Coleman - Borderlands - Ethics, Ethnography, and "Repugnant" Christianity

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300
SPECIAL SECTION
Borderlands
Ethics, ethnography, and “repugnant”
Christianity
Simon Coleman, University of Toronto
I explore the troubled relationship between anthropology and conservative Christianity,

represented here by Prosperity-oriented Pentecostalism. My interest is not only in the
complex boundaries erected between social scientific and religious practice, but also in the
ways both involve the construction of ethical orientations to the world that are chronically
constituted by the deployment of boundaries that play on movements between the
foregrounding and backgrounding of ethical standpoints. One implication of my argument
is that we need to consider more carefully the temporality of ethical framing of action.
Another is that anthropology must acknowledge the fragmented, even ironic and playful,
aspects of Pentecostal practice.
Keywords: Pentecostalism, prosperity, ethics, borders, Sweden
“Why are you studying such crap?”1 That was a question a colleague put to me
a few years ago about my research in Sweden on Prosperity Christians and the
so-called Health and Wealth Gospel. I was not especially surprised. This kind of
Christianity has hardly had a good press over the years, becoming associated with
the self-aggrandizements of televangelists, the miraculous claims of faith healers,
and numerous guides to “more effective” living that can be found in the self-help or
business sections of bookstores. An article in the Atlantic magazine published a few
1. With thanks for the comments from those who attended the “Speaking Ethically
Across Borders” workshop at which this article was originally delivered, including my
discussant Richard Irvine. Special thanks also to the editors of this collection and to
anonymous reviewers for their helpful and astute comments on an earlier draft. I am
grateful to St. John’s College, Cambridge, for hosting and funding my attendance at the
workshop.
his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Simon Coleman.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.2.016
Simon Coleman 276
years ago actually accused Health and Wealth-inspired risk taking of being a fun-
damental cause of the worldwide debt crisis (Rosin 2009). Denunciations of these
Christians’ supposed fakery and self-interest often come from fellow Christians, to
say nothing of secular commentators. So variants of pretty much the same ques-
tion have been posed to me over the past quarter of a century. It has often come
from fellow anthropologists, though perhaps this occasion was especially notable
because it involved an ethnographer of a form of popular religion that, while not
Christian, encourages an explicit search for prosperity that does not look so remote
from the people I have been studying. Still, for my colleague, his non-Western field
clearly constituted a very different kind of anthropological object, and not one that
needed overt justification—unlike mine.
I am certainly not the only anthropologist of conservative Christianity who has
been subjected to this kind of question. Susan Harding’s well-known essay “Repre-
senting fundamentalism: the problem of the repugnant cultural Other” (1991) cre-
ated what was almost a charter of origin for the subfield. Harding argued that the
Christians she studied constituted, from the conventional anthropological point of
view of the time, the wrong kind of cultural Other: supposedly anti- and not simply
nonmodern; powerful, in possession of their own voice; and thus to be kept away
from the conceptual and political space occupied by vulnerable ethnic minorities
or the colonized (ibid.: 392).
This type of Christianity was also “wrong” owing to its habit of crossing borders
into fields occupied by ethnographers: missionary matter out of place (Douglas
1966) because it was to be found in places of academic observation and produc-
tion; and yet, for many scholars, matter out of place that was not interesting, “local,”
or morally appropriate enough to deserve serious attention. As ethnographers of
Christianity in specifically Euro-American contexts, both Harding and I have
therefore had to deal with the study of evangelicals who occupy positions as close
institutional and cultural “neighbors” to our own everyday lives as academics. In
practice, this proximity may lead, as Harding’s work suggests, to policing academic
discourses connected with assumptions that she herself may well be a believer; or
more often in my case to a questioning not only of the inherent interest of my
subject, but also of its inherent value as a cultural phenomenon. Such boundary
concerns are often exacerbated in the United States by actual discursive contexts
between anthropologists and their evangelical students (discussed in Coleman and
Carlin 2004: 12–21). In the Swedish context, especially in the early years of my
study of Prosperity Christians in the university city of Uppsala, I encountered anxi-
eties among social scientists and theologians about the potentially baleful effects
of a well-funded, Americanized (and therefore glossy) Prosperity ministry on the
intellectual as well as emotional and spiritual lives of undergraduates. Within a day
of my first arriving in Uppsala to do fieldwork in 1986, a local anthropologist had
asked me, “Why on earth do you want to study those nuts?” (a variant of the “crap”
question) (Coleman 2002: 79).2
2. This question was given extra piquancy in the local academic context by the lively
debate that was occurring in the Uppsala Cultural Anthropology Department in the
1980s as to whether fieldwork “at home” was legitimate.

277 Borderlands
Many points relating to Harding’s piece have been taken up over the years, but
I want to point to an interesting juxtaposition raised in the very final paragraph of
her text, and one that has been much less frequently remarked upon. For Harding
ultimately does commit herself as an anthropologist to the project of designing
effective strategies to oppose the positions and policies advocated by conservative
Christians; yet, at the same time, she argues that we need more nuanced, local, and
partial accounts to describe who they are, thus “deconstructing the totalizing oppo-
sition between us and them” (1991: 393). Arguably, we see revealed here two routes
of ethical practice for anthropologists in relation to conservative Christianity,
though they may not lead in the same direction. There is ethics as overt political ac-
tion, a hardening of attitudes and a fight for what is perceived as the morally good
beyond the academic world—a kind of engagement as opposition, coming close to
what Michael Lambek (2010: 9) refers to as the meaning of ethics used in common
speech to refer to the positive valence put on certain acts. But there is also a disci-
plinary stance being taken, a plea for understanding, complexity, and nuance that
is a form of academic self-cultivation constituted precisely by seeing aspects of the
self in the conventionally repugnant Other.3 This latter point is exemplified in dra-
matic fashion in another well-known article by Harding, “Convicted by the Holy
Spirit” (1987), where she talks of how the language of conversion nearly catches her
in its narrative hooks. But I think one obvious question here is: How might accep-
tance of the need for politically articulated opposition relate to the ethnographic
project of self-deconstruction on behalf of the Other? Is the Other repugnant in the
first modality but not the second? And need we see these modalities as in conflict
or perhaps rather as incommensurable within the work of the same scholar? These
questions are central to my concerns in this article. They prompt me to address the
theme that the editors of this collection have raised in relation to understanding
how people negotiate a multiplicity of ethical positions—in my case both within
and across the respective “worlds” of anthropology and evangelicalism. They also
resonate with Didier Fassin’s (2008: 333–34) project of constructing a moral an-
thropology that subjects the discipline’s own moral prejudices to scrutiny, even as
it contemplates scholars’ sometimes uncomfortable positioning between a relativist
nihilism regarding knowledge and power, and the “ethical” as signified by marked
activism in the field.
In my approach, I am interested in what we might think of as the varied edges
of ethical practice: not only how far a given stance can be taken, and not only how
(and where) one stance acknowledges another, but also how seemingly very differ-
ent ethical orientations may nonetheless articulate in ways that are both surprising
and, at times, mutually productive. Thus, to reverse the phrasing, I am exploring
how ethical practice can become productive precisely through the chronic assertion
and deployment of edges, of boundaries, in ways that play on movements between
the foregrounding and backgrounding of ethical standpoints.4 Thus are ethical
3. I discuss this disciplinary stance in relation to the ethics of carrying out “participatory”
fieldwork in Coleman (2008).
4. For a discussion of foregrounding and backgrounding in relation to religious engage-
ment, see the articles in the special issue of Ethnos “Foregrounds and backgrounds:
Ventures in the anthropology of Christianity,” edited by Bandak and Jørgensen (2012).

