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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH 1

DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12365

— symposium

— ENTREPRENEURIAL RELIGION IN THE AGE


OF NEOLIBERAL URBANISM
stephan lanz and martijn oosterbaan

Abstract
The introduction to this symposium on entrepreneurial religion and neoliberal
urbanism discusses leading scholarly approaches to religion and urban theory, arguing
that, despite their merits, these approaches are in need of refinement. Theories on religion
and urban theory too often describe religion as a reactionary phenomenon. Religious move­
ments and spaces are generally defined as pockets of resistance and shelter against retreat­
ing or failing states under neoliberal restructuring programmes in the shadow of consump­
tion dreams. Although religious actors and ideologies unquestionably form part of urban
groups that are denied access to public and private means to wealth and security, the 
con­tributors to this symposium argue that within a global, comparative perspective,
the entwine­ment of religion, state and market reveal more complicated configurations.
Through a comparison of Islamic gated communities in Istanbul, Pentecostal prayer
camps in Lagos and Pentecostal grassroots movements in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro,
this symposium demonstrates that urban religion should also be regarded as a constitu­
tive force of contemporary capitalism and should therefore be placed at the heart of the
neoliberal construction of urban space instead of at its margins.

Introduction
During the 2000s, several edited volumes and special issues shook one of the
theoretical foundations of Western urban studies: that modern urbanity, as the last
stage of the city’s long spiritual decline, can be equated with secularity.
There is enough empirical evidence today for the proposition that the much-
discussed return of religion to the public sphere (cf. Casanova, 1994; Habermas, 2006)
can primarily be understood as an urban phenomenon. This is borne out in particular
by evidence of the fastest-growing global religious movements, such as born-again
Christianity and political Islam. It is obvious today that metropolises have become
laboratories for new religious phenomena, which have a huge impact on urban spaces,
cultures and societies. This is by no means only true for the cities of the global South or,
more specifically, their territories of poverty (cf. Bayat, 2007b). Rather, new religious
movements and communities that have broken away from their traditional cultural
environment pervade urban spaces. They develop both in the course of transnational
migration processes and under the guise of new ‘home-grown’ religions and de- and
re-territorialize themselves in the global flow of believers and corporate religious
enterprises, of religious identities, media and materialities.
From today’s perspective, one can see that the field of urban studies has long
since begun to address the challenge thrown down by Lilly Kong over a decade ago
(Kong, 2001: 212): ‘Theories of urban space and society must take on board integrally
© 2016 urban research publications limited
LANZ AND OOSTERBAAN 2

the ways in which socially constructed religious places overlap, complement or conflict
with secular places … in the allocation of use and meaning’. She noted that research
on urban-religious interactions had generally developed outside Western metropolises.
Hancock and Srinivas (2008: 620) rightly criticized the fact that: ‘One of the persistently
stubborn assumptions of much of recent urban theory and policy seems to be that
religion is external, incidental or peripheral to the discussion of urban modernity’. Not
only was there hardly any research on urban religion––as noted by Roberto Orsi (1999)––
it was actually considered an oxymoron. Orsi’s definition of urban religion (ibid.: 44, et
seq.), for its part, was still very much tailored to rural–urban migrants: he defined it
as ‘the site of converging and conflicting visions and voices, practices and orientations,
which arise out of the complex desires, needs and fears of many different people who
have come to the cities by choice or compulsion’.
It was less the empirical findings than a very particular epistemological config­
uration of circumstances that was the cause of the long disinterest of urban studies
in religious urbanities. After all, even in the midst of the most radical transformation
processes that came with the industrialization of Western cities, God did not die (as
presumed by Mike Davis in 2004). Instead, religion underwent a transformation process
that responded creatively to new urban modes of living. Numerous religious innovations
came out of the old industrial cities of Britain and the United States, among them the
reactionary, middle-class charity organization movement, the progressive Social Gospel
Movement, the urban Black churches and new kinds of religious organizations, such as
the YMCA with its combination of business and religion, and the Salvation Army with
its incorporation of popular culture. And finally, there was the Pentecostal movement,
which emerged in Los Angeles in the first decade of the twentieth century and is today
the fastest-growing religion in the world (cf. Cox, 1995; Winston, 1999; Goh, 2011;
Williams, 2011). So why is it that the field of urban studies has taken hardly any notice
of the fact that ‘the world of the modern city has necessitated, encouraged or simply
made possible a tremendous explosion of religious innovation and experimentation’
(Orsi, 1999: 45)––a development that appears to repeat itself in the transition from the
industrial to the post-industrial city in the late twentieth century?
First of all, urban studies is rooted in the theory of secularization, which, with
Max Weber, assumes secularization to be an unstoppable process. It is one of the dis­
cipline’s core beliefs that in the rational modern world, epitomized by the large city,
religion can only survive in communities that are detached from worldly affairs. More­
over, urban studies have tied the concept of modernity exclusively to Western
metropolises, leaving the cities of the global South to a ‘developmentalism’ (Robinson,
2006: 4) that cast them as underdeveloped and deficient. While in this way, modernity
and urbanity were connected to secularity and the West, the cities of the ‘rest’ of the
world––particularly its Islamic regions––were considered backward and marked by
religious rules. In illustration of Stuart Hall’s (1992) concept of ‘the West and the rest’,
the ‘Islamic city’ is, to this day, at its core an Orientalist discourse formation (cf. Abu-
Lughod, 1987).
In addition, with regard to analyses of the urban, two approaches have dominated
the field for some time. According to Aihwa Ong (2011: 2), both ‘bear a Marxist pedigree
and are thus overdetermined in their privileging of capitalism as the only mechanism
and class struggle as the only resolution to urban problems’. The protagonists of the
first of these approaches––the ‘political economy of globalization’––interpret global
capitalism as the singular driving force behind the production of the city. The analyses
coming out of the second approach, by contrast, narrow their ‘postcolonial focus on
the subaltern’ (ibid.) too much on the agency of marginalized actors. In other words,
while the first approach either ignores religion as an aspect of the urban altogether or
dismisses it as reactionary fundamentalism, the second one puts too much focus on the
religious practices of marginalized minorities: urban religion is seen here as essentially
ENTREPRENEURIAL RELIGION IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERAL URBANISM 3

a compensatory coping strategy employed by subaltern groups in the spaces of poverty


of postcolonial metropolises.
Based on these initial reflections, this symposium aims to lay the foundation for
and test a new conceptual approach that is capable of analysing interactions between
the urban and the religious in terms of mutually constitutive relations. This is done by
way of three case studies that illuminate that urban religion should be defined less as
pockets of resistance and shelter against retreating states under neoliberal restructuring
programmes than regarded as a constitutive force of urban modernity and of neoliberal
urbanism.
In the following section of this introduction to the symposium, we critically
discuss three conceptual approaches that, in the past decade, have aimed to ‘repopulate
urban theory with religion’ (Lanz, 2014a). The third section introduces the three case
studies and situates them within the context of the questions explored in the symposium.
In the fourth section, we elaborate our conceptual line of argumentation as fol­
lows: first, we present our assumption that the urban-religious movements under dis­
cussion here can be understood as entrepreneurial religions that constitute paradigmatic
neoliberal forms of organization. Secondly, using the case studies investigated in this
symposium as examples, we discuss the connections between the spread and activities
of the entrepreneurial religions and the variegated processes of neoliberal urbanism
in the cities of Lagos, Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro. Here, we posit that the analysed
urban-religious modes of interaction are permeated by elements characteristic of
the ‘age of neoliberal urbanism’. Nonetheless, we argue that they cannot be explained
fully if analysed strictly within a neoliberal framework. Thirdly, we argue that, as a
consequence, a new conceptual approach is needed if we are to gain an understanding
of how the religious and the urban interact and to what extent urban religion can be
understood as a constitutive force of contemporary urban capitalism. Taking our cue
from the transregional research project Global Prayers––Redemption and Liberation in
the City (Becker et al., 2014) we lay out such an approach in the last part of section four.
Based on a comparative analysis of the three case studies discussed in this symposium,
conducted as part of the Global Prayers project, our conceptual approach regards the
mutually constitutive relations between the urban and the religious as assemblages of
‘urban-religious configurations’.

