Abstract
The successful leadership of ethnic pastors in ethnic churches is usually under-theorised, as if their position and authority are self-explanatory, because they are ‘one of them’. The author presents a case from a Charismatic church of Roma/Gypsies in the Czech Republic where one religious leader has changed the shape of a local community of converts from a kinship-driven community to an ethno-religion. Whereas the leader based his political capital on his ‘Gypsiness’, he paradoxically succeeded thanks to the fact that he was not ‘one of them’. The author traces back this process of political empowerment by religious means, and delineates the strategies of hierarchical ordering of the local Roma through a Bible school. By focusing attention on a particular individual who operates within the fields of power and recreates these structures through their own strategies, I point to an aspect of the political–religious dichotomy that has been neglected in the sociology of religion.
Introduction: Identification of an ethnic religious leader as ‘one of them’
John and his wife Sasha were a non-Roma couple in their 30s with children, and born-again Christians connected to the local parish of the United Protestant Church in Márov – a small city near the western border of the Czech Republic. When they started a mission among the Roma in 2000, their efforts were focused on assisting Roma children, but they quickly realised that it was important to work with their parents too. They invited a Charismatic Roma musician and preacher from the regional capital and organised a series of events for parents. After several evangelising events they acquired their first adult converts (from one family) to a Roma prayer group. John secured premises for gatherings, but the prayer group was self-led and egalitarian. Sometimes John preached to them, but he encouraged everyone to read the Bible privately and strive to learn about the life of Jesus in order to live as he did. After several years he founded a free assembly and expected Roma converts to move to this new institution, but he failed to sustain their attention. Instead they turned their backs on him and after two years of very limited religious activity they invited a Gypsy
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preacher, Waleri, to become their pastor, and founded a congregation of their own. John explained the failure of his leadership through an ethnic narrative. He was not ‘one of them’, so they (the Roma) left him. Therefore, in John’s eyes the new Gypsy pastor was predetermined to be a more successful leader, precisely because he was ‘one of them’:
He is [better] able to point out things which should be improved. He is [better] able to do so without their dissenting because he is one of them. They accept it differently when a Roma tells them something. If you are in the position of a spiritual leader you see people’s lives; and it is your duty before God to remark upon certain spiritualties – you know, things that should not exist: if someone is a habitual drinker (yes, it is explicitly written in the Bible), if someone smokes, if he lives in an extra-marital relationship. These are all things that depreciate God’s name, which we bear.
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John portrayed a spiritual leader as a person who should watch over the behaviour of the members of the congregation and make remarks or reprove when needed. The licence to rebuke was traditionally reserved to those in authority. As I will claim in the following text, Gypsy pastor Waleri was a trailblazer due to his ability to acquire this licence as an ethnic religious leader.
I start with the concept of charisma and the notion of the charismatic leader. In my fieldwork within an Evangelic Roma congregation, charismatic religious leadership is combined with ethnic leadership. I review how Pentecostal conversions among the Roma in Europe have mediated between and recreated ethnic identities. I turn to my case study, where the local community was strongly egalitarian and lacking non-kinship authorities. I describe how the sense of hierarchical order was instilled in the Roma converts in a Bible school, and how the charismatic authority of Gypsy pastor Waleri – who was not related by blood to the members of his congregation – was built and sustained.
Charisma and charismatic leaders
Max Weber views charismatic authority alongside traditional and rational authorities as an ideal type of legitimate domination. He defines charisma as
a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities … and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a ‘leader’ … by his ‘followers ‘or ‘disciples’. (Weber, 1978: 241–242)
From Weber’s definition, individual charisma of the leader is the foundation of a hierarchical relationship between leaders and their followers – charismatic authority. It is not the meaning which is retroactively assigned to the event but the ‘participatory communion engendered by the charismatic performance [which] experientially and immediately releases the onlookers from their mundane sufferings’ (Lindholm, 2013: 12). The charismatic experience can be compared to a strong love (which can evolve into a strong hatred). Lindholm calls it a volcanic primary form of charisma, an ‘explosive and compulsive force radiating from a deified leader’ (Lindholm, 2013: 14). This volcanic charisma has the potential to bring about new worlds, and very importantly become the aim, or a telos, for all parties involved in the charismatic experience.
