Faith and crime in the construction of social coexistence in the outskirts of São Paulo

Abstract

This article discusses the coexistence of two seemingly disparate phenomena in the same urban environment, Pentecostalism and organised crime and violence. Both represent expressions of social living and identity formation in the outskirts of the metropolises. In these neighbourhoods, to be Pentecostal is a lifestyle choice that does not necessarily preclude participation in a criminal organisation called Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC; First Command of the Capital). The article first reviews studies dealing with the different ways in which religion and violence create interfaces in the daily lives of residents of the communities and then presents empirical observations of a Pentecostal community that has among its members one of the local leaders of the PCC. The study concludes that we are facing a new, unclassified Pentecostal phenomenon. This suggests the inadequacy or failure of the traditional concept of conversion in the face of the nature of religious affiliations in the outskirts of São Paulo.

Introduction

‘Pentecostalism’ and ‘crime’ are generally seen as belonging to distinct universes with no points of contact, as signs that represent antagonistic and mutually exclusive worlds. Accordingly, criminals have traditionally been accepted at Pentecostal churches solely in the context of a conversion process in which they should revisit life choices and change behaviour. For both the criminal and the believer it has been inadmissible that a person could participate in these two worlds concurrently. However, during recent years this reality has been changing in the outskirts of São Paulo and other large metropolises, where new relationships between the criminal world and Pentecostalism unveil the complexity of everyday life in these outlying communities, as well as the degree of Pentecostalism’s inculturation in the environments where it settles. If, until recently, it was unthinkable for any form of criminality to coexist with Pentecostal churches, today it is possible to find drug dealers who call themselves Pentecostals. Social reality is changing and with it, Pentecostalism.

The strong presence and visibility of Pentecostals in the outskirts and slums of the metropolises imply changes in the daily lives of people living there. This in turn is changing the Pentecostal way of being. The churches are in the middle of the territories of criminality, and criminals are in the churches. This is, perhaps, the price paid by Pentecostalism for its growth and for the struggle to achieve religious hegemony in the peripheries.

The reflections that follow are the product of four years of research, between 2009 and 2013, during which I observed a Pentecostal church at the eastern end of the city of São Paulo. Observations of this church were made in partnership with a student who had and has contacts with an informer in the criminal field, here named Kadu, who is, at the same time, Pentecostal. I accompanied this student – who recently earned his master’s degree – in the slum that he named East Village in his dissertation. Kadu and East Village are fake names for security reason. We had long discussions in our advisory sessions as well as discussions with other researchers at conferences and seminars over these years. This research was approved by the Ethic Committee of Pontifical Catholic University. The conclusions presented here are a result of this process.

Studies on violence

Any literature review of research on violence will necessarily be selective. The subject is comprehensive and includes a range of related topics – domestic violence, organised crime, economic and social marginalisation, political systems and corruption, urban social coexistence, public security, the prison system, and many others.

To delimit violence to criminality and to consider that area’s intersection with religion is something relatively new in academia, and there are few studies based on empirical research that adopt this approach.

Alba Zaluar (1999) mapped research on organised crime and violence carried out in Brazil until the end of the 20th century. She pointed to a high degree of thematic and methodological diversity. She also highlighted the different interests at stake in this discussion. This diversity of approaches and interests occurs because of the interlinking between the intellectual and political fields promoted by the advent of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which had a profound impact on research and reflexions on the problem.

The theme of criminality, which encompasses the problem of violence and organised crime, was divided by Zaluar into five sub-themes, namely: (1) reflections on the nature and meaning of violence – a discussion that usually ended in the identification of the evils to be fought, which depended on the agent emphasized and on the point of view adopted; (2) images and social representations of criminality, of violence and of fear in the population, which resulted in a cultural critique of the violent nature of Brazilian society and of its lack of emphasis on forming citizens; (3) the quantification and narration – the ‘body count’ – of crimes, that is, surveys of numbers of violent crimes and meanings of victimisation categorized by gender, age or colour; (4) the search for explanations for the increase in violence and criminality, of the emergence of organised crime, and of the relationship between poverty and violence; (5) the problem of criminality as a matter of public policy. The last topic is divided into two periods. Initially, there is a conflict between two paradigms of crime control policies: one that sees crime as a result of macro social policies and another that is more interested in the short-term costs of victimisation and that affirms the autonomy of public security policies. The second period starts when the issue of the militarisation of security and its democratic control enters the debate. This fifth sub-theme also covers the issue of institutional violence and the difficulties of establishing and enforcing public policies.

