Spirit on the Move: Black Women and Pentecostalism in Africa and the Diaspora (Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478000325 ISBN 13: 9781478000327

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2019

Synopsis

Pentecostalism is currently the fastest-growing Christian movement, with hundreds of millions of followers. This growth overwhelmingly takes place outside of the West, and women make up 75 percent of the membership. The contributors to Spirit on the Move examine Pentecostalism's appeal to black women worldwide and the ways it provides them with a source of community and access to power. Exploring a range of topics, from Neo-Pentecostal churches in Ghana that help women challenge gender norms to evangelical gospel musicians in Brazil, the contributors show how Pentecostalism helps black women draw attention to and seek remediation from the violence and injustices brought on by civil war, capitalist exploitation, racism, and the failures of the state. In fleshing out the experiences, theologies, and innovations of black women Pentecostals, the contributors show how Pentecostal belief and its various practices reflect the movement's complexity, reach, and adaptability to specific cultural and political formations.

Contributors. Paula Aymer, John Burdick, Judith Casselberry, Deidre Helen Crumbley, Elizabeth McAlister, Laura Premack, Elizabeth A. Pritchard, Jane Soothill, Linda van de Kamp

About this title

About the Author

Judith Casselberry is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College and author of The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism, also published by Duke University Press.

Elizabeth A. Pritchard is Associate Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College and author of Religion in Public: Locke's Political Theology.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Spirit — on the — Move

Black Women and Pentecostalism in Africa and the Diaspora

By Judith Casselberry, Elizabeth A. Pritchard

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2019 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4780-0032-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction — Elizabeth A. Pritchard, 
PART I: SAVING RACE, 
1 — VOICES OF GOD: Blackness and Gender in a Brazilian Black Gospel Music Scene — John Burdick, 
2 — RACE, GENDER, AND CHRISTIAN DIASPORA: New Pentecostal Intersectionalities and Haiti — Elizabeth McAlister, 
PART II: SCRUTINIZING AND SANCTIFYING THE BODY, 
3 — WOMEN AND THE AFRO-BRAZILIAN PENTECOSTAL WAR IN MOZAMBIQUE — Linda van de Kamp, 
4 — "DRESSED AS BECOMETH HOLINESS": Gender, Race, and the Body in a Storefront Sanctified Church — Deidre Helen Crumbley, 
PART III: SONIC POWER, 
5 — WEST AFRICAN AND CARIBBEAN WOMEN EVANGELISTS: The Wailing Women Worldwide Intercessors — Paula Aymer, 
6 — "THE KINGDOM IN THE MIDST": Sounding Bodies, Aesthetic Labor, and the End Times — Judith Casselberry, 
PART IV: MODELING THE STATE, 
7 — A CRITICAL APPROACH TO CONCEPTS OF "POWER" AND "AGENCY" IN GHANA'S CHARISMATIC (OR NEO-PENTECOSTAL) CHURCHES — Jane Soothill, 
8 — BLESS US WITH CHILDREN: Pregnancy, Prosperity, and Pragmatism in Nigeria's Christ Apostolic Church— Laura Premack, 
References, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

VOICES OF GOD

Blackness and Gender in a Brazilian Black Gospel Music Scene

JOHN BURDICK

VOICES OF GOD

Blackness and Gender in a Brazilian Black Gospel Music Scene

JOHN BURDICK

The struggle to alter dominant views about race in Brazil is a long, tortuous, uphill battle. Despite more than thirty years of sustained Black movement activism (Bailey 2009; Rodrigues and Prado 2013), views about race in Brazil today continue to be dominated by a cluster of deeply troubling ideas, such as that racial discrimination is not really a serious problem in Brazil; that slavery in Brazil was less oppressive than it was in the United States; and that political activism about race is both unnecessary and at odds with Brazil's mixed-race national identity (Alves 2012; Cicalo 2012; Reiter 2008; Reiter and Mitchell 2009; Soares 2012). Brazilian Pentecostals — still, the fastest-growing religion in Brazil — tend to embrace these ideas (Burdick 1998, 2013). They regard the secular realm as irredeemably corrupt, reject Afro-Brazilian spirituality as the devil's playground, believe converted Christians already enjoy full equality before God, and see the individual soul as fundamentally more important than any this-worldly collective identity (Corten and Marshall-Fratani 2001; Freston 1998; Novaes 1985; Pedde 2002; Pierucci 2006; Prandi 2004; Selka 2005).