A charismatic leader is one who has been recognised, while the very concept of leader is culturally and sub-culturally relative. This is precisely why leaders may be seen as ordinary folk by non-followers (Dawson, 2011: 117). Roy Wallis, in his famous study on the social construction of charisma, published in this journal in 1982, presents the story of David Berg – the charismatic leader of a group called the Children of God. Wallis traces the steps that one must socially endure in order to become a charismatic authority. In the beginning, Berg was just another human being – partner, friend and lover – whilst assuming the role as pastor and leader of the group, as the one recognised as having the worldliest experience. Later, his congregation identified him as an incarnation of the prophets of the Old Testament. He began to restrict access, forming a community of love around himself, full of affection and open sexual relationships. In this advanced stage of the charismatic moment, there were only two options for Berg’s followers: total acceptance and devotion to the leader, or excommunication from the movement. This was a mechanism he put in place to maintain his charismatic hold (Wallis, 1982).
Several authors agree that the most neglected part of the study of charisma is its institutionalisation/routinisation (Dawson, 2011: 114; Weber, 1978: 253) and the process of charismatisation (Barker, 1993). Here I present a case of charismatisation and creation of hierarchy within a community previously organised on kinship lines through its involvement in Charismatic Christianity.
The call for an ethnic leader
Many attribute the weak political representation and political involvement of Slovak Roma (the majority of whom currently live in the Czech Republic) to the lack of formal traditional representatives and ethnic leaders in the public sphere. Consequently, in public discussions, we are frequently confronted by the cliché that the Roma are without, and thus waiting for, their Martin Luther King. 3 I see two reasons for this comparison and assumption: (1) a supposed need for a dominant class to efficiently manage the dominated groups and (2) the prevailing model of cultural hegemony, which invites the dominated to develop particular types of ethnicity and ethnic leadership on a large scale.
The emergence of ethnic leaders who help to efficiently manage the subjugated group is discussed in classical literature on the relations between whites and blacks in the US in the first half of the 20th century. Myrdal, Sterner and Rose (1944) saw a rise of racial segregation in the American South in the 30s and noted that ordinary blacks developed fewer contacts with whites who would help them if they were in danger or need of assistance. Thus, the blacks who were known to maintain contacts with whites become significant figures within the black community (Myrdal et al., 1944: 722–726). Another important shift distinguished upper class black leaders from the archaic figure of ‘Uncle Tom’. The ‘Uncle Tom’ leaders would be ridiculed for their lower status within the black community, whereas upper class blacks who emerged would be honoured within the community. Soon thereafter, the whites realised that ‘they could find as many “Uncle Toms” among Negroes of upper class status as among the old-time “darkies,” and that educated persons often were much more capable of carrying out their tasks as white-appointed Negro leaders’ (Myrdal et al.: 729). A similar case of ethnic leaders acting as servants of the paternalistic system could be found in colonial administrations, but these same ethnic leaders, in time, became the main proponents of anti-colonialist struggles and ultimately helped to overthrow that system. This political-cultural shift was due to ‘radical institutions born out of accommodationist, state-sponsored buffer institutions’ (Goulbourne, 1991: 22).
Conversely, cultural hegemony in the age of globalisation is not homogenising, but rather expressed through the promotion of difference of a particular kind. Contrary to direct imposition, dominance is achieved by ‘presenting universal categories and standards by which all cultural differences can be defined’ (Wilk, 1995: 118). Domination finally causes the domesticated local, ethnic and national particularities to become constitutive parts of global cultural flows. 4 Ethnic leaders then become (in a uniform way) representatives of local cultures or ethnic groups (of a particular kind) in the game of cultural hegemons – in which, nonetheless, they play a highly active role as ethnic entrepreneurs (Bruebaker, 2002).
