Spirit and Power: Donald Miller’s Sociology of Global Pentecostalism and Religious Markets

In 2009 the John Templeton Foundation awarded $6.9 million to Donald Miller, Executive Director, University of Southern California Center for Religion and Civic Culture, for a four-year study of global Pentecostalism.

The project, “Spirit in the World: A Global Pentecostal Research Initiative”, was described as follows on the John Templeton website.

“The Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative (PCRI) uses a competitive process to provide funding to those scholars and institutes around the world best able to contribute to understanding the dynamics of the worldwide growth of Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, with a particular focus on worship, prayer, spirit, creativity and entrepreneurial activity. It also studies Pentecostal and Charismatic religion in Los Angeles, where Pentecostalism began. Finally, the PCRI establishes a Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Archive, which is creating a global inventory of published resources on Pentecostals and Charismatic subjects, as well as builds an online digital archive of primary historical materials related to Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity from different regions of the world.”

There are numerous outcomes from the grant that can be found through the Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative website at the University of Southern California and the Center for Religion and Civic Culture.

One outcome in particular is the new book Spirit and Power: The Growth and Global Impact of Pentecostalism edited by Donald Miller, Kimon Sargeant, and Richard Flory and published by Oxford University Press (2013).

The book draws upon the expertize of well-known scholars of Pentecostalism from a variety of disciplines with fourteen chapters in seven sections: historical origins, worldwide growth, politics, social engagement, transnational dynamics, gender, and religious experience. The introduction by Donald Miller is excellent and offers the reader an overview of the main ideas that shape the volume. The conclusion by Sargeant and Flory tie the various chapters together and show how they support the theoretical assumptions of rational choice theory or religious market theory, a prominent sociological theory based on the work of Stark and Finke and the application of economic concepts to religion (see Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion and The Churching of America: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy).

There are a number of key features that make this an exceptional book. First, the volume situates the varieties of Pentecostalism within the context of religious renewal movements. Sociologically, renewal movements refer to religious innovation that reinvents religion by offering creative pathways for participants. Historically renewal movements offer unmediated access to the sacred or God through religious experience. This view argues that Pentecostalism reinvents Christianity in response to the deadening effects of institutionalization and bureaucratic religion, a standard explanation offered by many sociologists of religion.

However, the book does not resort to a simple offering of institutional dilemmas for explaining Pentecostal growth. And the focus on growth should not be missed as it fits well a religious market explanation. Religious market theory rests on a number of assumptions. First, like any commercial market, religion too can be understood as a religious economy based on a free open market of competitors, products, marketing, supply, and demand.

The argument is that when a religious market is deregulated and there is open, free competition, some religions will win and some will lose. Since the demand for religion is always high, those who grow or capture a larger share of the market are those who can meet the demand by offering a supply of religious goods and services that meet the need. Pentecostal success, therefore, is not simply about what it has to offer the religious economy but that it does so in a way that is far superior to any of its competitors. And for Miller, the one key difference is the “Spirit Factor” by which Pentecostalism is characterized.

Rational choice theory does have its critics and not just those from the old paradigm who espouse secularization theory. There are sociologists like Robert Wuthnow, Christian Smith, and Roland Robertson whose work informs cultural sociology. In contrast with market theories, cultural sociology is an interpretive approach that examines a different set of questions that would lead to a very different book on global Pentecostalism.

For example, cultural sociology would be less inclined or even concerned about accounting for Pentecostal growth in the context of market decline among some religious groups. Cultural sociology would focus on the ways in which Pentecostals narrate the world they inhabit. It would examine how that world ought to be understood and whether it should be engaged or rejected. Cultural sociology would examine the symbolic narratives Pentecostals construct to make sense of themselves and the world. Cultural sociology would focus on the lived reality of daily life among Pentecostals and how it is ritualized. A cultural approach does not preclude institutional analysis. Since religious narratives are also cultural and come to animate social institutions, researchers can explore the various ways Pentecostals come to think about their organizations in relation to other institutions like the family, politics, health, and economics. 

This is not to say that Spirit and Power fails as a volume. Rather, what it means is that while this book has much to offer, it is rooted in a theoretical framework based on a set of questions that leads to specific answers. Questions raised by other theoretical analyses like cultural sociology will lead to other descriptions and explanations of global Pentecostalism.