Given the pervasiveness of such views among Brazil's Pentecostals, it is worthy of note that in the past two decades a growing number of Brazilian Pentecostal musicians have begun to play, deliberately and self-consciously, what they call música negra (Black music), of which the most prominent subgenres are música Black gospel, rap gospel, and samba gospel (Pinheiro 1998, 2003, 2004, 2009). São Paulo, Brazil's largest city, is the epicenter of this trend and now includes more than twenty major Black gospel choirs, two hundred amateur and professional Christian rap groups, and dozens of samba gospel groups. Thus, on almost any evening, in any neighborhood of São Paulo, one can hear a Black gospel choir, gospel rapper, or gospel sambista crooning the message of Christian salvation. During nine months of fieldwork between 2003 and 2005, I sought to understand how, and how much, these musicians might be pushing back against their religion's rejection of Black identity politics by configuring that identity in new ways. The relationship between Christian music and Black identity, though thoroughly explored in North American scholarship (see, e.g., Monson 2007; Radano and Bohlman 2000; Ramsey 2004; Reagon 2001), has not been much investigated in Brazil. In striving to grasp this relationship, I have paid special attention to the role of gender (cf. Selka 2007, 2009, 2010). This chapter details my finding that, while male and female Black Christian singers both articulate a positive Black identity, they do so in subtly different ways.

A note about methodology: on the Black gospel scene, I conducted in-depth interviews with twenty female and twenty male singers age eighteen to forty-five. I interviewed only people who identified themselves as negro. Use of this term self-referentially in Brazil tends to affirm a sense of belonging to a group that historically has been stigmatized; in contrast, self-referential use of the terms moreno (brown) and mestiço (mixed) is less group-affirming, drawing attention only to the individual's skin color or mixed ancestry (see Silva and Reis 2011). In São Paulo, however, everyday use of the term "negro" has become so common that it is no longer markedly group-affirming. Its very commonness pushed me to dig deeper, to see the different underlying meanings it possessed. Working with this group of forty interviewees, I asked: To what extent and in what ways did female Afro-Brazilian singers of Black gospel understand what they were doing in ethnoracial terms? How did these understandings differ from those of male Afro- Brazilian singers? In what ways did these understandings lead female and male Black gospel singers to push back against their churches' and Brazil's hegemonic stances toward racial politics?

My most striking finding was that almost all of the Black gospel singers I interviewed, male and female, thought of their music in intricately racial terms. In contrast to gospel rappers and gospel sambistas, Black gospel singers spoke spontaneously and extensively about the rootedness of their genre in the North American Black church (a igreja negra), its connection to the Black civil rights struggle in the United States, and the idea that their African descent conferred on them a predisposition to excel in this art form. But they went further and supported controversial (for Brazil) political projects, such as creating forums to discuss racism in church and teaching about the role of Africa in the Bible. I discuss these projects in more detail later; the point I wish to underline here is that, along with their strong consensus that ser negro (being Black) was directly linked to their art, male and female Black gospel singers conceptualized the linkage in different ways, which revealed gendered ideas about God, history, theology, and suffering. In this chapter, I draw attention to three of these differences. First, I suggest that the male and female Black gospel singers I got to know experienced and thought in different ways about the role of their voices in spiritual battles with the devil; second, they thought in different ways about the role of their voices, as Black voices, in God's plan for humanity; and third, they had in mind distinctive Black political projects.

WOMEN, MEN, AND THE SPIRITUAL BATTLE

I begin with Priscilla, a self-identified negra in her late twenties who was a soloist in her neighborhood's Pentecostal Church of God in Christ (COGIC). For her, singing was a constant inner spiritual battle. "The devil," she would say, "knows the power of gospel music to save souls. We singers are his worst enemies. His goal is to break our will." Indeed, when I listened to Priscilla sing, I could hear the sound of a soul engaged in life-or-death hand-to-hand combat. One afternoon, during one of my visits to her home, she glanced at the CD player on her dining room table, which was playing "Somethin' 'bout the Name of Jesus," by Kirk Franklin. "That song," she said, "is armor for me when I go into battle. Every morning I make coffee to that music. I don't know what the words mean, but I could listen to this song all day long, because I need to do battle all day long. I hear in the singer's voice something that makes me ready to do battle."

"Can you say what that is?" I asked.