Gypsy nation and Gypsy Pentecostalisms
In the mid-1950s French Pentecostal Gypsies let a very specific collective of ‘Gypsy people’ (peuple tsigane) emerge, composed of very different groups of Gypsies. This collective served as a response to the demands made upon Gypsies by non-Gypsies. Those who were previously hidden now had representatives who were accountable in the eyes of the public administration. Contrary to the minority concept promoted by pro-Gypsy activists in France, which put forward an image of suffering and identified Gypsy history with the Holocaust, Gypsy Pentecostalism brought a re-appropriation of self-image and self-history and progressive possibility to present it publicly without revealing too much of Gypsy identity (Williams, 1993: 6–8). In turn the entity of ‘Gypsy people’ turned inward. It is constructed through ‘gatherings, shared convictions and emotions and not only on agreement with the view of the non-Gypsies’ (Williams, 1991: 88; own translation).
A similar socio-cultural shift occurred in Spain, where some Pentecostal Gitanos began to act and view themselves as a diaspora, as ‘members of a society in the traditional anthropological meaning of the term (as a coherent body of institutions, statuses and roles)’ (Gay y Blasco, 2002: 16). This was in contrast to a previously held concept of the Gitano people ‘as a scattered aggregate of persons, of undefined size, origin and location, who are similarly positioned vis-à-vis the rest of the world and who uphold the Gitano laws’ (Gay y Blasco, 2002: 7). Cantón (2004, 2010) calls for differentiation:
… the new ritual spaces occasionally lead to a strong reformulation of ethnic identities that in some contexts, and always closely related to local circumstances, can strengthen the sense of belonging to a distinctive ethnic group or to a specific religious group, or combine both levels of belonging without much conflict. (Cantón, 2010: 258–259)
Roma migrants from Eastern Slovakia in Márov, and their leadership
My case is different, because the Roma I worked with are usually more aptly characterised as escaping Gypsiness (Ghosh, 2008). The Roma settlements in Eastern Slovakia – where the parents and grandparents of the converts in Márov came from – were organised along kinship lines, whole kinship groups living together in a small area. The vajda, or Gypsy chief, used to be a common figure, who settled disputes, gave advice and helped to maintain the internal cohesion of the local community (Kašparová, 2014: 154). Between the 1950s and the 1970s, when the communist assimilation and relocation policies were applied, the situation changed:
The communist regime supposed it would be beneficial to all if Roma were divided into nuclear families and scattered … . The Roma families were torn apart and the former values and ways of dealing with crises were cancelled. The internal authority represented by the position of vajda got lost and the bonds of the extended families strengthened their sovereign position, with its own value system, responsibility towards each other, own truth, rights and duties. (Kašparová, 2007: 20)
Jurková (Jurková, 2004) argues that Pentecostal pastors who are ‘one of them’ replace these strong leaders of the old times, and they are one of the reasons why Roma adhere to Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity. However, the explanation of the authority of an ethnic pastor through the figure of the vajda remains unconvincing to me, in the light of my fieldwork. The vajda is an old structure fixed in folklore studies and in the popular imagination of the majority non-Gypsy society. Nowadays, this reference to the tradition is tantamount to wishful thinking on the part of the majority society, rather than recalling an existing political structure or disposition. Rejection of vajda-like people was embedded in the local political order of the Roma with whom I did my research, and this forbids them from reproving one another.
