Becoming a God hunter towards conversion in a Brooklyn tongue-speaking church

Abstract

Based on over four years of ethnographic research in an Afro-Caribbean Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn, this article focuses on the process of becoming a religious seeker, or what I call a God hunter, towards conversion to a Pentecostal tongue-speaking church. Becoming a God hunter requires knowing the causes that explain religious seekership, the invariable sequence of interrelated events that are part of the process. It also requires gaining insight into motives at each stage in the process where potential converts arrive at their final decision to search for a religious group. This requires moving beyond a single set of essential variables, like crisis, or providing normative explanations to the motivation to become a religious seeker. Rather, this work explains the series of steps in a sequence of events that have a long and complex story in which individuals arrive at a point of convergence and decide to embark on a religious search. This article challenges the concept of crisis, used in both old and new scholarly models, to explain why someone decides to become a religious seeker. Final attention is given to the relevancy of continued academic debates on whether active or passive forces drive these individual decisions towards seekership.

This article focuses on the individual process of becoming a religious seeker towards conversion to a tongue-speaking Pentecostals church congregation. It provides a look into the lives of church members to capture personal stories as members proceed through the first stage of their Pentecostal careers. Unlike most research that focuses on large charismatic Christian churches, this work uses data drawn from a small Afro-Caribbean church in Brooklyn, NY, USA. It is here where individuals navigate through a particular milieu to construct unique biographies that led them to become religious seekers and to eventually become congregation members. The findings throughout this work engage in ongoing theoretical debates on the process of religious conversion using these biographical narratives on the first step to becoming Pentecostal. Almost four years of participant observation and dozens of intense formal and informal interviews give breath to the narrative voices of Pentecostals who give their own authoritative imprint in the telling of their experience. What I call ‘process analysis’ explains how individuals experience incipient moments at the first step of a journey to become religious seekers or ‘God hunters’ toward conversion that challenges the reigning theoretical paradigm in the sociological scholarship that uses crisis, or a single event that alters the course of an entire process, to explain religious seekership towards conversion.

Although all people are potential God hunters, some people might be more likely to seek out religious groups depending on things like race, class, gender, prior religious affiliation, past religious choices, and one’s available ‘stock of knowledge’. Yet many people have the same attributes of religious seekers but never decide to hunt for God or a church. The well-known Lofland and Stark conversion model sparked the 1970s ‘age of conversion’ literature, providing the groundwork for developing a theory on conversion. Their process-oriented, seven-stage model explains the necessary conditions leading a person to religious conversion (Lofland, 1966; Lofland and Stark, 1965). The first three conditions explain the individual’s path to becoming a religious seeker that involve an individual experiencing acute and enduring tensions within a religious, problem-solving perspective that leads to religious seekership. Other scholarly works on conversion argue that certain personality traits, social attributes, structural conditions, relative deprivations, general disillusionments, social pressures, dysfunctions and personal pathologies, and, especially, crisis explain, in part, why individuals embark on a religious quest (Snow and Machalek, 1984). These approaches are reminiscent of theories of deviant behaviors such as drug use that suggest individual pathology as motivation to consume drugs as a means to escape psychological conditions difficult to resolve (Becker, 1963).

Newer scholarly ideas on conversion challenge older models with a view of the seeker as a strategic and innovative actor. Older terms that attribute the seeker with pathology and other negative terms are replaced with new ideas that include the seeker as a creative bumbler and religious/metaphysical seeker fueled by intellectual/experimental curiosity, and developing a rationalized logic to become an opportunistic buyer (of religion) in search of social rewards that explain the motivation and pursuit to join a religious group (Baer, 1978; Lofland and Skonovd, 1981; Singer, 1988; Strauss, 1979; Zinnbauer and Pargament, 1998). These new ideas are simply the other side of the coin.

Instead of pathological, intellectually incompetent and culturally duped religious seekers, we now have creative active agents heroically resisting deterministic forces using brilliant strategies to triumphantly pursue sought-after rewards. The passive and duped convert is replaced with an active, heroic religious seeker resisting his or her own structural oppression. This article argues that both the new and old models do not fully explain how or why individuals seek a religious group. I doubt that the seekers would recognize themselves in either of these paradigms. These theories reify the religious seeker and limit our understanding of the many variables involved that influence the path to God hunting. Closer inspection of religious seekers reveals a complex and intimate story that unfolds in a larger process.

