some original analysis of it.
I did not find it.
Not in Niassa Province anyway. To be sure, charismatic ministries have spread throughout Mozambique, including in the historically less Christian, more Islamic north.8 Moreover, Niassa’s capital city of Lichinga is not without a Pentecostal presence. The most visible and well-known among Lichinga’s churches is the Brazil-based Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, or IURD). Fifteen branches had opened in the ten years prior to my arrival—evidence, indeed, of Pentecostal explosion.
Yet in that same time span, as many as three of those branches had folded, while others had moved into smaller buildings.9 The most graphic illustration of Pentecostalism’s tepid reception was written on the cracked, whitewashed façade of a two-story building near Lichinga’s municipal prison. During the time of my fieldwork, the building served as a storage and operations facility for Humana People to People. A banner displaying this NGO’s Portuguese acronym occupied the top right corner of the exterior wall. However, in faded yellow letters that the banner only partially concealed appeared the faintly legible words Jesus Cristo é o Senhor (Jesus Christ is the Lord), the slogan affixed to IURD buildings throughout the world. The narrative of Pentecostalism’s dramatic rise is commonly expressed in terms of former cinemas, factories, and storehouses turned into churches. Here I encountered the reverse.
Figure 2. A church building turned storehouse, Lichinga.
It is not that IURD churches in Lichinga were uniformly empty. Many services were reasonably well attended. However, I soon learned, the attendees were primarily vientes (newcomers). This Portuguese term refers not to Yao-, Makhuwa-, and Nyanja-speaking peasants arriving in the city from Niassa’s countryside. Rather, vientes are formally educated business and government elites who relocate from the more prosperous cities of Mozambique’s southern and coastal regions, usually with employment contracts in hand. One worship service I attended in Lichinga included a praise song recited in Changana, an indigenous language of Maputo Province, located nowhere near Niassa. The pastor, himself a viente, preached against the demonic influence of “traditional healers, false prophets, and mazione.” The latter word referred to the prophets of Zion churches that are ubiquitous in southern and central Mozambique but scarce in the north (Seibert 2005: 126). The preacher was clearly contextualizing his demonology—in response, though, not to the reality around his church but to the vientes within it.
When I asked one pastor how many of his congregants hailed from Lichinga or elsewhere in Niassa, he estimated around 3 percent. He added that in Lichinga’s peripheries, where migrant laborers live, “it’s sometimes hard to get fifteen people in the church, even on Sunday.” Every time a new congregation opened, he told me, masses of locals would flood in. But within a few months, most would leave. Curiously, many would appear again—too sporadically, though, to be counted among the faithful. I observed such patterns repeatedly during my time in northern Mozambique—of churches arriving, but without always thriving.
Scholars have rarely explored such seeming anomalies, though calls to do so are on the rise.10 Hefner, while framing his volume on global Pentecostalism in terms of extraordinary expansion, also notes an increase in defections, which “may prove to be an important horizon of research” (2013a: 27).11 In their edited volume on Pentecostalism, anthropologists Simon Coleman and Rosalind Hackett note that “cases of failure or halfhearted engagement” may disclose new dimensions and fresh insights (2015: 28). Stimulated by such suggestions, I intend with this book to advance what is clearly an emerging research agenda, one that eschews triumphalist accounts by querying rather than assuming the linearity of Pentecostal growth.
My aim, however, is not to replace conventional narratives of Pentecostal explosion with an equally generic account of Pentecostal decline. I have neither the data nor the inclination to make sweeping claims of this sort. A guiding premise of this book—the principle of existential mobility, which I detail later in this Introduction—holds that religious identity is an imperfect indicator of religious activity. I therefore critique the narrative of Pentecostal explosion not because I find the statistics behind them to be wrong, but because there is more to the story than statistics can convey.
One quantitative study, though, deserves special consideration. It not only poses one of the most original, and pointed, challenges to assumptions of a generalized Pentecostal surge. It also happens to be based in Mozambique. Analyzing national census records from the past many decades, Éric Morier-Genoud (2014) concludes that there is no basis for commonplace claims of a massive demographic shift toward Pentecostalism. What did change, in 1989, is that Mozambique’s erstwhile socialist state adopted policies of economic and cultural liberalization. New religious movements stepped in, suddenly free to project themselves into public space. They constructed large buildings, dominated mass media, and proselytized in the streets. It is the considerable visibility of these movements, argues Morier-Genoud, that has created the impression of extraordinary Pentecostal growth. It is an impression, however, belied by the data.
Researchers who predefine their studies as being about Pentecostalism are especially susceptible to reading too much into such impressions. That is because framing one’s work around any single tradition draws one, understandably enough, to where that tradition is most vibrant—and away from everywhere else. The recent effort of cultural anthropologists to organize a research program under the rubric of the anthropology of Christianity illustrates the bias. This subfield arose in response to anthropology’s historical neglect of Christianity as an object of inquiry.12 Avoidance came increasingly to be seen as untenable given Christianity’s—particularly Pentecostal Christianity’s—apparent rise in the very locales anthropologists have long gone for fieldwork. But if those outside the anthropology of Christianity have neglected the religion, while anthropologists of Christianity focus on where it most stands out—where “members practice their faith in ways that make their commitments hard to ignore” (Bialecki, Haynes, and Robbins 2008: 1141)—a large middle terrain remains largely unexplored.13
This book aims to help fill that gap. It shifts attention from the amply documented places where Pentecostal churches flourish to the relatively unknown places where they fail, from the centers of global Christianity to the fringes. In those places where Pentecostals are present but not prominent—where they are, in fact, easy to ignore—might there still be a story worth telling, a story in part about Pentecostalism itself?
Circular Migrations
What scholars tend to report about Pentecostal conversions—that they are universally on the rise—is just as often assumed about urban migrations (cf. Potts 2012). There is no disputing that most African cities are growing rapidly. So too are rates of transnational migration. In his more recent work on post–Cold War Togo, Piot pairs this “exit strategy” with conversion to Pentecostalism: “If Charismatic Christianity represents one response to the current sovereignty crisis, playing the visa lottery is another” (2010: 77).
But, as with conversion, so too with migration there is no shortage of stories to puncture the prevailing narrative. Consider Gildon, whom I met in Niassa’s rural district of Maúa, where I based my fieldwork and also where Gildon had grown up before pursuing advanced studies in Lichinga. He recalled the optimism with which his teachers had filled him: “They said about a person who studies that some will be presidents, some nurses, some teachers, some engineers.” Yet upon finishing school, reality set in. Since urban survival required a cash income, Gildon needed a job to survive. But since public examiners demanded bribes, he also needed cash to get a job. Lacking the money and the connections he needed, Gildon’s education eventually came to nothing. He took to selling tomatoes at the market, tomatoes that were always too quick to spoil. Unable to make ends meet, he decided finally to return to Maúa.