Zaluar (1999) also considers how the idea and types of violence are analysed in debates between experts on the subject. Here, the complexity of this research field becomes clear, given the alliances and interests that span the debate and define the privileged interlocutors at each moment and in each situation. The discussions are not consensual – not even in relation to value judgement of the criminal act.

The last decade has seen the expansion of discussions around this issue as a result of new research and ethnographies that have been trying to cope with the increasingly dynamic and complex scenario of the urban peripheries.

Besides NGOs, neighbourhood associations and government agents, there have emerged new actors that need to be taken into account in the analysis. Among these are the Pentecostal churches, which can no longer be ignored if one wants to understand the social processes of urban peripheries. In a ground-breaking text, Zaluar (2006) analyses the forms of organisation and social demands in the slums and how politics, religion and organised crime interact in the composition of the daily life of these communities.

She points out the paradoxes in the behaviour of residents resulting from their religious choices and emphasizes the need to make life viable in areas where the presence of the State is sparse or, contradictorily, unwanted. She reframes the failures of Brazilian democracy – and of the recent democratisation process – in terms of the different ethos of Catholics and Pentecostals. This is the first time in this long debate among intellectuals that religious views have been taken as central to the understanding of criminality.

Elizabeth Leeds (2006) describes the symbiotic relationship in Rio de Janeiro between criminal organisations and the residents of slums and public housing projects. She shows the mutual dependence that was born out of the corrupt structure of the repressive apparatus of the state. The institutions that should protect the population are not able to help those who live ‘on the hill’. On the contrary, these institutions – both the civil and military police – become part of the problem. In this context criminal organisations end up answering and catering to certain needs of the population – such as security, financial aid and basic material goods – in exchange for confidentiality and concealment. Organised crime becomes a parallel power established upon a kind of supplier–customer relationship with the locals.

Another author who must be mentioned is Clara Mafra. In her 2006 study of the social coexistence between drug traffickers and Pentecostal churches on the Santa Marta hill in Rio de Janeiro, she raises an issue that is key to the study of the territorial divisions inherent in such contexts. This division is set against the backdrop of circuits of power in the neighbourhood or community that are not explicitly or formally constituted but are tacitly present in the social scene of ‘the hill’ (see Mafra, 2008). The drug trafficking organisation, known there as ‘the movement’, acts as a centre of gravity that organises power flows and social trends, which only exist under the condition of affirming themselves beyond the margins of trafficking. This offers a means of understanding the possibility of a ‘peaceful’ coexistence of antagonistic social organisations, such as drug trafficking and churches.

There has been a recent intensification of research on these issues, with the recognition that relationships between Pentecostalism and organised crime do not obey a simple pattern of mutual rejection. Other behaviours such as indifference and tolerance can also be observed. At the same time that preaching from the pulpits in the slums rejects trafficking and anathematises criminality, there are drug dealers who, gun in hand, profess their faith in the power of the evangelical god to preserve them from all evil. (In Brazilian discourse, ‘evangelical’ is a broad term including most types of Protestantism, ranging from historical mainline churches to Neo-Pentecostalism.) The religious service of ‘closing the body’ of the faithful/clients (protecting them from evil influences) was formerly in the hands of the pai-de-santo (‘saint-father’, primarily in Candomblé) but is now in the hands of the Pentecostal pastor. This reveals in part the prestige that these churches have gained at the expense of Afro-Brazilian religions.

Pentecostalism

Research on Pentecostalism tends to foreground the realities in which the churches are inserted, and it has helped to order the conceptual chaos surrounding this popular religious expression. But existing work is limited in its description of the creativity with which the lower classes of society organise themselves and their forms of belief. In a way, we can say that the major paradigms of interpretation of Pentecostalism correspond to specific stages in academic interests. Four texts that have left their mark on virtually all research on Pentecostalism illustrate these different paradigms.

