Gypsy leadership,cohesion and social memory in the Evangelical Church of Philadelphia

Abstract

Nowadays, although throughout Europe the Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Protestant denominational identities remain among Roma, the conversion rate would suggest the number of Roma Pentecostal will have numerically overtaken all the others in just a few years’ time. The uniqueness of Spanish Gypsy Pentecostalism contradicts some of the stereotypes of global Pentecostalism and resides in its organisational complexity and hierarchical structure, its rapid institutionalisation as a sole church, the thorough theological training of its leaders, and its autonomy both from the State and from the European and Latin American Pentecostal Roma Movement. This article is structured around a life history and two concerns: (a) the role of the constant circulation of the gypsy evangelical ministers as regards charisma and leadership; (b) the growing transfer of prestige from the respected gypsy elders to the young evangelical pastors and their role in wide pacification processes involving ethnic cohesion and kinship.

Introduction

The remarkable events that took place in Azusa Street (Los Angeles, CA) at the end of the 19th century no longer sum up global Pentecostal history, although the model of ecstatic Christian life and the basic pattern of enthusiastic worship with dance, trance and people speaking and singing in tongues can be found all over the world today (Robbins, 2004: 120). Similarly, one of the most recognizable features of Pentecostalism is that it has been extraordinarily open to syncretizing with indigenous forms of worship. Pentecostalism has become an active factor in global cultural change processes, and its success as a globalizing movement is relevant ‘not only by its rapid growth, but also by the range of social contexts to which it has spread’ (Robbins, 2004: 118; Pine and Pina-Cabral, 2008). A century later, it is vital to include the numerous local stories and from these discover the most unexpected faces of a global religious movement which is both innovative and controversial (Wilkinson and Althouse, 2010: 11). From the 1950s, the Roma people began to organise themselves throughout Europe into ethnic congregations affiliated to the Pentecostal Church. Nowadays, Pentecostalism is one of the most important religions among the European Roma people and, probably, among the Latin Americans too ¹ . In fact, although throughout Europe the Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Protestant denominational identities remain, the conversion rate would suggest that the number of Roma Pentecostal members will have numerically overtaken all the others in just a few years’ time (Thurfjell and Marsh, 2014: 7)

The phenomenon is an example of the contemporary processes of religious and ethnic innovation. The theories that have linked Pentecostalism and poverty, basing the success of evangelical sectarianism on the uprooting and marginalisation of its followers, appear to be excessively simplified and abridged, as pointed out by Wilkinson and Althouse in reference to the legacy left by authors such as Bryan R. Wilson. Racial segregation, marginality and religious conversions cannot be separated; Robbins, based on David Martin, has pointed out that the majority of Azusa Street converts, like the majority of converts in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere, have been rural migrants to cities or people at the lower end of the social class scale (Robbins, 2004: 123). However, in Spain conversions increase among the less marginal groups within the gypsy population; those who have regular incomes from street market sales. Therefore, social anomie, deprivation and disorganization arguments cannot be put forward as the main reasons for the conversion. Paradoxically, the notion of religious innovation, which is so perceptive and appropriate for the transformations which have taken place due to the rapid Pentecostal expansion throughout the world, has been comparatively less used; perhaps the lack of attention to the perspective of innovation is due to the radical opposition shown by great sectors of Christianity towards the charismatic and controversial practices typical of Pentecostalism, from the lack of theological training of its leaders to the refusal to set up churches (Wilkinson and Althouse, 2010: 2). However, the uniqueness of gypsy Pentecostalism in Spain resides precisely in its organisational complexity, its early institutionalisation as a sole church (the ECP, Evangelical Church Philadelphia; IEF, Iglesia Evangélica Filadelfia), the thorough theological training of its leaders, regulated by the Philadelphia Evangelical Biblical Schools that they themselves manage, and the internal cohesion which enables them to be independent both from the State and from European and Latin American Roma Pentecostalism organizations. The religious leaders of the Church maintain an ideology and a formal discourse that from the public administration is considered in some points, like the one related to Gender equality, incompatible with the principles of a secular State. However, they eventually supported the Pentecostal associative movement because pastors are the only ones capable of reaching many thousands of gypsies. On the other hand, we know that French Vie et Lumière and the Evangelical Church of Philadelphia don’t have a joint integration into a larger supranational structure or a dependency relationship. Since the origin of the gypsy evangelical movement in Spain is French, and a good part of the European gypsy evangelical churches are organized at some supranational level and share the same name (Life and Light in United Kingdom, Leben und Licht in Germany, for instance), the independence of the Spanish Church of Philadelphia ² is amazing.

