The third horseman of neoliberalism: The Neo-Pentecostals (part 4)

The Neo-Pentecostals’ mega-churches are really mega-businesses. Their pastors act like executives and employ showman skills to entertain their followers. They preach entrepreneurship, management spirit and positive thinking. They were born in the USA but are spreading fast throughout Central America.

José Luis Rocha

Half a century ago, Antonio Gramsci wrote that “religion must be approached not in the confessional sense but in the secular sense of a unity of faith between a conception of the world and a corresponding norm of conduct. But why call this unity of faith ‘religion’ and not ‘ideology,’ or even frankly ‘politics?” More recently, Mario Vargas Llosa stated that we are living immersed in “the entertainment civilization,” where everything from politics to sexuality, and also religion, is turned into entertainment.

Over a century ago, evangelicals began making adjustments to ensure a permanently increasing congregation. But only recently, in 2005, did David Wells come up with the concepts for understanding the urgency of the adjustment by distinguishing between traditional churches (“producers”) and churches of the seeker-sensitive kind (“consumers”). Wells sustained that power had passed from the producers to the consumers. Churches that adapted their worship, dress and architecture to pander to consumer preferences had experienced rapid growth.

Churches with quality entertainment

Before Wells, around the seventies, pastor and expert on Christian leadership Bill Hybels, who founded the Willow Creek Community Church, intuited this significant distinction very well. His was a prototype mega-church—the third largest in the United States—with 23,400 churchgoers for Sunday service. Hybels was one of the first to fit out his church in accord with demand, avoiding cognitive dissonance between the religious and the everyday. After going house to house to investigate why his neighbors had distanced themselves from the church, Hybels designed a new decor to adapt the worship to look like just any other leisure entertainment activity. He changed his preaching techniques, relaxed the dress code and started using videos and contemporary music. Technology has played a star role in the giant mega-churches of the United States—and also of Central America—ever since, altering communication with the faithful and filling the collection boxes more. According to US researchers Christine Miller and Nathan Carlin, the theatrical lighting, music and young people jumping up and down put the religious experience as close as possible to the experience of MTV addicts and lovers of Disney World.

The Neo-Pentecostal churches have become quality entertainment. Lights with changing colors, thunderous noise and giant screens displaying men in suits and ties rolling around the floor—as in Cash Luna’s House of God in Guatemala—all stimulate the senses. They provide the opportunity to witness an outlandish epiphany of much greater dimensions—although similar exoticism—to those described in Erskine Caldwell’s In the Shadow of the Steeple: “But I.S. rarely had anything to say after taking me to listen to a prolonged and unintelligible babble in the Unknown Tongue, or to see people rolling in the throes of ecstasy on a church floor, or to watch a Sanctified preacher hit his head with an axe handle until he had achieved a state of semi-conscious delirium.”

TV is the new religious arena

The entertainment possibilities are much greater today than in Caldwell’s times. In the last two decades television has emerged as an innovative arena for religious entrepreneurialism, and with the slow erosion of Catholicism as the dominant religion, TV is helping redefine religion’s role and importance in the public arena. It has provided invaluable help in the Lakewood Church of Reverend Joel Osteen, son of Reverend John Osteen.

Osteen Jr. dropped out of university while still an undergraduate to get involved in his father’s television ministry. His sermons are broadcast simultaneously in 140 countries. Like many Christian shows, Lakewood Church’s had been relegated to the early Sunday morning slot and its corresponding paltry audience. But Osteen negotiated with the 25 US television networks with the biggest audience and managed to get his program broadcast between 8 and 10 am, so it’s now possible for 92% of US households to access it. To achieve this media projection, his church had to double its investment in television space from US$6 million to US$12 million a year.

Lakewood Church has three enormous screens that show what’s happening on stage. The technology is more spectacular now that its headquarters is the old Houston Rockets stadium. “We really want to feel like we’re in a concert,” said Lakewood Church’s executive director. And the strategy is working. Participation jumped from 6,000 in 1999 to 25,000 in 2003 and 43,500 in 2011, with an additional tele-congregation of 7 million in the United States alone.

The International Christian Center (CCI) in Honduras—founded by René Peñalba after the board of directors of the Living Love (Amor Viviente) Church audited him for speculating with lands belonging to that congregation—is a media conglomerate including CCI Radio, CCI Channel, the daily newspaper La Razón, the Sitios CCI website and CCI Publications. Also in Honduras, La Cosecha International Ministry has the Estéreo Fiel (Faithful Stereo) radio station and Channel 39. In El Salvador, the International Revival Tabernacle (InternacionalTabernáculo de Avivamiento) owns a TV channel and a radio station, while its pastor, Carlos Rivas, has his own column in a local tabloid. Meanwhile, the Christian Fraternity of Guatemala is a partner in Channel 21.