Contemporary approaches to the study of interactions between the


religious and the urban
In this section we posit that the ground-breaking studies on the interaction
between the religious and the urban that have been published within the past ten
years can be grouped according to three different approaches: (1) religious practices
as an integral part of the modern urban world; (2) the postsecular city; and (3) the
fundamentalist city.

— Religious practices as an integral part of the modern urban world


Under this heading we subsume an assortment of studies that examine a large
variety of religious practices in everyday urban life and their integral contribution
to the production of the city without subsuming them under a general term. This
approach explicitly postulates and analyses the modernity of urban religion and relates
it to other modes of urban modernity. Religion is viewed here as an urban practice that
is exercised by citizens and produces specific urban identities, spaces, communities,
cultures and political phenomena.
This approach is exemplified by the IJURR symposium ‘Spaces of modernity:
religion and the urban in Asia and Africa’, edited by Mary Hancock and Smriti Srinivas
(2008). Their symposium, with a particular focus on popular religion and on migrants
and subaltern groups, examines the ways in which religion is enacted in urban space
LANZ AND OOSTERBAAN 4

and the role it plays in the constitution of ‘a modern urban realm’ (ibid.: 621). While
urban studies, as Hancock and Srinivas rightly argue, usually examine the modes by
which the urban is produced by state and capital, a focus on the urban enactment of
popular religion makes it possible to track ‘the vernacular modernities that are formed
within and against the globalization of capital, the expansion of neoliberal policies or
the assertion of state sovereignty’ (ibid.: 624).
Here, as in newer compilations, such as Prayer in the City (Desplat and Schulz,
2012) and The Sacred in the City (Gómez and van Herck, 2012), religion is investi­
gated  not  so much in its manifold ‘connotations with belief structures, institutions,
hierarchies’ (ibid.: 3), but as a social practice and an expression of everyday urban life.
The value of these approaches lies, first, in the fact that they look at urban religious prac­
tices on a global scale as modern practices enacted by ‘ordinary people’ (Bayat, 2004),
rather than summarily ‘pathologizing’ them as fundamentalist. They strip the sacred of
its essentialist connotations and instead analyse it as a social construct. Their focus is
predominantly on modern forms of religion in cities of the global South, whose specific
manifestations of modernity have to date been either ignored or denied by ‘Western-
centric urban theory’ (Edensor and Jayne, 2012: 5). In this manner, they contribute
to the pluralization, vernacularization and ‘post-colonization’ (cf. Robinson, 2006) of
urban studies.
Nonetheless, the approach has its weaknesses too. Its emphasis on ‘vernacular
modernities’ downplays the character of the fastest-growing urban religions as ‘global
forms’ (Collier and Ong, 2005). Its focus on popular religion bears the danger of
perpetuating the interpretation of urban religion as a niche phenomenon particular to
subalterns. Its lack of emphasis on the character of religion as a ‘prescriptive regime’
(Marshall, 2009) bears the danger of downplaying certain repressive aspects of its
permeation of urban spaces. Finally, its emphasis on religious practices that challenge
‘modernist and liberal narratives of the state, planners or capital’ (Hancock and Srinivas,
2008: 624) is at odds with its call to investigate urban religion as a ‘constitutive force’
not only of modernity but of ‘contemporary capitalism’ (ibid.: 621).

— The postsecular city approach


Based on the work of Jürgen Habermas, who described contemporary society as
postsecular, a number of urban studies scholars have taken up this concept to theorize
the city in postsecular terms. At the core of the postsecular city approach lies the
acknowledgement that theoretical considerations regarding religion and urban space
should shed the ideological shackles of secularization theory that held them captive
for so long (Olson et al., 2012). Regarding religion as a constitutive force of modernity
implies that teleological accounts of modern transformation and religious decline
inaccurately capture the relationship between faith, knowledge and power under
modernity.
The postsecular city approach argues that shifting boundaries between  poli­
tics, religion and the state are most visible in contemporary cities. Amidst the urban
transformations, the postsecular city arises as a key trope in describing the ‘inter­
connectivities between diverse social realities … that were limited to hitherto totalizing
and prevailing notions of modernization and secularization’ (Beaumont, 2010: 7).
Moreover, the ‘postsecular city’ also points to a general acceptance of the role of
religious institutions in providing care, welfare and justice in Europe and the United
States, which contributes to a ‘rapprochement’ of secular and religious institutions
involved in the regulation of social life (Beaumont, 2008).
Nevertheless, this should not lead to an uncritical adoption of the term. Lilly
Kong (2010), for example, notes that secularization is a multifaceted historical process,
which occurred most saliently in Europe and even there followed strikingly different
trajectories. This raises the question whether indeed non-European societies witnessed
ENTREPRENEURIAL RELIGION IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERAL URBANISM 5

a decline of public religious life. If such is not the case, describing these societies as
postsecular does not accurately catch the transformations of the nexus between
governance, religion and capital. Other ardent critics have argued that the term
‘postsecular’ is misleading and that we should get rid of it altogether. For Veit Bader
(2012: 22), for example, the use of the term ‘postsecularism’ primarily answers to the
‘need to capture supposed changes in one catchy phrase’, whereas, in effect: ‘Secular,
secularity, secularisation, and secularism’ are family concepts that denote strikingly
different relations between ‘institutions, social processes and politics, principles, and
meta-narratives’.
Despite lingering doubts to what extent the postsecular city approach is to be
understood as a descriptive or as a normative project, how accurate the term ‘post­
secular’ is to describe transformations in the relationship between states and religions,
and whether and how it can be applied to regions beyond Europe, we do not propose
to get rid of the concept altogether. A postsecular perspective may help us recognize
the historical entanglements between specific modern nation states and particular
religious traditions and the detailed ways in which ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ have
developed as mutually constitutive categories in particular contexts (cf. Oosterbaan,
2014).
However, the postsecular city approach lacks the conceptual depth to help us
lay bare the shifts in the relationship between religion, capitalism and government in
non-Western societies. This holds true especially for the manner in which the approach
has framed the relationship between public religion and neoliberalism. Many of its
investigations relate to the changing role of faith-based organizations in the face of a
declining welfare state under neoliberal policy adjustments (Beaumont, 2008; 2010;
Cloke and Beaumont, 2013). Whereas we certainly agree with their analysis that
religious institutions have taken up services that were formerly provided by (welfare)
states in affluent societies, the theoretical approach that we propose in this symposium
does not depart from the notion that religious groups and ideologies primarily react to
governmental transformations under economic neoliberalism but rather take religions
as vehicles for a ‘worlding’ that unfolds in the midst of a ‘logic of entrepreneurialism’
(Ong, 2011: 4) and a ‘spirit of consumerism’ (Campbell, 1987).

