Research Area B - Junior Research Group Transcultural Dynamics of Pentecostalism

Project Leader: Katja Rakow
Project Members: Esther Naemi Rebekka Berg, Matthias Deininger, Sofia Khalifman, Xinzi Rao

Over the last decades, Pentecostal Christianity has increasingly developed into a global phenomenon with a strong ability to adapt to different cultural contexts.
Since the 1980s, a sustained growth of Pentecostal churches in the multi-ethnic and multireligious, but secular state of Singapore is observable. The Singaporean state prescribes a strict separation of the political and the religious sphere and sanctions any violation of the separation by law. State control necessitates ongoing negotiations and transformations of religious discourses, practices and identities that produce new localised forms of Singaporean Pentecostalism and simultaneously generate new forms of a global identification with Pentecostal Christianity.
The Junior Research Group “Transcultural Dynamics of Pentecostalism” focused on the transformation of late-modern Pentecostal moral codes and modes of subjectivation, questions of identity, and the negotiation of boundaries in the nexus of globalising processes and localised public spheres in contemporary Singapore. Local processes of negotiation, adaptation, and transformations of religious discourses and practices in a global context were at the centre of the analysis. Here, the focus was on the production of new forms of localisation of Pentecostal Christianity and how these are re-injected into larger circuits of exchange.
The JRG explored the transcultural dynamics of Pentecostalism in Singapore via three interlinked sub-projects. Each subproject focussed on different aspects of Pentecostal Christianity in Singapore in order to analyse transcultural processes from various angles: 1. transnational media networks, 2. lived religion in a transnational network of independent megachurches and 3. missionary activities within and outside of Singapore.