In The Charismatic Gymnasium Maria José de Abreu examines how Charismatic Catholicism in contemporary Brazil produces a new form of total power through a concatenation of the breathing body, theology, and electronic mass media. De Abreu documents a vast religious respiratory program of revival popularly branded as “the aerobics of Jesus.” Pneuma—the Greek term for air, breath, and spirit—is central to this aerobic program, whose goal is to labor on the athletic elasticity of spirit. Tracing the rhetoric, gestures, and spaces that together constitute this new theological community, de Abreu exposes the articulating forces among evangelical Christianity, neoliberal logics, and the rise of right-wing politics. By calling attention to how an ethics of pauperism vitally intersects with the neoliberal ethos of flexibility, de Abreu shows how paradoxes do not hinder but expand the Charismatic gymnasium. The result, de Abreu demonstrates, is the production of a fluid form of totalitarianism and Christianity in Brazil and beyond.

Maria José de Abreu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.

Preface: Breathe In. Breathe Out.  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction  1
Part I
1. The Media Acts of the Apostles  21
2. Confession, Technically Speaking  51
3. Outstanding Elasticity  80
Part II.
4. The Aerobics of Jesus  109
5. Sanctuary Theotókos: A Conception  128
6. Ghost Chair  156
Epilogue: Theology on the Run  177
Afterword: On Bipolarity  181
Notes  189
Bibliography  211
Index  225