La Economía De Dios: Social Media & the Latinos/as Prosperity Gospel Movement

This panel brings together four scholars whose training is not technically in Latina/o Studies, but who bring Latina/o Studies questions, texts, and approaches to bear on their work in the broader field of “religion.” What... [ view full abstract ]

This panel brings together four scholars whose training is not technically in Latina/o Studies, but who bring Latina/o Studies questions, texts, and approaches to bear on their work in the broader field of “religion.” What happens when Latina/o Studies texts are refocused on religious discourses, histories, and fields that are not specifically Latina/o? Looking at the legacies of USA Christianity, biblical studies, late antique history, and the history of Pentecostalism, how does the integration of Latina/o studies thinkers and writers transform these other fields?

Presenter #1: De Anda reinterprets the impact of Christianity in the USA through Latinao Studies epistemologies and wisdom. She (re)imagines how such theoretical frameworks may impact transformation of the socio-eco-political standing of Latinas. De Anda draws upon the work of María Eugenia Cotera, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, and David Carrasco to rethink the complex mixings of stories and histories into contemporary USA religio-socio-eco-political experiences around the role of Christ.

Presenter #2: Hidalgo theorizes what scriptures are and how they work. She draws on Latinx Studies and Chicanx Studies scholarship on codices and glyphs. Given how some Latinxs engage alternative scriptural traditions, Hidalgo queries how contemporary notions of revelation and scripture may be understood as more plural and diverse than the dominantized Christian bible. She then uses more contemporary Chicana ideas of codices, such as those of Cherríe Moraga, to rethink the histories and legacies of the Christian book of Revelation in the USA West.

Presenter #3 Mena utilizes Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderland theories of space and identity in order to read the potentiality of desert space for Christian authors in the third- and fourth-century of the common era. Chican@ Studies prove an important resource for considering the articulation of space and subjectivity in the history of Christianity. Christian hagiographies (or Saint’s Lives) describe the space of the desert as instrumental to the formation of the saint. Likewise, it is the hybrid mestiza figure of the saint in hagiographies that gives power to the construction of the desert. Mena argues for the way the desert and the saint are literary constructs of late antique literature and each constitutive of the other. Like Anzaldúa’s new mestizas of the U.S.-Mexico borderland, these hybrid figures are both products and producers of the space they inhabit.

Presenter #4 Sánchez-Walsh examines how the long-standing assimilation project of American Christianity, in the guise of Pentecostalism and specifically the prosperity gospel has accomplished Americanization by ensuring that the economic system of neo-liberal capitalism be sacralized as a part of becoming and staying Pentecostal. Latino media ministries accomplish this by adhering to the most prominent part of global Pentecostalism, a subculture called the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel is the belief that wealth is a sacred obligation. God wants you to be wealthy, and helps you achieve that goal. Through an examination of social media and Spanish language television, this paper will explore how Latino/a Pentecostals of various generations and social classes accept the underlying assumptions about capitalism.

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