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The phenomenal growth of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism around the world in recent decades has forced us to rethink what it means to be religious and what it means to be global. The success of these religious movements has revealed tensions and resonances between the public and the private, the religious and the cultural, and the local and the global. This volume provides an interesting perspective on what has become a truly global religious trend, one that is challenging conventional analytical categories within the social sciences. This book considers the character of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism not only as they have spread across the globe, but also as they have become global movements. Adopting a broadly anthropological approach, the chapters synthesize the existing literature on Pentecostalism and evangelicalism even as they offer new analyses and critiques. They show how the study of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism provides a fresh way to approach classic anthropological themes; they contest the frequent characterization of these movements as conservative religious, social, and political forces; and they argue that Pentecostalism and evangelicalism are significant not least because they encourage us to reflect on the intersections of politics, materiality, morality, and law. Ultimately, the volume leaves us with a clear sense of the cultural and social power, as well as the theoretical significance, of forms of Christianity that we can no longer afford to ignore.

So much has been written about the Rastafari, yet we know so little about why and how people join the Rastafari movement. Although popular understandings evoke images of dreadlocks, reggae, and marijuana, Rastafarians were persecuted in their country, becoming a people seeking social justice. Yet new adherents continued to convert to Rastafari despite facing adverse reactions from their fellow citizens and from their British rulers. This book draws on in-depth interviews to reveal the personal experiences of those who adopted the religion in the 1950s to 1970s, one generation past the movement's emergence. By talking with these Rastafari elders, the author seeks to understand why and how Jamaicans became Rastafari in spite of rampant discrimination, and what sustains them in their faith and identity. Utilizing new conceptual frameworks, the book explores the identity development of Rastafari, demonstrating how shifts in the movement's identity—from social pariah to exemplar of blackness—have led some of the elder Rastafari to adopt, embrace, and internalize Rastafari and blackness as central to their concept of self.

Los Angeles is the epicenter of the American gang problem. Rituals and customs from Los Angeles' eastside gangs, including hand signals, graffiti, and clothing styles, have spread to small towns and big cities alike. Many see the problem with gangs as related to urban marginality. For a Latino immigrant population struggling with poverty and social integration, gangs offer a close-knit community. Yet, as the book argues, gang members can be successfully redirected out of gangs through efforts that change the context in which they find themselves, as well as their notions of what it means to be a man. The book illuminates how Latino men recover from gang life through involvement in urban, faith-based organizations. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with Homeboy Industries, a Jesuit-founded non-profit that is one of the largest gang intervention programs in the country, and with Victory Outreach, a Pentecostal ministry with over six hundred chapters, the book demonstrates that organizations such as these facilitate recovery from gang life by enabling gang members to reinvent themselves as family men and as members of their community. The book offers a window into the process of redefining masculinity. It shows that gang members are not trapped in a cycle of poverty and marginality, and with the help of urban ministries, such men construct a reformed barrio masculinity to distance themselves from gang life.

Every December 12, thousands of Mexican immigrants gather for the mass at New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe's feast day. They kiss images of the Virgin, wait for a bishop's blessing—and they also carry signs asking for immigration reform, much like political protestors. It is this juxtaposition of religion and politics that this book investigates in Guadalupe in New York. The Virgin of Guadalupe is a profound symbol for Mexican and Mexican-American Catholics and the patron saint of their country. Her name has been invoked in war and in peace, and her image has been painted on walls, printed on T-shirts, and worshipped at countless shrines. For undocumented Mexicans in New York, Guadalupe continues to be a powerful presence as they struggle to gain citizenship in a new country. Through rich ethnographic research that illuminates Catholicism as practiced by Mexicans in New York, the book shows that it is through Guadalupan devotion that many undocumented immigrants are finding the will and vocabulary to demand rights, immigration reform, and respect. It also reveals how such devotion supports and emboldens immigrants in their struggle to provide for their families and create their lives in the city with dignity.

The “Hizmet” (“Service”) Movement of Fethullah Gülen is Turkey's most influential Islamic identity community. Widely praised throughout the early 2000s as a mild and moderate variation on Islamic political identity, the Gülen Movement has long been a topic of both adulation and conspiracy in Turkey. This book suggests that the Gülen Movement should be given credit for playing a significant role in Turkey's rise to global prominence. The book draws on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and the United States. It argues that the Movement's growth and impact both inside and outside Turkey position both its leader and its followers as indicative of a “post political” turn in twenty-first-century Islamic political identity in general, and as illustrative of Turkey's political, economic, and cultural transformation in particular.