God hunter stories

People make up stories that connect our past and present lives. It helps to make sense of important moments and the vast changes we experience in the construction of our biographies. Storytelling is the very thing that shapes our identities. The tales we tell ourselves and others, including to social researchers, become real. Although people sometimes lie when telling their stories, they more often conjure images that reinvent themselves in new and creative ways to reconstruct a past biography based on a new and always changing present. Applying Christian Smith’s conception of narratives to God Hunter Church members, narratives make meaning of actions, events, and incipient moments that establish cause-and-effect relations that allow members to understand their lives (Smith, 2003). What matters is not so called facts but rather ‘the more significant story running through, over, and under “the facts”, the story that itself constitutes what is a fact, what it is that matters’ (Smith, 2003: 66). We fundamentally believe in these stories. They ‘create the conditions and shape of our very perceptions, identity, agency, orientation, purpose – in short, our selves, our lives, and our worlds as we know them’ (Smith, 2003: 57). Pentecostals are storytellers par excellence, with narratives about their paths to conversion.

People make up stories to themselves and, especially, to researchers interviewing them. (Lewontin, 1995; Young, 2011). They do this to ‘create a satisfying narrative out of an inconsistent and often irrational and disappointing jumble of feelings and events which leads each of us to write and rewrite our autobiographies inside our own heads’ (Lewontin, 1995: 24–29).

Telling the truth is not as easy as it seems, especially in a rapidly transforming world. In this ‘age of plurality’, the individual constantly confronts new choices in just about every area of social life, including one’s own sex (Berger, 1992). This increased exposure to pluralism creates a complex and ‘fragmented’ self where individuals find themselves cast into various roles and identities (Gergen, 1992). It becomes increasingly difficult to take all the fragments of the self and piece them together into a coherent whole.

Criminologist Jock Young explains how late modernity is a situation of extraordinary rapid change, reflexivity, spatial mobility, pluralism, and social disembeddedness (Young, 2011). This impacts how identities form and change throughout life. Narratives are constantly broken and re-written while values are contested and people become more reflexive (Young, 2011). The relationship between identity and narrative explains how ‘in a lifetime of broken narratives, constant reinvention becomes a central life task. … Vocabularies of motive and narratives both fictional and “factional”. … Personal narratives have constantly to be rewritten and reinvented’ (Young, 2011: 94–95). Human actors have the agency to re-write their narratives and transform their identities. But we need ‘[a] method which is sensitive to the way people write and rewrite their personal narratives’ (Young, 2011: 17).

This article argues that individuals construct their narratives through the telling of their stories and keeps in mind human agency. Through storytelling we can better understand how Pentecostals create unique stories that link their past life before conversion with their new ones as members of a Pentecostal tongue-speaking church. But we must warn against taking first-hand reports of converts at face value. Instead, ‘conversion narratives’ help analyze the personal stories of converts to reveal (1) the socially constructed nature of convert accounts, (2) the temporal availability of convert accounts showing how individuals change their perceptions and experiences over time in the conversion process, and (3) the retrospective character of convert accounts that transform their understandings of past events in light of new life experiences (Gooren, 2010; Snow and Machalek, 1984). The conversion narratives help to understand how and why people become tongue-speaking Pentecostals. Narrative accounts of conversion experiences explain how people reconceptualize their past memory as they encounter new life experiences, including conversion (Becker, 1998; Young, 2011). This reconstruction of the self indicates how these subjective changes lead to the refashioning of one’s identity to create a new sense of self through the process of intensive reinterpretation of the past (Snow and Machalek, 1984; Staples and Mauss, 1987). Rhetorical indicators, or ‘transformative language’, reveal subjective changes in the consciousness of the convert, using what people say, or the new and changing stories they offer – such as changes in speech and reasoning – as indicators of individual subjective changes in the conversion process. Most scholars of religion describe the ‘dramatic’ conversion experiences as stories converts give connecting their life prior to conversion to their new ‘born-again’ life. These ‘rhetorics of discontinuity’ show how members present their stories as a sudden or radical break with the past (Gooren, 2010). These ‘rhetorics of discontinuity’ are used to explain radical changes in the conversion experience. The stories below borrow from the sociologist’s conceptual toolbox to understand the process of Pentecostal storytelling to examine how identities develop, change, and are recast in new and creative ways where Pentecostals innovatively create and re-create an identity for themselves. Their personal stories are interwoven within the narrative to show how church members explain their experiences in the first step in the process of becoming Pentecostal.

Analytic induction

This research uses a grounded methods approach to inductively develop ideas to explain the process of becoming a tongue-speaking Pentecostal. Generating ideas to explain the process of becoming a tongue-speaking Pentecostal followed the traditions of analytic induction made famous by Lindesmith (1949), Cressey (1973), Becker (1963), and Lofland and Stark (1965). Analytic induction is a qualitative procedure to collect data, develop analysis, and organize results (Katz, 2001). Although there are several versions of analytic induction (Goldenberg, 1993), the common strategy develops a hypothesis for an original case and tests the theory case by case (Becker, 1998). When a negative case is found, the researcher modifies the hypothesis to fit the troubling case or to change the definition of what is explained, thereby excluding the problem case. Data is gathered one interview at a time, making it possible to establish a provisional explanation in light of new variables leading to a progressive redefinition of the hypothesis and the phenomenon to be explained (Katz, 2001).

