Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the fashioning of cosmopolitan identities
This text provides an ethnographic account of how Pentecostalism expands globally. It examines the rise of the Australian megachurch Hillsong, its global spread, and its appeal to young middle-class Brazilians. It shows that Hillsong's adoption of the Cool Christianity style through music, digi...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Book |
| Language: | English |
| Subito Delivery Service: | Order now. |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
New York, NY
Oxford University Press
2024
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| In: | Year: 2024 |
| Series/Journal: | Oxford scholarship online
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| Further subjects: | B
Fashion
Religious aspects
Christianity
B Clothing and dress (Australia) B Hillsong Church B Clothing and dress Religious aspects Christianity B Clothing and dress (Brazil) B Pentecostal Churches (Australia) B Cultural studies: customs & traditions B Beauty and Fashion B Pentecostal Churches (Brazil) |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Erscheint auch als: 9780197673195 |
| Summary: | This text provides an ethnographic account of how Pentecostalism expands globally. It examines the rise of the Australian megachurch Hillsong, its global spread, and its appeal to young middle-class Brazilians. It shows that Hillsong's adoption of the Cool Christianity style through music, digital media, branding, and celebrity culture, elicits excitement, pleasure, and pride amongst its expanding global following. For Brazilian middle-class youth, the church also gives them a sense of cosmopolitan belonging to a Christian community located in the Global North. By joining Hillsong, they seek to distinguish themselves from the impoverished followers of Brazilian Pentecostal churches and their values. "When did Christianity become cool? How did an Australian church conquer the world and expanded into Brazil, a country with its own crop of powerful megachurches? In her exciting new book, anthropologist Cristina Rocha analyses the creation of a transnational Pentecostal field between Brazil and Australia, two countries that have been peripheral in the history of Pentecostalism but which more recently have been at the forefront of new forms of global Pentecostalism. She shows how new and reconfigured forms Christianity in both the Global North and South are increasingly digitally mediated, engaged with youth and popular cultures, and involve new forms of consumption, branding and identity. The Australian megachurch Hillsong has expanded globally through a Cool Christianity style which embraces pop music, digital media, spectacle, branding, and celebrity culture. Rocha follows young Brazilians from their budding Hillsong fandom, to their journey to Australia to join the church and study at its College, and on their return to Brazil. She argues that Brazilian middle-class youth join Hillsong to become cosmopolitan and to distinguish themselves from the Pentecostalism of the Brazilian poor. Notwithstanding Hillsong's recent scandals, the megachurch offers them an alternative geography of belonging, where pastors speak English and Christianity is about love, ethics, rationality, autonomy, and more equal relations between congregants and pastors. Rocha makes a strong argument for the importance of the local in globalization studies, and the key roles of class, affect and aesthetics for an understanding of the formation of religious subjectivities and communities"-- |
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| Item Description: | Also issued in print: 2024. - Includes bibliographical references and index. - Description based on online resource and publisher information; title from PDF title page (viewed on October 19, 2023) |
| ISBN: | 0197673236 |
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197673195.001.0001 |