Burying Life: Pentecostal Religion and Development in Urban Mozambique

Currently, the so-called secularization thesis is the subject of much debate (Asad, 2003; Taylor, 2007; de Vries, 2008). A new paradigm is emerging pointing at the ongoing in?uence or even resurgence of religion in modern societies. Increasingly, it is being acknowledged that religion is central to the lives of people and that religion cannot be separated from the political and the economic. This correlates with the increasing interest in the potential of religion for development programmes (Belshaw et al., 2001; Marshall and Keough, 2004). Yet, the new openness towards the potential of religion in developing society seems to imply both a Weberean and Durkheimean legacy; namely that religion helps to generate a capitalist society, brings progress, is supportive and contributes to security, democracy, certainty and continuity (see e.g. CDE, 2008; Ranger, 2008; Berger, 2009). The question is, however, whether the realization that religion is an intrinsic part of society and people’s everyday life can also be discerned in an investigation into what kind of ‘development model’ religions produce, which may not necessarily be directed to progress in a modernist sense. This observation arises from research carried out about Pentecostalism in Mozambique, which shows that Pentecostalism has become popular precisely because it questions and even destroys existing models of development.1