Since the year 2000, the increasingly intertwined relationship between consumer culture and pentecostal1 practice has become a major topic for scholars of pentecostalism. Scholars’ recognition of the influence exerted by the post–World War II rise of gospels of prosperity and the concomitant flourishing of the industry of Christian “lifestyle” products—recordings, books, videos, conference tours, and so on—has led them to see the necessity of a critical engagement with the economics of pentecostal-charismatic practice.2 This essay argues for increased scholarly attention to be given to the ways in which local believers themselves respond to the influx of consumer culture into their belief communities. Because these responses are often embedded in nonlinguistic and extralinguistic practices such as music making and dance, analysis requires methods that can attend to the shades of signification that emerge from such embodied practices. In particular, I make the case for the value of an ethnographically informed theology and a theologically informed ethnography in studies of the intersection of consumer culture and pentecostal practice.
My ethnomusicological research has shown how some believers use worship not simply as a liturgical activity but as a way of grappling with the challenges and circumstances of their lives (Boone 2013). Believers might critique the influx of a consumerist ethos into the church for the same reason that they might embrace it—as part of a process of working to find hope, affirm life, and empower their communities. They critically engage the religious resources available to them—commercial gospel music or Word of Faith doctrines, for example—as they seek the guidance of the Spirit’s signs and wonders. While the current chapter draws on the insights of Christian philosopher James K. A. Smith as a way to guide its (ethno)musicological analysis of one musical occasion in a local congregation, I hope readers get the sense that the symbiosis between theology and ethnography that I advocate can feasibly take root in several different disciplines and draw on a range of methodologies. The last section of the essay highlights penetrating work from different disciplines—anthropology, sociology, and theology—that shows the theological agency of believers in local pentecostal communities who are grappling with the influx of consumer culture. At Faith Assembly Christian Center, an African American pentecostal church in Durham, North Carolina, where I have conducted research for the past several years, the intertwining of consumer culture and worship practice is perhaps most evident through the church’s use of commercial recordings from the gospel music industry.3 These recordings, which constitute the majority of Faith Assembly’s repertoire, reach churchgoers primarily through radio, television, and the Internet, mass-mediated modes of dissemination in which these products are marketed not simply as musical recordings but as “worship experiences.”4 Recordings thus offer churchgoers two kinds of value. On the one hand, recordings have market value, in part because they ostensibly capture a genuine spiritual encounter. On the other hand, recordings have value because they participate in encounters that edify and empower the local community. In the first instance, the balance of agency tips toward producers; in the second instance, toward consumers.
This chapter explores one moment of a worship service in September 2012. This was a time when church members were grappling with the imminent death of their pastor. A group of six of the oldest women in the church performed a choreographed dance to a contemporary popular recording entitled “I Won’t Go Back” (McDowell 2011). The song’s verse/pre-chorus/chorus form, and its use of an extremely common four-chord harmonic progression in the chorus, makes it similar to dozens of other mid-tempo worship “anthems.” Its marketers have used sophisticated techniques to sell it as an authentic, yet nondescript and widely accessible, “live worship experience.” In short, the recording embodies many of the homogenizing forces at the heart of consumer culture. But rather than being rendered inarticulate by these forces, Faith Assembly used the recording as a medium through which the congregation could be highly articulate in a locally relevant way, transforming a product of consumer culture into a facilitator of a richly textured, community-situated experience.
I have two interrelated goals in exploring this moment. First, I want to examine how a recording such as “I Won’t Go Back” can play a key role in facilitating a nuanced kind of communication that is especially important in the lives of pentecostal believers. In Faith Assembly’s theological world, it is imperative that believers express an absolute faith in divine healing. They embrace the idea that they should “speak faith” and never “speak doubt.” But given the prognosis for their pastor, members of the community had to grapple with the inevitability of his death, even if the ways in which they could speak about it were extremely restricted. The dance to “I Won’t Go Back” created a situation in which those present did not have to do any actual speaking. A different level of exchange was allowed to emerge whereby the community could communicate about the unspeakable.