Questioning the notion that crisis leads to conversion

Members of the God Hunter Church share many social attributes and structural conditions. They are African-American or African-Caribbean, working- and middle-class people with some prior affiliations, if minimally, with a Christian tradition. Most live in Brownsville or nearby with many churches in the area. Still, many others who share similar contexts never become religious seekers. Why did the members of this particular group become God hunters?

The concept of crisis has reigned supreme throughout conversion literature. Many scholars of both old and new paradigms assume that crisis paves the way to religious seekership (Rambo, 1995). The stories revealed in this article show otherwise. God Hunter Church members have all experienced some degree of crisis, but not necessarily more acutely than what the ‘everyday’ non-religious seeker experiences. Perhaps some of the confusion stems from the lack of clarity on what exactly constitutes a crisis and how or why it relates to religious seekership.

One possible explanation as to why so many scholars claim that people experience a crisis prior to conversion is simply because these converts claim it. However, most sociologists warn against taking as fact the first-hand reports of the people they study, including converts (Beckford, 1978; for an alternative view see Rambo, 1995). The self-reports of converts must be questioned, and this is not because they intentionally lie, though this certainly happens. Rather, people construct and re-construct their narratives through a social process. When people enter into a new group and participate in that group’s ongoing social life, they begin to internalize the ideas of a group. That is, people use the words and ideas of that group as their own, and they begin to sound like a member of the group. Expressions like ‘before I was born (saved)’, ‘in my old life’, and ‘in my sinful days’ symbolically represent a rupture with the past sparked by a crisis. However, the socially constructed nature of convert accounts says as much about the group as it does the convert (Snow and Machalek, 1984).

There is another related reason to question first-hand accounts: Memories change as people progress in life and move on to new things. In this process, people often reinterpret their past based on new life experiences. Rhetorical indicators measure changes in speech and reasoning to show individual subjective changes during life transformations. The concept of biographical reconstruction explains how the self is transformed through intensive reinterpretation of one’s past based on new and emerging perspectives (Snow and Machalek, 1984; Staples and Mauss, 1987). It is entirely possible that individuals never experienced a crisis prior to God hunting and only perceive themselves to have experienced a crisis in retrospect, after conversion into a religious group (Gooren, 2010; Rambo, 1995)

Crisis explanations fail to distinguish between a crisis that results in a religious quest and one that results in a secular quest. Some sociologists of religion use role theory to explain how people convert to a religious group. For example, Strauss (1979) became the first to develop a pattern describing ‘how seekers seek’, arguing that seekers, without intention or strategy, look for a religious group by following various leads and eventually becoming deliberate strategists pursuing ‘hot’ leads and deciding to ‘give it a go’, whereby they develop friendships within the group and learn their behavior, ritual, and language leading to conversion. The problem with using role theory is that it explains how, not why, people decide to become religious seekers. In a pluralistic society, an individual’s crisis may result in other, more secular possibilities like searching for a movement to protect virgin forests, save the great apes, discover the ‘truth’ behind 9/11, or bird watching.

The significant weight given to crisis in the conversion literature needs to be further challenged. Crisis is not the only, or even most useful, explanation accounting for religious seekership. It very well might even be unreliable. I explain below why individuals decide to become God hunters – a concept that is the foundation of a larger process to becoming converts and eventual tongue-speakers. This process involves series of steps individuals take in a succession of events, and all the contingencies encountered along the way, that leads individuals to decide to engage in a religious hunt. Every member of the God Hunter Church has a story, a chain of events that leads to a religious journey that refuses to be reduced to reifying qualities.

Ongoing debates continue over the individual’s active or passive involvement in their own religious seeking (Gartrell and Shannon, 1985; Gooren, 2007, 2010; Granqvist, 2003; Singer, 1988; Staples and Mauss, 1987; Strauss, 1979). Similar to Rambo’s analysis on conversion (1995), God Hunter Church members reveal that passive and active elements are always at work. The relevant question is when do the former dominate over the latter and vice versa? Much of the past conversion literature seems to imply that individuals are somehow static and passive prior to conversion and suddenly experience a change in life, igniting a newfound agency that leads to a religious quest and conversion with both active and passive forces at work. Rather, I argue that individuals experience active and passive forces throughout the entire religious seeking process.

Denver’s story provides substance to these theoretical ideas, revealing a process consistent with every Pentecostal story in the God Hunter Church. Using what I call ‘process analysis’ explains all the steps that occur that make possible individual decisions to search for a religious group. The purpose is to explain the process where individuals arrive at this decision, distinguishing between religious and secular seekers.

