The Sect: the Anti-Politics of the Poor

Abstract

Pentecostalism is, potentially, a force of transformation. The nature of this force is to make utterable and acceptable what seemed unacceptable previously. It is to make the unacceptable enter the political language,1 and to transform it into a political language. Yet this force of transformation is not necessarily a force of revolution (Martin, 1990, pp. 42–6). In the past, other religious movements certainly did attempt to be revolutionary forces; yet confronted with the superior power of the ruling classes, they withdrew into ‘sectarian’ forms of organization (Niebuhr, 1929, pp. 52–3). The question of the revolutionary or, conversely, counter-revolutionary character of new religious movements will be our point of departure. Is Pentecostalism revolutionary or, on the contrary, does it divert the poor from the revolution?2 In this chapter, we shall also attempt to view this force of transformation in a different light. Rather than placing it in the context of the ‘revolution’, we shall consider this force as part of the ‘piety effects’- that is, the great ‘schismatic drives’3 which form within the sects.