UC Santa Cruz

ABSTRACT

William Girard

Enacting Pentecostalism: Spirit-Filled Development and the Honduran Coup d'État

This dissertation explores how Pentecostal Christians in the small town of Copán Ruinas, Honduras strive to remake both individual subjectivities and the national body as part of a drive towards development and modernization. In the process, these Spirit-filled Christians, which today make up as much as 35% of the Honduran population, fuse what are conventionally regarded as distinct religious and secular formations. The resulting politically charged practices and imaginaries draw on, but also significantly transform, long-standing and interwoven regional discourses of nationalism, progress, and race/ethnicity. Those engaged in this Pentecostal project also work to draw to their pastors the trust that is more commonly given to the state or translocal non-governmental organizations to develop the nation. The dissertation argues that this Pentecostal program is part of a far broader project of neoliberal governance, and that it is brought into being through the two types of power Foucault described as constitutive of modern life: discipline and security.

The hybrid and explicitly political nature of this Pentecostal project came into sharp focus after the June 28th 2009 Honduran coup, the first successful coup in Latin America since the end of the Cold War. In response to the coup, these Christians engaged in their own form of geopolitics, which aimed at defeating the deposed Leftist president, Manuel Zelaya, and the malicious demons they understood to be his allies. These efforts included praying to God to purify Honduras, imploring angels to defend the country's borders, carrying out "spiritual warfare," and currying favor with Israel, which they envision to be God's most beloved country.

Investigating this secular/religious project required that I not explore Pentecostalism as a discrete entity or imagine it as a preestablished whole, but rather that I trace how a range of modalities (forms of knowledge production, practices, sensibilities, technologies, texts, objects, and discourses) come together within diverse "enactments" of Pentecostalism. This perspective allowed me to identify the ways in which Pentecostals transform ostensibly secular projects of governance as they bring together previously disparate entities.