— The fundamentalist city approach


In response to the observation that in many cities, radical groups with essen­
tialist religious positions have set themselves up as powerful actors, Nezar AlSayyad
and Mejgan Massoumi (2011) have coined the term ‘fundamentalist city’. Research
conducted within the fundamentalist city paradigm focuses on the question of which
urban processes are at work in religious groups that become fundamentalist and
transform into powerful actors with the capacity to shape the structure and daily life of
cities (AlSayyad, 2011: 3, et seq.).
A fundamentalist city, based on AlSayyad’s use of the term, is a city that denies
equal rights to inhabitants who do not practice the dominant religion. The population
is thus forced to submit to the dominant religious codes and is exposed to normalizing
mechanisms of control and repression. According to AlSayyad, this is an ideal-typical
definition, since in reality, urban fundamentalism manifests itself in highly diverse
forms. Still, AlSayyad (ibid.: 24) contends that the fundamentalist city exists, in its
essence, wherever ‘certain categories of people or the religious other are rendered
“bare life”’. Case studies in cities as diverse as Cairo, Peshawar, Jerusalem, Beirut, Delhi
and London have shown that fundamentalist urbanities can be produced by a variety of
complex processes. For instance, radical politico-religious groups may be successful if
they deliver social support through meaningful offers rooted in the transcendental or if
they provide the ground for new forms of citizenship and community. This is the case,
for example, in urban contexts in which structures of power and exploitation inherited
LANZ AND OOSTERBAAN 6

from the colonial past, ethno-nationalist projects, selective modernization processes


and the arrogance of elites towards popular needs interlock.
What makes the term ‘fundamentalist city’ problematic is, first, the fact that
its sole focus on ‘dangerous’ radical variants of religion tends to result in a blanket
pathologization of urban-religious transformation processes. This bears the danger
of the approach reifying the differentiations made by a Western-centric urban theory
along the lines of modernity/backwardness, order/disorder or secular/fundamentalist.
Instead of coupling the terms ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘city’, it would be more appropriate
to understand the phenomena observed as dynamic urban constellations that are––in
addition to other processes––also marked by a fundamentalist logic. Put differently,
the ‘fundamentalist city’ as an overarching term submits highly diverse, often self-
contradictory or ambivalent urban-religious constellations to an overly simplistic and
dramatizing logic, according to which others are rendered ‘bare life’.
Nonetheless, the approach can be productive, principally when used in conjunc­
tion with the concept of ‘medieval modernity’, employed by AlSayyad and Roy (2006)
to capture the relationship between citizenship and urbanism in the contemporary
city. The authors argue that ‘modern forms of national citizenship might be giving way
to a fractal and splintered territorialisation of citizenship in medieval enclaves’ (ibid.:
17). The contemporary city, increasingly fragmented into quasi-feudalist enclaves,
can be understood as medieval in so far as it is marked by ‘competing sovereignties’
and ‘fiefdoms of regulation or zones of no law’ (ibid.: 1). AlSayyad and Roy distinguish
different types of such urban enclaves: the ‘gated enclave’, a sealed-off, privately gov­
erned community of the elites; the ‘regulated squatter settlement’, marked by informality
and governed by non-state actors (ibid.: 10); and the ‘camp’, a no-law zone marked by
a ‘state of desubjectivization’ (Butler, 2004: 98, cited in AlSayyad and Roy, 2006: 14).
These all constitute ‘states of exception’––spaces ‘in which the normal order is de facto
suspended’ (Agamben, 1995: 31, cited in AlSayyad and Roy, 2006: 13).
The fundamentalist city approach is useful to the extent that it reminds us that
politico-religious groups, presenting orthodox, transformative projects that seek to
remodel the environment, establish themselves in urban settings, which they attempt to
govern according to religious rules. In this sense, ‘medieval modernity’ is established––
not exclusively, but certainly also––in the context of ‘urban regimes of religious rule’
that ‘carve up the city into different orders of citizenship’ (ibid.: 11). AlSayyad and
Roy identified such regimes in particular in the enclave type of the regulated squatter
settlement (see Lanz, 2016, this issue). This symposium demonstrates that the gated
enclaves of the elites can also be subject to regimes of religious rule (see Çavdar, 2016;
Ukah, 2016, both in this issue).
We should, however, remain careful not to limit ourselves to one particular
notion of the contemporary territorialization of religion or to one spatial model of
competing sovereignties. The ‘medieval modernity’ concept suggests that we are deal­
ing with bounded territories. However, Étienne Balibar (2004) has shown that in con­
temporary society borders should no longer be conceived primarily as ‘lines’ but rather
as detention zones and as filtering systems, which radically shifts notions of inside and
outside. From this follows that the re-production of different subject-positions, tied to
different sovereign orders, maintains a certain spatiality, but not necessarily following
the model of a bounded territory with a recognizable border that marks the transition
from one sovereign order to the other. Modes of citizenship predicated on religious
affiliation do not necessarily translate into segregated religious spaces. We also witness
that religious groups attempt to envelop their followers in particular religious spheres,
produced, for example, by religiously sanctioned taxis, shops, media or business con­
tacts that appear in cityscapes. With reference to urban Nigeria, Brian Larkin (2008:
6) shows that infrastructures that shape the fabric of urban life are ‘the conduits that
dictate which flows of religious and cultural ideas move and therefore which social
ENTREPRENEURIAL RELIGION IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERAL URBANISM 7

relations get mobilized in their wake’. Thinking about urban space in terms of such
infrastructures––often consisting of religious ideologies, practices and materialities––
allows us to localize fundamentalist tenets not only in certain places (enclaves), but also
in networks, technologies and media.

State-driven, church-driven and self-governed urban-religious development


This symposium seeks to analyse characteristic forms of entanglement between
neoliberal urbanism and entrepreneurial religions in the contemporary city. Its three
case studies are interconnected in that each of them sheds light on a different variation
of the entanglement of state, market and religion in urban space. The analysis of the
Muslim gated community complex Basaksehir in Istanbul shows it to be a market-
ori­ented urban development driven by a desecularized state. The gated ‘Redemption
City’ in Lagos is owned by a Pentecostal prosperity church and reveals itself as a church-
driven urban development. The ‘born-again favela’ in Rio, finally, is neither the project
of a government apparatus with a religious agenda nor the venture of a profit-oriented
church, but the result of urban-religious worlding processes from below, driven by
favela inhabitants.

— Istanbul: state-driven urban-religious development


In the first case-study, Ayşe Çavdar analyses the urban configuration of religion,
politics, gated community construction and class formation in contemporary Istanbul.
It investigates the public–private development of the gated community complex
Basaksehir and its appropriation by middle-class Islamists. Çavdar, inspired by the
analysis of ‘medieval modernity’, shows that the blueprint of an urban form that is not
explicitly religious becomes highly attractive to religious actors who search for enclosed
urban enclaves in which Islamic communities can be protected against moral threats.
As Çavdar shows, the rise of contemporary Islamic gated neighbourhoods should be
understood in light of the coming to power of an Islamist Turkish government. Contrary
to pre-modern Ottoman Islamic urban enclaves, the Islamic gated communities cater
specifically to the Islamic upper middle classes that have wealth to invest and desire
a different urban-religious lifestyle than the ‘traditional’ one in the neighbourhoods
they want to escape. They seek a blending of Islamic with ‘common’ middle-class
values (single-family houses, respect for privacy) and see in Basaksehir the perfect
place for their desired life. These new configurations of middle-class lifestyles and
religion allow Çavdar to argue for a new conceptualization of the place and character
of religion in postmodern society. As Çavdar proposes, ‘reprofanation’ rather than
‘deprivatization’ or ‘pietization’ of religion best captures the current transformation of
religion.

— Lagos: church-driven urban-religious development


In the second article, Asonzeh Ukah analyses the contemporary growth of reli­
gious urban estates outside of Lagos. Arguing against a perpetuating description of
African cities in terms of deficiencies, Ukah proposes to view the development of Lagos
in terms of three spatio-religious shocks. The first of these shocks was the result of a
missionary-colonial endeavour to spatially organize the flow of goods and slaves that
lasted until 1915; the second one, which lasted until the 1970s, followed the attempt
of the Yoruba-initiated Christian Aladura movement to reconfigure Lagos’s urban envi­
ronment by building shrines and designating sacred groves, mountains and hills. The
actual spatio-religious shock, finally, is characterized by the Pentecostal appropriation
of large estates outside of Lagos. The so-called prayer camps, which contain houses,
businesses and prayer sites, are considered sacred places that display a new configu­
ration of real-estate investment and religion. Ukah analyses the largest of these camps,
the Redemption Camp of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), to argue
LANZ AND OOSTERBAAN 8

that urban development in Lagos is propelled by an aggressive form of religious revival


that transcends the borders between economics, spirituality and territorial conquest.
The Redemption Camp is a nearly self-sustaining estate owned by the church, which
itself is the leading party in this urban development. Nevertheless, as Ukah argues,
rich Nigerian adherents of the church desire to acquire property in the camp because
it allows them to secure their wealth while displaying their status as true believers.
The article shows how Pentecostal-entrepreneurial organizations such as the RCCG
have become the powerful engines behind a particular urban spread and clustering in
Nigeria.