Resorting to TV is symptomatic of an adaptation to what Vargas Llosa described as the entertainment civilization: “That of a world in which entertainment occupies the first place on the chart of current values, where having a good time, escaping boredom, is a universal passion.…” As a result, according to him, popularity and success are conquered not so much through intelligence and probity as through demagogy and histrionic talent. He argues that there’s nothing surprising about religion approximating circus and sometimes being confused with it in this pantomime civilization.

De-sacralized religious arenas

Forty years after Hybel’s discovery and subsequent success, the decor and programmatic proposals—if they merit such a name—in Nicaragua’s Hosanna, Honduras’ Abundant Life, El Salvador’s COMPAZ Ministry and Guatemala’s El Shaddai have to be able to satisfy ex-Sandinista army officers and former Ultreya regulars, in addition to former fighters in Guatemala’s Guerilla Army of the Poor and admirers of Marcel Lefebvre. In other words, they have to cater to people from the most diverse backgrounds. Symbolic and discursive shallowness is one of the keys to Neo-Pentecostal success. The more devoid of socio-political content the sermons, more common and “average” the proposed goals and more hieratic the churches look, the more members they will catch in their nets. If Nietzsche, Marx, Weber and Freud were prophets who revealed the world’s disenchantment, the entrepreneurial Neo-Pentecostal pastors have been the champions and executors of the de-sacralizing of religious spaces.

From the point of view of the protagonists, that de-sacralization could reflect the aspiration to live a faith expressed with little or no resorting to religious institutionalization, an idea that can be seen in the declarations of Reverend Moisés Fuentes from Brooklyn, New York’s Candelero de oro Pentecostal Church in 2007: “I’m not religious. I don’t like religion; religion obstructs, hinders. And the more legalist, traditional and inflexible a religion is, the more deadly, the more destructive it is…. I’m not talking to you about the testimony of a religion, I’m talking to you about the testimony of God’s pure Gospel. I am talking to you about a relationship with God. I’m not just talking to you about a system of liturgies and of religious customs and of traditions. I’m talking to you about a way of life, about a culture. The Gospel is a culture, the culture of the Kingdom of God.”

However, in the practice of the Neo-Pentecostal churches, that liberation from religious paraphernalia didn’t imply any liberation from earthly bonds or the creation of a culture specifically corresponding to the Gospel. It didn’t presume the absence of religious apparatus extolled by Fuentes. It wasn’t a kind of pre-Roman Christianity or atheist secularization. Against many mechanistic forecasts, the hurricane of secularization in Central America—and other places—didn’t lead to a decline in religious practices, but rather a switching of roles and cosmetics. On the one hand, the managers acquired papal infallibility and financial values became the Holy Grail before which society sacrificed itself. And on the other, the pastors speak financial jargon and profane decorations invade the religious ground, sweeping away stained glass and altarpieces and installing macro-screens and ATMs. It’s is the same dynamic seen from two different angles.

Lakewood Church:
Mega-shows for religious consumers

In the United States de-sacralization, marinated with managerialism and entrepreneurialism, has had an abundance of proselytes. This dynamic of adapting to grow and of ecclesiastical mega-businesses is the subject of Elizabeth Cook’s thesis Would You Like Your Jesus Upsized? McDonaldization and the Mega Church. In 1970 there were only 10 mega-churches in the United States. Two decades later, 250 could be labeled as such. Thirteen years after that there were 740; and by 2011 the number had nearly doubled to 1,416, according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. The hundred biggest have a combined congregation of over a million people and half of them are considered non-denominational. Texas is the state with the greatest concentration of them, including 17 of the biggest and 14 of the fastest-growing. The state capital, Houston, is home to two of the most gigantic: Lakewood Church and the Second Baptist Church, respectively the biggest and sixth biggest in the whole country.

Lakewood Church has the biggest congregation in the United States, with over 43,500 attending its Sunday services. Embracing Hybels’ findings, it produced its own web page taking the religious consumer very much into account and trying to emphasize the following elements: inclusivity, family, growth, trust, peace, spiritual experience… These concepts have either carefully relegated to the back burner or totally eradicated some of those that certain consumers might find strange, alien or distant: God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, creeds, traditional prayers… anything that might taint the Neo-Pentecostal community’s omnivorous spirit. This accounts for the vagueness of their mission and vision.

Marcos Witt: They will be like me...

