THE CHARISMATIC GIFT

Simon Coleman

University of Durham

Drawing on ethnographic analysis of a Swedish-based body of conservative Protestantsknown as the ‘Word of Life’, this article argues that certain forms of charismatic givingare orientated towards extending aspects of the ‘inner’ self beyond cultural and physicalboundaries. The notion of a ‘charismatic gift’ in the Christian (and Weberian) sense of aquality of authoritative inspiration is linked to a Maussian concept of the gift as break-ing down distinctions between persons as well as between persons and objects.

Mauss’s The gift (1990) is almost eighty years old but remains a rich sourceof ideas on the dynamic construction of social order, the connections betweenpersons and things, and the political nature of self-interest. Much of the work’sappeal to anthropologists may well lie in what Silber (1998: 136) sees as itshalf-nostalgic, half-utopian tone, together with its attack on utilitarianism andits implied suggestion that the transactions making up human life, includingthose of modern society, can sometimes retain strong elements of interper-sonal connection and mutual responsibility. The Maussian gift may containelements of poison and self-interested strategizing as part of its variable blend-ing of obligation and liberty (cf. Raheja 1988), but its importance for soli-darity takes on new significance in a world where, in one version of Mauss’svision (1990: 65), everything might one day be categorized in terms of theanonymous ‘morality’ of the market.

I draw on anthropological notions of the gift to analyse a religious move-ment whose adherents’ activities invoke the fertile ambiguities evident inMauss’s text. One of the most dynamic features in the world-wide growth ofconservative, charismatic Protestantism over the past thirty years has been therapid spread of one particularly vocal form of born-again Christianity, the so-called ‘Prosperity Gospel’, which is also widely referred to as the ‘Faith Gospel’(Coleman 2000). My focus in this study is a single Faith ministry which wasfounded in Sweden in the early 1980s, and which has proved to be a partic-ularly active disseminator of Prosperity teachings both within and beyondScandinavia.

To observers accustomed to more conventional forms of Western Christianity, adherents of the Prosperity Gospel would seem to display highlyanomalous and perplexing attitudes towards the construction of religious com-munity. Bromley and Busching (1988: 15) draw a distinction between ‘con-tractual’ and ‘covenantal’ social relations in order to point out that manycontroversies over new religions in the West have involved structural conflicts

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2004.J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 10, 421-442

between the two. Covenantal relations characterize families, clans, and con-ventional religious groups, articulating a logic of moral involvement and long-term mutual obligation (1988: 16-18). Contracts invoke a pragmatic,short-term logic of calculative strategy and promotion of self-interest. Bromleyand Busching’s ‘types’ recall post-Maussian distinctions between gifts andcommodities.1 However, conservative Protestantism challenges ideologicalboundaries erected (often stereotypically) in the West between covenantal andcontractual spheres of social exchange, while rejecting the antithesis betweenworldly bondage and transcendent liberation that is usually assumed to becharacteristic of salvation religions.2

These points can be illustrated with reference to two examples. First, anarticle in the British newspaper, The guardian,3 of 1999 pictures the Americantelevision evangelist, Pat Robertson, alongside the headline: ‘I found God, thenI found $200 Million’, and – in response to speculation that Robertson hadbeen or was going to be invited to act as a financial consultant in the UnitedKingdom – goes on to question the appropriateness of a man of God playingan important role in the British banking system. The argument is not thatRobertson should avoid either preaching or giving financial advice, but thattheir two distinct moralities should remain separate from one another. Sec-ondly, in her analysis of donations to the Revd Jerry Falwell’s televangelicalministry, Harding (Harding 2000: 105) challenges the widely held idea thatdonors are the dupes of venal swindlers with a gift for seductive religiousrhetoric; she proposes instead that their gifting should be seen as a knowl-edgeable and active form of sacrificial offering: ‘The whole point of givingto a God-led ministry is to vacate the commercial economy and to enteranother realm, a Christ-centered gospel, or sacrificial, economy in whichmaterial expectations are transformed.’ Falwell’s task is to present his ministryas worthy of such giving (2000: 109), converting the symbolism of moneyinto forms that invoke ‘the Blood of the Lamb’ and the sense that all giftsultimately go to God. Giving can actually derive added meaning from a sur-rounding hermeneutic of suspicion (2000: 124).The leap of faith that it entailsasserts the possibility of transfiguring monetary donations from earthly todivine purposes. Falwell’s ministry indicates that anthropological conceptionsof market relations and motivations, even when applied to ‘the West’, call fora more nuanced approach reflecting the distinctive ways in which a particu-lar sub-culture may generate its own distinctive understandings of the mate-rial and the economic (cf. Parkin 1993: 86).4

The Prosperity/Faith movement brings debates over the connectionsbetween Protestantism and economic action into particularly sharp focus.The roots of the movement lie, in part, within North American spiritualrevivals of the post-Second-World-War period which placed particularemphasis on speaking in tongues, belief in scriptural inerrancy, and the powerof the Holy Spirit, together with teachings focusing on themes of healing andmaterial plenty (Hollinger 1991). A key subsequent development was thefoundation in 1974 of Kenneth Hagin’s Rhema Bible Training Center in Tulsa,Oklahoma, which has attracted aspiring Faith preachers from around theworld.5 The Revd Hagin, who died in September 2003 aged 86, was a formerPentecostal preacher who became regarded as the founder of the Faith Move-ment, not least because of the success of his teaching of other pastors. The

422 SIMON COLEMAN

Center’s website,6 accessed in October 2003, stated that: ‘RHEMA is all aboutone thing. Our purpose is to help usher in the last great move of God’s Spiritand the Second Coming of Christ.’ The training of believers to go out andmissionize throughout the world clearly fits such a purpose and, having com-pleted their studies, graduates of Hagin’s Center have often returned to theirhome countries in order to start up their own ministries, using the TulsaCenter as a model. In thirteen cases, spread throughout Africa, Asia, LatinAmerica, and Europe, Training Centers have been set up which are explicitoffshoots of that of Tulsa. A more common model, however, is for ministriesto be established that are ostensibly independent, but which invite AmericanFaith preachers to their conferences and/or sell Faith products. Today, large,though usually loosely knit, groups of Faith adherents can be found in almostevery part of the world, most notably in North America but also in urbanareas of South and West Africa, South Korea, Singapore, and certain regionsof both Latin America and Europe (cf. Martin 2002). A high proportion ofadherents are educated people from backgrounds that can be broadly definedas middle class, but the Prosperity Gospel also attracts significant numbers ofdisadvantaged people for whom Faith teachings provide a potent vision ofpersonal, or sometimes collective, transformation and empowerment.7 Bothsets of interests are served by ideological contexts where the excitements ofinternationalism are stressed (Gifford 1998: 83).

While some commentators have seen the Faith movement’s preachers aslittle more than missionaries of American capitalism (Brouwer, Gifford & Rose1996), others have employed an approach which focuses on the local context,concentrating on those who embrace and adapt them to their own needs andaspirations. Martin (2002: 66-8) argues that such appropriations may reflectother forms of affinity, such as those between the Prosperity Gospel andAfrican or Amerindian traditions that emphasize the miraculous and the mate-rial.8 Significant differences of approach among local Faith leaders have alsobeen noted. For example, Gifford (1998: 82-3) contrasts the teachings of twoGhanaian Prosperity preachers. One, Nicholas Duncan-Williams, emphasizesthe immutable principle of reaping that which one has sown; the other, MensaOtabil, tends to focus on self-confidence and black pride, themes which con-trast significantly with the apolitical and individualist salvation message thatGifford sees as characterizing Faith ideology in many of its American variants.

