UC Berkeley

Drawing on 17 months of ethnographic research, Enchanting Disciplined Selves and Secular Publics examines everyday attempts of a brotherhood of charismatic Christian businessmen in Mexico to reconceive of what it means to be religious and what it means to be secular. This Christian brotherhood adopts a hybrid organizational identity that allows its members to operate on both sides of the religious/secular divide. In examining the brotherhood’s quest for a more potent relationship with the Holy Spirit than those of conventional religion the dissertation shows how a brother’s quest for experience and evidence of God’s supernatural intervention in the details of everyday life serve as a means of methodically scrutinizing, evaluating and exhorting the self. The dissertation also shows how the brotherhood’s distinction from “religion” enables brothers to make use of the meaning-laden character the “secular” to reclaim and celebrate the Christian origins of the concept. Growing numbers of scholars theorize co-constitutive relationships between the religious and the secular; this dissertation examines public actors’ attempts to wrestle with these nebulously intertwined relationships on the ground.