Evangelical Protestantism on the Move: A Look at the Theologies of Prosperity in a Postcolonial Context. Examples of Black Faithful from the Middle and Upper Classes
The Prosperity theology as a paradigm has been the subject of much analysis. Often, this abundance involves the mobilization of the notions of absence, lack, insufficiency, waiting, passivity, blockage, miserableness, laziness, especially in studies that have focused on the Churches of Africa or Latin America. Yet, on the ground, behind this concept, there is no evidence, no homogeneity, but a constellation of infinitely diverse meanings and practices, where resurgence and creation are intertwined. However, despite the heterogeneity of representations of what it designates and the realities it implies, its declination in the plural has not flourished in the social sciences. And it is this contrast between the specificity of the ethnographic view and the permanence of an ethnographically disinformed notion that pushes us to rethink it. This article therefore proposes to revisit this concept, in the light of the profound reconfigurations that the Franco-Belgian Protestant landscape and that of postcolonial movements have undergone in recent decades, in order to better understand the different games of appropriation and (re)interpretation at work within this religious movement.