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Members of the Pentecostal church praising the Lord. Chicago, Illinois. 1941

The discourse on the imbrication of religion and theatre/performance was built around the studies of ritual and drama. From the Passion Plays to Indian Sanskrit, Balinese Legong, Egyptian ritual drama, Greek tragedies, medieval morality plays, Japanese Noh, and African Indigenous religions, the provenances of these categories connect them to sacred cultural practices, blurring the boundaries between the performance practices and “religion” in the respective cultures. The overlap not only attests to the organicity of their intertwined relationships but also their ontological similarities as creative endeavors in the conceptual and illustrative thinking about God, eternity, morality, ethics, and society. At the core, they both do the same thing: transform the abstract into the concrete or weave the universal and the particular together. They converge in their concern with the character of the sacred, the nature of being, and the being of nature, and our human roles within these relations at both the first and second orders. The first level, or order, is praxis; the second is reflection of the action in light of a tradition or school.  

My decision to pursue the study of religion and performance at the University of Chicago was shaped as much by intellectual orientation as by space. Swift Hall offers a vibrant environment in which ideas are not merely articulated but tested: against history, against method, and against one another. Its architecture invites attentiveness, its classrooms sustain rigorous exchange, and its institutional culture refuses the isolation of performance from theory or embodiment from analysis. Ideas throb with life in this space, and I am proud to be part of the intellectual tradition Swift Hall builds and sustains. For a scholar concerned with how religion materializes through gesture, sound, movement, and collective affect, Swift Hall represents a site where performance can be studied not as an ornament or excess but as a serious mode of religious thought. Working in this space affirms my conviction that the study of religion must remain open to the ways meaning is made visible, felt, and contested in public life.

The general areas of my study, which I bring to Swift Hall, are Global Christianity and Pentecostalism, and performance has been a critical tool for investigating them. Performance manifests a vision—whether imagination, revelation, thought, or ideology—and gives an apprehensible form to what would otherwise remain abstract. The illustrative and constitutive quality of performance that makes the invisible seeable renders it a strategic technique of investigating religion, a practice that mediates human interaction with the transcendent. Religion and/as performance encapsulate the embodiment and expression of sacred ideals, as well as the striving for correspondence between vision and form. Indeed, performance is, in this sense, a dialogical meditation between the abstract and the concrete. To describe religion as performance is therefore to indicate how performance makes religion matter. This positions performance as both the method and object of study. In my scholarship, I endeavor to capture how this dialogical mediation operates within Pentecostal spirituality. I investigate how concrete religious practices manifest and communicate the abstract ideas of God, faith, and the blessed life, creating shared experiences that resonate on visceral and intellectual registers.

Pentecostalism is a global religion; its extensive geographic reach forms a dense network of practices that connect communities across space and time. A lively religion too, it meets social expectations for entertainment and moral edification with its worship forms that often produce communal jouissance. I was initially drawn to Pentecostalism by its exuberant, festive, and celebratory church services. Very much a religion of the spirit—one that centers on supernatural manifestation—Pentecostalism persistently explores the spaces between the seen and the unseen, a tension that reliably generates dramatic chaos and ritual resolution. Within these energetic enactments of divine presence lie the Pentecostal projection of power and the cooptation of audiences bound to the spells of its performances. Pentecostalism’s performative character owes much to the sensational and spectacular nature of its originary event. The biblical account of the Day of Pentecost describes the disciples of Jesus Christ gathered in one accord when a sound like “a rushing mighty wind” came from heaven and filled the house, followed by the appearance of “cloven tongues like as of fire” resting upon each of the twelve. Filled with the Holy Spirit, the disciples began to manifest. So compelling was this transformation of ordinary men that witnesses imagined they must have been “full of new wine,” (mis)taking a supernatural event for a bacchanal inebriation.

The Pentecostal movement is also connected to the local histories of communities in which it has taken root worldwide. In many postcolonial African countries, for instance, churches that later aggregated into the Pentecostal movement emerged from the African Indigenous Church movement during the early 20th century. These churches arose as a separationist response to mainline White missionary churches that alienated converts. By breaking away to create distinct spaces in which the power of the Christian God could be expressed through an indigenous ethos, these communities indigenized Christianity and profoundly shaped what would eventually become expressions of Pentecostalism. Their interweaving of the various rich histories of the African Indigenous Church with the aesthetics of global Pentecostalism lent the movement a distinctive character that remains palpable in the expressions of faith.

Another interesting factor is the decline of the “theater culture” in many of these societies following the 1970s, due to various socio-economic challenges.  The decline was coterminous with the rise of the Pentecostal movement—a religion with narratives of disruption and inauguration of the new—and was thus poised to address the stillness of socio-economic progress. Pentecostal churches’ emergence in this social phase addressed the numbness of socio-economic life by offering performance cultures that blended moral edification with entertainment. Those who turned to the churches to solicit the benevolent supernatural, capable of changing the tide of their personal fortunes, were welcomed with engaging displays of theatrical worship and ritual that sought to replace worldly entertainment with godly entertainment. For these reasons, Pentecostalism may be described as a “performative religion,” a characteristic evident across the movement’s global following. Since religion is embedded within broader socio-cultural and political dynamics that inform (and are informed by) the performances through which spirituality is expressed, religious performance latches onto mechanisms of cultural production such as theater, media, and popular culture, blurring the lines between the religious and the ostensibly secular.

Given the association of these forms with entertainment and leisure, how, then, is the transformative force of religious performance to be assessed? Early scholars, largely influenced by anthropological studies, weighed this question by oscillating between effects on a spectrum that spans ritual (as efficacy) and theater (as entertainment). In my work, I argue that what should interest scholars of performance in religion is not whether worship entertains or edifies, but how performance forges relationships that envelop audiences within a universe of meaning. The dramaturgical encounters produced by performance register forms into consciousness, and the viewer becomes inscribed with their meaning, enabling response. Whether the responses produced express elements of efficacy, devotion/or entertainment, or distraction, they are still by-products of the bond we build as witnesses to religion materializing through embodied expression.

Read additional faculty reflections upon Swift Hall's centennial: 

• "The Space Always Wins" by Cynthia G. Lindner, Director of Ministry Studies and Clinical Faculty for Preaching and Pastoral Care
• “Our Better Angels”: Reflections on My Years in Swift Hall by Willemien Otten, Dorothy Grant MacLear Professor of Theology and the History of Christianity
• "The Divinity School and the Hebrew Bible: Past, Present, and Future" by Jeffrey Stackert, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible