Patriarchal “Love School”: Entrepreneurial Heroic Masculinity and Neoliberalism in A Pentecostal Church in London

Abstract

Many Pentecostal churches founded in the Global South are now rapidly growing in European cities. Although research is catching up with this development, we know little about how these processes affect gendered and racialized practices regarding sexualities, bodies, and masculinities in former colonial metropolises shaped by neoliberal capitalism. This article addresses this gap by interrogating the transnational movement of Pentecostal masculinities and their economic, sexual, and political dimensions in a church in North London. The contribution argues that the church promotes what I call entrepreneurial heroic masculinity, which consists of three main elements: a gendered conversion narrative, a pastoral masculinity of dominating behavior, and the cultivation of anti-affective, rational love. In this way, traditionalist masculinist tropes are mapped onto a world allegedly full of opportunities for material blessings where becoming a man of God means becoming a faithful self-entrepreneur, which requires strict autonomy from emotions, family, and the government. The article contributes to the critical debate on masculinity and transnational religious movements by demonstrating how the demands and promises of neoliberal capitalism are deeply entangled with the reconstitution of heroic patriarchal subjectivity.

Too many men never really graduated from men school. Do you know why? They have been waiting for others to tell them what to do. They feel too comfortable depending on others like their mom or dad, or governments (Cardoso, 2010).

Introduction

Pentecostal of Christianity is one of the most dynamic social forces today, transforming the field of religious practice and gender norms across the globe with remarkable speed and in often surprising directions. Many Pentecostal churches from Latin America and Africa see the decline of Christianity as a motivation for a “spiritual re-conquest of Europe” (Oro, 2014, p. 220). Consequently, many have refocused their missionary efforts toward the old colonial metropoles. As Coleman and Hackett put it, “the centers of Christianity are shifting, so that older sites and states of colonial and missionary power are themselves becoming the objects of proselytization” (2015, p. 24). Like the Christian missionaries emanating from Europe, this new type of “reverse mission” (Adogame, 2013; Morier-Genoud, 2018) not only seeks to spread a particular interpretation of the gospel. Neo-Pentecostal missionaries ¹ also bring with them strong ideas about what family, sex, and femininity, but also what masculinity should look like. These gender norms are part of a broader socioeconomic vision of the world. Recalling how the plantation economy and slavery spread with the geographies of missionary activities from the 15th century onwards (Hall, 1992, pp. 204–2020), many Pentecostal churches conjoin the promises of spiritual salvation with the promise of deliverance from the financial hardship suffered by those trying to make a living outside the halls of wealth and power; a phenomenon that has been called “millennial capitalism” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2000). As a result, Pentecostal Christianity’s rise in Europe is deeply entangled with the refashioning of gender relations and the promotion of particular types of economic activity such as high-risk investment practices and the marketization of private and public life. This article provides an empirically grounded analysis of the synergies and frictions between Pentecostal Christianity, neopatriarchal masculinity, and the entrepreneurial self at the heart of neoliberal political economy.

Pentecostal churches’ South–North missionary activity frequently flourishes in the multicultural hearts of former imperial capitals, from Madrid to London (see de Castro Moreira, 2021; Robbins, 2004). Their highly diverse urban neighborhoods emerged through migration along the sinews of empire, constituted by dense networks of exchange of people, cultural artefacts, religious innovations, gender roles, and money (see Müller et al., 2021). Against the background of the neoliberal withdrawal of the state from some areas of basic infrastructure and vital health provision (Bevir & Waring, 2020), especially young people born in Europe and racialized as non-White are attracted to the promise of identity, orientation, and success these churches offer, often in exchange for strict observance of their moral code and logic of financial sacrifices (cf. Garbin, 2013; Oro, 2014). At the same time, racialized exclusion from the national body politic (Bassel and Emejulu, 2017; Gilroy, 1993; Meer, 2019) and the unattainable promises of the capitalist metropole (see Harvey, 2012, pp. 10–22; Robinson, 1983; Sassen, 2014) have created fertile ground for the growth of Pentecostal churches (Garbin, 2013).

The gender practices advocated for by Pentecostal churches offer a sense of meaning and stability that often stem from socially conservative and patriarchal milieus in formerly colonized societies such as Brazil or Nigeria in which those churches were founded (see van Wyk, 2014, pp. 59–115). These movements of revival and reformulation of patriarchal gender roles can also be seen as a response to what has been considered a multidimensional “crisis of masculinity” (Ferree, 2020). Not only do they recast the modern Christian woman as embracing the traditional roles of mother and housewife, a phenomenon that has received significant attention (see Gaddini, 2022).They also actively reshape the “geography of masculinities” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 849) by combining elements of patriarchal traditionalism with 21st century visions of manhood. Pioneering studies in this field demonstrate the urgent need for scholarly attention to the intersection of masculinities and Pentecostal Christianity (Burchardt, 2018; Lindhardt, 2015; Martins & Nascimento, 2021; Thornton, 2018).

The religious dynamics of Neo-Pentecostalism and the new patriarchal configurations they propagate unfold in the context of a political economy shaped by neoliberal capitalism. With the gradual dismantling of the post-war welfare state since the 1980s and its further eroding through the austerity measures introduced in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, basic service provisions in terms of education, healthcare, public infrastructure, and housing has become highly fractured in European cities (see Brown, 2019, pp. 9–10; Sassen, 2014, pp. 12–79). This is particularly the case in marginalized areas with high concentration of working class inhabitants and migrants racialized as non-White (see Bassel & Emejulu, 2017, pp. 33–51; Emirbayer & Desmon, 2015, pp. 334–350). Systemic individualization of risk and the responsibilization of the individual for securing access to basic services has shifted the subjectivity of citizenship from the rights bearing subject to what Michel Foucault calls the “entrepreneur of himself” (2007, pp. 220–226). Neoliberalism has created the material basis for the flourishing of life forms that resonate with the logic of individualization and responsibilization for social ills and economic success. Many forms of Pentecostalism thrive through its amalgamation of neoliberal entrepreneurial logics and neopatriarchal social norms (see Cooper, 2017; Connolly, 2005; Harding, 2001). However, the global dynamics of Pentecostal missionary activity and neoliberal capitalism transform and are transformed by the local setting where they unfold. This raises the question, what masculinities emerge when a Brazilian Pentecostal church takes root in a post-colonial, neoliberal metropolis such as London? How do male pastors and congregants discuss and navigate these masculinities and their affective, sexual, economic, and racialized expectations?