Second, my examination of this moment at Faith Assembly points toward the idea that significant theological content is embedded in nonlinguistic and extralinguistic practices such as dance. Revealing and better understanding this content will, I believe, necessitate an increased dialogue between ethnographers and theologians. There has been a notable turn toward issues of practice and embodiment in recent pentecostal scholarship. James K. A. Smith states that “a pentecostal worldview is first embedded in a constellation of spiritual practices that carry within them an implicit understanding. Pentecostal worship performs the faith” (2010, 30–31). If we accept this statement, then it is a short step to recognizing the value of ethnography to pentecostal theology. Using ethnographic methods to attend to what pentecostal believers do can provide insights that analyzing propositional statements of doctrine or belief cannot. At the same time, those trained in ethnography can turn toward theology to be able to better articulate the significance of the practices they observe in the field.5 Together we can navigate a careful course that works to unpack the extreme complexities that arise at the intersection of pentecostal-charismatic practice and consumer culture.
The notion of cultural liturgies as articulated by James K. A. Smith provides a useful framework for the discussion that follows. In his book Desiring the Kingdom, Smith defines liturgies as “ritual practices that function as pedagogies of ultimate desire” (2009, 87). Liturgies, he says, can include a large range of sacred or secular practices—everything from congregational singing to watching television to attending a university. But what makes a liturgy a liturgy for Smith is that it never merely informs us, but holistically forms us. Liturgies act on our minds, bodies, and hearts to “inculcate” within us particular “visions of the good life”—visions of what it “looks like for us to flourish and live well” (86, 53).
Most of Faith Assembly’s members first encounter the music that they use in church not in the act of worship but through their participation in cultural liturgies such as watching Christian television or listening to FM gospel radio. In addition to music, these liturgies include a barrage of images, sounds, and advertisements, all of which suggest a particular vision of human flourishing. Images on television show gospel artists who are youthful, sexy, and every bit as glamorous as their secular counterparts. And the advertisements on gospel radio suggest that you, the listener, can be like that, too. All you need are these weight loss pills, varicose vein treatments, testosterone supplements, easy cash fast(!), a new car financed without a credit check, and a fifty-dollar ticket to the next “empowerment conference.”6 The liturgies of contemporary black gospel music television and radio work to form people according to the idea that human flourishing can easily be bought. Marketers have even worked to commodify the very idea of worship experience so that Christians formed along the contours of these cultural liturgies might recognize that, too, as an element of the good life that is available for purchase.
Consider the contemporary gospel album Arise (2011) by highly successful black Christian artist William McDowell. Not only is the album subtitled The Live Worship Experience, but its promoters released a series of relatively low-production promotional videos in which the artist speaks intimately to his potential audience. McDowell claims that the live album was the result of unmediated spiritual inspiration and that it is, in fact, a pure representation of the worship experience shared by the musicians and audience on the night that the recording was made. McDowell appears to look the viewer straight in the eyes as he says, “I only believe in writing songs when God is speaking. Therefore, out of this time, I believe that the Lord is saying something powerful to us as a church and as a people.... It is my desire that you would enter into the worship experience that we had that night. We didn’t cut it. You will hear it the way it is from start to finish. That’s how it was that night. I want to invite you on a journey called Arise. Come go with me” (“William McDowell” 2012). The way in which this album is marketed—as a “worship experience”—is an example of a phenomenon much discussed by a long line of Marx-inspired cultural commentators: in advanced capitalist societies, the very things that seem to most resist commodification—such as spiritual experience, the “aura” of an artwork, or anti-capitalist sentiment itself—are transformed into things that can be bought and sold.7
But if the marketing of worship experience is part of one kind of cultural liturgy, Smith claims that Christian worship among local communities potentially represents another kind of liturgy that forms worshippers to desire a different vision of human flourishing. Local worship, in other words, can have the power to form believers against the grain of the liturgies offered by consumer culture. What happened at Faith Assembly Christian Center on September 23, 2012, provides an example of one of these formative experiences. Interestingly, however, this locally specific worship experience was built on the foundation of a commodified “worship experience” in the form of a popular recording. This presents a complex situation that is worth exploring in depth.