In Spain, the number of gypsies is over one million ³ and they are, in the main, sedentary individuals who identify themselves as gypsies or calós and not as Rom. In the mid-20th century, they began to adopt Pentecostal evangelism from North America, a process which turned into an unprecedented religious, organisational, participative and political experience, a movement whose structure, manifestations and effects are today difficult to compare with the history of Pentecostalism in other places (Martin, 1990; Robbins, 2004; Cantón-Delgado, 2013b). The political organisation, the prestigious hierarchies, the principle of patrilineality, the relationship between the patrigroups and with the non-gypsy society, with the inhabitants of the neighbourhoods, social workers, community and local authority representatives, have changed due to the prophetic and charismatic strength of a conversionist movement of religious innovation. One of the more important effects to be emphasised is that of the transfer of prestige and authority from the gypsy elders to the young evangelical pastors, something that has only been made possible by the adoption of evangelism. This has allowed the joint negotiation of internal community conflicts between the evangelical pastors and the respected gypsy elders. As Slakova has pointed out (2014: 57), ‘they are not just religious structures, but also play the role of a new kind of inter-community organization’. The pastors have participated for years in the administration of justice together with the respected gypsy elders regardless of the religious affiliation of the individuals involved in the conflict.

This aspect is vital in order to understand the role of the church in the pacification self-managed processes within gypsy populations. This is a crucial change which has meant an inversion of gerontocracy, from the generational logic in the structure of the chain of authority and respect, and from the principle according to which age takes preference when defining rank (Glize, 1989; Williams, 1991, 1993). The respected gypsy elders are referred to as the custodians of traditional authority and responsible for the application of gypsy law, a reified collection of notions referring to gypsy law and customs, which has been the central theme of the two issues which gypsy/Roma anthropology has been dealing with since the mid-1970s: their survival as an ethnic group, society or community, the propagation of their shared identity (Gay y Blasco, 2011: 445). Spanish gypsies appear to reproduce their singularity without recourse to the usual anthropological topics of land or territory, a shared past or a communal memory, internal unity or cohesiveness in the present. A look at Spanish gypsy life immediately confronts the observer with an apparent paradox: although the gypsies have an extremely strong sense of themselves as a people, set apart from the non-gypsies, they are not preoccupied with constructing a harmonious or united community. In fact, as Paloma Gay y Blasco asserts (1999: 3), the opposite is closer to the truth: they seem intent on objectifying fragmentation and differences among themselves. As she said, ‘the obvious conclusion is that, in the Spanish gypsy case, common identity is the main support of community’.

My work as an anthropologist is within the growing interest in Social Sciences about the global advance of religious conversions to Pentecostal evangelism, and about the correlation that exists between the mentioned movement and ethnic minorities like the Roma people, in this case the Spanish gypsies (Cantón-Delgado, 2013a). For this work, I am going to draw on data from a wide ethnography carried out on geographically very different congregations made up of evangelical gypsies, located in the autonomous communities of Andalusia, Madrid and Catalonia. The territorial regions or evangelical zones ⁴ chosen for the study are (along with the Levante, eastern Spain) those which have a greater concentration of gypsy churches, as well as a greater associative and ethnopolitical activity ⁵ . Fieldwork has been developed over nearly two decades discontinuously, and is still in process.