This contribution addresses these questions by analyzing the ways in which masculinity is being reconfigured among people attending a “branch” of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) in North London. Founded in Brazil in 1977, the UCKG is a Neo-Pentecostal church that promises success in what they describe as love, health, and finances. Their branches in Europe, including the one I worked in, is mostly frequented by immigrants and people racialized as non-White, particularly with heritage from lusophone and other parts of the African continent. Using ethnography, I will trace how becoming a “man of God” is instructed through a multi-layered gendered pedagogics comprising sermons, dedicated group activities such as “love school” and the church’s educational program for men called “IntelliMen.” ² Doing so will allow us to trace the complex interplay of Pentecostalism, patriarchy and neoliberalism.

The article argues that understanding the masculinities embodied by the pastors, the primary relays of this pedagogical project, cannot simply be described as “traditional” or “fundamentalist,” but rather as a complex ensemble of individualism, self-optimization and patriarchy. I will show the ways in which men are encouraged to maintain “rational relations” to the things that should matter most in their lives: God, wife and family, and money. What emerges from the analysis is what I call entrepreneurial heroic masculinity, which consists of three interrelated elements: (1) a patriarchal heroism of which a gendered conversion toward a man of God, financial independence and economic success are key indicators, (2) a pastoral masculinity consisting dominating, bullying, and shaming behavior, and (3) the cultivation of rational love as a signifier for a non-affective calculating and strategic behavior in intimate relationships, imbuing romance and sexuality with the same entrepreneurial logic prescribed in the realms of business and finance. The article’s second, empirical part is structured as an exploration of these three elements. The first part briefly outlines the ethnographic methodology in the context of my field site, and the location of this study at the intersection of three strands of scholarship: the transformations of Pentecostal Christianity and the field of strictly observant religion, the critical study of masculinities, and the aspirations of people living in the precarious socioeconomic landscapes of neoliberal cities. Combining these lines of inquiry allows us to not only trace the racialized and gendered exclusions resulting from life forms emerging with the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state, it also allows us to trace how the self-entrepreneurial believer propagated by the UCKG perfectly resonates with the subjectivity expected in neoliberal capitalism: free from the constraints of society, state, or relationships of care, the individualized believer is made responsible for his own success, which allegedly only depends on how much he is willing to ‘invest in God.’

Strictly Observant Religion, Intersecting Masculinities and the Ambiguities of the Neoliberal State

The rise of Pentecostalism across the world is part of a wider trend in the development and spread of what I suggest to call strictly observant religion. The term tries to capture a type of religiosity characterized by certain features while displaying a considerable degree of diversity. Strictly observant religion is a social system which aims at structuring all aspects of life around strict adherence to religious doctrines and mandated practices established by religious experts through social, emotional, and financial regimes of control, discipline, and punishment. It is distinguished to forms of religion where either following the rules established by religious authorities is seen as more or less up to individual digression and interpretation, or where no meaningful social systems aimed at the control and enforcement of such rules exist. Although the term “observant” is more prevalent in the descriptions and self-understanding of some religions such as Judaism, observing the rules laid down by a clergy, religious text, or traditional sacred authority is central to many religions, and certainly to many forms of Islam and Christianity. The advantage of this functional-systematic definition over terms used for similar phenomena such as “fundamentalism” is its relative independence from the particular legacy U.S.-American Protestantism and the related strong moral connotations . Some insights from the fundamentalism literature are helpful for understanding strictly observant religion such as the way that gender is central to religious systems of aspiration and control. Riesebrodt (1993, p. 206), for instance, defines fundamentalism as “patriarchal protest movement.” Although many conservative religious groups aim to recover an imagined past golden age of traditional family values, in fact they are reinventing and recreating the past in response to current sexual and gendered politics. The advantage of analyzing these trends through the lens of strictly observant religion allows us to capture different and sometimes surprising alliances and the way values, religious practices, economic activities, and gender dynamics are reconfigured, disaggregating, expanded on. This persepctive enables us to and go beyond what is usually understood as conservative, fundamentalist, or traditionalist religion.

Pentecostal Christianity is an exemplar of such multidirectional reconfigurations of religion in terms of gendered, economic, and political practices. Since its resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States, evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity has been marked by resistance against the politics of sexual liberation (see Harding, 2001), from LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer) rights to abortion. However, not all gender norms associated with modernity are necessarily rejected by Pentecostal groups. For example, across the continent of Africa, Christian activists and thinkers are also pushing forward progressive agendas on sexuality and social justice that challenge both secular feminist and conservative religious gender politics (van Klinken & Chitando, 2021). In some areas of life such as the authority of the church in organizational and dogmatic questions, these Pentecostal groups expect straightforward obedience. In contrast to this obedient subjectivity, in other aspects of life, they seek to cultivate an entrepreneurial subjectivity, where individual free choice in terms of economic activity and instrumental rationality to achieve purportedly universal life goals are foregrounded (see Coleman and Hackett, 2015; van Wyk, 2014).

The ways in which masculinities are shaped by race and class dynamics are a crucial dimension of Pentecostalism’ current transformations. Analyses of gender relations in religious contexts have mostly focused on the way in which sexist oppression affects women (Avishai et al., 2015; Gaddini, 2022; Liebelt & Werbner, 2018; Martin, 2003). More recently, studies increasingly focus on the transformation of masculinities in conservative and traditionalist religious contexts (Burchardt 2018; Inhorn, 2012; Naguib, 2015; Stadler, 2009; Thornton, 2018). Scrutinizing the reconfigurations of Pentecostal masculinities enables us to understand not only the ways in which patriarchal systems are being reproduced and destabilized, but also, crucially, how men who do not fit into the stereotypical expectations of “hegemonic masculinity” are subject to exclusion, marginalization, and oppression (Connell, 2005, pp. 67–86; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; hooks, 1984, p. 122).

Bell hooks reminds us that economic relations are a central mechanism shaping gender dynamics: “Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women’s behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres” (1984, p. 5). This is key to understand both women’s and men’s position in Pentecostal churches in the context of neoliberal capitalism: Patriarchy does not only restrict and limit possibilities. Instead, much like power is also productive in Foucault’s sense, patriarchal formations sometimes enable degrees of freedom that are linked to other forms of oppression. Brusco (1995) for instance argues that the asceticism propagated by evangelicals in Colombia including abstention from alcohol, smoking, and extramarital relations can contribute to saving men’s income for the family, thereby raising the living standard of women and children in the household.

These entanglements of gender, class, race, and religion indicate why it is necessary to take an intersectional approach to understanding contemporary forms of masculinities (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins & Bilge, 2016; hooks, 1984). This is particularly important since cause, effect, and subjectivity in intersectional discrimination is frequently difficult to disentangle. As Matlon (2019) puts it: “In 1961 Frantz Fanon wrote: ‘the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich’. We might also add that you are a man because you have money, and you have money because you are a man.” Connecting hegemonic masculinity to class and race in this way means that very few men adhere to its exclusionary standards. As a result, many men experience what can been called “gender distress,” caused by “struggles to remain manly” (Thornton, 2018, p. 133), since many men attending the UCKG in Europe come from deprived and predominantly non-White neighborhoods in which racial and economic marginalization intersect. In this sense, the present contribution also responds to Raewyn Connell’s and James Messerschmidt’s call for more concrete analyses of the “geography of masculinities,” where specific iterations of hegemonic and subordinate masculinities are studied through the dynamics of their local, regional, and global entanglements (2005, p. 849).

