PART TWO
HABITUS AND PRACTICE

3
A Communitarian Ideal

The impulse toward community has characterized the Catholic Charismatic Renewal from its outset. Charismatics invoke the communalism of the "early Church" and the symbolism of the Church as a "mystical body" (O'Neill 1985) as grounds for their efforts. They cite the ascetic movement of the fourth century, the mendicant movement of the thirteenth century, and the communitarian religious orders such as Benedictine, Franciscan, and Jesuit (Clark 1976; O'Connor 1971).^[1]   Contemporary Charismatic covenant communities fall under the sociological category of "intentional" communities and can be placed in historical context alongside a variety of communitarian developments in North America, especially those that emerged from the cultural ferment of the 1960s (Holloway 1966; Zablocki 1971, 1980; Kanter 1972; Fitzgerald 1986; Carter 1990). The more tightly structured among these communities approach what Lewis Coser (1974) has labeled "greedy institutions" that encompass all dimensions of members' lives. More precisely, although members often work in conventional jobs and live in neighborhoods among non-Charismatics, in these groups the nature of such outside relationships and the kind and degree of contact with the "world" of secular society—attendance at movies, teenage dating—is circumscribed by community teaching. Insofar as they are successfully constituted in the community's terms, that is, in self-declared opposition to the broader North American culture, even outside relationships are drawn into the totalized behavioral environment of covenant community life.

Indeed, the discipline cultivated in Charismatic communities is characterized by an enduring tension between what Weber (1963) called world-rejecting asceticism and inner-worldly asceticism.^[2]   Condemnation and retreat from the world while accepting a mission to transform the world is a variant of the paradoxical Christian injunction to be "in the world but not of it." This injunction takes on a distinctive configuration in the middle-class American society of most Catholic Charismatics, and as we have seen creates lines of differentiation within the movement itself. Radical communitarians come to speak patronizingly about their fellow Catholic Charismatics adrift "out there in prayer group land" and closely allied covenant communities split over the degree to which their ideals are threatened by the world. Indeed, for some the focus of evangelistic effort appears to have shifted from the spiritual "renewal" of Catholics at large to the rank and file of supposedly inadequately prepared Catholic Charismatics themselves.

The idea that I want to play out over the following chapters is that the differentiation of "visions" of the Renewal, ranging across the spectrum of prayer groups and covenant communities I described in chapter 1, can be described as the result of a rhetorical involution . By this I mean an increasing intensity and complexity, generated in ritual performance and in everyday life, in the meanings attributed to basic themes, principles, and motives of group life and in the implications for action of these themes, principles, and motives. Understanding this rhetorical involution will be the key to understanding charisma as a self process among Charismatics. As a preliminary example, consider how the North American psychocultural themes of spontaneity, intimacy, and control identified above are taken up into the transformed Charismatic habitus. For Charismatics, spontaneity appears to mean the ready availability of others for face-to-face (or telephone) interaction, the knowledge that there are people one can call on freely at any time. In addition, Charismatic communities are understood to have developed from what was seen as the celebratory spontaneity of the prayer meeting, and thus ideally provide the permanent setting for the experience of divinely inspired spontaneity. The problem of control appears to include the fear of being unable to fulfill one's responsibilities because life situations are beyond one's control or unable to maintain the effort of attempting to control one's circumstances. The results of surrendering control to God are made concrete in the commitment of one's affairs to the life of a community of like-minded persons within which a member finds both active support

and explicit direction. Intimacy is elaborated in part by the cultivated sharing of spiritual experience and life concerns as principal foci of face-to-face interaction. In another sense, there also exists a generalized intimacy based on common commitment to the divinely appointed mission that Charismatic communities see as part of the reason for their existence. Finally, there is ideally a concrete intimacy in marriages between community members, nurtured not only by shared belief, lifestyle, experience, and commitment but in some cases by a community-mediated courtship process and arranged betrothal.