Simon Coleman 278
borderlands created, and here we might think of Renato Rosaldo’s argument that
just as actual borderlands such as those along the US–Mexican boundary should
now be studied as sites of hybridity and cultural creativity, so metaphorical bor-
derlines—say, of class, gender, ethnicity—run through supposedly monolithic so-
cieties and may be loci of continuous invention (Rosaldo 1989; see also Carrithers
2005: 441). One of the borderlands I want to explore here is that between anthro-
pology and the kind of Pentecostalism that I study, and in doing so I want to show
that this is a metaphorical and literal space that contains still more dimensions than
Harding’s identification of repugnance, opposition, and (at least from one side)
attempts at understanding. Of course we can use the older language of liminality
here, but my interest is in ethical stances that are less neatly or systematically ar-
ticulated with each other than such a perspective tends to imply. Nor am I restating
the important but now established argument that anthropology emerges from, and
sometimes reflects, Christian roots (e.g., Cannell 2005). Rather, I see myself as ex-
ploring the shifting and sometimes overlapping ethnographic space created by two
ethical orientations to the world—anthropology and Pentecostalism—that consti-
tute themselves through the chronic construction as well as overcoming of borders.
In reflecting on such themes, we need to remember that Harding’s piece is itself
a response to a call to public account. She is essentially asked by colleagues: “Are
you now or have you ever been a Christian fundamentalist?” in an American con-
text where encounters between anthropologists and such apparent ideological op-
ponents might well occur on university campuses. Her ethnographic crossing of
this particular border between social scientific and religious commitment leads to
what Webb Keane (2010: 78) calls the giving of reasons as a kind of consequential
action that can enter into both making moral claims and ethical self-formation.
Through such justification, an anthropological ethics comes to the surface when
Harding indicates to her colleagues why she carries out such work (compare
Lambek 2010: 30).
So, I want to start by taking the “why are you studying such crap?” question se-
riously rather than dismissing it as either trivial or lacking in self-awareness. Why
should Prosperity Christianity look, from a certain anthropological perspective,
like crap, like matter out of place, not merely in religious landscapes but in ethno-
graphic ones as well?5 And why might exploring that question lead us to an eth-
nographic and not merely a self-reflexive examination of speaking ethically across
borders? Without wishing to overuse the metaphor, how might such crap act as
This concern with the productive dimension of (often shifting) boundaries links well
with the themes of Paolo Heywood’s article in this collection.
5. Of course, it can be argued that attitudes toward the study of evangelicalism have
shifted over the past two to three decades, gaining nuance as more anthropologists have
entered this subfield (Coleman and Hackett 2015). Recent articles that challenge the
anthropological–evangelical divide—while thereby indicating that it still exists—have
been provided by B. Howell (2007) and Meneses et al. (2014). Crapanzano (2000: 83)
presents an intriguingly ambivalent attitude: while indicating that the literalism of
Christian “fundamentalists” is in fact endemic within American culture as whole, he
also reports his extreme aversion to being subject to missionizing discourse during
fieldwork.

279 Borderlands
fertile theoretical manure and not merely represent the predictable result of ethical
outrage?
The fertility of borders

One initial response to the task I have set myself can be expressed in a method-
ological register: in working with Prosperity Christians, we might indeed struggle
to apply what Michael Carrithers (2005: 433) has described as the “moral aes-
thetic standards” of our discipline, “the ability to enter into another person’s situ-
ation imaginatively without necessarily sharing the other’s values or cosmology”
(ibid.: 438). This is not just a matter of politics. The Prosperity Gospel refers to a
faith that (in common with, for instance, varieties of so-called conservative Islam)
may appear self-consciously to resist its encompassment by the language of oth-
ers, to deny the legitimacy of intellectual appropriation through anthropology, and
to do so by deploying a powerful linguistic armory of its own. Arguably, the very
power of that armory constructs, at first glance, the image of a religion that seems
to be propounding a rigid, deontological approach to the exercise of faith. It also
implies confidence in believers’ ability to challenge or appropriate specific parts of
the academy. In 1987, during my fieldwork on a local, Prosperity-oriented gather-
ing of Christian undergraduates in Uppsala, I listened to a young Swedish preacher
tell his student audience that university-based theology and anthropology were the
worst subjects to study: the former removed God and the latter relativized him to
death (Coleman 2002: 82). During the 1980s and 1990s, however, I also saw the
work of scholars such as Ernest Gellner being put on reading lists for Christian
students at the Word of Life’s new university so that they could incorporate his
perspectives within their worldview. I wish I had been in the room when Nations
and nationalism (1983) was being discussed,6 and am equally curious to know what
would have happened if Gellner himself had been there to join in.
But there is much more to be said about anthropology’s troubled relationship
with such Christians. For I wish to see borders not only as routes across which
ethically charged speech may travel, but also as fertile catalysts for such speech on
behalf of informants or anthropologists. These borders become places that are pro-
ductive of explanation or justification, prompt explicit navigation—become con-
texts where the ethical becomes manifest and objectifiable (see Lambek 2010: 30;
compare Keane 2010: 69). If we wish to push the logic of this statement a little fur-
ther, we might say that making something manifest does not simply express what is
already there, it also remakes it, since objectification has certain effects and permits
certain forms of reflexivity (Keane 2010: 69) that are productive in their own right.
In these terms, Prosperity Christianity is not only objectionable to many anthro-
pologists, it is also a particular kind of object, or is shaped to become one, taking on
a semiotic form that can help make explicit but also (re)make certain aspects of the
ethics of anthropological practice. It might in the process indicate how and why we
6. I consider the use of Gellner’s work at the Word of Life, as well as reflecting in more de-
tail on the implications of his work for the study of evangelicals, throughout Coleman
(2008).

Simon Coleman 280
ourselves speak professionally across certain cultural borders but prefer to remain
silent over others—or to recognize them, perhaps, only as “crap.”
However, I am interested in Prosperity Christianity not only as a kind of border
object for anthropology, but also as itself chronically constituted by the construc-
tion and traversing of borders through speech and other media. Such borders are
made manifest at very different scales, but a key focus for this article is one that is
often associated with both ethical practice and reflections upon such practice, as
well as constituting a topic that has been debated within the virtue ethics approach:
the cultivation of the religious subject, and the means through which cultivation
itself may involve the apparent exercise of certain kinds of choice.
Reflecting on questions of choosing between options, Jarrett Zigon (2007: 133)
considers whether and how a person is being moral when he or she is not being
consciously forced to take a particular decision, as well as how a given dispositional
training might transfer across social contexts. He goes on to argue that ethics are
“performed” in moments expressing dilemmas or breakdown of normal expecta-
tions, when disagreements arise, or when an older “moral-cultural way of being”
encounters a new one, such as Pentecostal Christianity: “In this way, then, I make
a distinction between morality as the unreflective mode of being-in-the-world and
ethics as a tactic performed in the moment of the breakdown of the ethical di-
lemma” (ibid.: 137). For Zigon (ibid.: 138), the ultimate goal of ethics as tactics is
to reach the state of once again dwelling in the unreflective comfort of the familiar.
While, as noted, I agree with him on the need to consider the temporal framing
of ethical action, I am less convinced by the imagery of unreflective comfort, pri-
marily because it does not capture the extent to which Pentecostalism may involve
the active cultivation of “dilemmas” or “breakdowns” as part of its dispositional
makeup.
One reason why the issue of making active choices is a significant one in con-
sidering the relationship between anthropology and Pentecostalism is that the lat-
ter—unlike, say, being a member of the Nuer or the Azande—involves a cultural
framework that the actor can usually opt into or out of. This possibility contributed
to the suspicions of Susan Harding’s colleagues regarding her interest in American
evangelicalism. But being Pentecostal implies more than an original, one-off deci-
sion to become born-again: it is also to enter a whole new range of ethical choices.
James Laidlaw notes that “a number of philosophical and theological traditions
have held some variation of the idea that the ethical act presupposes a degree of au-
tonomy on part of the actor, since it must be the outcome of a choice made among
possible alternative courses of action” (2013: 65; see also S. Howell 1997).7 For the
anthropologist, one of the issues at stake here involves avoiding Durkheimian de-
terminism and conflation of the social with the cultural.8 I want to argue that for
Swedish Prosperity Christians, participation in their faith plays with the ambiguity
7. Though, as James Faubion notes (2014: 438), both he and Laidlaw seek to find a bal-
ance between assuming unfreedom, on the one hand, and an implausible assumption
of fully realized autonomy, on the other.
8. But see, for example, Fassin’s (2014: 430) assertion of the need for a more nuanced ap-
proach to Durkheim, and one that demonstrates that duty does not exhaust morality
(see also S. Howell 1997: 7).

