Faith Full: Sensuous Habitus, Everyday Affect, and Divergent Diaspora in the UCKG

This chapter explores the affective intersection of religious and racial identity and experience through an ethnographic account of black Neo-Pentecostals. The Brazilian-founded Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) curates a regimented sensuous experience and corresponding dispositions to facilitate filling devotees’ bodies with the Holy Spirit. This sensuous habitus is meant to inform how adherents feel and experience religious identity both inside and outside of the church, whereby being faithful equates to being faith-filled. The UCKG’s ideologically informed sensuous habitus intersects with other aspects of everyday affect, in particular racial identity. Tracing the relationship between race and faith through the assertion by members that they are “black but” baptized in the Holy Spirit, this chapter argues that Neo-Pentecostals reject prevailing notions of blackness, advancing a divergent black identity bonded by their collective decision to be proselytized through the Holy Spirit

Cantave, R. 2021. “Faith Full: Sensuous Habitus, Everyday Affect, and Divergent Diaspora in the UCKG.” In Embodying Black Religions in Africa and its Diasporas: Memory, Movement, and Belonging through the Body, edited by Y. Covington-Ward and J. Jouili, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.