Insult and Insecurity: Discernment, Trust, and The Uncanny in Two US Pentecostal Communities

Insult and Insecurity: Discernment, Trust, and the Uncanny
in Two US Pentecostal Communities
Frederick Klaits
Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 89, Number 4, Fall 2016, pp. 1143-1173

(Article)
Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2016.0071
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ARTICLE
Insult and Insecurity:

Discernment, Trust, and
the Uncanny in Two US
Pentecostal Communities
Frederick Klaits
State University of New York at Buffalo
ABSTRACT
Within many North American evangelical Christian communities, dis-
cernment denotes attentiveness to an interior voice that believers learn
to identify as God’s. This article adopts a comparative perspective on ev-
eryday domains of perception and feeling that practices of discernment
implicitly distinguish as unmarked by God’s activity, and as characterized
by specific forms of anxiety from which believers desire to be redeemed.
In a majority White Pentecostal congregation in suburban Buffalo, New
York, believers cast emotional insecurity as a condition demanding re-
demption, while members of African American churches in the inner city
hope to be redeemed from sensitivity to insults. While practices of dis-
cernment counter such anxieties by fostering forms of intimacy and trust,
they also reinforce anxiety by focusing believers’ attention on how familiar
relations may be distorted in uncanny ways. [Keywords: Pentecostalism,
discernment, trust, the uncanny, urban United States]
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 4, p. 1143–1174, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2016 by the Institute for
Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of The George Washington University. All rights reserved.
1143
Insult and Insecurity: Discernment, Trust, and the Uncanny in
Two US Pentecostal Communities
“T he devil must be laughing his head off somewhere,” remarked the

preacher at a funeral held for a 24-year-old man shot to death on
an inner-city street of Buffalo, New York in 2014 in a dispute over drug
selling turf. The preacher spoke of homicides as undermining the legacy
of African Americans’ struggles for social justice: “We’re a people who
lost their land, lost their language, struggled against slavery, became free
citizens, and now we’re killing each other. For no reason, over nonsense.”
Preachers often attribute street violence to “emotionalism,” that is, to a
readiness to lash out over perceived insults in a fashion they attribute to
the work of the devil. As is common at Black funerals in the inner city, the
preacher led a revival on this occasion, calling attendees to come forward
to be saved. After telling the 30 or so young people who approached the
altar that they were now saved, the preacher gave them a warning: “Now
I have bad news for you. The devil is angry at you now because you’re not
doing his work anymore, and he’ll find ways to attack you.”
This preacher’s reproof of his audience’s sensitivities to insults, together
with his warning to be on guard for insults motivated by the devil, provides
a neat illustration of the anxieties often inherent in religious ambitions for
redemption. In a recent essay on religion and morality, Michael Lambek
describes Max Weber’s view of “religious formulations or religious worlds
as generating their own specific forms of anxiety, which then get alleviated
in particular kinds of social action and their accompanying ethical for-
mulations or rationalizations” (2012:349). Lambek (2012:350) emphasizes
religion’s capacity to provide “a sort of archive, tradition, or resource” for
phronesis—that is, Aristotelian practical wisdom through which one cul-
tivates the capacity to choose between alternative means and ends. Yet,
this approach leaves open the question of how forms of anxiety motivate
the operations of practical wisdom, which may alleviate anxieties but also
fail to do so, reframe or sharpen them, or extend them in new directions.
In “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” Weber (1946) focus-
es on the roles played by religious intellectuals in systematizing specific
formulations of redemption:
“From what” and “for what” one wished to be redeemed,and, let us

not forget, “could be” redeemed, depended upon one’s image of the
world…Behind [each form of religious belief] always lies a stand to-
wards something in the actual world which is experienced as specifi-
cally “senseless.” Thus, the demand has been implied: that the world
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Frederick Klaits
order in its totality is, could, and should somehow be a meaningful

“cosmos.” (1946:280)
As João Vasconcelos (2007) points out, Weber recognized the intellectual-

ist limitations of his own perspective on religion. Other approaches (e.g.,
Lambek 1993, Hirschkind 2009, Brahinsky 2012) are necessary to provide
a grasp of the dialectical movements between embodiment and objectifi-
cation through which powerfully affective knowledge—and, I would add,
forms of anxiety—become experientially real and at the same time grasp-
able by others. Here I adopt a comparative perspective on such knowl-
edge and anxiety, exploring practices of what believers call discernment
within two US Pentecostal Christian communities, one of which casts in-
security as a condition demanding redemption, while the other frames
sensitivity to insults in such terms.
Within many North American evangelical Christian communities, as
Tanya Luhrmann (2007, 2012), has recently discussed, discernment de-
notes attentiveness to an interior voice that believers learn to identify as
belonging to God. In this article, I highlight the specific and variable quali-
ties of everyday perception and feeling that such practices of discernment
implicitly demarcate, if only to encompass or supersede them. In contrast
to recent analytical accounts of the everyday as a domain of subject for-
mation in which possible futures are worked out (e.g., Das 2007, Mattingly
2014), I take my cue from the ways believers are apt to construe the ev-
eryday (insofar as it is unmarked by perceptions of God) as a domain of
lack, in which they and/or others are subject to anxieties from which they
must be redeemed. Understood in this sense, the everyday exists as a
necessary counterpart to discernment, in a relation of ground to figure. In
simplest terms, everyday anxieties prompt believers to discern the activity
of God, while exercises of discernment remind them of what is lacking in
the everyday. This aspect of discernment is just as much a social process
as learning to identify and become absorbed in “the voice of an external
presence” (Luhrmann 2007:93).1 Indeed, believers may “acquire convic-
tion” (Lambek 2007) of the necessity to be redeemed from specific forms
of anxiety as much as they do of the activity of God in the world.
I discuss the mutually shaping dynamics between discernment and the
everyday in two Pentecostal settings in Buffalo, which was recently ranked
as the fifth most racially segregated metropolitan area in the US (Jacobs,
Kiersz, and Lubin 2013). In a majority White working-class first-wave
1145
Pentecostal church located in suburban Buffalo, believers discern through

a logic of intercession how God redeems them from insecurities construed
in broadly psychotherapeutic terms (Csordas 1994, Luhrmann 2012). By
laying on hands and speaking in tongues, believers publicly “intercede”
for one another, alternately assuming positions of supplicant and consoler.
A logic of prophecy governs discernment in inner-city African American
Pentecostal storefront churches, in which pastors prompt believers to dis-
cern the insults they have incurred through intimacies with exploitative per-
sons and malicious spirits, and extend them blessings by laying on hands.
Among other things, discernment practices in these churches are cod-
ed reflections on Whiteness and Blackness respectively. Recent critical
literature on the racialized ways in which evangelical Christian messages
have been disseminated within and from the U.S. (Dupont 2013; Emerson
and Smith 2000; Frederick 2015) shows how tropes that sustain White
supremacy (concerning, for instance, the value of individual work) have
been cast as universally applicable, whereas appeals to collective action
against injustice are framed in parochial terms as “Black social gospel.”
In effect, a principal thrust of this scholarship is to provincialize Whiteness
(cf. Chakrabarty 2000). My approach complements this literature by
specifying the divergent sets of anxieties that Pentecostal believers aim
to allay as they develop attentiveness to God’s interior voice, as well as
to public speech by pastors that is said to be “anointed” or inspired by
God. In Eternal Hope, a majority White church affiliated with a national
Pentecostal denomination, the demarcation of the everyday as a realm of
insecurity reflects a politically conservative vision of the moral order under
threat (Lakoff 2002).2 The pastors of the storefront inner-city congrega-
tions of Victory Gospel and Heaven’s Tabernacle frame Black suffering in
terms of everyday forms of exploitation that characterize both large-scale
patterns of injustice and interpersonal relations among the poor, who are
said to manipulate one another for material gain and emotional gratifica-
tion. While sensitivity to such insulting behavior may be said to promote
dangerous “emotionalism,” these African American pastors also stress
the necessity for believers to maintain awareness of those insults so that
the blessings God has in store for them will not be “stolen” or “blocked” by
devious others. Whereas members of the suburban congregation allay ev-
eryday insecurities by discerning God’s love, those in inner-city churches
assuage the effects of everyday insults by discerning the blessings God
bestows on them by virtue of their obedience to pastors’ prophetic words.
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Frederick Klaits
In the remainder of this introduction, I frame these anxieties in relation to