The “consumer” neo-Pentecostal churches have been leaders at recognizing Latinos as a growing population important to the current and future growth of their churches. In 2010, Hybels invited President Obama to talk about immigration reform. Lakewood Church went even further. Since 2002, Marcos Witt—legally Jonathan Mark Witt Holder, born in San Antonio, Texas—has been the pastor of the 6,000 Latinos who attend that church’s services. As their preacher, Witt prescribes positive thinking for them to respond to the disdain and persecution to which undocumented immigrants are subjected, the low salaries they beg for and the low-class neighborhoods to which they are confined: “Have you ever been looked down on? Have you ever been disdained? Have they said pee-yoo to you? Have they cast you aside? Ah! Look, don’t be upset because they’ve disdained you some time, because the Bible says that if you’ve been looked down on, they’ve done you a great favor: they’ve put you on the list of people who are now candidates to be used by God. Every time someone looks down on you, thank them. Why? Because now you can be used by God. Say to them: ‘God is going to use me powerfully. I’m a warrior, brave. So please, look down on me some more.’ God is going to use your family. You’re going to have money. You’re going to have a position.”

Prosperity through the correct positive attitude is the recurring prescription in all of Mark Witt’s sermons. Does it work? The pastors are living proof that it does. “When I was a young boy I was known as pee-pee boy,” says Witt, who was subjected to cries of “pee-yoo!” many times. And now he’s a musician; composer; singer; author of ten books; speaker; pastor with a congregation of 6,000; four-time Latin Grammy winner for the Best Christian Album; founder of the CanZion Institute, which has 28 campuses in 10 countries; and owner of CanZion Productions, which has recorded 30 CDs and sold over 10 million copies in the United States and Latin America. Millions have listened to his talks.

Marcos Witt is the message: the pee-pee boy turned religious music magnate. The fact is that there’s a marked difference between yesterday’s preachers and the new generation of mellifluous tongues. In the irresistible oratory of Zwingli, Luther, Bossuet or the Curé of Ars, the preaching centered on Jesus Christ. The new preachers have put themselves at the center of their discourse. In Joel Osteen as Cultural Selfobject, Christine Miller and Nathan Carlin analyze how Osteen has turned himself into a cultural object who can heal his followers’ self-esteem.

They preach about themselves

The notion of self-object was developed by psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, based on the discovery that each person’s environment consists of cultural goods that come to form part of his or her own identity. In the extreme absence of cultural goods in his or her immediate environment, the individual looks for them and assimilates them as part of his or her own being. For example, to compensate for the lack of cultural objects in their immediate environment, Afro-Americans from marginal neighborhoods create identity-bestowing objects such as basketball players, boxers and great athletes through a “remedial action.” An idealized father figure, a sportsperson, a pastor, serve to generate cohesion in a group and build identity.

According to Miller and Carlin, that’s what the Neo-Pentecostal faithful are looking for: “People don’t go to Lakewood to learn about the Bible intellectually or academically. They go, rather, to be restored—emotionally and spiritually. They go to be transformed. They go to find their best self.” That’s why the theological content of Osteen’s messages “isn’t as important as his personal and affirming presence in them.”

Joel Osteen and his wife Victoria are beautiful, well-educated suburbanites who live in a lovely house. They are the perfect example of Osteen’s message to the United States: following Jesus Christ is profitable. Osteen and Witt present themselves as prime examples of idealizing transferences, so the faithful will fuse with them. Harold Caballeros of El Shaddai and Cash Luna of the House of God in Guatemala; René Peñalba of the International Christian Center (CCI), Misael Argeñalof the Harvest, Mario Barahona of My Vineyard and Evelio Reyes of Abundant Life in Honduras; Carlos Rivas of the International Revival Tabernacle in El Salvador; and Arsenio Herrera of Hosanna in Nicaragua all emulate him. They talk about themselves and lock away the Christ of the Gospels in the chest of obsolete junk. Cash Luna is an outstanding disciple of Osteen, with a kind of intuitive knowledge of Stanislavsky. He knows what he has to put into the building of his character, of himself as character. But in terms of being a cultural object in himself, he’s bettered by the Salvadoran Vladimir Rivas, who certainly didn’t beat about the bush in generating a cult to himself, naming his ministry the “Vladimir Rivas Mini¬stries.” As a banner on his web page declares, “Vladimir Rivas has got it all.”

The topics these pastors address are themselves and the incidents involved in their success. They cultivate a militant narcissism. These gurus ascend to the kingdom of screens, where they are incorporated into the being of their admirers. Their followers take on their elegance, their fights and their itinerary for reaching stardom. They acquire momentary confidence in being able to lose weight, overcome an addiction, get a promotion, or successfully apply for a job.... But given that there are always unsatisfied expectations, the flipside to this dynamic is that they will become eternally dependent on their identity-bestowing objects. In other words, the “remedial action” can last for the rest of their lives.

This search for identity-bestowing objects forms the basis of the links between Lakewood Church and the Central American Neo-Pentecostal churches. Harold Caballeros did his training in Lakewood Church in 1981, when he was still working as a lawyer. His mentor was Joel’s father, John Osteen, the founder of Lakewood Church. Caballeros and his wife Cecilia were ordained there in November 1982. Marcos Witt is a frequent visitor to El Shaddai and Hosanna, where his talks are highly publicized. These churches’ web pages declare the same mission and vision, formulated with the same vagueness, as Lakewood Church’s web page: to form disciples of Christ and send them out to preach. Evelio Reyes, Cash Luna and Marcos Witt were celebrated as the greatest American evangelists at the Ibero-American Leadership Congress “Passing the Torch.”