Denver’s God hunting story

Denver believes in the American dream’s infallibility; the long-standing ideology that hard work and education lead to success. He is college educated and has an unfailing work ethic – which he believes are the keys to attaining life’s finer things. Denver became a key research participant during this research, which allowed for many long in-depth interviews.

Denver grew up in a family with an ‘immigrant mentality’ – a reference to the immigrant’s idea of the American dream to seek upward mobility through hard work and education. ‘That’s the spirit that’s been passed on through generations’, Denver says, ‘I have the same spirit’. That spirit persists in his life to make money, improve one’s lot in life, and provide for the next generation with values.

Denver lived with strict parents who established a set of rules that kept him indoors away from other children. Instead of developing bonding relationships, he would read from a home library. He suspects that this deprived him of developing strong and trusting relationships with peers. Denver admits, ‘I didn’t build a lot of strong bonds … I didn’t really have any friends until I was like 13 years old. … Socializing – it’s something I never did as a kid’. This experience influenced his concept of friendship as summarized in the statement, ‘You may do something for somebody, but they quickly forget, and it becomes, “What have you done for me lately?”’ Denver developed an individualistic attitude focused primarily on personal gain and mobility. Money and success became important goals to avoid the economic struggles his parents encountered.

While attending high school in Brooklyn’s Brownsville, Denver falls in love with Theresa. In Denver’s words, ‘I met the girl of my dreams’. Many Pentecostal churches frown on congregation members dating unsaved outsiders. This problem prevents a romantic relationship from developing. Denver, at the time, was unwilling to take such a drastic and seemingly unusual path. Lacking in what he calls true love, Denver chose the alternative of joining the military. Before his military service, Denver believed that ‘once people find that you’re no longer useful, they move onto the next person’. This view changed in the military as he developed close friendships with other servicemen. ‘Most of them were like my friends’, he said. ‘I built some strong bonds with them – because none of us had money’. In short, if people were friends, it was genuine. He spent eight years in the military.

While in the Army, Denver secured a job in Massachusetts building ion implanter machines that make the raw materials for computer chips. Meanwhile, he enrolled in Endicott College in Boston, eventually graduating with a degree in business administration. He grew increasingly motivated to secure future employment to maximize his earning potential.

I was on the fast track and ahead of my peers. It was a time in my life when I started having friends. The reason I was on a fast track was because I had no friends and no distractions, so my grades were always high.

Denver grew restless wondering if eight years of military service and another four years of school were wasted time. Such restlessness is a common reality in today’s world. As the economy continues to falter heading into the second decade of the 21st century, many young Americans such as Denver struggle to find secure jobs that offer financial security. It is hardly surprising in an uncertain and insecure economic landscape that more Americans and first- and second-generation immigrants become disappointed when the American dream fails to materialize. Denver becomes Robert Merton’s (1938) classic example of the innovator responding to the contradictions between cultural goals and institutionalized means.

I wasn’t fulfilled. It was like I graduated and had a degree, but at the same time, what I expected to happen, in life, you have these expectations and you think that if you do this and do that, follow the patchwork that’s been put together, follows the rules that are set, that you’ll get what you’re supposed to get. Once I didn’t get what I was supposed to get, I was furious. I was upset.

Denver continued working two jobs and earned less than his pre-college days. He developed his favorite catchphrase: ‘There’s got to be a better way’. This quote is a poignant example of Merton’s theoretical response of ‘innovator’ describing the moment when the disillusioned conformist develops a creative way to resolve the conflict between institutional goals and cultural means (1938). Denver ‘the innovator’ searched, not for a religious group, but for networks to enter into a business venture.

I’d had disappointments in life. Instead of seeing the positive, I figured the more money I have, the more respect I could get. I never decided to break the law or anything like that. … I started looking for opportunities to start my own venture, to be an entrepreneur. In my search, I found a business, that’s known worldwide. It’s called Runaway Global.

Runaway Global is a fictitious name to protect the identity of this controversial corporation that is believed by many observers to exploit people looking to establish an Internet business selling things from toilet paper to plant fertilizer. But to Denver, it was a legitimate business opportunity. Denver met Shiraz while working as an assistant at a low-paying law firm. Shiraz became an influential figure in shaping Denver’s life-story into a business venture. ‘He led me in the right direction’, Denver said, ‘and showed me what he does. It was my choice to be a part of it’. Here, ‘it’ refers to Runaway Global, the business corporation that recruits young men and women to become ‘entrepreneurs’ making Internet sales and promising stock and upward mobility for those who join. Using ‘power-seminar’ vernacular, Denver described how appealing the idea was for him. It offered him an opportunity to ‘make a legacy’ for himself.