Local political order: Reproving in everyday life and in the congregation
The key to local political order among the Roma in Márov lies in the practice of reproving mentioned in the introduction, by the preacher John. According to him, most of the time, people would be left to ‘go about their business’, including children, and no one would interfere in the right to autonomy of others, even if their behaviour was unorthodox in the eyes of the community. A direct rebuke was almost unthinkable (unless it was made by the oldest person in the family, or the father or husband) and the ways of solving problems with another’s behaviour were delicate techniques of indirect rebuke, such as gossip, making their behaviour public, or the asking ostensibly ignorant questions. However, there were some instances of direct rebuke through open and direct violence (or cursing) exercised in an altered state of ‘having bad nerves’ (mange nervi).
In terms of political authority, the local Roma were subject to the decisions taken by the father of their family, the head of the household or the eldest of the extended family – this was the optimal internal organisation applied in most of the cases. Quite clearly, there was a hierarchy with clear designated positions, but there was also a strong interest in equality among the rest of the Roma community, and any actions seen as superior or superordinate would be sanctioned.
The church preachers who came from the local community abstained from any reproving remarks, and criticisms would hardly ever be directed towards church members. Alternatively, when something needed to be said, they would say it openly only during a public prayer, where they would pray for someone to overcome his sins without publicly listing the member’s particular faults. For example, the preacher would speak in general terms: ‘God, please let this person quit evil things. You know best what this person has in her heart and what she needs’, but they would refrain from being explicit. Not once did I witness them prohibit someone from delivering a specific action or even tell an opponent in a theological debate that he was wrong. Preachers stayed within the limits granted to them by the local political order. Moreover, it was not only the behaviour of the preachers, but also the whole organisation of the congregation, which understood and respected the local authority’s hierarchical position. This was to be changed with the regime imposed by the new Gypsy pastor.
A new Gypsy pastor and an ethnic Gypsy congregation
The German Gypsy pastor Waleri, who was called to become pastor in Márov, was born in Germany to parents of Sinti origin; his mother was originally from the Czech Republic, although he never learned Czech. Most of his family perished in concentration camps. When Waleri was young, his parents were itinerant traders, and he attended school for only a handful of months. As an adult, he married a Sinti woman and had a daughter, and in his mid-30s he converted to Charismatic Christianity. Soon afterwards, he translated the Wycliffe Bible into the Sinti language, and then he found work dubbing Christian movies in Sinti. He also enrolled in a Charismatic Bible school and after several years of training became a missionary for the Roma and Sinti populations in his region. For some years, he worked for German missionary organisations among Manus Gypsies in France and elsewhere. Finally, he founded and directed his own missionary organisation with a board composed of representatives of various Free and Mainline Protestant churches in Germany. Fronting his missionary organisation, he arrived in Márov in 2007.
Waleri had a completely different vision of the congregation in Marov from that of the previous non-Roma pastor John, whom the Roma had left. While John promoted outreach to non-Roma marginals such as the homeless and drug users, Waleri came with a concept of a free Charismatic church formed by the Roma for the Roma, in which the members were trained to evangelise among fellow Roma.
Waleri claimed that being a Sinto he knew the laws and traditions of the Roma, so he became a specialist in mission work among them. He was, and still is, a great example of an ethnic leader and ethnic entrepreneur who founded his career upon promoting cultural difference and naming himself as a cultural specialist. He used to portray Czech society as ethnically divided, with the Roma at the bottom, living only in segregated neighbourhoods, all of them impoverished. He withheld from his German benefactors the fact that two-thirds of the Roma in the Czech Republic do not live in social exclusion, that there is a significant Roma middle class, and even the lives of the poorest Roma are always intertwined with the lives of some non-Roma. Reinforcing the image of a divided, segregated society was enough to generate money for the operation of the mission and, more importantly, to create opportunities for himself in his role as an ethnic Gypsy leader.
Waleri soon mobilised his followers, comprising evangelical pastors from Germany, to teach in a Bible school for the Roma every two weeks. Over a period of three-and-half years, he trained the local Roma in biblical knowledge, Teachings of the Holy Spirit, church history, religious studies, preaching techniques and pastoral work. The local Roma were eager to learn about religion and saw the Bible school as a means of education.