Despite, or perhaps even because of, its success in attracting adherents, theFaith Gospel has been subjected to virulent criticism in many parts of theworld. In Western countries particularly, its leaders and adherents are often dismissed by outsiders as ‘Junk Jesus’ merchants, whose Christianity has beendenatured by the forces of an increasingly secularized world which has con-taminated popular religion with the overspill of its commoditized and morallydubious tastes and values. Any researcher seeking to challenge such assump-tions has to grapple with the fact that such high-profile Faith personalities asthe American preacher Jim Bakker would appear to have manifested many ofthose negative qualities which have been widely associated with the materi-alist ethos of the Prosperity Gospel; Bakker himself served a prison sentencefor financial fraud.Yet, rather than accepting simplistic stereotypes of the Faithtradition as a kind of Christian kitsch, my aim is to explore the Faith economy

SIMON COLEMAN 423

of salvation from a perspective that focuses on the exchange practices of asingle ministry located in Sweden.What I seek to show is that sacralized trans-actions carried out by these Faith Christians can be fruitfully assessed from aperspective focusing on constructions of the born-again person which chal-lenge Western concepts of the bounded, autonomous social actor (cf. Busby1997). Certain forms of charismatic giving among Faith Christians are ori-entated towards extending aspects of the ‘inner’ self beyond cultural and physi-cal boundaries, thus suggesting the possibility of the mutual interpenetrationof believing persons.These transactions are expressions of a wider aesthetic ofcharismatic motion and embodied orientation that involves ‘reaching out’9

into the world, establishing connections between the human subject and formsof sacralized objectification – between ‘a material economy of things and amoral economy of persons’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 1990: 196). Bodily gestureand the gift, together with material transactions and the charismatic habitus,are all mutually implicated in this manifestation of Faith ideology and prac-tice (cf. James 1998).10 The notion of ‘spiritual gift’ in the Christian (andWeberian)11 sense of an authoritative quality of inspiration attached to thebeliever can thereby be linked to a Maussian concept of the gift as breakingdown two forms of distinction: those differentiating persons, and those dis-tinguishing persons from objects.

My aim here is to place an ethnographic and analytical nail in the coffinof what McDannell (1995: 6) calls the Puritan model of religious historiogra-phy.The influence of this approach is evidenced in Harding’s need to presentsacrificial economics as something other than naive submission to religioushucksterism; its adherents locate ‘authentic’ Western religious practice indisdain for material culture and economic exchange, thus disregarding thematerialist trend that is constitutively evident in Protestant forms of worship.McDannell notes (1995: 6): ‘If we immediately assume that whenever moneyis exchanged religion is debased, then we will miss the subtle ways that peoplecreate and maintain spiritual ideals through the exchange of goods and theconstruction of spaces.’ Faith Christians in Sweden combine the articulationof face-to-face interpersonal bonds with forms of self-consciously globalizing,para-social distanciation, aided by transfers of monetary resources (describedbelow) together with the extensive use of electronic media to communicatethat message and publicize their activities. Such media contribute to a charis-matic economy of sacralized images and words that create ambiguouslydefined and imagined spatio-temporal landscapes of Christian agency.The tra-versing of distance lends an enchantment to goods, media images, and evenpeople, but also raises the question of what kinds of reciprocity can be formedin contexts of virtual interaction.

The economics of faith

Weber’s The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (1930) focuses on wealthproduction rather than consumption: his Calvinists abhor self-indulgent enjoy-ment of possessions. Yet industrial capitalism entailed the emergence of anapparently paradoxical consumer culture, with, ideally, the secularized entre-preneur acting as ascetic producer by day, and conspicuous consumer by night

424 SIMON COLEMAN

(Bell 1978; Carrier 1995: 2-3). The mass-marketing of religious goods byProtestants can be traced at least as far back as the nineteenth century, whenVictorian domestic piety generated a high demand for oleographs, religioustexts, and other manufactured items (McDannell 1995). In Anglo-AmericanProtestant settings, religious objects were defended as acting, like the Bible, asmeans of channelling God’s message to the individual (thus avoiding RomanCatholic ‘idolatry’).

The great nineteenth-century American religious movements which cameto be known as revivals were founded on explicitly rational principles of effi-ciency; partly through their influence there was a generalized shift amongAmerican Protestants from Calvinist notions of predestination to Arminianforms of Christian self-conception. As this new American religious traditiontook root, the country’s widely shared evangelical optimism became closelybound up with ideas of Manifest Destiny and also with notions of both thenation’s boundaries and its markets as being unlimited and forever expanding.After the Second World War, the teachings of American Protestant revivalismbecame even more closely intertwined with commodity logic. In 1954 theAmerican charismatic preacher, Oral Roberts,12 formulated the concept of the‘Blessing-Pact’, according to which anyone who pledged $100 to Roberts’sministry was promised a refund if a like sum did not come back to the donorin the form of a gift from an unexpected source within one year (Barron1987: 62-3). Twenty years later, Roberts propounded a new notion, that of‘seed faith’. The idea in this case was that the Old Testament form of dona-tion, the tithe, was to be replaced with a form rooted in the ideas of the NewTestament: one would give and expect to receive an expanded blessing inreturn.13

Versions of this Prosperity message are now widely propagated by televi-sion evangelists both within and beyond the United States. Its proponents have created highly organized commercial networks which ostensibly exist in the public arena but are in fact patronized primarily by those who havealready embraced the Faith Gospel. Faith Christianity has become a hugelyimportant player in this world of globalizing conservative Protestant markets.Most of the larger Faith organizations are based around seminaries that train pastors but also produce and market a profusion of spiritually upliftinggoods such as video- and audiotapes of services and autobiographies ofpreachers.

Faith theology, at least in its Western forms, combines Pentecostal healingrevivalism (Barron 1987) with nineteenth-century American New ThoughtMetaphysics,14 according to which the conscious mind cannot fully compre-hend Divine Truth. Faith Christianity thus involves practices which have longbeen widespread among the many variants of American spiritual revivalism,15

most notably speaking in tongues (inspired utterance or glossolalia), dancingin the spirit, faith healing, and participation in emotionally charged massrallies.These activities are all informed by the conviction that, through domin-ion over consciousness, one may fully develop the potential of one’s innatespirituality. By giving tongue, that is, by making the utterances known as ‘posi-tive confessions’, the believer externalizes the power of the inner, spiritual selfand therefore gains power over physical reality. Faith adherents claim an agencythat is simultaneously divine in origin and emergent from the human believer.

SIMON COLEMAN 425

As we shall see, such a view contributes to the creation of a charismaticeconomy of exchange involving people, words, and objects.

‘God’s capitalism’: the Faith movement in Sweden

The Word of Life (Livets Ord) was founded in 1983 on the outskirts of Uppsalaby Ulf Ekman, a young priest in the Swedish (Lutheran) Church and a grad-uate of Hagin’s Training Center. After taking a theology course at UppsalaUniversity, Ekman had made a name for himself in the city as an energeticstudent-priest. He had also married Birgitta Nilsson, daughter of Sten Nilsson,a well-known Methodist pastor and missionary in India. Ekman claims that itwas his father-in-law who introduced him to Hagin’s preaching, and thus tothe possibility of studying in the United States in 1981-2. Having returnedto Sweden and given up his priesthood, Ekman soon found himself at thecentre of an intense national debate in the course of which his fledgling organization was widely condemned as unchristian and un-Swedish.The newministry was the target of a virulent threefold critique. From a political perspective, Ekman and his followers were denounced for a supposedly sinis-ter lack of ties or commitment to any local community structures; they werealso alleged to have connections with various forms of right-wing politicalextremism and to be dangerously out of step with the mainstream Swedishchurches’ long-standing accommodation with Social Democracy.The ministrywas also widely denounced on psychological grounds: the charge here wasthe systematic brainwashing of potential recruits, especially among the young.In economic terms, it was reviled as a network of hucksters involved in thesystematic fleecing of susceptible dupes, and the press even dubbed Ekman‘God’s capitalist’. The controversy surrounding the group has often made itdifficult for researchers, most of them theologians and therefore regarded asinherently ‘critical’, to gain the confidence of its members. My own fieldworkin Uppsala began with a fifteen-month stay between 1986 and 1987, and Ihave made three shorter subsequent research trips. After an initial conversa-tion with the congregation’s second pastor,16 I was permitted to attend Wordof Life events as long as I did not interfere with the group’s mission, andtherefore came to be regarded by Faith adherents as being generally support-ive of their ministry without actually being a member.17

In my initial period of fieldwork with Word of Life adherents, I also under-took participant observation among the one-thousand-strong membership ofthe local Pentecostal church; my aim was to observe relations between thetwo organizations. I soon found that much of what seems culturally anom-alous and hard to account for in the practices of Word of Life adherents canbe understood as both an invocation and a transformation of the Pentecostalistspiritual repertoire, most notably its key staples of radical conversion, biblicalliteralism, and speaking in tongues. In its own early days in the early twenti-eth century, Swedish Pentecostalism had been vilified in much the same termsas the Word of Life; it too was denounced as a dangerous movement foster-ing unseemly displays of ecstatic fervour and endangering social stability byengendering splits in established churches. Nevertheless, Pentecostalism rapidlyacquired a substantial following, not least among working-class Swedes;

426 SIMON COLEMAN

following the Second World War it experienced large-scale institutionalgrowth. Its extensive holdings now include a daily newspaper, a publishinghouse, and a television production company. Today, with some ninety thou-sand adherents, the Swedish Pentecostal movement has lost its suspect repu-tation and is now widely regarded as a conventional mainstream Christianorganization.18 It is far more ecumenical in orientation than in its early yearsand its economic and media interests have become largely taken-for-grantedfeatures of the religious and social landscape in Sweden.