— Rio de Janeiro: urban-religious worlding from below


In the third article, Stephan Lanz discusses the increase of Pentecostal adherents
in Rio de Janeiro in relation to the place of the favela in the urban-political spectrum.
Lanz critically engages with the work of AlSayyad and Roy (2006), among others, to
demonstrate that patterns of urban segregation and intensification of religious zeal do
not necessarily translate into a model in which religious actors ‘carve up the city’ into
different orders of citizenship. It is the Brazilian state that has been part and parcel of
the production of the favela as a segregated space and of an understanding of favela
dwellers as second-class citizens. In contrast to these classifications, Pentecostalism
presents a new mode of governmentality that breaks with some of the existing power
configurations. It allows favela inhabitants to claim equal citizenship and offers them
the possibility of a special status beyond daily precarity, the reign of violence and  ­
arbi­trary state action through religious practice. In this way, a new urban-religious
configuration has emerged, in which the Pentecostal movement and the favela are
intertwined and transform each other. Lanz shows that Pentecostal rebirth in the favela
involves technologies of self-governance that unfold in the interplay between the
modes of domination of the churches and the constellation of legal/illegal governance
that characterizes the favela. Strikingly, these urban-religious technologies of self-gov­
ernance are infused with neoliberal notions of entrepreneurial individuals. Pentecostal
adherents are identified as independent ‘entrepreneurs of faith’ and as self-made (wo)
men rather than as second-class citizens.

Analysing urban-religious configurations in the field of tension between


entrepreneurial religion and neoliberal urbanism
In this section, we argue that, for the purposes of a comparative interpretation
of the phenomena identified in the case studies, theoretical approaches developed by
different ‘schools’ of urban studies should be used in combination with each other. This
approach is an attempt to address Jennifer Robinson’s call for a ‘style of theorizing’
that ‘would be neither a parochial universalism nor a uniform global analytical field
but a rich and fragmented array of ongoing conversations across the world of cities’
(Robinson, 2011a: 19). We consequently did not try to force the case studies into the
strictures of an a priori theoretical and methodological framework. Rather, overarching
conceptual approaches were only developed following ethnographic analysis of the
case studies, based on collaborative conversation.
First, we show that the most successful urban-religious movements can be
regarded as entrepreneurial religions in that they produce paradigmatic neoliberal
forms of organization. In the second part, we discuss, by way of a comparative look at
the case studies, the ways in which the boom of these entrepreneurial religions is inter­
twined with the processes of neoliberal urbanism in Lagos, Istanbul and Rio. We argue
that neither neoliberal frameworks nor the existing approaches to urban religion lend
themselves to a comprehensive understanding of the variegated modes of interaction
between entrepreneurial religion and the urban. In the third part, we develop our
own approach to urban-religious configurations in an attempt to capture the mutually
ENTREPRENEURIAL RELIGION IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERAL URBANISM 9

constitutive relations between the urban and the religious in all their fragility and
diversity.
Through this work, we see ourselves contributing to recent efforts in urban
studies to establish a ‘theoretical pluralism’ that seeks to overcome the ‘outdated polit­
ical economy/post-structuralism divide’ (Mayer and Künkel, 2012: 9) or the chasm
between critical urban theory and assemblage urbanism (McFarlane, 2011; Robinson,
2011b) by combining several theoretical approaches tailored to specific questions and
objects of research. In the conclusion, we identify essential elements of the urban-
religious configurations examined here and show that entrepreneurial religions are
significant actors within urban capitalism and modernity.

— Entrepreneurial religion as a constitutive force of contemporary capitalism in


the city
Generally speaking, talk of the return of religion to the city––often wrongly inter­
preted as a return to the ‘purity of a religious past’ (Larkin and Meyer, 2006: 309)––
tends to obstruct recognition of the significance of religions as vehicles for a worlding
that unfolds in the midst of a neoliberal ‘logic of entrepreneurialism’ (Ong, 2011: 4).
For one, marginalized groups such as the urban poor and rural–urban migrants or––in
Western cities––immigrants and their upwardly ambitious descendants, often pro­
actively and very successfully adopt ‘a particular lifeworld determined by neoliberal
rules’ (Schiffauer, 2014: 49). The rise of Islamism in Istanbul analysed by Çavdar (2016,
this issue) illustrates this process. Whereas the original mass basis of its followers was
located in the informal gecekondu settlements, many contemporary followers have
successfully ascended to the middle class and aspire to live in the religious gated
communities. Secondly, the actors driving the new urban religions come from the ranks
of the educated middle class––who saw themselves cut off from their prospects for the
future, ‘felt marginalized by the dominant economic, political or cultural processes in
their societies’ (Bayat, 2007b: 581), and transferred their social ambitions to the field
of religion. The RCCG in Lagos, analysed by Ukah (2014; this issue), is an impressive
example of such a process.
As the three case studies in this symposium show, both religious mass move­
ments examined here––one Christian, the other Islamic––’mediate a particular kind
of religious modernity in which morality is brought to bear on the question of the
achievement and distribution of wealth’ (Larkin and Meyer, 2006: 309). We follow
Asef Bayat (2007a), Werner Schiffauer (2010; 2014) and others in calling the religious
movement examined here in connection with Istanbul ‘post-Islamism’. This phenom­
enon emerged in the 1990s as a ‘movement and worldview’ (Bayat, 2007a: 6) that set
itself apart from Islamism, putting sober work in place of a revolutionary blow that
would conquer evil. Essentially, it ‘represents an endeavor to fuse religiosity and
rights, faith and freedom, Islam and liberty’ (ibid.: 11). The second mass movement
relevant to the symposium is the Christian born-again movement––with Pentecostalism
as one of its most salient tenets. This movement is best described as a family of differ­
ent Christian traditions and practices that stress the gifts of God and the possibility
of conversion and offer adherents distinct possibilities of reordering notions of self and
society. ‘The new individualism the movement gives rise to represents in many ways
a revolutionary departure from the forms of social control and the cycle of debt and
obligation that constitute the historical forms of subjection’ (Marshall, 2009: 173).
With regard to both religious movements, Jean Comaroff (2009: 22) makes the
correct observation that ‘the character of contemporary faith is integral to a new stage
in the life of capital’ and the ‘reorganization of core components of capitalism as social
formation’. Schiffauer (2014: 56) defines the central elements of governance in both
reawakening movements as ‘a promise of salvation, asceticism and personal respon­
sibility; communitarianism, and missionizing’. They are expressed ‘in the language of
LANZ AND OOSTERBAAN 10

