It is the 3pm exorcism at the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God on the
Avenida Brigadeiro Luís Antônio in São Paulo. The air is sticky and the
afternoon has a lazy siesta feel. Middle-class Paulistas drift into the
cool, calm church, which, with its comfortable seats, sparkling granite
floor and raised stage, has a very American feel, more like the in-house
conference centre of a decent-sized multinational than a place of worship.
Most of them are women, some with children. There are plenty of shopping
bags. The 3pm exorcism seems to be squeezed in between the school run, the
laundry and the groceries.
The preacher, Pastor Eginaldo, wearing a white shirt and slacks, asks people
to bring forward trinkets belonging to loved ones whose souls are in
torment. The congregation sings a hymn — and hands are raised. Pastor
Eginaldo talks about the rudimentary problems of life — these demons cannot
be driven out by going to the hospital, he says. Then all the people in the
church link hands in a huge circle. They close their eyes. Pastor Eginaldo
lays his hands on people’s heads, willing the evil spirits out of them.
There are ripples of great trauma. A woman in a pink T- shirt collapses,
writhing, screaming. Some of the helpers are a bit aggressive: they order
people who open their eyes to shut them. But their main job is to catch
people who fall over when the pastor cries out, “Leave in the name of
Jesus!”
Pentecostalism is growing like crazy in Latin America, where it has shattered
the Roman Catholic Church’s monopoly of religion. According to the World
Christian Database, there are now 24 million Pentecostal Christians in
Brazil, compared with 5.7 million in the United States.
But if you want to see the full power of Pentecostalism there is only one
place to go: David Cho’s Yoido Full Gospel Church. For most people the word
“megachurch” summons up an image of a Wal-Mart-sized spiritual supermarket
in the American suburbs. In fact, five of the world’s ten biggest
megachurches are in South Korea. Yoido, the largest of them, sits opposite
the national assembly in Seoul, an astute piece of political positioning,
akin to Westminster Abbey. It looks somewhat unprepossessing — a brownish
blob surrounded by offi ce buildings — but Yoido boasts 830,000 members; one
in 20 people in Seoul is a member. Each of the seven Sunday services at
Yoido is a logistical challenge: apart from the 12,000 people in the main
sanctuary, another 20,000 follow the service on television in overflow
chapels scattered around neighbouring buildings. As one service begins and
the next ends, around 60,000 comers and goers are ushered by whitejacketed
traffic directors. The mother church beams pictures of the service to
hundreds of satellite churches around the world and to Prayer Mountain, a
gruelling religious camp close to the border with the North.
By the standards of American preachers, Cho is a remarkably restrained figure:
with his glasses, tie and tidy red cassock, he looks like one of the more
bureaucratic kinds of Asian politician. His tone is logical and unrelenting.
Sin and Satan are omnipresent, he argues, but if you ignore their
enticements, “your grave is already empty”. As he cites scripture, the
passages appear on the big television screens. Cho urges the liberation of
North Korea, and cites Ted Haggard as the man who drove out demons in
Colorado Springs by exorcising the telephone book. (Sadly, it seems that the
devil who drove Haggard to buy sex and drugs from a male prostitute was not
listed.) The Yoido Church’s whole culture is deeply American. Most of the
praying and converting is done at home, in groups of around a dozen people.
The idea is that these cells, like their biological equivalents, will
multiply. Yoido sends out six hundred missionaries a year. One target is
North Korea, which used to be the more Christian end of the country. (Locals
still talk stirringly of the Pyongyang Revival in 1907, which supposedly
hooked Kim Jong-il’s grandmother). Plans already exist at Yoido to build a
second sanctuary in Pyongyang, as well as 40 other churches.
In their different ways, Pastors Eginaldo and David Cho reflect three things:
the global spread of American-style religion in general, and Pentecostalism
in particular; the push by evangelical Protestants into politics; and the
way that global religion is a two-way street, with American- style
Christianity spreading to the developing world and then developingworld
Christianity returning to America.