281 Borderlands
not only of the borders of the subject, but also with choice itself as a marked cat-
egory and constituent of ethical action that can help contribute to self-cultivation.
In a recent article on Ghanaian Pentecostals, Girish Daswani (2013: 469) talks of
the complexities for believers of making moral judgments around positions of
uncertainty, and describes these moments of indeterminacy as destabilizing the
conventional parameters of what is acceptable in the present (ibid.: 468). Ethical
questions are thus roused, made explicit. I agree with him from the perspective
of my fieldwork; but I also argue that for the religious subjects I study, speaking
and acting across certain borders can become chronic means to cultivate and not
merely mitigate risk (Coleman 2011: 42), and in the process to experiment, often
consciously, with temporary loss of autonomy in the sense that such risk may allow
external forces to threaten but also to reconstruct what they perceive about them-
selves. Such a combination of choice and restriction may look like a paradox from
the “outside,” though not necessarily from the “inside.” It also raises a particular
kind of question for me as an ethnographer of a religious movement where par-
ticipation involves the learning of embodied practices, but where engagement may
nonetheless be fragmentary and situational. Michael Lambek (2010: 11), James
Laidlaw (2013), and others suggest that we are to see the ethical as a modality of all
social action or being in the world, rather than regarding it as a particular domain
of social life. The ethical is indeed always there in different forms, and Lambek has
emphasized the inconsistency of human action (2010: 9) but also the centrality of
the exercise of judgment to “everyday ethics” (ibid.: 26). These comments remind
us of the need to proceed with caution in thinking of the exercise of piety9 as a non-
deliberative aspect of one’s disposition, as Laidlaw (2013: 178) suggests in discuss-
ing Sabha Mahmood’s influential work on Muslim women in Cairo (2005: 137).
But how might we see religious participation as involving the situational and thus
temporally bound placing of a certain, marked ethical frame on events? And how,
in the case of a religious form such as Prosperity-oriented Pentecostalism, does the
situational character of the invocation of the frame coexist with a seemingly confi-
dent rhetoric of encompassing all of human life?
These questions take us back to borders and borderlands as productive cata-
lysts for the objectification—or, to change the metaphor, the temporary crystal-
lization—of ethical action and discourse. Referring to Ghanaian Pentecostalists,
Daswani (2013: 475) talks of the need to “understand how individual believers deal
with the challenges of negotiating between the normative and the tacit, between
incommensurable and incompatible practices.” Again I agree, but I am also inter-
ested in understanding how exercising choice can be a specifically positive form of
self-cultivation.
Making a choice often involves rendering one’s actions accountable to oneself
as well as to others. Michael Lempert (2013: 370) has recently suggested that “the
9. We need, of course, to bear in mind that piety in, say, Muslim and Pentecostal contexts
will have different associations. In the latter case, it introduces links with the Methodist
roots of Pentecostalism. For my purposes, piety implies the personally directed ex-
ercises of Pentecostal- and Prosperity-oriented practice, which, as we shall see, must
be regarded as forms of self-discipline/cultivation but also a more playful sense of
exploration.

Simon Coleman 282
presumption that ethics is immanent in practice continues to distract from the

problem of how to narrate, and theorize, the entanglements of discourse and eth-
ics.” For Lempert, accepting the ordinariness of ethics does not mean that we can
assume that they are effortlessly immanent, locatable as if turning over a stone
on a path. Rather, ethics are subject to performative contingency, are precarious
achievements requiring explicit semiotic labor to happen and to be intersubjec-
tively evident, and indeed “to the extent that ethical activity is kindled through
discursive interaction rather than being an ever-present quality of it, we must re-
main alive to performative felicity, and failure” (ibid.: 371).10 Of course, forms of re-
flexivity will vary across several dimensions, some violations will be noticed more
than others, and under certain conditions—especially those of moral broaches or
quandaries—we might expect people to cite cultural discourses on morality more
readily than on other occasions (ibid.: 377).11
Lempert usefully suggests that we might grasp the workings of ethics through
contingent and distributed performativity, with “interactants” working to invoke
as well as infer the ethical in situations (ibid.: 379). However, while he explores the
idea that in a discursive context one might shift “from speaker to hearer the burden
of figuring out that ethics is relevant and who this ethics is for” (ibid.: 379), my
emphasis on the invocation of ethical frameworks by believers (or anthropologists,
for that matter) as an act of self-cultivation means that I focus on speakers as much
as or sometimes more than I do on apparent recipients of ethical claims. My ap-
proach here comes close to Carrithers’ (2005: 434) model of culture and interactive
moral aesthetics as a matter of persuasion and rhetoric rather than a determining,
software-like program. I agree with Carrithers that people may use these cultural
tools to work not only on others, but also on themselves. In such work, I shall
argue, a set of ethical stances that constantly invokes borders, boundaries to be
marked and crossed, can have considerable effectiveness. Regarding much Pente-
costalism, the bringing to consciousness and objectification of ethical practice as
chronic action is central to the performance of a faith that is oriented around the
creation of cultural and moral borderlands. It also, as we shall see, poses questions
as to the immanence and coming to objectification of the ethics of commentators,
including anthropologists.
Anthropology and global Pentecostalism

I shall soon explore these questions further through a case study of the Swedish
Prosperity Christians whom I have been studying since the 1980s. But before doing
so I need to reflect for a final time on the place of conservative Christianity, and
10. Lempert (2013: 376) also discusses two major approaches to the contemporary anthro-
pology of morality: the neo-Aristotelian or Foucauldian approach, which regards eth-
ics as embodied in practice; and a more Kantian view of ethics as acts of standing apart
from the world.
11. Though I do not have space to develop the point here, we might consider parallels
between moral infractions and discourses of the miraculous as means of encouraging
reflexivity (see also Clarke 2014 on a Sufi example).

283 Borderlands
in particular Pentecostalism, in the wider landscape of the social sciences. In the

more than twenty years since Harding originally published her articles on study-
ing—and encountering—conservative Protestant discourse in the United States,
the discipline has changed in ways that her work partially anticipated. Since the
1990s, much scholarly attention has in fact come to rest on evangelical and espe-
cially Pentecostal activity around the world. Two of the most prominent analytical
approaches within anthropology agree on its cultural impact, though they do so
from rather different disciplinary stances. I see their respective positions as in-
structive in reflecting further on the tangled ethical relations between anthropol-
ogy and Pentecostalism.
Jean and John Comaroff ’s diagnosis of Pentecostal millennialism as a particu-
lar expression of a broader millennial capitalism and a form of “occult economy”
(e.g., 1999, 2000) uses the materialist, comparative tools of anthropology to indi-
cate the power of Prosperity discourse as an explanation of their plight for victims
of the current economic order, but also to explore the ability of anthropology to
uncover the ideological implications of such discourse. Clearly, I am not expressing
their (well-known) ideas in any detail, but the relevant point here is that their work
has provoked a particular kind of debate over the location and boundaries between
anthropological and Pentecostal forms of understanding and practice. Most nota-
bly, Ruth Marshall (2009: 30) worries that in their approach the authorial voice of
the scholar is made to speak “through the cultural text that is local religious belief,”
in the process “insisting that religious or supernatural signs signify a truth hidden
from those who express and elaborate them.” In other words, religious practice is
assumed to have an underlying rationality that is discernible through the methods
of social science;12 and yet, for Marshall: “What is left out of these studies [is] that
irreducible element of faith that marks the frontier of what it is possible for social
science to think, and which analyses circumnavigate, reduce, or ignore.” So at issue
here are the ethics of representation of such religious practice, and questions over
the extent to which the latter maintains a voice that can escape and exceed that of
social science. If we think back to the two routes of ethical practice that I sketched
out at the beginning of this article, we see a further worrying over the relationship
between anthropology as political (and critical) practice, and a disciplinary stance
that seeks more overtly to locate aspects of the self in the Other.13
However we position ourselves in relation to these contrasting ways to analyze
Pentecostalism, we might see the Comaroffs as deploying anthropology as a means
of politically engaged enlightenment that acts on Prosperity Gospels while also keep-
ing its distance from them. But other work has revolved precisely around borders
12. There are echoes here of Fassin’s discussion (2014: 432; see also Laidlaw 2014: 60)
of how concepts of agency may incorporate analysts’ views of the appropriate use of
freedom (i.e., the pursuit of “real” interests) into their very definition. We might also
compare Marshall’s remarks with critiques of the political economy approach to exam-
ining culture and difference, as documented by the editors in their introduction to this
collection.
13. I confess that I remain unclear as to what might be meant by the phrase an “irreduc-
ible element of faith.” But in saying so, in Marshall’s terms, I perhaps betray my own
irreducibly social scientific sensibility.

