The Third Horseman of Neoliberalism: The Neo-Pentecostals (part 5)

Each era produces its own religious products that generate meaning and identity. Neo-Pentecostalism has found its moment in the current “liquid Central America” and is having great success mixing a cocktail of Calvinist managerialism and positive thinking. Is that what Central America’s middle classes are looking for in Neo-Pentecostalism?

José Luis Rocha

The worship of managerialism and positive thinking and the consecration of the neoliberal postulates as a canon of common sense have not been the fruit of a spontaneous process. They are the generous harvest of decades of investment and the dominant groups’ ferociously consistent application of a strategy to change course in a direction that would let them increase their own benefits while the victims applaud from an increasingly anonymous place in a mega-church hall.

In the beginning there
was the “moral majority”

This story begins in the late seventies, when Evangelical leaders realized they could mobilize growing masses of followers and increase their political influence by playing the harp of values on issues such as the family, abortion and religious education. One specialist on the way the mind works, George Lakoff, has revealed how deeply rooted certain schemes of thought and metaphors are in our brains. They help us think and pull us along; they are in our most intimate fibers. Discourses on family values have an imperative force: in the United States they include the nation as a big family, founding fathers, sending our sons to war in other countries to defend Americans at home, the American Dream, the DAR… In Nicaragua we’d talk about the “sons of Sandino” or “los cachorros de Sandino” (Sandino’s puppies: the young conscripts in the Sandinista Popular Army of the eighties). Such metaphors encapsulate a cosmovision. And it is as such that they have been so profitable for Evangelical preachers.

In the United States, the agglutinating platform for this group was the Moral Majority, a fundamentalist and ultra-conservative political organization founded by television preacher Jerry Falwell in 1979 to promote traditional religious-moral values: the worship of the conventional family, nationalism and theological conservatism. This cult earned its followers the name “Teocons.” Although the Moral Majority no longer has the four million members it had at its peak, it did achieve powerful influence during the governments of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes and continues to be an essential pillar of the New Christian Right and the Tea Party movement.

Falwell’s celebrity peaked in 1993 when he proclaimed that “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals, it’s God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.” His movement perceived secular humanism as a threat and sought to re-sacralize politics. He therefore declared open war on the Liberal elite, which he labeled the “immoral minority.” He decided to commit his faithful to politically active public life, attempting to impose the movement at the ballot box and present candidates, such as Pat Robertson in 1986, to defend the moral majority’s interests. While Robertson was defeated, Fallwell’s followers were very effective at castigating candidates who dared to present such indecent proposals as arms control, gay rights and the funding of abortion clinics, policies that ran against the family, the US of A and God.

The eleventh commandment:
Thou shalt seek prosperity

Falwell and his followers racked up notable successes. In Louisiana and Arkansas they pushed through projects to make school programs assign the same amount of time to the literal teaching of Genesis as the theory of evolution. They also had very localized triumphs, such as in 1982 when the Christians of St. David’s in Arizona outlawed the books of William Holding, John Steinbeck, Joseph Conrad and Mark Twain in schools. Tom Sawyer was expelled from school and God readmitted.

In 1981, Mel and Norma Gabler launched a campaign in Texas to suppress from school teaching what Karen Armstrong lists in her book The Battle for God as “open-ended questions that require students to draw their own conclusions; statements about religions other than Christianity; statements that they construe to reflect positive aspects of socialist or communist countries (e.g. the Soviet Union is the largest producer in the world of certain grains); any aspect of sex education other than the promotion of abstinence; statements that emphasize contributions made by African Americans, Native American, Mexican-Americans or feminists; statements sympathetic to American slaves or unsympathetic to their masters.” The Gablers lost their little battle in court, but won the war on the streets, achieving such a massive echo among the population in that state that the editors of school textbooks had to adapt them to the conservative palate, alarmed at the prospect of losing a million-dollar market.

The impact of the new Christian Right on politics has to be measured not only in votes, candidates and initiatives, but also obliquely: following his affair with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent perjury, Bill Clinton “felt it necessary to address a breakfast meeting of the religious leaders of the United States and tearfully confess that he had sinned.” On this and other episodes, Armstrong concludes that “politicians could no longer treat the conservative views of the faithful with secularist disdain.” They had given a kick in the head to the secular humanism of the Enlightenment established by the founding fathers.

Armstrong considers that the advance of the Christian Right was limited by the cult of personality, the rejection of science and the fortunes accumulated by its preachers. The cult of personality contradicted “the transcendence of ego that should characterize the spiritual quest,” while the rejection of science created a hybrid that was neither good science nor good religion by turning Biblical myths into scientific facts, and the fortunes of the preachers “sat uneasily with the Gospel demand to abandon the pursuit of material wealth.” Yet in an audacious change of direction, these three features stopped being a cause of scandal. Through the mechanism of the cultural self-object, a pastor’s wealth is a vicarious pleasure for his or her faithful and/or offers them a glimpse of their own future. Thanks to neo-Calvinism and a very new alliance with Yahweh, God of financial battles, the search for prosperity became the eleventh commandment of Moses’s tablets of stone.

The pastors are organic to
the neoliberal machinery

Karen Armstrong sustained that the Christian Right had “created a counterculture that was supposed to be everything that the Godless mainstream was not.” But it no longer is. Now its members are totally immersed, participating in the turn-of-the-century conviction that anything’s possible, that wealth is the most desirable thing and can achieve anything.