The leaders of Hosanna in Nicaragua; El Shaddai, the House of God and Christian Fraternity in Guatemala; the International Revival Tabernacle and the COMPAZ Ministry in El Salvador; the International Harvest Ministry, the Apostolic and Prophetic My Vineyard Ministry, the International Christian Center, the House of the Potter, the Meeting of the Lord, the New Canticle Church, the International Shalom Ministry and Abundant Life in Honduras, all clone Osteen and Witt’s sermons. Their churches’ promotional brochures are sprinkled with a host of Caucasian youths, examples of success par excellence because, as Carlos Monsiváis says of the CEO mentality, the First World is the realest reality.

Mega-churches with
mega-business marketing

Lakewood has become a kind of Neo-Pentecostal Rome, disseminating positive thinking and the virtues of entrepreneurial managerialism. Christian entrepreneurialism isn’t new to the end of the 20th century. The faith business has a long history in the United States, from Jimmy Swaggart and his $150 million in profits during the eighties, to Kenneth Hagin (1917-2003), who peddled Jesus for nearly 70 years from the Southern Baptist Church. Oral Roberts sowed faith and harvested a fortune. How I Learned Jesus Was Not Poor occupies a prominent place among his many books. US Christianity is organized as a series of corporations. What secular corporation can compete with these businesspeople, who are offering the most valuable, in fact priceless, article: eternal salvation?

In the book Exit Interviews, William D. Hendricks sustains that “what distinguishes today’s mega-church is not size but strategy. Indeed, size is merely a function of strategy. In marked contrast to the traditional way of ‘doing church,’ the mega-church operates with a marketing mentality: who is our ‘customer’ and how can we meet his or her needs?” Those “denominational executives” who ask themselves this question and respond to it correctly end up with a mega-church. And this, according to Cook, is because mega-churches aim at highly mobile, well educated consumers who are from the middle classes launch the kind of marketing campaigns these consumer devotees are used to. For Cook, “mega-churches treat their organizations as businesses with something to market. Therefore, it is not unusual that the mega-church itself is operated, marketed and governed in a businesslike fashion.”

“Hybels really showed that churches can use marketing principles and still be authentic,” says Rice University sociology professor Michael Emerson, who has studied mega-churches. If the syncretism of the primitive Christian church was achieved by incorporating the new dogmas and beliefs into pagan rites and Roman institutions, the current syncretism assimilates marketing and the new artifacts of communication that have generated so many benefits in the worldly world of non-religious show business.

Getting pastors to think
like businesspeople

Supporting the growth of the churches is a business in itself. That’s why the publicity agency Kingdom Ventures, whose mission is to help faith organizations grow bigger, works with 10,000 churches in a broad range of activities from event planning (providing speakers and artists) to fundraising and facilitating high-tech advances, particularly new audiovisual and sound system equipment.

And if this wasn’t enough, Kingdom Ventures recently published the book PastorPreneur: Outreach Beyond Business as Usual, which caused glorious hysteria in Christian bookshops. It’s a manual to get pastors thinking like businesspeople, encouraging them to establish partnerships with non-religious groups and use marketing techniques to attract new members. These techniques have proven successful in the evangelization field. Most of the groups post a calendar of their events on their web site and announce the sale of books, CDs and DVDs, as well as asking for on-line donations.

These strategies are producing results. The tithes in Lakewood Church have made Olympian jumps, from $50 to $70 million between 2005 and 2008 alone. Osteen states—and he’s not lying—that the financial crisis didn’t affect its collections. Although the yield per individual and per family did drop, the tithes have shown sustained growth due to the increase in members. As a good positive thinker, Osteen’s view is that the best is yet to come: “My philosophy is that that $95 million will be nothing compared to what we’ll do when we have 100,000 people.” The growth of his church (an annual average of 57%) was much faster than that of one of the biggest Neo-Pentecostal churches in the world, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus), which jumped from 269,000 to 2 million followers in 1991-2000, at an annual average of 54%. A promising future of milk, honey and dollars awaits Lakewood Church.

When questioned about his wealth, Joel Osteen, who is a prolific author with over 45 bestsellers, responded rather equivocatingly that “God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books.” Your Best Life Now, one of his first fruits, sold over 5 million copies, and he was given an advance of $13 million for one of his latest successes, Become a Better You, whose 3-million print run was one of the biggest ever for a first edition hardback.