Simon Coleman 284
that have linked the effects of religious mission not only with shifts in the constitu-
tion of religious subjects, but also with changes in the constitution of the discipline
itself. Here, then, I move to the second of the prominent analytical approaches that
I want to mention in this section. If part of the force of Harding’s writing was in its
depiction of her being assailed by the language of colleagues (invoking the “repug-
nant Other”) and of believers (invoking “conviction by the Holy Spirit”) so that her
identity as a rational American scholar was called into question in both cases, recent
writing has invoked the charged language of rupture and continuity in depicting
still wider battles between Pentecostal and anthropological discourses. Joel Robbins
(2004, 2007) captures these issues beautifully in his depiction of the Urapmin of
Melanesia negotiating between traditional and Pentecostal Christian worldviews, a
sometimes tormented negotiation that leads them to approach so much of life as a
process of moral decision making (Daswani 2013: 468), even as it might also prompt
anthropologists to debate whether we are seeing some form of modernity and ir-
reversible change being instituted through such decisions. For Robbins, the wider
moral of his ethnographic story of transformation is that in recognizing the influ-
ence of Pentecostalism on informants, anthropology itself must change in accepting
the potentially irreversible transformations in the local: Pentecostalism becomes
a kind of hybrid trickster figure in such terms, articulating with and transform-
ing local ontologies and thereby forcing observers to accept that informants do not
simply assimilate new events into already existing cultural categories. So neither
“local” cultures nor anthropology itself can be seen as immune from the effects of
such Pentecostal border crossings. Perceived in this way, what Robbins (2007) calls
anthropology’s “continuity thinking” in the face of rupture becomes a form of pollu-
tion behavior, protecting the categories of the discipline through asserting the pres-
ervation of the power of local cosmologies to domesticate Pentecostal ideologies.
Again, whether or not we agree with Robbins’ thesis, we must acknowledge its
impact in its subfield, its ability to hit a raw intellectual nerve. His argument uses
ethnography to comment on previously taken-for-granted anthropological eth-
ics, given that assumptions over the moral and epistemological integrity of “lo-
cal” worlds helped to form the discipline and its practitioners over many years. In
this article, however, my imagery is less one of rupture per se than of examining
the constitution of Pentecostalism (as well as anthropology) at and through bor-
ders, including Euro-American contexts where scholarly and religious practices are
closely juxtaposed. I emphasize the ways in which part of the dynamism of Swedish
Pentecostalism and indeed of Pentecostalism elsewhere is in its inevitably partial
character. A rhetoric of world encompassment is consonant with and complements
the assumption that cultural and religious Otherness is always present and must be
engaged with. I therefore describe Pentecostalism as a kind of “part-culture” (see
also Coleman 2010: 800–802), presenting worldviews meant for export but often in
both tension and articulation with the assumed values of any given host. We should
not assume, of course, that Pentecostal forms exist in transcendental form, wait-
ing to be downloaded into societies or individuals. But a key point for me is that a
part-culture, defined in these terms, is one always already prepared to exist on and
through salient borders, to focus on and often to mark shifts in ethical practice
through a variety of semiotic means that have their own aesthetic integrity but also
prey almost parasitically on existing forms.

285 Borderlands
A related point, often underemphasized, is that the borders through which

Pentecostalists work are not simply “out there,” somehow expressive of the essential
differences between Pentecostal and local worldviews.14 They are constantly con-
structed and reconstructed by believers, and while much writing seems to think
that the key reason to examine Pentecostal activity is because of its ability to con-
vert non-Christians to its worldviews, I maintain that it is equally important to
examine another dimension of the boundary: the ways in which Pentecostalism
itself is reconstituted through asserting its need to work within borderlands in-
volving nonbelievers as well as believers. We might go back to Keane here, and his
argument that “the act of giving an account of oneself to others can be at the same
moment an act of self-formation” (2010: 78). Such accounts are surely forms of
self-objectification, and the audience might be the self as well as a putative Other.
Prosperity discourse in Sweden

Over the past quarter of a century, I have been studying the Prosperity-oriented
Word of Life (Livets Ord) foundation, based in Uppsala, as it has evolved from a
tiny congregation in the early 1980s into a church- and ministry-planting mega-
church whose empire stretches into Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Holy Land,
and beyond. Expansion has involved a fractal-like duplication of the Word of Life
ministry model (e.g., Coleman 2000), which itself takes strong inspiration from
North American Prosperity roots. Within Sweden in the 1980s, it soon became
known for its attraction to younger people, its apparently slick, Americanized self-
presentation (smart clothes, video screens, professional music), and its staging of
large conferences attracting luminaries of the global Prosperity circuit to faraway
and secularized Sweden.
While much of the recent literature on Pentecostalism refers to its expansion in
contexts of conversion to Christianity or away from Catholicism, or through re-
verse mission from Southern to Northern countries (e.g., Ukah 2008), the Swedish
case involved the emergence of neo-Pentecostalism in a context where, despite the
country’s reputation for secularity, more classical congregations have formed a
powerful and increasingly respectable institutional presence since the 1920s or so.
Nor, obviously, was this a case that raised questions of Pentecostalism as a medium
or harbinger of modernity. Rather, from its origins, Word of Life rhetoric looked
outward toward the idea of converting secular Swedes to Christianity, and inward
in its attempts to reform and revitalize the longstanding, respectable but bureau-
cratized Swedish Pentecostal movement. Reactions to the emergence of Prosperity
Christianity as a kind of part-culture in Sweden reflected this double orientation
quite closely, though less predictable was the sheer force of the reactions that the
group catalyzed. I have noted elsewhere that the emergence of the Word of Life
14. Thus, note the shifting analytical location of “the local” in this section. At times, Pen-
tecostalism is constructed by scholars as an example of global, or at least transnational,
culture in relation to more established, traditional ways of life. At other times, Pente-
costalism is regarded as part of the local cultural ecology, which is being analyzed by an
external agent—otherwise known as the anthropologist.

Simon Coleman 286
sparked a moral panic in the country that presented the group as a fundamental
threat not only to Pentecostalism, but also to many of the values of Sweden at large
(Coleman 2000: chapter 9).15 In 1986 and 1987, the archbishop of Sweden released
two statements regarding the group that referred to spiritual movements “foreign
to our own Christian interpretation and tradition of faith,” seen as causing “splits,
confusions and arguments” in Christian congregations, encouraging “fanaticism,”
and possibly leading to depression (ibid.: 208–9; reproduced in Wikström 1988:
13–15).16 One morning in October 1987, residents of Uppsala woke up to find slo-
gans such as “Word of Death” and “Hang Ekman” daubed on walls around the town
(Coleman 2000: 211), and a few examples of this graffiti were still evident in parts
of the city into the 1990s. By the year 2000, around thirty academic reports had
been produced on the group, mostly in Swedish, generally focusing on its anoma-
lous and controversial character in Sweden (ibid.: 211). If a national and cultural
border was being crossed, it was one that seemed to call for almost weekly demands
for accountability from the ministry’s representatives, and especially its head pas-
tor at the time, Ulf Ekman. Did the group represent a brainwashing cult, luring
young people off the streets or out of more liberal congregations into its portals?
Was it a mere conduit for an American Christian Right to establish a base in a
rich European country, contributing to the religiously sanctioned neoliberalizing
of what had been a formerly stable social democratic state? Was it somehow even
indirectly responsible for the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme, after he was
mysteriously gunned down on a street in central Stockholm in 1986? And so on.17
The panic has since largely died down, though it still surfaces occasionally,
most recently over accusations that Ulf Ekman is a hyprocrite for having decided
to leave the Word of Life and become a Roman Catholic.18 As a researcher who
first arrived in the mid-1980s, I found myself at times being approached by local
theologians who wished me to adopt one of the ethical stances I sketched out for
Susan Harding, that of political opposition, and they were disappointed when I
would not do so (Coleman 2002: 79).19 As noted, some of the local anthropologists
I encountered denied the value of the other stance she suggests, that of attempting
15. Despite the fact that, even now, the Word of Life congregation only has around 2,500–
3,000 members. Coleman (1989) includes a survey of national press reactions to the
Word of Life in the 1980s, indicating that the most frequent themes revolved around
the alleged psychological instability caused by membership and the targeting of the
young, but also broader accusations such as presenting a rightwing (American) politi-
cal agenda under a religious guise, and poaching members from other congregations.
16. My translation.
17. For a list of theories concerning Palme’s death, including the possibility that the Word
of Life was somehow to blame, see, for instance,
https://minalistor.wordpress.com/1999/12/12/lista-over-tidernas-skonaste-teorier-
kring-mordet-pa-olof-palme/ (last accessed September 24, 2015).
18. See, for instance,
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2014/08/13/how-i-moved-from-
my-megachurch-to-catholicism/ (last accessed, September 24, 2015).
19. Examples of such opposition included Bjuvsjö et al. (1984) and Nilsson (1988).

