationof the major discursive contexts through which AICs have been approached.

CHRISTIANITY AND “TRADITIONAL RELIGION”

A major discursive context framing research on AICs focuses on the relation-ship between Christianity and “traditional religion.” As intimated in the Introduc-tion, for a long time the research interests of anthropologists, missiologists, andAfrican theologians converged on the issue of Africanization, and this conver-gence opened up a space for interdisciplinary debate, above all in the Journal ofReligion in Africa. Although there has never been an agreement among scholarsas well as religious practitioners about the appropriate nomenclature (terms likeInculturation, Indigenization, Contextualization, Africanization, or African the-ology were all in circulation), the key concern was the search for an “authenticAfrican expression of Christianity” (Mbiti 1980, Ojo 1988, Wijsen 2000). Phrasessuch as Traditional Religion and Christianity: Continuities and Conflicts (the titleof the second part of the collection Christianity in Africa by Fashole-Luke et al.1978) pinpoint a particular discursive context that informed both religious schol-ars’ seemingly irresolvable question, “how to be Christians and Africans at thesame time,” (Appiah-Kubi 1981, Baeta 1968, Mugambi 1996, Sindima 1994) andanthropologists’ understanding of AICs as the backbones of African authenticity[or even as “surrogate tribes,” as Fabian (1980) put it critically]. The dualism ofthese reified categories, Christianity and traditional religion, has been criticized in-creasingly for its inherent, unquestioned assumptions, which misrepresent Africanreligious traditions as static, mission churches as alien(ating), and AICs as syn-cretically mixing elements from both yet ultimately rooted in and geared towardtraditional culture. Such a view not only neglects African agency in processes ofconversion in the context of mission churches, but also is unable to acknowledgethe extent to which AICs actually oppose(d) traditional notions and practices andincorporate(d) key notions “from outside,” as has been documented in many olderanthropological studies of AICs (without, however, being sufficiently theorized).Ranger (1987) argues that “we should see mission churches as much less alien



and independent churches as much less ‘African’” (p. 31) and acknowledge theextent to which AICs derive inspiration from revivalist movements within missionchurches and in the context of European and North American Pentecostalism (seealso Maxwell 1997, Ojo 1988).

Recently, the notion of Africanization has been problematized. In my historicaland ethnographic work on local appropriations of Christianity among the Ewein Ghana I have sought to point out (Meyer 1992, 1999) that it is a mistake toview Africanization as solely confined to AICs or to design it “from above” intonew theological programs (as was the case with the then acting moderator of theEvangelical Presbyterian Church where I conducted my research). Africanization,understood as appropriation of Christianity at the grassroots level, has been anintegral component of the spread of missionary Christianity from the outset. This“[A]fricanization from below” came about through processes of both translationinto the vernacular (Sanneh 1991) and the diabolization of Ewe religion (andits construction as “heathendom”), thereby merging nineteenth-century popularmissionary Christianity and local religious practices and ideas. Old gods and spirits,and also witchcraft, continued to exist as Christian demons under the auspicesof the devil. Hence, in addition to investigating African ideas about God or thepositive convergence of African and Christian notions, I argued for the need forscholars to consider also the negative incorporation of the spiritual entities inAfrican religious traditions into the image of the Christian devil as part and parcelof local appropriations. In this way, the “old” and forbidden, from which Christianswere required to distance themselves, remained available, albeit in a new form (seealso Droz 1997).

Hence it makes little sense to use Africanization in a singular manner andreserve it for the AICs, as was the tendency among anthropologists, or affirm theneed for Africanization in theology, as was, and still is, the tendency among manyAfrican theologians and missiologists (e.g., Bediako 1995, but see Onyinah 2002).Such a broad understanding of Africanization, as not simply entailing a positiveincorporation of tradition or its revival (often referred to with the biblical trope of“old wine in new skins”), pinpoints the necessity for scholars to revise the viewof AICs as the sole sites of successful, “syncretic” combinations of traditionalreligious and Christian elements.1 It means also that an understanding of traditionin terms of more or less incorporable elements belonging to the past was foundto be much too static. Nevertheless in the period under review here, it seems thata sophisticated treatment of African religious traditions in relation to Christianityis still relatively scarce (but see MacGaffey 1983; Maxwell 1999a; Peel 1992,2003; Schoffeleers 1994; Werbner 1989). This lack may be due to the fact that,

1Much more could be said about the politics of use of the term syncretism, which was oftenemployed by representatives of mainline churches in a pejorative manner, so as to designateAIC Christian understandings as impure and deviant. Conversely, anthropologists tendedto celebrate syncretism as an achieved synthesis of foreign and indigenous elements (for auseful critical discussion see Stewart & Shaw 1994).


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from a Christian perspective, local traditions are often viewed in a temporalizingperspective, which denies traditional religion its “coevalness” (Fabian 1983) withChristianity, allegedly the religion of modernity par excellence (Meyer 1998a,Steegstra 2004). For a long time, scholars have rather uncritically reproduced thistemporalizing device, thus still echoing Sundkler’s (1961) view of AICs “as thebridge over which Africans are brought back to heathendom” (p. 297).