In Western Europe, these geographies of Pentecostal masculinity are embedded in the desires and demands of individual freedom at the heart of the neoliberal project. At first sight, this seems to run against the socially conservative or even strict precepts dominating Pentecostal Christianity. However, as David Harvey points out, the political base for neoliberalism was crafted in conjuncture with “religion and cultural nationalism . . . racism, homophobia and anti-feminism” (Harvey, 2007, p. 50). Today, the elective affinities of Pentecostal Christianity, patriarchal masculinities, and neoliberalism unfold within what has been described as a broader political convergence: of neoliberal rationalities, social conservatism, and far-right authoritarianism (Brown, 2019). The “dethroned privilege that whiteness, Christianity and maleness granted to those who were otherwise nothing and no one” has been translated into “the Christian nationalist ambition to (re)conquer the West” (Brown, 2019, pp. 5–8). Much like Max Weber described a mutual and partial “qualitative shaping” of religion and economic ethics in his Protestant Ethics (Weber 2016, p. 75, see Howe, 1978), there seems to be an elective affinity between the political economy of neoliberalism, reassertion of racialized patriarchy and this type of Pentecostal religiosity.

However, according to Judith Butler, there sits an antinomy at the heart of “neoliberal rationality”: it “demands self-sufficiency as a moral ideal at the same time that neoliberal forms of power work to destroy that very possibility at an economic level, establishing every member of the population as potentially or actually precarious” (Butler, 2015, p. 14). Fueling these asymmetrically distributed possibilities, the state functions as the protector of individual liberty in the form of private property and of religious liberty, all the while supporting and being supported the White Christian nationalist project that is taken up by right wing forces across the Americas and Europe (Gorski & Perry, 2022). It is in this context that the Pentecostal revival seems to find particular resonance in the post-colonial states of insecurity and intersecting crises neoliberalism has helped to produce: of the welfare state, of care, and of traditional masculinity. By discursively propping up the material and ideological structures that keeps depravation along the axis of race, class, and gender intact, Pentecostal churches such as the UCKG contribute to upholding the implicit consent to the rules of the neoliberal order, or, “the spirit of millennial capitalism” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2000), which this study attends to.

Methodology and Context

This study is based on 5 months of ethnographic fieldwork with the UCKG in London, primarily conducted between April and November 2019. The UCGK was founded by Edir Macedo in Rio di Janeiro in 1977 and claims over 10 million members in over 80 countries (Freston, 2005, p. 34; van Wyk, 2014, p. 14). Although the UCKG espouses the social conservatism found in many Pentecostal churches, some statements such as Macedo’s pro-choice remarks concerning abortion indicate that the church’s institutional messaging shows some degree of variation and adaptability in its sexual and reproductive ethics (see Løland, 2020, p. 64). Macedo’s son in law Renato Cardoso held the first UCKG services on British soil in Brixton in 1995, one of London’s most well-established Black neighborhoods, which was also the site of the first UCKG church (see Eade, 2017).

I organized most of my work around one “branch” of the church in an area in North London where various communities practice their faith. Speaking of a “branch” instead of a church was one example among many of internal vocabulary borrowed from business contexts, “investing” in God being another prominent one. Most people going to this branch were Black British or Black African, with most of the regular attendees being roughly between 14 and 45 years old, with a few more senior congregants. The location of the church in a very religiously and ethnically diverse urban neighborhood was hardly ever mentioned inside the church walls. Van Wyk (2014, p. 23) observed with reference to the UCKG in South Africa that due to the lack of sociality in what she has called a “church of strangers,” church buildings become something of a “non-place” (cf. Augé, 1995), like supermarkets and airports, where people are largely unconcerned about the historical and relational situatedness of the place, and are mainly bound together by “a shared desperate commitment to attain their own blessing” (van Wyk, 2014, p. 23). Although the Sunday morning service was considered the week’s most important event by most members of the branch I worked at, the Universal Church offers an impressively dense weekly timetable in most of its London “UCKG Help Centres,” as their church buildings are officially known. These include four daily services, two youth meetings a week, and the highly popular “Impossible Cases” event each Saturday morning at 7 am. Pastors encouraged congregants to make the sacrifice to come to church that early if they were faced with seemingly irresolvable situations such as bankruptcy or terminal illness. The term “impossible cases” resonates with the entrepreneurial logic of case-based work used by consultancy and litigation firms. Through such interventions, the church promises fundamental transformations of the congregants’ lives. They are promised to be achieved by performing effective rituals through which the holy spirit is able to drive out what are considered the demons of laziness, depression, and economic failure (see de Castro Moreira, 2021).

During my fieldwork, I attended several services a week, youth meetings, and the Saturday outreach activity “Battalion,” which consisted of distributing church newspapers to passers-by and inviting them to visit the church. In addition to these activities organized by the local branch, I also attended special occasions such as the “Day of Power” in a major football stadium and the “Love Therapy” or “Love School” event series, which took place every Thursday in the main church building in Finsbury Park, at the premises of historic Rainbow Theater. Originally constructed as a cinema in the 1930s and later a boxing venue, the rainbow theater was once one of London’s prime concert venues, famously the place where Jimmy Hendrix first burnt a guitar. In a remarkable continuity throughout history, when I was doing fieldwork there in 2019, every week hundreds of young hopeful people flocked to the theater driven by their aspiration to find happiness, transcendence, and love.

I explained my research project to the pastors in the local branch and the main building in Finsbury Park and was invited to attend any of the church’s events. As a White German man brought up in a Christian church, I was mostly read as someone who could possibly be brought into the fold of the church, an expectation frequently expressed by pastors and congregants. One pastor told me that maybe my research was part of God’s plan to bring me back on the right path. The pastors were evasive when asked for formal interviews and told me to speak to them after the service, which was therefore my main point of interaction with them. Due to the very busy schedule of the church, I had most conversations with church members after services, when doing errands, and while grabbing food and drinks in the vicinity of the church.