Pentecostalism is the great religious success story of the 20th century. It is
not just spreading in Asia and Latin America: in large swaths of Africa
Pentecostalism is expanding faster than Islam. It is also expanding twice as
fast as Roman Catholicism, and three times as fast as other forms of
Protestantism in Africa. The evidence of this can be seen everywhere in the
developing world: from churches the size of football stadiums across Latin
America to 12,000-acre “redemption camps” in Nigeria. Across the world fiery
preachers are delivering the same message: live your life according to God’s
law, read the Bible as the literal word of Truth, watch out for miracles and
wonders and, above all, prepare yourself for the end of history and the
beginning of the millennium.
The success of Pentecostalism is a strange mixture of unflinching belief and
pragmatism, raw emotion and self-improvement, improvisation and
organisation: like all marketing successes, Pentecostalism owes some of its
success to its ability to adapt itself to local traditions, but it is
nevertheless a very American product.
Pat Robertson, a Southern Baptist who has always been close to Pentecostals,
has been more influential in Africa and Latin America than back home. In
1990 Robertson flooded Guatemala, a favorite evangelical stomping ground,
with “Proyecto Luz” (“Project Light”), launched from his Christian
Broadcasting Network. He reached 60 per cent of Guatemalan homes with
televisions, and galvanized thousands of Pentecostal churches. He also flew
to Guatemala City in 1982 to embrace Ríos Montt, a Pentecostal, after his
coup, and raised millions to support his regime in “Operation Love Lift”.
Korea was converted by American missionaries. Cho started his career as a
translator for Samuel Todd, an American Assemblies of God faith healer, who
staged a revival tour of South Korea in the 1950s. He founded Yoido in 1956
in a battered tent that he bought from the Marine Corps for $50.
In Guatemala, they have just finished the largest building in Central America.
Like Yoido, Mega Frater (Big Brother) is not ashamed of its American roots:
it boasts a 12,000-seater church, a vast baptism pool, and a heliport. The
road to the church is called “Burger King Drive”.
You can also see this Americanness in the Pentecostals’ determination to reach
as many people as possible. While the Catholic Church sticks to Spanish in
Mexico and Guatemala, Protestants use indigenous languages. The Pentecostals
also use the talents of all the people — especially women. For years, Cho’s
right-hand woman was his mother-in-law, Jashil Choi, a figure known as
“Hallelujah Mama”. Today Yoido boasts 62,580 female deacons — more than
twice the number of male ones.
There is also a very American emphasis on worldly success and upward mobility.
In Brazil Bishop Edir Macedo advertises his church as a place where the
faithful are rewarded for their sacrifices, usually of a financial kind.
“The church of results” will reward them for their 10 percent not just in
the next world but in this one. Those little envelopes are “investments”.
The bookshops of the megachurches are full of books by management gurus. The
churches exude a boundless confidence in the power of self-help and smart management.
The business model works: 44 per cent of church donations in Brazil come
from Pentecostals, only 31 per cent from the more numerous Catholics.
Harold Caballeros, the pastor of El Shaddai Ministries, a huge outfit in
Guatemala, argues that Pentecostalism can lift his country out of poverty by
two strategies: teaching individuals to be sober and thrifty (he turned to
religion when he was 17 after a period when he drank too much) and teaching
officials to abandon corruption. He points to the role that Protestantism
played in creating modern institutions in America and to the role that
Pentecostalism played in supercharging economic growth in South Korea.
The same force that shaped American religion for centuries is shaping
Christianity in both Latin America and Korea — the embrace of the free
market and individual choice. In Brazil and Guatemala there are hundreds of
smaller religious entrepreneurs. (“We have to work against the competition
as well as the devil,” says one young preacher.) And there is also a
fight-back by the Catholic Church. Having lost worshippers at a rate of 1
per cent a year since 1991, mainly to Pentecostal churches, Rome is finally
responding. That has meant getting rid of a lot of liberation theology; and
also imitating the Pentecostals. Brazil’s most famous priest is now Marcelo
Rossi, a former physical-education teacher who has been known to perform
aerobics during his services.
© John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge 2009.
Extracted from God is Back (£25, Penguin Books). To order it for
£22.50 inc p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit
timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
