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But what is not covered of the "surrounds" is really rather astonishing. Smilde notes that Venezuela was regarded as one of the more "secular" among the Latin American countries, though not as militantly so as Uruguay. That secularity overlay an inspirited religious landscape of syncretic folk Catholicism. Yet this landscape only emerges sideways through evangelical accounts of it. Smilde notes that the sense of the holy attached to the Bible and the Divine offers a slipway for movements of evangelical conversion, so that what evangelicalism provides is a near-optimum relation between similarity and difference. That apart, the Catholic Church remains undiscussed. Other work on Venezuelan evangelicalism is ignored, and even the Neo-Pentecostalism of the middle classes only appears marginally by way of contrast.

Given that Smilde's investigation approximates ethnography rather than any other genre, his range of comparative ethnographic reference with regard to a vast literature directly relevant to his concerns, is minute. The same is true of work on Pentecostal women, though it is obviously relevant for his specific analysis of Pentecostal men. I also find it surprising that he passes up the opportunity for comparative comment on the specific Venezuelan case, for example the parallel late emergence of interdenominational charismatic Christianity in Argentina. Of course, ethnography does not have to be comparative, except that Smilde makes selective raids on the comparative literature to make theoretical, and indeed injurious, polemical points that tell us as much about academic culture and the exigencies of survival in academia as they tell us about the culture of Pentecostalism. My hunch is that this literature has mostly been left unread, given the alternative explanations are worse: misunderstanding (which is unlikely, since Smilde is clearly highly intelligent) or misrepresentation at others' expense in order to clear a space for his own interpretations.

Smilde describes himself, a little oddly, at least in British academic terms, as a "trained" philosopher, and this training is deployed on issues in the area of "theory," especially rational choice. Theory provides the axes of the book and far too much of the bibliography. Much fascinating material is shredded through the kind of discourse that keeps professional journals in business: this is our most obvious déformation professionelle. Too many sociologists and social psychologists produce sharply angled theoretical takes on life as lived, especially religious life, based on reified alternatives. In Smilde's analysis these alternatives include instrumental action and non-instrumental action, contemplative and calculating, self-interest and mutuality, culture and structure, moral order and empowerment, agency and non-agency. He also exerts himself on the reified and mistaken dichotomy that contrasts the symbolic, figurative and generalized orientations held to be characteristic of religion, with the practical and concrete approaches of the mundane.

I am vividly reminded of the academic industry of New Testament criticism. Sociologists compulsively revisit the sites of older excavations to reconfigure them according to the most recent illuminations. What Smilde aims to reconfigure is a contrast between an interpretive schema stressing the rationality of conversion as a life-strategy and one stressing its "imaginative" character, in the pejorative sense: invented, unreal entities like the Devil or God. This affords him opportunity to produce the mediating concept of "imaginative rationality," based on a pragmatic understanding of truth as what works in practice. Though obvious, this happens to make good sense of evangelical Pentecostals as "agents" envisaging a better life through the prism of divine agency. It takes a sociologist triumphantly to arrive back at the obvious. It also takes a sociologist, or perhaps a literary theorist, solemnly to explain that a narrative of conversion involves temporality, that is, one thing following another in time. Again, though Smilde makes good use of network analysis, any lay person who has an addict in the family knows about the role of significant others in constraining an addict to continue or enabling him or her to discontinue. And there really is no problem about combining network analysis with a search for meaning.

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