ABSTRACT
An incidental side-effect of the ideological dismay that has characterized much of the academic response to the growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world has been a thread of intellectual and aesthetic disdain for the movement, more particularly for the ‘bad taste’ of its Neo-Pentecostal wave. This chapter examines the rationale of this response, partly through a critique of the work of David Lehmann, arguing that while Lehmann goes some way to explaining the disdain, his own exemplification of the phenomenon he is exposing prevents him from developing a convincing analysis of the Pentecostal aesthetic. It is suggested, following Weber, that a broader perspective on the tension between ‘religions of brotherhood’ and ‘the aesthetic dimension’ repays consideration. The chapter outlines the contours of an emerging aesthetic of Latin American Pentecostalism, noting the interplay of religious, class, gender and ethnic elements in the ‘materialization’ of the movement. The analysis pays special attention to Pentecostalism’s central focus on embodied salvation, including what Diane AustinBroos calls ‘bio-moral healing’, and to expressions of three characteristic binary oppositions: control/release; inner/outer; gendered/ungendered.