neoliberal mobilization and motivational campaigns’ (ibid.) that merge the secular and
the sacred and depict the world as a competitive arena.
Although seemingly incompatible, Pentecostalism and post-Islamism bear strik­
ing similarities. Larkin and Meyer (2006: 310) call them ‘doppelgänger’, since both of
them grant ‘access to global infrastructures and are trying [to attract] members into a
new religious regime thriving on new forms of subjectivation’ (ibid.). In their attacks
on their religious traditions, they have more in common with each other than they do
with the mainstream of their ‘own’ respective religions (Schiffauer, 2014: 50): both
movements borrow from each other types of proselytizing and socio-political activity;
both are individualized, de-culturalized forms of religion; and both find their social
base in similar social strata: young, well-educated urban milieus and––in Western
cities––often second- or third-generation descendants of immigrants.
Seen as a practice that is interwoven with the worldly realm, such urban religion
is not only connected with the ‘spirit of capitalism’ in the sense of Max Weber. Whereas
Weber was following a traditional mentalist approach of religious studies, which
relegated religion to the realm of private spirituality, the material approach to religion
we are following ‘takes as a starting point that religion is a mundane as well as world-
making social-cultural phenomenon’ (Meyer, 2014: 595). It elucidates that religion has
‘a strong material presence via objects, pictures, sounds, styles of dress, buildings, and
so on’ (ibid., emphasis in original; cf. Vásquez, 2011; Garbin, 2012). Religion, then, is best
seen as a ‘practice of mediation’ (Meyer, 2009: 11) between the idea and experience of
supernatural powers and everyday life. Religious communities provide rituals and a
precise code of conduct that believers are expected to govern their lives by on a daily
basis. The strategic programme of each particular religious community is inscribed into
the (new) believer in the process of subjectivization, which is largely realized through
bodily practices enacted in urban space (Lanz, 2014a).
In all their practices and fabrications, the forms of contemporary faith analysed
in the three case studies are thoroughly pervaded by neoliberal expressions of capi­
talism. The process by which this happens does not so much take the shape of a quasi-
mechanical response to the exclusionary effects of neoliberalism as that of an innovatory
vanguard that bear ‘aspirations––visions of a this-worldly millennium––that help pre­
pare the ground for more radical, market-oriented reforms’ (Comaroff, 2009: 24).
If we follow Foucauldian perspectives of neoliberalism, it is to be regarded as
a ‘global form’ and a ‘mobile technology’ (Ong, 2011: 4) that is rooted in an optimizing
‘logic of entrepreneurialism’. This optimizing logic also pervades domains and milieus
that––like religion––appear at first glance to be unconnected to the market, unfolding
in an ‘urban terrain of unanticipated borrowings, appropriations, and alliances’ (ibid.).
As a technology of governance, neoliberalism urges people to assume responsibility for
themselves and draws on personal loyalty relationships within, for example, neighbour­
hoods or religious communities. Thereby, the notion of freedom is key to effec­tive
governing. But freedom is understood not as a blank canvas. Rather, each indi­vidual
is called upon to make use of the freedom of self-governance, to act on the responsibility
for his or her own fate and the rationale of economic optimization (cf. Lanz, 2013). Since
this implies the risk of the individual refusing to meet this challenge, neoliberalism
grants not only more freedom but requires more security too: ‘Freedom has to be
stimulated, but in such a way that it remains within the parameters of normal
distribution––that’s what a politics of security does’ (Demirovic, 2008: 248).
The born-again faiths achieve this security by infusing believers’ subjective
processes with enough faith, aspiration and technologies of the self to enable them to
make use of their freedom in approved ways. They meet the disruptions of a globally
operating neoliberalism with a ‘total reclamation of the social sphere’ in that they offer
‘cogent orders of fixed referents and absolute truths’, thus mimicking ‘the creative forms
ENTREPRENEURIAL RELIGION IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERAL URBANISM 11

of the market, promising to unlock unprecedented sources of value and productivity


by tapping the direct operation of God in the world’ (Comaroff, 2009: 24; cf. Vásquez,
2009).
Whereas such born-again faiths are usually described as prosperity religions,
we prefer to define them as ‘entrepreneurial religions’: the term ‘prosperity religion’
essentially denotes a religious programme built on the promise to its adherents that
they will gain prosperity and upward social mobility if they submit to its tenets. ‘Entre­
preneurial religion’ reaches further: it points to the fact that its congregations consti­
tute a paradigmatic neoliberal form of organization––not only do they maximize their
adherents’ entrepreneurial self-government and the freedom inherent in a radically
free-market organizational structure, they also maximize security.

— The metropolitan religious mainstream: assembling neoliberal urban-religious


configurations
So what was the particular set of global circumstances that enabled these
entrepreneurial religions to spread in the city the way they did? In what follows, we
delineate the ways in which the boom of entrepreneurial religions in the cities we
investigated has been intertwined with the variegated processes of urban neoliberalism.
We show that it was not only the urban neoliberalization processes but, within them,
the role of the urban-religious movements too that have resulted in a massive balance
shift from actors marginalized by neoliberal processes towards those that pursue a
proactively neoliberal agenda.
Especially if we look at the Lagos case study, it seems that the gradual imple­
mentation of neoliberal policy models within the larger context of large rural–urban
migration movements and the effects of the economic crises that began in 1973 con­
stituted a turning point. In the global South, the structural adjustment measures
implemented by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were instrumental in setting
in motion a ‘dramatic destruction of state capacity’, as Ukah argues with regard to Lagos.
In Rio, Lanz argues, the enormous growth of born-again Christianity began at a time that
saw authoritarian modernization, economic decline, the debt crisis and IMF-mandated
stabilization plans intertwined with the rise of the drug industry. In Istanbul, according
to Çavdar, economic liberalization and its social and economic effects drastically
changed the balance between secular forces and growing religious forces. This was the
overall situation in which ‘the belief in progress collapsed which underlay the intra-
societal hope of salvation’ (Schiffauer, 2014: 55). Especially for young, educated groups
with upward aspirations, who now saw themselves barred from a future in the secular
world, ‘the failure of both capitalist modernity and socialist utopia … made the language
of morality (religion) a substitute for politics’ (Bayat, 2007b: 581). This opened up an
opportunity for providers of religion to offer an alternative type of religion that broke
away from tradition and promised a giant leap, as it were, into a better future in this life.
As Eric Sheppard (2014: 145) argues with regard to development norms in the
cities of the global South, the policies of a radical replacement of state-led development
with structural adjustment programmes as promoted until the 1990s were, in the Post-
Washington Consensus that was developed in the wake of the Asian crisis of 1997,
complemented and attenuated by a ‘good governance’ concept. Based on models from
the global North, a series of ‘reforms’ were implemented, the main rationale of which
was the development of policies that would foster economic competitiveness. All three
metropolises discussed here––Istanbul, Rio, and, in the past decade, Lagos––exemplify
some of the ‘reforms’ created by an urban politics that has made itself subservient
to the global market. Significant are an upgrading of the infrastructure and the built
environment with the aim of capital accumulation, the ‘cleanup’ of informal land use,
the subjugation of the use and aesthetics of urban space to Western standards, the
LANZ AND OOSTERBAAN 12