People acquire knowledge from two main sources: experience and books. If one listens to others for enough time, it becomes obvious where their knowledge derives. Denver’s ideas come from books – specifically from inspirational, business-oriented self-help books.

You have to go above and beyond and learn to excel. This organization puts the battery in my back to give me motivation to excel, achieve and accomplish. There are so many examples of people who came from absolutely nothing, came to this country as immigrants with a suitcase and a few dollars in their pockets and started this business. Now they’re multi-millionaires. I said, ‘I need to be a part of this organization, no matter how long it takes to get to that level.’

He jumped at the chance to become one of Runaway Global’s ‘three million independent business owners’. But he struggled to make so much as a dime, despite the fact that he attended weekly Runaway Global meetings. These informational meetings provided statistics on the company and offered continuous advice on how to become a wealthy entrepreneur. But achieving wealth would prove a daunting task. At one meeting, Denver expressed disappointment in his lack of financial success. His Runaway Global advisors directed him to join Brick World Wide (BWW), a mentoring program attached to the parent company Runaway Global, to achieve financial success within the company. BWW advisers presented Denver with a solution that he never would have previously considered: joining a church to find both spiritual guidance and networks with other young, like-minded black men.

Voilà! Denver becomes a God hunter. He explains, ‘My mentors at Brick World Wide told me I needed spiritual guidance, so they said, “Find a church to go to”. So I was looking. I started going to different churches in my [Brownsville] neighborhood’. At this point, Denver’s path to God hunting is unrelated to God religion; it is all about business. To become a successful businessman, he is told to develop strong church ties to network with other dependable and honest young business-minded people.

This is reminiscent of business life in 19th and early 20th century America where people in search of a business venture needed only to show their affiliation with a Protestant church to secure credit of one’s trustworthiness. Max Weber (2001) discusses the role religion played in fostering the development of capitalism in western countries like the United States, in particular the relationship between religion and business. Weber explains, ‘If one looked more closely at the matter in the United States, one could easily see that the question of religious affiliation was almost always posed in social life and in business life which depended on permanent and credit relations’ (128). It is a business decision, not a crisis or a religious experience, which motivates Denver to become a religious seeker. Denver states, ‘I had an agenda …. To see if I can find somebody in the church that I could make a business partner of mine. That’s the mode I was in … to get to another level financially’.

The story continues as Denver finds himself struggling to find a church, almost losing interest. Strictly business reasons were an insufficient motivation to join a church. Joining a church requires a commitment to forfeit a lifestyle many young men in New York City enjoy. Many people are reluctant to give up the promising opportunities that modern urban life offers. Church life hardly seems an exciting alternative. More was needed. Denver explains:

(My mother) attends an old-fashioned church where they sing these old songs – drawn out, dragged out music – and then they preach to you. You know, [it’s] for older folks really. The younger people who were there are just there because they go kicking and screaming. That made a difference to me.

Denver accepted another invitation to attend services with his friend Andrew at BWW. A week later, and still uninspired, the chance meeting on the bus occurred:

So I went to his church, then a week later, I bumped into Theresa on the bus. I just happened to be in a random place. I just happened to be on a bus and here she comes. And I’d been looking forward to seeing her for like the last 10 years. I just didn’t know how or when it was going to happen, but deep in my heart I knew it was going to happen. And so we bumped into each other on the bus, we started a conversation, we started a friendship, and things started to progress after that. The first thing she always used to tell me is, she would always invite me to church, and this time I took her up on the initiation. Finally, after 10 years, I took her up on the invitation.

Voilà! We now have Denver’s second motivation to become a God hunter – first business and second romance. He says, ‘I knew I couldn’t get the girl of my dreams unless I had some kind of spiritual foundation. She’s a great motivator in that aspect too. She comes with the package and that’s the package’. The twofold package of business success and romance motivated Denver to become a God hunter.

The concept of crisis: RIP

Stark (1999) uses RIP in the title of an article that calls for the death of secularization theory. He lies to rest ongoing debates that religion is experiencing a decline just as I argue that crisis, as an explanation of religious conversion, should rest in peace. Returning to the earlier statement that outsiders tend to explain seemingly unusual behavior with unusual motives, it is easy to see why many scholars consistently use crisis to explain individual decisions to become religious seekers. Why would a seemingly rational person embark on a religious quest to join a tongue-speaking group? Without proper understanding of the process, the concept of crisis fits. A deeper look into the etymology of the term, its modern definitional usage, and its application in the conversion literature demonstrates why the concept of crisis does not fit as an explanation for religious quests.

Crisis was first used in a non-medical sense in 1627. In modern usage, Random House Dictionary defines crisis within categories that include situational, structural, and individual.

