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Years of skilful interviewing by David Smilde of the men in two churches in dangerous parts of Caracas, Venezuela, conducted during the period just before Chavez, confirm what investigations have shown from Kingston, Jamaica, to Accra, Ghana, and points east. Evangelical, charismatic, and in particular Pentecostal Christianity offers visions and revisions of lives changed for good, spiritually, morally and (so far as may be, given the changes and chances of life) materially. Of course, some fall by the way, because things don't to work out as hoped, or else they are pulled back into old ways by boon companions. Most encounter experiences which try them "as gold in the fire," and getting right with God may turn out easier than getting right with a wife or partner. All the same, there is enough evidence of some betterment affecting all the interlinked dimensions of life to vindicate Providence in the eyes of believers rather than the influence of fortuna and fate. Even when sorely tried, Pentecostals turn to ancient, indeed biblical, ways of searching out the ways of God: for example, that he is teaching his children through adversity, that his ways are not as their ways, that their way of life has somehow been displeasing in his sight, and that the goods of this world corrupt our treasure in heaven.
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Smilde describes his work as ethnography, which I find rather problematic, given the absence of the "surrounds" needed to set off the specific character of the group (or groups) under scrutiny. Certainly we are offered lively accounts of the workings of the two churches selected for study, Emmanuel and Raise Your Voice to the Lord, and of the way Pentecostal evangelicals confront the trials of everyday life. These may involve the mockery of friends and the pull of old associates, or pressure from close members of the family, or confrontations with violent and murderous men in a macho culture of honor and feud. Smilde shows, once again, how Pentecostal strategies of survival both entail social costs and offer an understood way out of the spirals of reciprocal violence. He gives us moving examples of Pentecostal eloquence in (for example) open-air sermons, and, by acute questioning, he elicits remarkably thoughtful responses about how first getting right with God enables men to realize their "better selves" through (on balance) betterment all round.
Smilde also provides an account of the economic and social crises that hit Venezuela, above all in the "popular sectors," in the last two decades of the 20th century, after decades of rising prosperity based on oil revenues. A period of rising expectations, disfigured by a clientelist mode of distribution, was followed by a decline, characterized by degrees of corruption that made an objectively bad situation even worse. This was the period of the evangelical (mostly Pentecostal) takeoff, later than elsewhere in Latin America (except Argentina), so that evangelicals now make up about 5 percent of a population of over twenty million. It was also a period of mobilization undertaken by various groups, including evangelical Pentecostals, such as El Clamor por Venezuela, analyzed in an earlier work by Smilde but omitted here, even in the bibliography. What Smilde does offer is a tale of several cities thrown up by the socio-economic developments he graphically sets out. These comprise the long faded remnants of a disorganized colonial society and fractured Church, the monuments of a triumphant liberal anti-clericalism, the rapidly fading "modern" city of the oil boom, the gleaming postmodern city of global capital, and the vast "informal city" of the marginalized and impoverished, dotted with outposts of evangelical Pentecostalism.
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