problems of redemption and trust, and ultimately to perceptions of the
sublime and the uncanny that practices of discernment promote.
Luhrmann concludes When God Talks Back, her study of predominant-
ly middle-class Vineyard congregations, with the important observation
that the “evangelical Christianity that emerged out of the 1960s is funda-
mentally psychotherapeutic. God is about relationship, not explanation,
and the goal of the relationship is to convince congregants that their lives
have a purpose and that they are loved” (2012:296). This is congruent,
she points out, with the all too commonly frustrated ideal of happiness
among middle-class Americans who view it “as a kind of birthright, not
only as something they [have] the right to pursue but as a state they should
expect to achieve” (2012:296). Luhrmann draws attention to the historical
particularity of this stance, recalling how her mother, “raised in the shad-
ows of the Depression, lowered a book review of the dilemmas of working
women’s lives and said, ‘Why do they assume they should be happy?’”
(2012:296). Such vernacular understandings of happiness might plausibly
be glossed as reminiscent of Abraham Maslow’s (1954) concept of self-
actualization, with its attendant preconditions of safety, love, and esteem
within the “hierarchy of needs.”
I would hazard that assuming that unhappiness is a “senseless” condi-
tion (Weber 1946) from which one should be redeemed is a predicament
particularly (though, of course, not exclusively) associated with Whiteness
in the contemporary US. The long historical trajectory contributing to the
“possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz 2006) includes structural
advantages bestowed by employment discrimination and by housing
and school segregation. One legacy of such advantages, I suggest, is
the popularity of the notion that happiness in the sense of possessing
the safety, love, and esteem necessary for self-actualization is “a kind of
birthright.” As Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015:6) points out in Between the World
and Me, a defining feature of people who “believe that they are white”
is that they imagine themselves unaffected by the historical legacies of
slavery, discrimination, and violence (see also Sullivan 2014). To be made
to feel otherwise would trouble what Coates (2015:11) calls their “dream,”
namely that happiness is their due in the scheme of things. He recalls see-
ing “white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem
boulevards in t-shirts and jogging shorts. Or I saw them lost in conver-
sation with each other, mother and father, while their sons commanded
1147
entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as
terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated
to theirs” (2015:89). Given the popular currency of such assumptions and
aspirations, it is all the more upsetting when happiness is elusive, as has
often been the case in places like Buffalo where widening inequalities and
de-industrialization have made middle-class livelihoods more uncertain
(Cherlin 2014; Goldman 2007). A substantial number of the members of
the suburban church whom I interviewed held blue-collar jobs, but were
in precarious employment situations. They were getting by, but often fail-
ing to get ahead, and praying to God for help during times of job loss and
family turmoil associated with substance abuse.
For many Black inner-city residents, what appears “senseless” is that
their lives are not valued as they should be. As Coates writes, “[my moth-
er] knew that…all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled
upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to account for
this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human
but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of ‘race’” (2015:83).
Many Black poor assert less a right to happiness than a right to bless-
ings, understood as material and spiritual goods that contribute to human
flourishing: life—together with the respect upon which it depends—rather
than death.3 The Black church, in the broadest terms, has countered the
legacy of slavery and exploitation by insisting that God values the lives of
His people, blessing them in the midst of their oppression (Cone 1975,
Du Bois 1990, Pinn 1995). To be “blessed and highly favored,” a com-
mon phrase in African American Christian discourses, is to benefit from
the high opinion or favor of powerful others against the heavy odds of
discrimination and intergenerational poverty. The all too common contrary
situation is to be devalued and insulted by people who have appropriated
one’s rightful blessings for themselves.
In order to relate anxieties about insecurity and insults to practices of
discernment, I focus on how such anxieties prompt expressions of trust
and mistrust concerning the impact of divine and human activity on per-
sonal well-being. Discerning God’s love, for instance, is often tantamount
to acquiring the conviction that God will look after a person rather than al-
lowing her to suffer from everyday insecurities. To discern God’s blessings
is to trust that God will provide material goods and fulfilling relationships
in a manner that will compel other people to respect the believer. The in-
junctions commonly rendered in these Pentecostal communities to “trust
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Frederick Klaits
God” convey concerns about everyday difficulties of trust, difficulties that

may be only provisionally transcended through practices of discernment.
In considering issues of trust and mistrust, I have been inspired by
James Siegel’s (2006) and Peter Geschiere’s (2013) discussions of the
sublime and the uncanny in relation to witchcraft. Although witchcraft
is largely absent from the concerns of the suburban congregation and
somewhat peripheral to those of the inner-city congregations I describe,4
I find that the interplays between trust and mistrust involved in discern-
ment may be usefully framed in terms of connections between the sub-
lime and the uncanny, both of which entail disruptions of everyday per-
ceptions. Siegel’s (2006) key move is to frame Kant’s (1960) treatment of
the curbs on language originating from encounters with the sublime as
a counterpart to the cognitive limits precipitated by confrontations with
the uncanny. Countering anthropological treatments of witchcraft think-
ing as socially determined, Siegel argues that witchcraft beliefs “are not
reasonable; they insist on the continued presence of an unknown that
ideas of the sublime would seal off” in Kant’s framing (2006:25). For Kant,
the sublime is felt in retrospect, and confirms our powers of knowing:
“we recuperate ourselves because even if we cannot define whatever
it is that is in front of us, in taking in its objectivity we realize that we do
in fact have powers of cognition” (2006:24). With witchcraft, we do not
recover our prior powers of analysis; instead, “the experience would still
work through us,” causing us to fear the uncanny, “something whose
source was definitively neither subjective nor objective” (Siegel 2006:24).
Likewise, I suggest, the anxieties from which Pentecostal believers wish
to be redeemed may continue to “work through” them even as they dis-
cern God’s activity in their lives.
Geschiere (2013:177) registers discomfort with Siegel’s argument that
the use of the term “witch” reflects “a lack of words” as do encounters
with the sublime in Kant’s view, given the “ferocious production of words”
about witches in many contexts. In parallel with Geschiere’s objection, I
would argue that Pentecostal perceptions of the reality of God’s love or
blessings may well be characterized as sublime, in that believers “recu-
perate themselves” and have their powers of knowing confirmed in the
face of the ineffable, yet they experience no shortage of words as a result.5
Geschiere extends Siegel’s reading of Freud (2003) on the uncanny (das
Unheimliche) by framing it as a distortion of familiar or intimate domains
(das Heimliche). Witchcraft, Geschiere writes, is a way of imagining the
1149
transformation of the intimate into the uncanny. Where such transforma-

