Years of skilful interviewing by David Smilde of the men in two churches in dangerous parts of Caracas, Venezuela, conducted during the period just before Chavez, confirm what investigations have shown from Kingston, Jamaica, to Accra, Ghana, and points east. Evangelical, charismatic, and in particular Pentecostal Christianity offers visions and revisions of lives changed for good, spiritually, morally and (so far as may be, given the changes and chances of life) materially. Of course, some fall by the way, because things don't to work out as hoped, or else they are pulled back into old ways by boon companions. Most encounter experiences which try them "as gold in the fire," and getting right with God may turn out easier than getting right with a wife or partner. All the same, there is enough evidence of some betterment affecting all the interlinked dimensions of life to vindicate Providence in the eyes of believers rather than the influence of fortuna and fate. Even when sorely tried, Pentecostals turn to ancient, indeed biblical, ways of searching out the ways of God: for example, that he is teaching his children through adversity, that his ways are not as their ways, that their way of life has somehow been displeasing in his sight, and that the goods of this world corrupt our treasure in heaven.

Smilde describes his work as ethnography, which I find rather problematic, given the absence of the "surrounds" needed to set off the specific character of the group (or groups) under scrutiny. Certainly we are offered lively accounts of the workings of the two churches selected for study, Emmanuel and Raise Your Voice to the Lord, and of the way Pentecostal evangelicals confront the trials of everyday life. These may involve the mockery of friends and the pull of old associates, or pressure from close members of the family, or confrontations with violent and murderous men in a macho culture of honor and feud. Smilde shows, once again, how Pentecostal strategies of survival both entail social costs and offer an understood way out of the spirals of reciprocal violence. He gives us moving examples of Pentecostal eloquence in (for example) open-air sermons, and, by acute questioning, he elicits remarkably thoughtful responses about how first getting right with God enables men to realize their "better selves" through (on balance) betterment all round.

Smilde also provides an account of the economic and social crises that hit Venezuela, above all in the "popular sectors," in the last two decades of the 20th century, after decades of rising prosperity based on oil revenues. A period of rising expectations, disfigured by a clientelist mode of distribution, was followed by a decline, characterized by degrees of corruption that made an objectively bad situation even worse. This was the period of the evangelical (mostly Pentecostal) takeoff, later than elsewhere in Latin America (except Argentina), so that evangelicals now make up about 5 percent of a population of over twenty million. It was also a period of mobilization undertaken by various groups, including evangelical Pentecostals, such as El Clamor por Venezuela, analyzed in an earlier work by Smilde but omitted here, even in the bibliography. What Smilde does offer is a tale of several cities thrown up by the socio-economic developments he graphically sets out. These comprise the long faded remnants of a disorganized colonial society and fractured Church, the monuments of a triumphant liberal anti-clericalism, the rapidly fading "modern" city of the oil boom, the gleaming postmodern city of global capital, and the vast "informal city" of the marginalized and impoverished, dotted with outposts of evangelical Pentecostalism.

But what is not covered of the "surrounds" is really rather astonishing. Smilde notes that Venezuela was regarded as one of the more "secular" among the Latin American countries, though not as militantly so as Uruguay. That secularity overlay an inspirited religious landscape of syncretic folk Catholicism. Yet this landscape only emerges sideways through evangelical accounts of it. Smilde notes that the sense of the holy attached to the Bible and the Divine offers a slipway for movements of evangelical conversion, so that what evangelicalism provides is a near-optimum relation between similarity and difference. That apart, the Catholic Church remains undiscussed. Other work on Venezuelan evangelicalism is ignored, and even the Neo-Pentecostalism of the middle classes only appears marginally by way of contrast.

Given that Smilde's investigation approximates ethnography rather than any other genre, his range of comparative ethnographic reference with regard to a vast literature directly relevant to his concerns, is minute. The same is true of work on Pentecostal women, though it is obviously relevant for his specific analysis of Pentecostal men. I also find it surprising that he passes up the opportunity for comparative comment on the specific Venezuelan case, for example the parallel late emergence of interdenominational charismatic Christianity in Argentina. Of course, ethnography does not have to be comparative, except that Smilde makes selective raids on the comparative literature to make theoretical, and indeed injurious, polemical points that tell us as much about academic culture and the exigencies of survival in academia as they tell us about the culture of Pentecostalism. My hunch is that this literature has mostly been left unread, given the alternative explanations are worse: misunderstanding (which is unlikely, since Smilde is clearly highly intelligent) or misrepresentation at others' expense in order to clear a space for his own interpretations.