I must preface this exploration by stating that my involvement with Faith Assembly dates back to 2002, when I began playing electric guitar in the church’s band. Initially, I was a complete outsider—a non-pentecostal and the only white attendee. By 2010, however, when I officially began field research for my dissertation, I was very much ensconced in the community. Thus, my work inevitably reflects the fact that my roles as researcher and community member at Faith Assembly are thoroughly intertwined. The field reflection that follows is written from my vantage point in the band pit at the front of the sanctuary, from which I face the congregation.
September 23, 2012. It was a rainy Sunday morning. All of us at Faith Assembly Christian Center were still reeling from the news that Bishop Leroy McKenzie had announced two weeks prior. He reported that he had been diagnosed with stage-four cancer and that the doctors had said all they could do was “help him be comfortable.”
McKenzie was the church’s founder, head pastor, and patriarch. Most of the one hundred or so regular attendees at the church considered him not only their pastor but a personal friend. Several church members saw him as a father figure and regularly referred to him as “my spiritual father,” “like a father to me,” or even “the father I never had.”
On this Sunday, Bishop McKenzie, enfeebled and unable to preach, sat in an upholstered chair in the back of the sanctuary while his wife, Pastor Mary McKenzie, presided over the service. By the time the praise team—the small group of singers who lead the musical selections in each worship service—completed its second song, the atmosphere in the church was like static electricity.8 The congregation crackled with bursts of tongues speech and cries of “hallelujah!” One woman lay prostrate by the wall at the far side of the sanctuary; another knelt at the altar.
Pastor Mary McKenzie tried to move the service forward but seemed powerless against the experiential tide. For several minutes, she simply stood in front of the congregation, her silent presence embodying the ineffability of the moment. Finally, Pastor McKenzie reined in the flood of feeling and welcomed to the front of the church a group called the Women of Faith, to “come bless us in dance.”
Six of the “church mothers,” each of them old enough to receive Social Security, stood in front of the congregation dressed in black and adorned with brightly colored sashes. They were still for a long moment while the sound man fumbled with the recording. As the congregation waited, reverberant spasms of emotional overflow moved across the church body like waves. Finally, the recording came on, playing at the extreme volume that is normal at Faith Assembly. The disembodied recorded voices of a group of singers filled the sanctuary with the words “I’ve been changed, healed, freed, delivered / I’ve found joy, peace, grace, and favor.”
From my place in the band pit, I looked out over the congregation. Many church members hugged or placed arms around one another’s shoulders. People were crying, singing together, and shouting out encouragements for the dancers. The church mothers’ movements were far from agile, but there was a tremendous openness and magnanimity in them. Their moving bodies seemed to communicate deep wisdom as they danced before the congregation. These were the oldest members of the church, taking the helm for a moment, leading worship, becoming the unifying focal point. It was as if they were using dance to show the younger members how to live in the face of death. When the recording’s anthemic chorus arrived, each woman lip-synced along: “I won’t go back / can’t go back / to the way it used to be / for your presence came and changed me.”
“I Won’t Go Back” expresses one of the most common sentiments at Faith Assembly and in popular gospel music in general: a dedication to forward momentum. Though churchgoers and recording artists often say that this is about rebirth and the cleansing resurrection of Christ, an insatiable desire for the new is also the engine that drives the liturgies of consumer culture. And standing as a vague signifier of the type in which commodified culture trades, the fist-pumping mid-tempo declaration “I won’t go back” might apply to an individual’s decision about a new hairstyle or pair of shoes just as easily as it could to an individual’s decision to follow Jesus.