The diversity among Catholic Charismatic communities can be understood in part as the result of local variations on these themes as they are woven into the habitus as dispositions created in practice and performance. The intensity and complexity that define what I am calling rhetorical involution are results of the specificity with which these themes are elaborated in collective life. There is another involutional rhetorical dynamic that comes into play, however, which is that collective elaborations of each theme appear in varying degrees to generate and embrace their opposites. Thus spontaneity itself becomes ritualized and conventionalized. The hug as a spontaneous gesture of intimacy in greeting becomes a ritual alternative to the handshake. Spontaneous expression of praise to the divinity becomes conventionalized in form. Likewise, the surrender of control to divine will may result in an increasingly standardized and controlled style of life including tightly scheduled daily activities and restrictions in choice of clothing. Finally, intimacy may generate authority, as mutual concern and support becomes commitment to abide by canons of collective life promulgated by a leadership that represents the intimate fatherly concern of a paternalistic deity.

Without getting too far ahead of my argument, I want to formalize the dimensions of complexity and intensity as a dual process, which I will call the ritualization of practice and the radicalization of charisma. In the next chapter I will show in detail how this dual process characterizes the development of The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit, the Charismatic community in which these processes have been carried to the greatest lengths and hence are most clearly describable. To do so, however, we must become familiar in greater detail with the history and organization of the community. Accordingly, the remainder of this chapter is an ethnographic sketch that will provide the context for the more process-oriented discussion in chapter 4.

I, and those who are with me, call you The Word of God

Recall that The Word of God originated in 1967 when Steven Clark and Ralph Martin, who had begun their partnership at Notre Dame University through activity in the Cursillo movement and who had undergone the Pentecostal Baptism in the Holy Spirit during a weekend retreat with the original Catholic group from Duquesne University, were invited to work at the student parish of the University of Michigan. With two comrades they held their first prayer meetings in a rented apartment, a site that remains a landmark on a Charismatic tour of Ann Arbor. Within a year they had recruited additional members from the local university and from Notre Dame and as was typical for rapidly expanding prayer groups at the time, added a second smaller weekly meeting for the core group. As in most Charistmatic prayer groups, core group participants defined themselves as those who were more committed and who wanted to maintain a setting of spontaneity and intimacy free from the need to "serve" or integrate newcomers. A formal initiation process originated when one bedroom was set aside for an explanation session and another for laying on hands in prayer for Baptism in the Holy Spirit. By 1969 the initiation was formulated by Martin into the Life in the Spirit Seminars, which incorporated the basic Pentecostal religious experience, teaching about Christian life, and integration into the group.

The idea of a covenant that would bind members together was put forward in a community conference that year. The conference also established a council of twenty, centered around the community's founders, with vaguely defined leadership responsibilities. A dimension was added to the group's ritual life with the visit of Don Basham and Derek Prince, leaders of the nondenominational neo-Pentecostal Christian Growth Ministries of Fort Lauderdale. They instructed the community on the disruptive effects of evil spirits on interpersonal relationships and on "God's work" and taught the practice of deliverance from evil spirits. During a prayer session that became known as Deliverance Monday the two preachers cast out demons, which exited their hosts in a paroxysm of screaming, crying, and coughing. The reported effect for those who were not frightened away was freedom from "relationship problems" and a "bottled up" feeling, in a situation in which the inten-

sity of interpersonal relationships was already having a transformative effect on participants' mode of dealing with the world and each other. Other early covenant communities were also discovering deliverance at this time, and it frequently became a required experience for people entering community life.

At a second community conference in 1970, the name "The Word of God" was formally adopted, based on prophetic messages uttered by group leaders. In addition, the leaders put forward a conception of covenant as a formal written commitment among members. Understood to be desired and sanctioned by the deity, it would be publicly accepted by each member in a solemn ceremony. The covenant has four elements: all must attend community assemblies, all must contribute some service to the welfare of community members, all must respect the community order (i.e., the accepted way of doing things and the accepted pattern of authority), and all must support the community financially by tithe. At the conference Clark and Martin outlined their plan for restructuring the group to facilitate community growth. The Life in the Spirit Seminar was subsequently revised to emphasize community living, and members were required to take or retake an additional twelve-week Foundations in Christian Living course. Prospective members could make a preliminary or underway commitment, but only after completing all the courses and being invited by community leaders could they make a "full commitment" to the covenant. "Growth groups," small-scale spiritual development groups that were characteristic of Charismatic prayer groups from the movement's beginning, were reorganized on geographic lines within subcommunities.