“Discover the champion inside you”

Religious books have been a source of pecuniary blesing for a long time now. Gore Vidal registered as much when referring to certain books: “Celebrity-sinner books are sold by the millions through hundreds of bookstores and dozens of book clubs that cater to fundamentalist Christians. Last year over $600 million worth of ‘Christian books’ were sold in the United States.… Watergate criminals are also in demand. When the inspiring Charles Colson (author of Born Again) and the inspired Jeb S. Magruder (author of An American Life) confess to all sorts of small sins and crimes not unlike those that Shakespeare’s Cardinal Wolsey sang of in his final aria, the audience is able to enjoy if not pity and awe a certain amount of catharsis.”

But Osteen obviously doesn’t owe his fortune to his gift for writing alone. He sold the patronage of each seat in his 14,000-capacity stadium-sanctuary for US$2,500. In the article “Joel Osteen: The Prosperity Gospel’s Cover Boy” in the confessional magazine Christian Sentinel, Jackie Alnor reported that in the area of financial success Osteen, whose slogan is “Discover the champion inside you,” has no reason to envy Malibu celebrities, informatics stars or the big winners of the bank collapses described in Inside Job. She presents him as the most rising star in the world of positive motivational Christianity, fusing the style of Tony Robbins with the looks of Richard Gere; the eloquence of the managerial guru with the charm of the actor. Osteen lives in accordance with the prosperous life he preaches: in a house valued at US$1.25 million. And he says he owes it all to his positive thinking: “We can obtain what we want from God through faith-filled words.”

This reworking of Calvinism—your prosperity proclaims the authenticity of your faith—omits the sacred role that political skills and connections play in Evangelical prosperity and the accumulation of talent. In 2004, Lakewood Church reached an agreement to lease the old NBA sanctuary for a 60-year period, paying $13 million in cash for the first 30 years’ rent. Before disbursing a penny more, fortune smiled on him: on March 31, 2010, the Houston City Council voted 13 to 2 for the city to definitively cede the land to the church for just US$7.5 million. Later, Osteen invested $95 million in outfitting the premises, a task that included purchasing and installing a 32 x 18-foot screen and two twin waterfalls that rise and fall in front of a revolving golden globe and a pulpit from which Osteen—savaged by critics for his superficial theology, as he lacks any theological education—invites his followers to remain positive, filled with the same zeal as those who in days gone by preached purity, cleanliness of heart or the three cardinal virtues.

Churches similar to corporations

Analyzing these and other trajectories of “pastorpreneurs” in Christian Capitalism: Megachurches, Megabusinesses, Luisa Kroll concludes that maybe the churches aren’t so different from corporations. Their businesses are enormously varied. World Changers Ministries, for example, manages both a music and a graphic design studio and has its own record label. New Birth Missionary Baptist Church has a three-dimensional special effects chief for its web site, which offers videos at the public’s request, and publishes a magazine. The Second Baptist Church of Houston, whose 22,723 members give it the sixth largest membership in the United States, has a modern cathedral the size of an airport terminal—the 21st Century Worship Center—which cost $34 million and was then remodeled at a cost of over $8 million more. Its vast domains also include various gyms, bookshops, cafeterias, a primary school and a free car repair service for single mothers. It has an annual budget of $53 million.

These are some of the mega-businesses of the mega-churches led by pastors who act like executives and use marketing tactics to capture and the skills of a showman to entertain more and more loyal followers. Their purpose—expanding the faith—goes hand in hand with a happy collateral effect: expanding the profits. The mega-churches’ average income in 2003 was estimated at $4.8 million, a tidy sum for those who also have the privilege of being tax-exempt. They are the children of Elmer Gantry, the character from Sinclair Lewis’s novel of the same name (1927): a cynical alcoholic who is mistakenly ordained as a Baptist minister, eventually becomes a Methodist minister and makes a fortune as an itinerant preacher.

To be financially prosperous

This entrepreneurial and managerial spirit is coming to Central America. Its symptoms can be detected in each “product” of Central American Neo-Pentecostalism. The Hosanna temple in Nicaragua produces a weekly bulletin. I have the one dated January 8, 2012. It’s a sheet of paper folded to give four sides, with the national colors of blue and white predominant. A positive slogan stands out: “With God, the impossible doesn’t exist!” The offer of $30 baptism classes in the “School of new believers” is the only ad I could identify as properly confessional. The rest of the space is dedicated to the cult of managerialism and other pecuniary topics: a diploma course in human talent management with a managerial curriculum, a conference for young adults on “how to have a healthy financial life” and a “business seminar” advertised with an image of young executives in suits and ties positioning gigantic jigsaw pieces.