In addition to the participant observation in and around church activities at the local branch and the Love Therapy events, I also conducted a document analysis (see Bowen, 2009) of the online course “IntelliMen,” the church’s main educational program for men. Designed by the Brazilian Renato Cardoso, the son-in-law of UCKG founder Edir Macedo and a very influential bishop in the church, it consists of 52 weekly “Challenges,” a set of tasks such as watching a video, journaling and specific behavioral change such as “make money in an interesting way” (Challenge #34; Cardoso, 2013g) or “porn-proof yourself by block [sic] any and all access to it” (Challenge #46; Cardoso, 2013h). They are supposed to deal with the problem that “many men are lagging behind and struggling to catch up,” resulting in “Disoriented, Discontent and Discredited men” (Cardoso, 2013j). I analyzed the data produced by extensive field notes and the investigation of the training courses and texts by using the method “open coding” (Strauss, 1987, pp. 59–58). To focus the vast array of data collected, I clustered information around different themes related to my research questions, which I used to go over the primary data again to identify patterns that were then turned into the descriptive and interpretive framework presented below.

I came to the field with an interest in the ways in which the anti-liberal ethos of some Pentecostal churches might conflict with or challenge the cultural normalizations propagated by the liberal state. Paying close attention to any instance where someone talked about the government, courts, schools, and other state organizations in sermons, prayers, and formal and informal conversations, I was struck that these themes were largely absent. They rarely referred to any institution of the state, actions of politicians, or the legal order, despite the fact that many of the congregants had in the past or continued to have very intimate encounters with state institutions. Some were open about having been arrested for petty or drug-related crime, some had been active in gangs, and many were concerned about knife crime and substance abuse their children were involved in, including the possibility of prosecution that would get them into jail for prolonged periods of time. However, instead of demanding better youth services, a more inclusive schooling system or an end to racial profiling and violent attacks by the police, these issues were discussed only in terms of the individual moral failings of the people involved. Not once did I hear someone interpret this through a societal perspective, discussing the systemic mechanisms behind people’s experiences. Instead, the church offered a supposedly instant remedy through prayers, rituals, and the promise of sudden prosperity that resonates with the logic of racial capitalism that produces this precarity in the first place (cf. Robinson, 1983). Accordingly, the “the government,” as the epigraph indicates, is considered as an obstacle to the limitless possibilities of the individual faithful and God.

The church’s public perception in London was also shaped by the notoriety of the child abuse case of Victoria Climbié, which to many encapsulates how the church approaches questions of both mental and physical health. One day, when I joined some of the church regulars at their weekly outreach activity consisting of distributing the church newspaper near a tube stop in North London, a man started shouting at us: “I know who you are! I know what you did to that girl!.” He was referring to an incident of severe domestic violence in which the 8-year-old girl Victoria Climbié was beaten and abused by her parents for months. In February 2000, the parents brought her to the UCKG main church in Finsbury Park, where, as the House of Commons Inquiry Report states, “Pastor Lima expressed the view that Victoria was possessed by an evil spirit and advised Kouao [her mother] to bring Victoria back to the church a week later” (House of Commons, 2003, p. 9). A week later, when they returned to the church and Pastor Lima recommended them to go to hospital, it was already too late; Victoria died within a couple of hours. Many statutory agencies of the British health and childcare sector were involved in Victoria’s case and failed miserably due to various reasons, including insufficient resources to meet the high demand (House of Commons, 2003, p. 5). It seemed very difficult to trace the exact involvement of the UCKG and the neglect of their duty of care and I could not decern any further action taken against Pastor Lima or the UCKG following the report’s publication. However, in 2023, a compliance case over “potential safeguarding concerns” was opened by the UK Charity Commission (Wait, 2023).

The UCKG also had previously made national headlines in South Africa because they were investigated by the Human Rights Commission for “financially exploiting the poor” and “rituals that amount to forms of psychological conditioning” (Anon quoted in van Wyk, 2014, p. 16). In 2009, “dozens” of ex-pastors accused the Universal Church to be “a money-making scam,” requiring women to quit their jobs in order to get married to their pastor fiancés and forcing pastors to “undergo vasectomies to prevent them having children so they would not carry any ‘baggage’” (Motsepe, 2009; Wyk, 2014, p. 17). In London, the church has also met opposition by groups of former members such as “Surviving Universal.” Its founder Rachel Reign reports that she was made to perform exorcisms on other children when she was 15 years old; another ex-member said he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from a conversion therapy “to make me heterosexual;” another former member related that her ex-husband was persuad to give the security deposit for the house to the church resulting in them being evicted from their home (Reign, 2022; Twomey, 2022). Notwithstanding these controversies, the UCKG branch I worked in seemed to attract hundreds of congregants every day, many of which told me of how transformative their conversion into the church had been for their lives.

Gendered Conversions and Patriarchal Heroism

During an intense prayer in front of the altar at one of the Love Therapy sessions, Elijah, a young Assistant, put his hands on my head to “rebuke” evil spirits, an exorcism ritual that involves very loud shouting commanding the demons of depression, poverty, etc. to leave the person, and urging God to drive those evil spirits out. ³ Following this emotionally and physically intense experience, Elijah offered to have a conversation after the service. After the last chords of the final hymn, he quickly came up to meand invited me to sit next to him in one of the auditorium’s rows of the red velvet chairs . His inquiry about my experience during his prayer evolved into a conversation during which I asked him about his journey to become an assistant. He sat up straight, his eyes lit up, and his facial features started to move vividly. He told me he came to church when he was in his late teens. At that point, he was “confused about his sexuality, was masturbating, was watching porn.” He always felt bad after that, and knew that it was wrong, it was God inside him telling these things, but he was “addicted to it.” When I asked him why masturbation was bad, he hesitated, and then said that “he always felt very bad after it,” he “felt filthy, dirty,” and that there was an “emptiness.” Elijah also told me that he had “homosexual desires” and that he was watching “homosexual pornography.” But then, in a loud and determined voice he declared, “at the bottom of my heart I wanted to be a real man.” He wanted to have a wife by his side, so he stopped the things he used to do before. He told me that he was improving in the church by serving and dedicating his time and he became an assistant. At church he also met somebody, who was also an assistant. He sounded excited and reassured when he told me that it really was the way the pastor in Love Therapy had described, alluding to today’s sermon on the “love triangle.” Elijah raised his arms, moving his hands closer together as they moved up and explained that he and his girlfriend came closer to each other the closer they came to God. They were planning to get married the following March.

Elijah’s account of becoming an assistant demonstrates the principal importance of masculinity and sexuality to a radical break in self-narrations of conversion (see Martins & Nascimento, 2021, p. 281; Robbins, 2014, p. 167). These conversion narratives are key elements of what could be called “patriarchal heroism,” which functions as a contemporary version of the traditionalist trope of the male as the hero emerging victorious from the battle against evil. This image of the male as the dominating hero unfolds against the background of what has been called a “post-heroic age” (Münkler, 2007). Münkler (2007) claims that “the erosion of the religious promotes post-heroic dispositions,” including the relative decline of male hegemony. Against this, the conversion narratives in the UCKG like that of Elijah reinforce the figure of the strong male as reestablishing control and domination through sacrifice, both key elements of the hero trope.