In the manner of other revivalist Protestants around the world, Pentecostalleaders regularly ask themselves whether their once-radical movement hasbecome complacent and overly respectable, so that the Word of Life’s freneticactivities uncomfortably remind them of a fervour which they appear to havelost. Given the lack of co-operation on the part of Word of Life leaders, it isdifficult to gain reliable demographic data on followers.19 However, the min-istry’s leaders and followers were often brought up in the Church of Swedenor in Pentecostalist congregations (Skog 1993: 94-6), and so the accusation of‘poaching’ members from established congregations – fuelled partly by therapid growth of the ministry’s congregation at least in its first decade – hasoften been levelled at the new group.Yet the real issue here is not so muchwhether the Word of Life movement has been growing at the expense ofother Christian organizations, but a much more fundamental set of concernsabout its basic ethos. As in other countries where the Prosperity Gospel hastaken root, Swedish Faith Christians tend to be younger than their Pentecostalcounterparts, and also less avowedly ascetic in behaviour and attitude.Althoughthey are enthusiastic about ‘mission’, by which they mean energetic prosely-tizing, most Swedish Pentecostalists are still committed to the notion of the‘local congregation’, a self-governing body sustained by ties of kinship andclose fellowship. Membership of congregations is expressed by tithing but,despite the success of the movement’s banking activities and other enterprises,money plays only a small part in its congregational discourse. In contrast, theWord of Life juxtaposes a congregation of over two thousand members witha plethora of functions centred upon rapid movements of people, goods, andimages throughout Scandinavia and beyond. In addition, it runs possibly thelargest Bible school in Europe – boasting, as of May 2003, more than eightthousand graduates from eighty countries – a university affiliated to that ofOral Roberts, a media business, and an extensive missionary operation. Officesand affiliated Bible schools have also been established in Britain, Australia, theUnited States, and eastern Europe.

While the core participants in weekly services are likely to be congrega-tion members, who are either baptized into the group or are former affiliatesfrom another Church, members of other Swedish congregations, includingPentecostalists, sometimes attend because they see the Word of Life as pro-viding spiritual resources that are unavailable in traditional Churches. In thissense, affiliation can have a fluid, voluntary character. In Faith terms, therevivalist ideology of Protestant Nonconformity is being given new life,demonstrating its power through its popularity and dissemination of practicesthat transcend the trappings of place and history. An example of how suchthinking is reflected in believers’ aspirations was provided by Lena, a youngwoman who had left her Baptist congregation in southern Sweden to study

SIMON COLEMAN 427

at the Word of Life Bible school, and who at the time of my interview withher wanted to start her own congregation. Lena felt ‘stifled’ (begränsad: liter-ally, ‘bounded’) in her old church and wanted to establish a congregationwhere members could try out new ideas and be less embarrassed about talkingabout money. This sense of attempting to break down limitations at personaland congregational levels is common in Swedish Faith discourse. Somemembers of the group expressed the idea to me by appealing to a well-knowntrope in Swedish popular culture, the so-called ‘Jante-Law’.20 This stereotypeof Swedish personhood, which my informants held to be characteristic of asocial-welfare state, states: ‘Du skall inte tro att du är någon’, which can beroughly translated as: ‘Don’t think you’re anything special. Be like everyoneelse.’ Participation in ‘Faith-orientated’ activities – services, conferences, found-ing congregations, mission, as well as personal economic enterprises – is per-ceived as resisting the stultifying implications of remaining within the religiousand cultural mainstream. Another believer, who worked as both a pastor anda business adviser in Stockholm, noted that both activities provided means of‘releasing resources into God’s kingdom’, and added that such a combinationwas already established in the United States. In other words,America was seenas a context where the boundaries between ostensibly religious and economicactivities could be dissolved, so that the idea of a businessman-pastor (or, onemight add, a television evangelist advising a bank) would be nothing out ofthe ordinary.

If the Word of Life reminds more established Nonconformist denomina-tions that their revivalist fires have cooled, the anxieties which this generatesdo not really explain the deep alarm and enmity that the group has arousedover the last twenty years. Many writers (e.g. Milner 1990) have commentedon the characteristics of the so-called ‘Swedish model’ of society, combiningcorporate capitalism with extensive public services and relatively low levels ofincome inequality. One of the key ideological underpinnings of the Swedishwelfare state has been the notion of the folkhem (‘people’s home’), idealizingsocial and economic equality. As both a symptom and a cause of such appar-ent consensus one can point to the success of the Social Democratic party inkeeping an almost-unbroken hold on power since 1932, but also to the rela-tive lack of a sizeable immigrant population until recently. However, in thepost-war years, particularly since the 1970s, Sweden has seen important trans-formations of the folkhem. Political parties have grown increasingly scepticalof large-scale social welfare programmes. The period from the 1950s to the1970s also saw significant labour migration not only from other Nordic coun-tries but also from the former Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Poland, Italy,Germany, and the United Kingdom, and more recently many political refugeeshave entered the country. Today, around 10 per cent of the population haveat least one foreign-born parent, and while the largest number of foreign citizens are Finnish (100,000), almost 40,000 are from Iraq and some 21,000from the former Yugoslavia. Hannerz (1996: 150) notes that Swedish urbancentres inevitably look ‘toward the centers of the global ecumene from acertain distance’ (that is, from a position of relative peripherality); however,while immigrant populations often retain links with the societies from whichthey came, Swedish indigenes have a tendency to fix their gaze elsewhere,towards media and business concentrations in Europe and North America.

428 SIMON COLEMAN

The significant point is that the Word of Life21 has provided a resonanttouchstone for current debates in socio-political realms located far beyond theNonconformist churches. In other words, the group appears to foster a North-American-orientated form of transnationalism at a time when notions ofSwedishness are being re-examined in the context of increasing concern aboutSweden’s apparently unstoppable transformation into a society that is at oncemulticultural and Americanized (Ehn, Frykman & Löfgren 1993).Word of Lifeleaders tell adherents that Sweden would be better off with a governmentcommitted to free markets and the interests of entrepreneurs, thus tacitlyaccepting a future of social and economic inequalities, and an end to the (literally and metaphorically taxing) yoke of secular Social Democracy. Whatsceptical outsiders therefore see is a movement which appears to encouragesomething akin to unfettered self-indulgence, particularly among the young,while simultaneously requiring adherents to surrender themselves to the willof authoritarian charismatic leaders. For many Swedes, the Word of Life istherefore objectionable because it seems to valorize private desire over publicgood. The attitudes that such critics dislike do appear to exist; indeed, theywere succinctly summed up for me in a remark made by an elderly Swedishmissionary who regularly took part in Word of Life services: the man told methat he remained attached to a Pentecostalist church so as to be able to helpothers, but attended the Word of Life in order to help himself. His remarkimplied that the older movement continues to express traditional ideals ofsocial conscience, while the newer group provides greater personal access tothe material benefits of charismatic power.