It is in this context that what Susan George very accurately termed the “Gramscian Right” attacked with force. Gramsci sustained that “Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc.” The neoliberal businessperson, thirsty for downsizing and retooling, creates the manager and the coach, life coach or labor coach to tell the recently dismissed supernumerary workers that instead of lamenting the disappearance of their jobs—or cheese—they should be entrepreneurs and go look for cheese elsewhere, or even start up their own cheese factory. It is the contemporary version of the 19th-century Horatio Alger “rags to riches” myth. In a legal order that allows contracts of extremely short duration in which the worker-owner relationship goes no deeper than piece work, “pastorpreneurs” who preach that God wants us to prosper and that whether or not we do depends only on our abundance or absence of faith are precisely what the neoliberal machinery requires to operate at full steam, grinding up rights and jobs as it goes.

Those who engrave common sense

“Organic intellectuals” are usually understood to be committed, exemplified by the sociologist inserted in the environment he or she is studying, dressed in a cotton smock and wearing sandals, accompanying workers and peasants in their struggles. Or a cabinetmaker who, in addition to working with wood, is a self-taught Marxist who produces thoughts and publishes in journals. “Organic” has been turned into a synonym of commitment and social sensitivity.

The sociologist and the cabinetmaker may or may not be organic intellectuals but, even if they are, they aren’t the best examples of their species for Gramsci. To him “organic” means a systemic linkage. A piece that fits into the actual machinery is organic; in short, it’s an inbuilt piece because it has been created by the machinery for its own better functioning. Organic intellectuals include the school teachers to whom children’s education is entrusted, lawyers who implement the everyday work of the legal machinery, priests and pastors who dispatch Truth from their pulpits...

For Gramsci, “The category of ecclesiasts can be considered the category of intellectuals organically bound to the landed aristocracy.” But that hierarchy reformulated its organicity to link itself to other dominant groups, although no longer situated at the pinnacle of intellectuality, which in the subsequent social formulation was occupied by the “toga-clad aristocracy” (jurists and lawyers) and has now been replaced by managers and technocrats from different disciplines. All of them—teachers, writers, lawyers, ecclesiasts—are entrusted With “spontaneously” producing social consensus and do it based on the prestige and credibility of intellectuals in the eyes of the rest of the population.

We can also add journalists to the list, as they are currently much more influential than in Gramsci’s time given the increase in literacy and the resulting surge in the consumption of information, reports, investigations and analysis by newspaper and TV audiences…. All of them engrave common sense. They turn their vision of social order into the only acceptable one. In the United States, and increasingly in Central America, the Neo-Pentecostal pastors have become a particularly influential group of organic intellectuals.

In the US, the late historian and political analyst Arthur Schlesinger was one of the first to admit that “born again” Christians were no longer confined to a “disdained and isolated Bible Belt minority,” but had come to represent at least 40% of the electorate. Susan George sustains that “The religious Right’s scenario is not a fantasy, nor are their demands a distant goal. Already $40 billion yearly in State and Federal public funds is channeled through religious charities, while secular charities under the Bush regime have suffered comparable funding cuts. The border between Church and State grows constantly more blurred.”

Many pastors have received millions of dollars to promote sexual abstinence, support Bush junior and other causes, including white Hispanic pastor Luis Cortés, credited with taking many Hispanics over to the Bush camp. Lakewood Church founder Marcos Witt proudly tells how George Bush invited him to celebrate and sing at the White House.

“Like wildfire” in Central America
as in the United States

The US Traditional Values Coalition coordinates the lobbying efforts of 100,000 churches with their respective congregations. Susan George quoted its web page as announcing “our battle plan to take back our courts from the anti-God Left.” But much more than web sites, it is the pulpit and the printed letter that are the dissemination platforms for these organic intellectuals. The series Left Behind, books from the end of the world in an ultra-conservative key written by the Coalition’s founder, Tim LaHaye, and Jerry B. Jenkins, has sold millions of copies. “In the religious literature sweepstakes, LaHaye is the only competitor of the Holy Bible itself,” states George. His wife is president of Concerned Women for America, a mass membership organization of about half a million women that promotes anti-gay, anti-abortion and pro-family legislation.

As George pointed out, “The Economist, not atypically, sees this wildfire religious movement as a sign of our own version of modernity and sheds an Adam Smithian light on the stunning success of revivalist religion. Rather than a monopoly—such as the one the Catholic Church long enjoyed—the revivalists are model small capitalist entre¬preneurs.” And in effect, they do foster the entrepreneurial capitalist spirit.

The Christian Right, represented by Neo-Pentecostalism, has put down firm foundations in Central America. El Shaddai, the House of God, the Christian Fraternity, Hosanna, Abundant Life, the International Christian Center, The Harvest, My Vineyard, the International Revival Tabernacle, the COMPAZ Ministry and other Central American churches are all offspring—or cousins—of the powerful and immense Lakewood mega-church in Texas and grandchildren of Falwell and his Moral Majority. They assumed his legacy: the duty of engraving common sense, re-sacralizing politics and baptizing the world of business. And they’ve had significant successes in all three fields. In Guatemala, former President Jorge Serrano Elías is a product of El Shaddai, the Neo-Pentecostal church of Harold Caballeros, who is today the country’s foreign minister.