The first author to propose an innovative reading of the Pentecostal phenomenon was Antonio Gouvêa de Mendonça (1992), who presented a typology of this religious subfield in an attempt to give it some intelligibility. This text is clearly inspired by a debate between Duglas Teixeira Monteiro and Rubem Alves (Valle and Queiroz, 1984) on the new Pentecostal churches that had popped up in spurts in the 1970s, confusing those who tried to infer some consistent pattern from that religious reality. Three other authors also sought to give some rationality to the subfield: Paul Freston (1996), in his article ‘A brief history of Pentecostalism in Brazil’, Leonildo Silveira Campos (1997), with his doctoral thesis ‘Theatre, temple and market’, and Ricardo Mariano (1999), with his master’s dissertation ‘Neopentecostals: Sociology of the new Pentecostalism in Brazil’. Freston’s article, drawn from his doctoral thesis, was the most successful attempt to give some order to the Pentecostal universe. The paradigm he applied to the waves of Pentecostalism spreading across Brazil still lingers today, despite attempts at superseding his approach. All three texts were significant, however, not only in giving Pentecostalism a visible face, but also in creating an autonomous research field. Until then Brazilian Pentecostalism had been studied as a derivative form of traditional Protestantism, and it was to a certain extent the interests of the media, which did not know what to say about this religious alternative that boldly resisted submitting itself to traditional framing, that prompted attempts to construct interpretive frames of Pentecostalism.

Given the dynamics and the speed with which Pentecostalism acts and reacts to the contexts in which it thrives, there will always be an aspect of novelty to this phenomenon that calls for analysis. The life of churches in violent environments is one of those aspects of Pentecostal reality that remain in need of deeper study.

Pentecostalism and crime/violence

There are, to my knowledge, only two surveys that look deeply into the relationships between Pentecostalism and violence or organised crime. ¹ The first was that of César Pinheiro Teixeira (2008), who presented an article based in his ethnography of a slum in the city of Magé, Rio de Janeiro, in which he draws widely from the theoretical framework developed by Marcel Mauss (2000 [1923–1924]) in his Essai sur le don. Teixeira sought to understand the relationships between Pentecostals and traffickers who shared the same territory. For him, the believers of the Assembly of God of the Lagoa neighbourhood in Magé enjoy greater prestige and authority than the traffickers who control the area. This prestige is built from a negative application of the rules of reciprocity; that is, Pentecostals seek to avoid contracting any kind of debts with the traffickers, so that they will not have to pay later in the form of connivance or involvement with criminals. For Teixeira, the Pentecostals:

Follow rigorously the rules of gift and counter-gift. Guided by an enchanted world view consisting in understanding the day-to-day actions and conflicts according to the disputes and actions of God and the Devil, i.e., guided by the logic of a Spiritual Battle, Pentecostals can respond more precisely and rapidly to the questions posed by a violent context. (Teixeira, 2008: 183)

Among the lower classes, the recognition of the boundaries between coexistence and connivance is essential to ensure both exemption from crime and the authority to criticise it and try to ‘win for Christ’ the criminals. This lack of involvement with drug traffickers plus the strong ethos of the Pentecostal believer is, according to Teixeira, ‘an alternative to living in a context that involves the authoritarian and violent presence of drug traffickers with all the associated risks.’ (Teixeira, 2008: 183)

The faith of some and the criminal actions of others interpenetrate due to geographic proximity, to family relationships between believers and traffickers, and to the inescapable social interaction necessitated by day-to-day interactions. These relationships ‘are on the streets, on street corners, at home: beside the church there is a boca-de-fumo (crackhouse); a sister who is a believer has a trafficker’s child; cousins belonging to the two groups get together in football, in street conversations or at school’ (Teixeira, 2008: 184). Any exchange established with the traffickers means creating links with them because ‘they become present in the church, extending their mana and their hau to it’ (Teixeira, 2008: 189). ² But the church avoids putting itself in a situation that is hierarchically inferior to that of organised crime. Therefore, it does not accept favours and does not give in, as far as is possible, to the ‘local laws’. If a brother is robbed in the slum, he does not ask for compensation from the trafficking chief. He bears the loss alone. According to Teixeira’s informants, it is this quest for distinction that guarantees the church’s authority and the respect of the traffickers.