More general debates about the “invention” or “imagination of tradition”(Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983), which stressed that tradition is not simply a matterof the past and hence ultimately opposed to modernity, but an essential part ofdiscourses of modernity, shaped the research of scholars of Christianity in Africa.They started to approach traditional beliefs and practices no longer as a givenbut as actively produced in particular arenas, by colonial and postcolonial stateofficials, artists striving for rehabilitation of the African Cultural Heritage andChristian churches or movements. Investigators argued that far from simply alien-ating African converts from their own culture, missionaries and African evangelistsproduced reified notions of indigenous culture, which affirmed cultural differenceand the imagination of distinct tribal or ethnic identities (Meyer 2002a, Peel 2003,Steegstra 2002, Vail 1989). Conversely, those cultural agents who refer to traditionas a desirable point of reference and basis of cultural pride are often involved ina project of secularizing traditional rituals, thereby turning them into “harmlessculture” (Peel 1994, p. 163)

PCCs’ rather merciless attitude toward local cultural traditions and rejectionof village culture has caused many researchers to ponder these churches’ stancestoward local religious traditions. Certainly those churches fiercely opposing localtraditions may be much more indebted to traditional ways of thinking than culturalagents celebrating tradition as cultural heritage (Peel 1994; see also Coe 2000, Hall1999, Meyer 1999, Steegstra 2004). Although charismatics tend to critique main-line churches for seeking to accommodate local culture through Africanization,they dismiss “Spiritual Churches” for drawing on occult forces, making use ofallegedly idolatric elements such as candles and incense, and thus linking up withthe “powers of darkness” (Sackey 2001). Tying into popular narratives (often putinto circulation by nineteenth-century missionaries and African evangelists) aboutthe devil as the head of all the demons who were once cast out from heaven andsettled in Africa, many PCCs devote much room to deliverance from the satanicforces, which possess members and are held to cause material and psychic prob-lems in the sphere of health and wealth. In such semipublic or private meetings,Pentecostal pastors and members of the “prayer force” seek to cast out demons bycalling on the Holy Spirit to turn the demonically possessed into born-again Chris-tians (Asamoah-Gyadu 1997, p. 23 and subsequent pages; Laurent 2001b; Meyer1999, p. 155 and and subsequent pages; for a detailed description from an insiderperspective see Onyina 2002, pp. 122–25). Such deliverance sessions happen bothin African rural and urban settings (in prayer camps or churches) as well as inPCCs catering to the needs of (often illegal) African immigrants in the diaspora(Van Dijk 1997, 2002). In a sense, they offer a version of African Christianity that



does not make it necessary to (secretly) seek for help outside the confines of thechurch. Being born-again is perceived as a radical rupture not only from one’spersonal sinful past, but also from the wider family and village of origin (Engelke2004; Laurent 2001; Marshall-Fratani 1998; Meyer 1998a, 1999; Van Dijk 1992,1998). Thus, while at first sight these churches appeared as heavily antitraditional,closer investigation reveals that this attribute is problematic, as PCCs take seri-ously spiritual forces to a much larger extent than do mainline churches, whichtend to regard such beliefs as superstitious (albeit on the level of their theologicallytrained leaders, not at the grassroots level).

The fact that PCCs affirm a negative, inversed image of traditional gods andspirits and allow for spirit possession in the context of deliverance pinpoints the ex-tent to which Christianity and local religious traditions are interrelated. In a sense,PCCs’ ongoing concern with deliverance shows the very impossibility of theirself-ascribed project to break with what Pentecostals discursively construct as the“forces of the past.” Claims to the ultimate power of the Holy Spirit notwithstand-ing, the despised evil spirits seem to be alive and kicking. Against this backdropit has become clear that, despite the need for analysis on the level of believers’ideas, it would be much too simple for researchers to remain within PCCs’ ownself-descriptions and take at face value the claim that they lead believers away fromtheir local background. This notion must be analyzed as a conversion narrative,rather than as an achieved state (Engelke 2004). Pentecostal-charismatic practiceultimately affirms the impossibility for born-again Christians to escape from forcesgrounded in and emanating from the local. In this sense, PCCs, while speaking todesires to link up with the wider world and escape the constraints of poverty, alsoarticulate Christianity in relation to local concerns.