To engrave that common sense, the Neo-Pentecostal churches have taken on the task of publishing books, magazines and bulletins and launching radio and television programs, stations and channels. They couldn’t overlook those megaphones in the civilization of the media and show business. But nor have they cast aside the classic arenas: the church, of course, and schools. Most of the Central American Neo-Pentecostal churches have schools. El Shaddai and The Harvest chart the most ambitious course with their San Pablo University and Christian University of Honduras (UCRISH), respectively, but middle education establishments are the ones that predominate.

The International Revival Tabernacle founded the Isabel Allende School in 2002, and Major Martín Reyes is its discipline director. The main things it offers is the general baccalaureate and the technical vocational baccalaureate with an option in accountancy. In 2007, the Hosanna Family Restoration Community founded the Hosanna Christian Academy. The Harvest International Ministry of Tegucigalpa administers the Torre Fuerte Elementary School, the Torre Fuerte Bilingual School, the Torre Fuerte High School and the The Harvest Biblical Institute. The International Christian Center (CCI) owns the CCI Evangelical School in Tegucigalpa. And since 1987, El Shaddai has prided itself on its Bilingual El Shaddai Christian School, while a year before that the Christian Fraternity of Guatemala founded the Bilingual Christian Fraternity High School to offer an “education that transcends eternity.”

Honduras’s incredible framework law

In Honduras, following his controversial career in the Living Love church, Pastor René Peñalba appeared transformed into Bishop Peñalba, author of dozens of books and engraving common sense to the rhythm of the demand for life coaching. His policy of expansion has shown itself to be the most aggressive of the Central American churches. His church can look Lakewood in the eye as an equal; and while its cousin may be richer, it’s no more influential. It is the first Central American transnationalized church. Month after month it absorbs new churches and incorporates them into its already gigantic CCI Global Missionary Network, which has almost 250 churches and missionary projects in 20 countries and four continents. In recent years, the CCI has founded or assimilated churches in Peru, Brazil, Uganda, Ecuador, Tanzania, Nepal, India, Spain, Ghana, Cuba, Panama, Mexico and Costa Rica, among others. It incorporated 46 churches in Chile and Argentina alone. The 30 churches of Pakistan are a testimony to its cosmopolitan capacity to adapt itself to very diverse cultural contexts.

Also in Honduras, in the field of Politics with a capital “P,” an Alliance of Neo-Pentecostal and Pentecostal churches—associated in the Evangelical Cofraternity of Honduras (CEH), whose president is Pastor Alberto Solórzano of the CCI—pulled off a masterful surprise attack that took the breath away from devotees of the secular State and knocked the wind out of the sails of its colleagues in the region who are trying to take their first steps in politics. On September 30, 2010, the CEH managed to get the National Congress to approve the Framework Law for Evangelical Churches of Honduras (Decree No.185-2010), the first of its kind in that country, created to grant members of those churches the authority to “establish primary-, middle- and university-level private teaching centers within the law… establish hospitals, clinics or health centers” and “enjoy exoneration from taxes such as ‘income tax, sales tax, tradition tax and taxes related to the importation of goods and services.’” (Article 4).

In this way, they became the only Evangelical association with legal recognition. The CEH “is the legal entity that represents the Evangelical Church of Honduras” and “is consequently the means of representation and communication with the authorities of the Republic [of Honduras]” (Article 6). Any entity excluded from the bosom of the powerful Cofraternity will be reported to “the corresponding fiscal authority” (Article 8). This particular article was an atomic bomb in a tea cup, but the authorization to occupy public posts (Article 4) caused just as big a commotion. Religious groups that do not participate in the Confraternity—including the Rosicrucians, Gnostics, Masons, Jehova’s Witnesses and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, among many others—immediately issued statements on the law.

Also highly contested, albeit from the other side of the ideological spectrum, was the law’s Article 3, which reflects an anti-secular spirit and the Evangelical churches’ commitment to the powers that be: “The church submits itself to the authorities, respecting the law, but there is no authority that does not come from God and those that come from God have been established.”

Despite all of the religious tantrums and secular diatribes it stirred up, the law was passed. National Party legislator Mario Barahona, who is candidate for mayor of Tegucigalpa and son of the main pastor of the Neo-Pentecostal My Vineyard Church, did formidable work in the National Congress to push the law through, but its detractors didn’t lose heart and filed five petitions of unconstitutionality. In what amounted to a failure for the religious Right, the Honduran Supreme Court of Justice ruled in February of this year that the law should be repealed.

Pastor Evelio Reyes goes on a hunger strike

Another Neo-Pentecostal incursion into Honduran politics came when Evelio Reyes, the main pastor at the Abundant Life church—popularly redubbed the Abundant “Dough” church—decided to join the hunger strike initiated by four heroic Honduran prosecutors on April 6, 2008, to win the right to dust off shelved files full of acts of corruption by Honduran untouchables.

The envío correspondent in Honduras, Jesuit priest Ismael Moreno, who joined the strike four days after the prosecutors, described Reyes this way in an article in our July 2008 edition: “a well-dressed man with a confident bearing, clear voice and firm words. We grasped each other in a hug. For the last five days he had put all his church’s not inconsiderable resources—thanks to the tithes of a large congregation of the capital’s middle and upper classes—at the service of the prosecutors’ strike. He had pitched a tent alongside the strikers with radios, speakers, doctors, medicines and prayers. It surprised me that a church I had always categorized as “money-grubbing,” with empty zeal and superficial proposals, should be there with its main pastor in the lead…

“With a well-organized speech, Reverend Reyes arrived at the Bottom of the Congress looking very elegant in a suit and tie. He hugged each of the strikers and if a reporter was nearby, the hugs were longer and stronger.… As the strike unfolded, Reverend Evelio Reyes—‘the Doctor’ as his pastor colleagues call him—became a voice of authority for the movement. And it was at him that the spokesmen of the corrupt political class ended up aiming their barbs.”