The Christian Fraternity of Guatemala, popularly known as the Mega-frater, is the biggest Neo-Pentecostal temple in both Guatemala and Central America. It couldn’t be any other way as Neo-Pentecostal temples are a gauge of the size and prosperity of the middle classes in each country, in relation to which Guatemala ranks top and Nicaragua bottom. The Mega-frater cost $29 million. One minor detail: its complex of 113,000 square meters can accommodate 12,000 devotees per shift, who will pay those millions and many more besides through their tithes: big is profitable. According to Jorge H. López, its founder and main pastor, “We wanted it to be something majestic as a testimony to society that Evangelicals can put up dignified and big buildings in Guatemala, as a reflection of all their potential.”

Jorge H. López is autor of Cómo salir de la crisis financiera [How to get out of the financial crisis]. He presents it has “an approach based on the Word of God to reduce the economic impotence to which people see themselves subjected as a result of credit purchases, laziness, superfluous spending, greed and the desire to have more, which lead them to financial chaos as the result of debt. It is also a practical guide to identifying the enemies that impede fulfillment of the Lord’s promises to be prosperous, and teaches a life built on the firm basis of purchasing in cash and on how to confront worry and embarrassment when they cause dejection.” Calvin must be smiling in his grave!

Another book penned by López is Fórmulas bíblicas para prosperar (Biblical formulas for prospering): “It is an invitation to travel the biblical paths sustained by the will of God and a clear answer to those questions that arise when one is living in adverse financial circumstances, when we are in crisis, when we are in debt. Step by step, sermon by sermon, you will receive the necessary understanding to be freed from your finances and know how to free yourself from any chain of economic oppression.”

There is no great distance between this offer and the kind made by life-coach speakers or CEOs rallying their teams. As Barbara Ehrenreich said, “A positive message not only sold better to the public than the ‘old-time religion’ but also had a growing personal relevance to pastors, who increasingly came to see themselves not as critics of the secular, materialistic world but as players within it—businessmen or, more precisely, CEOs.”

Now they talk of added value
rather than heaven and hell

The books on offer at René Peñalba’s International Christian Center follow the same trend. One that particularly stands out is Principios bíblicos para una administración eficaz [Biblical principles for effective administration], which includes a training plan and even a printed diploma and develops the following topics, among others: We are all administrators, Administration from a biblical perspective, A God that delegates the administration of his resources, God as responsible for our prosperity and eager for us to have an abundance of resources…

Also up there is Vladimir Rivas and his cry for “Financial Freedom” and the International Revival Tabernacle with the seminar offered by the famous international life coach Alex Marvel in 2011 during the celebrations of the church’s tenth anniversary. Guatemala’s El Shaddai offers Spanish versions of the following books: Strategic Plan for Transformation by Alistair P. Petrie; Authority in Heaven, Authority on Earth by Tom Marshall; The 4:8 Principle: The Secret to a Joy-Filled Life by Tommy Newberry; and Cents & Sensibility: How Couples Can Agree about Money by Bethany and Scott Palmer, among many other examples showing that the cross and the billfold are the new neocolonial binomial.

“Everything is practical in the San Pablo University,” explained the receptionist at the university, which has Caballeros as its rector and is located in the El Shaddai complex. There’s a notable pragmatism to its curriculum, which hits the bull’s-eye in the business world: Marketing and Sales Management: “Highly innovative major that is a requisite for organizations’ competitiveness.” Business Management and Entrepreneurship: “A major that develops professionals with an entrepreneurial spirit, capable of managing a national or international organization.” Investment: 32,500 quetzals (approximately US$4,148).

It’s the preferential option for entrepreneurs. In other times, not as far off chronologically as psychologically, that little university would have concentrated on Bible courses. The most worldly teachers would have gone there to offer training on rhetorical skills. But the Bible is no longer everything. We can’t talk about fundamentalism or Lutheranism anymore. Faith alone isn’t enough. What we’re seeing is a sacralizing of capitalism at levels Weber never dreamed of. To paraphrase Gramsci, why call them universities and religious temples rather than “business schools”?

The managerial discourse has permeated to the very bones of neo-Pentecostalism, both in the United States and in Central America. Bill Hybels was an admirer of Peter Drucker and hung a poster quoting the business expert outside the entrance to his office: “What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value?” Like Hybels and Osteen, the leaders of Central American Neo-Pentecostalism talk about incentives and added value. Pecuniary topics and the world of finance are as present in their sermons as the fires of hell and the Archangel Gabriel were in sermons a century ago. More realistic winds are blowing.

“Jesus wasn’t poor!”

It’s not just a question of sermons and books, or of giant stages that look like the auditoriums of prosperous corporations in both design and ornamentation. The very lifestyle and strategies of the Neo-Pentecostal pastors also seek to exactly replicate the entrepreneurial CEOs who have made a fortune through their managerial abilities.

