Gender Trouble, Spiritual Trouble: Female Leadership in Precarity

The female Pentecostal leaders introduced in this article demonstrate various strategies that African Pentecostal women can draw on to navigate gender paradoxes in the messy and complex context of a post-migration, post-colonial European city. The approaches of Pastor Miranda and Pastor Elisabeth place a strong emphasis on being a good Christian woman. Both pastors demonstrate an approach that seems to be more aware of the precarities and power relations in which women of African origins build their everyday lives in Dutch cities. In this section I will discuss the practices of holiness and care in more detail, without assuming that these are completely different or opposed.

First of all, for all the female leaders with whom I interacted in the context of my study, good Pentecostal womanhood is rooted in the practice and performance of a holy lifestyle. This requires intense religious labour (e.g. Casselberry 2018), as has become visible in this article. The vignette already indicates that inviting the people to bring Jesus into their lives in the red-light district is not something that these women do lightly and easily. It required intense prayer before, during and after the outreach. Moreover, the outreach itself was seen as a form of spiritual warfare. Engaging in this spiritually dangerous and morally fraught part of the city, as well as coping with the reluctance of the sex-workers to agree to talk to them, were all part of this intense labour. Bringing people to Jesus is serious business. It’s ‘The King’s Business’, as the organizers of the Women’s Conference put it, the word business indicating that good Christian womanhood indeed requires work. I observed women performing such intense religious labour in church settings as well. Before stepping into a leadership role during a religious service, pastors kneel down next to their chairs and pray intensely. I met Pastor Julie after her prayer group in a Hague parish church, when she had not been at home after a long day at the office. Individual women I interviewed and a group of female pastors from the Rotterdam area I joined for an evening retreat all mentioned their daily and weekly routines of prayer in the morning. For Pentecostal Christians these intense practices of prayer and worship have the purpose of becoming fully absorbed by their spiritual lives and developing an intimate relationship with God (e.g. Luhrman 2005). This is significant beyond personal and church life, as it also affirms that they are good Christians and good citizens (Fumanti 2010). For female leaders this serves as a way to claim spiritual authority (e.g. Casselberry 2018).

Secondly, this article has demonstrated that sexuality is intrinsically part of living holy. It is from living holy that good sex emerges (e.g. Spronk 2014), while good sex in turn also constructs holiness. Living holy is emphasized as important to all Christians, regardless of their gender. However, the construction of good sex in African Pentecostal churches relies on distinct feminine and masculine roles, symbolically marked by referring to female leaders as wives and mothers. I noted the centrality of male sexual desire and virility that is central to both male and female roles. Women are expected to fulfil male sexual desire to realize a stable marriage, or resist men and their urges to prevent sexual interaction outside of marriage. Female sexuality, in other words, appears to be central to the personal and social transformation that is required to produce good Christian personhood, families and congregations (e.g. van de Kamp 2012). Moreover, male-female relations are sexualized to produce a form of masculine authority that is associated with virility (Obadare 2018, Lindhardt 2015). Women’s cooperative ethic, as we observed in the figure of Pastor Elisabeth with her emphasis on women’s responsibility to please their husbands sexually, has the purpose of completing male authority that otherwise remains incomplete (Casselberry 2018).

This study has focused on female Pentecostal leaders, women who are predominantly middle-class, educated professionals, and part of an emerging elite within religious and ethnic communities (e.g. Werbner 1991). In informal interactions with the women who made up the audience of the two conferences there was a lot of appreciation for how space was created for what they considered to be ‘typical’ women’s issues, yet in this informal public setting there was little opportunity for more detailed conversations about how they experienced the ways in which sexuality and intimacy came up during the conference. However, research among Afro-Dutch women conducted as part of the same project, did suggest that religious leaders do play important roles in offering knowledge, guidance and counselling on matters of sexual well-being (e.g. Bakuri 2021, Bartelink and Knibbe 2019). A focus on female leadership among Afro-Dutch Pentecostal women is also relevant in terms of how it reflects broader trends in female leadership in European societies. Pastor Elisabeth’s construction of female and male roles in marriages illustrates the division of labour in which the physical and emotional support of members of the family falls primarily on the women (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). Yet, as the irony in Pastor Julie’s introduction of herself as a pastor’s wife indicates, this is not the only narrative about women. Since the 1960s women are no longer defined solely by their husbands, and their individual biographies have changed alongside the dynamics within marriage and the family (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). Female leadership makes these changes visible, hence offers a lens on how the pressures on family and marriage that have emerged since then are navigated and solved within African Pentecostal communities in European cities.

