Andrew Chestnut’s study belongs to the wave of increasingly sophisticated analyses of the Pentecostal movement in Latin America that has washed over the social sciences in the last decade. Like other writers in this current, Chestnut skeptically regards earlier interpretations of Pentecostals as rural-urban migrants seeking substitutes for the paternal patrons they left in the countryside. Instead, based upon solid field research in the Amazonian city of Belém carried out in 1993, Chesnut offers a sensitive portrait of men and women who, in their struggle to keep body and soul together, turn deliberately and self-consciously to the Pentecostal faith. For Chesnut, Pentecostalism’s great appeal lies above all in its power to heal the afflictions of poverty: physical disease, and the social and moral stresses that poverty imposes on the household. While this interpretation echoes the views of many others in the new generation of scholarship, Chesnut fleshes it out admirably with vivid life-historical data.
It is Chesnut’s larger institutional and political analysis of Pentecostal churches that represents his more original contribution. In this connection it is perhaps a sign of the maturing of this generation of “Pentecostalism scholars” that Chestnut is ready to challenge some of the more recent claims about Pentecostalism’s potentially progressive tendencies. In contrast, based upon careful archival research, Chestnut is able to document nearly 30 years of close collaboration between Belém’s Assembly of God Church and the most reactionary political forces in the state. Although his archival material suggests that the views of the leadership have not always converged with those of its followers, the conservative-elite alliance undoubtedly placed major limits on the extent to which countertendencies within the church might grow.
While exemplifying the strengths of the new wave of Pentecostal studies, Chestnut’s work also displays some of its weaknesses. For example, in his effort to account for the rapid growth of Pentecostalism, he tends to underestimate the appeal of the alternatives (pp. 67-72). While it is no doubt true that the power of Pentecostalism resides partly in its ability to cure physical and social ills, it is also true that the miraculous healing powers of popular Catholic saints such as Aparecida, Anastacia, and Padre Cicero constitute a large part of their appeal too, and that the ability to deliver healing continues to attract millions of people to the incredible variety of non-Christian cults in Brazil, including (but in no way limited to) umbanda. Chesnut is aware of this, but still builds his argument about the appeal of Pentecostalism by insisting on the weakness of its rivals. In practice, this strategy leads to some unconvincing and overstated claims, such as that Catholic saints “do not possess the healing power of the Pentecostal Jesus and Holy Spirit,” or that Catholicism requires supplicants to come to the sanctuary in order to access spiritual healing power (p. 75). Say either of these things to a devotee of Aparecida or Anastacia and you are likely to get a bemused smile. To the extent that the question remains the nature of Pentecostalism’s “comparative advantage,” it may, paradoxically, only be when we appreciate not just the “weaknesses” but also the strengths of the full range of Pentecostalism’s competitors that we will grasp what that advantage is.
There may, however, be a larger problem here. Chestnut’s study, like others in the genre of Pentecostal studies to which it belongs, continues to insist that the really “big story” is Pentecostal growth. Yet we know that religious alienation, wandering, idiosyncrasy, syncretism, and disaffection remain powerful, omnipresent processes in Brazil. From this point of view, important insights may be gleaned not only from stories of “successful” evangelical cure and conversion, but also from the stories of people who have been frustrated, disillusioned, or alienated from Pentecostalism. What new frontiers of understanding into the Pentecostal phenomenon itself might be opened up if such stories began to be listened to?
