Practice, meaning and belief in Latino Pentecostalism: A study in the dynamics of religious healing, theology and social order

This dissertation is an ethnography of a Latino Pentecostal church located in Los Angeles called Nuevo Crecimiento. Pentecostalism arose in the United States in the early 1900s as a Christian movement emphasizing faith healing miracles. This work seeks to understand and explain the phenomenology of religious healing, and to account for the dynamic rise of Pentecostalism across the Latin American world. My central thesis is that religious healing and other examples of spirit possession in Nuevo Crecimiento were dependent upon displays of congregational solidarity. In this way, the sense of God, as well as personal feelings of rejuvenation, were linked to practices that sustained the social order of the church itself. The members discovered spiritual and physical empowerment as the very ability to form an independent church. This served to offset feelings of weakness in society resulting from poverty and discrimination. It also emboldened members to realize that with the most limited of resources, namely the ability to congregate, they could oppose notions of divinity established by the massive Roman Catholic hierarchy. These principles appear to apply to the rapid spread of Pentecostalism throughout the Latin American world. My ethnographic findings resonate on a theoretical level with Durkheim's sociology of religion, and Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology. Field work for this study was conducted from October of 1997 to November of 1998, in Nuevo Crecimiento, and among the surrounding households of its members.