The ECP/IEF in numbers

During the last four years of field study ⁶ we have carried out dozens of interviews with pastors and elders from the ECP, people in charge, treasurers and secretaries, leaders and community mediators, those responsible for (generally speaking the zone secretaries) the periodic censuses of the ECP. It is worth our while to tentatively put a figure on these conversions in Spain. About 20 percent of the Spanish gypsy population, some 200,000 individuals of all ages, currently read the Bible regularly, they have approximately 1,300 halls for services scattered all over Spain and count on four large biblical schools where 6,000 evangelical ministers have already been trained. According to the sources consulted during the field work, the gypsy population in Spain at the end of 2014 was reaching approximately 1,200,000 individuals, 200,000 to 225,000 of whom were active members of some church belonging to the Philadelphia Church, all of them baptised by immersion. At the same time, and following the calculations of the representatives of the Church referring to the whole of Spain, approximately 800,000 individuals of the gypsy ethnic group are ‘involved’ population due to: (1) the intensity and the extent of the kinship links as the principal vehicle for the transmission of the beliefs and ritual practices; (2) the successful mediation of the religious leaders in the resolution of internal community conflicts.

One of the reasons why these figures appear to us to be reliable is due to the fact that the percentages are lower than those in the most recent quantitative study that we have access to at the moment, published by the Centre for Sociological Research in 2011 ⁷ . We can deduce from this study that, regardless of the total figures that we do not know for sure, half the Spanish gypsy population was evangelical in 2011, a figure which is far higher than the one contemplated by the leadership of the Philadelphia Church itself. It can also be deduced from this study that at the beginning of the 21st century 50 percent of the religious self-adherences of the Spanish gypsy population corresponded to the evangelical churches, which leads the authors to make four conclusions: (1) the Pentecostal churches are the most relevant supra-family institution in the gypsy cultural universe; (2) they are at the same time one of the main driving forces for social change; (3) the conversions to evangelical Pentecostalism go beyond intra-ethnic differences of class, age, gender, environment and religion; (4) the increase in conversions has been constant during its dramatic/vertiginous growth in the 1980s and 1990s ⁸ .

The figures that are in the hands of the National Council of the Philadelphia Church, paradoxically less optimistic than those provided in this study, suggest that around 20 percent of the total gypsy population is made up of actual members of an evangelical church. They also suggest that 60 to 70 percent, although not members, know and frequent the evangelical churches, and are to varying degrees influenced by evangelical language, idearium morality, Pentecostal corporality and the charismatic leadership of the pastors. These extremely relevant percentages can only be explained if we look again at the patrilineal and traditional gypsy gerontocratic authority structures, which show increasing levels of complicity and acceptance of the evangelical religion, of its symbolic efficiency, of its power structures and the moral authority of its leaders.

This article is organised around a life story and two issues: (1) authority, charisma and leadership, addressed via the constant circulation of the pastors between the different churches; (2) peace-making negotiations and ethnic cohesion, addressed via the transfer of prestige of the respected gypsy elders to the young evangelical pastors. Taking the life story of a gypsy pastor who for more than thirty years has led the Orcasitas church, a working class district located in the south of Madrid, as its main theme, the text follows the complex transformation and social memory of the evangelical gypsy churches in Spain in the last three decades. The story follows the life of the pastor Enrique Y, from the age of 15, until the year 2015, when Enrique Y consolidated his work as the Mission representative for the ECP for Latin America. His story is that of one of the most influential historic leaders of gypsy evangelism, veteran member of the National Assembly Committee of the Philadelphia Church and responsible for the Latin American Mission.

Authority, leadership and charisma: gypsy Pentecostalism and Rom political activism

Biographies, deemed not as the account of individual trajectories but rather as collective works that recover the social memory, are the ethnographic resource that demonstrates best how intersect history and ethnography, action and structure, the great sanctioned stories and the experience of those whose voices are rarely heard (Lewis, 2008). The biographical account of Enrique Y is a structured account, and as such could be subscribed to by many evangelical gypsies who had similar experiences until they became pastors. Their story and their voice will allow us to bring to the fore some of the tensions and complexities of the contemporary evangelical gypsy phenomenon via personal experience and its expression in the life story.

