Pentecostalism – Protestant Ethic or Cargo Cult?

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Still, there are two distinct views on how Pentecostals relate to society. David Martin, the British sociologist who has pioneered in this area since the mid-1980s (Tongues of Fire, 1990), has been proposing that Pentecostals are a new embodiment of what Max Weber called the “Protestant ethic”—a morality of self-discipline, hard work and saving—which, he argued, was an important factor in the birth of modern capitalism. The research center which I founded in 1985 at Boston University supported Martin’s early work, which focused on Latin America. I liked to give nicknames to our projects. This one I called “Max Weber is alive and well and living in Guatemala” (that country, for reasons I don’t quite understand, has the highest proportion of Pentecostals in Latin America, somewhere between one third and one half of the population). If Martin is right, Pentecostalism is a modernizing force, certainly in terms of economic behavior, possibly also as a “school for democracy”. Not least of its revolutionary qualities is the transformation it seeks in family life and the role of women—broadly speaking, toward gender equality. Bernice Martin, David’s wife and collaborator, has paid special attention to this aspect.
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The other interpretation sees Pentecostalism very differently—as a kind of “cargo cult”. This was a curious movement in Melanesia in the first half of the twentieth century. Its core belief was that ships (and, later, airplanes) would come and shower the inhabitants of those Pacific islands with all the material goods of modernity—and that magic and ritual practices could make this happen. No special effort was required by the recipients of the “cargo”, other than the faith that the magic would work—certainly not sweaty Protestant entrepreneurship. Two scholars who, cautiously, tend toward such a non-Weberian approach are Birgit Meyer in the Netherlands (Translating the Devil, 1999) and Paul Freston, who has been teaching in Brazil and North America (Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America, 2008). If that interpretation is correct, Pentecostalism is not modernizing at all—in fact, is a carry-over from a pre-modern worldview that actually inhibits modernization.
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Mormon hero, let me go grab my rattlesnake, and drink a little stricknine, and i will get back to ya! 😉 Peace
 
Both those theories seem rather fanciful and inadequate to me. There is some truth to the first, though that would hardly be unique to Pentecostalism. Calvinism is known for it too. And it seems to me that it would work at least equally well for Mormonism, which also teaches self-discipline, hard work and saving! The second theory would seem to apply mainly to the Word of Faith movement, which however is a minority subset of Pentecostalism.

My Assemblies of God (the largest Pentecostal denomination) church is just a normal Christian church, with theological roots in the Wesleyan tradition, and not cessationist. I would have to infer that Catholicism is also not cessationist, since the last two Popes have given their blessing to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal.
 
benidict said:
Mormon hero, let me go grab my rattlesnake, and drink a little stricknine, and i will get back to ya! 😉 Peace
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aww come on guys. the pentecostals that are famous for that aren’t the majority. Saying that Pentecostals play with rattlesnakes and all that is like saying Catholics worship Mary. The pentecostals that do this stuff are in the waaay minority, just like there are a few (VERY few) uniformed Catholics that are guilty of Mary worship.

Although I guess Pentecostalism can seem a bit cultish at times, the pentecostals I know are just really fervent in their love for Christ.
 
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