Related shifts in the urban fringes were highlighted by Christina Vital da Cunha (2008). In the Acari slum outside Rio de Janeiro, the evangelical churches are increasingly assuming an authoritative position in the local religious field and acting as mediators between the population, the residents’ association and the drug trade: ‘The “bandits” seek spiritual protection no longer with the local “mães-de-santo” (saint mothers), who are now socially and politically weakened, but with the evangelicals, who position themselves as moral guardians and propagators of truth’ (Da Cunha, 2008: 32).

The proximity between organised crime and Pentecostal churches and the consequent sharing of territory necessarily implies agreements of coexistence. Novel and unexpected formats of such coexistence emerge, for instance:

Antagonistic memberships can be exclusionary, as in the case of being either a ‘criminal’ or an evangelical, but this can also be relativized in social relations, allowing us to speak of multiple affiliations, as in the case of being a ‘criminal’ and an evangelical, even though this double membership is accompanied by limits for the integration of the individual into the ‘body of the church.’ New ways of communicating with God and of faith expression in modernity allow concomitant experimentation and the resignification of symbols connected to various religious alternatives as well as the resignification of criminal practices themselves. (Da Cunha, 2008: 42)

This novelty observed in the Acari slum should cause no surprise. It should be expected that as the number of Pentecostals grows and they come to share cultural hegemony with the Catholic Church, they also end up taking on the colours of the local landscape. It would be a shock to sociological theories if these churches remained as a cyst, isolated within their environment, even as they assume a leading role in the life of a slum.

Da Cunha’s originality does not lie solely in her highlighting of the new life formats of the Pentecostal faith or in her showing how traffickers and organised crime members have ‘used’ Pentecostal discourse, replacing that of Candomblé. Her way of discussing the interactions between Pentecostalism and violence is in itself a step forward in relation to previous studies. Violence in academic research has tended to be presented from a girardian perspective (Girard, 1990) or as an intrinsic element of religious life (De Carvalho, 1990); alternatively, religion has been portrayed as a form of sublimation of violence (Noé, 2004). Only recently, in new ethnographies of the urban peripheries, has the complexity of the Pentecostal presence come to be recognized.

All the above-mentioned authors conducted their research in Rio de Janeiro. However the reality of violence and organised crime in Rio is quite distinct from that in the state of São Paulo. In Rio de Janeiro there are several organisations vying for the monopoly of trafficking in drugs and arms. In São Paulo a single criminal organisation holds hegemony over crime, the so-called First Command of the Capital (PCC).

The PCC is a criminal organisation that emerged around 1990 in prisons in the interior of the state, originally demanding better treatment of prisoners by the government. By violent means the PCC put a stop to the disputes, fights and rapes between inmates, ensuring relative peace among them. The organization quickly transcended the walls of prisons and gained hegemony in the outskirts of the cities, ousting other criminal groups. At the time of this research, all criminal acts – murders, bank robberies, burglaries and drug trafficking – demanded the approval of the organization’s ‘high command’. That power is now being questioned, however, and emerging groups that do not recognise the PCC hegemony over crime are beginning to assert themselves.

The PCC is called the ‘Party’ or the ‘Fifteen’ and its members are called ‘brothers’. Coded signs enable recognition between ‘brothers’, and in the suburbs where they are present relative peace is maintained by virtue of the organisation’s power and control. In the early years, joining the PCC involved a rigid procedural code. The candidate was observed and accompanied by the ‘brothers’ for a certain period. If he showed courage and loyalty, he would be invited to join the organisation. The ‘brother’ who made the invitation would become his ‘godfather’ and would be made responsible for the behaviour of the new member. After a ritual that, according to our informant, involved signing a 17-clause document consisting of the Party by-laws, the candidate was considered a member of the organisation. Not every criminal is a member of the PCC, and non-members are called ‘cousins’. It should be noted that while these formalities applied in the PCC’s early years, there is currently some flexibility in its command structure, in the entrance procedures and in the recognition of who is or is not a member of the Party.

