Pentecostalidad

The Pentecostal emphasis on individuals' duties rather than on their rights, however, distinguishes its conception of individual freedom from that of most North and South American feminism. Since no one is oppressed by anyone but the devil, to be free is to be able to disobey the devil's will. Asceticism proves that one is free.

The restrictions that Pentecostal women impose on themselves reflect a new concept of liberty. N. R., a member of the Assembly of God, explained how her idea of freedom had changed. She said that she had been very reluctant to become a believer and join the Assembly of God because of its restrictions on leisure and dress: "I though I was going to be in prison, but I was wrong. It's freedom.... I can go to the beach now, but I don't. I'm not going to miss church to go to the beach." According to this conception, what freedom means is not the absence of restrictions but resisting temptation and remaining faithful to the values and responsibilities one has assumed. The freedom that Pentecostals seek is not from social or religious laws but from the human selfishness and desires identified as devilish. One is free when one is able to give up bad habits. Pentecostal liberation is a personal transformation, explained M. B. After the baptism in the Holy Spirit "the person changes, even though there are things that you had never managed to give up before."

In general, women who become Pentecostal already had an austere lifestyle prior to conversion. Many, especially the married, drank little or no alcohol, and their sexual activity was restricted to their spouses or partners. Conversion does not represent as great a break with a past lifestyle for women as for men. In fact it seems to reaffirm the dominant feminine lifestyle rather than to transform it. A great number of Pentecostal churches, however, preach the abandonment of "vanities" such as earrings, makeup, haircuts, and pants and shorts for these women who had so little else to restrict in their lives. Most of the Pentecostal women we interviewed talked about this issue of dress and feminine beauty.

Some women approved of this strict code regarding dress and makeup and explained that their choice of a church had been positively influenced by that code. For example, M. S., a low-income seamstress, reported that her church's code was very strict: "I thought I wouldn't get used to it. You couldn't wear short or long pants or cut your hair or anything like that. I thought the doctrine was right.... I believe that if you're a Christian you have to be different." She also explained that her church was against going to the beach: "The question is not the beach but the clothes you wear there." The austere dress code was also appealing to R. P. and Z. J., both poor women from the Assembly of God. They were impressed by the believers' modest apparel and attracted to the church precisely because of this style. Some Pentecostals argue that the discreet, nonprovocative clothes protect poor women from sexual harassment, as seems also to happen among AfroAmerican Pentecostals.28

The strictness of doctrine in fact serves as a dividing line between different Pentecostal denominations and is one of the factors responsible for individual decisions to join or leave a given church. The ascetic code of conduct that preaches against alcohol, cigarettes, and participating in Carnival is widespread throughout the Pentecostal churches. Nevertheless, there are many churches with less stringent dress codes that attract women who reject the traditional Pentecostal sobriety. Middle-class and Neo-Pentecostal churches such as the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus are generally more flexible. Some women explained that they had avoided joining denominations with very strict dress codes (for instance, forbidding the wearing of pants and sleeveless clothes). Most of these women were middle-class like M. N., who told us that in her church women did not need to change their way of dressing. She also explained that this had helped her husband to accept her conversion, because he had been worried about seeing her with her hair tied in a bun and wearing a long dress as traditional Brazilian believers did. M. N. also said that she went to the beach quite often and had no problem with wearing a bikini there.

Our data confirm the conclusion of Ahaunna Scott's study on Appalachian Pentecostals that career and the consequent social mobility allow women to contest the rigid dress code.29 In most middle-class churches, restrictions regarding dress are minimal or nonexistent. For example, D. U., a twenty-six-year-old member of the Assembly of God church, was the child of a specialized manual worker with little education but had managed to become a student at a state university. There she felt peer pressure regarding her way of dressing. She told us that in her church other young people like herself debated the prohibition of bikinis and long pants, arguing that it was not in the Bible. Nevertheless, she concluded that these rules were right because "the world is looking to believers" and they had to be an example to others.

Despite these variations, Pentecostal women all stress their personal transformation. They see the solution to all their problems in their own transformation and not in the transformation of those around them-who will have to help themselves by undergoing their own personal transformation. The new individual that each must be is not the passive suffering individual of the traditional feminine role but an individual responsible for her own happiness and material achievement.