287 Borderlands
to understand the group in a more nuanced way. In these scholars’ terms, the Word
of Life did not present genuine ethnographic material because its members were
“nuts,” or it involved studying urban Sweden while the role of anthropology should
be to examine non-Western parts of the world. All of these views provide variations
on the “crap” theme, though I suspect that many of them have at least moderated,
as, for instance, anthropology “at home” has become an important dimension of
Swedish ethnographic practice. But what I also explore here is a different way of
thinking about the ethics of this case, in other words the question of how anthro-
pologically to characterize a religious subjectivity formed through chronic if also
chronically partial traversing of borders at different scales of perception and action.
I begin by highlighting a notable point of discursive contact between the Word
of Life’s public representatives and its critics: in the early days especially, both large-
ly agreed at least officially that religious participation meant a radical and complete
shift into a new framework of being, thinking, and acting. As the sociologist of
religion Margareta Skog (1993: 113) put it, the considerable authority enjoyed by
the Prosperity pastors represented a new religious form in Swedish free (i.e., non-
conformist) churches, and one where the sheer force of personality of the leader ap-
peared to attract followers as well as acceptance of a seemingly authoritarian, “One
Shepherd” principle of governance. But for me the question is what to make of this
totalizing discourse as an ethnographic object in itself. In the context of thinking
about the contingencies of marking out ethical practices as well as the ambiguities
behind determining the agency underlying ethical judgments, I am also interested
in how such discourse was operationalized by both believers and critics as a fram-
ing device where choice appeared to be combined—consciously or not—with a
certain surrendering of autonomy on the part of the individual believer.
Unsurprisingly, Prosperity thinking formed a key, if disputed, point of distinc-
tion between the group and its conventional, more classical Pentecostal forebears
and rivals: many of the latter abhorred the brash materialism of the new group—at
least those who were not discreetly attending some of its services. Yet, in practice,
the Prosperity Gospel can mean many things. Even within the Word of Life, and
despite the totalizing rhetoric mentioned above, it needs to be seen less as a co-
herent theology and more as a multivalent practice, an orientation constituted by
boundary crossing that occurs at different scales and through very different me-
dia of articulation. In this vein, a dimension picked up by some critics in Sweden
was the way in which ideas associated by Word of Lifers with Prosperity contained
twin notions (and associated practices) of abundance and overflow,20 materiality
combined with movement, invoking senses of both excess and exuberance.21 I have
20. Överflöd. This is translatable as both “overflow” and “abundance.”

21. Bible school students at the Word of Life were instructed, for instance, to read a core
text by the American preacher Kenneth Copeland on this topic, and then to start put-
ting the so-called laws of prosperity into practice in their lives in Swedish Överflödets
lagar (1985; translatable literally, if unidiomatically, as “The Laws of Abundance/Over-
flow”) and published by the foundation itself. The English title for the book is in fact
The laws of prosperity, so that the local version published by the Word of Life has a very
slightly different connotation—more directly a sense of going beyond boundaries (see
Coleman forthcoming).

Simon Coleman 288
recently discussed aspects of this concept of overflow elsewhere (Coleman forth-

coming), so here I mention its most basic aspects, while expanding on its links with
my discussion of ethics.
The first point is that Prosperity implies less a conventional theology as such,
less a following of specific propositions or rules of conduct, and more the creation
of an attitude toward the world that might be adopted and used to reframe any
“circumstances” (omständigheter). Such an attitude incorporates but also has wider
application than the conversionist orientation conventionally associated with such
Christians. In other words, missionary attempts to convert others to the faith draw
on broadly the same assumptions as those behind the idea that God blesses ambi-
tions of believers to build new congregations across Sweden and beyond (starta
eget, literally “start one’s own”), or is bound by divine covenant to reward donors
who give tithes or other monetary donations to the church. These are all meth-
ods of “reaching out” (att nå utt) into the world, and note how they invoke scalar
expansion across boundaries of self and other, sacred and secular, in a number of
respects: ideological, spatial, material, linguistic (Coleman 2000: 131–42; 2004).22
Notice also the complex double orientation that such reaching out entails. Its asso-
ciated notion of overflow can imply both self-extension/objectification—pushing
beyond normal boundaries of personal etiquette—and self-reward—the benefits
expected from such extension. Social, material, and spiritual productivity redound
back upon the believer as well as out in the world at large. Significant here, also, is
not only the prepositional orientation of “over,” but also the associations of “flow,”
the breaking down and moving across accepted categories and expectations in
ways that easily resonate with charismatic notions of the Spirit. Such “overflow-
ing” practice can be adapted to numerous situations, but may also be emphasized
or deemphasized according to the moods and motivations of the actor. Thus one
elderly Pentecostalist missionary explained to me that his engagement with both
classical Pentecostalism and the newer, neo-Pentecostal ministry involved dispa-
rate ways in which to actualize spiritually charged practice as well as religious sub-
jectivity (Coleman 2000: 188), and while my conversations with him took place in
the late 1980s, he expressed attitudes that are still evident today among believers
who move between the two sets of religious practice. While being a conventional
Pentecostalist implied a more intense social engagement with others and a close
sense of mutual and complex engagement, adopting a “Prosperity” orientation was
more a matter of increasing the scale of one’s ambition in order to take command
of situations, whether they involved converting others, ordering one’s business af-
fairs with confidence, or simply “conquering” the mundane challenges of everyday
life. In other words, Pentecostalism and Prosperity did not just represent different
(albeit related) movements; they also involved different framings of his own atti-
tude toward his own capabilities and understanding of his influence over others. In
22. A good illustration of the link between missionary expansion and personal empower-
ment is provided by the young convert Anders, who described his involvement in a
minifellowship within the Word of Life in the 1980s thus: “I got to hear that our group
. . . was viewed by the congregation leadership as pioneers who would save Uppsala
first, and then Sweden and then the whole world. My sister’s circle wasn’t regarded at all
in the same way and it really boosted my ego to be picked out” (Coleman 2000: 111).

