Salvation as Cultural Distinction: Religion and Neoliberalism in Urban Africa

Abstract

Intervening in debates on religion and social inequalities, this article advocates a shift from concerns with economic ethics to a focus on religious belonging as embodying class-based cultural distinctions. In the first part, I critically review the literature that draws inspiration from Weber’s concept of Protestant inner-worldly asceticism and advance two arguments: Pentecostal orientations toward this-worldly salvation thwart rationalising potentials and feed into magic, or “occult,” economies instead. Simultaneously, however, Pentecostalism promotes personal autonomy by emphasising the possibilities for radical personal change through conversion and becoming “born again.” In the second part, I draw on Bourdieu’s cultural sociology and show that personal autonomy and certain images of Pentecostal modernity are increasingly deployed within practices of cultural distinction between the modern Pentecostal and economically successful and the backward who remain locked in the past. The article is based on ethnographic research among Pentecostals in South Africa as well as a review of the literature on other African societies.

Biographical Note

Prof. Dr. Marian Burchard (SFB 1199 & Leipzig University)

Marian Burchard is Professor of Sociology at Leipzig University. As a cultural sociologist, he is interested in how diversity shapes institutions and everyday life. His research engages with the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, urban sociology and theories of modernity, and draws on qualitative and ethnographic methods. He is especially interested in how notions of diversity influence social life and public space through nation state regulations, law and urban policy. He is the author of Regulatin Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in theb Secular West (Rutgers UP, 2020) and Faith in the Time of AIDS: Religion, Biopolitics and Modernity in South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan 2015)