I was born into a Christian home, so my parents brought me up by example before becoming a Christian myself. My mother converted first, she was a Catholic and a genuine believer, with the arrival of the Gospel, she quickly believed in it and accepted it, she experienced miracles because she was cured of an illness … My father commented, ‘You are mad’ but as a result of her conversion, my father, a noble and modest man, a respectful one, received the call and accepted the Lord. Consequently, I was brought up in a very spiritual environment. I found the Lord when I was 15 years old, by this time I was working and had my circle, my friends, I was working for a company, painting to be precise, I specialised in decoration and became a master painter, I had my own company in 1983, when I was a pastor, and at that time I had a Great Awakening with some 150 people and I had the idea of my wife working in the street market trade so that I could dedicate all my time to my pastoral ministry.

Thirty years ago, leadership-making was of a random nature, personalist and informal, more organic: somebody with special qualities and oratory capacities, who had already converted, was called upon to lead a church without being subjected to the exhaustive institutional control and training processes that are obligatory today. The case of Enrique Y was no different. This recent past can be found in his account:

So my family and I went to Quintanar de la Sierra, in the province of Burgos, and this united us furthermore, we went from Aranda de Duero where we lived and we went because there were a lot of conflicts among gypsy families and the situation was very tense and my father had to deal with the families, so we moved 90 kilometres away. My father was already Evangelical but there was too much tension. The pastor of Aranda de Duero came to visit us and started to hold services in the village and I promised him that I would help him and attend the service. I could not convert in Aranda de Duero … when I had the call of God I decided to come and live in Madrid. Here in Madrid there was a church, there was a daily prayer environment, so I came to Madrid to be a true Christian, because in Madrid we have family on my father’s side, and some of them were already preachers, and we all went to Madrid, not just me. After a year and a bit in Madrid, brother Nani from the Pan Bendito (Blessed Bread) church saw me preaching and there were gifted ones in the churches, prophecies and he said to me that I had to be a pastor, I had been converted for less than two years and pastor Nani said to me that all of them had seen it and that I should start to preach and I stepped forward as a local candidate and began to minister in the church. … Then I go to the neighbourhood of Manoteras in Madrid and after, by then 1980, the Orcasitas Church requests me to become their pastor.

Even though the training procedures for candidates to become pastors have been formalised in the last three decades via the creation of the Philadelphia Evangelical Biblical School run by gypsy pastors and destined for biblical study over a four-year period for future pastors, the mobility of pastors, already referred to in Enrique Y’s account, has been exacerbated rather than reduced. During the years of fieldwork, we have seen how the pastors who are assigned the running of a congregation rarely stay in the position for more than one or two years. At the end of this period, they are replaced by other pastors or workers designated by the person in charge. A continuous flow of pastors between different churches, at times quite distant from each other, leads to the exhaustion and destabilisation of the churches for some (experts and social workers from Christian associations, certain members of the governing body, some members of the church and a considerable number of external observers), whilst for others (mainly the pastors) it is simply a matter of cultural coherence and cultural continuity, a way of ensuring renewal of the evangelical pastors worn down by the conducting of services on a daily basis, in addition to being the driving force for growth within the Church. We have to take into account that this mobility: (1) promotes the continual training of the pastors, (2) turns the position into something desirable and socially prestigious, and (3) avoids excessive leaderships and, in turn, possible schisms.