Whereas, up until now PCCs have mainly referred to local cultural and religioustraditions through diabolization or demonization, signs indicate a more positiveappreciation of these traditions in charismatic circles. Pentecostal African theolo-gians recently started to reconcile African religious traditions and Christianity in apostmodern synthesis (e.g., Onyinah 2002). For example, the charismatic leader ofthe International Central Gospel Church [headquartered in Accra, Ghana (Gifford1994, 1998, 2003; De Witte 2003), yet opening branches all over Africa] seeksto develop the notion of African pride (Otabil 1992, see also Larbi 2001). Alsothe emergence of new Gospel Music groups that deliberately incorporate tradi-tional signs and symbols into their lyrics and performance suggests that the rathernegative attitude toward tradition may be changing (M. de Witte, personal commu-nication). The question is, of course, what to make of this revival of tradition (if itgets through at all). I would suggest that rather than viewing this apparent revivalas a return to the “authentic,” and thus relapse into the resilient yet false tempo-ralizing device that locates authenticity and tradition in the past, it may be moreuseful to understand it as a new practice of signification in which tradition featuresas a cultural style (see also Ferguson 1999, p. 96). In any case, as anthropologistshave successfully deconstructed the modernization perspective, on which the viewof tradition as a matter of the past ultimately depended, it has become difficult,


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though all the more challenging, to find an appropriate conceptual space for theauthentic or the traditional. This is one of the major tasks researchers will face inthe future.

AFRICA AND “THE WIDER WORLD”

Whereas the notion of Africanization, thriving in the interface of anthropologyand religious studies, ceased to be the main drive behind anthropological research,globalization and modernity became the buzz words in the 1990s. This new focusopened up new venues for interdisciplinary exchange with sociologists of religion(Lehman 2001, Martin 2002), and opened up possibilities for debates about PCCsacross the limits of area studies (Coleman 2002, Corten & Marshall-Fratani 2001,Corten & Mary 2001, Poewe 1994). Of course, the question as to how Africansrelated to the “modern world” already informed earlier studies of AICs. Muchresearch in the 1960s and 1970s was conducted from a perspective of modern-ization, which saw indigenous culture as ultimately doomed to disappear withongoing Westernization and secularization. Whether classified as escapist “crisiscults” or as creative Independent movements, AICs were regarded as indicatorsof the extent to which Africans still found themselves between traditional andmodern society. This perspective, with its reference points of “traditional religion”and “new nation-state,” was indebted to “a notion of society as a normally stablearrangement of structures, roles and institutions” that regarded religious enthusi-asm as ultimately disturbing, at least conceptually if not politically (Fabian 1981[1991], p. 114). AICs were held to cope with modernization, be it by offeringthe capacity to “explain, predict and control” the larger macrocosm into whichAfricans were drawn by colonialism through conversion to the High God (Horton1975), or by enabling revitalization through a symbolic experience of “returningto the whole” (Fernandez 1982). Horton’s intellectualist approach is problematicbecause it regards the individual quest for knowledge as the prime drive behindand explanation for conversion, thereby neglecting the metaphoric richness of reli-gious thought and action, the emotive appeal of the sacred, and the power of morestructural political-economic processes. Fernandez’s position, as outlined above,draws too strong a contrast between African images and the forces of colonialismand modernization.

Anthropology’s (re)turn to modernity and globalization in the 1990s is a com-plex and contested matter, which far exceeds African studies and cannot be ad-dressed here (see Appadurai 1996, Inda & Rosaldo 2002, Kearney 1995).Researchers of PCCs were pushed to rethink modernity in the context of glob-alization above all because, on the one hand, they were puzzled by these churches’transnational organizational structure and the outspoken links made between be-ing born-again and going global, and, on the other hand, by the way in whichbelievers’ life worlds were shaped by contradictions between political, social, andeconomic aspirations and possibilities arising from Africa’s partial participation



in the global economy. The key challenge was to develop a conceptual frameworkthat would allow for a more sophisticated understanding of the complicated rela-tionship between modern and traditional, or global and local; thus it became urgentto discover how these seeming oppositions, though called on in PCCs’ practice,are actually entangled. It was certainly not a question of returning to the mod-ernization perspective, although researchers, in their eagerness to make sense ofPCCs’ self-descriptions, may occasionally find themselves relapse into this old dis-course. The main concern was to address modernity not from within the paradigmof modernization, but as a critique thereof. Taking as a point of departure critiquesof anthropology’s bounded notions of culture that question a view of the localas a primal category (Appadurai 1996; Fabian 1991, Ch. 10; Gupta & Ferguson1997) and the realization that cultural specificity, rather than being opposed toglobalization, is an essential component of globalization’s dialectics of flow andclosure (Clifford 1988, Meyer & Geschiere 1999), many anthropologists venturedinto ethnographies of modernity. This endeavor, characterized by a dialecticalunderstanding of the relationship between theory and empirical research, seeksto explore how people’s encounters with colonialism, missions, or the capitalistmarket economy take a different shape in different localities. Hence one finds theemphasis on multiple modernities situated at different times and places, rather thanon one single teleological structure (Comaroff & Comaroff 1993, Geschiere 1997).Given the characteristics of PCCs, the framework of ethnographies of modernitywas perceived as appealing. In any case, “modernity” proved to be a powerful pointof reference, and is also good to disagree with (Englund & Leach 2000, see below).