Reverend Reyes started his strike on Sunday May 4 and suspended it “the following Sunday after fainting during his third sermon.” Moreno reflected the suspicions of certain hunger strikers: “Evelio Reyes’ discourse was blatantly political and in Honduras the only ones who talk about politics unambiguously do so because they want to be President, or at least a legislator. As a result all eyes were on Pastor Evelio, expecting him to opt for one of the political parties. Or did he maybe want to create a religious party?

“I frequently wondered myself what was behind this man with such a well-groomed figure, behind his impeccable preaching, as millennial as it was politic, behind the personality cult with which his congregation rewarded him.”

Pastor Evelio Reyes in politics

Whether justified or not, the suspicions about Pastor Reyes are symptomatic of the perplexity generated by such an aggressive incursion into politics by a representative of religious groups that, in Central America, had supposedly not shown signs of such marked political interest. But it shouldn’t be a surprise: we’re in the presence of the Neo-Pentecostal mutation, a religious phenomenon with a very novel look to it.

Today, Reyes is exhorting and pushing people toward politics: “Youth, get involved in politics. Politics is everything that has to do with the way the common goals of a community are organized. Politics is the practice of the human being as a social being; it responds to the social dimension of man and has to do with the transformation of society. Not participating in politics is to abandon Honduras, to allow the big decisions to remain in a few hands and sometimes in the worst ones; not participating actively in politics is to let others decide our future.”

The suspicions of Moreno and others acquire an element of plausibility if we take a look at the leaflets Reyes distributed during the strike. Under the title, “For a Honduras with honor. Firm and onwards!,” one of them shows him among three acolytes looking up at a sky surrounded by dark storm clouds. Reyes is the only one whose head is framed in a halo of light, like a picture-card saint. When the Neo-Pentecostals decide to launch theMselves full bore into the electoral race, who will be able to compete against God’s chosen ones? Could it be that Evelio Reyes wants to imitate Celso Russomanno of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, who is the Republican Party candidate for the mayor’s office of Sao Paulo, Brazil? It would be a real coup for Neo-Pentecostalism to take Sao Paulo, which has 42 million inhabitants and accounts for a third of Brazil’s gross domestic product. A victory for Russomanno could puff up the conceit of Central American Neo-Pentecostalism.

Foreign Minister Caballeros:
“Eight dead...?”

In Guatemala, Foreign Minister Harold Caballeros is the main Neo-Pentecostal bastion in high-flying politics, largely due to his post but above all due to his condition as a religious leader, which confers a more sacralized touch on his incursion into politics.

His most recent blunder is symptomatic of his position “to the right of God the Father” and even to the right of President Otto Pérez Molina. Following the murder of eight indigenous people in Totonicapán on October 4 (see the article on Guatemala in this issue), Caballeros declared at a meeting regarding the massacre with the diplomatic corps that “I acknowledge with sorrow that in certain parts of the world eight dead is a very big thing…. Although it sounds very bad to say so, we have twice as many as eight dead here every day. Therefore, it’s not really a big wake-up call.”

There was an immediate reaction, with social activists and leaders calling for his dismissal. Caballeros called those who branded him “stupid” on Twitter “idiots,” although he later apologized, claiming he had sinned due to excessive honesty, innovatively adding a new deadly sin to the original seven. Friendly pens forgave him his inexperience, while adverse ones denigrated him for the same reason. With his long and extensive curriculum on the stage at El Shaddai, it’s hard to believe that Caballeros has limited experience regarding what to say and where and when to say it. It’s more plausible to think that his spontaneous reaction was to excuse his boss’ adroit firm hand, and to think big and managerially about Guatemala’s statistics on violence, abstracted from local and personal tragedies. And it’s more believable that he wasn’t at all affected by the death of a few Mayans, whose culture, according to his self-confessed cosmovision, is actually to blame for the violence reigning in Guatemala. Whatever the case, his reaction gives us a taste of the kind of political management we can expect from Guatemala’s Neo-Pentecostal leadership.

Nicaragua’s Hosanna church doesn’t have the same kind of political influence in the higher spheres, though it has had and continues having notable success in recruiting intermediary cadres of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). In Nicaragua, the re-sacralization of politics was most perceptible in the FSLN’s active leadership—hand in hand with the most traditional Catholic and Evangelical conservatism—during the successful 2006 campaign to criminalize therapeutic abortion. And it remains evident in the presence of Miguel Obando as the Ortega-Murillo family’s own “pocket cardinal” and in the mutually eulogistic relations between Ortega and the ultra-famous Evangelical leader Yiye Ávila. The colorful t-shirts First Lady Rosario Murillo gave out for the anniversary of the Sandinista revolution on July 19, 2012 already bore identity-bestowing words from our native Evangelism: “Blessed and prosperous Nicaragua”—the same two words increasingly found in her daily speeches.

The new religion of positive thinking

The organic intellectuals’ successes have been greatest in the Calvinist consecration of business and managerialism because they have availed themselves of an opening of unparalleled persuasion: positive thinking. Calvinist self-discipline has been complemented, not replaced, by positive thinking: faith in the supreme power of the will and desires. The fact is that entrepreneurialism is related to positive thinking. Entrepreneurialism isn’t about setting up a business; it’s about launching an initiative with an uncertain future, given that there’s no perfect competition or information to guarantee any action’s success, according to economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises’ theory of human action. An entrepreneur is someone who possesses the supreme confidence to accurately predict the future and obtain success because his action comes from a “future vision.”