Although the Word of Life is less heavily stigmatized now than in the recentpast (when for instance ‘The Word of Death’ was daubed over its premises,and members were called ‘fascists’ on the streets of Uppsala), those who un-warily disclose Faith allegiance can still encounter a Swedish version ofHarding’s hermeneutic of suspicion. In my experience, members of the grouphave often been unwilling to reveal their affiliation to secular employers,family members, or even potential converts. Although believers argue that ‘theDevil only attacks those whom he fears’, there is no doubt that, for ordinarymembers, being associated with the group often raises dilemmas of self-representation. I show below how such dilemmas influence processes of ‘reach-ing out’ into the world.

Embodying the generic

Ideological oppositions between stasis and movement – or cultural idiosyn-crasy and generic replicability – are played out in a key arena of Word of Lifeidentity and agency, that of the person. The body constitutes the ‘outside’,while soul and spirit are on the ‘inside’. Ekman argues that the spirit-filledinside of the born-again person is ‘larger’ than the outside and is, indeed,unbounded because this is the space where one becomes united with God.Unbounded ‘inner’ must dominate bounded ‘outer’. While the soul (roughlyanalogous to mind) and body are subject to contingency and human temp-tation, the renewed spirit is an infallible point of contact with the Holy Spirit.When a believer asserts ‘I feel in my spirit’ that something is the case, this

SIMON COLEMAN 429

implies the presence of ‘revelation knowledge’ that transcends ‘mind knowl-edge’ and expresses the ‘inner person’ (invärtes människa).The spirit part of theborn-again person is ideally able to impose divine will on difficult situationsand is not bound by social context or emotion (recall again Lena’s desire notto be ‘limited’); it is also performative, in that the power of such spirit is real-ized only as it is transferred from the inner self into the environment, or eveninto another person (cf. Busby 1997: 269).22 Thus believers sometimes speakof God’s Word as coming to them and instructing them to take a particularjob or go on a journey, sometimes even to marry a particular person, but theycan also deploy the Word to ‘conquer’ circumstances such as a sceptical spouseor unruly child.

Incarnational practices unite inner person and spirit-laden Word. Readingand memorizing biblical verses ‘feed’ the self with spiritual nourishment.Listening to a preacher lodges powerful and anointed words within the inner-self. Some Word of Life members actually echo Ekman’s glossolalia, asif re-externalizing his previously internalized spiritual substance. We see heresomething of the ambiguity of possession: spirit is generic and available to all,providing access to a sphere of global exchange, but its qualities may also beassociated with particularly powerful figures. Authority is gained through theability to encourage others to appropriate the spirit-filled aspects of one’scharismatic self. One young woman told me that what was crucial in rein-forcing her commitment was the fact that a number of fellow-believers hadcompared her to a well-known American woman preacher. Such labellingpointed to the possibility of a transnational – explicitly Sweden-transcending– dimension to her personal ministry but also to the sense that her callingreplicated that of an already authoritative person.

These practices provide ritual exemplifications of what Csordas (1997: 237)calls the ‘inward otherness’ of language. They also raise the important ques-tion of the authorship of spiritual agency (cf. Keane 1997: 7, 24). To whatextent can the Christian claim to have authored words that are perceived tohave come from elsewhere – possibly from another person? It is striking thatdisillusioned former adherents of the Word of Life often report feeling thatsacred words and phrases continue to live within them long after they left thegroup. One woman I know described her painful withdrawal thus: ‘I felt resis-tance to the language’. Just as the person is ‘split’ in three ways, so the apos-tate ‘I’ that opposes charismatic language is forced to confront what appearsto be a deeply rooted but alienating aspect of the self. I have not heard remarksof this kind from current members of the Word of Life; such complaints wouldvery probably be regarded as ‘negative confession’ – an admission of personaldoubt which, because of the performative power of spoken words, may actu-ally create the very state that it describes. It is true that some believers expressthe view that lack of knowledge or certainty can be present ‘in the natural’;but the important thing is to retain inner conviction at a spiritual level thattranscends conventional cognition.

In one sense, a Western commodity metaphor (cf. Strathern 1988: 135) isappropriate to describe such Faith ideology, whereby the individual person‘owns’ linguistic properties of the self and ‘gains’ from strategic deployment ofspirit-filled resources. Yet in another sense the believer is ‘dividualized’ (cf.Busby 1997: 275; Strathern 1988: 348) through the constant need to exter-

430 SIMON COLEMAN

nalize and exchange the spirit part of personhood.23 But might there be other,more obviously material, resources that transfer spiritual substance betweenbelievers as well as into supposedly unbounded spheres of activity?

The charisma in the gift

Money is central to transactions between believers and the Word of Life. It isused to purchase Faith merchandise.24 It is donated in large buckets that arepassed around during services in Uppsala. Even the most apparently com-moditized of these transactions partakes of a sacralized quality in that it con-tributes to the global Faith nexus of production, distribution, and associatedmissionary activities.25 Yet the transaction that might appear most expressiveof a formalized and long-lasting obligation to the group – tithing – is not theone that Faith adherents value the most. Many members disregard the stipu-lation that they should give 10 per cent of their annual earnings to the Wordof Life, preferring to make their spiritual investments in other ways. Onewoman commented to me: ‘We’ve never [tithed]. They teach about it, butwe’ve given so much anyway.’

Two related forms of donation maintain higher profiles. The first involvesofferings made on special occasions, such as conferences: perhaps an American preacher might ask for money towards a cable television station, orEkman might request donations in support of mission. The amount collectedis often announced subsequently to great jubilation. Various features of thistype of donation distinguish it from tithing and suggest reasons for its signifi-cance. It is apparently ‘spontaneous’ rather than routinized, and provides ameans through which Swedish believers can demonstrate their contributionto projects that are global in scope. Offerings to American preachers are par-ticularly interesting since they involve the transfer of resources to a countryalready rich in material and spiritual terms.The charismatic gift at such timescannot be described as exactly ‘poisonous’, but it does contain a double-edgedmeaning that is connected to the nature of the relationship between donorand recipient: the American cause is advanced, but the peripherality of theSwedish donor is also transcended through a gift that gains a place in Ameri-can narratives of charismatic progress. In addition, the size of the collectivedonation – often running into thousands of kronor – has a dual indexicalfunction: it measures the ‘sacrificial’ giving power of the congregation but alsothe ability of the preacher to elicit such generosity from his or her audience.

Such donations create multiple returns. For instance, the Word of Life maybe perceived as promoting its own chances of gaining a television station bycontributing to one being set up by a visiting preacher. And the rewards ofgiving in this apparently collective fashion can be reaped at a more personallevel. Here is the testimony of a man concerning a personal ‘economicmiracle’:26

In the summer of 1985 a collection was announced for [the Word of Life] building …and Ulf Ekman mentioned … that according to God’s Word one could expect a thirty-, sixty-, or one-hundred-fold ‘share-out’ on what was given to God. Since I …needed a new car I sent in 1,000 kronor more than I usually offer, at the same time as

SIMON COLEMAN 431

praying to God to give me a new Volvo 740. As the Bible teaches, I first received it infaith and thanked God for the new car every day … I continued to give thanks …without seeing visible results. During this period my circumstances changed at work andI got to be involved in an important project. It … went well and the boss called me inand asked if he could do anything special for me. I said that I wanted a new car andafter a while I got both a hefty raise and a work car – a white Volvo 740!

Ekman’s reported request initially expresses the conviction that gifting guar-antees a material return to the believer, and does so with substantial interest.The narrator then mentions a key point: he is exceeding his normal amount,demonstrating confidence in stretching his resources beyond common sense.27

The man is not trying to outdo an exchange partner. Rather, his ‘opponent’is an aspect of self – a more ‘fleshly’ self which on its own would be toofaint-hearted to overcome an instinctive reluctance to put resources into cir-culation. It is perfectly acceptable and indeed expected for adherents to expressmaterial desires when they engage in such charismatic giving; what is taboois admission of doubt over the outcome. However, the man’s reward comesnot from the original recipient of the donation.The Volvo and the salary risecome from his work life, and we cannot assume that his employer has anyconnection with the Word of Life or that he is even a Christian.