But in the instance I have just described, the lyric was potentially imbued with a much more specific meaning for the Faith Assembly community, particularly because this meaning was being channeled through the bodies of the church mothers. These older women seemed to be drawing on their personal wells of experience and speaking to the congregation about the inevitability of loss and how the living must continue living. They seemed to be speaking about the perpetual ebb and flow of joy and suffering and the unyielding insistence of time.9
The congregation sang along while the mothers danced, and the words “I can’t go back to the way it used to be, for your presence came and changed me” could have just as easily been directed to Bishop McKenzie as to God. In fact, later in the same service, all of the dozen or so graduates of Faith Assembly Academy, the K–12 school run by the church, took turns speaking to Bishop McKenzie in front of the congregation. Several of them actually employed language similar to the song’s lyrics, saying that his “presence in their lives” had “changed them for the better.”
If the liturgies of consumerism form us to race headlong toward the next new thing rather than face the harsh realities of the present—if they form us to desire neatly packaged bits of captured experience over and above the unforgiving complexities of lived experience—then what happened at Faith Assembly in September 2012 pushed forcefully against the grain of these liturgies. The church mothers were dancing openly about death, preparing the community for the loss of its leader. The church was practicing a vision of human flourishing that was not glamorous in the way of the gospel stars on television; it was not characterized by easy fixes or tidy answers. As the church members participated together in the mothers’ dance, they were not ignoring hardship but working together to find empowerment, consolation, and possibly even joy in the face of hardship. What emerged during the church mothers’ dance was not the kind of nebulous and undemanding transcendence offered by marketers of “worship,” but a thickly textured affirmation of life, community, and belief.
Of course, this was not necessarily explicit. It is primarily an interpretive move on my part to claim that the “church mothers were dancing openly about death.” At the time, none of the church members specifically said anything to that effect. In fact, such a statement would not have been acceptable given the constraints of belief and practice at Faith Assembly. Belief in divine healing is a crucial part of church members’ theology, as it is for most pentecostals. In addition, the idea of “positive confession”—a practice whereby believers speak only about positive outcomes as a way of making spiritual blessings manifest in the natural realm (Harrison 2005, 10–11)—resonates strongly at Faith Assembly. Although the church is nowhere near as strict and methodical about this practice as the “hard prosperity” ministries that brought it to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century (Bowler 2010, 114–20), Faith Assembly’s leaders frequently emphasize the importance of thinking positively and “speaking faith.” They make it clear that any words expressing doubt in God’s omnipotence are not welcome. When Faith Assembly’s members spoke about Bishop McKenzie after his diagnosis, they often said that they were “expecting a miracle” or “believing God for healing.” I never heard anyone at the church explicitly acknowledge that McKenzie’s death was a possibility.
But despite this emphasis on positive speaking, words never tell the whole story for African American pentecostals. Their communicative world is filled with complex webs of signifying sound, sight, motion, and touch, including melodies, moans, glossolalia, gestures, dance, hugging, and laying on of hands. Through these communicative webs, nuanced “conversations” unfold before and beyond the words that people speak. The church mothers’ dance was one of these conversations. And in this instance, the commercial recording was a key facilitator of the conversation. While it played, it took over the role of “positive confessor.” The disembodied voices on the recording declared, “I’ve been changed, healed, delivered.” Those present became free to bodily express their own complex and various interpretations of what that meant to them. The church mothers led with their choreographed movements while some in the congregation cried, some leaped with joy, some hugged, and some simply stood motionless. But all of these embodied interpretations emerged within the context of a worship service where Bishop McKenzie’s physically weak presence contrasted sharply with the vitality with which he had filled that same sanctuary for many years. In this context, the recording opened a space where church members could communicate a range of thoughts and feelings that they were not necessarily free to express in words.
