Inbetween nostalgia and the dream of equality. Critique and proposal to the foundationalist assumptions of the Pentecostal community in Lalive d’Epinay

Abstract

This article examines three foundational sustentions that Lalive d'Epinay confers to the Pentecostal community: the ‘hacienda’ model, the shelter-church and the church of the poor. It emphasizes a critique to the ‘hacienda’ model that the author supports for spotlighting an idealized and benevolent model to a system based on race, class and contempt for its workers. We argue that rural nostalgia is the ideological foundation of Pentecostalism, where a feminization of the community, and not its patriarchalisation, is enhanced; and that conflict is the other foundation that defines the Pentecostal, and not the harmonic imaging proposed by the author. We conclude with a brief analysis about the community crisis of Chilean Pentecostalism.