The fact that an original donation is converted into a better job and cardemonstrates the power of the gift to move between the two realms of theostensibly ‘sacred’ and the ostensibly ‘secular’, perhaps even between those of(sacrificial) consumption and production. Note also how the nature of the‘return’ indicates the possibility of translating the generic medium of moneyinto forms of prosperity more obviously associated with the particular cir-cumstances of the donor. (Admittedly, requests and returns are not always sospecific, but it is felt that God can be relied upon to provide appropriate mate-rial rewards for believers.) However, the element of generalized exchange inthe transaction acts both to test adherents’ faith and to underline the key pointthat such donations neither generate any kind of social tie between individ-uals, nor create indebtedness to the giver on the part of the ministry or anyindividual person, except perhaps indirectly on the part of Ekman. The manis not even present at the Word of Life when he makes his donation, sendingit in by post. As with Oral Roberts’s form of seed faith, the return is regardedas coming from the divine realm. The gift is in ideological terms both ‘free’and ‘interested’: an obligation to provide a material response falls not on fellowhumans but on God. Former members of the ministry have sometimes madea similar point to me: they say that they feel frustrated and slighted whensomeone to whom they have given food or money thanks God instead ofthem. It is thus notable that the employer of the Volvo story’s narrator playssuch a marginal role in his account. The surface sphere of marketized, con-tractual exchange between employer and employee is depicted as functioningconventionally, but is also interpreted by the person concerned as the vehiclefor ‘deeper’ forms of transaction between giver and God.

The revalidation of the charismatic self is rendered dynamic not only bythe element of risk, but also by that of increase. A donation is fetishized herenot through having any innate properties of self-expansion (Taussig 1980: 31),but through being externalized so that divine value can be added. God is oftenreferred to as ‘big’ in Faith discourse, and the interest on the investment

432 SIMON COLEMAN

evident in the return expresses divine magnitude, transferring it back to abeliever whose receiving inner spirit is unbounded. Thus a human giftbecomes translated into a divinely charged contribution to the self. A paral-lel with the fetishized Word is clearly manifested here, since adherents regardthe power of both sacred words and material resources as lying dormant untilit is activated and given ‘life’ when believers reach out beyond the self throughsuch acts as speaking in tongues or donating/investing. Indeed, the very actof extending something from the self expresses the idea of unfetteredness bothphysically and metaphorically. On a mundane level, the man’s labour has pro-duced a reward from his boss that values his efficiency; but at the level of thecharismatic gift, labour is rendered irrelevant to material increase, which isproduced through a form of sacrifice that uses exchange to demonstrate thepresence of faith.

Thus the man both tests his charismatic agency and reconstitutes it by inter-preting future good fortune as resulting from activation of the divine.The orig-inal decision to give in this way is not the product of overt social obligation,but instead provides a means by which believers can initiate a process of self-surveillance which parallels the need to deploy ‘positive’ language. (Similarly,believers have talked to me of the need to present a dynamic image to theworld, for example, by investing in smart clothes even when they are short ofmoney, on the grounds that successful body language is a kind of positive con-fession.) Note that the donor continues to give thanks after the gift has beenmade, even though visible results are not initially apparent. This element ofdelayed return partially decommoditizes the transaction, as well as providingthe opportunity for a disciplining of the potentially doubting self. Absolutealienation of Faith donations only occurs when it becomes impossible to inter-pret a return as having been made – a rare event, and one that can be explained(at least in public) as Satan the ‘thief ’ robbing those who are spiritually blessed.We see here a specifically Faith version of what Jean Comaroff (1985: 235-6),describing collections practised by Zionists in South Africa, has called a regain-ing of the self in a gift that is also a personalized contribution to the collec-tivity’s fund of power. Such action cannot be characterized in simplistic termsas either ‘pure’ (charitable) or ‘impure’ (self-interested); to do so would be to make highly problematic assumptions about either salvation religions ingeneral or Christianity in particular as being rooted in a single and rather one-dimensional form of asceticism. If this example illustrates the juxtaposition offlesh with spirit, and of the social with the spiritual, it also suggests an inher-ent tension in many of the activities of ordinary believers. We saw that theemployer of the man giving the Volvo testimony appeared to be unaware ofthe spiritualized nature of his transactions with his employee. In fact, such igno-rance is common in dealings between believers and secular others. Membersare enjoined to ‘reach out’ beyond both normal expectations and the bound-aries of the group, to engage in risks in order to gain influence.Yet they areaware that they may encounter suspicion or outright hostility if they revealtheir religious convictions to other people in Sweden. Faith Christians cer-tainly do not always conceal their allegiance when dealing with outsiders, butin many cases they find themselves uneasily positioned between declaring andconcealing their spiritual hand. This is not a point made openly to me bymembers of the group, since it clearly has ‘implications of ‘negative confes-

SIMON COLEMAN 433

sion’.Yet it is mentioned by former members, and I have observed it myself,for instance when being evangelized by Word of Life adherents who do notknow me, and who have merely referred to being part of ‘a church’ in Uppsala.I also remember a conversation with a local hotel-owner who was in fact anadherent but who referred to the movement as ‘the group over there’ until sherealized that I was about to attend a service. She then engaged in animatedconversation about fellow members’ ability to ‘believe forward’ funds, relaxingwith a person now accepted as a partial insider.

A second form of high-profile giving differs from the one which I havedescribed above chiefly in terms of the recipient. Believers sometimes simplygive money to unknown others. I have once been the beneficiary of such agift (cf. Coleman 2000: 195). An elderly woman approached me just before aservice and explained that, on the previous day, God had given her the equiv-alent of about £20, telling her to give half to somebody at the ministry. Inever met the woman again, but in accepting her money I acted as the personto whom resources needed to be transferred in order for further blessings toreturn to her with interest.The appropriate response from me was ‘God blessyou!’, but this reply was not necessary for the gift to be efficacious. My socialdistance from the woman allowed the transaction to function in much thesame way as a donation to a foreign preacher. In both cases, the donor canperceive their gift as generalized rather than restricted, thus as entering acharismatic landscape that lies far beyond everyday life. If I had then enteredinto a long-term and binding relationship with the woman, the symbolicpower of the gift – arising from its participation in an unrestrained spiritualimaginary – might even have been diminished. Yet the fact that we were ata service meant that there was an enclaved quality to the transaction, a sensethat the world to which it was contributing was that of charismatics ratherthan sceptics. As in the previous example, the gift invokes a certain kind ofrisk – ‘sacrificing’ money – without engaging in direct confrontation withsomeone who might challenge the meaning of what is occurring.This is notto say that ‘open’ donations to secular strangers cannot occur, but I have notobserved them or heard them much discussed. Furthermore, the sense of either‘enclaving’ action or partially disguising it is evident in other activities. Wehave seen that, in some cases, those proselytizing on behalf of the group donot mention it by name. It is striking, too, that the Word of Life engages in a great deal of virtual or non-direct evangelizing, through videos, books,satellite television, and prayer – much more than would be characteristic ofPentecostalists in Uppsala. In addition, some actions play on inside-outsideboundaries at the level of the group, for instance, on occasions when Ekmanhas responded to critics by writing in secular newspapers, appealing to notionsof civility and citizenship, and then (in the context of group services) hasexplicitly reinterpreted the same debates in Faith terms as defending the groupagainst evil forces.

Both forms of giving show that practices relating to financial prosperity domore than fund ministry enterprises; they are central to the articulation ofcharismatic identity and commitment.The resources released are said to enablemissionization of the unsaved but also act to benefit the saved. In his book,Financial freedom, Ekman states (1989: 12): ‘Just as you enjoy giving gifts toothers, so God enjoys giving to you. God is a cheerful giver.’28 Displays of

434 SIMON COLEMAN

joyfulness are manifestations of the donor’s optimism and are thus a form ofembodied ‘positive confession’ which is mimetic of God’s own assumed state.The examples also parallel other forms of developing the ‘unbounded’ spir-itual self through externalization of resources.When one Word of Life membermentioned to me that he had decided to move into a larger house that costmore than he could currently afford, the implication was that he was doingso because of the leap of faith which this move entailed, rather than in spiteof it. Another former Bible school student-turned-pastor made the followingcomment, in relation to the movement’s outreach activities in Russia:29 ‘Youcan give – money! Lack of money should not be allowed to be a barrier toreaching out … We become unbounded in God and can become an enor-mous blessing for these people.’ Here, giving and ‘reaching out’ are placed inparallel, with both seen as means literally to transcend borders through mis-sionary work.