Conclusion

Pentecostalism involves individualist assumptions and values, but its individualism differs from much of liberal feminism. Through conversion, men and women alike learn to see themselves as autonomous beings responsible for their own achievement. Pentecostalism therefore alters people's conceptions of individualism and individual freedom, and this implies a transformation of the family and of gender relations. Although these new models represent an improvement in the position of women, especially in societies where machismo predominates, they fail to address the rights considered fundamental by many North and South American feminists. Pentecostalism does not embrace the kind of individualism that is at the core of the feminist project. Pentecostalism is individualistic inasmuch as it emphasizes a personal choice of faith and the possibility of changing the course of one's life. This change depends solely on one's relationship to God. The individual's choice is the key to all personal or social transformation. This belief breaks with the traditional and patriarchal worldview while increasing individual responsibility and establishing equality between genders.

At the same time, Pentecostalism's assumption that the free individual is always committed to God's law limits the individualism it fosters in granting autonomy to believers. Pentecostalism seems to adopt an intermediate position between traditional machismo and feminism, which is seen as threatening the continuity of the family that is the raison d'etre of many oppressed women. It is for this reason that Pentecostalism seems to be so appealing to women, who, upon conversion, acquire greater autonomy in relation to their husbands and families while avoiding direct confrontation. In entering the church, women are in fact seeking greater independence, but their intention is only their salvation and the salvation of their husbands and their households. According to the Pentecostal view, individuals cannot hold their own happiness as the main goal of their lives; God must be placed above all. Because of their commitment to God, Pentecostals do not adopt a modern individualism, just as they do not submissively conform to a traditional view of society.

Thus Pentecostal women no longer see men as masters they must obey. Nor, however, do they view them as oppressors they must rebel against. Rather, men are seen as victims of evil as they once were themselves, and therefore women feel responsible for their husbands and try to help them. The belief in demonic possession in everyday life relieves men of responsibility for their acts and in a certain way also legitimates women's autonomy. Deliverance from the devil – or, rather, the exorcism practiced in Pentecostal churches – contributes to the process of individualization for both men and women. Pentecostalism is able to resolve marital conflict because it redefines the relationship between the individual and evil.

Rejecting a fatalistic view of life, the Pentecostal woman no longer sees herself in the traditional role of victim and servant of her husband and family, nor does she become a rebel who fights against masculine oppression and tries to free herself from it. The Pentecostal woman, on the contrary, views herself as stronger than the masculine oppressor, who is a sinner. Because of her strength, she feels responsible for the salvation of her husband and family, as well as for their material prosperity. With their distinctive concepts of freedom and of evil, Pentecostal women do not demand sexual liberty or the right to drink alcohol, and they deny those rights to men. For the Pentecostal, the liberated individual is one who can resist temptation, not a transgressor of moral and divine laws.