The research projects carried out by Teixeira (2008) and Da Cunha (2008) point in different directions in their respective conclusions. This is not surprising, as there are several possible configurations of organised crime and Pentecostalism. While Teixeira (2008) points to Pentecostalism as a survival alternative and a site of resistance in the Lago community, in Magé, Da Cunha (2008), researching the Acari slum in Rio de Janeiro, presents situations in which the traffickers themselves use the Pentecostal repertoire to structure their identities. Likewise, Feltran (2008a; 2008b) and Biondi (2010) diverge in their conclusions on the organisation and structure of the PCC. While Biondi does not recognise a hierarchical force in the Party (this is the argumentative axis of her thesis), Feltran attributes a reduction in criminality to the power of the hierarchy.

Obviously, we are not interested in consensual readings or in trying to harmonise interpretations. Different configurations of the ways that churches and criminality interact are possible and perceptions of criminal organisations and churches are shaped by specific contexts. In his doctoral thesis at Unicamp, Feltran (2008a) studied the case of the relationship between the ‘public world’ and violence in the Sapopemba neighbourhood, in the city São Paulo. The life experiences that give content and substance to the existence of people in the urban periphery, such as work, family and religion, go through intense processes of change of meaning, making room for a new order where organised crime finds space and opportunity to grow. Organised crime becomes a fundamental agent of local management – something that needs to be taken into account by political, public and private organisations. The same survey also yielded an article published by the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) (Feltran, 2008b).

Adorno and Salla (2007) present the PCC as a product of both the national and international drug scenes. Drug trafficking has introduced a major change in patterns of delinquency and urban crime. Until the mid-1960s, crimes were generally individualised, mostly property crimes. In contrast, the drug trade recruits large numbers of criminals, from among the most impoverished populations.

Dias’s (2011) doctoral thesis in sociology at the University of São Paulo (USP) was a study of the origins and consolidation of the PCC in the prisons of São Paulo. She points out that it was the crisis and disruption within the prison system itself that created the social and political conditions for the emergence of the PCC. Dias takes an X-ray of the Party, its power structure, its command lines and its hegemonic control of physical violence within prisons. She concludes her thesis by discussing the opportunities and limitations for pacifying the areas in which the PCC operates, both inside and outside prisons.

Biondi’s (2010) book, also the result of doctoral research, presents an ethnography of the PCC inside the jails and prisons of the State of São Paulo. She traces the Party’s logic of action, its operation and its structure through a major transformation, as it became progressively more diffuse and its leaders lost their influence.

Biondi studied the PCC’s operations within prisons, which may explain why the information that I gathered in the city of Ferraz de Vasconcelos, east of the metropolitan region of São Paulo, does not support her research. The PCC has certainly changed much since its foundation, but, at least in the area where I focused my attention, it retains a clear structure and command ‘laws’. It is interesting to note, when comparing ethnographies conducted in Rio and São Paulo, that the different faces of organised crime reflect the different social and political landscapes of specific areas and differences in the organisation and operation of ‘public security’. In São Paulo a single organisation prevails (despite certain internal tensions), in contrast to the territorialised activities to be found in Rio, but the role of the Pentecostal churches as actors and social agents also needs to be taken into account. To date, the role of these churches in the constitution of the urban peripheries has not been considered relevant in academic studies.

Pentecostal conversion and criminality

My specific interest is in the interactions between the Pentecostal phenomenon and the environment and the culture of violence in the outskirts of São Paulo – a focus that, as I have shown, has been rare among researchers. Given the obvious and visible growth of these phenomena in the urban peripheries of Brazilian cities, it makes sense to consider them through a common lens. I believe that looking at violence, and the way it is experienced by the different social groups, can shed light upon the social dynamics of those who are excluded or have restricted access to the market of cultural and materials goods.

Besides the studies cited above, the work of Vagner Aparecido Marques (2013) is of interest in this context. This research, which formed the basis for his master’s degree, relate to the ‘conversion’ of brothers of the PCC to some Pentecostal churches in East Village. ‘Conversion’ appears in quotes not to cast doubt on the legitimacy or sincerity of the ‘conversion’ of the PCC criminals but to call into question our understanding of what it means to convert to a given faith.

