Religion as (Blurred) Moral Boundaries: Umbanda and Pentecostalism in a Changing Social Context

MÍGUEZ, DANIEL

Pentecostal Others: Transcontinental Religious Encounters'

Tauris

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2009; p. 261 - 275

Usually when Umbanda and Pentecostalism are compared they are seen as two opposite alternatives, with stark contrasts between them. All the more well known elements composing these two religions seem to point in this direction. It clearly seems, at first glance, that nothing could be more different than a set of beliefs originated in the ‘American Bible Belt’ and another that emerges from a complex Brazilian syncretism between Kardecism, Catholicism and the Yoruba cult of the ancestors. But at a closer look and in recent times things don’t seem to be so clear cut in the poor outskirts of Buenos Aires. Changes in Argentina social structure (unemployment, growing poverty, etc.) have made unviable traditional lifestyles and people have had to resort to new alternatives to recast their social and moral orders. It is this process that in the eighties associates with an unprecedented expansion of Pentecostal churches, and that in the nineties explains the unusual growth of Umbanda. However, these two alternatives have not remained mutually exclusive. If Pentecostalism, in a way, reaffirms a traditional moral order were law, family and legal and formal work are the main drives of life, Umbanda makes this moral standards relative to the immediate needs of individual believers. Therefore, it becomes admissible to violate conventional values if they are an obstacle to a person’s wellbeing. In this way the traditional Manichean view implicit in Chirstianism is jeopardized by a more pragmatic worldview were ‘survival’ is the paramount value. What this paper will show is that in a context of growing deprivation reaffirming traditional morals or making them relative to immediate needs can be two alternative, but not mutually exclusive, adaptive strategies. So, although ‘officially’ Pentecostalism sees Umbanda as its ultimate ‘other’, in the trajectories of common believers both moral worlds can be combined according to changing circumstances, making usual religious borders or frontiers increasingly relative.