According to what we can deduce from testimonies collected in fieldwork, the movement of pastors makes the churches very unstable, but at the same time it is necessary and almost unavoidable because: (a) the services among the IEF congregations take place six days a week and last two or three hours, in addition to the special services that are held every week, prayer meetings, weddings and baptisms (immersion for adults), presentation of new-born babies and the constant attention to families outside the church (at home, in hospitals, prisons, markets, management tasks and processing in public administration). All this makes running a congregation a constant, exhausting and very absorbing activity; (b) the pastors tend to have accumulated their own capital before they are entrusted with a church and they frequently expect economic bankruptcy at the end of their mission. Only in some cases does the Church assign a salary to a pastor on which he can live comfortably; the most common situation is economic insecurity. That is why, frequently, a period of ‘rest’ is asked of the person responsible for the zone, that is, to temporarily or definitively leave the church they are leading when the situation becomes unsustainable or the exhaustion threatens the pastor’s own ‘spiritual life’ ⁹ .

Enrique Y tells us in this way about the economic consequences of leadership, which are in part explained by the constant suspicion that affects pastors who are considered to ‘sponge off others’ and who are not considered to be ‘true believers’.

So in the Orcasitas area it was a huge undertaking, a day to day work, but it is God’s doing because if God does not give the growth, nobody can, God takes the praise but as regards the work, it was lots of hours, I had to leave my job, I had no security, and above all we did not want the gypsies to think that the pastors wanted to sponge off the church, so I had to tighten my belt, I had to depend on my wife, my mother had to teach her how to sell sheets, tablecloths, blankets and to earn money to make ends meet in this way. When we made the decision, we already had two children and the decision had an impact on my parents and siblings who worked with me in the company, they also had to leave their jobs at the company and start selling in markets. Without any security apart from the one provided by my wife’s job, but we believe in God’s provision, we know He provides sufficient to live on and sometimes, an old customer would call and I could do a couple of good jobs in a year and in this way I could earn some money so that she could buy merchandise and sell it … but it was an act of faith, God did not give me a written contract. We lived well but I must say that it all depended on my wife, if I got where I got to in the church it was all due to her. When she started to work the children were already at school and this is the way it was, I left her at the market, they went to primary school although they weren’t good students and they left in the end, so they finished primary when they were thirteen and they could stay home on their own while their mother was working. Meanwhile I worked as a full time pastor, because this is what it means, praying, meetings, visiting the sick, sometimes spending the whole day with drug addicts and preaching in the Valdemoro prison for nine years…

At the same time (c) we have to contemplate another argument that would explain the constant rotation: the Governing Body of the ECP makes sure that no pastor acquires a position of strength among his congregation to avoid rifts and possible schisms; (d) the mobility of the pastors is coherent with gypsy mobility (Spanish gypsies are not a nomadic population, but this sedentary lifestyle does not imply zero mobility) and with the extraordinary geographical dispersion of the wide lineage, which in the end functions like evangelical and family support networks (it’s therefore also a matter of cultural continuity); (e) there is a disproportionally high number of pastors compared to places of worship, for example in the Madrid area in 2014 there were around 120 churches and 450 pastors. This encourages and almost makes rotation a necessity, and at the same time the need to rotate them would explain the reason for a relatively high number of pastors; (f) but that high number of pastors is, at the same time, due to the fact that standing up as a candidate and then being trained as a pastor is a de facto decisive factor of recognition and ascent on the ladder of social prestige, which in turn leads to the biblical training schools being more and more in demand.

In this sense, it must be taken into consideration that the religious leaders seek to intentionally convert themselves into the opposite of discredited politicians of the Rom identity movement. At the same time, the leaders of the international Rom movement underestimate the political mobilisation capabilities of religious leaderships (Toyansk, 2013), although they recognise that the evangelical pastors have built their authority over the kinship networks, and due to this they have a consistent and powerful grass-root social support. In fact, it is the evangelical leaders who manage to bring together the important gypsy families from all over the national territory, gathering together thousands of gypsies in the ‘grand get-togethers’ or reencuentras (periodic meetings of the churches from all over the State territory). We have to look for the explanation from within the very nature of religious leadership: the pastors know about the day-to-day and the daily life of both the converted and the non-converted. And above all, they are taking care of all the community and not only the community of converted gypsies.

