Global Religious Infrastructures: The Australian Megachurch Hillsong in Brazil

Abstract

This article explores the infrastructures that allow the Australian Pentecostal megachurch Hillsong to expand into Brazil. Hillsong is a global religious phenomenon: it has branches in global cities, celebrities among its followers, and an award-winning worship band. Drawing on five years of multi-sited ethnography in Australia and Brazil, I analyse significant infrastructures – smart church buildings, hip soundscapes, and digital media – that enabled Hillsong to establish itself in Brazil. I show that such technologies comprise an architecture through which Hillsong’s ‘Cool Christianity’ circulates. I argue that these infrastructures communicate success, excitement, modernity, and cosmopolitanism to young middle-class Brazilians who aspire to break with the local conservative Pentecostalism that caters for the poor. Here, I call for a focus on human and nonhuman actors and infrastructures that move religion across borders, and a special attention to how imagination and power differentials shape mobility and immobility.