Many PCCs present themselves as ultimate embodiments of modernity. Build-ing huge churches to accommodate thousands of believers, making use of elab-orate technology to organize mass-scale sermons and appearances on TV andradio, organizing spectacular crusades throughout the country—often paradingforeign speakers—so as to convert nominal Christians, Muslims, and supportersof traditional religions, creating possibilities for high-quality Gospel Music, andinstigating trend-setting modes of dress all create an image of successful masteryof the modern world (de Witte 2003, personal observation; Droz 2001; Hackett1998). PCCs owe at least part of their wealth to the fact that they successfullyoblige members to pay tithes (10% of their income). To help believers advance,some PCCs offer a small loan to needy members, which should enable them toengage in trade and become financially independent—an aim desirable not onlyto the person in question but also to the church, as it eventually yields higherdonations. Many PCCs represent prosperity as a God-given blessing and resentthe mainline churches for legitimizing poverty by referring to Jesus Christ as apoor man (Marshall-Fratani 1998, Maxwell 1998, Meyer 1997). The figure ofthe charismatic pastor—with such stars as Nicolas Duncan-Williams and MensahOtabil (Ghana), Nevers Mumba (Zambia), and most important, Benson Idahosa(Nigeria) as paradigmatic figures—dressed in exquisite garments and driving aposh car pinpoints that prosperity and being born-again are held to be two sidesof the same coin.


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The question of how to relate religious content to social-economic issues andclass has been addressed by many researchers, thus linking up with the sociol-ogy of Pentecostalism in Latin America developed by Martin (1990, 2002) andFreston (1998). These churches had tremendous appeal especially for young peo-ple, who seek to eschew gerontocratic hierarchies and aspire to progress in life (theupwardly mobile), yet think (realistically, perhaps) that this goal can be achievedonly through a God-given miracle. Indeed, “Your miracle is on the way” is a pop-ular slogan, to be seen on church advertisements, car stickers, and shops all overAfrica, which embodies the power of the still unfulfilled, yet resilient “expecta-tions of modernity,” which are frustrated by daily experiences of disconnectednessand marginalization (Ferguson 1999). However, the Prosperity Gospel also risksbecoming subverted by its own appeal, in particular if the promise of wealthon which it thrives fails to materialize among believers (Maxwell 1998, p. 366and subsequent pages). Numerous scandals show many times over that powerand wealth may seduce even the staunchest born-again pastor to go astray (a fa-vorite topic of especially Nigerian video-movies). Smith showed that charismaticPentecostalism not only tends to reproduce the structures of inequality againstwhich it positions itself (see also Marshall 1998), but also stands “dangerouslyclose to the world of witchcraft,” and, while critiquing the possibly evil, occultsources of wealth, is easily suspected to draw on those (Smith 2001). In Owerri(Nigeria) witchcraft suspicions regarding the wealth of flashy born-again pastorsled to public riots, in which the church premises and pastors’ residences weredestroyed. More research needs to be conducted to assess the way in which theProsperity Gospel is at once PCCs’ main attraction and, as the promise in the longrun fails to materialize among most ordinary believers, its main weakness.

Despite PCCs’ strive for prosperity, the achievement of wealth is moralizedby distinguishing between divine and occult sources of wealth, often by referringto traditional ideas concerning the nexus of wealth and morality (Droz 2001).Because the modern world is represented as thriving on temptation (Marshall-Fratani 1998, Meyer 2002b), PCCs appear to alert believers of being wary notto lose themselves in crude consumptive behavior and to use wisely the moneythey earn. People should avoid drinking alcohol, leading a loose moral life, and,in the case of men, squandering money with “cheap girls.” They offer elaboratelessons on marriage, which young couples prior to their wedding must attend,and special hours for marriage counseling. Though the issue of gender appearsto be pertinent, little research has been conducted in this regard (but see Mate2002). The ideal is a moral self, not misled by the glitzy world of consumercapitalism nor misguided by the outmoded world of tradition, but instead filledwith the Holy Spirit. Although there is likely much overlap between the Protestantmodes of conduct that Max Weber found to be typical of early Protestantism, thestrong emphasis on becoming prosperous and showing off wealth distinguishesPCCs from early modern Protestantism. Because the devil is supposed to operatenot only through blood ties linking people to their extended family, in particular,and local culture, in general, but also at the heart of modernity in the sphere



of consumption, the prospect of prosperity is made to depend on deliverance.Occult forces, embodied by the Spirit of Poverty, may block the accumulationof capital; seductive powers, as embodied by Mami Water, may induce them tosquander their money on petty things such as cosmetics, perfumes, and sweets,whereas witchcraft and ancestral spirits may prevent them from prospering in life(Bastian 1997; Meyer 1998a,b; Ukah 2003b; see also Ellis & Ter Haar 1998, p. 183and subsequent pages.). Linking up with ongoing debates about the “modernityof witchcraft” in African studies (Cziekawy & Geschiere 1998, Geschiere 1997,Moore & Sanders 2001), PCCs’ witchcraft discourses express the contractions ofmodernity, its malcontents and promises (Comaroff & Comaroff 1993), and themoral panics to which it gives rise (Marshall 1991).