While the products of consumer culture are often critiqued for the homogenizing force they exert, in a situation like this one, a commercial recording can allow for the expression and coexistence of complex and heterogeneous meanings. Rather than suppressing local agency, the recording provided a foundation on which community members could express nuanced responses to an emotionally trying local situation.
But even if the church mothers’ dance to “I Won’t Go Back” represented a powerful moment of community edification at Faith Assembly, on a broad scale this affective moment does very little to slow the steady creep of consumerism into pentecostalism. The potential negative consequences of this influx are amplified in the African American community, where, because of centuries of discrimination, many individuals lack financial safety nets in the form of accumulated wealth or savings (Oliver 2006; Conley 2010). In the contemporary moment, as many African Americans are plagued by debt, practices that embrace and encourage consumerism are potentially threatening to the socioeconomic health of individuals and communities.10 Clearly, the issues that arise at the meeting place of Christian practice and consumer culture are extremely complex, and answers are not easy. Theologian Vincent Miller suggests that an ethnographically informed theology may be one of the best ways to move forward through this thorny terrain. He writes that the theological questions posed by consumer culture “are very difficult to answer. They require methods beyond the training of most theologians, and the subtleties involved make them resistant to quantitative social-science methods.... [They call] for something akin to the immersive methods of ethnography, whereby the anthropologist spends extended time with members of a culture, attending to the implicit logics of their practices and the texture of their daily lives” (2004, 227). In the concluding section of this essay, I want to consider Miller’s suggestion in a bit more detail, thinking about how ethnography and theology might work together in studies of pentecostal practice.11
Pastor and theologian Cheryl Sanders concludes a 2011 article on African American “pentecostal ethics and the prosperity gospel” with a call for “serious prophetic engagement of consumerism, conservatism, and TV studio multiculturalism by men and women who truly understand what it means to be ‘in the world but not of it’ ” (151). Sanders’s challenge seems to be directed toward church leaders, but it is my contention that such engagement is already being enacted by those in the pews. Of course, the ability of these believers to combat problems such as social injustice and systemic inequality on a national stage is limited, as most of them lack the privileges necessary to gain access to the gatekeepers of power, including corporate executives, policy makers, and those ensconced in ivory towers. Nevertheless, their words and actions are transformative in their own local communities.
Thus, I claim that the scholarly conversation about pentecostal practice and consumer culture can benefit from serious and sustained attention to the agency of local believers. Three examples of recent scholarship suggest the extent to which the practices of pentecostal-charismatic believers represent a critical engagement with, rather than a simple acceptance of, doctrines, beliefs, and theologies. Anthropologist and professor of African American studies and religion Marla Frederick-McGlathery worked with women in rural North Carolina for whom televangelism plays a major part in religious life. She explains how these women construct “alternative and contextualized readings of religious television that allow them to dissent from the politically conservative messages of televangelists while adopting the more biblically conservative tenets of evangelical Christianity” (2006, 287). Her conclusions focus on political rather than economic interpretations, but one can easily imagine how “alternative and contextualized readings” could be applied to the logic of consumerism just as they are to the logic of political conservatism.
Sociologist Milmon Harrison’s research concerns believers in prosperity-embracing Word of Faith churches. Based on extensive interviews, Harrison shows how these believers construct and adopt strategies for negotiating the doctrinal demands of church membership (2005, 107–30). Through “filtering” and “venting networks,” members continually question and critically engage with the expressed doctrines and beliefs of their leaders. Theologian Jonathan Walton uses the metaphor of jazz improvisation—which he borrows from Harvey Cox, his colleague at the Harvard Divinity School—in a recent essay about how attendees at Kenneth and Gloria Copeland’s Southwest Believers’ Convention negotiate the doctrines of Word of Faith theology (2012, 109). Drawing from interviews and conversations with conference goers, Walton concludes that “the Word of Faith movement offers a theological chord structure from which persons can theologically riff and spiritually improvise” (128).
