In the course of the Twentieth Century, „Enthusiastic Christianity,“ as Hollenweger has called it, emerged as the most influential religious movement on a global scale. Even more than Islamism, Enthusiastic Christianity came to define religious styles and exert political influence in Third World countries and the USA. Displacing some of the certainties of the Enlightenment tradition, Christianity gravitated toward the Global South, and first of all to Latin America, as the center of a „New Christendom“ (Jenkins). In the context of significant social inequality, weak government, violence, and insecurity, the emphasis that the Pentecostal movement places on the Holy Spirit, its ample use of exorcism and blessing rituals, and its apocalyptic beliefs provided a fertile base for an increase in the social and political relevance of Pentecostal social actors. The transnational networks of the Pentecostal movement worked to the same effect.

The project on "Religious faith and social presence", funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschaft), aims to shed light on the transformations of the religious and political fields in which the Pentecostal movement partakes. Research will be conducted in Guatemala and Nicaragua, two Central American countries with an interrelated, yet markedly distinct recent history, and, as regards Guatemala, levels of endemic violence that rank among the highest in the world. Putting Guatemala and Nicaragua into a comparative perspective, the project aims to grasp the similarities and differences of two very dynamic religious fields. Pentecostalism is, in both cases, one of the main factors of contemporary social transformations and political processes, which nevertheless take both countries along quite distinct paths. The project further focuses on the effects of emergent religious identities and strategies on the transnational level, especially where these are related to the increasing integration of the Central American region, and to hemispheric relations across the American subcontinents.

The methodological „toolbox“ for the sociological analysis of religion that this research project deploys emerges from the work of Heinrich Schäfer and is based in Bourdieu's praxeological approach. The device of „habitus analysis,“ which includes the dynamics of fields and the social space into the analytical focus, was developed during extensive fieldwork in both Latin American countries from the 1980s onward. It has also been tested in various projects of our actual research team at CIRRuS. The method permits to describe and explain the connections between the objective position of religious actors in a (national or transnational) social space and their subjective religious identities, or „contextual theology.“ It is, thus, possible to describe the relations between, on the one hand, social competences, political practices, and transnational networks, and, on the other hand, the specific religious beliefs and practices of differentiated Pentecostal groups.

The project yields, firstly, profound and extensive empirical insights into a steadily changing religious movement that speaks eloquently to the relation between religion and late modernity. Secondly, the project provides a solid empirical basis for further theoretical development of a praxeological approach to the sociology of religion. In conjunction with Heinrich Schäfer's past research it will, thirdly, provide an abundance of methodologically controlled data produced across a long time span, and thus a splendid and rare opportunity for comparative sociological research in the diachronic dimension.

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• last Update: 02.10.2012 by Linda Groß   |   
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• Systematic Theology, Sociology of religion
  • Religion, Conflict, Peace
    • The Ethos of Religious Peacemakers
    • The World Council of Churches in its Conflict Zones
    • Conflict Mediation and Mediation in Schools
  • Pentecostalism and Social Inequality
    • Guatemala: Religious faith and social presence
    • Pentecostalism Worldwide and Religion in Latin America
    • E pluribus unum? - Identity Politics in the Americas
    • Argentina: Religious Taste, Religious Con version and Social Structure
    • Pentecostalism in Korea
    • Faith Identity and Community - Mexico- city
  • Dogmatic Theology and Ethics
  • Fundamentalism
  • Theory of Religion
  • Conflict Mediation
  • HabitusAnalysis
• Psychology of Religion and Religious Education
  • Dekonversion and Fundamentalist Biographies
    • Introduction
    • Qualitative Results
    • Quantitative Results
    • Methods
    • References
    • Research Team
    • Enquete Study of Christian- Fundamentalist Biographies
  • Religious Stiles and Schemata / Faith Development
  • Inter-Religious Learning and Development of Xenosophia
  • Religious Socialisation of Turkish-Islamic Immigrants
  • Children's Religious Drawings
    • Children's Drawings I
    • Children's Drawings II
    • Children's Drawings III
  • Youth and Religion
  • Mediation / Conflict Management
    • Gewaltpräventions- Workshop 2009
  • Spirituality / New Forms of Religion
    • Semantics of "spirituality" in light of Osgood's Semantic Differential
    • Semantics of "spirituality" and "religion" in light of corpus linguistic analysis
    • Psychological correlates
    • Biographical context
    • Methods and Instruments
    • Sample and Focusgroups
    • Research teams in Bielefeld and Chattanooga

• Research Concept
• List of Research Fields
• Team Members
• Cooperation Partners