Occupying the Global City : Spatial Politics and Spiritual Warfare among African Pentecostals in Hong Kong

Titelangaben

Kirby, Benjamin:
Occupying the Global City : Spatial Politics and Spiritual Warfare among African Pentecostals in Hong Kong.
In: Garbin, David ; Strhan, Anna (Hrsg.): Religion and the Global City. - London : Bloomsbury Academic , 2017 . - S. 62-77 . - (Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space, and Place )
ISBN 978-1-4742-7242-1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474272414.0009

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Abstract

I was in Hong Kong in the second half of 2014 at the time of the Occupy and Umbrella Revolution movements that mobilized an unprecedented number of people to stage mass sit-ins across the centre of the city in response to proposed electoral reforms and deepening inequality. he circumstances prompted me to reflect on the political ambitions and strategies of the four African-initiated Pentecostal churches at which I was conducting fieldwork. Many of the 30–100 people who attend the main Sunday services at these churches come from African countries, but the majority come from the Philippines and Indonesia and are employed in Hong Kong as domestic workers (see Yap 2015). For worshippers whose status as formal citizens or legal residents in Hong Kong could conceivably be called into question, there was an understandable reluctance to risk encounters with police at protest sites and an equally understandable sense that the protesters’ struggle was not ‘their’struggle. Among the pastors, all of whom are legal residents in Hong Kong from African countries (and three of whom are from Nigeria), there was some difference of opinion about the protests. Pastor Samuel1 wholly sympathized with the protesters’ demands for ‘better governance’, while Pastor Isaac expressed to his congregation a concern that they were unnecessarily jeopardized the enviable prosperity and harmony of their city. Where I found real consonance between the four pastors, however, was in their conviction that any substantive political change would be reliant on two factors. Both follow from a shift in the wider born-again movement with respect to the perceived …