From his pulpit in the House of God, Cash Luna, flaunting the whole lifestyle and income of a CEO, talks about the devil, but not in the old style. The devil that Cash rails in numerous sermons against is the internal demon that whispers “It’s wrong to prosper.” Against that demon he declares the conviction that “God wants to bless you, He wants your soul, your body, your economy to prosper. It is his desire. So let your Father bless you! It is God’s will for your soul, your body, your economy to prosper. One of the things you must learn is that being prosperous is not so much your desire, but rather you Father’s desire.”

With his Christian Fraternity, Jorge H. López’s project was to found a “church that would turn the mentality that a Christian has to be poor, ignorant and with no influence in society” into a thing of the past. In this new view, opposing prosperity and social climbing amounts to opposing the divine will. It is a curse. Low salaries, unemployment and labor mistreatment are just excuses devised by the devil. A positive attitude and managerial skills are enough to unmask any cunning arguments and destroy evil.

“I hear Satan’s voice whispering to me: ‘But, what about Jesus? They say he was poor? Was he accursed?’ What an outlandish idea!” The exegete Cash illuminates us with a subtle distinction worthy of Thomas Aquinas: “He didn’t live in accursedness, he became a curse for us; he took the sin, the sickness, lived under the curse, became accursed, but didn’t live under a curse. In terms of prospering, was he poor? No! He became poor. They are two very different things.”

In this neo-Calvinism, prosperity isn’t an option; it’s an obligation. The prosperity that God gives us, Cash insists, is the product of an ordered life. A disordered life will not prosper. If you give tithes and offerings, God gives to you. But if you squander it, the devil takes it from you. This is the most explicit condemnation of poverty, branding it as the opprobrious outcome of a disordered life. And it is also the easiest shortcut for Cash to say “Your prosperity is mine,” through tithes.

The insistence on tithes is common to the Neo-Pentecostal churches. In the International Christian Center, when I asked for leaflets on their activities and purposes, all I could get were little tithe request envelopes bearing phrases from one of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians justifying their insistence: “They gave as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability”; “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”

Harold Caballeros:
Think positively, think big

The managerial abilities that lead one along the narrow pathways of prosperity are frequently associated with—or reinforced by—positive thinking. In fact, what is often attributed to positive thinking was actually the result of the pastors’ penetrating business sense.

Guatemalan Harold Caballeros swears that, on the verge of bankruptcy, he prayed and prayed until God sent him a devote buyer who wanted to earn a place in heaven by paying El Shaddai a fortune for a devalued plot of land. With the total amount from the sale, Caballeros was able to acquire his congregation’s new headquarters in a better placed area, take care of his financial solvency problems and send out an unequivocal sign of the blessing El Shaddai had received.

A whole masterly speculation move disguised as sudden divine intervention resulting from positive thinking: “We agreed to meet earlier to pray. When the interested parties arrived, the meeting went normally until the moment came for the expected question: ‘How much do you want for the property, pastor?’ And I listened in surprise as exactly double the amount we were originally expecting came out of my mouth.”

Jorge H. López of the Guatemalan Christian Fraternity—whose slogan is “love, power and order”—must also have received some blessing or unusual illumination to jump from meetings of 22 people in 1978 in the Holiday Inn—at that time the Hotel Fiesta—to the Camino Real Hotel and then seven months later to the hall of the Reform Cinema and finally on to buy a 3.5-acre plot of land on the edge of the Roosevelt Calzada road in 1985. By 1991, the church had inaugurated a four-story building, bought another plot of land measuring over 17 acres in San Cristóbal and finished building an auditorium for over 12,000 people, with parking for 2,531 vehicles.

God’s very lucrative businesses

With fewer resources but no less managerial talent, the faithful from the International Revival Tabernacle were also distinguished. Born in 2001, it had attracted so many followers “where the fire of the Spirit burns” in just four years that they were able to contribute funds between then and 2008 to pay for a 3.5 acre plot in San Salvador—where even junk costs an arm and a leg—and start building a church valued at $3 million. According to its web page, the TAI International Complex was inaugurated by none other than President “Carlos Mauricio Funes Cartagena, before the gaze of some 50,000 people who followed this miracle in their own homes on television, radio and Internet, all of which broadcast the event live.” God’s businesses are as lucrative as those of the most seasoned speculators. The children of the light have more entrepreneurial talent than the children of darkness.

Another demonstration of Caballeros’ managerial talent is his painstaking cultivation of a club of friends. It’s something they now call social capital management. Years ago, the humble origin of Pentecostalism’s leaders and sympathizers made it easier to discredit them. Retired General and former de facto President of Guatemala Efraín Ríos Montt, a minister of the California-based Pentecostal Church of the Word, raised the bar, but the effectiveness of his genocidal scorched earth operations and his prestige as a hardline statesman were not enough to win Pentecostalism a strategic place among the dominant groups, plus which he was ahead of his time in the mega-church timeline. That honor goes to the El Shaddai leader, Caballeros, who maintains that he has 17,290 voluntary contributors who help him economically in rural and urban areas, including Diego Pulido, the manager of the Industrial Bank; Jaime Arimany, former president of the Coordinating Committee of Associations of Agriculture, Commerce, Industry and Finances (CACIF); and Adrián Zapata, who was once a guerrilla fighter. Anything goes.