The situational: ‘A stage in a sequence of events determining the trend of all future events, especially for better or worse; a turning point’. (Dictionary.com) Here, a crisis occurs at a pivotal moment where a single decision is given great weight in determining the outcome of an entire process.

The structural: ‘A condition of instability or danger, as in social, economic, political, or international affairs, leading to a decisive change’. (Dictionary.com) Instability and danger cause a crisis that leads to change. Humans are not decision-making agents but rather subject to the precarious whims of outside forces.

The individual: ‘A dramatic emotional or circumstantial upheaval in a person’s life’. (Dictionary.com) Crisis, as defined here, is an event that happens to a passive individual.

The Americanized alternative: A fifth definition of crisis can be included that is popularly used in American culture. When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters, one representing danger and the other representing opportunity. Though this translation is more urban myth than semantically accurate, the two interesting elements characterizing a crisis are a dangerous situation leading to a potential for improvement.

Now it is possible to connect these definitions of crisis to its theoretical application in the conversion literature. Crisis has been used to explain how mystical experience, near-death experience, illness and healing, general life dissatisfaction, desire for transcendence, altered conscious states, protean selfhood, individual pathology, apostasy, and externally stimulated forces (social upheaval, revolution) cause individuals to seek a religious group (Rambo, 1995). Though these categories of crisis have various degrees of intensity, duration, scope, source, and continuity, they remain consistent with their definitional usage. A situation arises in which a definitive decision must be made that will alter the course of an entire process. The emphasis remains on a single decision that occurs at a pivotal juncture, one that surpasses all other moments in a process, leading the individual to make a drastic decision to seek out a religious group or some other organization. In most of the cases reported in the conversion literature, and consistent with the more passive definition of the term ‘crisis’, an event of crisis happens to the passive individual who must react to the situation. Instead of individuals making many decisions opening and closing the door to different possibilities at important steps, they are seen as facing a crisis and suddenly becoming active agents to solve the disruption.

Going against decades of research on conversion, this article shows evidence against the concept of crisis as a significant cause for individual decisions to become a religious seeker. Put differently, at least in the initial hunting stage in the process of becoming Pentecostal, the cases do not include instances of crisis. The concept of crisis, as defined and theoretically applied, simply fails to fit the cases reported in this research. There is no single moment when one decision was made that affected the whole outcome of events. Rather, many decisive moments happen prior to any decision, even major ones. A decision is made among many possibilities at each step in a larger process that, taken cumulatively, leads to the decision to search for a religious group. Denver’s case illustrates how one decision did not result, as definitions and past theoretical applications of crisis indicate, in his hunting for a church. Instead, a decision was made at each step in a long chain of events that, when taken together, made it possible for him to decide to search for a religious group. Looking at all the cases reported, this article rejects the concept of crisis as an important explanation causing an individual to seek religion.

Though mythical, the Chinese pseudo-translation of crisis fits better with the cases reported. But instead of a single danger that offers a magical solution or opportunity to once and for all resolve a problem, I see in these Pentecostal stories potential risks at each step in the process. The risks allow the individual an opportunity to proceed to another step, so that when all the steps are taken, and the onslaught of risks met with decisions, it becomes possible to make the choice to become a God hunter. Instead of using crisis, ‘incipient moments’ occur at each stage where the individual makes decisions that make possible new choices that lead to new steps. In the Pentecostal stories reported in this article, the idea of incipient moments, rather than crisis, becomes a useful concept to understanding why individuals arrive at a point to make the decision to become religious seekers.

Bishop Redford’s God-hunting path

To further illustrate the point, Bishop Redford’s experiences illustrate the most radical example of all the cases conducted in this research and fit consistently with the arguments proposed. Here, only the relevant points in Redford’s life are discussed as they relate to his path toward becoming a God hunter.

Pastor Redford personifies a charismatic authoritative figure in the church. More than four years of research with Pastor Redford not only allowed access into a Charismatic Christian congregation but also provided deep insight into the world of a religious leader. He serves as the most powerful figure in the church as, among other things, father figure, mentor, role model, preacher, councilor, spiritual leader, and friend. Bishop Redford tells his story:

When I got saved, I went home that day, and I became born-again on the train. I was on the train and the Lord spoke to me, I gave my life to Christ, and when I got home, the first thing I did, all of the liquor that I had, I took all of it and destroyed it.

In his experience are echoes of the sudden conversion of the biblical figure Saul while on the road to Damascus. If we take Redford’s first-hand account at face value and look no further, we could discuss sudden conversions and the crisis that caused his conversion. But we know better. This seemingly spontaneous event did not just happen. Rather, it occurred after a series of steps that made the event possible complete with decisions and chance events where inter-contingencies led to this moment. People can decide to hunt for a church prior to or after becoming saved. Bishop Redford, in this case, became saved prior to hunting for a church, unlike Denver who searched for a church then became saved. The process works the same; Bishop Redford’s decision to get saved was also a decision to hunt for a church. Let’s look more closely at the details of Bishop Redford’s conversion.