The functions of community leaders were categorized by specialty, including charismatic gifts such as prophecy, services in support of the community, and offices such as elder. Those specializing in service received the title "Servant" if male or "Handmaid" if female. The former were charged largely with administrative responsibilities, while the latter's functions included limited pastoral responsibility for other women. Invoking biblical justification for a principle of "male headship," women were excluded from the position of community elder. To eliminate the possibility that outsiders would interpret their actions as aimed at starting a new church, Clark proposed the term "coordinators" instead of elders for those male leaders who, with increased authority under the covenant, would replace the loosely structured council. Martin and Clark became overall coordinators with authority over the others. The local bishop received a proposal outlining this "pastoral experiment."

The authority of the coordinators was consolidated during 1971–1972, as was the structure of the community and its self-conception as a "people." A series of "teachings" on the theme of "repentance" sobered members' attitudes toward their collective project. The coordinators' decision that it was within their power to expel a woman accused of "false prophecy and unrepentant homosexuality" highlighted both their increasing authority and the existence of boundaries between the community and the outside world. The generality of the covenant allowed coordinators gradually to appropriate authority over more aspects of members' lives, and they regarded it as part of their divine mission under the covenant to do so. A decision-making process emerged based on consensus among coordinators as to "what the Lord was telling them" through discussion, prayer, and prophecy, with the ultimate authority residing in Steven Clark.

Input from the community at large was formalized via "community consultations." These were called for by the coordinators when major changes were under consideration, such as adoption of the covenant or formation of the Sword of the Spirit. Five such consultations were held between 1968 and 1990. Each Iasted for several weeks or months, during which members "prayed about" the matter and communicated insights, opinions, or prophecies to the coordinators. In less focused periods, the coordinators expected a general flow of "prophecy mail" from members. The content of prophecy mail was understood as the outcome of members' personal efforts to "listen to the Lord" and receive prophetic inspiration that would propose, comment on, or confirm ideas and trends in group life. Along with these changes, a strict notion of "community order" evolved. This order was exercised in 1975 when a man was excluded from the community after taking his complaints about the hierarchical/authoritarian (and decreasingly "spontaneous") direction of group development directly to the local bishop, rather than through "proper channels," namely, the coordinators themselves.

The consolidation of coordinators' authority in 1971–1972 placed them at the apex of four distinguishable hierarchical systems, based on living situation, personal headship, prophecy, and community service.

The cornerstone of the living situation hierarchy was the "household," organized on a model adopted from the Episcopalian Charismatic Church of the Redeemer in Houston. The household ideally consisted of one or more married couples, their children, and one or more unmarried people. The primacy of intimacy as a goal is evident in the possibility for individuals who did not share a common domicile still to be members of a

"nonresidential household." Following the principle of male headship, the eldest married man was pastoral head of his household. As the community grew into as many as fourteen geographic "districts," each household head was made subordinate to one of several "district heads," who were in turn responsible to a "district coordinator." In 1972, a year after the institution of households, coordinators assumed authority for assigning people to households. In 1976 three higher-level "head coordinators" were ceremonially consecrated to oversee communitywide affairs, with Steven Clark remaining as overall head coordinator, a structure that with minor variations remained in effect until 1990.

The "personal head" is similar to a spiritual adviser, except that he is not necessarily ordained and that "full headship" (required of those publicly committed to the community covenant) entails obedience to the head in matters related to morality, spirituality, and community order.^[3]   Although formally distinct from the headship of living situations, the same persons often function as heads in a variety of contexts. Furthermore, a household head was often the personal head of most members of that household, and a husband was always personal head of his wife. The coordinators' heads were the head coordinators, who in turn were each other's heads in a fight circular relationship.

In a culture that emphasizes the value of individual autonomy, headship was perhaps the most controversial of covenant community practices, from the perspective of both outsiders and other Charismatics. At the same time, the cultural logic in defense of headship was implicitly framed in terms of the psychocultural themes I have identified as central to Charismatic self process. With respect to control, members were quick to argue that only the most advanced and committed were "under obedience" to their heads. For average members, it was said that heads typically gave advice rather than orders, although given the divinely sanctioned nature of the relationship, such advice had an implicitly coercive overtone. This potential for coercion was dealt with not only by invoking benevolence and attributing divine guidance to the head but especially by appealing to the theme of intimacy. People would describe their relationship as one of deep "sharing" and say "My head really knows me." Finally, the theme of spontaneity was relevant in that although most members typically met with their heads by appointment, there was a sense that they were always available when needed.

