Gender, Social Change and Spiritual Power: Charismatic Christianity in Ghana (review)

Ruth Marshall-Fratani’s 1991 essay “Power in the Name of Jesus” (Review of African Political Economy 52) opened what has become a longstanding debate on the roles of gender, social change, and power in African Pentecostalism. This book, based on case studies in Ghana, is the most important research on these questions to date. Clear, concise, and elegantly written, it provides a subtle and nuanced analysis of the gender dynamics in this form of African Christianity.

Jane Soothill is very aware of the difficulties posed by her position as a female British scholar versed in the gender debates of the Western academy. As she notes, the “book looks at the lives and experiences of ‘African women,’ which requires the researcher to be doubly aware perhaps of the relationship between the ‘Self’ and ‘Other,’ especially given the history of European women’s engagement with their African counterparts” (22). This is an awareness she accomplishes very well.

Soothill looks at Pentecostalism and gender in historical perspective before moving on to contemporary patterns. Looking back to the evangelical movement in the United States, she notes that “on the whole the evangelical movement was not a feminist one” but that “many women, when they did move from evangelicalism to feminism, took with them the knowledge and skills they had learnt” in their churches. These claims are often made for Pentecostalism in other parts of the world. Soothill examines the work of Salvatore Cucchiari and Elizabeth Brusco, writing from southern European and Latin American perspectives, while going on to look in some detail at the claims of Ruth Marshall-Fratani with regard to Pentecostalism, gender, and power in Africa. It was upon much of this material that David Martin based his somewhat ecstatic conclusion that Pentecostalism is in fact a “women’s movement,” a “sisterhood of shared experience” (Pentecostalism in Latin America, Catholicism in Eastern Europe [Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996], 52). Martin points to the “buried intelligentsia who through their involvement in the churches more and more actively relate to each other and sustain each other” (Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. [Wiley-Blackwell, 1993], 203). Jane Soothill’s analysis is more complex and she is more circumspect, concluding that “the gender discourses of Charismatic Christianity are used in multiple ways to challenge old cultural forms, to create new ones, and to generate renewed forms of legitimacy for ‘traditional’ gender norms” (26–27). Deepening that line of thought, she notes that essentially these discourses do not “challenge the structures that reinforce and perpetuate gender inequalities” (63).

Two remarkable figures in Ghanaian Pentecostalism, Francesca Dun-can-Williams and Christie Doe Tetteh, emerge in the chapter entitled “Big Women, Small Girls.” Soothill was clearly impressed (maybe even a little overawed) by these “big women.” Yet while she feels their power, they also feel hers; their relationship was marked by a definite tension. For me this was a particularly fascinating part of the book. The author explores the relationship of power between born-again women and argues that leading female figures such as these exert considerable authority over other women in their respective churches. Concluding her marvellous study of these two figures, Soothill states, “The new churches appeal to many women primarily not because they provide opportunities for communal solidarity—though they may do this to some extent—but because they provide access to the spiritual power of prophetic individuals” (179).

While these “big women” have enormous power, other women can also have access to it, particularly in relation to their men. In chapter 6, entitled “Men, Marriage and Modernity,” the author examines the influence of this form of Christianity on the understanding of marriage, and how “born-again women access spiritual power through charismatic practices and use it to try to mediate changes in their gendered relationships” (218). Going back to the late Adrian Hastings and Richard Gray, and...