289 Borderlands
his terms, a person might be more classically “Pentecostal” in attitude one minute,
more “Prosperity” another, with the latter implying much more of a sense of go-
ing beyond one’s behavioral comfort zone, and often interacting with anonymous
others—either encountered face to face or more virtually through electronic me-
dia. The sense of moving across literal or metaphorical territory entailed in flow
invokes some notion of the presence of Otherness as an overt motivation for one’s
actions:23 the believer must identify strategic areas of action such as encounters
with hitherto unsaved people, money that is not being used properly for God’s
purposes, even stubborn aspects of the self that should be worked on so that static
“form” can indeed turn into fertile flow. In practice, the range of things that can be
declared Other in these terms is quite varied, and may differ among believers. The
degree and direction of imposition on Otherness are not always predictable, and
may say something about the specific character of a given person’s invocation of
Prosperity. Thus considerable semiotic work was evident in some of the contested
proxemics of Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal worship that I observed particularly
in the 1980s, but also into the 1990s. When some Word of Life supporters attended
services at the established Pentecostal church in Uppsala, they would engage in a
directly parallel ritual repertoire: tongues, raising of hands, private prayer, and so
on, but with a force, loudness, speed, and intensity that echoed but also surpassed
(and sometimes simply drowned out) those of other members of the congregation.
Other Prosperity supporters, however, simply adopted classical Pentecostal norms
of force and tone, appropriate to context.
In Sweden, especially in the last decades of the twentieth century, these atti-
tudes could also take on much wider cultural and political resonances (Coleman
2000: 210–20): a form of brash Americanization in the eyes of critics, or a break-
ing out from staid, overly cautious, cramped attitudes toward worship and indeed
life at large in the eyes of supporters. In common with their American counter-
parts, some Word of Lifers felt encouraged to start their own businesses, ranging
from hot-dog stands to computer supplies to financial advice, on the grounds that
blessings could extend into the worlds of work. Probably the most striking of these
initiatives was a telephone sales firm, founded in the mid-1980s by a Word of Life
member and staffed by fellow believers, where deploying persuasive rhetoric over
the phone to clients was juxtaposed with bouts of speaking in tongues in the office
(Coleman 2000: 192). Such actions indicated the links between exercising “over-
flow” and the adoption of risk taking as an orientation to various dimensions of
one’s life, exposing oneself to potential ridicule from skeptics or financial embar-
rassment in business affairs, and yet remaining confident in the assumption of
receiving God’s blessings, later if not sooner (compare Marti 2008).24 Risk taking
could itself become indexical of the spiritual strength or current state of the per-
son: believers might come to assess and indeed objectify their own trust in God
23. As one reviewer of this article has remarked, the “Other focus” inherent in proselytiz-
ing groups may provide food for comparative thought across the “Abrahamic tradition”
in general.
24. Numerous explanations for delays in success are available, ranging from one’s own lack
of confidence to the actions of the Devil, to the fact that success has indeed occurred in
the divine realm, but not yet in the “natural” one.

Simon Coleman 290
precisely by perceiving how much they would put in play at a given point. Thus the
thinking might run (in a scenario that has often been mentioned to me by believers
throughout all of my fieldwork): A person stands alone next to you at a bus-stop.
Do you remain silent (in typical Swedish fashion) or do you engage them in con-
versation that will soon turn into witness? Any given day is full of such opportuni-
ties, and you can learn to identify them, but you must also choose to take advantage
of them—to become, as one of my key informants, Pamela, has put it, a “fighter” for
the faith, partaking of a God who “has no limitations” (Coleman 2003: 22–23). In
making this point, Pamela is referring not only to her explicitly Christian abilities
as a missionary, but also to her seemingly secular role in the telephone sales firm
mentioned above.
What is less clear is the limit that might be put on such action, without con-
tradicting the optimism of much Prosperity thinking: Where does human reason
meet spiritual ambition in a way that satisfies both? At one point in the mid-1980s,
Pastor Ekman had to tell Bible school students that they should stop going around
to unwitting potential partners and saying that God had told them that they would
get married to each other (compare Coleman 2000: 139). I found his statement
striking for his public acknowledgment that not all “revelation-knowledge” from
God (uppenbarelsekunskap) could be regarded as an unquestionable guide to ac-
tion. More broadly, we see here something of the ambiguous character of such risk
taking by students: its decidedly proleptic and subjunctive character, its confound-
ing of future reality with present desire, challenging and indeed collapsing the
temporal division between the two. To convert an idea/hope that one has into the
definitive statement “God has told me that I will marry you” is an interesting varia-
tion on illocutionary language, where the wish for, and the performance of, action
come together in ways that might at times be effective, but which are highly likely
to cause unease in the listener. In Prosperity contexts, such unease is likely to be
increased by mutual awareness of the power of language, combined with valoriza-
tion of an ethic of reaching out. As Lambek has noted (2010: 18), certain ritual acts,
such as making sacrifices or giving and receiving gifts, have the power to initiate
(or cancel) particular ethical criteria, conditions, or states. In this Word of Life
example, we see words, backed by the assertion of revelation, seeming to reframe
the social conditions and spiritual stakes of an encounter between two people. We
also observe, as Maussian anthropology indicates, the potentially agonistic quality
of extending the self out to another. Borderlands can be uncomfortable places to
inhabit and coconstruct.
From the perspective of the initiator of action, such evident risk taking is con-
ceptualized and carried out through means that come close to positive thinking:
acting as if one’s desires were already realized is seen as a way of obtaining one’s
wishes (Coleman forthcoming). Believers may talk of thinking of themselves as
already prosperous, even in circumstances where their situation “in the natural,”
that is, viewed through secular eyes, appears to contradict such a view. This logic
applies both to speech and to wider forms of embodied behavior, encapsulated in
the notion of the “happy giver” (glad givare), where both externalization of materi-
ality and outwardly expressed confidence increase the power of what is being done.
Thus giving of money, time, or assistance should not be done grudgingly. Pros-
perity and the proleptic are united here, but so are two senses of “act” in Western

291 Borderlands
terms: both a perception of self-determined agency and a more theatrical dimen-

sion of “acting out,” forcing the self to adopt a pose of certainty in relation to out-
comes as well as the gaze of others and, indeed, the self. A spiritual authenticity
emerges through risks that demonstrate and simultaneously objectify commitment
to the faith. This point was forcefully made to me in an intriguing way by Pamela
(see above; Coleman 2003). She noted that she swiftly gained status at the Word of
Life in the late 1980s through her ability to embody an outgoing attitude to others,
expressing her qualities as a fearless communicator of the faith to believers and
nonbelievers alike. At the same time, this very quality of expressing unfettered con-
viction, assumed to be a sign of spiritual authenticity, was also described by fellow
believers as making her seem like an echo of a famous American preacher, Sandy
Brown (ibid.: 23). Such mimesis (conscious or unconscious) of another person was
not taken to be a challenge to Pamela’s authenticity but was interpreted instead as
further proof of its existence.
The subjunctive collapsing of present and future in acting out certainty bears
some comparison with Jane Guyer’s (2007) analysis of the “experiential horizon”
of both monetarist and evangelical notions of time, where the near future is evacu-
ated—perceived not only as a hiatus but also as unintelligible, and thus even mor-
ally dangerous (ibid.: 415). Word of Lifers often also see the present age as one
where human action is carried out in the gap—of uncertain length—that remains
until the very end of time, and yet I have tried to show how danger and risk are also
cultivated in relation to the proximate future. Having said that, the interpretation
of the success of such risk taking need not be subjected to secular criteria of judge-
ment: it is considered that events do not necessarily appear “in the natural” world
as quickly as they are registered as having occurred “in the supernatural” realm.
This assumption of what we might see as subjunctive, or spiritual, success is itself a
disposition that can be cultivated, and it is one that precisely encourages the culti-
vation of a proleptic orientation to life.
Prosperity as abundance and overflow clearly cannot be seen as embodied in
any single Word of Life set of propositions or form of practice; but it can be seen
as an ethical quality of action that includes a sense of “going beyond” at different
scales of operation, deploying different forms of materiality not as mere consump-
tion goods but as means of indexing spiritual status. In other work, I have devel-
oped this point extensively in relation to practices of donating money not only to
the ministry but also to unknown others (e.g., Coleman 2004, 2011). Here, then,
the spiritual and material are coconstitutive in ways not always understood by ex-
ternal commentators. Scale becomes important both as a measure of significance
and because it implies a sense of translation and/or transaction across borders,
moving from spirit to labor, from saved to unsaved, the local context to the distant
mission field, and so on. It is no accident that highly significant institutional forms
for the Word of Life have included not only its congregation, but also conferences
and its international Bible school. These latter institutions are not merely gather-
ings where networks can be consolidated, collections taken up, and so on; they are
also key sites for ethical practice, venues where publics are both made present and
made to embody principles of scaling up and reaching out.
It is hardly surprising that Word of Lifers, especially in the early days of the
group, were accused not only of reckless economic activity but also of attempting

