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Gender and a Violent Christianity in Mozambique

In southern Africa, women outnumber men by quite a margin in most Christian churches, and have done so since Christian missionaries first proselytised on these shores. This pattern is particularly pronounced in Pentecostal churches, where believers emphasise a bodily experience of the Holy Spirit, supernatural gifts and miraculous healing. Many scholars have tried to explain why these strongly patriarchal churches appeal to women. In this body of work, it became common cause that Pentecostal churches generally improved women’s autonomy and equality by creating respectable public social roles for women beyond the home. At the same time, Pentecostal churches were said to improve gender relations within households by ‘domesticating’ men and giving women a moral position from which to criticise ‘sinful’ men and resist unwanted male sexual advances. In the 1990s, these theories lost some of their explanatory force with the entry into southern Africa of an aggressive new form of Pentecostalism from Brazil. Lead by the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, locally known as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), this wave of neo-Pentecostal churches showed little interest in cultivating harmonious social relations or creating public roles for women. Instead, churches like the UCKG emphasised that bad luck, illness and poverty originated from intimate social relationships that enabled the nefarious work of demons. Pastors in these churches often urged their congregants to combat – and thereby overcome – the work of demons through direct confrontation and participation in ruinously expensive church campaigns. As I have shown in my own work, neither of these remedies was conducive to the establishment or maintenance of happy families, neighbourhoods or intimate relationships. Indeed, the UCKG in South Africa exaggerated its members’ suspicions of other people, even fellow churchgoers, and introduced radical inequalities between individual members and ‘unbelievers’; it was a church of strangers that estranged intimate partners, children, families and friends. In Violent Conversion, Linda van de Kamp examines the growth and dramatic social impact of Brazilian Pentecostal churches such as the UCKG, God is Love, Maná and The World Church of the Power of God in Mozambique. In Maputo, Brazilian churches have attracted an overwhelmingly female, upwardly mobile following, who have enthusiastically embraced these churches’ ‘pioneering’ message (pp. 25–8) ostensibly to carve out new opportunities and change their lives. Of particular concern to many of these women is the role that mysterious ‘spirit spouses’ (Chapter 4) play in wrecking their chances of marriage, fertility and intimate relationships. But like their fellow believers in South Africa, the ‘violent technologies’ (p. 189) they employ against such spirits has unleashed a ‘violent spiritual war’ (p. 20) that comes at the cost of family, romantic relationships, social networks and financial security. Indeed, as van de Kamp shows, breaking ties with family and tradition (Chapters 2 and 3), confronting local norms of proper behaviour (Chapter 5) and destroying local patterns of exchange through huge financial sacrifices (Chapter 6) are central technologies in these churches. At its core, the book grapples with the question of why relatively well-off Mozambican women would join Brazilian Pentecostal churches if their conversion leads to increased