The Pentecostal movement among Spanish gypsies, as opposed to Rom identity gypsy activism, does not reduce gypsy society to ‘an ethnic minority’ among others, but rather to a moral quality which is common to converted and non-converted gypsies and superior to that of the non-gypsy world (not so much in the case of the non-converted world). This could explain why without the unwavering kinship organisational principle it would be difficult to understand the rapid growth of conversions among Spanish gypsies.

In order to better understand the differences between both leaderships, we believe that the aspirations of gypsy Pentecostalism are very different to the ideals of Rom political activism. The former adheres to a belief in the difference between the gypsies and the majority non-gypsy society, as well as the insurmountable moral difference between the two (Gay y Blasco, 2002: 180–181). In addition, the ingrained nature of the churches within gypsy society and kinship is total, and they underline the unity and compensate with transversal solidarity and religious brotherhood; the consubstantial fragmentation of kinship and weakness of the latter is seen as a cohesive factor, due to the dispersion of lineage in the unstoppable urbanisation process (San Román, 1999). The churches create loyalty links which no longer depend exclusively on kinship relations, but affect gypsies from other provinces, other countries and even other continents; what was until twenty years ago a vague imagined community whose leaders were seen as a growing threat to the power and prestige of the respected gypsy elders, tradition and culture, now has a solid structure with a system of well-defined replacements which in fact represents (1) a new ethnogenesis project and (2) a new kind of diaspora. For Paloma Gay y Blasco (2002: 183–184) this new project is closer to the anthropological notions of society as a united body of institutions, status and roles than the ideals of community defended by the non-converted world. In addition, they represent a new moral authority which constitutes a novel alternative, and in constant repositioning, to gerontocracy, which in a certain way is more and more difficult to sustain.

Ethnic cohesion and peacemaking: from rejection to trust

So in 1980 I go to Orcasitas as a pastor, a very problematic neighbourhood where there was a lot of drugs and crime. In reality the neighbourhood is divided into three zones: Orcasur, Meseta de Orcasur and Poblado de Orcasitas … the whole of Orcasur was especially very problematic, drugs, crime, shantytowns, with a majority of non-gypsies but also a large gypsy population, at that time in el Rancho del Cordobés there were about 2,000 gypsies, it was notorious for drugs and after they had knocked down the shantytown many of them left, they were gypsies who had been living there for a long time, there were some from Talavera, people from Barcelona, Andalusians, Castilians from Castile, there was a great mixture. We had to fight hard to eradicate drugs from the neighbourhood, there were gypsy drug pushers, non-gypsy ones too, and they threatened us on many occasions due to our evangelical campaigns against drugs in the neighbourhood, publically, in the street, because we took them to the farms ¹⁰ , we paid for their travel expenses to get there. Some of them now are pastors. But it was very difficult, the drug-pusher ¹¹ would wreck my car when I got to the neighbourhood, but the taxis wouldn’t go there, and the people who were involved in the drug dealing didn’t like the evangelical anti-drug campaigns, nor the rehab farms, which were set up by Remar, Reto ¹² , but we also had our own rehab farms, we had one in Badajoz, but due to a lack of resources, and because the drug issue got better, we now have fewer of them.

In the neighbourhood, there were several respected gypsy elders, in 1975, I get the calling, but in 1972–73, the Orcasitas church as a place of mission and evangelisation had already begun, I got there when the church had already been open for five years and there were about 18 to 20 members. When I got there, there were no converted gypsies, there were only about twenty, some older gypsy guys, but they didn’t sort things out, because not all the older gypsies sorted things out; there were no more than twenty people, two or three married couples and some younger people, however now there are about 300 or 350 baptised people in the neighbourhood.

The neighbourhood had got worse and the deterioration had brought with it a loss of respect towards gypsy culture, those who sold drugs ceased to be gypsies because money was everything and blinded them, but it helped us that the rejection of drugs also came from non-evangelical gypsies, this was good for the church but at the same time there was rejection, it was considered to be a jinx because they said that gypsy culture was getting lost, but it is false, we eradicated revenge and hatred, but we gave even more importance to respect for elders, marriage … the Gospel has further strengthened gypsy culture.