For Mises, entrepreneurialism is a “spiritual phenomenon in itself,””a mental act” because “it creates new values in the mind.” Pastor Harold Caballeros recently preached on the radio that he who has vision gets what he wants. “Provision follows vision,” he said, playing with words in a perfect fusion of positive thinking and managerialism. The phrase “believing is creating” [creer es crear] is also being heard in Central America now. In summary: an entrepreneur is a prototype of positive thinking. In the neo-Calvinism of the “pastorpreneurs,” prosperity reflects positive thinking, a Neo-Pentecostal pseudonym for faith.

The fantasy of self-help literature

In his unbeatably titled article, “Self-help yourself and God will self-help you,” [Autoayúdate que Dios te autoayudará], Carlos Monsiváis defines positive thinking like this: “To lack a future with confidence, the best thing is to abide by belief: if you’re poor, it’s enough to make a big effort to stop being so. Everything in life is will, everything depends on the moment at which one decides to triumph and, to achieve it swiftly, memorizes formulas, proverbs, slogans, the whole world of stimuli that range from ‘you can do it!’ to ‘go for it!’”

“Where do they get the idea of the end of utopias?” Monsiváis wonders. “Self-help literature is the most convincing of the home-delivered utopias: hopes are also globalized and strategies for success recommended for North America are easily imported or translated... It’s the unflagging fantasy that goes unnamed because its users consider it the most realistic goal of all: acquiring success just by desiring it and putting into practice some wonderful advice… Self-help literature is based on the premise that we are what we believe even without realizing it, and with different degrees of effectiveness, this manipulates the universal credulity… It reaches its extreme when the Michoacán Family drug trafficking network contracts two self-help experts to give motivational conferences: Drug trafficker! You can do it!”

Anything is possible
with positivizing power

Cash Luna, Jorge López and Harold Caballeros in Guatemala; Carlos and Vladimir Rivas in El Salvador; the highly politicized Honduran Neo-Pentecostals and Hosanna’s pastors in Nicaragua are some of the apostles of this new utopia. Their sermons ooze positivity.

It’s no surprise. They are clones—with a lot less sparkle—of the thinking of Marcos Witt, who invariably starts his sermons with a positive and positivizing prayer: “Raise your Bible and repeat after me: This is my Bible. I’m everything it says I am, I have everything it says I have, I can do anything it says I can. Today I will receive the word of God. I confess that my mind is alert, my heart is receptive; I will never be the same again. I am on the point of receiving the incorruptible, indestructible, always living seed of the word of God. I will never be the same again. Never, never, never. I will never be the same again! In the name of Jesus. Amen.” Witt sprinkles his sermons with positive exhortations: “You’re a champion! God made you to triumph! We want to help you discover the champion God has placed inside you!”

In El Salvador he is emulated by Vladimir Rivas and his exhortation “To be able to defeat giants: when one dares to lift oneself up and defeat the impossible.” In Guatemala, his disciple Harold Caballeros is a positivizing gentleman who exceeds the mental powers of Lakewood Church. If Osteen, the pastor who owns that US Neo-Pentecostal mega-church, gets airplane seats, places in packed parking lots and avoids traffic fines just by thinking positively, Caballeros leaves him in the dust by obtaining astronomical prices for devalued land, unexpected donations and mortgage loans. The Guatemalan’s thinking has to be more positive. After praying for 270 hours, God granted him the ability to speak in and understand English. He used the same “secret” as an acquaintance of Rhonda Byrne, author of best seller The Secret, who tells in her book of a woman who attracted her perfect man by pretending he was already with her, leaving him a space in her garage for his car and in her wardrobe for his clothes until he came into her life. Byrne herself used this method to improve her vision and hasn’t had to use glasses since. That’s why life coach Alex Marvell, the lecturer at the 10th anniversary of the International Revival Tabernacle, offers programs on his web page for people to achieve 100% of their potential.

“God the majordomo” and
the unexpected return of magic

For Caballeros, as for Cash Luna, Osteen, Napoleón Hill or Norma Vincent Peale—and also von Mises—success comes from reprogramming the mind. Positive mental images have the force of the law of attraction. Osteen promises that “you are going to produce what you are continually seeing in your mind,” which he backs up with: “God wants to change your attitude because when you change your attitude, you change your whole life… My attitude determines my future.” The central notion of positive theology is that God is like a boy scout, always ready to lend a hand and fulfill our whims. In this vision, God only plays a support role. Barbara Ehrenreich describes with terrific sarcasm how God “has been reduced to a kind of majordomo or personal assistant. He fixeth my speeding tickets, he secureth me a good table in the restaurant, he leadeth me to book contracts. Even in these minor tasks, the invocation of God seems more of a courtesy than a necessity. Once you have accepted the law of attraction—that the mind acts as a magnet attracting whatever it visualizes—you have granted humans omni¬potence.”

Other disciples of Caballeros have resolved tricky situations thanks to positive theology. Lewis O’Neill mentions the case of Julio, a member of El Shaddai, who was traveling by bus when a man tattooed like a youth gang member got on: “I prayed, and as I had positive ideas, which are stronger than negative ones, the guy was freed of the demons inside him, because inside him there were demons that wanted to rob the bus.”