As the (prospective) born-again person is PCCs’ point of departure to changethe world, much research has focused on Pentecostal notions of the self, the wayin which members are enticed to write new scripts for their lives. In my own workI tried to show that, as deliverance was understood as “cutting blood ties” (thuspreventing jealous family members and demanding spirits to intrude a person),the invasion of the Holy Spirit through whom this severing occurred could beunderstood as a symbolic creation of a modern individual subject (1999). Althoughmany charismatics are suspicious of the extended family and “the witches in thevillage” is a recurrent trope in many sermons, the extent to which PCCs stimulatethe genesis of new forms of communality, which may act as a surrogate family,should not be neglected (as emphasized by Van Dijk 1997, 2002; see also Englund& Leach 2000, p. 235). As Marshall-Fratani (2001) argues, “it is not so muchthe individualism of Pentecostal conversion which leads to the creation of modernsubjects, but the ways in which its projection on a global scale of images, discoursesand ideas about renewal, change and salvation opens up possibilities for local actorsto incorporate these into their daily lives” (2001, p. 80; see also Marshall-Fratani &Peclard 2002). Calling on believers as brothers and sisters in Christ, contemporaryPCCs incite imaginations of community that surpass the space of the ethnic groupor the nation as these imaginations are delocalized. This stance materializes inwidely available (cassette and video) sermons, music, and literature that circulatein global Pentecostal networks and entice the constitution of a new public of born-again believers with a strong global outlook (Ellis & Ter Haar 1998). It also playsan important role in the diaspora, where many Africans do not have a staying permitand yet are entitled to be married in the church, thereby surpassing national identitypolitics (Van Dijk 2002). As Martin (2002) put it, “Charismatic Christianity is theportable identity of people in diaspora” (p. 145). So far, however, anthropologistshave done little to develop more adequate research methodologies taking intoaccount the transnational dimension of PCCs. They are still mainly studied at oneparticular location in Africa. One notable exception is Rijk van Dijk, who hasresearched Pentecostal networks stretching over Europe and Africa and conductedmulti-sited fieldwork in Accra, The Hague, and Botswana (1997, 2002, nd.).

Although the research presented so far in this section may suggest that PCCs’practices translate smoothly into the notions of modernity and globalization, their


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use has also triggered debate. Englund & Leach (2000) have criticized anthropo-logical fieldwork on PCCs for being “organized by the meta-narrative of moder-nity,” which draws them into a Western perspective that ultimately fails to capturewhat actually goes on in these churches. In order to avoid misrepresentation, theyadvocate “to subscribe to a tradition of realist ethnography in which fieldwork aslived experience is indispensable for the production of anthropological knowledge”(p. 229). Presenting the case of Pentecostals in Chinsapo (Malawi), Englund &Leach offer valuable ethnographic material (see also Englund 1996), which indeedcautions not to disregard the particularities of different localities at the expense ofsweeping generalizations about PCCs’ attitude toward modernity. Although this isnot the place to discuss these authors’ intervention in any detail (but see the com-ments on their piece in Current Anthropology), I would like to briefly address therelationship they propose between ethnography and theory. Their plea resonatesquite well with Fernandez’s opposition of African imaginations and imagelessWestern concepts. The problem with such a view, as I try to point out above, isthat it is based on an understanding of “African” or, as Englund & Leach callit, “local” as ontologically prior to and distinct from “the wider world” (see alsoGupta 2000), and thus as impossible to capture by imageless theoretical frame-works, be it structural-functionalism, Marxism, or modernity. Given that the mainreason for turning to modernity (and globalization), as outlined above, was thequest to better grasp how the supposedly “African” or local relates to foreign orglobal forces without relying on essentializing reifications, Englund & Leach’stheoretical intervention does not have much to offer.

The need to move beyond this position, which has been haunting Africanstudies—and certainly research on Christianity in Africa—for decades, has beenasserted by the French political scientist Jean-Francois Bayart. In his reflections(2000) on “extraversion,” he seeks to surpass the “sterile distinction between theinternal dimension of African societies and their insertion in the international sys-tem” (p. 234; see also 1993). Insisting that Africa, in its own way, is a player in theprocess of globalization (rather than being merely disconnected), he investigateshow initially foreign, colonial forces subjected Africans by constituting them assubjects. Building on Foucault’s insights, Bayart argues that subjectivation, in bothsenses of the term, occurs most successfully through a noncoercive use of power,as, for instance, was the case with missions that played a key role in generatinga new type of person characterized by new internalized modes of conduct per-ceived as irredeemably constitutive of one’s identity. For Bayart, appropriation isthe prime strategy of extraversion; but in his opinion it is not a question of “newwine in old skins,” as was the case in the discursive context of Christianity andtraditional religion. Instead, the appropriators themselves change in the processof appropriating new matters through external links. Here external and internalare not absolute but dialectical categories that continuously erase each other (andthis, in the end, makes it difficult to say what exactly is African about strategies ofextraversion, as Bayart still seems to claim). Extraversion, understood in this way,should not however be viewed as innocently creative and positive; rather, as Bayart



shows, through appropriation and other strategies of extraversion, Africans alsoparticipate(d) dramatically in their own submission, resulting in political turmoil,war, and despair, and the adoption of alternative strategies such as trickery andbrute coercion. Against the backdrop of this complex argumentation, which canonly be evoked here, it becomes clear that essentialist differences between Africaand the world or the local and the global are impossible to maintain. Accountingfor both structural constraints and creative appropriation, the notion of extraver-sion also allows scholars to reconcile an emphasis on narrativity and agency (Peel1995), with attention paid to the “long conversation” initiated by the dynamics ofnewly emerging power structures (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991).