"Just listen."

So I listened. There it was, Dalon Collins's voice, belting the line "just like fire shut-up in my bones / The holy ghost is moving and just won't leave me alone." Listening, I thought I understood what Priscilla meant. Along with the ache and yearning in Collins's voice, I heard something else: ferocity, as if the singer were engaged in gladiatorial combat. "I think I hear it," I said. Priscilla pressed her lips together, closed her eyes, and nodded.

"I hear a force of power," she said, "a supernatural force, because that singer is engaged in a spiritual war. That is what I go through when I sing. It is a very deep war, John. When I sing, I am fighting. When I sing, I confront the devil. When I sing I'm in a battle. When I sing, I feel the devil is near. I can feel him."

A lengthy silence settled on us.

"How do you feel him?" I asked. "How do you know he is close?"

"I feel his hot breath on my cheeks," she replied. "And his voice. When I am about to sing, I hear a little voice trying to plant doubts in my mind about my right to sing before the multitudes. He speaks to me about my past, about the bad things I've done, and says, 'Priscilla, how come you think you can ascend the pulpit and minister to anybody, with all you have done in the past?' He reminds me of my past sins. He makes me think, Who am I? I can't be doing this. So the first minute, he makes me feel uncertain, because he is saying to me, 'Ha! They're making fun of you, Priscilla. They're looking at you, and they think you're drunk. They think you're crazy! Ha! Why do you think you can sing to them?' That's what I hear in the first minute. It is the devil, trying to plant an inferiority complex in my brain."

Priscilla proceeded to tell me some of the things she felt inferior about: she had been tempted in the past; she had slept with men she should not have; she had felt lust, greed, and jealousy; and she had not always walked in the ways of the Lord. She had felt moments of pride in her own voice: "There are times, yes, that as I was singing, I began to feel that pride in being listened to, replacing my pleasure in God with pleasure in myself."

"So," I asked, "then what happens?"

"Well, I can hear the devil's words. I can feel his hot breath. When I feel him near, I draw down God's power so I can battle him directly. I praise God louder and stronger, so I am doing battle with the devil. That's when I need the Holy Spirit. Because all alone, I cannot face the devil. The only way I can survive is by drawing down the power of the Holy Spirit."

When I asked her what she did to draw down the Holy Spirit, she replied in brutally physical language: "To draw it down, to let it fill me, I must rip myself apart, to break my heart open." She placed two fingers on the V of her blouse, right below the collarbone. "I must rip myself in two," she said again, "right here, at the bone, digging down to a place deep inside my heart. When I do that, then the spirit enters. And when faced with the Spirit, the devil cannot remain. And so I feel a welling up of joy, as the devil slinks away, and I sing with even greater joy, because the Holy Spirit has won." She clenched her fists and started to spar against an invisible opponent. In fact, all this talk of bones, ripping, and digging made Priscilla sound like a prizefighter, down but not out, climbing back up, adrenaline rushing, preparing to deliver a knockout blow.

Suddenly she lowered her voice to a near-whisper. "I know," she said, "that demons can surround you, but when the power of the Lord arrives, I close my eyes and see angels, singing all around me. We put up such a ruckus the demons cannot remain. They have no choice. They must leave. They can't stand to be in the presence of such intimacy with God."

The experience of singing as spiritual battle is far from unique to Priscilla. Many other female Black gospel singers I got to know spoke at length about how, when they sang, the devil fought back by getting them to feel fearful, embarrassed, and ashamed, all emotions that impeded full-throated song. Deborah, a Black gospel singer in her forties, explained:

What happens is that when the Holy Spirit arrives, I lose all my fear. I am up there singing, at first shy, at first timid. I hear my own voice and I wonder whether I have a right to be there. That is the devil at work. He is trying to tear me down; he does not want me to sing. He is afraid of that, so he whispers in my ear, "Deborah, ha! Deborah, you piece of filth, you nothing, you have no right, no right to stand before the multitudes. This is all a lie. You are sinning even now. You are doing my will; you are mine, all mine." But then I seek fervently the Lord. I break into a cold sweat. I seek the Lord; I invite the Lord to come and be with me. And then I lose all timidity. I open my mouth, and the power of the Lord, it is Him, not me, that sings. And from that comes this power, this strength, I feel no fear. I shed those doubts, that feeling of inferiority.