Other positive rites of El Shaddai recall primitive tribal ceremonies, as in the case of a group of churchgoers who prayed in tongues before a basket of black stones for seven hours a day, without a break or distraction, over three weeks. Each stone, imbued with energy from this magical procedure, was placed in the doorway or immediate vicinity of 72 carefully selected places in the Guatemalan capital: the airport, the zoo, the Supreme Court, the National Palace, the Cathedral… One of the stone placers explained the purpose of the action: “When detonated, the stone will collapse the foundations and principalities that govern the city. The stone will change everything: no more corruption, no more violence, no more assaults or bad ideas.”

With energized stones and atavistic rituals, Neo-Pentecostalism has consecrated the unexpected return of magic under the heading of “positive thinking.” The primitive faith in the omnipotence of ideas has thus survived the demystifying Enlightenment and found an unquestioned welcome in postmodern minds. The novelty is that a pocket—and perhaps disposable—God is much more practical and in line with the times. The ego—humiliated by living on an insignificant planet, having primates for ancestors and not even being able to govern its own battered psyche—recovers its control of the universe and its self-esteem through Neo-Pentecostalism. And it delights in a cosmic narcissism in which it is backed by a God that also runs its errands for it.

Two religious tendencies in dispute
from the sixties to the eighties

Each era produces its own religious products, which generate meaning and identity. The era of repression saw two religious visions emerge in Latin America to explain the present and future reality: liberation theology and the apocalyptic perspective of Pentecostalism. Between the sixties and the eighties, Central America experienced accelerated urbanization processes with the subsequent growth of shanty towns ringing the main cities. With the decline of traditional activities the rural world was modernized and inequity and militarism were increased, the latter to stifle the social discontent generated by the former.

In that context, the two Christian religious tendencies offered two different ways of interpreting the solution to the region’s problems, each linked to its particular conception of the kingdom of God. In liberation theology, that kingdom started here and now, with a radical change in the organization of society. Its gospel was justice and a predilection for the poor. The apocalyptic vision of the Pentecostals was nothing new, but it did experience an understandable boom during the war: the end of time was imminent and there was an urgent need to repent one’s sins before the final judgment. As Homer Simpson splendidly put it: “God loves you and he’s going to kill you!” What that vision offered people who were suffering was an abrupt end in Armageddon and the anesthesia of trances with glossolalia, exorcism, visions and the intervention of miracle workers.

These two visions have been displaced in neoliberal Central America. Today, the tribulations of the middle classes are palliated at the breast of Neo-Pentecostalism. The question is why its managerial/entrepreneurial offer currently attracts in a way that would have been unthinkable two decades ago. My hypothesis is that Neo-Pentecostalism’s ideological proposal responds to very specific concerns and needs of the middle classes.

Central America’s middle classes
are seeking a religious cartel

What the Central American middle classes are looking for in Neo-Pentecostalism is to build a religious cartel that can replace the withering of state power and act as a counterweight to the political cartels.

Manuel Castells argues that in the information era, state control over the local economies and societies is being overwhelmed by global flows of capital, goods, services, technology, communication and power. State sovereignty and its instrumental capacity have been severely undermined by globalization, a process that relocates many processes, as economic activities have been transnationalized, exchange rates are highly inter-dependent, the global capital markets are determinant and the International Monetary Fund and other international finance institutions impose their guidelines. The result is that States have lost control over their economy and other spheres. The state vacuum is not occupied by supra-nationality, but rather by political cartels.

Max Weber identified the recurring problem that the “savior” classification is given to saviors from political misfortune among peoples who, like the Jews, are subjugated by political oppression. In the current liquid times, in which powerful companies go down the tubes in sudden failures, venerated gurus end up in jail accused of pedophilia or fraud and weather-vane political parties change program, ideology and leaders in less time than it takes to announce it, unlimited power is evoked: the only thing that is incorruptible, invincible, eternal…

Faced with an anemic Leviathan, the Neo-Pentecostals have resorted to the eternally powerful as a supreme authority, establishing transnational religious cartels that have replaced many of the vacuums left by a State at low ebb. Thus they charge taxes, as their tithes are precisely privatized taxes, with all the consequences that metamorphosis entails; they play the role of welfare State, offering social services from education to vehicle repairs for single mothers; they issue guidelines; they generate social capital… At the same time, they make efforts to rescue the Leviathan and actively participate in politics, exploiting their religious platform’s social capital. It’s still too early to discern exactly where their incursions into politics will take them.

Seeking to mitigate the anxiety
generated by mass unemployment

The Central American middle classes are also seeking to mitigate their anxiety in the face of labor instability by stimulating the ethics of entrepreneurialism in a “workfare State” era. The decline in the welfare State gave rise to the workfare State, described by Bob Jessop as the tendency to promote the innovation of products, processes, organizations and markets and to seek the improved competitiveness of open economies and the subordination of social policy to the markets’ demands for labor flexibility. That new role has emerged in an era hostile to full employment in which temporal and informal labor are the norm.

Neo-Pentecostalism offers the middle classes affected by labor instability and income uncertainty the ideologies of entrepreneurial managerialism and positive thinking: tomorrow, my acolyte, everything will be different. And that prosperous tomorrow will come very soon. The illusion of imminent success helps extinguish the anxiety generated by labor precariousness. For those whose only option is to be their own bosses in a small family business that offers humble services to the big market sharks, such ideologies have exalted self-employment, informality and underemployment to the rank of entrepreneurial exploits.