Simon Coleman 292
to proselytize in inappropriate contexts, for instance supposedly trying to force faith

healing on patients while working as medical staff in local hospitals (Coleman 2000:
112). What should also be emerging, however, is the often fragile, even fragmented,
quality of the invocation of Prosperity discourse. To be sure, reaching out can be-
come a habit, even almost a habitus (ibid.: 62), but it also involves an element of
choice in the sense that it often calls upon believers to make a conscious decision
to (re)frame their activity—and desire—in explicit terms to themselves and to oth-
ers. In this way, the “total” confidence contained in Prosperity discourse may be
combined with feelings of ambivalence at a personal level, which people in my ex-
perience have been far more willing to reveal after they have left the group.25 This
is an ambivalence that perhaps inhabits the gap between Zigon’s unreflective mode
of being-in-the-world and ethics as a tactic performed in moments of breakdown.
Assuming proper exercise of spiritual agency involves constant engagement with,
and exercising judgment in relation to, a wider landscape of action where circula-
tion of words, objects, even bodily practices, forms part of the construction and re-
construction of an always potentially “amplified” self. From one perspective, we see
here a form of personhood that seems well adapted to a religious ideology where the
generic, fungible nature of the spirit part of the person allows him or her to engage
with anonymous as well as known others. So what I am sketching out may be seen as
a form of Prosperity-oriented self-disciplining that contains a striking combination
of solipsism—the construction of a spiritual reality that is validated through person-
al ambition—alongside the need to reach out beyond the self in order to constitute
effective faith. In choosing to reach out, the person is converting immanent desire
into publicly recognizable action, often through the medium of language. It thus
seems appropriate to draw brief parallels once more with Carrithers’ (2005: 442)
notion of rhetoric culture, concerned as it is with the moves that people may make
to move from the inchoate and the not-yet-grasped to both interpretation and plan-
ning, followed by action. Prosperity as proleptic action makes the move from idea
to embodied claim on reality, and does so in numerous contexts, ranging from the
church to the workplace to the possibly romantic encounter. In doing so, it throws
current definitions of reality into doubt, encouraging an attitude that “seeds” reality
with potential. Although such potential may not be realized in the immediate mo-
ment, that is not to say that it will not be realized in God’s time, or after the literally
diabolical shackles of doubt and self-limitation have been removed.
Yet the point is also that the system cannot be seen as hermetically sealed in
terms of its actual operation, no matter what its rhetorical orientation implies.
While much Word of Life rhetoric is totalizing in its claim that reaching out reach-
es reliably into all areas of life, the apparently uncompromising language of much
Prosperity discourse has not been accompanied by exclusivity of membership or
practice: the ministry has some closed meetings and a good group of core support-
ers, to be sure, but much of the time it has been open to people of other theological
persuasions, or none (Coleman 2000: 109). Certainly, when the group was emerging
25. Thus Coleman (2000: 182-3) includes an analysis of the sometimes traumatic experi-
ences of those who leave the Word of Life, and often feel caught between admiration of
the ministry’s energy and exhaustion at the effort required in maintaining a Prosperity
outlook on life.

293 Borderlands
in Uppsala in the 1980s, it was very common for regular visitors to maintain their
membership in another congregation (Lutheran, Pentecostal, Methodist, etc.). In
fact, when I first carried put fieldwork in Sweden, I found the level of surveillance
of my personal conduct and social networks to be much more extensive in the local
Pentecostal congregation than at the Word of Life: the moral density of the former
was simply far greater than in the latter. Similarly, Jonathan Walton (2012: 109)
juxtaposes the seeming theological consistency of the American Faith Movement
with the creative interpretations and appropriations of it by the demographically
and denominationally diverse believers whom he encounters at a conference. Here,
perhaps, we see a further dimension of overflow, albeit not one that is articulated
much in public by leaders: the fact that choice frequently involves opting out rather
than in, that this apparently uncompromising variety of religious engagement is
totalizing in self-presentation but deeply situational, temporally bound, in enact-
ment. I think we also see some further dimensions of part-culture, including not
only the sense that Prosperity’s powerful framing as ethics may depend on its opta-
tive quality, but also its capacity to ignore or absorb variations in practice—the
fact that in the actual lives of believers it may frequently coexist with apparently
incommensurable forms of Christian life. From a theological perspective, it pos-
sibly seems impossible to be both a mainstream Lutheran and a Word of Life sup-
porter; but from a perspective where ethical frames may or may not be invoked at
any given point, it is eminently feasible. Thus I think, for instance, of the elderly
woman I first met in the Pentecostal church where she was a member, whom I
also occasionally met at the Word of Life in the 1980s, and whose apartment, I
discovered when invited over for lunch, was festooned with beautiful Orthodox
icons. More broadly, I came to learn of the significance of the division of religious
labor involved in participating in Word of Life services but retaining membership
in other congregations, where the latter offered community but not the sheer en-
ergy and outward orientation that the new group embodied, as both my missionary
informant and Pamela have illustrated in this article.
So what I have been describing is a stance, or rather a behavioral idiom rather
than an all-encompassing habitus, that when appropriate involves an amplification
or extension of the powers of the self—or even the creation of a persona that can
be operationalized at certain points in one’s life. Some American believers seem
very similar to their Swedish counterparts in this respect. Walton (2012: 127) refers
to ways in which “the seeming clarity and coherence of the Word of Faith mes-
sage provides the authoritative baseline from which persons . . . can then appropri-
ate, negotiate, and religiously interpret on their own terms.” It is as if the overflow
can exceed the official, interpretive limits of the religious language itself. Walton
(ibid.: 109) uses the metaphor of jazz to describe “an operative chord structure or
repetitive rhythmic refrain within the Word of Faith Movement to which persons
adhere,” even as “adherents strategically riff and creatively improvise within the sys-
tem.” In my vocabulary, if Prosperity practices can form part-culture at the level of
wider institutional structures, they can also frequently operate as part-time culture
at the level of the individual adherent without necessarily creating dissonance.26 In
26. Compare Lempert (2013: 387) on the important of the temporality, and not just the
location, of ethical consciousness.

Simon Coleman 294
talking of the ethics of Prosperity, I am referring to situations where amplification

and overflow can be enacted through the everyday practice of applying for a mort-
gage as much as through speaking in tongues; and where some participants at least
are engaged in positively if not necessarily coherently piecing together a religious
life. Thus to choose to enter the ethical realm, the temporal frame,27 of prosperity,
of overflow, itself becomes part of an act of piety: it is to choose to cross the bound-
ary into a kind of borderland that one is constantly making and remaking in con-
trast to other possible ways of perceiving and acting in relation to “reality.” In such
circumstances, the repugnance of others is not only to be expected; it can become a
sign that one has entered a powerful realm of Christian action and potential. After
all, the Devil attacks those who threaten His realm.
Conclusions: Back to crap; or, the importance of (not always)

being e(a)rnest
I began this article with a discussion of anthropology’s troubled relationship with
Pentecostalism and conservative Protestantism in general, before moving on to an
extended examination of Prosperity-inspired Word of Life enactments of “reach-
ing out,” “self-amplification,” and “overflow” in numerous areas of life. My remarks
have indicated some of the reasons why such Christians often appear so opposed
to anthropological ethical practices and orientations. Other peoples, other cultures,
other traditions, are acknowledged as believers are encouraged to raise their per-
spectives toward far as well as proximate horizons, but the result is not, from a
cosmopolitan point of view, a widening of viewpoints so much as the invocation
of Otherness as a semiotic and ideological catalyst for producing borderlands. The
views available in the latter look within as much as without, and are consequently
much concerned with particular forms of self-cultivation.
It may gladden the hearts of most anthropologists to know that convention-
al mission seems, at least in relation to its overt purpose, to be a deeply ineffi-
cient activity: almost nobody is ever converted by being approached in the street
in Sweden. But from another perspective (not necessarily one shared by believers
or anthropologists), such a conversionary stance must not be seen as only about
27. Compare my argument here with Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff ’s (2005: 23, 31–2)
discussion of “regimes of living,” or situated forms of moral reasoning, where configu-
rations of normative, technical, and political elements are brought into “alignment”
in problematic or uncertain situations, and oriented toward a specific understanding
of the good. Thus (to paraphrase them closely) they discuss Weber’s description of
Benjamin Franklin’s ethic of self-conduct, organized around accumulating rather than
consuming capital. The ethic describes norms of action that can be deployed in a wide
variety of circumstances, and which are ethical not only in the sense of being morally
correct, but also in suggesting techniques for working on and constituting the self as a
certain kind of subject. Furthermore, in parallel with my argument, an important qual-
ity of regimes of living is a capacity for extension, so that they can be flexibly invoked
by actors in problematic or uncertain situations—such as situations characterized by
a gap between the real and the ideal. However, Prosperity, in my terms, emphasizes
“overflow” rather than “accumulation” (see also Campbell 1987).