tions take place, trust becomes a problem. Approaches to the problem
have historically ranged from the attitude expressed in the Duala proverb
“You have to learn to live with your witch” (2013:205) to “efforts to com-
pletely eradicate das Unheimliche in order to establish an absolute form of
trust that leaves no room for doubt” (2013:202). Such attempts at eradica-
tion have included early modern European witch hunts and contemporary
Pentecostal crusades against witches that ironically affirm the uncanny as
an omnipresent danger.
Recalling Georg Simmel’s (2011:191) argument that trust necessarily
involves an element of faith, “a state of mind…which is both less and more
than knowledge,” Geschiere’s approach raises comparative questions
about the reasons why it is important to establish particular kinds of trust,
the consequences of mistrust, and how efforts to allay anxieties about
trust shape practical wisdom.6 For many evangelical Christians, sublime
encounters with the unknowable restore their trust that familiar relations
will be recuperated. Yet the everyday is both familiar and suffused with
anxiety, a point underscored by Freud’s own uncanny usage of the term
heimliche, which connotes both the homely and the secrets hidden within
the home (Csordas 2004).7 The concept of the uncanny helps to specify
how practices of discernment may engender mistrust through focusing
believers’ attention on distortions of the familiar. In registers potentially dif-
ferent from that of witchcraft, Christian efforts to discern the sublime so as
to reinstate the familiar often reinforce awareness of the uncanny aspects
of the everyday, and may for this reason constitute practical methods for
working out issues of trust and mistrust.
Methods
I conducted fieldwork with members of the suburban congregation of
Eternal Hope for about 15 months between 2013 and 2014. My fieldwork
with the urban congregations of Victory Gospel and Heaven’s Tabernacle
has been ongoing since 2014. None of these churches has any connec-
tions with the others. I attended Sunday services consistently, together
with Wednesday and Thursday Bible study sessions. In addition, I carried
out semi-structured interviews with about 20 members of Eternal Hope
and 15 members of the urban churches, including the pastors. Eternal
Hope is an established congregation of about 200 people affiliated with
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Frederick Klaits
a national Pentecostal denomination. Most members of Eternal Hope ei-

ther had lived in the city of Buffalo or have parents who did so before the
1980s, a period of large-scale White flight to the suburbs. While there
are substantial minorities of African Americans and Hispanics at Eternal
Hope, the church leadership at both local and regional levels is composed
mainly of White men.
Almost all members of the officially nondenominational inner-city con-
gregations are African American; there are a small number of West African
immigrants in Victory Gospel. Founded in 2010, Victory Gospel comprises
a congregation of about 50 members led by Pastor John, a former drug
dealer who was saved at the age of 19, about 15 years before I met him.
Unusually for urban churches, there is a substantial proportion of men
in Victory Gospel, and most members are in their 20s or 30s. Founded
around the same time, Heaven’s Tabernacle is a smaller-scale church con-
sisting almost entirely of women, perhaps ten years older on average than
Victory Gospel’s members, led by Pastor Hilda, a woman in her mid-40s
who was saved in her 20s. Most of the participants in the urban churches
hold low-wage jobs or are unemployed, but a substantial number of wom-
en members, including Pastor Hilda, are trained nurses and careworkers.
While there are some important differences between these male- and fe-
male-headed urban congregations in regard to their stances toward patri-
archal authority, I concentrate here on the commonalities between Victory
Gospel and Heaven’s Tabernacle so as to highlight the contrasts between
them and the suburban church. As a result, I write of three Pentecostal
congregations but of only two “communities.”
Discerning God’s Love

It might seem curious to frame discernment in terms of trust. Within evan-
gelical Christian circles, discernment is the focus of a wide range of prac-
tical instruction involving how to recognize and assess whether specific
words, acts, and events have been inspired by God, as well as how to
make decisions on the basis of such assessments (Bielo 2009, 2011;
Bialecki 2010, 2011; Luhrmann 2007, 2012; Lynn 2013). Discernment is
necessary to determine the validity of scriptural interpretations; to assess
divine, human, or demonic influence over events; and to understand the
nature of one’s own spiritual gifts. Discernment is a learned skill, a subject
of explicit and tacit instruction within faith communities, as well as a set of
1151
embodied dispositions involving absorption in speaking to God, hearing

God’s speech as an interior voice, and writing about God’s activity in one’s
life (Luhrmann 2012). Within the Pentecostal communities I describe, as
in the evangelical Vineyard congregations discussed by Luhrmann (2007,
2012), the process of learning discernment ideally culminates in perpet-
ual attunement to the voice of God, experienced as an external presence
within the believer’s consciousness.
Exercises of developing familiarity with God provide grounds for the
intrusion of the uncanny, for example when prayers are not answered.
Luhrmann (2007) recounts how a certain woman named Elaine developed
a clear sense that God wanted her to stay in a single apartment even
though she could not afford the rent. She prayed regularly in advance of
job interviews to no apparent avail. In such instances, “the problem of dis-
confirmation is no longer the challenge to an abstract hypothesis, a theory
of reality. The problem of unanswered prayer becomes the problem of
why your good buddy appears to be letting you down” (2007:95). A typical
response in such situations is to make a “move towards intimacy in the
face of apparent material failure” by asserting that God desires to make
the believer feel entirely dependent upon Him. You are said to “need him
badly precisely because you did not have what you needed” (2007:95).
Such uncanny disturbances are provisionally resolved by asserting
renewed forms of intimacy that are supposed to negate possibilities of
mistrust. In spite of the uncanny nature of her failures, Elaine maintained
trust in both God and her “prayer partners” upon whom she was rely-
ing for their discernment of God’s will concerning her situation. Early in
my acquaintance with Eternal Hope—the majority White working-class
congregation—a middle-aged woman named Lynne told me that she had
to sustain intimacies with the people whose circumstances she wanted
to change, so that she might pray “specific prayers” for them. For ex-
amples of how to formulate “specific prayers,” she referred me to a best-
selling book by the evangelical writer Stormie Omartian, The Power of a
Praying Parent (1995). Omartian writes that she feared becoming a parent
because her mother had been mentally ill and abusive, and “discovered
that without God we are destined to repeat the mistakes of our past and
to mimic what we’ve observed” (1995:14). She relates that she was con-
sumed by fear for her son: “Kidnapping, drowning, disfiguring accidents,
irreparable injuries, diseases, sexual molestation, abuse, rape, or death
all played across my mind as possibilities for his future” (1995:15). All of
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Frederick Klaits
these possibilities represent intrusions of the uncanny into the realm of the
everyday: patterns that should be routine and comfortable are distorted in
fearsome ways. As she discerns God’s intimacy with herself, her anxieties
about disasters that would occur in the everyday absence of the divine are
simultaneously sharpened and allayed:
An important part of our job [i.e., hers and her husband’s] was to keep
the details of our child’s life covered in prayer. In doing this, I learned
to identify every concern, fear, worry, or possible scenario that came
into my mind as a prompting from the Holy Spirit to pray for that par-
ticular thing. As I covered Christopher in prayer and released him into
God’s hands, God released my mind from that particular concern…
God didn’t promise that nothing bad would ever happen to my child,
but praying released the power of God to work in his life, and I could
enjoy more peace in the process. (1995:16)
In keeping with Omartian’s wish to “enjoy more peace,” and in line with
psychotherapeutic imperatives, preaching within Eternal Hope tends to
frame the peace of mind of the individual believer as the greatest good. A
sensation of peacefulness signals that a believer has properly discerned
the will of God (Harding 2000:53; Luhrmann 2012:65–67). The remission of
sins that occurs through repentance and baptism in Jesus’s name is said
to bring about peace of mind for believers, who are known as “saints,” to-
gether with a desire to ensure its continuity by “walking with God” through
the difficulties of a lifetime. On one occasion, the pastor of Eternal Hope
preached: “Jesus commanded the winds: ‘Peace, be still!’ The winds are
the work of the devil in your life, and Jesus is the one who brings peace.
This is what He meant by ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’: Christians are the
ones who help you to Jesus’s peace.” Believers come to regard alcohol,
drugs, and promiscuity as false forms of happiness, uncanny distortions
of the sublime experience of peace derived from prayer. Lynne recalled
discerning God’s voice when she first experienced the joy of praying in
tongues: “God pressed on my heart and showed me: ‘You see, Lynne, you
thought you needed the alcohol to get to this point where you were laugh-
ing and happy, but you don’t need that, you just need Me.’”
For the saints of Eternal Hope, receiving peace after “praying through”
problems at the altar, a raised platform at the front of the worship space,
is a sublime moment. When a saint is troubled, he or she approaches the
1153
altar, often kneeling upon one of its steps. Other members then “inter-
cede” for the person by laying hands upon him or her while speaking in
tongues. This exercise models the theological trope that Jesus intercedes
for believers when the devil accuses them of sinfulness at the final judg-
ment as well as in their everyday lives, when consciousness of sin may
cause discouragement. The person who prays on another’s behalf at the
altar is figured as being at comparative peace, and as helping the sup-
plicant to discern God’s love for herself in spite of the work of the devil,
identified with troubling conditions such as depression or addiction. In
contrast to the hierarchical prophetic practices in the African American
churches discussed below, intercession promotes lateral relations among
believers: the person interceding for someone else might be in need of an
intercessor the following week.8
Trust is a key trope in intercession. Intercessors encourage the troubled
person to trust that Jesus’s love will bring them peace, while believers’
unspoken invitation to others to intercede on their behalf reflects their trust
that intercessors will help them discern Jesus’s love at vulnerable mo-
ments. Over time, an acquaintance between a worshipper and a more
mature intercessor may develop into a long-term mentoring relationship.
Lynne described the embodied intimacy of such encounters, telling me
that she needs to be “sensitive to the spirit of God” to know when to pray
for particular people at the altar. After taking part in a group intercession
for a man who had visited the church occasionally, she told me:
We helped him just raise his hands, ’cause he used to be, almost like
a stone, because he’s got a lot of stuff going on with him right now…
and all of a sudden, ’cause we were praying in Jesus’ name, you
could feel how his whole body was starting to relax, his whole body
wasn’t as stiff as it had been. And he was receiving it, he was moving
his lips, like talking to the Lord, I couldn’t hear what he was saying,
and I don’t need to hear what he was saying and that’s what we were
telling him: “This is between you and Jesus. Whatever it is, just talk to
Him, ask Him to help you, and He will, He will give you that strength
and that wisdom and He will teach you His ways.” ’Cause I’m not in
his face, I’m whispering in his ear, I’m not yelling at him, I’m letting
him know in a soft voice that Jesus loves you and He already knows
what you’re going through, but He wants you to ask Him to help
you…I know there are a couple of little things, I don’t know anything
1154
Frederick Klaits
about his sister, but He kept pressing on me about his sister, about
emotional healing.
Lynne established footings of intimacy and trust as an intercessor by dis-