At the same time, as Jean Pierre Bastian saw it, these cults start to interest certain urban middle class sectors for whom their offer of spiritual relief is a way to overcome anxieties linked to the precariousness of their middle class position, permanently threatened by recurrent economic crises. But it’s not just about spiritual relief. They are convinced from the pulpit that the uncertainty of self-employment is the route to success and that they alone are responsible for crowning themselves or sinking into stagnation. The best of all possible worlds is to subcontract to make the outsourcing of costs viable.

Seeking to be part of a greater whole

The Central American middle classes are also looking to Neo-Pentecostalism in order to build community, to form part of a greater whole. The nation, the party, the work center, the neighborhood have all ceased being community platforms. The nation has been weakened by low-intensity citizenships, fragmented by disjunctive democracies and overwhelmed by globalization, while the programmatic changeableness of the political parties erodes their cohesive capacity beyond clientelism and instrumentalization and labor instability allows only volatile relations among colleagues. Mixophobia—the rejection of things that are different—and the fortification of homes into mini Alcatrazes has pulled the social life out of neighborhoods by the root.

Is everything pushing toward an atomized society? What is the reference community? In this respect, the Church provides the replacement. El Shaddai’s cells and Hosanna’s friendship circles represent a welcoming redoubt; catacombs in a monadic world. Homogenized by membership—although each individual cuts the cloth to his or her own measure—the Neo-Pentecostals are creating a very scarce commodity—trust—and forming community and communities.

Seeking to channel the fear of crime

They are also seeking to channel fears and sublimate the war on crime. The Central American region has become an extremely insecure territory for the middle classes. During the years of armed conflicts the war hardly affected the lives, properties and rights of urban businesspeople and professionals. But the “democratization of violence” in the postwar period has turned them into the target of kidnappings, assaults and robbery. Fear has grown and can be measured in the astronomical growth of private security companies: in 2006 Guatemala already had an army of 80,000 security guards compared to 18,500 police officers, and two years later Nicaragua had amassed a contingent of 23,000 security guards compared to its 10,500 police officers.

In an era weighed down by citizens’ insecurity and riddled with violence, the military exhibitionism of Harold Caballeros preaching in military fatigues, like a divine kaibil [the name of Guatemala’s dreaded counterinsurgency forces], and Cash Luna with his brilliant Division General uniform, offer an unforgettable spectacle and evoke the idyllic times when the Army had everything under control. Today, the war against evil is a sublimation of the war against crime and the cult to the iron fist.

Seeking recognition
of female protagonism

The middle classes are also seeking to get female protagonism recognized. There are multiple signs in Neo-Pentecostalism of the recognition of the greater prominence women have acquired in public arenas and of the metamorphosis of their role in family, community and social spheres. The male pastor-female pastor binomial and Cecilia Caballeros’ leadership of El Shaddai—now that her consort is fully immersed in politics as Guatemala’s foreign minister—are novelties symptomatic of more space for women and the assimilation of more modern values.

The same is true of the words of Honduran Evelio Reyes: “Women, Christ gave you not only salvation, but also freedom, dignity, dreams and the capacity to fulfill yourselves. Blessed hour of the recognition and participation of women!” For all this, however, patriarchal power has not been destroyed in Neo-Pentecostalism. What there may be is a compromise solution or a slow transition, in which male superiority remains: women’s virtues are still based on their life as part of a couple, their support for their man and their unconditional care for their children.

Reyes’advice for young ladies still has a repressive edge: “Escape from infatuations and premature sex, from consumerism and trivialities that dehumanize and enslave.” In his web page, Cash Luna announces his section “Woman, you are exceptional” with great pomp and circumstance, but then fills it with writing using the worst kind of female stereotypes, such as “Who am I going to marry?” and “A closed mouth catches no flies,” which censures the presumed female proclivity toward gossip. The bit on criminalizing jealousy starts with the words “God has created us women as an ideal help for our husband.” Consistent right down to the bone, Luna promotes nights with men dressed up in military camouflage and stresses the virtues of the macho who fights against Satan.

Seeking to adapt to worship
of the market and managerialism

Our middle classes are also seeking to adapt to worship of the market and the managerial culture. In the current era, with the predomination of economic matters over political ones and the worship of managerial virtues, the Neo-Pentecostals are right on target with their ideology, cosmetics, language and conception of their church as a business. José María Mardones, a sociologist who specialized in religion, argued that the theology of prosperity synthesizes a sensitivity and even a way of believing. That way of believing requires training. The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (“Stop suffering!”)—which has a presence in 180 countries and has been suspected of money laundering—distributes the daily worship thematically: “On Mondays we celebrate the current of prosperity that culminates in the current of comfortable life or the current of the businesspeople...”

There can be many examples of managerial sensitivity. Harold Caballeros is an emblematic case of managerially shaped sensitivity and affection, as he administers kisses and his time with his children. He talks in terms of “investing in them.” According to Lewis O’Neill, affection is administered, ordered, calculated and managed with particular purposes. Investing in one’s children generates a future return. Time is regulated and measured—15 to 20 minutes with each child—in a kind of paternity technology that must produce citizens who can move at even the most mundane levels of society.

