Melanie C. Ross presents the various shapes of Christian liturgies that emerged in non-mainstream Protestant churches, including Quakerism, Anabaptism, Methodism, Pentecostalism, and Evangelicalism. Despite the prejudice that these traditions are non-liturgical, she demonstrates the profound theological and spiritual depth of their worship services.

This book is framed by two bookended revolutions, print in the sixteenth century and the internet and social media in the late twentieth century. How, then, is Christianity changing in the age of social media and international connectivity? What social and cultural changes were already underway in the decades immediately preceding the internet revolution that have a direct bearing on the generations most affected by that revolution? What is the impact of new technologies and social media on the beliefs, practices, and “lived religion” of Christian communities, organizations, and denominations? Finally, to what extent has the internet helped develop global religious networks in which the directional flows of power and influence have begun to change from a North/South trajectory to the reverse?

The aim of this chapter is to apply the book’s general organizing principle and method to some of the most significant developments in the English-speaking Protestant world in the last four centuries, including the transition from pietism to evangelicalism, the explosive growth of Protestant missions, the origins of premillennial dispensationalism and its contribution to the rise of American fundamentalism, and finally the worldwide spread of Pentecostalism. None of these developments in the creation of a “Protestant International” can be studied within a single denominational or national tradition, and none can be understood without coming to terms with its nucleus of ideas/theologies, the nodal points of transmission and dissemination, and the transnational networks that facilitated growth.

This chapter explores Pentecostal conversion as both an affective and a political process. It considers the kind of subjects young urban Pentecostals are called upon to become: organised, enterpreneurial, armed not only with a transformed heart but with a ‘vision’ for their future and a ‘strategic plan’. This subject both converges with and diverges from the RPF’s attempts to create ‘ideal’ subjects who are able to participate in the country’s post-genocide development. While some young Pentecostals benefited from such self-making, others became disillusioned. Instead, they highlighted the limits of the Pentecostal project and its inability to deliver the bright future they felt they had been promised.

This chapter considers gender dynamics within the new Pentecostal churches and the role of young women within them. It explores Pentecostal gender constructions and how they conflict with the RPF’s more ‘progressive’ gender policies. The chapter foregrounds young women’s timework and how their actions are oriented towards leaving a Christian legacy for imagined heirs in the future. Here legacy is related to notions of urwibutso (memorial), with the concept taking on new meanings in Pentecostal churches. This chapter continues the discussion of Christian ubwenge, arguing that it becomes particularly important for young Pentecostal women.

Chapter 2 explores Pentecostal ethics, and how urban Pentecostal churches in Rwanda attempted to Pentecostalise ubwenge, a traditional concept often translated as ‘intelligence’, ‘wisdom’, or even ‘cunning’. It traces discursive attempts on the part of Pentecostal pastors to show that the ‘spirit of intelligence’ (umwuka w’ubwenge) had divine origins. Moving from discourse to practice, the chapter also considers how young Pentecostals employed ubwenge in their own lives, using it to navigate relationships both within the church and with the state.

This chapter introduces the main arguments of the book by exploring the case of Kizito Mihigo, a well-known popular singer who was imprisoned, was released, and later died while in police custody. It discusses the idiom of the heart – or, more particularly, the need to transform the heart – as key to understanding post-genocide social life and urban young people’s attempts to navigate a difficult political terrain. Instead of reproducing theoretical binaries – resistance–domination, sound–silence, past–present – this chapter proposes looking to popular culture and Pentecostalism in order to understand the different ways young people in Kigali attempt to assert agency and make ‘noise’ despite a wider context of silence.

This chapter focuses on the new sound economy that Pentecostalism brought to Rwanda after the genocide. It considers a wide range of Pentecostal sound practices – from noise-making to praise and worship to Pentecostal radio – and shows how sound was understood to be key to inner and outer transformation. Pentecostals drew a distinction between ‘godly’ and ‘secular’ media, which allowed some young singers to become ‘gospel stars’. This chapter equally focuses on the materiality of Pentecostal sounds – the work that sound does outside of its discursive properties – and places this within the wider sonic context of post-genocide Rwanda. The RPF state has increasingly cracked down on noise – associated both with the new churches and nightclubs – and in 2018 closed thousands of chruches across the country. Perhaps ironically, despite their differences, the new Pentecostal churches and the RPF state share a conviction of sound’s transformative power.

The Conclusion returns to the case of Kizito Mihigo and his tragic death in February 2020. It considers how his music reveals a certain politics of humanity, and the ways in which the RPF state tries to define who is and is not to be considered human. Returning to the theme of sound, noise, and silence, it sugggests the importance of taking sound seriously in Rwanda. Thinking more closely about sound – not only its discursive properities but its material ones as well – opens up new avenues for scholarship.

