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In recent decades, the Pentecostal movement in India has not only grown significantly, it has also become increasingly diverse. While the majority of the movement’s adherents still belong to marginalized groups in Indian society, middle-class Pentecostals are growing in number and changing the dynamics and identity of the movement. 

This dissertation explores middle-class Pentecostal Christianity as a lived religion in India. More precisely, the aim is to better understand how female members of middle-class Pentecostal churches express and experience their religion in the context of their everyday lives. In addition, it examines what it might mean to be a Pentecostal and middle class in contemporary India. 

The analysis suggests that, for the participants, it was a relational project to live as a Pentecostal. The women were engaged in a common effort together with God to realize shared goals connected to their religious lives, such as, working on the self and living according to God’s plan. While largely dismissing rigid and ritualistic religious behavior codes, the women were nonetheless in agreement on the importance of living a Christ-like life. However, in contrast to many other Indian Pentecostal contexts, this moral imperative did not involve withdrawal from “the world”. Rather, it was closely related to their emotional lives in that they strived to resemble Christ by being loving, humble, and grateful. The study also draws attention to how the women’s religion, to a significant extent, revolved around handling worries and concerns. Despite being in a privileged economic position that provided the women with a relatively comfortable standard of living, they experienced their everyday lives as unstable and insecure. The analysis shows how their religion was a resource that empowered and aided them in tackling these uncertainties while at the same time brought on a sense of vulnerability.  

The study is based on six months of fieldwork in the North Indian city of Gurugram. The participants were members of the two middle-class churches, Loving Assemblies of God and Church of All Nations. During the fieldwork, a combination of methods was used, namely, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and diaries.  

Indian Pentecostalism has been considered a religion of the poor andlow caste since its inception in the beginning of the twentieth century.However, over recent decades, middle-class Pentecostalism has establisheditself as an integral part of the Indian Pentecostal movement.Proceeding from a lived religion perspective, this article explores howwomen in middle-class churches express and practice their religion intheir everyday lives. More precisely, it focuses on four defining features ofthe women’s lived religion (following God’s plan, tending to the relationshipwith God, overcoming everyday challenges, and transforming theself). An argument that will run through the article is that the women’sway of “doing religion” is contingent upon what they experience as theactions of God, an agentic interplay that I conceptualize as “collateralagency”. The study is based on six-month-long fieldwork in the NorthIndian city Gururgam, including, among other things, interviews with 30women in two middle-class Pentecostal churches.

In this article, I explore how eight female Pentecostals express their everyday religion in contemporary Sweden. This article indicates that a shift has taken place in religious practice in Swedish Pentecostalism from earlier decades. The world-rejecting attitude and individual pietistic heritage have been toned down and replaced by what I will term a relational piety that emphasizes the relational side of being “Christ-like” and encourages adherents to practice their everyday religion together. The informants depended on their family, friends, congregation, and Christian networks to maintain and deepen their religiosity and Christian lifestyle. The study is also an example of a broadly gender-equal expression of Pentecostalism and points to the movement’s ability to adjust to different contexts.

OVER the last few decades, Hindu-Christian relations in India appear to have taken a new worrying turn. Since 1998 violent attacks against Christians in India have increased significantly, and there are no signs of decline. Pentecostal and Pentecostal-like groups have been afflicted to a greater extent by this recent development and are disproportionately targeted in attacks in comparison to other Christians.1 Considering the explosion of academic studies on Pentecostalism worldwide, it is striking that so little attention has been paid to the contemporary situation of Indian Pentecostals. In particular, there is a notable lack of studies dealing with Indian Pentecostals’ everyday life from a non-church perspective. The aim of this case study—consisting of in-depth interviews with students at the Pentecostal college Doon Bible College2 in Dehradun (Uttarakhand)—is to explore from a micro perspective how North Indian Pentecostals perceive and experience the relationship with the Hindu surroundings in their everyday life. The study proceeds from a Social Identity Theory (SIT) framework, accordingly paying particular attention to the construction and perception of group relations.