What makes a Christian?: Perspectives from studies of pneumatic Christianity

Through the study of religious embodiment and religious text all three scholars under review explore their subjects’ profound concerns about what constitutes a Christian. In their different ways, Crumbley, Kirsch and Marshall examine a series of related themes: the boundaries between believer and non-believer; the construction of religious authority; and what constitutes authentic religious practice. Although only Kirsch would situate his work within the anthropology of Christianity, all of the scholars contribute to one of the more pressing themes of this new field of research, namely, how Christian adherents distinguish themselves from practitioners of other religions.¹

The studies have other commonalities. All three of the monographs under review examine pneumatic churches. The adherents of these movements believe that the pneuma – Holy Spirit – plays a central role in their lives and their communities as a source of revelation and reformation manifested through tongues (glossolalia), divine healing, prophecy, and deliverance (exorcism). The three books demonstrate the diversity and dynamics of pneumatic Christianity in contemporary Africa. Deidre Crumbley examines the Aladura churches of Nigeria: communities of white-robe-wearing Christians renowned for their ‘fervent spontaneous prayer, which evokes the power and presence of divine spirit’ (Crumbley 2008: 19). The antecedents of Aladura churches lie in Euro-American Pentecostal missionary activity and revival within the historic mission churches during the 1920s. Ruth Marshall studies Pentecostal churches in Lagos, Nigeria as a local expression of a global born-again movement. These churches, which actively cast themselves as electronic, prosperity-seeking and international, have roots in the more recent past, emerging from university fellowships and Scripture Union groups in the 1970s, which emphasized interdenominational Bible study and evangelism. Whilst Nigerian Pentecostals stand in continuity with Aladura Christians and share many of their pneumatic practices, they dismiss the latter as demonic and syncretic because the Aladura Christians use soap and candles as objects of religious mediation and accept polygamy (Marshall 2009: 77). In the meantime some Nigerian ‘praying churches’ have Pentecostalized in response to the success of the Pentecostal revolution. The prime focus of Thomas Kirsch’s work, the Spirit Apostolic Church, sits between the Aladuras and the Nigerian Pentecostals. It is an ‘African-initiated Pentecostal Charismatic church’, product of a local schism from the Full Gospel Apostolic Church in the 1960s, which has taken a particular local form in Gwembe Valley, southern Zambia.

Although coming from different disciplinary perspectives – Religious Studies, Political Science and Anthropology respectively – Crumbley, Marshall and Kirsch share common approaches to their research. All three have studied Christianity as local expressions of a global religion. But while they have focused upon localizing strategies, they remain alert to the influence of transnational connections, exploring how intellectual and material resources from the outside can stabilize and modernize movements, unify potentially heterogeneous movements, and introduce new ideas that change the content and nature of belief. Each scholar has conducted long and intensive periods of fieldwork and emphasizes how pneumatic Christianity is a religion of the body: a stage for the drama of healing and exorcism and a script upon which Christian belief is recorded (Hollenweger 1972). The authors have also taken seriously the study of religious texts produced by their adherents. These range from tracts and journals, spiritual autobiographies and hagiographies to canonical histories and the odd academic dissertation written by church leaders. They also include more mundane but no less important pieces of writing such as baptismal registers, attendance lists, study guides and self-help manuals, and certificates for preachers and members. This linguistic turn to texts and representation, which began...