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DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12365
— symposium
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
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).
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
‘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
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
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