‘Religious conversion’ seems to imply the idea of a radical change in one’s life (Snow and Machalek, 1984). The nature of this change and its radicalism can be questioned, but the idea remains that there is a life change involved in conversion. It is this change that justifies the use of the word conversion in the process of acquiring a faith. With new faith comes a new identity. Scholars discuss whether conversion is radical, drastic, fundamental, dramatic, but at no time do we ask how much life change is required for a conversion to be recognised as such. Snow and Machalek present the distinction, first made by Arthur Darby Nock (1933), between conversion and religious adherence. For Nock, according to Snow and Machalek, conversion implies a reorientation of life, a change of attitude or of piety, whereas adherence is the acceptance of a new religion, not replacing the previous one, but as a kind of ‘useful supplement’ to the religion to which one belongs.

Rambo (1993) says that conversion is not a single event but a religious change process that happens in a dynamic field of forces of people, events, ideologies, institutions, expectations and guidelines. For him, this discussion must also include the problem of who defines genuine conversion. In the eyes of the converted person, his change is sincere and deep, but for the missionary or agent of the new faith the conversion is often less than adequate. According to a normative approach, the formulation of what the conversion could be has in its background a theological conviction or a particular religious tradition. This theology or tradition seeks to elaborate what it expects or requires for a valid conversion. The descriptive approach, on the other hand, seeks to delineate the contours of the phenomenon, giving little attention to what the tradition says is happening. The descriptive approach seeks to understand the nature of the process.

The distinction between conversion and religious adherence, proposed by Nock, can help us to understand what happens in this growing phenomenon on the periphery, in which members of a criminal organisation declare themselves Pentecostals and regularly attend a church without giving up running with ³ crime. In East Village there is a small Pentecostal church, similar to hundreds of other Pentecostal churches, i.e. a community that gathers around 30 people, attended by three or four families. It meets in a floor space not greater than 40 m² in an adapted garage. The community is not rich enough to maintain a dedicated pastor. In the case studied, the pastor runs a small shoe factory that is enough to give him a living standard slightly higher than that of the members of his church. In this church there are worship services on Wednesdays and Fridays, in addition to meetings for young people and adolescents on Saturdays. On Sundays there is a religious education service in the morning and a worship service in the early evening. Like other churches, it also seeks to be present in the lives of its members most of the time, and people also attend at other times.

Group leadership is unquestionably exercised by the pastor. His words and guidance are received with attention and respect by all. I observed, however, that he seeks to share this leadership with other members of his community and there is a kind of informal hierarchy within the group. At the top of the pyramid of power is, in isolation, the pastor. Immediately below are his wife and his daughter, who enjoy considerable authority both in doctrinal guidance and in group counselling regarding everyday misfortunes. The daughter of the pastor, who is married, is highly sought after by the girls of the church for advice on issues relating to dating and relationships. Below them is a young fellow who is an eloquent speaker and preaches at the Sunday night services. (The pastor uses the Wednesday and Friday services as opportunities to inspire and train other leaders.)

The church that I observed over three years is an example of the most common type of Pentecostal community in the outskirts of São Paulo. The census of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) does not discriminate between these churches but categorizes them all under the rubric ‘Other evangelical churches of Pentecostal origin’, which accounts for one-fifth of Pentecostals in Brazil. This is not a small number. A portion of the churches included under this rubric are located in communities of the kind I studied. It is very difficult to say how many of these there are, but in view of their capillarity in the great ravines of the cities, these churches play an important role in the development of a culture of the periphery.

The periphery has a culture, or a habitus as Bourdieu calls it (2003: 73), which is expressed in art forms such as hip hop, rap and graffiti, in the life surrounding amateur soccer, in the barbecues on the concrete roofs of the shacks, in the dances, in the ‘flow’. ⁴ Pentecostalism has become an important component in this culture. One notices, in conversation with the inhabitants of these neighbourhoods, that there is a slow and ongoing process of loss of hegemony of Catholicism as a form of articulation and rationalisation of everyday experience. This loss of hegemony is visible not only in people’s vocabulary, but also in the way they interpret the world around them, in the way they greet each other, in the place that the idea of God occupies in the control of the daily events, and in the ordering of personal and family routines, which have as their reference meetings at the church. Gradually, Pentecostalism has become a way of being in the periphery. Being Pentecostal is a state of life. The small Pentecostal churches are responsible for this diffusion, reflecting their status as a part of the local landscape that blends in with its surroundings.