Introducing new hierarchies through the Bible school
Waleri, unlike anyone before him, introduced the Roma to a hierarchical structure of positions in the congregation, and he was able to sustain this model for several years. The local Roma had a completely different approach to religious authority and managed most of the activities themselves 5 (most notably through individual or collective prayer). Baptisms and burials would be the only ceremonies the Roma would ask the clergy to lead. If they married, for example, they would do so at the municipal office.
Waleri’s direction, conversely, imported a hierarchic structure into congregational practice. During one of the sessions of the Bible school for local Roma, which was attended by 10–15 senior congregational members, a German teacher (under whose influence Waleri had converted and who now worked with him) depicted Waleri as Saint Peter in contemporary times. In fact, Waleri was cast as even more righteous in his mission than Saint Peter, because he denied his own people and chose to be Christian when it came to a crucial decision in his life. The purpose of this particular lesson during the Bible school was to build a hierarchy, with listeners positioned as inferior to the pastor.
The invited German teacher, Hans, asked students for the definition of ‘apostle’ and asked if the students had some apostles in their congregation. One of the preachers replied they had many apostles; all of them would missionise here and in surrounding towns. Hans corrected him: in the congregation there would be only evangelists. He reminded the student of the (hierarchical) sequence of God’s servants: apostles, prophets, teachers, pastors and evangelists. True apostles not only spread the Gospel but also exorcised demons and practised healing:
And evangelists always pertain to a local congregation, as for example here. It is possible they also do powerful things, but their main job is to spread the Gospel. But an apostle has more to do … . He finds new areas, new congregations. He prepares a new situation, a new town, to arrive and spread the Gospel. And there the will of God shows through him.
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Hans explained to the students that they were not apostles; they were lower than apostles. During the same class, he introduced another hierarchy: that of leadership rank. When he lectured on Saint Peter, he emphasised that Peter was the first among the disciples and corrected one of the students who did not elevate Peter to the top of the disciple sequence:
Finally, Hans ranked the pastor at the same level as Saint Peter:
Throughout the Bible school lessons, two hierarchies were constructed: a hierarchy of the disciples according to their vocation, and a hierarchy of apostles with Peter as a main figure. The students were placed on the lowest level of the hierarchy, whereas the pastor was labelled an apostle, the highest, and likened to Saint Peter, who was the highest ranked apostle. Thus, he could reinforce the leadership of the pastor over a community that had had no pastor before.
An ethnic pastor who is not ‘one of them’
Pierre Bourdieu examines how the church instils in individuals hierarchical thinking:
The most specific contribution of the church (and more generally of religion) to the conservation of the symbolic order consists of … transmutation of logic into order. It makes the political order submit to this by the mere fact of the unification of the different orders. (Bourdieu, 1991: 32)
The church is capable of achieving this by establishing correspondence between the cosmological hierarchy and the social or ecclesial hierarchy. It constructs the hierarchy among the apostles, and likens this to the relations between actors in the congregation, identifying the pastor with Saint Peter. Here, repeating the ‘correct’ order of God’s disciples in terms of importance creates a hierarchy. Furthermore, the logic transmutes into order by ‘imposing a hierarchical way of thinking that “naturalises” … the relations of order by recognizing the existence of privileged points in cosmic space just as in political space’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 32). This is achieved by presenting and promoting the hierarchical political structure as a ‘natural thing’, privileged in the sense that Jesus himself wished his own congregation had been organised in this manner.
Logic, reasoning and other new competences that arise in Bible study are inculcating hierarchical cosmologies. Waleri’s position at the top of the hierarchy allowed him to wield direct power. For example, he would interfere in relations between couples, which used to be uncontested terrain, or ban smoking at the church door. He also openly criticised people for their behaviour. He did not resort to the indirect moralising techniques used in life outside the church; neither did he use the interference-avoiding techniques of the local Roma preachers. In my view as a participant observer, he constantly crossed the boundaries of non-criticising and admitted to doing so, claiming that he was very knowledgeable about the traditions of the Roma and their culture. In his time as pastor of the congregation, he managed to get away with these criticisms.