This article has demonstrated how female leaders navigate the challenges of gendered norms and individual lived realities in different ways. The outreach in the red-light district in the vignette constructs the Pentecostal women as ‘respectable’ Christian women in contrast to the unsaved sex-worker, who is a woman in need of recovery and conversion (e.g. McGrow 2017). The sex-worker Maria resisted this binary opposition. Maria’s critique can be seen as a critique on women who reaffirm and promote patriarchal norms. Her critique laid bare the limited interest of the missionaries in the sex-workers’ lives, their multiple identities, their religiosity and spirituality. While we do need to consider that, from a Pentecostal perspective, saving women to become part of the Kingdom of God is also a loving and divine act, the encounter reveals women who are caught up in the patriarchal construction of gender and sexuality. Lacking knowledge about the individual women who were doing sex work, the glass windows became ‘mirrors’ (McGrow 2017) in which the sex-worker had to be the very other to the Pentecostal women: ‘unholy’, ‘unsaved’, ‘unchaste’ and ‘unclean’.

These mirrors, however, also indicate that Christian rescue missions have something in common with secular progressive politics, as discussed in the literature review. Secular progressivism problematizes religion and culture as hindering women’s empowerment, which has influenced domestic and international policies and programmes that focus on rescuing women from harmful religions and cultures (e.g. Abu Lughod 2015, Bartelink and Le Roux 2020). Christian rescue missions that want to save women from their lives in darkness and sin tend to be seen as deeply problematic because they confirm the secular preoccupation with religion as a force imposed on women. Yet, both are missionary endeavours that centralize a problem analysis that is not (necessarily) shared by women who are affected by inequality and violence. They also tend to impose their solution strategies without considering how those women who are subjected to them propose to navigate precarity and realize well-being.

Female Pentecostal leaders’ perspectives and approaches in respect of gender and sexuality are more complex and diverse than public understandings of religious conservatism suggest. The ethnographic account of conversations around sexual well-being in church contexts, forms of care and support become visible that often remain unnoticed within both the dominant secular and Christian discourses. When I invited Pastor Julie to reflect on her gentle correction of Pastor Elisabeth’s advice that women with sexual trauma should focus on sexually pleasuring their husbands, she suggested that Pastor Elisabeth is an older woman and that generational differences in addressing sexuality in public were at play. Furthermore, Pastors Ruth, Julie and Mercy all bring their professional and academic knowledge and skills into their practice as pastors. This does not make all female leaders formally independent of their spouses or marital status in the context of the church: after all, Pastor Julie is also a pastor’s wife. Yet, these female leaders’ roles go beyond the traditional gender roles to which society confined them for so long. At the same time, their authority as ‘mothers’ in the church is also vested in their class position and, in the cases of Julie, Mercy and Ruth, their professional knowledge and skills.

The question remains to what extent these leaders as ‘mothers’ are endowed with an authority that also denies women in less privileged positions their agency (e.g. Gaitskell 2000 on the construction of motherhood in missionary narratives in South Africa)? Here we have observed how female leaders’ caring work creates a space for alternative forms of leadership in the church. While caring relations may reaffirm gender and class differences, Hochschild (2013) also reminds us that care produces empathy. In the case of the female Pentecostal leaders in The Hague, this meant that they created a space for leadership around precarious gender and sexual issues that does not fit the normative ideal type of Pentecostal discourse and theology. This ‘politics of the personal’, as observed in historical studies of female Christian leadership in southern Africa, creates solidarity among women across racial and class divides (Gaitskell 2000, 88). In the context of the African-Dutch churches this translates not only into a more sensitive and knowledgeable approach to issues around sexual well-being, but also into a greater awareness for those women who need professional support. The care that was expressed for survivors of sexual trauma by the female leaders during the Kings Business Woman’s Conference also created a space in which to mend and challenge patriarchal religious and social norms. The focus of the conversation shifted from the focus on (male) sexual pleasure as a basis for a stable marriage to the well-being of the women and their experiences of sexuality. In addition, pastor’s roles were also acknowledged as limited and their authority as incomplete. While people might consult them and seek advice regarding matters of sexuality, it was emphasized that this should not exclude seeking professional support.

It is in the complex realities of post-migration life in diverse cities in Europe that Pentecostal norms and ideals regarding sexuality have to be navigated in relation to the real and lived experiences of women. I argue that it is within such frontier zones (Meyer 2018) that female leadership emerges as an in-between space in which new ways of being and acting can unfold. The intimate and caring labour performed by female leaders within the churches allows them to complement the practices of holiness and spiritual authority with the practices of empathy and care. In doing so, a form of leadership emerges that is more attuned to the complexity and precarity of life in the frontier zone.