How can we reconcile the binomial of Álvaro Pop, a Q’eqchi indigenous leader, and Cromwell Cuestas, a top Volvo official in Central America and El Shaddai member dating back to its foundation? Only the Neo-Pentecostal faith seems able to bring together what politics, wars and racism gave birth to in separation and raised in confrontation. Cuestas provides us the key to the sex appeal of Caballeros, that homogenizing alchemist of irreconcilable ingredients: “Harold sees things where nobody else sees them. He isn’t self-conscious: he teaches to think big.”

Calvin reborn: The idolatry of money

Waving his Harvard master’s degree, Caballeros is better equipped than other Neo-Pentecostal pastors to conceptually elaborate the marriage between the Bible and the billfold. First he traced the historical origin of the condemnation of wealth: Ibero-Catholic culture and its theological paradigm, whose condemnation of all economic transactions leading to personal profit only managed to reduce us to poverty.

The second step was to show how the Calvinist aporia can be resolved: Calvin believed in predestination. With the number of chosen people predetermined from the beginning of time and material prosperity an indicator of divine favor, why make any effort? Why be good? Why work? Well, to show that one was among the predestined, of course. The doctrine of predestination, which with a different ideological inflection would have been fatalistic and paralyzing, worked for Calvin and is working for Caballeros as “a powerful incentive for appropriate behavior and thoughts.”

Harold Caballeros, Jorge López, René Peñalba and Arsenio Hernández don’t insist as much on prosperity as Cash Luna, Vladimir Rivas and Evelio Reyes. But all of them venerate entrepreneurialism and emphasize managerial abilities, elevated to the rank of theological virtues, as happened in days gone by with the three classic virtues of faith, hope and charity. And certainly, their practice has led them to prosperous vineyards, abundant life and opulent tabernacles.

Calvinism has been reborn with new determination in Neo-Pentecostalism. Let’s take a look at how much the Renaissance version dovetails with its present manifestations. According to German philosopher Ernst Bloch, in Calvinism the active ego is strong and responsible and remains active precisely and with much greater reason where it feels chosen. Individuals don’t have to realize themselves separately from the effort and work that lead to the greater glory of God, to which end they grant God the needed energy and will. For Bloch, the chosen come to feel more securely free in earthly work because once they have been the object of grace they can’t lose that state. Divine justification, the only presumable indication of positive predestination, is thus only revealed in self-discipline, energy and coherence of working, as God’s activity operating unceasingly within the believer. This is particularly true for business success, a visible reward for that work, not for depth and fervor of feeling or for the quietist signs of Lutheran mysticism, removed from and superior to the world. Bloch argues that self-discipline is the subjective guarantee of the certainty that one has been saved, while success is the objective guarantee.

If Luther left the world in its abjection, putting it at the mercy of the princes, moving the soul and his God inward, Calvin preached a bourgeois faith in which Renaissance secularity is sacralized in the church of Mammon, the money god. Luther fell into idolatry of the State; Calvin into idolatry of money.

An irresponsible magical optimism

Zwingli declared laboriousness to be a lifestyle pleasing to God. But it was the Calvinist ideal of work—applied to the consumer—that led to wealth having to be increased for its own sake. Paul’s idea of “having nothing, yet possessing” (2 Corinthians 6:10), which according to Bloch was also practiced by monks-turned-traders and men of business who acted as God’s executors or treasurers, did away with the scruples rooted in primitive Christianity and encouraged the unrestricted cult to accumulation that the flourishing capitalist economy required.

Through a similar mechanism, Neo-Pentecostalism’s ideology of prosperity has swept away the last Christian scruples over money and placed itself at the opposite pole to primitive Christianity with theological bestsellers such as Jesus Was Never Poor and God Wants You ToBe Rich. Chemically pure Calvinism and Neo-Pentecostal Calvinism justify economic inequality. But the Calvinist demolition of scruples could be verified at the dawn of a series of technological transformations whose promising future was palpable and gloomy consequences—environmental devastation—less perceptible. Way in the distance, the welfare State and relative labor stability could be seen allowing plans to be made with manageable levels of uncertainty.

In contrast, the Neo-Pentecostal creed and its irresponsible magic optimism provide lethal hallucinogens that make people believe in the possibility of ever-imminent success in a world of shaky economic structures. In Central America, a world of scandalously unequal social and economic structures, they act as an “opiate,” the crack of our peoples.

To be continued…

José Luis Rocha is a member of the envío editorial council and consultant researcher for NITLAPAN-UCA.

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