In Elijah’s account, the heroic nature of the conversion becomes most visible through the contrast with the evils that previously afflicted the hero: addiction, promiscuity, and homosexuality. Through a process of “self-othering,” the former life becomes an important part of the narration of the new life, as de Castro Moreira (2021, pp. 118–125) describes in his work on the UCKG in Madrid. At no point in his account did Elijah mention that his belief had changed. He did not talk about how his thinking about God or his faith had developed in a way that would have led him to dedicating his life to the church. Instead, the difference that marked the conversion was expressed through a break with previous behavioral patterns and a transformation of bodily desires, in Elijah’s case from homosexual to heterosexual orientation. That a perceptible change happened in people’s lives—affective, attitudinal, financial, sexual—is considered a constitutive element of the threshold of conversion from the “old man” to the heroic “new man” (see Martins & Nascimento, 2021, p. 281).

The temporal differentiation between the before and the after is crucial to Elijah’s and many other church members’ conversion stories and “testimonies” I heard. For Elijah and many others, doing the right thing manifested God’s presence, rather than a shift in one’s beliefs. In this way, fighting the sexual desires associated with the devil’s temptations are intimately connected to the temporal-material threshold of conversion, and of becoming a man of God. In what the church calls “IntelliMen Challenges,” number #46 and #47 explain that “addiction to porn, along with its number one ally, masturbation, dominates the lives of many young adult males,” which is why men should “stop looking at other women,” “practice self-control when it come[s] to masturbation,” and “porn-proof yourself” (Cardoso, 2013e, 2013i). This means that sexual self-control and the disciplining of desires are not only primarily understood as virtues born out of an ethics of abstinence but also as a proof of the conversion to become a man of God. This supports Annelin Eriksen’s argument that in contrast to the egalitarianism proclaimed by many Pentecostal churches (see Robbins, 2004, p. 125), sex inequalities manifest in a “gendered experience of conversion” (Eriksen, 2014, p. 266; Martins & Nascimento, 2021, p. 202).

The language of control is not incidental here, rather, it ties into the overall reproduction of the male as dominant, self-determined, and in control. One of the IntelliMen challenges asks participants to watch a video titled “Man up,” in which Bishop Renato Cardoso outlines the rules of “being a man” (Cardoso, 2010, 2013b). These include “to be a provider,” since “a man does not depend on others”: “If you are married already but you’re not able to take care of yourself, let alone of your family, so you are not really being a man yet” (Cardoso, 2010). Being a man is directly coded as being independent and autonomous. Self-reliance and providing for one’s family are considered central elements of manhood, as is being determined to achieve specific goals and following one’s own desires, as the bishop explains:

A man goes after his kill, he goes after what he wants to, to do and to conquer, he doesn’t wait for others, he doesn’t wait on parents, on friends, he doesn’t wait on favours, he doesn’t wait on government. He just counts on himself and his abilities and he goes for the kill and he brings that kill home. He feeds himself, he feeds his wife, his family, his kids if he has any. That’s one of the number one rules of being a man (Cardoso, 2010).

Many elements of this normative prescription of masculinity follow the traditional model of the patriarchal man as responsible for the material provision of the family which is justified with historical recourse to man’s role “since the beginning of time [. . .] to hunt, form armies, fight wars, provide for his family and make it grow. [. . .] This characteristic is part of what makes men strong, secure and determined—a natural-born leader” (Cardoso, 2013c; see 2013a). A close reading of this and other text passages allows us to sketch the IntelliMen program’s meta-narrative. It naturalizes certain traits that all men allegedly have, such as acting autonomously, being in charge of making decision, pursuing self-realization, seeking domination, and being prone to violence. The will to power and to dominate are cultivated as characteristics of being a man and are used as a justification for radical independence from both the closest ties of kinship such as the family and cultural community, as well as from institutionalized support structures usually referred to with the general term “the government.” Feeling “too comfortable depending on others like their mom or dad, or governments,” is coded as emasculation. In the achievement-oriented language of IntelliMen, this is framed, as quote at the beginning of the article indicates, they “never really graduated from men school” (Cardoso, 2010). The comparison with schooling renders becoming a man as an encompassing pedagogical project of identity formation that bestows status, knowledge, and power. Only by dominating the “things that dominate men these days,” such as “addictions, laziness, fear, trauma, sex, masturbation, pornography,” but also “religion” “self-doubt” and “negativity,” one can be a real man (Cardoso, 2013d). This reflects the central role of ending masturbation and pornography consumption in Elijah’s account of conversion, of becoming a man of God. In the process of becoming a “man of God,” it seems the term ‘‘man’’ is almost as important as ‘‘God’’. It is through achieving the accolades of being a “man” that one implicitly reaches the religious state “of God.”

In addition to accessing manhood, conversions also imply partial access to the status attached with whiteness. The act of conversion through exorcism urged congregants racialized as Black to leave behind the cultural and social ties of their ancestors and to access the realm of spiritual and financial success modeled by the White leadership of the church. This racialized dimension is not unique to Britain, but is rooted in the historical emergence of the UCKG in Brazil. ⁴ As Birman (2019) shows, the practice of conversion through the ritual of exorcism of evil spirits needs to be understood in the context of the intended break with the social and cultural beliefs both of Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian religions (see Lundell, 2020). Exorcism is a key instrument in recreating a racial hierarchy, since the UCGK as a church led by people racialized as White performs conversion as a demonization of and radical break from key tenets of Afro-Brazilian religiosity and culture.

This expands Eriksen’s argument outlined above: Not only are conversions gendered and raced, but also the conversion manifests itself through a change in gendered, sexual, and economic behavior: Becoming a man is a prerequisite for becoming a man of God. It is impossible to do God’s will without trying to embody the racialized hegemonic masculinity promoted by those with pastoral responsibility, from the assistant in the local branch to the church’s most influential bishops.

Pastoral Masculinity, Dominating Behavior, and Manhood of God

As Elijah’s account of conversion and Renato Cardoso’s dismissal of mental health issues, poverty, and all form of dependence indicates, this dominating masculinity is not only a pedagogical project, but is also embodied in the affects and habitus displayed by the pastors. The habitus of the pastors, while of course multifaceted, struck me as frequently combining a self-narration of redemption through conversion with a dominating demeanor. In one of the youth sessions that I attended, Pastor Evan, a young “auxiliary pastor,” told his conversion story based on his desires as a teenager: “Every young guy wants to have a reputation, the power [. . .] When he walks into the room, want[s] everybody to fear them. And I had this thug mentality. People will fear me! [. . .] I wanted guys, I wanted reputation, I wanted the girls, and I got it. I got it and I said, is that it?” Significantly, Evan was convinced to join the church by a pastor who seemed to be able to engage with him on his own terms, as he recounted during a youth event:

There was a pastor [laughs], he made a challenge. If what I am saying is not real, leave and don’t come back. I said this man has guts. Because you only speak like that if he knows what you are speaking about. I said: If that God works, I will try. I was 14 years old, weapons already carried, drugs already involved. Now I am in my mid 20s. Where would I be now?