Smilde describes himself, a little oddly, at least in British academic terms, as a "trained" philosopher, and this training is deployed on issues in the area of "theory," especially rational choice. Theory provides the axes of the book and far too much of the bibliography. Much fascinating material is shredded through the kind of discourse that keeps professional journals in business: this is our most obvious déformation professionelle. Too many sociologists and social psychologists produce sharply angled theoretical takes on life as lived, especially religious life, based on reified alternatives. In Smilde's analysis these alternatives include instrumental action and non-instrumental action, contemplative and calculating, self-interest and mutuality, culture and structure, moral order and empowerment, agency and non-agency. He also exerts himself on the reified and mistaken dichotomy that contrasts the symbolic, figurative and generalized orientations held to be characteristic of religion, with the practical and concrete approaches of the mundane.

I am vividly reminded of the academic industry of New Testament criticism. Sociologists compulsively revisit the sites of older excavations to reconfigure them according to the most recent illuminations. What Smilde aims to reconfigure is a contrast between an interpretive schema stressing the rationality of conversion as a life-strategy and one stressing its "imaginative" character, in the pejorative sense: invented, unreal entities like the Devil or God. This affords him opportunity to produce the mediating concept of "imaginative rationality," based on a pragmatic understanding of truth as what works in practice. Though obvious, this happens to make good sense of evangelical Pentecostals as "agents" envisaging a better life through the prism of divine agency. It takes a sociologist triumphantly to arrive back at the obvious. It also takes a sociologist, or perhaps a literary theorist, solemnly to explain that a narrative of conversion involves temporality, that is, one thing following another in time. Again, though Smilde makes good use of network analysis, any lay person who has an addict in the family knows about the role of significant others in constraining an addict to continue or enabling him or her to discontinue. And there really is no problem about combining network analysis with a search for meaning.

Finally, Smilde makes what he regards as three original points. One is that students of religion should "provincialize" Europe with its "sacred canopies," as well as the United States, and "incorporate need satisfaction through religious practice." Yes indeed. He adds that marginalized sectors and displaced social élites frequently mobilize themselves through cultural identities, and that populations moving around the globe make distinctions like center and periphery, industrialized and developing, "largely" irrelevant. This kind of long-delayed and overstated wisdom is yet more evidence that vast stretches of research in several continents over decades have completely eluded his attention.

As for his emphasis on consciously desired and comprehensive betterment when it comes to "deciding to believe," of course evangelical appeals offer release from vicios while distinguishing, as he shows, between business gain and moral reorientation. Certainly evangelicals sharply repudiate the cruder versions of the prosperity gospel, and the spin it gives to words like "rich" and "fruitful." The problem lies in his phrase "deciding to believe," when the heart of the matter only marginally involves shifts of belief, if by belief we mean a grammar of assent. Belief is a notoriously multivalent notion. The beliefs in question are inspirited orientations largely shared with the wider society, except for the rejection of "idols" and the (unmentioned) mutations from Mary to Sophia, and from the suffering of the Passion to celebration. Rather, we are dealing with fiducia, trusting faith. Alike in the canonic narratives of the Bible and of the paradigmatic histories of Pentecostals, the climactic shift, sometimes immediate, sometimes more prolonged, is in the passive-active mood: "I yet not I." It is a standard paradox of the phenomenology of conversion that those suffering from "the bondage of the will" outsource renewed moral "agency" to the Holy Spirit. Narcotics Anonymous works in a parallel way with regard to a "higher power" and the need to accept one's own helplessness as a precondition of agency. Smilde calls the accounts of conversion he cites "loose," when in truth they are subtly presented in terms of tight, classical paradoxes: "I yet not I," in the Pauline sense, and the shift from dis-ease to abundant (or "eternal") life, in the Johannine sense, here and now.

Smilde also contrasts Marxist emphases on structural constraint with a supposed "neo-conservative" emphases on unlimited voluntarism, meaning an ability to choose your culture at will. This latter view he initially attributes to Brigitte Berger (wrongly spelt) in a quoted sentence retaining crucial provisos (p. 12). However, he rapidly drops the provisos. By page 280 he is correcting a "glib" neo-conservative voluntarism, which he then loads onto me and Peter Berger.

In the past I have lamented the careless, ethnocentric projection of categories derived from America's culture wars onto the analysis of global Pentecostalism. In this instance, Smilde projects "neo-conservative" onto someone in a culture where political alignments are quite differently articulated, and where there are all kinds of selective conservatism with a small "c" outside his cultural range. As for the charge that I believe people can adopt any culture at any time, it is outrageous. When I and, for example, the Bergers and Larry Harrison, claim that culture makes a difference, it is, or ought to be, a truism. Culture obviously matters, as any visitor to the former East Germany knows, and as the achievements of the Chinese or the Jews in diaspora clearly indicate. At the same time, the cultural revisions achieved by Pentecostals derive from structural openings. They are constrained and they vary over time and cultural space. To suggest I or the Bergers think otherwise passes belief. Is this deliberate misrepresentation? Surely, surely not. Let it be put down to what the Catholic Church in its charity calls "invincible ignorance"—with perhaps an additional reflection that we who choose to live in a menagerie should not be so surprised when we get scratched. Else "Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?"