The history of the Church of Philadelphia begins in the mid-20th century and as we can gather from Enrique Y’s words, in the early years the gypsies’ rejection of the preachers was due to the idea that the conversions would lead to a deterioration of ‘gypsy culture’, the Church ‘was jinxed’. But this perception has changed in the last two decades, so much so that gypsiness and Pentecostal gypsiness tend to get confused (Gay y Blasco, 2002: 186; Cantón-Delgado, 2010). The churches are filled with entire gypsy families, and the same patrilineal principle is hybridizing as regards the structure of positions of responsibility in the church. Negotiation with traditional authority and the sharing out of responsibilities is apparently exemplary in many places, and this is due to the fact that among gypsies the experience of the born again characteristically Pentecostal generally does not separate families, nor does it mean that gypsies cease to be gypsies ¹³ . The Evangelical Church of Philadelphia has prospered thanks to this respect between pastors and elders that has become reciprocal over the years. The meaning of conversion is inseparable from links between family members, while it widens its effect because loyalty and solidarity obligations among evangelicals transcend kinship links ¹⁴ . The religious experience is making inroads into the kinship structure, and evangelism makes use of it, blends in with it, renews it and opens it up to a new verbal and body language: being a gypsy is synonymous of being the chosen people and following the biblical teachings is to behave like a gypsy of long ago.

Half a century later, gypsy social fabric and evangelical ethics sit comfortably together with more successes than tensions: in the churches, it is preached that honour, virginity, respect for elders, mourning, the giving up of drugs, alcoholism and crime are unequivocal axiological references. They only move away, as they say themselves, first from drugs and alcohol, and then from ‘flamenco and pistols’, and in doing so declare that they are doing nothing more than following the teachings of the New Testament. The rejection of the violence of the Gypsy Law as a way to resolve offences is the only non-negotiable principle. For them flamenco is more than a music genre, it is ‘a way of life for those that are still in the world’ associated with the night and parties, excesses, money, drugs and alcohol, and although it has been one of the main vehicles for integration and acceptance on the part of the non-gypsy world, it is generally rejected by the churches, at least formally ¹⁵ . The meaning of partying, music and celebration has changed.

Following the fieldwork carried out over the last four years we can state that it is impossible to speak about an organised attempt to take the place of the traditional authority on the part of the religious leaders. These religious leaders were in fact, for decades, exposed to rejection by the non-converted gypsies and the traditional authority of the respected elders itself, preaching in the face of hostility from their own because they were ‘bad gypsies’ and preaching in the face of hostility of the non-gypsy majority for being gypsies and, on top of this, Protestants (in a mainly Catholic country). A decline in traditional authority helps us to understand the emergence and growing prominence of the pastors, and at the same time, a parallel and constant increase of respect towards the evangelical ministers in the neighbourhoods where there are evangelical congregations. The pastors state that they have ‘learnt to separate gypsy law from Christian authority’ when they are called upon to resolve conflicts in mixed families, made up of converted and non-converted members.

Discussion

Since the beginning of their presence on the Iberian Peninsula at the start of the 15th century, the relationships between the different groups of gypsies have been characterised by common elements: the weakness of external common frameworks of social and political cohesion for individuals and small groups, as well as the socio-political fragmentation and physical dispersion, differences in religious and ethnic affiliation, without excluding those related to economic success (San Román, 1997). There are papers that show how in general gypsies don’t see themselves as belonging to a society in an anthropological sense, with a status structure characterised by replacement which would sustain the cohesion of groups, but rather belonging to a united moral community which owes its cohesiveness to non-written laws (Gay y Blasco, 2002). Evangelical gypsies take ownership for the diaspora narratives, persecution and the moral ideal of a pangypsyness, and at the same time they are aware, at times in a vague way, that there are too many groups which are as unknown to them as they are to a non-gypsy or gadjé. It is just one of the reasons why they are usually against the utopian ideal of their own State according to the terms defined by the Rom identity activists (Toyansk, 2013), because not only would it bring together gypsy populations of different origins, languages and traditions who have little or nothing in common, but also because their concentration in a same territory would convert them into an all too easy target for the ubiquitous anti-gypsy racism.

