The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in South Africa: a church of strangers by Ilana Van Wyk (review)

Most compelling about Ilana van Wyk’s book is its anthropological attention to a decidedly un-anthropological topic: asociality. Similarly compelling is van Wyk’s challenge to a foundational assumption sustained by scholars of African Christianity: the assumption that community and commensality are intrinsic to the tradition. The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), an originally Brazilian but now multinational Pentecostal church, is different, at least in Durban, South Africa, the site of van Wyk’s ethnographic research. Here, pastors transfer rapidly between branches, worshippers attend services alone, marriages and deaths go uncelebrated and sometimes unremarked, prayer and Bible study groups are non-existent, and charitable outreach is discouraged.

These are just some of the reasons why the UCKG draws suspicion – particularly from academic, journalistic and religious elites – nearly everywhere it travels. Other reasons include the improbable curative powers it claims for itself and its aggressive solicitation of money from desperately poor people. Yet the UCKG is arguably the most prominent, if not also the most successful, Pentecostal church in South Africa today. Van Wyk sets for herself the immensely important task of exploring why so unsociable and, to many, so unsavoury a church has nevertheless found such popularity.

Van Wyk locates the answer in particularities of the UCKG itself. Each chapter explores a unique facet of the church: its localized expressions of spiritual warfare, the detachment of UCKG clergymen from their congregants, the faithful and unrecompensed service of female church assistants, ordinary members’ conceptions of porous bodies and intersecting visible and invisible realms, the performative rather than referential attributes of language, the spiritual and social significance of money, and the familial tensions fostered by UCKG demands.

Periodically, van Wyk emerges from these richly detailed explorations to position her work within broader scholarly debates. In response to anthropologists who have accused her of missing out on the forms of community that surely must exist, she writes, ‘I could only refer them to my daily attendance at the church over 18 months’ and her ‘contacts with church members’ who ‘explicitly described the UCKG as unsociable’ (p. 217). This methodological ‘return to the local or the small-scale’ contrasts with the political economy models favoured in the scholarly literature. For van Wyk, ‘one would be hard pressed to make sense of UCKG members’ behaviour without looking at their particular understandings of prosperity, the human body and invisible agents – or the influence that their pastors and the UCKG had on their perceptions of the world’ (p. 28).

In both of these statements, van Wyk’s work emerges as a profound critique of social anthropology – its propensity to see sociality everywhere and to reduce all phenomena to anonymous social forces. Yet it is precisely in the manner van Wyk articulates her theoretical contributions that a limitation comes to the fore. Van Wyk’s fieldwork, as her own catalogue of activities suggests, appears to have taken place almost exclusively ‘at the church’ andinconversationwith ‘church members’. Theinfluence of ‘pastors and the UCKG’ on people’sbehaviours and perceptions appears to be unproblematic. Here, as well as in the book’s title and subtitle, is revealed van Wyk’s focus: the church as an institution. This is simultaneously the book’s strength and its weakness. Although helpfully shifting attention away from the macro-economic, it ends up privileging instead the macro-ecclesiastic.

Granted, to push this critique too far would be to misunderstand van Wyk’s intention. Her intention is to document the particularities and peculiarities of the UCKG, and to find within them explanations for the church’s appeal. In this, she succeeds wonderfully. Moreover, her success by no means forecloses a broader exploration. Indeed, it sets the stage for one.

For example, as van Wyk makes clear in Chapter 8, the UCKG’s lack of sociality does not turn its members into individualistic free...