Jane Soothill's sophisticated and path-breaking study, Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power, focuses on women in nondenominational charismatic churches in Accra, Ghana. Even more than in Venezuela, life and politics are saturated in the world of the Spirit. Moreover, the historical sequences are strikingly similar, for example, the effects of International Monetary Fund interventions and the emergence of groups mobilizing as part of an incipient civil society. However, Ghana's oil was cocoa. What specially characterizes Ghana is a semi-mythical evocation of precolonial gender equality, a tendency on the part of the colonial government to work with male local leaders, the political co-option of women's movements after independence, and the re-emergence of "Queen Mothers" as powerful "First Ladies."

Soothill addresses established themes in global research, particularly in Africa. These include orality and the extraordinary power of the media, the freedom of the Spirit and participation in a context of authoritarianism, the role of networks and aspiration in geographical and social mobility, American influence and rapid indigenization, and individuation in the context of the emergent nuclear family. The names of the churches she studied show how much they emphasize victorious living rather than patient suffering. Indeed, Action Chapel International, Alive Chapel International, and Solid Rock Chapel International resemble their American counterparts in promoting self-realization and "holding up your head" for both sexes, rather than the more patriarchal emphases still present in fundamentalist Christianity. Self-esteem and sexual harmony replace abstinence in a thoroughly modern manner. Soothill identifies gender as an area of potent ambiguity and paradox where three main theses have been put forward: that the Pentecostal emphasis on domesticity reinforces patriarchy; that Pentecostalism transforms the patriarchal family by feminizing the man; and that the priority accorded to feeling good, whether one is male or female, more than counteracts recourse to gendered hierarchies.

In her chapters on "Womanhood" and "Big Women, Small Girls," Soothill first argues that born-again discourses emphasize an individuality that creates a tension between women's social roles and their personal trajectories. She then suggests that genuine opportunities for participation and self-expression are tempered somewhat by narratives of mistrust among participants, and the dominance of the leadership. In the cases of leaders such as the Reverend Francisca Duncan-Williams and the Reverend Christie Doe Tetteh—when they are not in international orbit—we have "Big Women" in the clientelist style of "First Lady" while lesser participants take up the role of "Small Girls." What the new churches successfully provide is access to spiritual power on the part of prophetic individuals, a power that is then deployed more widely as women try to use it in mediating their gendered relationships.

In her key chapters on "Men, Marriage and Modernity" and "Christianity, Gender and Cultural Authenticity," Soothill widens her scope to include Mensa Otabil of the International Central Gospel Chapel and David Oyedepo of Winners Chapel. Though Ghanaians remain more embedded in wider kin relations than was anticipated, charismatic Christianity is at the forefront of shifts to the nuclear family and shifts to mutual solicitude, respect, and commitment. It was Adam who originally courted trouble and let in the snake by his absenteeism—"Adam, where art thou?"—not Eve, and his headship has been redefined as humble self-giving. Charismatic Christians are told to replace African traditions with this more Christian attitude. Charismatic sermons on male misconduct and the proper conduct of lovemaking might raise an eyebrow even in the more liberal sectors of ECUSA: "You just had fun for five minutes, and she carried the burden for nine months … . O, God! If I had a cane, we would lash all the man on their backs, on the bare behind." Success in spiritual warfare against satanic and demonic influence comes with fulfilled responsibility, and when men fail, as they do, women are their salvation through their appropriation of spiritual power. Ancient and modern are here combined.

Soothill poses awkward questions about the negative judgments made by Western theologians on this kind of Christianity, and about African theological intellectuals dubious about its African authenticity. For charismatic Christians, Africa is the problem, not the solution, and yet their own solution is clearly framed within the African religious imagination and its enspirited universe. Female pastors adopting the role of "Big Women," Soothill suggests, are "post-colonial hybrids" disjoined and yet connected to Africa's precolonial and colonial past. As for "authenticity," who decides? As David Lehmann argues in the context of Latin America, populist Pentecostalism is markedly indifferent to the sponsorship of intellectual élites.

On a wider historical horizon one cannot help reflecting on the way Christian genealogies mutate over time. Calvin was a progenitor of Joseph Priestley, and now it seems German Pietists, with their focus on the Passion, were the progenitors of Archbishop Idahosa, with his focus on Jesus the Winner Man.

David Martin is the author of On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Ashgate). He was recently elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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