Each of these examples suggests that the theologies that pentecostal-charismatic believers actually live emerge out of pragmatic concerns at least to the same extent that they reflect or enact specific beliefs and doctrines. On a micro-level, believers are already responding to the influx of consumer culture in incredibly nuanced and, to echo Cheryl Sanders, “prophetically engaged” ways—that is, ways that pragmatically address the concerns and needs of their communities. Importantly, these responses are often nonlinguistic and extralinguistic, unfolding in dance or music making. It seems to me that theological accounts of the intersections of consumer culture and pentecostal practice have much to gain from taking seriously the ways in which local worship “performs the faith” (Smith 2010, 31).
Working toward this scholarly goal will require a more ethnographically informed theology and a more theologically informed ethnography. Jonathan Walton’s essay provides a good example of the kind of nuanced insight that can be facilitated by a theologian’s use of ethnographic methods, but even his careful analysis rests primarily on propositional statements made by believers. What kind of theological insights will be revealed when ethnographic methods are used to seek meanings that emerge before and beyond words, in dance, music, and the heterogeneous webs of utterance that characterize pentecostal worship?
This essay has tried to ever so slightly begin to address that question within the frame of the meeting place between consumer culture and worship practice. In discussing a dance to a popular commercial gospel recording choreographed by the church mothers at Faith Assembly, I have shown how a moment of church members coming together in a local worship context can be read as an implicit critique of the ethos of consumer culture that has infiltrated African American pentecostalism. I argue, however, that this “critique” is best understood as a secondary dimension of the more pressing pragmatic work that had to be accomplished by this dance. Facing the death of their pastor, Faith Assembly’s members needed to come together in such a way that could not be facilitated simply by a popular song or the doctrine of “positive confession.” Led by the church mothers, they performed an in-the-moment theology that empowered them as a community of worshippers facing the imminence of deep loss and difficult transition. How might we describe the dimensions of such a theology so that it resonates beyond the boundaries of this single community? How might we articulate the significance of such moments of local practice for pentecostal theology more broadly? These are the kinds of questions that my training as a musicologist and ethnographer leaves me unprepared to answer satisfactorily. But I believe that they are fruitful questions that can be addressed through an increased dialogue between ethnographers and theologians.
The conversation about the challenging issues that arise at the intersection of pentecostal practice and consumer culture will, I believe, benefit greatly from works of theologically informed ethnography and ethnographically informed theology that value inside-out perspectives. I borrow this spatial metaphor from the folklorist Henry Glassie, who wrote in his 1982 book Passing the Time in Ballymenone, “The way to study people is not from the top down or the bottom up, but from the inside out, from the place where people are articulate to the place where they are not, from the place where they are in control of their destinies to the place where they are not” (1982, 86). Working from this model, we can attend to local specificities, the richness of particulars, and community-situated experiences that will deepen our understanding of how believers are acted upon by forces of consumerism and how they exert agency amid those forces. We have a lot to learn from the myriad ways in which pentecostals across the world use the things around them—commodified or otherwise—to help affirm life and belief, even in their darkest hours.
1. Small-p “pentecostal” is not meant to connote a particular denominational affiliation but instead refers to “the diversity of pentecostal/charismatic theologies while at the same time recognizing important family resemblances and shared sensibilities.” See Smith (2010, xvii). Theologians such as Douglas Jacobsen and Amos Yong employ this usage as well.
2. Perhaps the most thorough of this kind of engagement is Yong’s In the Days of Caesar (2010, esp. chap. 7). See also Attanasi and Yong (2012). A few examples of recent scholarship dealing with these issues specifically as they pertain to African Americans include Walton (2009); the special thematic issue of Pneuma: The Journal for the Society of Pentecostal Studies, vol. 33, no. 2 (2011); Alexander (2011, esp. chap. 9); and several of the essays in Yong and Alexander (2011).
