David Smilde

De‐Centering and Re‐Centering: Rethinking Concepts and Methods in the Sociological Study of Religion

2011

Four conceptual and methodological edges or areas of study are outlined. They are located near what have been the boundaries between the sociology of religion and other subfields, where we believe a potential exists to encourage a wide range of scholars to revisit some central concepts. Paying attention to these edges—as a means to de‐center to re‐center our debates in new ways—not only broadens and deepens our knowledge of the “religious,” it encourages us to reexamine long‐standing conceptual tools, unquestioned assumptions, and accepted methods in the sociology of religion. We illustrate these edges through a review of recent literature and examples drawn from our current empirical projects.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2011.01585.x

Contradiction Without Paradox: Evangelical Political Culture in the 1998 Venezuelan Elections

2008

Venezuelan Evangelicals' responses to candidates in that country's 1998 presidential election seem to confirm the view that their political culture is inconsistent, contradictory, and paradoxical. Not only were they just as likely to support nationalist ex–coup leader Hugo Chávez as was the larger population, they also rejected Venezuela's one Evangelical party when it made a clientelist pact with the infamous candidate of Venezuela's discredited Social Democratic party. This article uses concepts from recent cultural theory to analyze qualitative data from these two cases and make sense of the contradictory nature of Evangelical politics.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1548-2456.2004.tb0026…

A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Conversion to Venezuelan Evangelicalism: How Networks Matter1

2005

While the influence of networks in conversion is among the most established findings in the sociology of religion, relatively little is known about how and why they have their influence. In this study the author finds the social conformity theorization most often used in network analysis important but incomplete. Network ties are frequently influential despite little or no direct contact between ego and alter and little or no motivation to conform. Similarly, “structural availability” works not only by freeing an actor from conformity‐inducing constraints but also by indicating a relative absence of social and cultural support. This absence motivates individuals for religious innovation. Finally, while network location strongly determines who converts, the individual experience of life problems remains a causal factor, and, in a small but irreducible number of cases, actors clearly exercise agency over their network locations.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/497306

Skirting the Instrumental Paradox: Intentional Belief Through Narrative in Latin American Pentecostalism

2003

Research on the dramatic growth of Pentecostal Christianity in Latin America has centered on the idea that participation in Pentecostalism is a cultural strategy with which poor Latin Americans overcome substance abuse, step out of crime and violence, and address conjugal conflict. However, such “intentional” belief violates the idea of the relative autonomy of culture, and sociologists have generally thought that such an attempt would be self-defeating—falling to what is referred to as the “instrumental paradox.” Here I argue, with reference to data from fieldwork with Pentecostal men in Caracas, that three aspects of narrative—the play of canonicity and particularity, the predication of intention and agency, and the predication of temporality—permit actors to skirt the instrumental paradox.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1024014225750

Article Navigation “Letting God Govern”: Supernatural Agency in the Venezuelan Pentecostal Approach to Social Change

1998

Social scientists studying Pentecostalism in Latin America have argued that it is political in the identities, expectations, and social formations it creates; and that it could have important political consequences in the future. But do Pentecostals themselves think about their role in changing society? In this article I conceptualize the “religious frame” of Venezuelan Pentecostals and explore it using data from qualitative interviews. The results show that these Pentecostals see social problems as the result of wrong relations between humans and the supernatural realm. The solution therefore arises from religious action that seeks to order the relations between humans and the supernatural. This vision represents the common thread that runs through the type of involvement Pentecostals themselves propose, and the particular opportunities and dangers they see in common forms of secular social action. In the conclusion, I use this conceptualization to assess their future political impact.

https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article-abstract/59/3/287/1641613