The politics of Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity: Religious language, charismatic authority, and temporality in a Melanesian revival movement

ABSTRACT

Through an analysis of a series of revival movements that erupted across the Melanesian island of Malaita in the 1970s, this article articulates a strongly political reading of Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity (P/c). A series of charismatic eruptions that swept Malaita in 1970 effected an overhaul of the epistemological, organizational, and eschatological frameworks imposed upon local Christians by foreign missionaries. Such rapid profusions of charismatic activity reveal how P/c experientialism undercuts the laborious textualism of conservative evangelical Christianity, how the democratization of charisma challenges hierarchical mission religious authority and, most broadly, how the dramatic shift to messianic eschatology constructs a qualitatively different metahistorical narrative to that imposed by the colonial project.

KEYWORDS:

• Revival
• Melanesia
• Malaita
• Pentecostalism
• charismatic Christianity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).