In this article we have focused on the global movement of Christian revival among Spanish gypsies. We have dealt with the transfer of prestige and authority from the respected gypsy elders to the generations of young evangelical pastors; we have explored new forms of intraethnic social mobility and the attribution of prestige, regardless of age and even patrilineality; we have outlined the main ideas of a process of cultural innovation based on religious belonging and reported on a new narrative about gypsyism of long ago based on biblical justification, as well as the surge of a new moral community with millenarian and messianic elements which gives preference to ethnic cohesion and the continuation of the extended family as a vertebrate institution, beyond even religious differences and a history of diaspora. The strength of a fast-growing organic religious movement, self-governed and extremely participative, has lead to a profound transformation in recent decades of that social gypsy organisation, fragmentary and ordered around kinship, redesigning the traditional prestige hierarchies, internal leadership processes, relationships between gypsies and the non-gypsy society, with social workers, community mediators and local authorities from the public administration. The increasingly consolidated religious leadership of evangelical pastors explains the emergence of new forms of mobility and intra-ethnic prestigious award, regardless of age and even the principle of patrilineality. Pastors who give the recognition owed to the respected gypsy elders ¹⁶ become men of respect in turn, that is, they become a parallel authority not intended to supplant the respected gypsy elders; a religious authority that does not exhibit superiority of a spiritual nature, but negotiation and dialogue. An evangelical pastor or a zone secretary area manager is a kind of unarmed respected gypsy who has exiled violence ¹⁷ . Whether elderly or not, the pastors have authority, and when traditional elders fail to resolve any conflict, the pastor comes hoping he knows how to solve it, and knowing that the whole community will benefit.

The case is an example of contemporary religious processes of innovation and the correlation between the innovation and some ethnic minorities, in this case the Spanish gypsy/Roma. As is the case with so many ethnic minorities in the world, Spanish gypsies also live under constant and not always subtle pressure to conform their values and lifestyles to those of the majority. The age-old subject of integration, modernisation and development that is the language of the state, is expressed in the games of acceptation, the search for or the avoidance of their visibility as a ‘ethnic minority’ in the public sphere (Cantón-Delgado, 2013b), and it stages several ways of identification with the democratic reality of the state and the political spectrum. I insist on addressing this fascinating phenomenon from the perspective of innovation, because thus we subvert the conventional ways of translating the practices of the Christian and ethnic language revival to the language of the state interests, and also we avoid the addition of these innovative practices to the language of standardization. We often see, through cultural translation made by social scientists, how a genuine form of self-government can be incorporated into a language of normalization and centralized governmental power, that’s why it’s necessary to check and review the complicity of Social Sciences with the thought of the state. I think that addressing this phenomenon only in terms of social benefits through the integration of marginalized sectors liquidates its richness and complexity. The revival among the gypsies is not necessarily a sign of a traditional practice or strategy of survival. On the contrary, it may represent (and in fact is representing) the expression of a non-secular process that can bring (and in fact is bringing) alternative forms of political/cultural affirmation through unexpected ways. Religious movements among the gypsy/Roma, such as Pentecostalism, seem to be an almost unexplored area in terms of political mobilization, struggles for self-affirmation, empowerment and contestation of externally imposed forms of authority.

Church elders are part of a generation of pastors who are now between sixty and seventy years old, and they have tens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They are being replaced more and more by young evangelical pastors, most of whom are immediate family. Those elders raised the Evangelical Church half a century ago, in a time that is lagging far behind and that surely will die with them. The future of the most original ethnoreligious movement in the history of Spanish gypsy people depends on the destination and use of that legacy.