The significance of disciplined contributions to the workplace is not deniedin these practices, but truly fertile creation of prosperity is made dependent onactions that continually extend fetishized tokens of the spiritualized self intocirculation. Ekman states: ‘Those who constantly save become only poorer;while those who give become wealthier’ (1989: 57); and: ‘Wealthy people whoare not saved are reservoirs for the Devil.They pile up possessions and gatherwealth to themselves, thus restricting resources which could be put to muchbetter, active use’ (1989: 58). Money becomes ‘bitter’ in the Swedish Faithcontext (cf. Shipton 1989; Taussig 1980) because the personal agency andfreedom that one may realize through the attainment of material wealth willinevitably stagnate and thus fail to bear fruit for those who do not have a rela-tionship with God.30 Ekman writes (1989: 26) that when he returned fromTulsa in 1982, the Devil told him not to preach about prosperity and money,as people would think he was too Americanized: God’s reply, Ekman says, isthat prosperity teaching was needed more in Sweden than anywhere else.Thepoint here is that, while Sweden may appear to be a materially prosperoussociety, what most Swedes have is the wrong kind of wealth: this is wealthwhich is profitless because it is rendered immobile and unfruitful by beingdirected into high taxes, secular government projects and ‘unsaved’ bankaccounts.The boons generated by financial ‘freedom’ show the world that whatcritics may think of as ‘Americanized’ values are actually appropriate to anycountry and culture. A former (now hostile) Bible school student commentedon such claims by declaring: ‘In Sweden, we are not that spontaneous.’ Hercomments were striking not only because they presented Swedish culture asinherently inimical to Faith values, but also because they assumed a link betweenembodied action and economic orientation:‘spontaneity’ applied both to physi-cal demeanour and to the cultivation of an entrepreneurial attitude.

Ekman practises what he preaches. Until recently he has lived in a com-fortable but not luxurious suburb outside Uppsala. Money from his tapes andbooks is ploughed back into the movement’s missionary activities. He makesno claims to be a competent businessman, but his ministry has continuallyexpanded its enterprises, despite repeated cash-flow crises over the years.If Ekman shares in the character of God by being a visibly bold investor in enterprises that reach out into the world, he also accumulates symboliccapital by keeping material forms of capital flowing both out of and into his

SIMON COLEMAN 435

ministry.31 He has now moved out of Uppsala, settling with his wife inJerusalem in order to set up a Word of Life Study Centre there.

Word of Life adherents do not conflate money with words, but both act asmedia of self-objectification and surveillance since they are believed to containthe divine, generic power that has been stored in the spirit, encouraging theperson to think of the most sacred part of themselves as becoming abstracted,removed from any confining social context and inserted into a world of lim-itless possibility. Just as one language can be translated into another, so moneyrequires the establishment of rates of equivalence between currencies; indeed,the fruits of verbal and pecuniary resources can be enjoyed only by engagingin forms of investment that create a ‘promiscuous’ breaking-down of bound-aries between persons and social situations (cf. Robbins & Akin 1999: 4, 7).In both cases the idea of a recipient is important, but close or extended socialinteraction with the immediate beneficiary is not.The performative effects ofverbal communication and of material giving frequently have to be imaginedor read inductively from subsequent events, and the separation of speaker/giverfrom listener/recipient allows the imagination to work unfettered by prede-termined events or relationships.

Sacralized words have one considerable advantage over money in thischarismatic economy: they represent an inexhaustible medium, so that thelogic of a superabundance of verbal consumption is complemented by anequal abundance of production. Deploying words does not have a particularlysacrificial character, except in cases when witnessing to non-believers provokesridicule, and preaching involves submission to divine inspiration. However,while all believers employ sacralized language and see such language as self-empowering – either in everyday life or as means of distinguishing themselvesfrom less ‘enthusiastic’ Christians – relatively few gain regular representations in those settings – conference platforms, taped sermons, magazine articles,official web pages, and so on – which permit massive amplification of the significance of verbal gifts. Given that sacralized words act as vehicles of interpenetration, this situation means that, insofar as it is possible for anyhuman being, well-known preachers can ‘author’ the spiritual personae ofmultiple others.When a journalist calls a member of the group a ‘mini-Ekman’this is meant as a term of abuse, suggesting an excessive form of devotionwhich involves surrender or destruction of the autonomous self. For a Lifeadherent, by contrast, this would be something to view in a positive light: itwould imply that a believer has allowed Ekman’s language to enrich his orher spirit, to penetrate that inside part of the person that is unbounded andopen to externally derived divine power.

Appreciation of the importance placed on such ‘redistribution of self ’ isnecessary for an understanding of an apparent paradox in Faith constructionsof fame. Preachers present themselves as mere receptacles of a divine inspira-tion that is available to all who are born again; yet such self-effacing state-ments serve only to increase their personal renown. Retention of the idea ofspirit in its generic, abstracted form is necessary to an ideology that requiresthe Christian message to transcend human boundaries in its application.However, by acting as particularly powerful facilitators of verbal exchange,charismatic leaders gain authority that is attributable to an unusually gifted(and gifting) self.32

436 SIMON COLEMAN

One might be tempted to equate these attitudes with Maussian notions ofthe hau-bearing gift, but caution is needed here.Words and objects carry qual-ities of the charismatic donor, but these qualities are made up of a strugglebetween commoditization and inalienability, the abstracted and the personal-ized.Thus a video depicting a sermon by Ekman might be sold over the inter-net to an American consumer who has never seen the Swedish preacher inperson. In one sense the cassette is merely an object whose ownership is trans-ferred at the point of sale. The money paid for it benefits the Word of Life,but does not have the sacrificial character of the donations described above.At the same time, according to Faith ideology, the video does more than bringin funds: it transfers Ekman’s spiritual substance via ‘his’ words (borrowed fromGod) to an unlimited constituency. The ‘return’ in the form of charismaticfame is indirect, but such a return is certainly expected by Ekman and hisfollowers. Charisma displays a tautological quality, in that it is taken to be anexpression of the very authority that it serves to create (cf. Comaroff &Comaroff 1990: 206). Again treading carefully, we might state that the con-struction of Ekman’s charismatic persona is initially reminiscent of Munn’s(1986) discussion of the Gawan construction of fame. In the New Guineacontext, the capacity to develop spatio-temporal relations extending beyondthe self is something that is cultivated: intrinsic to the value-production processis the rendering of the self by significant others, so that (1986: 105) famebecomes a mobile, circulating dimension of the person (cf. Miller 2000). Butone of the significant contrasts with the Swedish case presented here consistsin the fact that Ekman’s fame does not always need to be reciprocated by anexchange partner who can be identified. His charisma is the product of aglobalized spatio-temporal landscape that is imagined and narratively con-structed, as well as being produced through observable transactions.33

Concluding remarks: from a ‘Hau’ to a ‘Geist’?

The temptation is to assess Prosperity Christians in relation to two perspec-tives: first, the extent to which they measure up to a Protestant Ethic accord-ing to which economic success signifies grace but not self-indulgence; second,the degree to which they have ‘fallen’ into the marketized relations that arethought to be a pervasive feature of Western society. My aim has been tochallenge such assumptions. I have argued that the notion of ‘the gift’ is impor-tant within charismatic discourse but also that it provides a powerful meansof understanding Swedish believers’ constructions of identity and personhood.To see Faith Christians’ gifting of money as the actions of gullible dupes beingswindled by cynical confidence tricksters would be to misread these practicesin terms shaped by narrowly secular assumptions about the autonomy of theeconomic sphere in Western social life. Participation in Word of Life projectsallows believers to cultivate a sense of themselves as active agents reaching outinto the world by monetary and linguistic means. These actions may com-plement more socially intense participation in traditional Christian fellowships,such as those of local Pentecostalist churches. Surrounded by sceptical out-siders, these believers project themselves outwards and yet construct a moreenclaved sphere of exchange permeated by spiritually driven assumptions.This

SIMON COLEMAN 437

Faith gift economy does not assert the virtues of an intimate and decom-moditized solidarity, but rather articulates a sphere through which charismaand divine grace can appear to inhabit a global realm of influence.