These small Pentecostal churches differ widely from the largest and best-known churches such as the Assemblies of God, the God is Love Church, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, and the World Church of God’s Power. They both reflect and effect the wide-ranging fragmentation of Pentecostalism, few gathering more than 50 people in their services. The pastors of these churches are rarely able to make a living from their pastoral work alone. They have other jobs in business, as public employees or as autonomous workers.

But the important thing to note is that, because of their size and of the restricted circle of people they reach, these churches have a quite limited social support network. Unlike the larger churches, they cannot meet all the needs of their members with regard to social relationships and practical issues. They have little to offer in terms of prestige and status, especially for youth. This creates a dynamic tension in which relationships with the ‘world’ must be re-negotiated in each particular situation. It is this area of negotiation that allows the existence of people with ties to multiple organisations such as, in the case of the church that I studied, both the Pentecostal faith and the PCC.

If the kind of Pentecostalism present in these peripheries is not strong enough to structure itself as an exclusive alternative behaviour and a way of being, thus ending up becoming just another component of the local landscape, then the very concept of conversion turns out to be innocuous. How can an individual convert to something he already is and that is already part of his habitus? If, in addition, there is a sociologically understandable rationality in the conversion event, then it is related to the advantages perceived by the convert in the adherence to the new network of social relations.

Conversion, in a strictly sociological sense, is, as defined by Stark and Bainbridge (2008: 252), the affiliation of an individual to a new religious group. This affiliation will be perceived as conversion if the concept an individual has of himself is negative. Therefore, sociologically speaking, it makes no difference whether affiliation is the result of an intimate transformation of the individual or not. And it makes even less difference if this transformation is sudden and radical or slow and gradual. Such personal transformations must be understood within the logic of the field of symbolic exchanges that sustain local power relations: discourses of personal transformation, with the consequent implicit criticism of the sinful past, will be used only if they provide an advantage in the process of inclusion and participation of the new member in the group. In groups where a sectarian attitude is more pronounced, the conversion is more desired and expected. The less sectarian the group, the lower the demand for conversion. As Pentecostalism becomes a ‘normal’ component of the culture of the periphery, conversion becomes less and less clear.

In one of these little churches in the East Zone of São Paulo, there is a man, Kadu, who belongs to the cadres of the PCC and who is at the same time a church deacon. The number of Pentecostals in the Party cadres has increased as a result of the evangelisation work that the churches are performing in the jails. Many of them leave crime when they convert to the church, but an increasing number of ex-convicts maintain ties after they leave prison both with the churches and with the criminal organisation in the neighbourhoods and slums.

Kadu, now 39, began his career in crime as a teenager. He joined the PCC at 18 after making a few burglaries with the ‘brothers’. He was arrested only once and served two years for burglary. Kadu is a person of few words, always using a low voice, and every time we talked he was courteous and affable. However, he is respected both in the organisation and in his neighborhood as a result of his history of courage and crime. He is the one who organises the debates in the slum. Debate is the name the Party has given to a kind of court held to solve outstanding issues and conflicts emerging in daily life, not only among its members but also among residents of the area where the PCC is present, such as debts, control of drug-selling spots, violent actions undertaken without authorisation, and what should happen to those who do not behave. For severe infringements, depending on the statements put forth during the debate, the decision might even be the death of the offender. Rapes in the slum, for example, are not forgiven and the decision does not take more than fifteen minutes. The offender pays for the crime with his life.

Kadu enjoys the confidence of the leaders of the organisation in the neighbourhood. He does not hide from anyone that he is a Pentecostal. His dual belonging is, however, not quite clear or organised in Kadu’s mind. He is no longer sure what should or should not be done. Debate decisions depend as much on the people involved as on the crime performed, and he applies his own personal sense of justice. His main concern is the maintenance of order in the neighbourhood, even if this means that someone must die:

When there is some trouble in the shantytown here I am called on to solve that. I see no harm in it. Even though I belong to the church, I cannot leave the favela in a mess. Whenever there is a need, any theft, something that jeopardises the order of the place, we are called by the folks themselves. One of these days a crazy fellow stole the girl here and she and her family got panicked. … We found the wacky guy and solved the situation. … In a situation like that you will not pray, but act. We cannot let a lot of guys mess up the slum, and it is not just because I’m attending the church that the thing will get mucked up. (Marques, 2013: 75)

