Pentecostal preaching and prophetic politics: when the ‘End’ really does justify the means

Abstract

Alongside the ferocious debates in the final months before the 2016 EU Referendum, some Pentecostal Premillennialists throughout Ulster were conducting their own prophetico-politico-religious crusades. Yet unlike the Leave/Remain campaigns, which used apocalyptic language in a metaphorical fashion, these Protestant preachers constructed an ‘enchantment tale’ aimed at delaying a very real, and catastrophic, ‘End.’ This paper focuses upon three pastors who used their pulpits to rally support for the Brexit campaign. It suggests that the clergymen’s justification of political activism as biblically based, prophetically inspired and divinely endowed points to what happens when political ideas about national ‘well-being’ become ‘enchanted’ by biblical language, and devotees become ‘semiotically aroused’ by what they hear. The rhetoric of these religious leaders also illustrates how tightly the language of the apocalypse is woven into the historical fabric of Northern Irish politics. Finally, this study argues that their activities eclipse some of the ways in which local politicians and clergy continue to manipulate religious vocabulary, to evoke a politically productive affective response in their audiences.

Keywords:

• Affect
• apocalypse
• eschatology
• hope
• language
• millennialism
• political theology

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the students of the Apocalypse module at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), for being the initial audience and inspiration for this research. I am also most grateful to the two reviewers, whose thoughtful insights have enriched this paper.

Ethical approval

Earlier ethnographic research conducted with this group received ethical approval from the School of History and Anthropology Research Ethics committee at QUB. New material drawn on in this paper is openly available and subsequent ethical permission is not required. There are no funding sources to report for this current research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this paper, affect is understood as a term that encompasses a broad range of humanly experienced feelings; it includes both emotions and moods; it is a basic sense of feeling on a continuum from unpleasant to pleasant, sad to happy, or - in this case - fear to hope (Russell 2003). As O’Neill (2015, 209) observes, affect is often ‘religiously managed and politically motivated’; it is a sensation that exposes deep-seated political dynamics. It is this dimension of affect I focus on here.

2 See also Johnson’s (2018) discussion of Mark Driscoll’s ‘arousing empire,’ in which feelings of hope, joy, shame and paranoia are amplified in the name of religious conviction; and Searle’s (2014:128) analysis of semiotic arousal couches disparate events within an intense and cohesive apocalyptic narrative.