The usefulness of Bayart’s approach to the study of Christianity in general (seePeel 2003) and PCCs in particular is obvious. Gifford (1998), for example, ob-serves: “[F]or all the talk within African circles of localisation, inculturalisation,Africanisation or indigenisation, external links have become more important thanever” (p. 308). Extraversion being both a practice in place to incorporate externalmaterial and spiritual matters and a method of surviving, “Africa’s newest Chris-tianity, while in many ways reinforcing traditional beliefs, also serves [. . .] as oneof Africa’s best remaining ways of opting into the global order” (p. 321). Corten &Marshall-Fratani (2001), Maxwell (2000) and, somewhat surprisingly against thebackdrop of his earlier stance, Englund (2003) have drawn similar conclusions.There is a danger, though, of overemphasizing the creative and positive aspects ofextraversion, which would bring the notion disturbingly close to earlier approachestoward Africanization in the sense of tradition-oriented wholeness and harmony.In many respects, the study of PCCs has little eye for the possibly disorienting,unsettling, and destructive implications of born-again Christianity, the contradic-tions on which it thrives and the disappointments it generates (but see Behrend1999, Marshall-Fratani 2001, Smith 2001). This omission may have to do withthe fact that the anthropology of religion as a whole still seems to be very muchbiased toward an understanding of religion as stabilizing above all, in that it offersmodes of orientation and control and a secure place to feel at home.

RELIGION AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

If the two discursive contexts presented so far struggled, albeit in different ways,with the question of the relationship between Africa and the world, the last—andstill less developed—discursive context to be presented here is organized alongsomewhat different faultlines: the relationship between Christianity and politics,or, in more general terms, religion and the secular. The question of AICs’ politicaldimension having been a key concern for a long time, debates on the relationshipbetween religion and politics tend to downplay one at the expense of the other(Ranger 1986). Whereas some scholars saw AICs as proto-nationalist organiza-tions, others regarded them as inferior to political activity. Yet, Ranger (1986)noted, “few can study these movements without feeling that even if they were not


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unequivocally anticolonial they constituted a form of politics” (p. 6). This feelingthat religion and politics were entangled in a more complicated way than wouldsuggest their straightforward distinction and the academic division of labor asso-ciated with it (religious studies and political science) continued to inform debatesabout questions of resistance and domination. In these debates the understandingof resistance, and for that matter politics, was broadened so as to encompass thesphere of everyday life. Comaroff (1985), for instance, presented Tshidi Zionismunder apartheid as constructing a “systematic counterculture, a modus operandiexplicitly associated with those estranged from the centers of power and communi-cation” (p. 191). Because afflicted people served as metonyms for the whole group,healing and deliverance from evil spirits was not merely individual, but rather in-volved collective restorative work. That Zionist churches did not stimulate overtcollective political action was, Comaroff reasoned, due to a lack of opportunity toprotest openly. Therefore, the powerless protested within the domain of everydaypractice. Although Zionism could only mediate societal contradictions, but nottranscend them, it did not turn Tshidi into docile servants of Apartheid, but in-stead enabled them to express symbolic resistance against the system. Schoffeleers(1991), building on similar data, argued that this understanding of resistance ex-tended the notion beyond recognition. He presented the Zionist churches, and forthat matter healing churches in general, as instilling political quiescence in theirmembers—a position which evoked much disagreement (Gunner 2002, p. 6 andsubsequent pages). Research on the relation between the symbolic and the polit-ical in AICs stretched “the semantics of the political” (Gunner 2002, p. 7) anddeveloped into more complex reflections on processes of domination and control,in terms of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony (see Comaroff & Comaroff 1991) orBayart’s notion of extraversion.

In my view, the relation between religion and politics is much more compli-cated than is highlighted in debates about the kind and extent of AICs’ resistance.Scholars recognized that, power being always “rooted in the fusion of the secularand sacred worlds” (Akyeampong 1996, p. 167), it was impossible to disentanglereligion and politics. Yet at the same time they reflected on religion and politicsin a modern framework, which stressed that both belonged to separate spheres.In retrospect, one can observe that the master narrative of secularization, which,if implicitly, informed theorizing about AICs’ politics, collided with the press-ing realization that secularization made little sense with regard to the empiricalcontext under study. Fields’s (1985) study, mentioned previously, was crucial inhighlighting this contradiction by showing that even in the colonial administration,a modern site par excellence, it was impossible to contain Christianity in a privaterealm. It went disturbingly public.

