Girard, “Spirit-Filled Geopolitics”
Abstract: Set in the town of Copan Ruinas, Honduras, this article describes the role of Pentecostal ‘Christians’ ontology in their broad support for the 2009 coup, which overthrew the left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya. It draws on recent scholarship that considers how the political engagement of some indigenous movements in Latin America diverge from modern framings of “politics” in order to argue that Pentecostals similarly engage in a nonmodern mode of political action. Among other nonmodern elements, this mode of Pentecostal politics—which I term “spirit-filled geopolitics”—includes both an apocalyptic temporality and integrated “supernatural”/political domains. The article utilizes indigenous-focused scholarship as a framework for detailing how Pentecostal politics remain entangled with, but not reducible to, both the dynamics of neoliberalism and the practices and imaginaries of the secular nation state—especially in the Cold War geopolitics of the 1980s.