Abstract
Abstract
This chapter explores significant infrastructures—smart church buildings and their hip soundscapes, digital media, Hillsong network and teaching programs, and a Brazilian Christian travel agency—that allow Hillsong to expand into Brazil. Importantly, such infrastructures allow people to achieve a sense of co-presence with other congregants elsewhere in the world. This was particularly apparent when Hillsong’s services and activities went online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter shows that these infrastructures comprise an architecture through which Hillsong’s Cool Christianity circulates. It argues that these infrastructures connect with followers through affect (pride, desire, excitement) as they communicate success, excitement, modernity, and cosmopolitanism to young middle-class Brazilians who aspire to break with the local conservative Pentecostalism that caters to the poor. This chapter calls for a focus on human and nonhuman actors and infrastructures that move religion across borders, with a special attention to how imagination and power differentials shape mobility and immobility.
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York
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