Together with God: Lived Religion among Women in Middle-Class Pentecostal Churches in India

doi:10.1558/pent.43391

PentecoStudies, Vol 20, No 2 (2021)

Together with God: Lived Religion among Women in Middle-Class Pentecostal Churches in India

Julia Kuhlin

Issued Date: 28 Oct 2021

Abstract

Indian Pentecostalism has been considered a religion of the poor and low caste since its inception in the beginning of the twentieth century. However, over recent decades, middle-class Pentecostalism has established itself as an integral part of the Indian Pentecostal movement. Proceeding from a lived religion perspective, this article explores how women in middle-class churches express and practice their religion in their everyday lives. More precisely, it focuses on four defining features of the women’s lived religion (following God’s plan, tending to the relationship with God, overcoming everyday challenges, and transforming the self). An argument that will run through the article is that the women’s way of “doing religion” is contingent upon what they experience as the actions of God, an agentic interplay that I conceptualize as “collateral agency”. The study is based on six-month-long fieldwork in the North Indian city Gururgam, including, among other things, interviews with 30 women in two middle-class Pentecostal churches.

Download Media

PDF (Price: £18.00 ) Restricted Access

DOI: 10.1558/pent.43391

References

Abraham, S. 2011. “Ordinary Indian Pentecostal Christology”. PhD thesis, University of Birmingham.

Abraham, S. 2017. The History of the Pentecostal Movement in North India: Unfolding its Social and Theological Contexts. New Delhi: Christian World Imprints.

Ammerman, N. T. 2016. “Lived Religion as an Emerging Field: An Assessment of its Contours and Frontiers”. Nordic Journal of Religion and Society 29(2): 83–99. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1890-7008-2016-02-01

Anderson, A. 2014. An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bauman, C. M. 2015. Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bergunder, M. 2008. The South Indian Pentecostal Movement in the Twentieth Century. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Bialecki, J. 2014. “Does God Exist in Methodological Atheism? On Tanya Lurhmann’s When God Talks Back and Bruno Latour”. Anthropology of Consciousness 25(1): 32–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12017

Bilge, S. 2010. “Beyond Subordination vs. Resistance: An Intersectional Approach to the Agency of Veiled Muslim Women”. Journal of Intercultural Studies 31(1): 9–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256860903477662

Bowler, K. 2013. Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brusco, E. E. 1995. The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Burke, K. C. 2012. “Women’s Agency in Gender-Traditional Religions: A Review of Four Approaches”. Sociology Compass 6(2): 122–33.

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00439.x

Engberg, A. 2019. Walking on the Pages of the Word of God: Self, Land, and Text Among Evangelical Volunteers in Jerusalem. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.

Eriksen, A. 2017. “Going to ‘Pentecost’: How to Study Pentecostalism – in Melanesia, for Example”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24: 164–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12757

Ibrahim, M. 2020. “The Sites of Divine Encounter: Affective Religious Spaces and Sensational Practices in Christ Embassy and NASFAT in the City of Abuja”. In H. Dilger, A. Bochow, M. Burchardt and M. Wilhelm-Solomon (eds), Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes, 98–118. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.

Ingalls, M. M. and Yong, A. 2015. The Spirit of Praise: Music and Worship in Global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. Pittsburgh, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Jacobson, S. 2006. “Modernity, Conservative Religious Movements, and the Female Subject: Newly Ultraorthodox Sephardi Women in Buenos Aires”. American Anthropologist 108(2): 336–46. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2006.108.2.336

Kuhlin, J. Forthcoming. “Lived Pentecostalism in India: An Ethnographic Study of Women in Two Middle Class Churches in Gurugram”. Dissertation, Uppsala Universitet.

Lindhardt, M. (ed.). 2011. Practicing the Faith: The Ritual Life of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians. Oxford: Berghahn.

Lukose, W. 2013. Contextual Missiology of the Spirit: Pentecostalism in Rajasthan, India. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock.

Madsen, O. J. 2014. The Therapeutic Turn: How Psychology Altered Western Culture. Abingdon: Routledge.

Mahmood, S. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Marshall, R. 2009. Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Martin, B. 2001. “The Pentecostal Gender Paradox: A Cautionary Tale for the Sociology of Religion”. In R. K. Fenn (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion, 55–66. Oxford: Blackwell.

McGuire, M. B. 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Oosterbaan, M. 2008. “Spiritual Attunment: Pentecostal Radio in the Soundscape of a Favela in Rio de Janeiro”. Social Text 26(3): 123–45.

https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2008-007

Rakow, K. 2013. “Therapeutic Culture and Religion in America”. Religion Compass 7(11): 485–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12074

Robbins, J. 2010. “Anthropology of Religion”. In A. Anderson, M. Bergunder, A. Droogers and C. Van Der Laan (eds), Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods, 156–78. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Roberts, N. 2016. To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Sahoo, S. 2018. Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India. Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Satyavrata, I. M. 2011. “Contextual Perspectives on Pentecostalism as a Global Culture: A South Asian View”. In M. W. Dempster, B. D. Klaus and D. Petersen (eds), The Globalization of Pentecostalism: A Religion Made to Travel. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock.

Shah, R. S. and Shah, T. S. 2013. “Pentecost amid Pujas: Charismatic Christianity and Dalit Women in Twenty-First Century India”. In Robert W. Hefner (ed.), Global Pentecostalism in the 21st Century, 194–222. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Wariboko, N. 2018. The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Williams, R. R. 2013. “Constructing a Calling: The Case of Evangelical Christian International Students in the United States”. Sociology of Religion 74(2): 254–80. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srs054

Yadala Suneson, A. 2019. “Indian Protestants and their religious others: views of religious diversity among Christians in Bangalore”. Dissertation, Uppsala universitet, Uppsala, Sweden.

Refbacks

There are currently no refbacks.

Equinox Publishing Ltd - 415 The Workstation 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0)114 221-0285 - Email: info@equinoxpub.com