295 Borderlands
turning others to the faith: it also provides opportunities to delve into realms of
positive risk and the subjunctive, the borderlands that are chronically produced
and reproduced as part of the labor of exercising and constituting faith. The very—
or mere—act of reaching out therefore provides its own kind of success.
There remain many reasons why some of us might, if we are secular, liberal
anthropologists, still regard Prosperity Christians as rather crappy, and dangerous
crappy at that. Nonetheless, if they want to produce nuanced ethnography or even
effective activism, anthropologists should not let themselves be seduced into de-
ploying the very language of totality and encompassment that such Christians use
in making such statements, to echo the rhetoric of self-amplification with an equal
and opposite reaction against the alleged homogeneity of the “opposition.” Ironical-
ly, such an approach would be to accede to the power of Pentecostal language, while
also deploying an older anthropological language of encompassing whole peoples
within notions of a single “culture.” And in another irony, my argument says some-
thing about borders that, again, neither the opponents nor the proponents of Pros-
perity Christianity in Sweden or elsewhere will like very much. For if we are to see
such Prosperity as made up in part of complex but fragmented overflow, a partly
opportunistic piety and part-culture that is deeply adaptable to circumstance at
different scales, we are also suggesting that to talk in one-dimensional or constant
terms of belief will not suffice. In “Convicted by the Holy Spirit” (1987: 178), Hard-
ing talks of the “membrane” that separates belief from unbelief, and of how she is
nearly seduced by proselytizing language to cross from one to the other. But I am
not convinced that such a membrane exists in any obvious or stable way for the
people I study. I therefore prefer the other metaphor that she uses, that of coming
under conviction as standing in the “gaps” that open up in the ordinary world,
helping to constitute a paradoxical state of overlap between engagement and skep-
ticism, and thus revealing the kind of space where ethnography can locate itself.
The borderlands that believers inhabit are plural, they are patchy, and they come
in and out of focus, sometimes within one’s control, and sometimes not. There is
no single way in to the borderlands of Prosperity, and there is no single way to
remain there. If such neo-Pentecostal culture is partial, it is also in a sense playful:
there is much humor in its practice, but as we have seen there is much exercise of
the proleptic, the subjunctive, the exploration of the “what if.” For many believers,
there is movement in and out of explicitly articulated Prosperity frames of per-
ceiving and acting on the world. Dogmatism thus becomes one discursive practice
alongside others. There is also evidence of experimentation with radically other
uses of other language, other vocabularies, for instance as believers move from the
church to the university seminar. Thus while Word of Lifers have been encouraged
to read Ernest Gellner (1983) on nationalism, I wonder whether they would also
recognize themselves in his Postmodernism, reason and religion (1992), his staging
of a “trialogue” between advocates of the Enlightenment, of fundamentalism, and
of the latest forms of relativism. If so, I suspect they might have difficulty identify-
ing themselves only with the so-called fundamentalists of Gellner’s text: in practice
they share with the relativists a strong sense of the coexistence of numerous world-
views, and the experience of moving between different frameworks of understand-
ing even in the chronic attempt to place a Prosperity frame on their actions. I am
therefore reminded not only of “Ernest” the person but also of discussions in this

Simon Coleman 296
collection of the quality of earnestness per se, and Lambek’s suggestive exploration
in his article here of typological differences between earnest and ironic traditions.
In Lambek’s terms, the former seek to reach agreement, consistency, certainty, and
truth, whereas the latter emphasize contingency, multiplicity, discontinuity, and
movement. The temptation is to see the Word of Life as the epitome of earnestness,
and in doing so we would also contribute to the remaking of a boundary between
anthropology and one of its primary, repugnant Others. I am asking for a little
more irony over our own positioning. As anthropologists, we should not let the ear-
nestness and seriousness of our ethical stances cause us to fail to acknowledge the
particular qualities of irony and play in practices of Prosperity. Borderlands can be
confusing, if productive, places in which to dwell, and in which to make ourselves.
I therefore finish this article by briefly juxtaposing some final forms of irony:
both evangelical and anthropological. If we see irony (in its manifold varieties) as in-
volving implicit comparisons with other performances and possibilities (Carrithers
2014), or as an exploration (and cultivation?) of nonfixity through perceiving the
disparities between different versions of the world (Fernandez and Huber 2001:
3–4), then it emerges as a significant dimension of the ethical practices of both be-
lievers and their scholarly observers. In the very act of framing the world through
the subjunctive and self-consciously expansive discourse of Prosperity, religious
practitioners explore the temporal and perceptual gap between the “is” and the “as
if ” (one that is parallel to, but not quite the same as, that between the “is” and the
“ought”). Part of the anthropological challenge then becomes not only to locate
such evangelical practices within our own comparative frameworks, but also to un-
derstand how what looks like an all-encompassing and monotonal approach to the
world is anything but, and indeed persists through, not despite of, its very flexibility
and even fragmentation. This is not to say that such an assertion resolves my initial
question concerning the anthropologist as activist versus the scholar concerned
to deconstruct totalizing oppositions. It is, however, to suggest that our responses
in both modalities are unlikely to be effective unless they acknowledge the ethical
polytonality of much Pentecostalism, its ability to work at different temporal and
cultural registers as it not only attempts to convert the world to an alternative sys-
tem of values, but also applies the proleptic to already existing believers.
Naturally, we might apply such conceptual charity, if that is what it is, to our-
selves. How do I know that the speaker who asked me why I was studying such crap
was not being playfully ironic? I cannot be absolutely sure. But I can at least hope
that his remark has been productive as a catalyst for exploring the borderlands of,
and between, the worlds of both anthropology and Pentecostalism.
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Zones frontalières: éthique, ethnographie, et ‘répugnant’ christianisme

Résumé : J’explore la relation tourmentée de l’anthropologie avec le christianisme
conservateur, représenté ici par le pentecôtisme partisan d’une théologie de la
prospérité. Je m’intéresse non seulement aux frontières complexes érigées entre
une pratique des sciences sociales et une pratique religieuse, mais également aux
manières dont ces dernières comprennent aussi des orientations éthiques face au

Simon Coleman 300
monde qui se constituent par des changements de perspective renouvelés, et donc

soutenues par des positions éthiques changeantes. Une implication de mon rai-
sonnement est que nous devons considérer avec plus d’attention la temporalité des
positions éthiques concernant l’action. Une autre implication est la nécessité, pour
l’anthropologie, de prendre en compte le caractère fragmenté, et même ironique et
ludique, des pratiques pentecôtistes.
Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study
of Religion, University of Toronto. Previously, he was Professor of Anthropolo-
gy at the University of Sussex. He has carried out fieldwork in Sweden, England,
and Nigeria, and works on both charismatic Christianity and pilgrimage. He has
been editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and is coeditor
of Religion and Society: Advances in Research, as well as series editor of Ashgate
Studies in Pilgrimage. Books include The globalisation of Charismatic Christianity
(Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The anthropology of global Pentecostal-
ism and evangelicalism (edited with Rosalind Hackett, New York University Press,
2015).
Simon Coleman
Department for the Study of Religion
Jackman Humanities Building, Rm. 333
170 St. George St.
University of Toronto
Ontario M5R 2M8 Canada
simon.coleman@utoronto.ca

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2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

Simon Coleman, University of Toronto

I explore the troubled relationship between anthropology and conservative Christianity,

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Simon Coleman.

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

The fertility of borders

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

presumption that ethics is immanent in practice continues to distract from the

Anthropology and global Pentecostalism

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

in particular Pentecostalism, in the wider landscape of the social sciences. In the

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

A related point, often underemphasized, is that the borders through which

Prosperity discourse in Sweden

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

20. Överflöd. This is translatable as both “overflow” and “abundance.”

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

recently discussed aspects of this concept of overflow elsewhere (Coleman forth-

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

terms: both a perception of self-determined agency and a more theatrical dimen-

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

to proselytize in inappropriate contexts, for instance supposedly trying to force faith

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

talking of the ethics of Prosperity, I am referring to situations where amplification

Conclusions: Back to crap; or, the importance of (not always)

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

Zones frontalières: éthique, ethnographie, et ‘répugnant’ christianisme

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

monde qui se constituent par des changements de perspective renouvelés, et donc

2015 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 275–300

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his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Simon Coleman.