Waleri transformed the existing local political order from a kinship-based community with the characteristics of an individualistic structure into an ethno-religion of the Sinti and the Roma in Europe, with himself as their ethnic leader. Thus he succeeded in transforming his ethno-religious capital into a political one, which was previously restricted solely to kinship structures. This newly gained political capital, then, allowed him to reprove and correct the members of the congregation.
Conclusion
My findings disagree with Ries’s (2007, 2014) statement that missions are successful among Roma/Gypsies if they are able to adapt to their position vis-a-vis the non-Roma population. In his account, a mission with a trans-ethnic ideology aimed at an exclusivist Roma group would fail, whereas in the case I have presented, an exclusivist ideology aimed at the Roma, who were more likely striving for recognition and integration, would succeed through the reinforcement of an exclusionary model of ethno-religiosity. It was Manuela Cantón who warned against generalisations about Gypsy Pentecostal churches and commented that ‘the Philadelphia Church is gypsy, separate and distinct, to the extent that there is a recognised line dividing gypsies and payos in certain aspects of social life’ (Cantón, 2010: 263). This line is not established by the nature of one or the other group, of course. My case presents yet another perspective: that of a strong ethnic leader who works creatively with those on both sides of the divide.
Pierre Bourdieu states that the prophet is less an extraordinary man than a man of extraordinary situations; an individual with strongly decrystallised status who is able to occupy places not available to him in the normal order of things. The study of charisma must seek to unearth the characteristics that predispose certain individuals to test the ethical and political arrangements already present in the group (Bourdieu, 1991: 35). At the beginning of this article, we heard a non-Roma preacher’s thoughts on the Gypsy pastor Waleri: he could afford to reprove others because he was ‘one of them’. Some scholars also tend to reduce the question of leadership in Roma congregations to ethnic self-leadership. I claim that Waleri could sustain an authority that allowed him to reprove others thanks to the fact that he was not ‘one of them’, and so he did not have to follow the local political order. He found a gap. If he had been one of the locals, he would never have been granted the privilege to moralise or correct members of the congregation. He succeeded in constructing a new community and became its leader. But again, as with the notion of charisma, this ethnic leadership was not self-explanatory.
The deconstruction of charismatic leadership presented here also reconciles the seemingly conflictual relationship between the emotional and embodied paradigms in the study of charisma, as represented (among others) by Lindholm (1990, 2013) and Asad (1983). While Lindholm asserts that embodiment, obedience and ritual belong to the realm of traditional, habitual authority (which is a different analytical category), I argue that they are rather preconditions to the development and preservation of charismatic authority. In the case I have presented, the very notion that different vocations are given to individuals, that these vocations are hierarchical and that the hierarchy in vocations should correspond with the hierarchy in the political organisation of the religious group, had to be embedded through repetitive teaching in the Bible school. This embodied hierarchy could then be used to construct and sustain charismatic authority as an eruptive, emotionally loaded relationship between the religious leader and the group.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
A version of this text was presented at the 2013 ISSR Conference in Turku, Finland. I am grateful to anonymous reviewers from the ISSR and Social Compass, Ruy Llera Blanes, Yasar Abu Ghosh and Bernt Schnettler for their comments.
Funding
This research received funding from the Charles University Grant Agency under No. 28 610, a BAYHOST stipend, MoE institutional grant no. 267 701, ‘Actor knowledge and practices in a glocalized world’, and the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports – Institutional Support for Long-term Development of Research Organizations – Charles University, Faculty of Humanities (Charles Univ, Fac Human 2014).
Notes
Author biography
Address: Department of Social Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague, U Kříže 8, 158 00, Praha 5, Czech Republic
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