claiming interest in the content of the anxious person’s speech to God,
even as she helped him to discern God’s love by laying hands upon him
and “whispering” encouragement to pray. The physical relaxation and
spoken responses that Lynne aimed to elicit were forms of “yielding” to
God, a process of first discerning and then “accepting another’s direc-
tion” (Brahinsky 2013:405) so as to develop the conviction that God and
intercessors are trustworthy. For intercessors, encouraging others to trust
Jesus involves prompting them to speak truth about themselves to them-
selves. This approach is consistent with Luhrmann’s (2012) conceptu-
alization of the evangelical Christian God as an internalized therapist, a
“self-object” in Heinz Kohut’s (1971) sense (see also Csordas 1994, 2004).
Eternal Hope’s women’s group models a somewhat different form of
trust by circulating books of “prayer needs.” At the beginning of the year,
each woman writes the names of her own family in her book, along with
their birthdays and particular prayer needs—for instance, healing after an
accident or finding God after backsliding. The books are then distributed
anonymously within the group, so that no woman knows who has received
her book and is praying for her family’s needs. She may receive anonymous
notes and gifts from her “prayer partner” throughout the year, handed to
third parties for delivery. At the end of the year, the identities of the prayer
partners are revealed to one another. “You find out who it was, and then
you think, ‘Oh, it was you who did this for me!’” one woman told me. This
process of concealing and subsequently disclosing the identity of one’s
beneficiary reflects the sublime experience, common among evangelicals,
of discerning God’s purposes for one’s life in retrospect (Harding 2000). At
the same time, trust in fellow believers’ good will is both a premise and an
outcome of praying for another woman’s needs.
Another method of cultivating trust in God’s intentions consists of lis-
tening to the divinely inspired words of an intercessor or preacher in order
to apply those words to one’s own situation.9 This approach to listening
sets up a dynamic in which the uncanny may be transformed into the sub-
lime, but also vice versa. A young woman member of Eternal Hope named
Kathy, who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress following a difficult
mission trip to a Middle Eastern city, related how the public speech of a
1155
pastor at a retreat had allayed the uncanny episodes of fear that she had
experienced since returning, but very nearly did the opposite:
The sermon that really, really broke that stronghold that the devil
had on me was the last sermon [of the retreat], when [the minister]
preached about a chess-board. He said that not all moves on a chess-
board are forwards, some are sideways. God has different ministries
for us. And sometimes God sacrifices people, and they get taken off
the chess-board, and then he started talking about John the Baptist,
and how after his job was done he got beheaded. And I was starting
to freak out again, I was like “Oh my gosh, I thought I was healed, I
thought I was going to be okay, what is going on?” And all those hor-
rible feelings were coming back…And he started telling a personal
story about how he wanted to make a greater move and work for God
in a city, but he just got this feeling one day that something bad would
happen to his oldest daughter. So he was driving with his wife in the
car, and she said to him, “Do you get the feeling that if we do this
work, something bad would happen to our daughter?” And since they
both got that feeling, they were freaking out, […] but then he spent a
lot of time praying and fasting about it, and then God said, “Nothing
is going to happen, it’s just the devil that’s creating all this fear in your
life, it’s going to be okay...” And then the preacher said [to the audi-
ence], “If you’re going through something similar…God is saying that
I’m going to protect you and you will go back, and this time you’re not
going to have any fear.” And when I heard that, I was like, “What? All I
wanted to hear was that I was going to be protected and saved, I had
no idea or thoughts about going back [to the Middle East], because
I was so scared of it…When God works, He exceeds your expecta-
tions. I not only got healed and set free from that mindset of “I’m go-
ing to die,” God told me that He was going to protect me.
Over the course of my acquaintance with Kathy, she has often ended such
narratives by exclaiming, “I just realized that God really loves me!”
“Freaking out” at the uncanny was part of the Pentecostal sensorium
(Brahinsky 2012) in this instance, no less so than is “yielding” to the will of
God conveyed in the comforting whispers of an intercessor. Kathy con-
cluded her account by relating the sublime moment when God healed her
stress. Yet, her process of discernment was suffused with the uncanny,
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Frederick Klaits
particularly when the preacher’s allusion to John the Baptist made her fear
that God was preparing to sacrifice her. Likewise, the preacher’s narrative
about his own process of discernment centered on an uncanny experience
in which he and his wife simultaneously feared for their daughter. In both
cases, a distortion of the familiar was experienced as a crisis of trust in God
demanding resolution. Thus, members of Eternal Hope not only struggle
against doubt by taking a Kierkegaardian leap of faith but grapple with
everyday experiences of the uncanny, when the familiar is distorted and
the restorative sublime moment is elusive. For example, Kathy recalled her
unhappiness on occasions when other church members failed her trust by
not interceding for her at the altar: “I know what it feels like when you want
help and there’s nobody there. I’ve had to walk with God on my own.”
In some measure, the sense of threat Kathy experienced during her
mission trip was shaped by fear of “radical Islam.” These anxieties were in
keeping with the right wing politics of her church, which emphasizes how
the patriarchal moral order is threatened by external dangers like terror-
ism and by internal weaknesses such as same-sex desire (Lakoff 2002).
During 2013 and 2014, much preaching was directed against same-sex
marriage as an “unnatural” distortion of familiar arrangements. Eternal
Hope members conveyed the visceral nature of their mistrust of those
whom they regard as disturbing the moral order in remarking that they
“get a check in the spirit” when encountering people who have a spirit
that is “against God.” In this connection, they mentioned a community
on Cape Cod with a large gay population, a village of spiritualists in rural
New York, and wearers of Goth fashions.
“Checks in the spirit” are forms of discernment, signals from God of
the proximity of spiritual danger. In my view, such reactions reflect the
uncanny sensation of encountering representations of the kinds of people
church members feel that they themselves might have been had they not
been saved. For example, in the course of preaching against same-sex
relations, the pastor of Eternal Hope remarked, “And I’m not saying that
I haven’t had to ask God for forgiveness, because I am unworthy, Lord.”
There is a monstrous quality to people whose spirit is “against God” in
that while they may appear happy, their happiness derives from improper
sources. To the extent that Eternal Hope members perceive these people
as taking over the world (such as LGBTQ individuals advocating legaliza-
tion of same-sex marriage), they discern more keenly the pervasiveness
of insecurity in everyday domains (Hofstadter 1965). At sublime moments,
1157
they experience a restoration of trust that the familiar will be re-established

both on personal levels and on a cosmic scale with the return of Jesus.
Discerning God’s Blessings

