UNIVERSAL POLITICS: NEO-PENTECOSTALISM, CANDOMBLÉ, AND POLITICS OF SPACE/RACE.

With an acute awareness across the globe of widening economic inequalities and an increasingly elusive middle class, where do religious institutions fit into the modern social and political ideologies? Examining interviews and ethnographic notes from data compiled in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, I will seek to answer two main questions: First, how does the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God fit (or not) into the neoliberal agenda/ideology? Second, how does the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé fit (or not) into the neoliberal model? Comparing the socio-cultural and symbolic alignments of neo-Pentecostalism and Candomblé and how each religion favors different types of political subject formation in regard to space and racial consciousness, I conclude by remarking on the increasing fragmentation of Afro-Brazilian religious subjects, since each religious institution seeks to gain political influence through conflicting socio-political ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]