reg­ularization of land markets according to the rules of private property and the
‘privatization of public utilities and services’ (ibid.: 146).
The authors of this symposium argue that economic and urban policy constel­
lations of this kind ‘cannot be regarded as the course but should rather be understood
as the context and space within which Pentecostal effervescence occurred’ (Ukah, this
issue).
In Istanbul, the transformation of a social housing programme into upscale,
pri­vately managed companies building gated communities bears the hallmarks of
competition-oriented municipal politics: the privatization of public services, the
upgrading of the built environment through public–private partnerships and the cre­
ation of new markets for urban services. Strikingly, during and after its transformation,
the project maintained the religious impetus of the original socially motivated housing
programme. Nevertheless, the change in political direction interacts with the rise
of a new, individualist, lifestyle that combines conservative Muslim values, urban
professionalism and ostentatious consumerism. In addition, a religious entrepreneurial
class has emerged that is handed public contracts in a clientelistic environment. This
post-Islamist, state-driven religious urban development thus combines policies char­
acteristic of neoliberal municipal politics with a matching transformation of religious-
political programmes on the part of the governing powers and the emergence of an
urban-religious lifestyle to match.
The character of Lagos as a Pentecostal city with an extensive religious pro­
duction of material space follows a number of different processes. Among these are
the expansion of education in the postcolonial era, an urban infrastructure that has
been declining for decades, the destruction of state capacity through IMF-imposed
structural adjustment measures, the advance of new religious groups into voids cre­
ated by these measures and the desire for a religiously pure, efficiently managed city.
The Redemption Camp, examined here, merges two opposing forms of urban space
production: the creation of real estate rooted in economic speculation and the creation
of sacred space rooted in religious motivation. Its central actor is a religious corporation
in which the lines between economics and religion are almost entirely dissolved. Its
production follows a cooperation between speculative big business and a state that
fosters entrepreneurialism through tax exemption and has ceded all its regulatory and
administrative duties (infrastructure, security, taxation) to this religious corporation.
Although the production of the Redemption Camp ‘privileges capital and profit above
piety, virtues or ethics’ (Ukah, this issue), its nature is nonetheless hybrid: its uses are
determined as much by its functions as a centre of religious self-examination, worship
and study for church members as by speculative vacancies, social exclusion and elites
walling themselves in.
Rio’s ‘born-again favela’ illuminates the rise of an entrepreneurial religion in
the context of a contradictory combination of state intervention into the favela and
an urban development policy geared towards the requirements of the global market.
Its outline was developed in the form of public–private partnerships with business
associations and shaped to serve the logic of global mega-events (cf. Lanz, 2014b). In
the favela, the state established a violent ‘war against drugs’ and a ‘governing through
community’ scheme that instrumentalized the traditional system of self-government
(cf. Lanz, 2012). This package was complemented by an urbanist state interventionism.
In large-scale infrastructure upgrading programmes, measures for regularizing infor­
mal settlements, social transfer measures and new security programmes are tied, in
authoritarian fashion, to the inhabitant’s acquiescence and the city’s global marketability
in general. The entrepreneurial religions offer favela inhabitants several possibilities
for engaging with this constellation of governance: they provide answers applicable in
everyday life to violence and the state of emergency, and they set clear dichotomies of
ENTREPRENEURIAL RELIGION IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERAL URBANISM 13

good and evil against the corrupt practices that mark the state’s alternating presence
and absence. The entrepreneurial construction of religion also produces a new kind of
‘spiritual economy’ that enables inhabitants to combine religion, economy and entre­
preneurial self-governance.
The three case studies first of all show how entrepreneurial religions (as para­
digmatic neoliberal forms of organization) are intertwined with features that are
char­acteristic of the ‘urbanization of neoliberalism’ which––according to Theodore
et al. (2011: 24)––mark ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (ibid.) at a global level. None
of the current urban-religious modes of interaction we analyse here can be described
as resistance movements against the destructive moments of neoliberalism that have
obliterated state capacities. Rather, these moments created an environment in which
the entrepreneurial urban religions could develop. It is actually the ‘moments of
creation’ in the neoliberal restructuring process that entrepreneurial religions engage
with. They even appear to co-create specific modes of neoliberal governance––through
the development of new speculative housing markets, the privatization of public
services, the creation and private regulation of urban spaces for the purpose of capital
accumulation, and the strategy of ‘capitalizing on social capital’ (Sheppard and Leitner,
2010: 187) as practiced in the ‘governing through community’ schemes implemented in
poor neighbourhoods.
Secondly, the case studies also illuminate the fact that urban-religious config­
urations cannot be fully comprehended––either from a political-economy or from a
governmentality angle––if interpreted solely within the conceptual framework of neo­
liberal urbanism. Both approaches have a tendency to occlude the ‘structured dynamic
of urban processes’ (Robinson, 2011c: 1088): ‘the first one through a functionalism in
the last instance …; the second because the Deleuzian dispersal/recomposition analysis
similarly evacuates the terrain of the urban as a distinctive, structured, and systematic
site of politics’.
Actual political-economic approaches define neoliberal urbanism as a highly
contested and contradictory ‘living institutional regime’ (Peck, et al., 2009: 65), in other
words, as dynamic, ‘specific hybrid formations’ that keep emerging in the open-ended,
erratic and unstable process of a ‘variegated neoliberalization’ (Brenner et al., 2010). The
term ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ points to the ‘contextual embeddedness and path
dependency’ (Peck et al., 2009: 50) as well as to globally circulating policy transfers (cf.
McCann, 2011) in which neoliberal restructuring strategies interact with ‘pre-existing
uses of space, institutional configurations, and constellations of sociopolitical power’
(Peck et al., 2009: 54). The three authors do note that there is ‘always more going on
than neoliberalism; there are always other active sources and forces of regulatory
change’ (Peck et al., 2013: 1093), but they do not provide any tools that would allow
this ‘more’ to be analytically tied to the processes of neoliberalization. Rather, their
conclusion somewhat simplistically states––as Parnell and Robinson (2012: 599) point
out––that ‘despite this diversity what we are seeing is a convergence of wide-ranging
policy innovations into a “syndrome” or wider tendency of neoliberalization at the
urban scale’.
As shown above, all urban-religious configurations analysed here are permeated
by elements characteristic of the ‘age of neoliberal urbanism’, both with regard to the
technologies of rule employed by the entrepreneurial congregations and in terms of their
entwinement with modes of urban governance. Thus, the agency of entrepreneurial
congregations produces, together with other actors, ‘contextually specific, yet globally
interconnected, conjunctural formations’ (Peck et al., 2009: 54) of neoliberal urbanism.
Still, some of the other central elements of the urban-religious configurations ana­
lysed here cannot be captured within a neoliberal framework. The clientelistic politi­
cal structures, the informality, the violence and the sheer urban materiality of the
LANZ AND OOSTERBAAN 14

‘born-again favela’, the regulatory practices and identification as a City of God of the
RCCG camp, and the dichotomy between secular and religious forces in light of religious
party politics in Istanbul are elements that do not fall within the scope of neoliberal
urbanism. This raises the question of how to analyse the connections between neoliberal
technologies and other processes and elements at work in the hybrid formations we
identified.

— Analysing entrepreneurial religion in the age of neoliberal urbanism as urban-


religious configurations
In this subsection we argue that the complex modes of interaction between the
religious and the urban can be captured by employing the ‘urban-religious configurations’
approach developed within the Global Prayers project (Becker et al., 2014; Lanz, 2014a)
that has given impetus to this symposium. This approach builds on a combination of
the two concepts of ‘worlding’ and ‘assemblage’, as well as on a revised comparative
urbanism. This makes it possible to throw into relief the high significance of neoliberal
technologies and formations in the emergence of urban-religious configurations with­
out either losing sight of processes that this approach cannot capture or wrongly sub­
suming them under any ‘syndrome’ associated with neoliberalization.
Taking the blind spots of a Western-centric urban theory as its departure point,
this approach seeks to systematically incorporate religion into urban studies––in both
its empirical and its theoretical aspects––as an integral factor of the production of the
urban in all its dimensions and thus to further advance the field’s postcolonization
(Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2009; 2011; Edensor and Jayne, 2012). This entails questioning
those assumptions that locate both the origins and the vanguard of urban modernity
in the cities of the West and concede that the cities of the global South are at best a
catching-up, copied version of modernity. We counter these assumptions with an
approach that regards and examines urban modernity as a phenomenon with multiple
origins that is hybrid in nature and circulates globally (Roy, 2011: 310).
In response to the Western-centric, secularist perspective of urban theory with
its over-emphasis on capitalist logic, as well as to the overly narrow postsecular and
fundamentalist city approaches, this research approach uses an ‘open heuristic concept
to focus on the question of the religion of the city’ (Lanz, 2014a: 25). Its conceptual
framework has come out of a number of case studies (including the three discussed in
this symposium), on the transregional academic field of city/religion, which, in terms
of methodology, are based on an actor-centric and a practical-theoretical research
approach. It is concerned less with (religious) worldviews or programmes than with
the ‘way of doing things’ the actors in urban-religious constellations employ. The
urban-religious configurations approach makes use of three current approaches in
urban studies: worlding, assemblage urbanism and a revised comparative urbanism (cf.
Lanz, 2014a).
On one level, urban religions can be understood as ‘practices of worlding’ in
the sense of Roy and Ong (2011), who conceive of worlding as an analytical framework
of postcolonial urbanism that is capable of examining urban situations both in their
particular and their global aspects without subjecting them to overly simplistic explan­­­
atory models. (Urban-religious) worlding practices ‘creatively imagine and shape alter­
native social visions and configurations––that is, “worlds”’ (ibid.: 12). They are urban
interventions in the sense of situated everyday practices enacted in a city understood
as a ‘field of intervention’ and a dynamic ‘nexus of situated and transnational ideas,
institutions, actors and practices’ (Ong, 2011: 4).
Within the context of the case studies presented here, worlding refers to the
aspi­rations and imaginations informing religiously motivated attempts to create alter­
native urban worlds that transcend the city as it exists in reality. The concept of
ENTREPRENEURIAL RELIGION IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERAL URBANISM 15