Following a public dispute on the phone-in prayer line between two mem-
bers of Victory Gospel, an African American storefront church, the senior
woman who serves as the “church mother” felt it necessary to deliver a
speech during a Bible study session in May 2015. “We have some strong
personalities in this church,” Mother Smith said. “We have so little, and
we want respect from other people so we’re always on the lookout to
see who’s going to aggravate us.” During a Sunday service a few weeks
later, Pastor John told everyone to turn to the person sitting next to him
or her and say, “Neighbor, I’d rather have truth than be real.” Perceiving
his audience’s confusion, he elaborated: “We street people have got no
problem being real. ‘An eye for an eye’ is real, but ‘Turn the other cheek’
and ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay’ are truth.” In other
words, readiness to perceive and react to insults is a feature of everyday
patterns of behavior, whereas discernment will induce a believer to refrain
from retaliation and leave vengeance to God.
Such sensitivities to insults reflect the aspirations for respect shared
by many inner-city residents (Bourgois 1995, Ralph 2014). Whereas the
communities where most members of the suburban church reside rank
in the middle percentiles of reported household income in the United
States (somewhat over $40,000 per year), the urban churches are located
in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the nation. The annual median
reported household income of slightly over $20,000 in some neighbor-
hoods of the East Side of Buffalo lies in the next-to-lowest single percen-
tile (ZipWho.com 2015). The lives of inner-city residents are devalued on
a systemic level through high unemployment, redlining, a lack of grocery
stores, chronic disinvestment in housing, poor schools, high crime rates,
unresponsive policing, and substandard health care (Kraus 2000; Lee and
Lim 2009; Richardson, Glantz, and Adelman 2014; Trudeau 2006). In re-
sponse to the failures of the commercial economy and legal system to
affirm the personhood of the racialized poor (Wacquant 2009), inner-city
residents devise rubrics for assessing and realizing the value of one an-
other’s lives (Klaits and McLean 2015). For instance, gang subordinates
gradually acquire value in the eyes of superiors by showing them honor.
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Frederick Klaits
They honor them largely by rendering money from drug sales and receiv-
ing in turn a share of the gang’s profits. Subordinates commonly use their
pay to purchase fashionable gym shoes, proving themselves “worthy of
the gang’s investment” (Ralph 2014:60) by displaying their commitment to
accumulation and hence to advancement in the gang. In parallel fashion,
practices of discernment in the inner city focus on how God has valued
the lives of believers by providing them blessings. God is thought to dis-
tribute blessings in a manner commensurate with the praises believers
bestow upon Him, and with the respect and monetary donations they be-
stow upon pastors to demonstrate their commitment. Over time, such
displays of commitment enable them to acquire prestige within church
circles (Marina 2013).
If they hope to receive blessings, believers must learn to recognize
the long-term dynamics through which praises and donations elicit them
(Frederick 2003, 2010; Harrison 2005; Lee 2005). This is the case in other
Pentecostal contexts as well: Faith Gospel adherents in Tanzania identify
the slow pace of God’s blessings as signifying their divine as opposed
to occult origin (Lindhardt 2009). Likewise, members of the inner-city
churches stress that “trusting God” is a disposition they need to develop.
Tony, a member of Victory Gospel in his mid-20s, explained that a chal-
lenge many believers face is to discern how God works to bless their lives
over the long run, since they are used to receiving commodities or cash
immediately through purchases or sales. “You put that much effort to sell-
ing [drugs] on the streets,” Tony remarked, “you sowing that seed into
that drug dealer so that he will give you back something.” In other words,
a street seller gives cash to the dealer in order to acquire another stash
of drugs to sell. Tony made clear that the metaphor “to sow a seed into”
a person is not used on the streets. Rather, church members use this
expression to describe how they donate money to preachers to acknowl-
edge the blessings that pastors have bestowed on their lives through
inspired words, and in the case of Victory Gospel, gifts of money and
commodities.10 In sowing a seed into a preacher, a believer expects to
receive a “harvest” in the form of material and spiritual blessings. “On the
street, too,” Tony’s wife Christine added, “you reap what you sow, but it’s
faster on the street. If you don’t get that return immediately, that’s trouble!”
Tony went on to say that the problem with many of the saints is that they
want something immediately. Money comes “fast” on the street, but “fast
money don’t teach you patience. You don’t have patience, it’s going to
1159
decrease your faith.” Tony imitated someone saying, “Oh man, it’s been
a month, it still hasn’t come through for me.” He concluded: “You need to
sow that seed [by donating money in church] and have patience, saying,
‘God, I know you’re doing a billion other things, but I know you got me, and
when it get here, I’m going to give you praise!’” By contrast, while mem-
bers of the suburban church of Eternal Hope regularly render tithes, they
do not speak of “sowing money into the pastor,” who (unlike most pastors
of small-scale African American churches) is paid a salary.
For inner-city believers, the act of “giving God praise” expresses their
sublime realization of the blessings they have received as a consequence
of trusting Him. “Giving God praise” involves a range of enthusiastic wor-
shipping styles, including speaking in tongues and running in place or
around the church space. The exuberant motion that accompanies “giv-
ing God praise” constitutes an implicit contrast to undesirable forms of
slowness (disability, inconvenient bus transport) and confinement (dilapi-
dated housing in segregated neighborhoods, incarceration) that inner-
city residents often endure. Josh, a young man who serves as an of-
ficial assistant to the pastor of Victory Gospel, remarked while leading
Bible study that he wanted “to be like the money man” who appears in
television commercials for GEICO insurance. This is a figure completely
covered in dollar bills, driving a motorcycle or motorboat with no obstruc-
tions ahead of him while money blows off his body to be caught by sta-
tionary people behind him.11 While the advertisements’ stated message
is that customers should purchase the company’s inexpensive insurance
because they are not made of money, Josh viewed the “money man”
as an ideal image of personal value, consisting of unrestrained mobility
combined with an unlimited capacity to bestow blessings on others. On
the other hand, Pastor Hilda says that if circumstances weigh you down
so heavily that you forget how God has blessed you, you will move with a
lumbering gait, a “Snuffleupagus walk.”
A common occasion for “giving God praise” is when a pastor makes
a prophetic statement about a saint’s future prosperity, calling out to the
congregation that God will bestow money, a car, or a job on the worship-
per within a specific period. One way believers can discern the truth of
a prophecy is by assessing whether it provides a “confirmation” of what
they had been hoping to receive as a blessing. Often, a church member
will smile at a colleague sitting across the room while listening to the pastor
preach, pointing at his or her own eyes, and then at the other person. This
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Frederick Klaits
lateral byplay signals their mutual recognition that the pastor is speaking
about a topic that they had recently been privately discussing. Such a
concurrence may provide confirmation to the saints in question that God
will soon bring to pass an event they had been hoping for, or that God
wants them to give further thought to the subject of their conversation.
Alternatively, believers may understand a blessing received as a confir-
mation of God’s will. For example, Tony had recently been hired for a nine-
to-five job at Wal-Mart after a series of unsuccessful searches for jobs with
more career opportunities. On all of his failed applications, his background
checks had raised concerns, but the background check carried out by
Wal-Mart had come back clean. Tony discerned that these events were
confirmation that God wanted a nine-to-five job for him at this point. He
had, he said, been wrong to “lean to his own understanding” about his job
search. “If you try to do things your way, you’ll walk right into a wall, but if
you trust God, you’ll walk straight down the corridor.”
In this conception, God seems less a comforting self-object than an
evaluative being who puts saints through “tests,” allowing them to suffer
the consequences of failure. Pastors insist that blessings will accrue to
saints who trust them to discern God’s will for their lives and who place
themselves “under their authority” by allowing them to direct their con-
duct. The following account of church leaders’ words on the subject docu-
ments their public remarks in sermons and Bible study sessions. Their