3. There are two main ways in which recordings make their way into services at Faith Assembly: (1) the church performs its own versions of the songs on the recordings, and (2) the recordings are played over the sound system (usually as an accompaniment for dance).
4. A few recent examples from artists whose music is widely known among the African American communities with which I work are Bishop Leonard Scott Presents: My Worship Experience (Tyscott Records, 2010), Kathy Taylor’s Live: The Worship Experience (Tyscot Records, 2009), and Marvin Winans’s The Praise and Worship Experience (MLW Productions, 2012).
5. There is a growing body of theologically informed ethnomusicology (for example, Dueck 2011; Engelhardt 2009; and Ingalls 2011). There is also a body of ethnographic literature that attends closely to local pentecostal practice and thus articulates (at least implicitly) locally enacted theologies (for example, Hinson 2000 and Lawless 1988). With regard to African American pentecostalism and consumer culture, however, the extant research exists, for the most part, in two distinct strands. One the one hand, there is the theological work exemplified by Walton (2009) that explores popular and consumer culture in contemporary African American Christianity but does not engage deeply with the experiential and communicative dimensions of worship. On the other hand, there is the ethnographic work exemplified by Hinson (2000) and Nelson (2005) that explores the experiential and communicative dimensions of worship but does not engage deeply with popular and consumer culture. The present chapter claims that scholarship on African American pentecostalism and consumer culture could benefit from increased dialogue between these bodies of work.
6. I have regularly heard advertisements for each of these products on The Light 103.9, the North Carolina–based FM radio instantiation of the urban media corporation Radio One.
7. For a recent discussion of this phenomenon from a theological perspective, see Miller (2004).
8. By using this metaphor, I consciously invoke Cheryl Sanders’s insightful discussion of the dialectic between static and kinetic energy in “Holiness-Pentecostal” worship. See Sanders (1996, 59–63).
9. The fact that this communication came from the church mothers is crucial to the significance of this moment. Among African American pentecostals, church mothers have long occupied a place of “tremendous power and authority.” In her history of women’s role in the Church of God in Christ, Anthea Butler writes, “Perhaps it seems strange to attribute much power to the church mothers.... [They] are not those who we normally think of as policy makers or theologians. Look closer. Church mothers are the women who recall the history of their churches, who chastise the pastor when he has interpreted the scriptures incorrectly, and who set the cultural and behavioral patterns for their congregations” (2007, 2). See also Hardy (2011).
10. DeForest Soaries Jr., a prominent New Jersey–based African American pastor, states in the recent CNN documentary Almighty Debt, “There is no question to me that debt is a bigger problem than racism [in the African American community].” For a clip containing this quotation, see Lieber (2010).
11. The combining of theology and ethnography is not a novel idea. Robert Orsi stands out as one scholar who has both incorporated ethnography into studies of religion and called for more similar studies (see esp. Orsi 2005). Eerdmans’s new Series in Ecclesiology and Ethnography provides recent examples of this kind of work and discussions of how such work might be best conducted (see Ward 2012 and Scharen 2012). Unfortunately—and surprisingly, given the centrality of embodiment and performance to pentecostal practice—very little of this recent scholarship engages specifically with pentecostalism.
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. 2012. “Stop Worrying and Start Sowing! A Phenomenological Account of the Ethics of ‘Divine Investment.’ ” In Pentecostalism and Prosperity: The Socio-economics of the Global Charismatic Movement, edited by Katherine Attanasi and Amos Yong, 107–29. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ward, Pete, ed. 2012. Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans.
“William McDowell—Track by Track—‘I Won’t Go Back.’ ” 2012. YouTube video, 2:44. Posted by Entertainment One Nashville, February 10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wky4_TrMj0&feature=relmfu.
Yong, Amos. 2010. In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans.
Yong, Amos, and Estrelda Y. Alexander, eds. 2011. Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture. New York: New York University Press.