The testimony of Pastor Evan demonstrates how certain forms of masculinity that are tied to relations based on fear, readiness to use violence, and “getting the girls” function as marker of status to form the basis of the ensuing conversion. Although being situated in a particular sociocultural milieu, this essentialized image of what “every young guy wants” naturalizes certain distinctions as the basis of a gendered social order, namely being “male,” which needs to be transformed by “becoming a man.” Despite the rendering of conversion as process in which certain “primitive” elements of dominating masculinity are transcended, many structural features of this patriarchal masculine habitus remain firmly in place. Evan told the congregation that the pastor that convinced him had “guts” and was using a “challenge,” which shows a continuity of wanting to become the man who commands respect and whose social interactions are based on challenge and competition, thereby continuing to benefit from what Raewyn Connell calls the “patriarchal dividend” (2005, p. 79).

The naturalization of men’s heterosexual desire for being with a lot of women, “the girls,” also became manifest in Pastor Jacob’s retelling of the biblical story of Solomon. Solomon was a frequent reference in the UCKG because of his famed wealth, big sacrifice, many wives, and construction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, an oversized replica of which is the church’s flagship building in São Paolo. In a sermon, he asked the congregation: “How many wives did Solomon have?” He shouted, “One thousand wives!” and burst out in laughter. He grinned and said quietly, “one woman already is many [sic] work, but one thousand!” Later in the Youth Group, Pastor Evan referred to the sermon and explained that Solomon hit all his goals, “Do you know how many wives he had? Seven hundred wives! . . . How do you get bored from seven hundred wives? How can a man that has everything not be happy?.” In these accounts, women are not only relegated to the objects of male desire, but the heterosexual hunger for interactions with a large number of women is depicted as central feature of hegemonic masculinity. In addition, women are talked about mainly as passive objects within a proprietarian framework: “having the girls” and “having wives” are marked as symbols of status and respect, whereas efforts of care and relationship engagement are relegated to bothersome “work.” This narrative of male desire and property acquisition creates a continuity between the biblical account of Solomon’s polygamy to the thuggish teenage years of Pastor Evan and the need for men of God to control their sexuality.

A related continuity of this dominating habitus of masculinity consists of the rhetorical and pedagogical use of mocking by many pastors in the sermons I listened to. Those not following their instructions or not agreeing with them were frequently ridiculed, shamed, and declared to be stupid. One day at the end of the service, Pastor Evan announced an upcoming cinema screening of “Nothing to Lose 2,” a Hollywood style feature film on the life of UCKG founder Edir Macedo directed by Alexandre Avancini. Evan explained that with each ticket, costing the stiff price of 20 pounds, one would get a T-Shirt. He then said, impersonating one of his congregants asking him, “Can I have two pastor?,” and then responding in a stern voice “No, I said one!,” which resulted in some restrained laughter from his audience. Mocking of what is considered stupidity, lack of courage, or unmanly behavior was frequently present in the Love Therapy sessions and is also reflected in the language of the IntelliMen program: For example, Challenge 32 on regulating emotions reads “What’s worse than an emotional woman? An emotional man. [. . .] Imagine an emotional man doing this . . . ‘I need to kill that deer, but it’s so cute . . . awe, it looks just like Bambi!’ He would die of starvation” (Cardoso, 2013f). ⁵ Masculinities that do not conform with the dominating form of masculinity are delegitimized as “latest trend” such as “‘sensitive men’. They cry, use earrings, get easily offended, use their wife’s moisturizing cream and even pluck their eyebrows . . .” (Cardoso, 2013f). Although displays of emotion were generally ridiculed as effeminate and weak, during intense prayers and exorcisms men were encouraged to cry, which they frequently did. In this way, emotions, with the exception of anger, were directed away from romantic relationships, the family, and other people and directed exclusively towards God.

The mocking tone pervading the church’s official educational materials was also reflected in the behavior of Pastor Evan. In the Victory Youth group session, his habitus often included mocking and ridiculing other points of view and gendered practices. He also dominated all conversations to the point of bullying those that disagreed. There seemed to be more than an accidental resemblance between how he described his persona as running a street gang and the way he dominated the young people in church. Denigrating, mocking, and in some cases bullying people or ways of being that do not conform to gender, religious, and social norms was a behavior that I witnessed as central to pastoral masculinity.

The course material of the UCKG’s IntelliMen project makes it unambiguously clear that a “male” who is financially dependent “is not ‘a real man’ and hence not an IntelliMan, a true ‘man of God’” (Cardoso, 2010). For the pastors, this financial independence is thought to be achieved using an economic metaphor for what are essentially donations of time and money to the church. As Pastor Evan put it in one prayer: “Father I am willing to invest in you, give you the opportunity you are asking for. If you make that decision, you can be absolutely sure that God will be thinking of you.” In this sense, the very possibility of being a faithful subject is tied to a certain masculinity which in turn is dependent on one’s position and activity within a highly stratified capitalist economy, echoing individualized expectations mobilized through hegemonic masculinity (see Connell, 2005, pp. 67–86, 254).

This heroic masculinity was enacted particularly strongly by the pastors from Brazil, all of whom had a very light skin color. As far as I could tell, they occupied most of the higher echelons of the church leadership in the United Kingdom, indicating the racialized division between the Brazilian church leadership racialized as White and the congregants mostly racialized as Black. This shows how the hegemonic masculinity advanced in the UCKG is not only entwined with class, where financial success is made a marker of manhood, but also with race, in which whiteness is implicitly associated with independence, rationality, virtuousness, and power. The ideal of what could be called the faithful self-entrepreneur is not only gendered as male but also racialized as White. In other words, self-assured, dominant, and avowedly independent from any relational or societal ties, the predominantly White, Brazilian-born pastors were presented as embodying the conversion into a man of God. This form of patriarchal heroic masculinity is discursively contrasted with the figure of the passive “male,” as Cardoso puts it. The passive “male” is not living up to the expectations and requirements of what could be called manhood of God, the inextricable entanglement of gendered, racial, economic, and religious normativity.

This posed a serious challenge for many congregants I worked with. Many of the men I met did not meet the expectations articulated by the pastors’ articulations of hegemonic masculinity. They often attributed guilt for financial, health, and relationship issues to their insufficient sacrifice and discipline in following God’s commands and the subsequent absence of his material blessings. They frequently embodied forms of what could be understood as subordinated masculinity, contrasting with the pastors’ performance of confidence and success. Many of those men were rather shy, reluctant to make eye contact, not very confident in communicating, less well educated, economically dependent on their families, and struggling to find employment. Particularly for men racialized as Black and with African heritage, and who were facing intersecting marginalization along the lines of class, race, and geography, the UCKG’s promises often failed to materialize.