‘world­ing’ makes it possible to examine urban religion ‘as a constitutive force’ (Hancock
and Srinivas, 2008: 621) of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. It gives the researcher
a handle on interventions by religio-entrepreneurial urban governments (Istanbul), by
religious corporations or real-estate capital (Lagos), but also on religio-entrepreneurial
processes of ‘worlding from below’ (Simone, 2001) in the sense of aspiring practices of
ordinary people (Rio).
These practices are intertwined, in imaginary or real terms, with global move­
ments, whether they are urban-religious forms of inter-referencing and modelling
(Cities of God, gated communities), identities (belonging to the Ummah or to Pente­
costalism), or the expansion of religio-political and economic power (big church
corpo­rations, post-Islamism). Even though most of these religious groups––the RCCG
in Lagos among them––exaggerate the extent of their global presence as part of their
proselytizing strategy, the religious urbanities they produce can be viewed as global
forms. They are characterized by their ‘distinctive capacity for decontextualization
and recontextualization, abstractability and movement, across diverse social and cul­
tural situations and spheres of life. Global forms are able to assimilate themselves to
new environments, to code heterogeneous contexts and objects’ (Collier and Ong,
2005: 11). Pentecostal conversion is tied to the ‘projection on a global scale of images,
discourses and ideas about renewal and salvation’ (Marshall-Fratani, 2001: 89), and
with regard to post-Islamism, David Garbin (2010: 11) speaks of a ‘multiscalar con­
cep­tion of the Ummah, that is, articulating local, national as well as global/diasporic
spheres’.
In entrepreneurial religions, ‘modelling’ and ‘inter-referencing practices’ prove
to be central types of worlding (Ong, 2011: 21). The believers’ urban practices are rooted
in the inter-referential comparison between the here and now––often cast as a godless
hell, such as, for example, the favela in Rio––and an imagined elsewhere or future. The
RCCG Redemption Camp, for example, is the materialization of a City of God, which
is experienced as the positive mirror image of unruly Lagos. Religious organizations
package their innovations into models that refer directly to their holy scriptures (for
example the ‘New Jerusalem’) and seek to disseminate their successful urban-religious
transformation practices on a global level. This dissemination takes a variety of forms,
from physical versions of the City of God (Basaksehir, Redemption Camp) to models
of the sacralization of formerly profane urban cultures. Local–global networks and
the extensive use of electronic media serve to create a circulation process in which
religious narratives and images are continuously disseminated between the global
and the local (Marshall-Fratani, 2001: 83). Inter-referencing takes place both at the
local and the global level: not only does the Redemption Camp in Lagos serve as
a model for a City of God that the RCCG is planning in Dallas, Texas (cf. Vásquez,
2009)––competing local Pentecostal churches and even Muslim organizations take
their cue from it for their own prayer camps that line the Lagos–Ibadan highway like
pearls on a string.
The similarities of both types of religious movements analysed in this sympo­
sium are partly a result of this practice of reciprocal observation, borrowing and appro­
priation. In this respect, the religious communities are social actors too: they create
practices of ‘new solidarities’ that fuse––as described by Aihwa Ong (2011: 21) with
other examples––’neoliberal calculations’ and social activism. In contrast to traditional
socio-religious activities that are rooted in the concept of providing welfare to others,
the core elements of the entrepreneurial religions’ ‘new solidarities’ are empowerment
and the invocation of personal responsibility and of each individual’s ability to rise in
society through self-discipline and God’s miraculous workings. The case of Rio’s ‘born-
again favela’ illuminates the ways in which the urban poor, whose history is one of self-
governing, can use this essentially neoliberal programme to their advantage.
LANZ AND OOSTERBAAN 16

Our focus ‘on the city as a milieu of intervention and on the referential character
of such urban experiments’ (McCann et al., 2013: 586) sympathizes with the concept
of assemblage, since it lends itself to capturing the diversities, temporalities and
ambiguities that determine urban-religious interconnections. Religious practices––in
conjunction with other urban practices, actors, symbols and materialities––act as co-
functioning and sympathetic components that shape the city, which is seen here as an
assemblage, a multiple, dynamic, and contingent object (McFarlane, 2011).
The concept of assemblage does not posit power as power over but, following
Deleuze and Foucault, as power to (Dovey, 2011: 349) and in this manner it supports
an actor-centric analysis of religious urbanity. Rather than explaining phenomena
such as domination or injustice from structural causes, it examines how particular
asymmetries and unequal relations of power originate and identifies the shapes they
take. A similar approach is taken in the analysis of the role of capitalist processes.
Capitalism is investigated here ‘as a form of life’ in its specific role within urban-
religious configurations. It is not understood as an abstract global logic that subjugates
cities, but investigated ‘as a concrete process assuming multiple forms’ (Farías, 2011:
368).
The double perspective of the assemblage approach always points to the
relation between the material and the emerging, the prescribed and the possible,
between ‘expression and content’ (Simone, 2011: 357; cf. Farías, 2010) and allows for
capturing the double character of religion as both a prescriptive regime and a practice
of mediation between everyday life and supernatural experiences. The focus of the
assemblage approach on doing and performing and on the materiality of urban everyday
life supports a material view of religion as a force at work in creating the urban and
highlights the intertwinement of religion and urbanity. This means that religion is
investigated neither as ‘an independent variable nor an epiphenomenon or mere idiom’
(Meyer, 2014: 595) but as part and parcel of specific urban-religious configurations as
‘assemblages of material, social, symbolic, and sensuous spaces, processes, practices,
and experiences where the religious and the urban are interwoven and reciprocally
produce, influence, and transform each other’ (Lanz, 2014a: 30).
While this urban-religious configurations approach is based on a comparative
perspective, this does not mean that it advocates ‘systematic studies of similarity and
difference’ (Nijman, 2007: 1) between cities as mutually exclusive units. Filip de Boeck
(2014: 562) points to ‘paradox, ephemerality, disjuncture, and possibility’ as central
elements necessary to an understanding of the dynamic ambiguities within and between
urban-religious configurations. The term ‘comparison’ here thus denotes a particular
focus on transformations and connections within the context of (transnational) encoun­
ters and on overlaps between various urban-religious configurations that always point
to global processes and forms. This understanding of comparison follows Jane Jacobs’s
plea not to focus so much on whatever essential differences may exist between A and
B, but to investigate multiplicity and ‘directions of emergence and becoming’ (Jacobs,
2012: 905) and in this manner generate ‘an ever-present ground “untruthing”’ (ibid.:
907). The approach of this symposium thus answers recent calls for a ‘comparative
gesture’ (Robinson, 2011a) in urban studies that is more experimental, ‘tentative and
uncertain’ (ibid.: 19) than traditional comparative research and thus avoids its pitfalls
(cf. Robinson, 2014).
By way of conclusion, the theoretical and empirical potential that is inherent in
the examination of urban-religious configurations is not limited to the inclusion of the
previously marginalized category of religion in urban studies. The object of research
itself compels an experimental approach suited to push postcolonization processes
in urban studies forward. Only a shift of view that recognizes that the most dynamic
forms of religious-urban modernity are to be found in the global South can change the
established lines of inquiry of Western-centric research.
ENTREPRENEURIAL RELIGION IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERAL URBANISM 17