I want to suggest that this interiorization of the spiritual battle is gendered, an effect of discourses that teach Brazilian women in general, and female Pentecostals in particular, to regard themselves as unworthy of standing before the multitudes. In the Pentecostal churches I spent time in, women performed roles as evangelists, prayer leaders, and Bible study teachers, but only men could become pastors and preachers. This was justified by the epistle to the Ephesians in which Paul states that God ordained men to lead women, and, in fact, many of the women I got to know held the view that God wanted men to be the leaders — both in church and at home. This reading of the Bible shapes how women think of themselves when they ascend the pulpit to testify or sing, making them feel they do not belong there. "When I stand before the church," says Marta, a singer in her twenties, "I am full of doubt. For a full minute, I hear the voice of the devil."

Yet these same women believe in the power of the Word and know that if they speak or sing with sincerity, God will move within them. Thus, for women in Pentecostal churches, the experience of standing before the congregation can be a deeply tense one, with tension arising between their religiously ingrained self-suspicion and their conviction that God is moving within them. They experience within their bodies a collision between these two forces. "It is a deep battle within me," Marta says. "At the start I don't believe I should stand there, a sinful, imperfect vessel. So I close my eyes when I'm up there. I'm so shy that I just can't stand to look at everybody looking at me. The devil wrings my heart. It is like a pain in my heart. But then the Spirit comes and gives me the victory."

The gendered nature of this experience of inner spiritual combat became clear to me when I asked men to describe their experiences of singing. Of my sample of twenty male singers, only two spoke of singing as causing collisions within their souls. More commonly they described spiritual battles as happening to others or as external assaults on the church, not as struggle within their own hearts and minds. This discursive pattern, it turns out, appears among male Pentecostals in other parts of the world. Shaunna Scott's analysis of a Pentecostal revival in Appalachia notes that male preachers spoke of the devil as a force external to themselves. Male testimonies revolved "around identifying signs of the supernatural struggle and aligning [one]self with God's side." Men's discourse was an externalizing one, in which the devil troubled other people, not them. "The devil is getting people's spirit today," Scott reported one preacher as saying. "I feel like Satan is here. ... Do you know why [Satan is winning]? Because [people here] are wanting it. They're wanting it" (Scott 1994: 232). Another analysis of Pentecostals in New Zealand similarly points to men describing spiritual warfare as about battling the devil "out there" rather than within. "It is common," Andrew Monteith (2010: 55) writes, "in a deliverance session for demons to be directly rebuked or commanded away." In contrast, self-accounts of female Christian singers suggest an intimate, interior battle against the devil: they sing tentatively at first, until they "find" their voices. As Toni Morrison describes redemptive singing in Beloved, women's arrival at full- throated song is always an accomplishment, the outcome of a search, rarely all there right away. "The voices of women," she writes, "searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees" (Morrison 1987: 308).

Tentativeness and searching were decidedly not the pattern among my male informants. Most of the male Black gospel singers I interviewed spoke of a spiritual battle, but they did not speak of it as an interior one; theirs was, rather, an external battle between them as vessels of the Holy Spirit on the one side and the devil on the other. The image they painted was of themselves as fearless guardians of the church, standing up against an external force that penetrated the congregation from without and circulated in search of the church's weaker members. "When I stand before the church," explained Sérgio, "I feel the Holy Spirit speaking very clearly to me: 'Sérgio, now is the time to fight against the enemy. Look out across this church, the enemy is haunting this place, he has wandered in from the street, he is doing the rounds, striving to tempt the souls of these people." In this scenario, the devil is a stranger, a con man who has wandered in off the street. This is not an intimate whispering of threats into the anointed singer's ear. Nothing about the picture raises questions about the male singer's right to stand before the multitudes; nothing about it evokes an inner wrestling match with self-doubt. Here we are in the presence of a full-scale Brazilian ethos of masculine self-assurance. Male singers told me they arrived onstage strong in the spirit and launched right away into their singing. Mariano looked at me quizzically when I asked whether the devil ever bothered him when he began to sing. "No, not me," he said. "I am anointed by God, and the devil cannot touch me. But he is here. He comes to the church to trouble souls among the multitude. When I sing, that chases the devil away."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Spirit — on the — Move by Judith Casselberry, Elizabeth A. Pritchard. Copyright © 2019 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478000325
• ISBN 13: 9781478000327
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248
• Editor: Casselberry Judith, Pritchard Elizabeth A.