New Ways of Being Pentecostal in Latin America by Lindhardt Martin;Martin Bernice;Thorsen Jakob Egeris;Gross Toomas;Hunt Stephen;Martin David;

Author:Lindhardt, Martin;Martin, Bernice;Thorsen, Jakob Egeris;Gross, Toomas;Hunt, Stephen;Martin, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Congregação Cristã no Brasil

Nowadays, the proliferation of a consumerist, competitive economic ethos among Brazil’s aspirants to middle-class stability (see Lima 2010, 2012) works as an effective foil for people sympathetic to the understated religious values of the CCB. Many people in the CCB have experience in some of the more recently established forms of Pentecostalism, and they often commented to me how their new spiritual home represented a refuge from the vulgar marketization of Evangelical religion. Converts to the church valued the CCB’s rejection of individualized charisma, its minimization of public spectacle, and avoidance of talk of money and consumption in the ritual environment. While Lindhardt (chapter 4 in this volume) shows how the broad rise of individualism in Chile since redemocratization is leading people away from the traditional Evangelical Pentecostal church toward newer churches, in São Paulo I found the CCB to offer Pentecostals a type of conservatism that seemed simple and pure without being oppressive.

By saying the CCB is conservative I mean that it preserves the status quo within the organization—in its ritual character and sequence, in architectural and other aesthetics, in the soundscape, and in the way people are socialized into the church. The CCB as an organization promotes no agenda in electoral politics and does not participate in any efforts at influencing public morality; therefore the CCB is not a conservative force in politics. Some formal aspects of CCB conservatism stand out as anachronistic in the world of contemporary Brazilian life; for example, when first witnessing a congregation full of women concealing their heads in white veils, sitting together on the opposite side of a temple from the men, an outsider can feel transported to a bygone era of sexual separation and repression.

However, the church’s traditional noninterventionism has come to be amenable to the complex, morally ambiguous world that today’s youth inherit, and it is tied to the way that parents and children manage the transfer of faith. The CCB began as a marginal community, which made no impact on wider Brazilian life, nor did affiliation to the group interfere in the practical, productive lives of the members themselves. Nowadays in settings where members interact, people avoid intervening in the personal lives and choices of other individual church members. There are matters deemed “personal,” which should not be brought into the collective life of the church, including details about members’ income, political opinions, leisure activities, and cultural preferences. A goal of this discretion, I was told by members, is to minimize human influence on individuals’ lives so that people develop an understanding of what God desires for them rather than responding to social pressure to conform. Understanding God’s wishes is especially important regarding spiritual matters, such as choosing whether to attend the CCB and whether to be baptized. The lack of pressure exerted by parents on their children’s choice to be baptized stems from this overall atmosphere of noninterventionism.

For this chapter I offer the views of both parents and children of CCB participants. While some

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.