From a young age, Redford dreamed of becoming a professional singer. In fact, that desire motivated many of his life decisions. After graduating from high school, he accepted an invitation from a cousin to wait tables at a Hotel in St. Croix in hopes of becoming a musician. His musical career took time to develop until, after working four years, he met tenor saxophone virtuoso King Curtis who encouraged Redford to continue striving toward his goal of becoming a singer. Redford moved back to Antigua and began his musical quest, joining an Antigua musical group called The Hondells. He saw limited success as part of the group, which played mostly at weddings and parties. It was at one of these wedding receptions where he would meet his future wife. Around the same time, he would be ‘discovered’ by Lenny, a popular and talented singer in Antigua, who invited Redford to form a partnership. Together they created a music group called The Nomads. The Nomads were on their way to a promising musical career, once performing as the opening act for ‘The Godfather of Soul’ James Brown in Antigua. But misfortune would strike, as Redford and Lenny encountered financial problems with other band members, prompting the dissolution of band. Redford and Lenny would form a duo, but that arrangement brought them only limited, and short-lived, success. With Redford growing intolerant of Lenny’s drinking and doping prior to rehearsals, he would decide to go solo, at which point he would attract the attention of a female manager based in Germany. Together, they created a self-published record called ‘Twenty-four Hours Eternity’ and took it to Germany for promotion. The tour was a success, and Redford and his manager were just one day from signing a contract with a record producer. The future was bright, until a nightmarish dream occurred.

I saw myself in a dungeon type of setting and there were a whole lot of people there, but they looked like zombies. They were wearing robes and they were there for a very long time. And I heard a voice say, ‘What is a young man like you doing in a horrible place like this?’ And I remember I got shot.

Redford immediately left Germany, with little notice to his manager expecting a promising career to ignite. With his wife Jamie, he would leave Europe and continue his musical career in New York. Though his first album ‘Twenty-four Hours Eternity’ began to sell, the financial rewards failed to materialize.

Meanwhile, Redford’s wife Jamie reunited with her long-time friend Pastor Richards, a former pastor from Antigua now living in New York. Though Jamie didn’t consider herself religious, she maintained a friendship with her childhood pastor in Antigua that continued in New York. Pastor Richards made various unsuccessful attempts to convert Jamie. ‘He [Pastor Richards] was saved at the time and he’d tell me, “Oh, you’re with that crazy guy [now Bishop Redford]”, at that time he was a singing and sinful creature’, Jamie recalls. ‘He’d tell me, “You’re with that guy. You need to give your heart to the Lord”’. With his bond with Jamie deepening, Pastor Richards attended family functions and evening dinners at the Redford family table. Redford, the ‘singing and sinful creature’, became friends with the pastor, who encouraged the couple to attend church and live a ‘Christian’ lifestyle. At first, Redford declines, in deference to his interest in his musical career, and to drinking and smoking marijuana.

Even after years of limited success, and mounting frustration with his career, Bishop Redford still hadn’t reached a point to where seeking religion to get saved was possible. Instead, he continued to pursue his musical career with his German manager. With seven children to feed, Redford watched as sales of his self-published record began slipping.

Eventually, Jamie became suspicious of his manager’s intentions. ‘This woman was supposed to be his manager, but she really wanted him’, Jamie said. ‘She gave him a big chain – big, big chain – and on the end of it had a pendant with a big diamond in the middle’.

One restless night, Redford would head to his manager’s house, where he spent most of the night. The story unfolds in dramatic fashion. Bishop Redford refers to Jamie to tell it:

It was a crazy situation. He went to Jersey that night and didn’t get home until the next morning. He had a dramatic experience on the train, a blackout, and he was able to change trains from Jersey to Brooklyn. He was out for a couple of hours at the manager’s house and when he came to, they quickly got him on the train because they were scared because they couldn’t get him, they thought that he was dead or something. But then he was revived and took that journey back. When he got to Newkirk Avenue, he heard a voice tell him ‘I saved your life’. And he knelt down on the platform right there and told the Lord, ‘OK, you saved my life, then I’m going to serve you’. All this happened while I was at work. I usually called to give him a wake-up call, so I kept calling to wake him up so he could get to work and my brother kept saying he’s not here yet. By the time I got home after working the midnight shift, he was there. He said, ‘Oh honey, I’m saved’. And I said, ‘Oh yeah?’ You could smell the alcohol and the cigarettes and everything from the night before, oh yes. And of course I knew what that meant. That’s when you’re one of those crazy people who clap their hands. I was upset because he never stayed out before. I didn’t know what he was doing. I thought he slept out. He just said he fell back asleep and then when he caught himself, he said he’s saved and he took all of his records and broke them up, all of the liquor in the house, just threw it out, all his jewelry.