This chapter reads the essay form as key to the consolidation of the Gold Coast intelligentsia in the early twentieth century, when Anglo-Fante public intellectuals including J.E. Casely Hayford, S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma, and J.W. de Graft Johnson sought to persuade their London audience of Africans’ capacity for self-determination. In using the essay form to negotiate the relationship between national and Christian leadership qualities, they also tested the boundary between neutral practices of observation and religious experience. Casely Hayford’s 1915 essay ‘William Waddy Harris’, on a prominent West African evangelist, is an especially rich case study in how to reconcile a premium on facticity with a new openness to direct communion with God. In this way, Gold Coast anti-colonial intellectuals introduce an anti-secularising vector to the history of the essay form as well as to the rise of the African nation state.

The chapter analyzes how frequent- and infrequent-churchgoing youth understand their citizenship identities and obligations at the local and national levels. Both frequent and infrequent churchgoers highlight communal aspects of citizenship, but frequent churchgoers stress citizenship as faith-inspired actions such as prayer and reciprocal ties in church communities. Frequent churchgoers view citizenship as acts that build the nation, though this citizen goal often has a distinctly Christian tenor. Frequent churchgoers use more legalistic language than infrequent churchgoers and display more political efficacy. Afrobarometer findings confirm that more religious involvement relates to higher political activism, but our respondents illustrate that youth agents at times contest religious leaders’ political messaging and question those leaders’ integrity. Case studies from a renewalist church in Ghana and a mainline Protestant South African leadership program illustrate how youth adapt political messaging as they craft their own citizen identities.

Chapter 3 considers the making into ‘migrants’ of those who moved and asks what it meant for their kinship relations. It looks at processes of migrant-making through encounters at three different scales: nationally (with the British state), locally (with their neighbours, strangers, and other Christians), and transnationally (with their kin), arguing that migration compressed these two historical generations into one ‘migrant’ generation. At the same time, I show how migrants participated in these processes, particularly vis-à-vis their kin and, in doing so, fuelled the latter’s expectations of economic and other support. Central to the discussion are the ways in which the imaginings of migrant and non-migrant kin diverged post-migration, creating friction transnationally. Christianity also features prominently in this chapter, as migrants sought to make sense of their dashed expectations, while seeking means to pursue their aspirations and cultivate a sense of belonging.

Why are religious minorities well represented and politically influential in some democracies but not others? Focusing on evangelical Christians in Latin America, I argue that religious minorities seek and gain electoral representation when (a) they face significant threats to their material interests and worldview and (b) their community is not internally divided by cross-cutting cleavages. Differences in Latin American evangelicals’ political ambitions emerged as a result of two critical junctures: episodes of secular reform in the early twentieth century and the rise of sexuality politics at the turn of the twenty-first century. In Brazil, significant threats at both junctures prompted extensive electoral mobilization; in Chile, minimal threats meant that mobilization lagged. In Peru, where major cleavages divide both evangelicals and broader society, threats prompt less electoral mobilization than otherwise expected. The multi-method argument leverages interviews, content analysis, survey experiments, ecological analysis, and secondary case studies of Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala.

This chapter explores the intersection between American horror and religion and how our understanding can benefit from an approach that recognizes how both subjects wrestle with what happens when human experience goes sideways, how people attempt to understand things beyond their experience, and how they address questions pertaining to why they are here and where they think they are going. While both clearly confront such key questions of human existence, religion frequently addresses them within expectations tied to core doctrines, beliefs, and practices, while horror more often reaches beyond those limits. And yet there are moments in which both kinds of texts overlap in that they share an interest in the kinds of overwhelming questions people ask in times of concern or crisis. This chapter explores several of those moments in a survey that ranges from American Puritan literature to Spiritualism, and then to the rise of modern Pentecostalism.

The Pentecostal movement in Nigeria, with its emphasis on this‐worldly blessings and healing, has become so vibrant that today even Muslim organisations appear to be increasingly ‘Pentecostalised’. Nasrul‐Lahi‐il Fathi Society of Nigeria or NASFAT – the religious movement described in Chapter 4 – is a case in point. In an effort to compete with Pentecostalism on Yorubaland‘s religious marketplace, NASFAT has copied Pentecostal prayer forms, such as the crusade and night vigil, while emphasising Muslim doctrine. As such, the case of NASFAT illustrates that religious borrowing does not imply that religious boundaries do not matter: indeed, NASFAT is a powerful example of the preservation of religious differences through the appropriation of Pentecostal styles and strategies. In this spirit, religiously plural movements such as NASFAT prompt us to unlock analytical space in the nearly hermetically sealed anthropologies of Islam and Christianity and to develop a comparative framework that overcomes essentialist notions of religious diversity.