Interconnections and conclusions


To conclude, we want to highlight how our theoretical approaches intersect in
each article and what we can learn from this by comparison.
In his article, Ukah (this issue) explores the real-estate mechanisms that have
shaped the genesis of ‘Redemption City’ from a political-economic perspective and
illuminates how an assemblage of profit-oriented production of urban space, massive
materiality of sacred territory, religious mass practices and governmental interventions
turned the Redemption Camp into the flagship for entrepreneurial urban projects of
the RCCG. In their articles, Lanz (this issue) and Çavdar (this issue) employ the concept
of assemblage to show how the dynamic, varied and fragile interconnections between
a variety of actors, symbols and materialities shape the urban-religious configurations
of the born-again favela and the religious gated community, highlighting how these
assemblages are sustained by and reproduce technologies of rule and of the self.
Examined together, the three case studies on formations of religious neoliberal
urbanism (that merge politically directed market mechanisms with religious agency)
reveal a number of common characteristics.
First, and generally, all three case studies reveal the contradictory, hybrid and
fluid character of urban-religious configurations across religions, world regions and
cities, thus pointing to the fact that subsuming these configurations under homoge­
nizing concepts such as the fundamentalist city or the postsecular city is a problematic
endeavour. Religion turns out to be an ‘unstable signifier’ (Ivakhiv, 2006) that, depending
on context and situation, can lend itself equally well to reactionary and fundamentalist
claims and to emancipatory claims.
Secondly, all three cases demonstrate that state institutions play a pivotal role:
in Istanbul, the state appears as a central actor in the realization of an urban-religious
configuration that follows the rationale of a moral political economy; in Lagos, it is
present in the entanglements between political and church elites and the privileges
that have enabled the prosperity church to emerge as the largest private landowner and
build and rule its own city; and in Rio, it acts as a sovereign power that relegates certain
people to the status of ‘bare life’, issuing them with second-class citizenship and leaving
them to a neoliberal government through community, thus demarcating the territory in
which prosperity religion can evolve.
Thirdly, all urban-religious configurations examined here can be read as exam­
ples of medieval modernity in the sense of AlSayyad and Roy (2006). In all of them, the
relationship between citizenship and urbanism is marked by the city’s fragmentation
into quasi-feudal enclaves. In the religious gated enclaves that are governed by the logic
of economic gain (Basaksehir, Redemption Camp) urban elites rule themselves on the
basis of norms that apply only within their confines. Nevertheless, in the case of the
born-again favelas, the enclave is not the product of an ‘urban regime of religious rule’
(ibid.: 11) but of a failure on the part of the secular state to provide favela inhabitants
with a citizenship on the basis of democracy and rule of law, keeping them instead in
a ‘fiefdom of regulation’ (ibid.: 1). Here, entrepreneurial religion does not contribute
to ‘carv[ing] up the city into different orders of citizenship’ (ibid.: 1); on the contrary, it
constitutes an attempt by subaltern groups to seize an equal citizenship. This illustrates
that urban fundamentalism does not necessarily follow a repressive logic and that the
fractal and splintered forms of urban citizenship do not necessarily follow the spatial
model of enclaves. Spaces that from one perspective can be portrayed as enclaves
(favelas, ruled by criminal factions, for instance) are, from another perspective, made up
by translocal or fluid spheres (churches) that may offer connections to other sovereign
orders. Especially the born-again favela shows that the concept of the fundamentalist
city based on exclusionary practices, as described by AlSayyad, has to be complemented
and contrasted by AbdouMaliq Simone’s notion (2014: 159) that urban fundamentalism
opens up ‘a space and time of the miraculous’. This kind of fundamentalism is a positive
LANZ AND OOSTERBAAN 18

reference to ‘the fundamentals of the city’ in that it invokes the potential, implicitly
inherent in the city, to endow inhabitants who lack the eligibility to act with an ‘ability
… to act’ (ibid.).
Fourthly, it becomes apparent that the entrepreneurial branches of the religions
discussed here (Pentecostalism, post-Islamism) are global forms that––in their interplay
with other urban forces and actors––evolve into specific urban-religious configurations.
Viewed as worlding processes, they all spring from a determination to create an earthly
version of a City of God. It becomes apparent across the different urban-religious
configurations in which the programmes and practices of entrepreneurial religion
become entwined with those of neoliberal urbanism, that religious urbanities have
thrust their way into the heart of urban modernization. They produce a ‘religious
metropolitan mainstream’ (Lanz, 2014a: 36) in that their urban development strategies
and lifestyles have their counterparts in certain worldwide core elements of late
capitalist urbanity. The market and marketing mechanisms at work in Basaksehir and
the Redemption Camp are exemplary of the production processes of neoliberal urbanity;
the gated community concept they are modelled on conforms to the type of space
paradigmatic of the late capitalist city; the entrepreneurial mechanisms playing out in
the born-again favela can be read as pioneering neoliberal anti-poverty schemes based
on self-discipline and micropreneurship; the codes of conduct and modes of (self-)
governance employed by the urban entrepreneurial religions are mobile technologies
that could have sprung from the pages of an imaginary handbook of neoliberalism; their
solidarity models operate with a distribution of resources based on religious affiliation
and combine neoliberal calculation with social activism. And finally, the elites walling
themselves off, the quasi-feudal rulers of the Cities of God, the religious gangsters
and the micro-entrepreneurial pastors are, in a way, social prototypes for a ‘modern-
medieval’ neoliberal model of the city.
The contradictory, ambiguous, hybrid and fluid character of these connections
between the religious and the urban point to this symposium’s overarching rationale:
to establish and put to the test––by way of three case studies that highlight the ways
in which urban-religious developments can be state-driven, church-driven or self-
governed––a conceptual approach that, taking the blind spots of a Western-centric
urban theory as its point of departure, seeks to systematically incorporate religion into
urban studies as an integral factor of the production of the urban.
The symposium illuminates the fact that the religious in the city does not con­
stitute a niche phenomenon, nor can it be subsumed under the labels of various homog­
enizing syndromes (postsecularism, fundamentalism, neoliberalism). Rather, it should
be regarded as a constitutive force of contemporary urban capitalism and modernity.
The symposium’s globally comparative approach––which locates similar developments
in metropolises of the South (Rio, Lagos) and on the margins of the West (Istanbul),
thereby revealing their modernity on a global scale––thus constitutes a contribution to
the postcolonization of the field of urban studies.
By way of a comparative analysis of the three case studies, this introduction argues
that an approach that conceives of the mutually constitutive relations between the
urban and the religious as ‘urban-religious configurations’ (Lanz, 2014a) while employ­
ing the concepts of ‘worlding’ and ‘assemblage’ is capable of analysing religion as an
integral part of all dimensions of the urban. Applying the concept of ‘worlding’ enables
us to analyse religiously motivated imaginations, aspirations and interventions to create
alternative urban worlds that transcend the city as it exists in reality. In contrast to the
other approaches discussed here, an understanding of urban-religious configurations
as assemblages leads to an understanding of the contradictory, multifaceted character
of the interaction between city and religion as it moves between the material and the
emerging, the doing and the performing, the prescribed and the possible.
ENTREPRENEURIAL RELIGION IN THE AGE OF NEOLIBERAL URBANISM 19

Stephan Lanz, Economic and Social Geography, Faculty of Social and Cultural
Sciences, European University Viadrina, Große Scharrnstraße 59, 15230 Frankfurt
(Oder), Germany, lanz@euv-frankfurt-o.de

Martijn Oosterbaan, Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Behavioural


Sciences, Utrecht University, Padualaan 14, 3584 CH Utrecht, Netherlands, martijn.
oosterbaan@gmail.com

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