In the conversations we had with Kadu, his attempt at reconciling his running with crime and with his membership of the church was most visible in his focus on relations between his actions and the idea of order and justice, which he sees as necessary for peace in the slum and in the neighbourhood. He sees no inconsistency in his participation in the social networks of crime and the church. For him, maintaining links with PCC buddies even after having become a Pentecostal is a natural thing:

When you convert you do not stop exchanging ideas with partners. This thing of not greeting or not sharing anymore, this does not exist. I mean, I have always lived here, I know everybody, everybody knows me. Then I go to church and stop chatting with the brothers of the Party? Just because you converted you’re not going to close yourself off. My private deal is with God. (Marques, 2013: 75)

Kadu is an ardent fan of hip hop. He is the leader of a rap band and participates in church services by playing music and dancing. He provides sound equipment for the church. Few members of Kadu’s church are aware of his participation in the PCC. His whole family – mother, sisters, brothers, sons, nephews and nieces – participate in the same community. His family is the largest in the church. This was one of the reasons for his conversion. However, only his mother and one of his sisters are aware of the degree of his involvement with the Party. Most members of the church see him as a person who has abandoned crime even if he maintains ties with his former friends. None of them puts pressure on him to make an exclusive option for the church.

The pastor also knows Kadu’s history of crime and is aware of his present links with the PCC. He thinks, however, that it is better to maintain him in the church than to put pressure on him to choose a side on this issue. Even though he disagrees with Kadu’s participation in the criminal organisation, he prefers to have him around. According to the pastor, he received a message from God assuring him that in three years Kadu would be fully converted. This is the deadline the pastor gave him to fully abandon crime. However, two years have elapsed since then, and it looks like this prophecy is not going to be fulfilled in the near future, if ever.

The churches and the PCC are networks of social interaction among many in the peripheries. Some are more structured than others, but all have their explicit or implied rules, which can be triggered in different situations. These networks do not exist only in juxtaposition: they interpenetrate and create dynamic zones of social exchanges. According to Marques (2013: 76) ‘the permeability of networks of engagement is the condition of life in the periphery. This is important especially because cohabitation in the same territory forces exchanges and social interactions’.

If an effective distinction between the concepts of adherence and religious conversion is possible, we have a rich vein to be explored in a social environment that enables, encourages and requires multiple memberships. No social network can explain, exclusively, the complexity of the scenarios presented by these suburbs. Social codes structure a new semantics, often with reversed polarity, where criminality is not always read a negative way and the believer is not necessarily a model of behaviour.

Conclusion

The outskirts of our cities present elements that introduce significant novelties to the study of the Brazilian religious panorama and of Pentecostalism more specifically. (1) The kind of Pentecostalism most present in the peripheries is not that of the largest and best-known Pentecostal denominations. It is an autonomous Pentecostalism without denominational affiliation and independent of any institutional organs, whether conventions or fraternal associations. (2) The Pentecostalism of the periphery needs to constantly negotiate its religious identity. What does it mean to be Pentecostal in an environment where the local habitus and the Pentecostal habitus become confused in many situations? (3) What is the meaning of ‘conversion’ when the differences between the converted believer and the unconverted are becoming smaller and signs of holiness no longer work as operational codes of distinction? If the concept is amplified beyond religious adherence, indicating some form of life change, it may obscure our understanding of how Pentecostalism interacts with its surroundings. (4) The consternation caused – both inside and outside the academy – by the fact that there are Pentecostals who work with the PCC stems from the normative view of Pentecostalism. In observing the peculiar Pentecostalism of the periphery, it is important to interrogate the definitions that have guided academic understandings of what it means to be a Pentecostal. The normative reading of the Pentecostal phenomenon obstructs a fuller understanding of the social dynamics of the peripheries of the cities, where religion, with its support and engagement networks, is just another component alongside other forms of social interaction. In the peripheries these networks tend not to be mutually exclusive. Rather, in a slow and daily process of negotiation, they come to an arrangement of accommodation in which social exchanges may happen. It is a condition of survival in these places.