underlying assumption is that God has many blessings in store for the
saints, but may be withholding them because they have not reached an
appropriate level of spiritual maturity. On the other hand, pastors may dis-
cern that saints are not receiving their blessings because they need to be
“delivered from people” who are not “walking with God.” For pastors, a
principal task is to help saints develop the kinds of intimate relationships
with God that they have attained, so that they will be able to discern God’s
voice on their own. Newly saved saints learn to identify occasions when
God has “spoken to” them, for example, when a thought they felt was not
theirs had intruded on their awareness.
Yet before saints reach the “level” of intimacy with God at which He
speaks to them routinely, they are prone to demonic influences, stemming
for instance from improper sexual practices such as viewing pornogra-
phy. Because believers fear that less mature saints might transmit demons
to them through physical contact, the practices of intercession prevalent
in Eternal Hope are much less common in Victory Gospel and Heaven’s
1161
Tabernacle. For the most part, the only people who lay hands on saints
are the pastor and trained assistants who are known as “armor bearers”
because they defend the pastor from any demons affecting the worship-
pers.12 In keeping with these concerns about obstructions arising from
intimacy, Pastor John sometimes remarks during Bible studies that his
own practice of worrying about the saints’ problems can interfere with his
anointing, making it difficult for him to discern God’s voice.
To safeguard the saints from demons, pastors devote much energy to
warning them about how the devil will “use people” to do his work, such as
drug selling, human trafficking, and murder. In his sermons, Pastor John
explains that a person being used by the devil does not usually realize that
this is the case, and may enjoy financial blessings for a short period while
being “downgraded, spiritually, emotionally, physically, and mentally.” The
“devil’s system” is an inversion of “God’s system,” whose purpose is to
“upgrade you” in all of these respects. In accepting Jesus as Savior, a new
saint antagonizes the devil, who is infuriated that the believer is no longer
doing his work. Developing an intimate relationship with God causes a
rupture in one’s previous familiarity with the devil, so that from the devil’s
perspective an uncanny reversal has taken place. As a result, saints are
apt to undergo the uncanny experience of having the devil sour their ac-
customed relationships with kin and consociates. For instance, Mother
Smith of Victory Gospel related at a Bible study that her sister refused, for
no reason she could comprehend, to speak to her for a year after she was
saved. Developing discernment of the devil’s work is crucial in this regard.
“You’ve got to understand,” Pastor John often preaches, “this thing is not
natural but spiritual.” Saints must say “God bless you” to those who insult
them, realizing that the devil is at work. They must not retaliate, but leave
vengeance to God.
Unlike most people who are used by the devil, Pastor John explains in his
sermons that witches intentionally deploy the devil’s tools to get what they
want. People become witches by “praying their emotions” upon someone
else, for instance: “I pray that the Lord will strike so-and-so dead.” One
must always pray that God’s will be done rather than one’s own, practicing
the discernment necessary to transcend everyday “emotionalism.” Pastor
John stresses this point in his preaching because a believer is liable to
become a witch by “praying amiss.” In an uncanny reversal of valuing the
life of the pastor, witches are apt to come to church to challenge the man
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Frederick Klaits
of God, whispering to other saints that “he don’t know what he’s talking
about” and spreading false rumors about his favoritism.
Unlike intercessors at the suburban church, Pastor John must also
contend with members’ suspicions that he possesses inappropriately in-
timate knowledge about their lives. Immature saints, he preaches, do not
understand that when he talks publicly in Bible study about what “some of
you are doing outside church” (without specifying names), he is repeating
what God has told him. Rather than accepting “correction,” he remarks,
they whisper that he has spied on them or is inappropriately airing their pri-
vate business. Pastors are very commonly hurt by the backbiting caused
by such “emotionalism.” Pastor John preached, “When I give you love, I’m
looking to see if your word is risky,” using a metaphor of a risky monetary
investment. “If I find that you’re risky, I’m going to accept you and forgive
you, but I’m going to back off.” The importance of honoring the pastor is
a common theme in preaching. At a banquet held to commemorate the
fifth anniversary of Victory Gospel’s founding, the bishop of a prominent
Buffalo church remarked that a pastor always has to wonder about a saint:
“Can I trust you enough to sow my heart into you?”
Thus, the principle that one should avoid retaliation does not imply a
refusal to recognize everyday insults or a presumption that people in gen-
eral are trustworthy. At Victory Gospel, a major theme of Easter preach-
ing in 2015 consisted of how Jesus had outmaneuvered Judas. Pastor
John asked those in the congregation who had felt betrayed by someone
close to them to stand, and everyone did so. He instructed each person
to turn to his or her neighbor and say: “I’ve been betrayed, but I’m getting
ready to rise!” He continued: “Every time you walk in Jesus, someone is
going to turn their back. You’ve got to accept betrayal. Judas might be
your wife, husband, mother, father, someone very close to you. It’s inevi-
table if you’re really saved.” On the same day, Pastor Hilda of Heaven’s
Tabernacle preached, “Hell had a party when it thought Jesus had gone
down.” Turning to the audience, she continued, “How many of you know
that they’re gonna have a party when they think they’ve got you down? If
you don’t got a Judas, you got a problem. If you’re walking with God, you
got a betrayer.” Often such remarks are coupled with assertions that God
will eventually bestow so many blessings upon the saints that those who
insult them will be compelled to recognize their true value. On one occa-
sion, Pastor John preached: “The devil wants to take you out but can’t get
at you, so he tries to get in tune with the emotional side of you,” tempting
1163
you to retaliate. “The enemy knows who to use at certain times to get on
your nerves. There are already people out there talking, scheming about
you. Tell them that they better do it quickly, because God’s got a counter-
move!” This speech elicited an enormous outburst of approval.
Underlying such remarks are ever-present suspicions that pastors who
bless saints, or saints who request blessings from pastors, are in fact us-
ing one another for their own advantage.13 This concern motivates com-
parisons in Black popular literature between pastors who bless and pimps
who exploit: it is never unambiguously clear that a pastor who insists that
worshippers render monetary tithes and offerings is not exploiting them
(Klaits and McLean 2015). Likewise, pastors feel exploited by believers
whom they bless with money or other assistance during emergencies but
who refuse to tithe. “Everybody ain’t your friend,” many inner-city resi-
dents remark, sometimes recalling with affection an elder relative who im-
parted this life lesson to them. Such statements reflect the predicaments
arising from imperatives to be valued under conditions of exploitation. In
order to be valued, a person must “sow” money, labor, and love into others
so as to “reap” blessings; yet, it is impossible to be certain that recipients
are not engaging in manipulative “pimping” behavior. In aiming to foster
believers’ discernment and to develop their trust in God and spiritual men-
tors, pastors endeavor to transcend, but at the same time focus attention
on, the uncanniness of such everyday possibilities.
Thus, Pastor Hilda spoke at a Bible study about the dangers of gossip
and “peace-breaking lies.” She instructed the group: “When you are lied
on, don’t pick up the phone and try to chase it. Gossip is the spark and
fuel for conflict.” Pastor Hilda did not tell her listeners to try to ignore lies
directed at them, but rather spoke of “perverse people, we all know some
of them: they always do the opposite of what they say. We’re a big fam-
ily, we’re connected to lots of people, and you need to know what you’re
getting connected to.” Pastor Hilda went on to describe how she had con-
fided to a friend some plans to purchase a house. “Sometimes people can
be so close up on you that you can’t tell what they’re doing.” She would
speak to this friend about the house on the phone, and walked around the
property with her. Since her plans were not coming to fruition, she asked
God for discernment. God told her that the next person to call her on the
phone, who turned out to be this friend, had been “stealing her blessing.”
The so-called friend had been “blocking her prayer” while walking around
the property with her in silence. Pastor Hilda concluded: “The world would
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have us believe that we ought to be angry. But if we humble ourselves, we