Autoras: CECILIA LORETO MARIZ AND MARIA DAS DORES CAMPOS MACHADO

NOTES

1. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 104.
2. For instance, in Brazil women are in the majority in the Spiritualist religions, both Kardecist and Afro-Brazilian, as well as in the Catholic church, where women outnumber men in the charismatic-renewal movements, in the base communities, and at Sunday masses.
3. Peter Fry and Gary Howe, "Duas respostas a aflicao: Umbanda e Pentecostalismo," Debate e Critica 6 (1975), pp. 75-94.
4. In Western history, magic is also often associated with the most oppressed social classes. See, for example, Weber, The Sociology of Religion.
5. F. C. Rolim, Pentecostais no Brasil (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1985); Christian Lalive d'Epinay, O refugio das massas (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1970).
6. Elizabeth Brusco, "The Reformation of Machismo: Asceticism and Masculinity Among Colombian Evangelicals," in Virginia Garrard-Burnett and David Stoll, eds., Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), pp. 143-158; Cornelia Butler Flora, Pentecostalism in Colombia: Baptism by Fire and Spirit (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976); Maria das Dores Machado, "Charismatics and Pentecostals: A Comparison of Religiousness and Intra-family Relations within the Brazilian Middle Class," paper written for the 22nd International Conference on Religion and Society, Budapest, Hungary, July 1993, and "Adesão religiosa e seus efeitos na esfera privada: Um estudo comparativo dos Carismáticos e Pentecostais de Rio de Janeiro," Ph.D. diss., Instituto Universitario Pesquisa, Rio de Janeiro, 1994; Hanneke Slootweg, "Mujeres pentecostales chilenas," in Bárbara Boudewijnse, Frans Kamsteeg, and Andre Droogers, eds., Algo mas que opio: Una lectura del Pentecostalismo Latinoamericano y Caribeño (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones, 1991); David A. Smilde, "Gender Relations and Social Change in Latin American Evangelicalism," in Daniel Miller, ed., Coming of Age: Pentecostalism in Contemporary Latin America (Lanham, Md. University Press of America, 1994); Monica Tarducci, "Pentecostalismo y relaciones de género: Una revisión," in A. Frigerio, ed., Nuevos movimientos religiosos, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Centro Editorial de América Latina, 1993).
7. Eliane Gouveia's study is an exception. Gouveia was the first to examine the situation of women in Pentecostal churches in Brazil. Comparing women from the Congregação Crista do Brasil and Brasil para o Cristo, she concludes that both churches are patriarchal and androcentric but the former, because it is a sect rather than a church and less open to the wider society, is the more oppressive of women. In drawing this conclusion she assumes that these women were better off before conversion (outside the church) than they are now. Eliane Gouveia, "O silêncio que debe ser ouvido: Mulheres pentecostais em São Paulo," Master's thesis, Universidade Pontificia Católica de São Paulo, 1987.
8. Salvatore Cucchiari, "Between Shame and Sanctification," American Ethnologist 14, 4 (1990), pp. 607-707.
9. Tarducci, "Pentecostalismo y relaciones de género."
10. John Burdick, Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Machado, Adesão religiosa."
11. Machado, "Adesão religiosa."
12. Cecilia Mariz, Coping with Poverty: Pentecostal Churches and Christian Base Communities in Brazil (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).
13. The emphasis on family is not exclusive to Pentecostalism. On the contrary, family is a central theme for all religions, especially in contemporary society, in which religion increasingly deals with private life.
14. The empirical data we refer to in this chapter were mostly collected for two ongoing research projects carried out in Rio de Janeiro state: Cecilia Mariz and Maria das Dores Campos Machado, "Identidade, sincretismo e transito religioso: Uma comparação entre carismáticos e Pentecostais," supported by Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa and the Brazilian Research Council, 1994, and Machado, "Adesão religiosa."
15. For example, Lalive d'Epinay, O refugio das masses; Rolim, Pentecostais no Brasil.
16. David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass. Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 181.
17. Cecilia Mariz, "O mal e o demônio no discurso Pentecostal," paper presented at the Seminar on Evil, Institute Sociologico Estudos Religiosos, Rio de Janeiro, 1994.
18. Pentecostalism may therefore be an example of what Weber calls "rationalizing charisma" and what Berger claims to be a modernizing consequence of a movement with antimodernizing intentions. Peter Berger, A Fair Glory (New York: Free Press, 1992).
19. R. Stephen Warner, "Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States," American Journal of Sociology 98, 5 (1993), pp. 1044-1093.
20. Slootweg, "Mujeres pentecostales chilenas."
21. Machado, "Adesao religiosa."
22. Burdick, Looking for God in Brazil.
23. See also Cecilia Mariz, "Alcoholismo, genera e Pentecostalismo," Religiao e Sociedade 16,
3 (1994), pp. 80-93.
24. Edir Macedo, Orixas, caboclos e guias (Rio de Janeiro: Universal Producoes, 1990). 25. Machado, "Adesao religiosa."
26. See, for example, R. Alves, Protestantismo e repressao (Sao Paulo: Atica, 1982); P.Velasques Filho, "Sim a Deus e nao a vida: Conversao e disciplina no Protestantismo brasileiro," in A. G. Mendonra and P. Velasques Filho, eds., Introducao ao Protestantismo no Brasil (Sao Paulo: Edicoes Loyola, 1990).
27. Gouveia, "O silêncio que debe ser ouvido."
28. C. Gilkes, "Together and in Harness: Women's Tradition in the Sanctified Church," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10 (1985), pp. 678-699.
29. Ahuanna Scott, "They Don't Have to Live by Old Traditions: Saintly Men, Sinner Women, and an Appalachian Pentecostal Revival," American Ethnologist 21, 2 (1994), pp. 227-244.