Since Max Weber's writings on "Stände, Klassen und Religion" (Status, Class and Religion), it has been clear that people's religious dispositions are closely interconnected with their social positions. This is true not only within national societies but also in various strategies dealing with transnationalization and globalization. Today, this interconnectedness is demonstrated very clearly in the Pentecostal movement in the Third World, which is currently the world’s most dynamic religious movement. Various projects dealing with Pentecostalism shed light particularly on the connections between social positions and religious dispositions in order to better understand the religious and social importance of the identity politics and transnationalization strategies of religious actors transforming Third World societies. Systematic theology, and particularly the areas of fundamental theology and hermeneutics, is stimulated by the confrontation with radically different approaches to practicing theology, as well as by theology's content-related orientation. In dogmatic theology these stimuli are found in Pentecostal Pneumatology; in ethics in the reflexion on global and local inequality as a question of justice, for example, in the consideration of a methodological-communitarian approach to ethics as well as in the capability approach.
- Religious Identity Politics of the Pentecostal Movement
During the Twentieth Century, „Enthusiastic Christianity“ (Hollenweger), even more than Islam, has become the most dynamic religious movement worldwide. Separating itself from the Enlightenment tradition, it has shifted the center of the Christian world toward the so-called Third World (Jenkins) and Latin America. The social and political relevance of the pentecostal movement, its orientation toward the Holy Spirit, its exorcism and blessing rituals, and its apocalyptic focus are greatly enhanced by social inequality, weak government, social violence, etc., which also affect the transnational integration of the movement in loose, identity-based networks.This project, which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG), constitutes the first of two installments. The subject of this first project is comparative empirical research in the synchronous temporal dimension of the pentecostal movement in two highly dynamic, yet very different countries/societies: Guatemala and Nicaragua. The subsequent second research project will achieve a diachronic comparison with empirical data collected by the head of this research group, Heinrich Wilhelm Schäfer, in the years 1985 and 1986. Both, past and present research is grounded in a method for the analysis of religion that has been conceived by Heinrich Wilhelm Schäfer on the basis of the foundations laid by Pierre Bourdieu. This method describes and explains the relation between the objective positions of religious actors in the (national and transnational) social space and their subjective religious identities, or „contextual theologies.“ On this basis, it is possible to elucidate the motivations, political practice, transnational development of capacities, etc, in conjunction with the religious beliefs of specific segments of the pentecostal movement. This project will produce empirical insights into the religious practice of the contemporary pentecostal movement, a methodologically controlled diachronic comparison that spans the quarter of a century, and a significant step toward a multiply tested theory of religion and a complementary research methodology.
Researcher: Tobias Reu, Adrián Tovar
- Argentina: Religious Taste, Religious Conversion and Social Structure
Contrary to the assumptions of theories of religious individualization, decisions about religious conversion are not independent of socio-structural influences on the actor’s religious tastes. Aspects of social positioning (class habitus), as well as the dynamics of the religious field itself (heterodoxy vs. orthodoxy, erosion of religious monopolies), influence individuals’ decisions to change their religious affiliation and thus emerge as orientations and limitations for religious strategies of status. This doctoral project examines these issues using the example of Catholic and Pentecostal Christians in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires.
Researcher: Jens Köhrsen
- Pentecostalism Worldwide and Religion in Latin America: Bertelsmann Religion Monitor
Within the framework of the quantitative surveys on religiosity in twenty-one countries, we were responsible for the areas of Pentecostalism and Latin America. Although the Monitor did not take any socio-structural variables into account, it is nevertheless possible, with the data on religious practices, to carry out interesting analyses of religious habitus and the transformation of the religious field.
Researcher: Heinrich Schäfer
- Faith, Identity and Community in the Mega-city: religious diversity under conditions of relative social homogeneity in the ward 'el Ajusco', Mexico-city.
The project analyses different religious groups - Pentecostal, Catholic and others - in a highly homogeneous urban space. It combines Habitus-analysis with ethnographic observation of the studied religious groups and theoretical elements from urban sociology and analysis of urban space. It concentrates on three main research-axes: religious diversity under conditions of relative social homogeneity, transversality of religious styles (forms of believing across forms of belonging) and the relation between religious identity and urban spaciality.
Researcher: Adrián Tovar Simoncic
Completed:
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