can take something that’s going wrong and move it the right way. While
you were in the world, you would have cussed somebody out, but once
you’re saved you’ll find that God has taken away that spirit of rage.”
It is a sublime experience to discern God’s power to take away one’s
rage, and to trust Him to avenge the uncanny insults one has incurred.
For inner-city residents, the appeal of this vision of the sublime rests on
a profound longing for blessings that will enable them to pursue their
ambitions in the face of poverty, injury, illness, disrespect, and violence
(Ralph 2014). Even as blessings demand disciplined adherence to the
word of God and the prophet, people desire blessings in many instances
because they enable them to participate in practices of sharing that are
appreciated for their very commonplaceness (Mattingly 2014), such as
cooking, eating, playing sports, caring for children, and “chilling” (doing
nothing in particular). Yet such routines of sharing often precipitate con-
cerns about insults and betrayals. For instance, a pastor announced at a
retreat that he would pay a $10 fee for each church member who told him
that they could not afford the hotel breakfast, because this was an occa-
sion for celebrating the love they had for one another. He proceeded to
warn them: “But don’t mistake my kindness for weakness. If I tell you to
do something [i.e., a task for the church] in the future, you’d better do it.”
He was alive to the uncanny possibility that his beneficiaries would insult
him by failing to value him in turn.
What distinguishes aspirations for God’s blessings from the desires
for God’s love expressed by members of the suburban church are inner-
city residents’ perceptions of how blessings are contingent upon how
they are valued or devalued by God and other people. In the process of
helping inner-city believers to appreciate the sublime nature of the bless-
ings they have received, pastors often prompt them to distinguish the
uncanny ways in which their value has not been properly recognized. All
the same, the methods of allowing God to “take away the spirit of rage”
that urban pastors promote are more akin to the approaches of “learning
to live with your witch” described by Geschiere (2013:205) than are the
suburban church members’ propensities to receive “checks in the spirit”
when encountering distorted representations of happiness.
During a Bible study at Victory Gospel, Mother Smith recounted how
someone had recently accused her of “going behind her back”:
1165
Then the anger rose up in me, and I wanted to make a list of all the
ways she was wrong and tell her off. That’s when God showed me
that the spirit of anger was still dormant in me, even though I thought
I was saved, sanctified, and Holy Ghost-filled. He will put you in situ-
ations that will reveal to you who you are, and say: “Well, what are
you going to do about it?”
Unlike the White evangelical writer Omartian (1995), who aspires to “an
absolute form of trust that leaves no room for doubt” (Geschiere 2013:202)
in God’s power to grant her peace by forestalling uncanny events, Mother
Smith affirms what Julia Kristeva (1991:191) calls “the strange within
us.” Extending Freud’s approach to the uncanny to issues of xenopho-
bia, Kristeva remarks that Freud “teaches us how to detect foreignness
in ourselves. That is perhaps the only way not to hound it outside of us”
(1991:191). Mother Smith frames God’s promise to redeem believers from
their sensitivities to insults as, in effect, a divine demand that they recog-
nize how their selfhood can never be entirely integrated in this world. “God
is constantly perfecting you,” Pastor John preaches, “and when you are
fully perfected, He calls you home.”
Conclusion
In a recent essay entitled “What Is the Matter with Transcendence?”, Joel
Robbins (2016) argues that recent discussions of “everyday” or “ordinary”
ethics (Das 2012, Lambek 2010) have tended to obscure the formative
role of religion in ethics. In Lambek’s formulation, “the ‘ordinary’ implies
an ethics that is relatively tacit, grounded in agreement rather than rule,
in practice rather than knowledge or belief, and happening without calling
undue attention to itself” (2010:2). This approach highlights domains of
sociality in which potential futures are negotiated, as distinct from those
that reproduce established patterns of subject formation (Mattingly 2014).
Implicitly opposed to ritual, the concept of “ordinary ethics” runs the risk,
Robbins points out, of promoting assumptions that the forms of transcen-
dence offered by religion are overly magisterial, appropriate only for people
who cannot run their ethical lives smoothly. Rightly, in my view, Robbins
(2016) detaches transcendence from its associations solely with the eter-
nal by recalling Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological point that without any
representations of transcendence of the here-and-now, there would be
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no life-world at all (Schütz and Luckmann 1973). Thus, the place of reflec-
tion in everyday life is liable to be missed in conceptions of “ordinary” or
“everyday” ethics as grounded in tacit understandings. Robbins pursues
this argument by focusing on values, which involve transcendence of im-
mediate experience because they prompt reflection, in part by stimulating
engagement with clashing ideals. Following Victor Turner (1967), Robbins
argues that ritual makes values appear desirable (as well as obligatory) in
ways not usually apparent in everyday life. Ritual reaffirms values whose
ambit transcends immediate situations.
In framing the everyday as a counterpart to discernment, my aim has
not been to identify one as tacit and the other as reflective. Quite the con-
trary: to the extent that Christian believers construe everyday elements of
their experience as unmarked by God’s activity, their reflective practices
help to define the nature of those very experiences. My argument dove-
tails with that of Robbins in stressing the role of reflection in constitut-
ing such everyday domains. However, it is a different kind of transcen-
dence that I have aimed to document. The move Robbins (2016) makes
to identify ethical practice with values or “the good” (2013) runs the risk
of obscuring the ways in which religious efforts to transcend anxieties
may reinforce as well as alleviate them. What specifically, in short, is be-
ing transcended? Taking theoretical cues from Weber and Freud rather
than Durkheim, I have suggested that ritual holds the potential to generate
both the uncanny and the sublime. Ritual efforts to locate the occult, for
example, commonly de-familiarize people with their accustomed ways of
being with others (van Wyk 2014, Werbner 2011). Following this lead, I
have framed Christian practices of discernment in terms of trust, an ap-
proach that opens comparative questions regarding the circumstances
under which the generation of trust may be contingent on the production
of mistrust and vice versa.
By discerning the activities of God and the devil, believers in the two
communities I have described learn to mistrust, respectively, false forms of
happiness and false ways of valuing persons. In either case, discernment
involves a “consciously cultivated sensorium” (Brahinsky 2012:232) that
promotes perceptions of both the sublime and (perhaps less “conscious-
ly”) the uncanny. In the suburban congregation, intercessors model God’s
love through comforting physical contact, encouraging the distressed wor-
shipper to recognize the uncanny falseness of the happiness derived from
alcohol, drugs, and same-sex relationships, as well as the falseness of the
1167
notion that he or she is unloved. Through “checks in the spirit,” they sense
insecurity as a pervasive danger demanding ongoing efforts at transcen-
dence. In the urban congregations, the sensory emphasis is placed on de-
veloping receptivity to words from God and prophets that provide insight
into one’s circumstances, and on “giving praise” through active worship.
In receiving such words, believers discern how God bestows blessings
upon those who make faithful monetary donations, as well as how the devil
promotes false expectations for immediate returns, causing people to feel
insulted when such returns are not forthcoming. At the same time, pro-
phetic words reinforce believers’ sense of the uncanny likelihood that those
close to them will betray and manipulate them by appropriating their right-
ful blessings for themselves. From such experiences of being personally
devalued springs an outraged, viscerally felt “emotionalism” that only God
can enable one to transcend, however provisionally.
