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ABSTRACT
I explore the conversion of a Swedish Pentecostal Prosperity preacher to the Roman Catholic Church in order to examine questions of analytical perspective, temporal scale, and ethical discernment in the operation of religiously charged forms of repetition. The paper juxtaposes neo-Pentecostal with Roman Catholic understandings of temporality through tracing the ideological movements of Pastor Ulf Ekman over the past three decades, summarizing these understandings as based around tropes of ‘excess’ and ‘encompassment’ respectively. In exploring repetition as both theoretical category and ethnographic object of observation, I distinguish between actively marked repetition and the merely repetitious, while also drawing distinctions between continuity and the iterative, oscillatory character of repetitive actions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Shorter versions of this paper were given at the panel ‘Different Repetitions: Anthropological Engagements with Figures of Return, Recursion, and Redundancy,’ American Anthropological Association Meeting, Washington DC, 2014 and for the 2017 Society of the Anthropology of Religion Presidential Panel ‘Religion and Time,’ New Orleans, 15 May 2017. I am grateful for comments provided at these presentations, and for extremely perceptive readings by Andreas Bandak and Ingie Hovland, as well as by David Henig and anonymous referees.
3. My host reminded me that the cathedral had always been a hub for crossings and exchanges: between Scandinavian mission and Roman Catholic ambition, between Denmark and Sweden. Indeed the previous day I had taken the train to the city across the iconic Öresund Bridge that acts as the road, rail, and internet hub between the Scandinavian Peninsular and Central and Western Europe.
4. The role of Birgitta Ekman remains unexplored in this paper, and deserves separate attention in its own right. Her charismatic and Catholic personas have attracted far less attention than those of her husband.
5. While I focus here on marked forms of repetition, I do not deny the significance of less motivated forms—as explored on a macro-scale in Martin (Citation1978).
6. Implicit in this point is a distinction, also discussed in the Introduction, between ‘mere’ recurrence as unwilled or seemingly automatic return, and a more willed and positively desired form of repetition.
7. As Butler and others indicate, ‘stabilization’ will also inevitably entail a degree of modification.
8. Compare also Mayblin’s exploration (Citation2018) of female Catholic priests who articulate forms of dissent rather than rupture, leading to disputed claims of spiritual renewal.
9. On the uncanny and repetition, compare Bandak (Citation2018).
10. These terms are my own rather than explicitly stated by informants. However, we shall see how they receive emic expression through such terms as ‘reaching out’ (excess) and ‘depth’ or ‘unity’ (encompassment).
11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDMIJXxCJ0A. Accessed 13 October 2017. My translation.
12. ‘Upptäcktsresande.’
13. My translation.
14. Called in Swedish Överflödets Lagar. The English title for the book is ‘The Laws of Prosperity,’ so the version published by the Word of Life has a slightly different connotation—more directly a sense of both abundance and going beyond boundaries, which is also sometimes called ‘increase’ by Copeland.
15. See e.g. the ministries mentioned at http://www.woli.info/eng/
16. Note echoes with the economic notion of marginal utility.
17. Aletheia, a magazine consistently opposed to Ekman, identified Ekman’s papal interests in 2008, with e.g. the article ‘Ulf Ekman: Påven Ligger Bakom Pingströrelsen’ 18 August 2008, by ‘MyTwoCents.’
18. In an interview in the newspaper Dagen, Ekman notes: ‘I don’t think all crises are negative. They force us to take a step toward God.’ http://www.dagen.se/ulf-ekman-darfor-blir-jag-katolik-1.94507 Interview with Thomas Österberg, 11 March 2013 (My translation).
19. The general secretary of the Swedish Evangelical Alliance referred to him as, ‘the most dynamic and influential Christian leader we have had in Sweden during the past half century.’ http://pulpitandpen.org/2017/03/31/false-teacher-of-the-day-3-ulf-ekman/ (My translation.) The newspaper Expressen published an article ‘Herregud, en sån helomvändning’— https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/inloggad/herregud-en-san-helomvandning/ on 10 March 2014, noting the figure of around 250,000 explicitly participating in Word of Life enterprises around the world.
20. http://www.dagen.se/livsstil/kyrkohistoriker-ulf-ekmans-beslut-ar-varldsunikt-1.95508; ‘Kyrkohistoriker: Ulf Ekmans beslut är världsunikt.’ 13 March 2013. (My translation).
22. http://www.svtplay.se/video/2705275/min-sanning/min-sanning-ulf-ekman-sasong-7-avsnitt-3. 21 March 2015 (My translation).
24. CCR Melbourne – ‘What Is The Church?’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzto7TENKV8. Published on 21 Feb 2017.
25. See also of Meyer’s (Citation1999) discussion of hybrid images of the Devil being invoked as West African Pentecostalists wrestle with both rejecting and retaining spiritual images of the past.
26. The first comment I found under the YouTube video of Ekman’s Australian sermon was: ‘This man is a liar!’
27. Service attended 7 May 2017.
29. Ekman’s actions also have a flavour of ‘supersessionism’: originally a theological claim by the Church to have surpassed Judaism in becoming the favoured people of God (moving from Old Covenant to New), but here applied to Ekman’s own biographical shifts.
30. In this sense, the Pentecostal imminence yields to Catholic immanence.
31. His positioning of himself combines what Ferguson and Gupta (Citation2002, 981) call two principles key to state spatialization: verticality (lying above society) and encompassment (embracing localities).
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