While invoking Mauss, I do not mean to ignore Weber.The latter’s under-standing of the genuine charismatic type was that she or he must despise ratio-nal, everyday economic strategies (Eisenstadt 1968: 52).34 In this context,however, I have explored the ways in which processes of rationalization andof the construction of charisma can maintain ambiguous affinities.The charis-matic gift should ideally be a spontaneous product of the self but may alsohelp to reconstitute the believing person by being deployed systematically asa means of self-surveillance. Regularized risk-taking in economic affairs resonates in Sweden with wider attempts to avoid the routinization of com-mitment to God. Believers’ apparent conviction that their salvation is assuredimplies a static, bounded level of experience that cannot satisfy desires forcontinued self-affirmation.

This Faith aesthetic of excess in the redistribution of material and otherresources might appear to be an ideological world away from Weber’s Calvin-ists.As Campbell has noted (1987: 134),Arminianism has affinities with a moreRomantic ethic, an introspective yet worldly tendency to create desires forconsumption while assuming that full satisfaction can never be attained.However, in both Weberian Calvinism and Swedish Prosperity thinking,convincing measurements of personal spiritual capital are valorized. In thecontemporary group, a sense of being in touch with the transcendent emergesnot from denial of commodified expressions of generic spirituality but fromthe ability relentlessly to deploy such expressions in ways that suggest mobil-ity, the transcendence of distance, and ‘reception’ by multiple, even imagined,others.

NOTES

Versions of this paper have been given at Sussex and Aberdeen Universities. I thank JamesCarrier, Michael Carrithers, Jon Mitchell, and anonymous readers for JRAI for insightful comments.

1 See, for example, Gregory (1997). For discussions of gift-commodity distinctions see, forexample, Carrier (1995), Keane (1997), and Laidlaw (2000).

2 See, for example, Parry (1986). Parry (1998: 168) argues that the millenarian exceptionproves the transcendent versus worldly rule: the chasm between this world and the next willsoon be bridged, so that sacred status will no longer be incompatible with the exercise ofpower.

3 [The guardian] (1999: 1-3).4 As Carrier has pointed out (pers. comm.), it is not necessarily money per se that is perti-

nent for many people in the West when they complain about its pervasiveness in society, butrather ‘the realm that most money comes from, the commercial realm of (supposed) imper-sonal and rational calculation’.

5 As of 2000, Hagin’s Training Center claimed to have produced over 16,000 graduates andits monthly magazine, The Word of Faith, claimed a world-wide circulation of over half a million.

6 http://www.rhema.org/about/7 There are thought to be millions of Faith Gospel followers around the world. Many would

reject any suggestion that this adhesion constitutes membership of a religious movement onthe grounds that such a stance would imply a form of institutionalized or church-like alle-giance, whereas a key feature of Faith involvement is often its fluidity; indeed, some believers

438 SIMON COLEMAN

combine their adherence to Faith ideas with an attachment to a more mainstream church orother organized Christian denomination. However, for my purposes the word ‘movement’describes a wing of the charismatic revival whose supporters draw, admittedly to varyingdegrees, on broadly common preachers and texts. Hunt (2000) argues that Prosperity ministrieshave become a significant source of cultural capital in the ‘emerging’ economies of central andeastern Europe, the Pacific Rim, and Latin America. He also notes that the movement has beenparticularly successful in African countries, such as Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa, wheremissionary activities dating back to the nineteenth century gave rise to strongly rooted tradi-tions of local Christianity.

8 Similar debates have occurred about the political implications of Faith teachings. Gifford(1998: 85, 193) traces the career of the former Zambian president, Frederick Chiluba, whoendorsed Prosperity Gospel teachings during the 1990s and proclaimed the enactment of aCovenant with God for the entire country. The result, Chiluba said, would be to transformZambia from a poor and dependent recipient of international aid to a thriving economy withthe capacity to act as a major aid-provider to other nations.

9 This (att nå ut) is a term used by believers themselves.10 Both ‘sacrifice’ (Hubert & Mauss 1964) and ‘the gift’ invoke interplays of self-interest and

disinterest alongside ritual transactions involving two parties and a physical intermediary.11 In Weber’s (1965) ideal-typical notion, anti-institutional aspects of such authority are under-

pinned by emotional rather than rational foundations, as well as the constant evocation of movement rather than stability.

12 Although not an adherent as such, Roberts has been a largely sympathetic supporter ofFaith ministries from the 1970s onwards.

13 The parable of the talents (Matt. 25) extols such virtues of entrepreneurial investment. InLuke 8: 11, the seed is explicitly associated with the Word of God.

14 One influential figure, E.W. Kenyon, was probably influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson’sNew England Transcendentalism.

15 The American form of Pentecostalism originated in the early twentieth century: its keyexpressions of faith include belief in the baptism of the Holy Spirit as manifested in glosso-lalia. A high proportion of Pentecostalists are working class; many are black. While early Pentecostalists formed independent organizations throughout the world, other Christians inNorth America and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s promoted spiritual baptism and speakingin tongues without advocating splitting from established denominations to form autonomousgroups. These Christians, less separatist than their Pentecostal forebears, were labelled ‘charis-matics’ (or sometimes ‘neo-Pentecostals’). Pentecostals and charismatics number at least 500million followers world-wide. In Sweden, Pentecostalism emerged in the 1920s partly as aprotest against the (then) liturgical conservatism of the established Swedish Lutheran Churchand partly in opposition to theological hostility from Methodist and Baptist denominations.The Word of Life has become the de facto leader of a new ‘Faith’ denomination which todayhas about twenty to thirty thousand adherents across the country as a whole; what they allshare is enthusiasm for ‘positive confession’ and a commitment to Prosperity teachings. Thegroup sponsors annual summer conferences which attract as many as eight thousand peopleeach year. The ministry is ‘charismatic’ in that it emphasizes spiritual gifts, but lacks the orga-nizational exclusiveness and behavioural sobriety which has long characterized the Pentecostalistchurches in most parts of the world.

16 Robert Ekh, like Ekman a former priest in the Church of Sweden and a graduate ofHagin’s Training Center.

17 Members tended to view me as attending the group for a ‘higher purpose’ that was unacknowledged and, indeed, unrecognized by myself, and which they understood to be mysalvation.

18 The Church of Sweden (disestablished in 2000) has a membership comprising approxi-mately 85 per cent of the population. Among Nonconformist churches (3 per cent of the population) the Pentecostal denomination is the largest, outnumbering the 20,000 Baptists and 5,000 Methodists, challenged only by the 70,000 members of the more liberal SwedishMissionary Covenant.

19 I have not been able to discern any significant trends in relation to the class backgroundof Word of Life members, but I would categorize most of the adherents I know as either upper-working class or middle class.

SIMON COLEMAN 439

20 The expression was coined by writer Aksel Sandemose in the 1930s.21 The congregation with which I have worked contains few immigrants, but its Bible School

attracts a diverse array of non-Swedish-born participants.22 Gender is not highlighted as relevant to transfers of substance, though Harding (2000:

176-9) points to the masculinist assumptions behind much conservative Protestant rhetoric.23 Strathern (1988: 132) describes the Melanesian person as being vulnerable to the bodily

disposition of others, in a context where persons contain a generalized sociality. She arguesfurther (1988: 167): ‘The appropriation of surplus product is central to a commodity economy;those who dominate are those who determine the manner of appropriation. In a gift economy… those who dominate are those who determine the connections and disconnections createdby the circulation of objects.’ I trace the degree to which charismatic authority is built uponan economy that involves controlling the circulation of words and material resources amongpersons who ‘share’ the generic sociality of the Spirit.

24 Space does not permit exploration of the physical properties of money as mediator (cf.Comaroff & Comaroff 1990: 21).

25 Although charitable works are practised, they are usually associated with missionary activities.26 Word of Life (1987: 12). Cf. Gregory’s (1980) contrast, drawing on Mauss, between gifts

to men and gifts to God.The significance of the latter lies in the destruction rather than redis-tribution of wealth that it entails, but Gregory notes that in the Papuan village of Poreporenasuch gifts are appropriated by the Church, not physically destroyed. In the Word of Life, a gift‘to God’ often ends up being directed to the earthly organization, though note also the assump-tion that such gifts provide a return to the giver.