Redford saw his musical career fading and his marriage threatened. Changes needed to happen, and quickly. He made a decision; it now became possible for Redford to become a God hunter.

Redford explains, ‘When I got saved, I took my children and I started going to church, and I remained in the church. No one had to invite me’. Redford never searched for a church at any previous point. Only after these experiences did this path become possible. Like Denver’s business ideas, musical ambition motivated Redford’s decisions and an unanticipated religious quest resulted. Put differently, searching for a musical career led to an unexpected, unintended religious quest. Becoming saved and searching for a church was not possible until all the steps in this process were taken bringing Redford to a religious decision.

Process analysis: ‘Only God decides when’

Common phrases emerge when God Hunter Church members discuss religious seekership and becoming saved. It’s all about timing. They repeat phrases like ‘only God decides when the time is right’, ‘only the Lord decided when’, ‘Jesus knows when you are ready’. Sociologists cringe at such explanations and hope to dig further and gain more insightful responses. Admittedly, I initially suspected that these responses were attempts to avoid a thoughtful answer. I finally reached a startling realization: these often repeated slogans have meaning. They just cloak it in religious terms. These phrases are part of a larger process that had to first occur for the individual to reach a moment in time when deciding to search for a church and to become saved became possible. Using Bishop Redford as an example illustrates the point. He could have become saved in his youth while singing at a church, but did not. He could have become saved after his troubles with The Hondells, The Nomads, or his old friend Lenny, but this did not happen. He could have become saved after the dreaded dream in Germany. He could have claimed the dream an act of God, which years later, after converting, he indeed claimed (biographical reconstruction). It did not happen this way. He made decisions motivated by his musical ambitions that resulted in a religious quest to find a church and to convert. He could have listened to the family friend Pastor Richards and joined a church, secured a ‘real’ job, supported his family, and stopped living the ‘singing and sinful’ life. This, too, did not happen. But all of his life experiences did happen, taking Redford step by step to a point where a different decision to become saved and search for a church became possible. This path, and all the experiences, or steps, along the way led him to this position. As with Denver, it could have happened otherwise, if this or that, but it happened this way, through this process and all the decisions made, that led to the point to become a God hunter.

Conclusion

This article described the individual path to becoming a religious seeker, or what I called a ‘God hunter’, challenging traditional conversion and post-conversion theories. Rather, this article argued against both of these paradigmatic approaches, claiming that we simply replaced conservative, dry theories with fantastic liberal fantasies that offer still-limited explanations that remain unconvincing and fail to fully explain how or why individuals seek a religious group. God hunting towards conversion needs to be understood as a part of a process of lifelong decision making, rather than a momentary crisis, that involves an ongoing and continuous self-transformation, that occurs in a gradual but unsteady process, where the individual is sometimes active and other times passive, leading to uneven behavior and cognitive changes, and that continues throughout the life-cycle of the Pentecostal career. Though God Hunter Church members experienced some degree of crisis, they were no more acute or enduring than for the everyday person. Further, God hunters offer retrospective accounts of their crisis experience indicating that they reinterpreted their past life experiences leading up to their crisis leading to conversion only after they adopted the rhetoric of the group. That is, they reinterpreted their past based on their new reality within the church ideology.

Using Denver and Pastor Redford as examples, this article argued that understanding the causes and motivations to become a God hunter requires (1) unfolding a story that details all the steps a person takes (2) in a chain of events (3) where individuals make decisions at incipient moments (4) that occur at each step, making possible the next step (5) that, when taken cumulatively, (6) and considering all the chance events that occur along the way, (7) lead to a God-hunting path. What I called process analysis shows conversion as a process that reveals a logical journey where the individual makes a decision to convert, without crisis as necessary or relevant to explain religious seekership.

In this late modern world of rapid change and growing instability, uncertainty and flexibility, immediacy and self-actualization, ontological insecurity and existential uncertainty, fear and risk, rapidly changing and highly reflexive identities, and heightened pluralism and individualism, God hunting serves as a quest to redefine the self and find certainty in a world increasingly lacking in it. With economic precariousness and the increasing disruption of family, work, community, and interpersonal relationships that define modern life, the individual pursuit of a religious group demonstrates how people develop a sense of agency to save the subjective self from the anomie of a seemingly decentered and fragmented objective world. As opposed to much of the scholarship that argues for the emergence of a secular age, perhaps God hunting will increase as people experience a loosening of their moorings in a world fraught with uncertainty and disruption that permeates multiple spheres of social life. Religious seekership showcases a resilient form of human agency in an attempt to save the self from a cannibalizing world of uncertainty and increasing discontent.