Modernity's limits: Pentecostalism and the moral rejection of alcohol in Malawi

Abstract

In the mid-1970s, teenagers and secondary school and university students suddenly took to the streets of Malawi's main urban areas to proclaim a moral reordering of society based on Christian fundamentalist notions. A whole array of Pentecostal groups emerged. The striking feature of this born-again charismatic Pentecostalism is its rigid insistence on a strict moral ideology and a denunciation of alcohol. The author investigates the rejection of alcohol in Malawi's Pentecostal moral order from two perspectives: first, against the backdrop of developments in Malawi's Independent Christianity movement, and, second, in relation to the modernist debate that this type of Pentecostalism represents. The author concludes that the rejection of the use of alcohol by the born-again preachers coincides with a deeper generational conflict. This has had ramifications since it emerged in the context of the Banda regime that relied on gerontocratic power structures. Against this background one can argue that the debate about alcohol was, and still is, a modernist one, a discourse that allows for the moral rejection of things and structures emerging from the impure and threatening 'past'. Includes bibliographical references. [ASC Leiden abstract]