27 Cf. Cheal’s (1988: 12; Carrier 1995: 157) depiction of gift-giving as going beyond recognized expectations.

28 Cf. 2 Cor. 9:7.29 Word of Life (1990: 15).30 Cf. Parry’s (1980: 88) reference to contradictions relating to Benares funeral priests: accep-

tance of offerings is financially essential to the priest and spiritually necessary to the donor,but such acceptance subverts the priest’s status and worthiness. In Faith terms, the dangerousaspects of accepting gifts are subverted primarily through their continued circulation amongthe elect (or allocation towards mission).

31 Writing of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil, Kramer (1998) showsconnections between Faith logics of consumption, self-reliance and entrepreneurial risk-takingin a context where boundaries of formal adherence are flexible.Van Dijk (forthcoming) relatesforms of giving among Ghanaian neo-Pentecostalists to the construction of transcultural sub-jectivity. For Ghanaians, a central concern is access to ‘modernity’ freed from the constraints offamily; in Sweden, modernity is taken for granted, and constraints are represented primarily ascoming from an overly intrusive state.

32 Consubstantiality is not associated with Communion, which is rarely practised, but withforms of communication.

33 Compare Freund (1969: 233-4) on Weber: ‘Theoretically, the charismatic leader’s horizonsare unlimited, at least so long as his followers remain loyal to him and their numbers continueto increase.’

34 Peacock & Tyson note (1989: 220-2) that Weber does not systematically interrelate‘charisma’ and the ‘Protestant ethic’.

REFERENCES

Barron, B. 1987. The health and wealth gospel. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press.Bell, D. 1978. The cultural contradictions of capitalism. New York: Basic Books.Bromley, D. & B. Busching 1988. Understanding the structure of contractual and covenantal

social relations: implications for the sociology of religion. Sociological Analysis 49, 15-32.Brouwer, S., P. Gifford & S. Rose 1996. Exporting the American gospel: global Christian fundamen-

talism. London: Routledge.Busby, C. 1997. Permeable and partible persons: a comparative analysis of gender and body in

South India and Melanesia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 3, 261-78.

440 SIMON COLEMAN

Campbell, C. 1987. The romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell.Carrier, J. 1995. Gifts and commodities: exchange and Western capitalism since 1700. London:

Routledge.Cheal, D. 1988. The gift economy. London: Routledge.Coleman, S. 2000. The globalisation of charismatic Christianity: spreading the Gospel of Prosperity.

Cambridge: University Press.Comaroff, J. 1985. Body of power, spirit of resistance: the culture and history of a South African people.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.——— & J.L. Comaroff 1990. Goodly beasts, beastly goods: cattle and commodities in a South

African context. American Ethnologist 17, 195-216.Csordas, T. 1997. Language, charisma, and creativity: the ritual life of a religious movement. Berkeley,

Calif.: University of California Press.Ehn, B., J. Frykman & O. Löfgren 1993. Försvenskningen av Sverige. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur.Eisenstadt, S. (ed.) 1968. Max Weber: on charisma and institution building. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.Ekman, U. 1989. Financial freedom. Uppsala: Livets Ord.Freund, J. 1969. The sociology of Max Weber. New York:Vintage.Gifford, P. 1998. African Christianity: its public role. London: Hurst.Gregory, C. 1980. Gifts to men and gifts to God: gift exchange and capital accumulation in

contemporary Papua. Man (N.S.) 15, 626-52.——— 1997. Savage money: the anthropology and politics of commodity exchange. Amsterdam:

Harwood.[The guardian] 1999. The guardian, 3 Mar., G2 section, 1-3.Hannerz, U. 1996. Transnational connections: culture, people, places. London: Routledge.Harding, S. 2000. The book of Jerry Falwell: fundamentalist language and politics. Princeton, NJ:

University of Princeton Press.Hollinger, D. 1991. Enjoying God Forever: an historical/sociological profile of the Health and

Wealth Gospel in the USA? In Religion and power, decline and growth: sociological analyses of religion in Britain, Poland and the Americas (eds) P. Gee & J. Fulton, 53-66. London: BritishSociological Association, Sociology of Religions Study Group.

Hubert, H. & M. Mauss 1964. Sacrifice: its nature and function. London: Cohen & West.Hunt, S. 2000. ‘Winning ways’: globalisation and the impact of the Health and Wealth gospel.

Journal of Contemporary Religion 16, 85-105.James, W. 1998. ‘One of us’: Marcel Mauss and ‘English’ anthropology. In Marcel Mauss: a

centenary tribute (eds) W. James & N. Allen, 1-26. Oxford: Berghahn.Keane, W. 1997. Signs of recognition: powers and hazards of representation in an Indonesian society.

Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.Kramer, E. 1998. The ritual value of words and money in Brazilian neo-Pentecostalism.

American Anthropological Association Conference, Philadelphia, 2-6 Dec.Laidlaw, J. 2000. A free gift makes no friends. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.)

6, 617-34.McDannell, C. 1995. Material Christianity: religion and popular culture in America. New Haven:Yale

University Press.Martin, D. 2002. Pentecostalism: the world their parish. Oxford: Blackwell.Mauss, M. 1990. The gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.Miller, D. 2000. The fame of Trinis: websites as traps. Journal of Material Culture 5, 5-24.Milner, D. 1990. Sweden: social democracy in practice. Oxford: University Press.Munn, N. 1986. The fame of Gawa: a symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua

New Guinea) society. Cambridge: University Press.Parkin, D. 1993. Nemi in the modern world: return of the exotic? Man (N.S.) 28, 79-99.Parry, J. 1980. Ghosts, greed and sin: the occupational identity of the Benares funeral priests.

Man (N.S.) 15, 88-111.——— 1986. The gift, the Indian gift and the ‘Indian gift’. Man (N.S.) 21, 453-73.——— 1998. Mauss, Dumont, and the distinction between status and power. In Marcel Mauss:

a centenary tribute (eds) W. James & N. Allen, 151-71. Oxford: Berghahn.Peacock, J. & R. Tyson 1989. Pilgrims of paradox: Calvinism and experience among the Primitive

Baptists of the Blue Ridge. Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press.Raheja, G. 1988. The poison in the gift. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

SIMON COLEMAN 441

Robbins, J. & D. Akin 1999. An introduction to Melanesian currencies. In Money and moder-nity: state and local currencies in Melanesia (eds) D. Akin & J. Robbins, 1-40. Pittsburgh: Uni-versity Press.

Shipton, P. 1989. Bitter money: cultural economy and some African meanings of forbidden commodities.Washington: American Ethnological Association.

Silber, I. 1998. Modern philanthropy: reassessing the viability of a Maussian perspective. In MarcelMauss: a centenary tribute (eds) W. James & N. Allen, 134-50. Oxford: Berghahn.

Skog, M. 1993. Trosrörelsen i Sverige. Tro och Tanke 87, 89-138.Strathern, M. 1988, The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in

Melanesia. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.Taussig, M. 1980. The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, NC:The Uni-

versity of North Carolina Press.Van Dijk, R. forthcoming. The moral life of the gift in Ghanaian Pentecostal churches in the

diaspora. In The social life of things revisited (eds) P. Geschiere & W. van Binsbergen.Weber, M. 1930. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin.——— 1965. The sociology of religion. London: Methuen.Word of Life 1987. Word of Life Newsletter, April.——— 1990. Word of Life Newsletter, spring.

Le don charismatique

Résumé

À partir de l’analyse ethnographique d’un groupe de protestants conservateurs suédois connusous le nom de « Mot de la Vie », l’auteur veut montrer que certaines formes de don charis-matique sont orientées vers les aspects en développement du moi « intérieur » au-delà deslimites culturelles et physiques. La notion de don charismatique au sens chrétien (et webérien)d’une qualité d’inspiration donnant autorité est liée à un concept maussien du don qui abolitles distinctions entre les personnes et entre personnes et objets.

Deptartment of Anthropology, 43 Old Elvet, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3HN.s.m.coleman@durham.ac.uk

442 SIMON COLEMAN