Rebirth in Christ seeks to target the untapped market of a restless young generation who has grown up with a steady diet of images. This is a generation whose lives are deeply imbued with hyperanimism, with a highly mediatized immediacy that blurs the boundaries between virtuality and reality, producing vivid enchanted simulacra, intense self-referential experiences such as being in the middle of combat (World of Warcraft), or being part of a violent heist (Grand Theft Auto) or a plot to kill an important historical figure (Assassin’s Creed). To compete with and co-opt the hyperanimism of contemporary consumerism, youth culture, and cyberspace, Rebirth in Christ has produced its own extreme experiences. After all, as George Bataille tells us, religion is about excess and violent intimacy. Simulating the simulation and re-orienting virtual violence within the framework of pneumatic Christianity, Renacer organizes “extreme fight nights,” setting up rings at churches where pastors and wrestlers clash, showing their technique in vale tudo (literally “anything goes”), a Brazilian type of martial art that mixes multiple styles. These extreme fight nights become “deep plays,” to use Clifford Geertz’s term, where the cosmic struggle between Jesus Christ and the devil is displayed in and through the bodies of the fighters. As in the Balinese cockfight, for followers of Renacer em Cristo attending and participating in extreme nights serves as “a kind of sentimental education,” where a generation weaned on caffeine, adrenaline, and virtuality learns what Neo-Pentecostalism’s embodied “ethos and . . . private sensibility look like when spelled out externally in a collective context.” As a pastor told participants, “You need to practice the sport of spirituality more . . . [y]ou need to fight for your life, for your dreams and ideals.”
Reborn in Christ is hardly alone in creatively reworking the ludic aspects of Brazilian culture and religion. Igreja Bola de Neve (Snowball Church), founded by beach-goers and surfers, has specifically targeted Millennials and the Net Generation through a hip mixing of Christian reggae, rock, and Brazilian funk with avid blogging, surfing, and other extreme sports. Bola de Neve now has churches in places as diverse as India, Canada, Russia, the U.S. (Los Angeles) and Australia, where it has a célula (cell) in Harbord, close to the Sydney’s northern beaches. Other churches include video games, tattoo parlors, and child miracle healers as part of their outreach strategies.
All these examples point to a pervasive hyperanimism, a thorough spiritualization of the material and materialization of the spiritual that characterizes late modernity’s dialectics of over-production and scarcity, virtuality and reality, mediatization and immediacy, and of visibility and invisibility. Pneumatic religions are truly at home amid these dialectical spirals, produced and disseminated by new national and transnational actors and media in an emerging post-colonial economy of the sacred. Scholars need to develop a new transnational, comparative-yet-non-totalizing, post-Hegelian phenomenology of the spirit capable of taking into account the creative and diverse embodied and emplaced interactions among pneumatic religions, capitalism, media, sports, entertainment, and popular culture, interactions which are taking place at multiple nodes in a polycentric global cartography of religious production, circulation, and consumption.
Page 3 of 3 | Previous page