Following and Analyzing a Divinity: God Speaks in Public, or Charismatic Prophecy from Intimacy to Politics

This contribution describes how Evangelicals (claim to) hear God talking to them. It focuses on “prophecy,” i.e. public utterances that the faithful attribute to this supernatural entity. This approach consists in following carefully corporeal and discursive traces, as well as local and global networks of actors: thus, it becomes possible to restitute how this evanescent being, God, is made manifest to the believers and, potentially, to third parties. The chapter starts by addressing methodological, theoretical and normative issues about this kind of ethnography, and the specific problems that the Evangelical God’s ontology causes to the ethnographer. It then tackles central dimensions of Charismatic prophecy—love, belief, power—through a critical discussion of two important authors, Bruno Latour and Tanya Luhrmann. The third part of the chapter analyzes varieties of prophetic speech, with attention to divine presence and to the referential dimension inherent to revealed propositions. This tracking of inspired utterances and prophetic figures shows that the range of topics addressed by divine words can encompass the believer’s intimacy as well as the (political) destiny of nations