Reason To Believe Cultural Agency In Latin American Evangelicalism

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 31 (2009) 105-160

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David Smilde, Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). ix + 262 pp. $55.00 hardback; $21.95 paper.

Reason to Believe is a ﬁ ne example of the contribution that sociological research can make to understanding the nature of religious belief and practice. The book is the third volume in a series entitled The Anthropology of Christianity , whose editor, Joel Robbins, has played a signiﬁ cant role in afirming Christianity as a legitimate object of ethnographic research and contemporary social scientiﬁ c theory. Readers of varied disciplinary stripes will ﬁ nd Smilde’s empirically rich exploration of the relationship between human intention and belief, and more signiﬁ cantly, the nature of cultural change, to be compelling and provoca- tive all at once.

The book consists of three sections. In the opening section Smilde clariﬁ es the strengths and shortcomings of current social scientiﬁ c thinking on religion and social change in Latin America. The ﬁrst chapter oﬀ ers a precursor to Smilde’s deft critical engagement with this scholarship. He takes aim, for example, at both neo-Marxists, who generally dismiss the “power of cultural mobilization” generated by Evangelicalism, and neoconservatives, who tend to understate the impact of social and political-economic structures upon the choices that individual actors make. Problematizing these opposing perspectives is a theme that runs throughout the book. A brief description of the growth of Evangelicalism in Venezu- ela, along with a historical account of the political economy of the study’s urban setting, Caracas, is detailed in the second chapter. The chapter ends with a reﬂ exive discussion of how Smilde’s status — a white, North American, middle-class male, and an “observant” Christian — shaped the ethnographic endeavor. For the author such critical self-awareness is not merely post-modern navel-gazing. Rather, a “book by a man, about men, as men . . . facilitates an analytic move away from abstract theologies and teleologies and toward lived practice, grounded meaning-making and relational reasoning” (p. 43).

In the second section (Imaginative Rationality) Smilde aims to answer one of the study’s principal inquiries, which seems straightforward enough: “Can people really decide to believe in a religion because it is in their interest to do so?” (p. 7). The question, however, is not an uncomplicated one. Smilde critically explores the insights of sociology (Durkheim, Bourdieu, and Christian Smith), political philosophy (Jon Elster), and literary theory (Ken- neth Burke) to address the query. What is noteworthy about the analysis is how Smilde punctuates his theorizing of culture with the perspectives and moral reasoning of the eighty or so men who participated in the study. Sermon transcripts, life history interviews, and participant-observation recordings are the empirical heart of the study and are used to shed light on the process of “imaginative rationality” that Smilde expertly elucidates. Converts to Evangelicalism are not portrayed as unthinking, unreﬂ ective religious automatons. In other words, the Evangelical meaning system is not one that lurks in the cognitive shadows exerting its inﬂ uence (for better or worse) on unknowing converts. Rather, the study con- vincingly asserts that Evangelical men consciously “construct second-order beliefs about the way their belief and practice work” (p. 150). Especially rich examples of this process are provided in chapter ﬁ ve. The description of how new converts assess the “prosperity theol- ogy” of neo-Pentecostal groups and how they engage the problem of “everyday theodicy” deserve the attention of theologians and social scientists alike. This section makes a strong

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 31 (2009) 105-160

case that Evangelical meaning systems are mobilized by men to conceptualize and address the “dis-ease” they frequently experience. Men do decide to believe.

The author turns his attention to the study’s other principal research question in section three (Relational Imagination): “If people are capable of bettering their circumstances by adopting a set of beliefs and practices that will help them confront life’s problems . . . then why doesn’t everybody do so?” (p. 153). The simple answer: the inﬂ uence of social networks. This closing section builds on one of the hallmark analyses of the sociology of religion — network theory — to argue that the conversion experience itself is embedded in a social structure. This claim moderates the voluntarism implicit in neoconservative theories of culture change by arguing that “conversion to Evangelicalism depends largely on interpersonal contexts that facilitate exposure to the meaning system or at least do not hinder cultural innovation” (p. 155). The penultimate chapter compares the lives of two diﬀ erent men, Augusto and Ugeth, who Smilde re-interviews some ﬁ ve years after the original study. While the chapter ably demonstrates the inﬂ uence of networks on each man’s life trajectory, it is the only one that seems disjointed from the overarching analytical ﬂ ow and logic of the study. In the closing chapter, Smilde returns to his critical dialogue with social science and philosophy of religion to articulate a “relational pragmatic theory of cultural agency.”

Reason to Believe succeeds on many levels. First, it takes seriously the meanings and con- cepts people use to make sense of their lives and to construct their actions. Evangelical men’s imaginative rationality is not explained away as false consciousness or as evidence that men are behaving as “rational maximizers” (p. 47). Rather, it is illustrative of “creative intel- ligence confronting problematic situations” (p. 52). This assertion provides a more empiri- cally sound starting point for exploring whether Evangelical movements in Latin America will generate broader forms of social, economic, and political change. The study also accom- plishes a fundamental aim of good ethnographic research — namely, the generation of theories of culture situated in local time and space. We are not merely left with a particular descriptive account of a religious meaning system shared by some eighty men living in contemporary Venezuela. Rather, readers are asked to critically reappraise their theories of culture and religious change in light of the life histories and daily experiences of Augusto, Ugeth, and the other men who walk the streets of Caracas. This is social science at its best.

Reviewed by James G. Huﬀ

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