David, a Black British man in his early 20s told me that he was excited about learning a lot in the church, including from the IntelliMen program, and from an assistant who taught him how to trade in highly speculative financial products. David continued to experience financial difficulties, which he blamed on his own insufficient commitment to the campaigns offered by the church. This further exacerbated the sense of failing to live up to the expectations of heroic masculinity; he was failing to live up to both the religious and socioeconomic expectations of success. David and his male friends also hoped that the formats offered by the church such as Love Therapy and Love Walk, a structured dating event, would help them to find a partner. Many young people in the church trusted that achieving manhood of God would also help them achieve their romantic aspirations. In this way, the heroic masculinity promoted by the UCKG also seemed to endow participants with a church-specific kind of erotic capital, which can be increased by attending services, strictly adhering to the demanding rituals, giving the expected tithes, becoming materially successful, and gaining control over one’s emotions. David’s failure to live up to the standards of masculinity propagated by the predominantly White pastors also illustrates how the church mirrored the racial inequalities in London as postcolonial metropolis.

As the case of Victoria Climbié, the organization Surviving Universal UK and my interlocutors’ stories demonstrate, many people involved in the UCKG experienced the intersecting exclusion of the neoliberal stripping of the welfare state and the lack of care and structural support, or worse, the abuse, and exploitation of the church in which they invest their hope, time, and money. In this way, many UCKG members undergo what could be called double responsibilization: the neoliberal state makes them responsible for their economic destitution, whereas the church makes them responsible for their lack of success interpreted as a lack of faith. This includes, most perniciously, blaming peoples’ mental health problems on their allegedly insufficient faith. Mental health issues such as depression are considered to be demons that can be driven out with the help of God through very money and time-intensive rituals offered by the church, which ironically can further exacerbate the economic hardship that fuels mental ill-health (see van Wyk, 2014, pp. 171–200).

Rational Love and the Uses of Anger

The third element of heroic entrepreneurial masculinity is what I call “rational love” or “anti-effective love.” As discussed above, the pastoral masculinity of the UCKG members I worked with mobilized a regime of practices and languages that redefines and polices the gender binary of man and woman. The strict separation between thinking and feeling, and the association of men with the former and women with the latter is another binary that forms a crucial element of the hegemonic masculinity in my field site, as it does in many other patriarchal social structures. After one service in the branch I worked in, I sat down with Pastor Fontes, the branch’s main pastor from Brazil, to ask him a couple of questions. I told him I was interested in why women could not become pastors in the UCKG. He responded by saying that there were female pastors in other countries, just not in the UK. “Women are often too emotional, they just aren’t . . .,” he didn’t finish the sentence, but his body posture changed, he was sitting up a bit straighter, gesticulating with both hands, turning them into fists, and continued, “to be a pastor, you need to be more . . .,” and paused, then made a gesture with his opened hand, like cutting something, saying, “basically, women are too weak in many regards.” He reassured me, however, that women could perform all sorts of other tasks in the church, his wife could preach or conduct meetings for women and they could become assistants. During the conversation he came across as very confident, telling me that since women were allowed to do many things in the church, he did not see the problem with barring them from becoming a pastor. The women I talked to about this question largely agreed that men and women were different, that they had different tasks, and that it would be difficult for both man and woman to be a pastor. Many said that they did not want to become pastors themselves anyways.

These gendered imaginations became particularly clear to me after watchin the movie Nothing to Lose 2 together with congregants from my branch. The UCKG decided to screen the movie in London’s Westfield Stratford City, dubbed “Europe’s biggest shopping centre” (Barret & Felsted, 2011). The movie provided a detailed depiction of the courting and relationship between Edir Macedo and his wife Ester Bezerra. I was struck by the fact that as far as I could tell, during the whole two hours of the movie, Macedo not only constantly told her what to do, but also, as far as I remember, never asked his wife a single question. She seemed to mainly have the role of providing emotional support by smiling and hugging him when times were difficult. After watching the movie, I stood outside the cinema with some people from my branch and we talked about what a good relationship looked like. Philonella, a woman from Guinea-Bisseau in her 30s, emphasized that when thinking about a future husband, “the most important thing is that he respects you.” “If he doesn’t respect you, you kick him out of the house.” Eliza, a Black British woman in her 20s, said that the most important thing was to share the same faith because otherwise you “learn different things,” “and then there is disagreement.” She explained that her father used to come to the church and then stopped, and her parents were much more unified and together when they were praying together. “Now he gets up when mum gives money to the church.” I asked them where this “learning” that she talked about would took place. She responded, “at Love School,” another name for Love Therapy.

In the UCKG discourse, love seems to have a paradoxical status. The main event format for singles and couples which aims to prepare them for and help them finding partners with whom they could have a good marriage, uses the term love. Love life, next to finances and health, is frequently mentioned in sermons as one of the three core areas of concern for every human being. In this way, love is at the heart of the church’s pedagogical project on relationship and sexuality. However, love is not considered to be an emotion, or even to have significant emotional components. Instead, the love one should pursue is rational. Being in the same church and being respected are two major factors emphasized by young women in their search for a partner. Love in this way gets recoded as relationship and as a sphere of life, where adherence to certain “rational” rules is expected to lead to certain trade-offs such as basic respect for physical integrity.

Listening to the life histories of many women, from the testimonies they were giving on stage to the personal conversations I had, it became clear that many women had very negative experiences with men, were survivors of assault or had previously been in abusive relationships. For Philonella, a divorced mother of two, being in a relationship with someone who believes in God and attends the church would make it much more likely that he would respect her. In this way, love becomes a rational choice that is based primarily on the other partner’s commitment to the moral code promoted the church, which in turn is expected to guarantee a certain degree of respectful treatment. Many of the young congregants grew up with either one parent not present, or even as orphans, and experienced a high degree of structural precarity and exclusion. Despite their patriarchal character, the “rational relationships” promoted by the church seemed to instill the hope in young women that the men they would encounter in church would become reliable partners providing a sense of stability and security that their position in the asymmetrically racialized socioeconomic structure of their urban environments made so hard to achieve. As bell hooks observes, it is not uncommon for male leaders in gender-conservative religious movements “to develop a strong patriarchal base in which women were given protection and consideration in exchange for submission” (hooks, 1987, p. 111).

