City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala (review)

I first heard about the El Shaddai Church when its pastor, Harold Caballeros, announced a national campaign to liberate Guatemala from Satan. It seems that Caballeros was building a new temple next to an aqueduct when he ran into trouble with his construction permit. The aqueduct dated to colonial times and was built atop a serpentine pre-Columbian earthwork. Equal to the occasion, Caballeros announced that the earthwork had been built to dedicate the entire country to the Plumed Serpent, the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, but now he would lift a curse of centuries by mobilizing an army of prayer warriors. In the twenty years since, Guatemala has not lacked for prayer. The largest of the Central American republics seemed like a deeply Catholic country until the 1970s and 1980s when evangelicals multiplied to a third of the population. Most were Pentecostals practicing baptism in the Holy Spirit. Pentecostalism was so appealing that it spread to the Catholic Church through charismatic renewal. Today as many as 60 percent of Guatemalans could be involved in Pentecostal and charismatic worship.

Kevin O’Neill has produced an ethnography of the most flamboyant of the Protestant denominations, El Shaddai, and its founder Harold Caballeros, a boy-wonder who has also built up a network of radio stations and whose next ambition is to be elected president of Guatemala. Not coincidentally, El Shaddai is a neopentecostal megachurch because of its upbeat health-and-wealth gospel, which teaches that God wants his people to prosper in this world as well as the next. Like other operations of this ilk from the Sunbelt to Central America to Brazil, Shaddai’s capacity for mounting spectacles has outshone older Protestant denominations as well as the Catholic Church. O’Neill is an effective storyteller and strays into academic thickets only occasionally—chiefly the Bois Foucault. As a cultural anthropologist, he immersed himself in Shaddai and shows us why Guatemalans are attracted to such churches. They offer hope, entertainment, community and survival logic, step-by-step procedures for protecting oneself and one’s family from a dog-eat-dog society. The risk-averse essentials include staying off the street, avoiding confrontation, and investing one’s hopes in prayer—what O’Neill calls “policing the soul” (p.60).

Unlike traditional Pentecostals, neopentecostals like Caballeros do not confine themselves to saving sinners; they also aim to save an entire society that, judging from the newspapers as well as their fulminations, is drowning in violence and corruption. “When men start acting like fathers,” Caballeros reasons, “then Guatemalans will start acting like citizens” (p120). Like Foucaultians preoccupied with social construction, Caballeros and his followers believe that they can think, pray and fast a decent society into existence. O’Neill argues that Shaddai and the like are heaping moral responsibility for social problems onto the shoulders of the believer, reducing the time and interest they have to participate in more traditional modes of citizenship. This could be. But I think O’Neill is underestimating the collectivity-building implications of congregational life. Certainly evangelicals see themselves in the first person plural as well as singular, and that helps explain why their churches have become such a refuge. When I looked at prayer warfare in the 1990s, I wondered whether it might motivate political activism. Judging from O’Neill’s fieldwork, this is not very likely because, for Shaddai members, prayer warfare is not a spur to act on the principle that God helps him who helps himself. Instead, prayer warfare is a substitute for action, in the hope that God will intervene through someone other than the prayer warrior. The neopentecostal approach to Christian citizenship sounds like a cop-out.

One other caution: while O’Neill has a fine eye for urban Guatemalan existence, he could have done a better job of explaining the different kinds of evangélicos. No one has been more scandalized by the thaumaturgical excesses...