In both cases, discernment provides Pentecostal worshippers with em-
bodied experiences of peace, protection, and personal value together with
a capacity to communicate such experiences in objective terms. Yet, even
when discernment is deemed successful, believers are not definitively
separated from their anxieties. Their practical wisdom may consist of pro-
jecting anxiety onto others, who thereby take on a character of uncanny
threat, or alternatively of recognizing uncanniness within themselves. n
Acknowledgments:
My greatest debt is to all the church members who have generously involved me in their faith communi-
ties. Funding for this project was provided by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the University at Buffalo
Humanities Institute, and the Community Engagement and Public Policy Research Initiative at the
University at Buffalo. A previous version of this paper was presented in a panel entitled “The Politics
of Discernment in Christian Practice” at the Biannual Meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of
Religion held in San Diego, California from April 16 to 19, 2015. I wish to thank all the members of the
panel for their helpful feedback, in particular James Bielo and Robert Blunt, as well as two anony-
mous reviewers for Anthropological Quarterly. I would also like to thank Shay McLean for stimulating
conversations.
Endnotes:
1Distinctions between discernment and the everyday might appear questionable in light of Thomas
Csordas’s (2011:129) point that Pentecostal habitus “subsume[s] quotidian practices within the sphere
of ritual activities” to the extent that the process “eventually leaves no room for distinction between
the sacred and secular action even in everyday life” (1997:108). My aim, however, is not to distinguish
between sacred and secular frames of reference, but rather to specify the everyday as a domain of
1168
Frederick Klaits
anxiety that emerges concomitantly with believers’ ritualized practices of cultivating (Brahinsky 2013)
or becoming absorbed (Luhrmann 2007) in discernment.
2All proper names are pseudonyms.
3By respect, I have in mind the ordinary deference that privileged people usually take for granted, the
withdrawal of which is liable to jeopardize life. For instance, recipients of food stamps cannot count on
caseworkers to show them respect. If a mother files a complaint, a caseworker may retaliate by reducing
the food stamps she receives, thereby putting her children’s health in danger.
4Members of inner-city churches often express concerns about witches who transmit spirits of depres-
sion and fear by entering their homes. Witches are also said to attend church services so as to disrupt
the “flow” of God’s blessings to the congregation. However, the churches in question do not frame
witchcraft as an omnipresent threat by orienting their entire ritual practice around crusades against it.
5Writingof theological debates within the Pentecostal movement, historian Douglas Jacobsen counters
popular perceptions that “pentecostalism is an emotional rather than a cognitive faith…. When the
power of Pentecost fell on people and knocked them to the ground, few rose in silence. Instead, most
struggled to their feet trying to talk about what happened” (2003:2).
6In a similar vein, Harri Englund (2007:480) argues that “‘trust’ appears more felicitous than ‘faith’ as a
description of the orientation” of Pentecostals in a Malawian township, where precarious circumstances
are apt to give rise to pervasive distrust. The analytical usefulness of trust is that it “allows the analyst
both to describe the specific sources of their trust and to explore the relationships that emanate from
this orientation” (2007:480).
7Csordas (2004) frames the interplays between the familiar (das Heimliche) and the uncanny (das
Unheimliche) highlighted by Freud in terms of the intimate alterity of the self in religious experience.
Describing imaginal performances of healing prayer in a Catholic Charismatic movement, Csordas ar-
gues that “the capacity for intimacy begins with an existential coming to terms with the alterity of the
self and that the presence of Jesus is an embodied metaphor for that condition of selfhood” (2004:169).
Csordas stresses how the process of recognizing the alterity of one’s self and body blends the intimate
with the uncanny. However, anxiety is downplayed in Csordas’s formulation of the uncanny. The insults
and insecurities I describe are uncanny in that they are troubling distortions of the familiar that must be
countered through specific forms of trust.
8There are many ritual instances (for example, sermons) in the suburban congregation when hierarchical
relationships assume prominence between ordinary saints and pastors. However, practices of interces-
sion emphasize lateral connections.
9Believers identify rhema words as inspired speech that reveals to particular people the significance of
specific events. By contrast, logos words are written in the Bible and are addressed to the generality
of believers.
10Intimes of emergency, Pastor John sometimes makes gifts to members of Victory Gospel from his
earnings as a landlord.
11This commercial was last accessed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy66dFYiV9o and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SHDRDSXv8I on Dec 26, 2015.
12The Biblical phrase “armor bearers” has been appropriated in some Pentecostal circles to refer to
pastors’ assistants (e.g., Nance 2006). The connections that inner-city believers make between armor
bearing and defense against demonic attack reflect concerns about witchcraft (e.g., Bloomer 1997) that
do not pertain in the suburban congregation.
13Writing of Pentecostal congregations in the Copperbelt of Zambia, Naomi Haynes (2013) describes
comparable anxieties about the reproduction of spiritual authority. Members of these churches worry
that pastors will pursue relationships with wealthier believers—who are better able to “sow seeds”
into the “good soil” that pastors’ prayers provide—at the expense of poorer ones. This dynamic is
mitigated by the capacity of the poor to start their own congregations in response to improper forms of
1169
redistribution (Haynes 2015; see also Daswani 2016). Here, the existential anxiety is not that a person
will be disrespected or insulted, but rather left without patronage (Ferguson 2013).
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F o r e i g n L a n g u a g e Tr a n s l a t i o n s :
Insult and Insecurity: Discernment, Trust, and the Uncanny in Two US Pentecostal Communities
[Keywords: Pentecostalism, discernment, trust, the uncanny, urban United States]
侮辱与不安全感：论两个美国五旬节社区的洞察力，信任与诡秘
[关键词：五旬节运动，洞察力，信任，诡秘，美国都市区］
Insulto e Insegurança: Discernimento, Confiança e o Mistério de Duas Comunidades Pentecostais
Norte-Americanas
[Palavras-chave: Pentecostalismo, discernimento, confiança, o misterioso, o urbano nos Estados
Unidos da América]
Обиды и неуверенность: Распознавание, доверие и сверхъестественное в двух пятидесятнических
общинах США
[Ключевые слова: пятидесятничество, распознавание, доверие, сверхъестественное, городские
США]
‫ التشخيص والثقة والخارق للعادة يف جامعات الكنيسة البنتاكوستال األمريكية‬:‫اإلهانة وانعدام األمن‬
‫ الواليات املتحدة الحرضية‬،‫ الخارق للعادة‬،‫ الثقة‬،‫ التشخيص‬،‫ البنتاكوستالية‬:‫كلامت البحث‬
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Insult and Insecurity: Discernment, Trust, and the Uncanny

in Two US Pentecostal Communities

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 89, Number 4, Fall 2016, pp. 1143-1173

Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

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Insult and Insecurity:

“T he devil must be laughing his head off somewhere,” remarked the

“From what” and “for what” one wished to be redeemed,and, let us

order in its totality is, could, and should somehow be a meaningful

As João Vasconcelos (2007) points out, Weber recognized the intellectual-

Pentecostal church located in suburban Buffalo, believers discern through

In the remainder of this introduction, I frame these anxieties in relation to

God” convey concerns about everyday difficulties of trust, difficulties that

transformation of the intimate into the uncanny. Where such transforma-

a national Pentecostal denomination. Most members of Eternal Hope ei-

Discerning God’s Love

embodied dispositions involving absorption in speaking to God, hearing

Lynne established footings of intimacy and trust as an intercessor by dis-

they experience a restoration of trust that the familiar will be re-established

Discerning God’s Blessings

have us believe that we ought to be angry. But if we humble ourselves, we

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