If research on AICs’ politics has mainly explored symbolic forms of resistance,the new PCCs of the 1990s, often emerging in conjunction with processes of democ-ratization and liberalization, urged researchers to pose new questions about Chris-tianity’s public role (e.g., Gifford 1998, Haynes 1996). Gifford’s (1998) pioneer-ing work on Christianity’s public role in Ghana, Uganda, Zambia, and Cameroon



articulates the paradox at stake: “In the West Christianity, while arguably a keysource of modernity, has declined in its public significance as modern society hastaken shape. In Africa it may be that Christianity is assuming an increasing signif-icance in the creation of a modern, pluralistic African society” (p. 20). Importantfactors explaining Christianity’s—not only PCCs’—public role are the precariousrole of the African postcolonial state, with its run-down structures of governanceand failure to achieve legitimacy, and its loosening grip on “civil society” as aresult of IMF’s pressure for “good governance” and “democratization.” PCCs, inparticular, owe their appeal to the fact that they easily link up with popular worldviews, which assert the power of invisible forces to impinge on the visual realmand thus readily match Pentecostalism’s emphasis on evil spirits and deliverance.

The question of how to appreciate PCCs’ politics is a matter of debate. Whereas,for instance, the political scientist Haynes (1996) sees PCCs as catering to the realneeds of the people and countering the woes of modernization, Gifford is morereserved. Critiqued by mainline churches for their irrational outlook and politicalopportunism, PCCs easily “walk the corridors of power” (Gifford 1998, p. 341)and align themselves with the government, as numerous examples given by Giffordshow. Conversely, those in power may parade their born-again identity, as was thecase for Zambia’s president Chiluba or Benin’s president Kerekou. Nevertheless,here too, it is problematic to generalize, as different charismatic pastors adoptdifferent stances toward politics and the government (as, for example, the case ofthe Ghanaian Mensah Otabil, who was a fierce critic of the Rawlings government,shows, whereas other charismatics aligned themselves with Rawlings) and PCCs’members’ attitudes toward politics has hardly been subject to research. Recently,the question of PCCs’ attitude toward democracy has become a new research focuswhich, for instance, materialized in a program funded by the Pew Foundation“Evangelicals and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America,” with Ranger actingas the head of the African dimension of the program (Ranger 2003). The linkbetween anthropological and political science approaches in research on PCCsand the recontextualization of this research in a global frame is laudable. Yet,an all-too-easy slippage into the discursive frameworks of democracy and civilsociety—the current catch words of global development circuits—needs to beresisted because these notions are often employed in a Eurocentric and normativeway that is not helpful in understanding politics in Africa.

The most important feature of Gifford’s analysis is the suggestion to investigatePCCs’ popularity against the backdrop of the shifting role of the state in Africa.Whereas in the era of one-part dictatorial regimes (aptly analyzed by Mbembe2001) the state sought to contain Christianity outside the public realm (and oftenfiercely resented mainline churches’ criticisms leveled against its politics), the sit-uation changed significantly with the onset of democratization and liberalization,when politicians (to be) voted into power depended on the consent of their oftenlargely born-again constituencies. In such a situation, becoming Pentecostal maybe a seductive political strategy, although, as Phiri (2003) has shown, declaringZambia a Christian nation was of no help for the born-again president Chiluba to


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stay in power. It is fruitful to proceed along these lines in the future because therise of particular PCCs and their public role can be understood only in referenceto the reconfiguration of the political field in general, and the state in particu-lar (Marshall-Fratani 1998). Capturing the entanglement of religion and politicsrequires an analysis in which attention to religious content and its political posi-tioning converge, as argued (as well as demonstrated) by Ellis & Ter Haar (1998)in their perceptive analysis of the political implications of religious tracts as partand parcel of power struggles that straddle the boundary between the visible andinvisible world as easily as that between religion and politics, or fantasy and reality(though, by calling attention to the religious dimension, they paradoxically reaffirmthe understanding of religion as a separate sphere, which they put into question).The important and marked public role of PCCs testifies to the fact that the masternarrative of secularization, which claims an intrinsic link between modernizationand the decline of the public importance of religion, is inadequate to understandPCCs’ attraction and impact on the political as well as personal level.