It is these paternity technologies and this managerial/entrepreneurial attitude that obtain what Mardones called the “virtues of adaptation, mobility, self-control of the work process, initiative, creativity, capacity for risk and communication, etc. that are supposedly forging an ethics adjusted to the spirit of globalized and deregulated neoliberal capitalism. Neo-Pentecostalism is supposedly helping to create the ‘new culture’ that—in Latin America at least, and presumably in Africa—is supposedly contrib¬uting to a non-traumatic transition from many people’s original pre-modernity to the post-industrial era.”

But Neo-Pentecostalism’s adaptation goes even further. As Mardones stressed, there’s an obvious structural homology between the ways multinationals operate and Neo-Pentecostalism’s dynamic of internationalization. Mana¬gerial logic has been fully assumed by the religious business. And at the end of the day, who can compete with those offering the most longed-for goods: salvation and eternal life?

Seeking to enjoy the worship of wealth

What the Central American middle classes are looking for can also be explained as a need to participate vicariously in wealth in a world that worships money. The mercantile dynamic into which Neo-Pentecostalism has immersed itself is being reinforced by the worship of wealth in itself, which is one of the modes of post-industrial, post-Ford and post-Weberian capitalism.

Neither savings nor effort matter. Mexican journalist Julio Scherer wrote that “money possesses a miraculous spirit. It reproduces on its own, like the bread and fish of those beautiful Biblical stories.” The Archpriest of Hita said that money “makes the blunderer discreet”and that “moneys turn [the foolish man] into a noble doctor.”

The new miraculous effect of wealth is that those who possess it, by the mere fact of being millionaires, magnetize the media’s attention and their most insignificant actions, characteristics and positions become worthy of the front pages. That’s where the concept of “celebutante” comes from, something embodied by the model Paris Hilton. Like Pastor Osteen and Hilton, Cash Luna is a living icon, a “cultural self-object” because he offers his acolytes vicarious access to his wealth, telepathic enjoyment of his fortune.

This attitude is caricatured by Xavier Velasco through the main character in La venus de los cheques [The Venus of the Checks]: “Every first of the month, when the interest is capitalized, her gaze merges with mine in such absolute communion that I get the animal urge to throw a whole wad of bills on her and devour the whole thing, caress by caress. Having no bills, I sign her a new post-dated check that gives me access to long fits of passion in which she stimulates my hormones endlessly whispering sweet nothings in my ear about returns on investments and fines. She gasps for breath, her vision clouds over, she goes weak at the knees every time she mentions everything I owe her…”

Looking to take the ego to its limits

Through Neo-Pentecostalism, the middle classes are also achieving the pinnacle of individualism: the omnipotent ego with a tailor-made religion. On the one hand, Neo-Pentecostalism’s positive thinking allows individuals to free themselves from all institutional bonds and socioeconomic conditioning. Neo-Pentecostalism takes the modern ideology of individualism to the extreme. According to Mardones, in Neo-Pentecostalism “individual singularity is elevated to the point of making us believe we are the builders of a unique biography in a society that institutionally restricts us.” The serpent’s promise that “you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5) is finally realized and culminates in the ego’s omnipotence.

Another aspect of individualism taken to the extreme is the cosmovisional relativism leading to a religion that fits the initiate’s taste, as part of consumerism and modernity’s ideology of the individual. The omnipotent ego obtains a tailor-made, even disposable, religion of consumerism. As Jesús García-Ruiz observed, the era of the privatization of public sector companies was also the era of the privatization of religion.

Seeking to avoid conflict

Another thing being sought in Neo-Pentecostalism is denial of evil, avoidance of conflict. I can’t say it any better than Monsiváis: “The self-help fever fosters the great illusion: if the economy declines lethally, if one lives immersed in routine and scarcity, there is the recourse of moving to another mental time that is another country, another set of suppositions where no reality contradicts us.”

In the field of positive thinking, the Neo-Pentecostals are seeking something similar to the devotees of the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda: “The force of Umbanda resides in its capacity to imagine an alternative reality that is better than the sad reality.”

All this is happening in
our liquid Central America

In short, what the middle classes are looking for is to resolidify Central America. Today’s Central America is, as Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman would say, is a liquid one in which labor and community relations, among others, lack the firmness of yesteryear. It’s a swampy terrain, a breeding ground for anxiety and uncertainty where organized and disorganized crime, the unbridled greed of big capital and little capitals and political and social fascisms all prosper.

The attraction of Neo-Pentecostalism is its capacity—according to the occasion and the issue—to counteract, mitigate, adapt itself to or deny that lack of solidity of our Central American society in post-modernity. The syncretism with the managerial tendency and positive thinking is at the service of those four defense mechanisms.

Like Neo-Catholicism, Neo-Pentecostalism can make a cocktail of Dale Carnagie and Ecclesiastes or concentrate Pablo de Tarso and Paulo Coelho in the same stock. Anything to maintain the revival of men reduced to mice that seek cheese instead of protesting about the stolen cheese, the outsourcing of costs and labor informality. How can such mice be produced? In liquid Central America it would have been hard for the Gramscian Right to do so without resorting to religion.

The isthmus is suffering a post-traumatic scarcity of religious leaders moving to break with the system and working to break the system itself. There is an excess of those reproducing the values that are ending up imposing themselves as dominant. The Neo-Pentecostal pastors are the organic intellectuals of the hegemony of the managerial culture and positive thinking, those sedating options for the Central American middle classes that listen to the same thing every day: Impoverished of the world, unite! Welcome to the church, the only corporation you can’t be fired from… if you prosper as entrepreneurs and think positively!”

José Luis Rocha is a member of the envío editorial council.

Print text

Send text