For the women I worked with, achieving this relative stability and protection required a symbolic and emotional transformation into what can be called “anti-affective love” ⁶ that required separating themself from their feelings. At one point, Pastor Evan imitated a congregant asking him for advice. Speaking in a high pitched, over-affective voice that caused the young people in the audience to laugh, he said “Pastor, it took me four years until I realised. . .” He did not finish the sentence and shouted, “you wasted four years!” “She could have been graduated by now!” He explained that “When she was seventeen, she was doing the things the way according to the way she FELT, FELT,” raising his voice again when saying the last words. The lesson he drew from the story was tied to the separation of feelings: “To have thoughts of God, you need to let go of your own thoughts. Why the Holy Spirit hasn’t come onto you? Because you haven’t let go of your thoughts? Your dreams, your culture, your traditions, your feelings, your THINGS!.” In one Love Therapy session, Pastor Cortes proclaimed that if one person could show him that “in the Bible Jesus once says, ‘how do you feel’, I will quit my job.” Feelings are considered to be a force that is destructive not only of the relationship with God but also of the general conduct of life, including relationship life. Severing affective bonds also serves the function of separating participants in the various church campaigns, where enormous sums of money are being sacrificed, from the interference by relatives and friends. Like feelings, parents and culture are considered as likely impediments to achieving the entrepreneurial “success” and “victory” materialized through the highly money and time-intensive rituals (see van Wyk, 2014, p. 268).

Notwithstanding the anti-emotional rhetoric, spaces of intense emotions abound in the practices of the UCKG, especially in the form of large-scale collective rituals such as the rebuking of demons and evil spirits. Additionally, in a semantic sleight of hand, anger is implicitly excluded from the concept of emotions. This helps to uphold the image that men are less emotional than women. This is congruous with bell hooks’ observation, “There is only one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men; that emotion is anger” (hooks, 1984, p. 122, 2004, p. 41). In the IntelliMen course, anger is seen as something men naturally have and which men are even encouraged to make use of. Challenge #10 encourages participants to “Awaken your anger against something wrong, and use it in an intelligent manner to do what is right.” Anger seems to be the only emotion that is actively promoted for men. This stands in sharp contrast to how the sexist and racist stereotype of the “angry Black woman” has been used for silencing and repressing of women, as Audre Lorde argues in her famous essay “The uses of anger” (1981).

In UCKG discourse, anger is interpreted as an indication of male virtues: “A sign that you have embraced a cause, and fight for it, is anger” (Cardoso, 2013e). IntelliMen participants are encouraged to “identify a situation in YOUR LIFE which you should be angry at, but instead, you’ve been passive about it. Wake up your anger and examine your life” (Cardoso, 2013e; original capitalization). A blogpost linked to the course material called “Where anger comes from” by Renato Cardoso even goes so far as to claim that “anger comes from God Himself. It originates from His righteousness” (Cardoso, 2011). Although feelings in general are associated with women and as something that both men and women need to get rid of through gendered conversion, the one feeling that is actively affirmed for men is anger. In this way, the anger of the young men I worked with, frequently experiencing marginalization at the intersection of race and class, got validated and reaffirmed as an instrument of the ethical-economic project of entrepreneurial heroic masculinity. Even more, men’s anger became transcendentalized as a gift from God. In this way, the patriarchal figure of the angry man was sublimated into the transcendent agent of divine justice.

Conclusion

My analysis suggests that that the hegemonic masculinity among the congregants of the UCKG branch in North London can be described as entrepreneurial heroic masculinity. Although it is a complex social ensemble, this study identifies three crucial elements. First, entrepreneurial heroic masculinity features a traditional patriarchal heroism that uses conventional patriarchal tropes such as victory in battle and translates them into religious framings such as beating up the devil. The rite of passage to this kind of masculinity as “man of God” is a deeply gendered conversion experience, in which overcoming the former self—variably sexually promiscuous, pornography consuming, homosexual, masturbating, drug addicted—is the negative image against which the newly found masculinity is defined. Second, the behavior of the pastors as self-defined exemplars of a normative man of God is markedly dominating, and uses mockery and shaming of beliefs and behaviors that do not conform to the gendered and religious expectations of being a man of god. Finally, the rationalist and calculating logic of neoliberal capitalism is used to conduct the conduct of intimate relationships toward non-affective form of love. The specific Christian iteration of this economic logic rendered the “investment in God” as part of the entrepreneurial logic. According to the church doctrine, time and money needs to be invested into the church first, and into business activity second. The investment logic of a man of God includes the self-optimization imperative to become disciplined, economically successful, disposing over resources on the basis of a cost–benefit analysis, and oriented toward material and personal growth. By dominating one’s inner life, rationalizing all relations, and following the multiple practices prescribed by the church, in this vision of hegemonic masculinity, men can achieve the heroic act of economic and spiritual victory.

The subjectivity that is fostered through this is not the obedient servant that painstakingly follows all rules that other strictly observant religious groups analyzed by Harding, Riesebrodt or Stadler might aspire to. Instead, what emerges is an entrepreneurial subject that aims to be independent of the rights and duties of citizenship, including any support by or support of government or societal institutions apart from the church itself. In this imaginary, the only obstacle to material success is an insufficient willingness to dedicate all available time and money to the church. Structural questions, such as social stratification, racism, inequality, disability, physical and mental health, and spatial disparities, are virtually absent. This resonates with the worldview of free-market enthusiasts like Friedman, who famously proclaimed that because of economic globalization, today “the world is flat” (2005). For the UCGK pastors, any intermediary social structures and hierarchies are irrelevant or nonexistent, the world is imagined as an empty space where the individual employs the help of God to fight against the forces of the devil.

States are seen as mere containers that are neutral for the purposes of the church and personal success, which is only dependent on whether God is on your side, as the rags to riches story of Edir Macedo demonstrates. The self-entrepreneur in turn is the subjectivity that fits most perfectly into the sociality promoted by neoliberal governmentality and capitalism: thoroughly apolitical, individualistic, self-oriented, and detached from any communal belonging, the faithful self-entrepreneur seeks success in three areas that are the same for all people on a level playing field: health, love and finances.

The subject of entrepreneurial heroic masculinity thrives in the void left by the shrinking social, economic, and communal support and meaning making structures in the superdiverse urban metropolis, offering a thoroughly apolitical response to the precarity produced by the political economy of racialized neoliberal capitalism. The gendered faith promoted by a Brazilian church in Europe turns out to be far from anti-modernism. Instead, it amalgamates modernist rationality, patriarchal masculinity and capitalist entrepreneurialism into a system that is well-suited to meet the desperation caused by the intersecting crises and precarities experienced by those living at the margins of the postcolonial metropolis. Instead of collectively labeling all these various forms of masculinity regressive traditionalism, feminist theorizing would benefit from further geographically specific studies on their apparent attractiveness to young people “in the ruins of neoliberalism” (Brown, 2019) today, and what an intersectional feminist response to these developments might be.