What is likely at stake is the way in which charismatic movements impingeon the imagination of communities, once the privileged sphere of the nation-state (Anderson 1991). Although our world is a world of nation-states, currentAfrican politics shows the incapacity of postcolonial states to bind the citizens intothe vision of the nation. The constant occurrence of wars and terror in Africa—presented as a seemingly natural feature that does not even call for explanationin much press footage—pinpoints that the state seems to reach its limits in theface of both small-scale autochthonous incentives and transnational movementssuch as political Islam or PCCs. Recently the role of PCCs in the formulationof alternative imaginations of community has become a research topic. In thiscontext, the blurring of distinctions between politics and religion is addressedin relation to the emergence of new modes of communication and debate in thepublic realm. Many PCCs (as well as Islamist movements) have been found toappropriate keenly new electronic media that have become easily accessible and,in a context of media deregulation, allow for an active part to play in identity politics(Marshall-Fratani 1998, Meyer 2004). In addition to the question of how newlyavailable media technologies impinge on and possibly transform existing practicesof mediation between the divine and the human world (Bastian 2001, Hackett 1998;see also Lyons 1990, Lyons & Lyons 1991, de Witte 2003), investigators also payattention to the political and cultural implications of PCCs’ new public voice. Thisis a question not only of politics in a more narrow sense, but also of the way inwhich PCCs contribute to the emergence of a new, more Christian public culture.Interesting in this context is the question of how, as a result of PCCs’ popularity,public culture assumes a strong Pentecostal touch, yet also evokes strong oppositionfrom other camps, such as neo-traditionalists (who increasingly tend to adopt thesame media formats as PCCs) and Muslims (Meyer 2004).

In the future, there is a need not only for more comparative work between PCCsin Africa and other continents, but above all for more grounded investigations ofthe different voices in a particular arena, taking into account Islam, neo-traditional



movements, and charismatic Christianity. An important issue concerns the way inwhich religions play into current identity politics, as they thrive in the limits ofthe state, by adopting new media practices that enable them to assume a publicvoice. Of particular interest is the question of how far, despite mutual disagree-ment and animosities, different religions actually tend to adopt similar formatsof public articulation and religious mediation [as the striking similarities betweenthe charismatic Muslim leader Haidara in Mali (Schulz 2003) and Mensah Otabil(de Witte 2003, Gifford 2003) suggest].

Ultimately, the need for anthropologists to pay attention to the shifting roleand place of religion in Africa, which motivates much current research, also callsfor a critical investigation of the notion of religion itself. As Asad (1993) argues,an understanding of religion in terms of “inner belief” is historically situated inWestern Christianity and can thus not be applied simply to different religious tra-ditions that may, for example, place much more emphasis on ritual and materiality(the often-reported misunderstandings between missionaries and Africans aboutthe material outcome of conversion are telling in this regard). Much research onPCCs, however, refers to the religious dimension in terms of a deeply seated innerbelief that constitutes the, in a sense, ungraspable power of religion, thereby reaf-firming a definition of religion as a separate sphere (e.g., Ellis & Ter Haar 1998,Englund 2003, Hackett 1986). Although it is important to pay attention to PCCs’power to evoke deeply felt emotions and to mediate experiences of the supernatu-ral, a universal definition of religion must be resisted. As Martin (2002) argues, forinstance, certain features such as the strong notions of the “mobile self” and the“portability of charismatic identity” raise the question of whether Pentecostalismrepresents “postmodern religion” par excellence.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The main aim of this review has been to show how the shift from AICs, as primefocus of study, to PCCs in the 1990s impinged on three discursive frames thatshaped, yet were transformed by, the study of Christianity in Africa. Echoinga more general trend in anthropology (and cultural studies), also in the field sur-veyed here, researchers’ relative certainties about the classifications and categoriesin use—as well as their usefulness—gave way to, albeit contested, processes ofde-essentializing such notions as African, authentic, or local, detemporalizing tra-dition, deconstructing modernization, multiplying modernity, blurring the bound-ary between religion and politics, and even deuniversalizing religion. Of course,as I have tried to argue, these deconstructions happened for good reasons as, in asense, the object of study itself seemed to demand these conceptual “liquidations”to be understood as part and parcel of a wider world. And yet, paradoxically, re-searchers’ growing uneasiness about fixed categories and qualifications does notseem to be paralleled in the world they study. The openings facilitated by the accel-eration of flows of people, goods, and ideas, the intensification of global links across


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national borders, and the compression of time and space seem to call into being newboundaries. Attempts to de-exoticize Africa and grasp its entanglement with “thewider world” notwithstanding, it is equally clear that many Africans experiencebeing marginalized and “forgotten.” The mass appeal of PCCs can be explained,at least in part, against this backdrop. Adopting a strategy of extraversion, whichdeliberately develops external links and promises connection with the world, PCCsnevertheless have to address a politics of identity and belonging, in which fixedmarkers govern processes of in- and exclusion, both in Africa and the diaspora.The challenge for the future is not only to understand what charismatic religioncan and, equally importantly, cannot do in such configurations, but also to graspthe power of identity without naturalizing it, to deconstruct reifications withoutneglecting their power. The call for solid ethnography is as pertinent as ever.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to John Peel and my colleagues at the Research Centre Religion andSociety and the Department of Anthropology (University of Amsterdam): GerdBaumann, Peter Geschiere, Mattijs van de Port, Peter van Rooden, and JojadaVerrips for their perceptive, stimulating, and constructive comments on earlierversions of this review.

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at http://anthro.annualreviews.org

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