Prophecy was originally uttered within and outside of prayer meetings by anyone who felt inspired, but in 1971 a "word gifts group" composed of those recognized for exercising this charism began to meet

regularly. As the community grew in size, public prophecy began to be restricted to members of this group, and a hierarchy of prophets emerged, including both men and women. In 1975 the office of prophet was created within the community and one of the head coordinators, Bruce Yocum, was consecrated as its holder. Under his direction, members of the word gifts group cultivated their capacity to listen to the Lord and took responsibility for distilling and screening the divine word as it came to the coordinators from the collectivity in the form of prophecy mail. In addition, prophecy at community gatherings came to be dominated by this group, and regular members wishing to prophesy would have to clear their message before uttering it to the assembly. This development shows clear compromise between themes of control and spontaneity: although universal access to spontaneous divine inspiration was preserved in prophecy mail and in public gatherings (as well as in smaller service groups, families, and interpersonal relationships), it was subject to control by being filtered through the word gifts group and the community prophet.

While all Charismatic prayer groups have a variety of "ministries" in which members can participate, the requirement of covenanted members to contribute some service to community life led to development of multiple "services." By 1972 an anthropology dissertation on the community recorded forty-four formal services such as evangelization, child care, music, pastoral leadership, healing, initiations, guest reception, or "works of mercy" (Keane 1974: 98–99). These services generated their own hierarchy of headship, again with its apex among the community coordinators.

In 1972 the conservative Belgian Cardinal Suenens paid an incognito visit to The Word of God, subsequently announcing his endorsement of the group and encouraging its members to expand the international horizons of their work. The other principal development in 1972 was the founding of a "brotherhood" of men under Clark and Yocum. These men dedicated themselves to greater discipline and asceticism in service to the community. Living communally in the state of "single for the Lord," or celibate bachelorhood, they became the shock troops of the international expansion encouraged by Suenens. Christened the Servants of the Word, the brotherhood held a ceremonial public commitment for its members in 1974. A "sisterhood" of women living single for the Lord called the Servants of God's Love was not established until 1976, and remains less developed than the parallel brotherhood.

In 1974 a series of teachings by the coordinators reemphasized the

principle of male headship in outlining acceptable gender roles. The office of handmaid was discontinued, perhaps because its holders expected more pastoral responsibility than the coordinators were prepared to grant. The office of handmaid was reinstituted only some years later, after the community's conservative and male-dominated definition of gender roles was firmly entrenched. Also in 1974, the ritual practice of "loud praise" was borrowed from the covenant community in Dallas, transforming collective prayer of praise to the deity from quiet speaking or singing in tongues to loud vocalization and hand clapping. A second visit by the ministers who had in 1969 introduced the practice of deliverance from evil spirits prepared community members to be transformed by divine power through prayer and revelation.

Events accelerated dramatically in 1975. A more apocalyptic tone characterized prophecies and coordinators' teachings. The coordinators decided that the community must become reoriented to a worldwide sense of mission. To emphasize the importance of this mission, each publicly committed member was required to retake the advanced initiation seminars and make a formal recommitment to the covenant. Adapting a practice that Martin had observed in a French covenant community, at the recommitment ceremony each male member was vested with a mantle of white Irish linen, and each female with a veil of white Belgian linen (see photo insert following this chapter). These were to be worn at community gatherings as a symbol that members belonged to a "people" with a divine commission. Internal resistance to adoption of ritual clothing, to the increased demand for commitment of time and finances, and to the additional increase in coordinators' authority led to the first major crisis in the community. For the first time, there was a substantial loss of members—or "pruning" in the biblical metaphor of the faithful—as some declined to make the recommitment and others were excluded from it by the coordinators. Extracommunity developments were highlighted by three events: the annual community conference, which was held jointly with the People of Praise in anticipation of a coming merger; the establishment of the movement's International Communication Office by Ralph Martin and Cardinal Suenens in Brussels; and the utterance of the Rome prophecies at the movement's international conference.

In 1976 the two goals of establishing an Association of Communities and establishing an international evangelistic "outreach" based in Belgium were finally realized. Community coordinators promulgated a series of teachings on "getting free from the world." Community ritual

life was augmented by household "Sabbath ceremonies" adapted from the Jewish seder by a born-again Jewish member. Teachings the following year elaborated community standards of "honor and respect" for one another, between people of different ages and genders, for coordinators and others in positions of authority, and for God. Solemn respect for God was emphasized in ritual life by the new practice of prostration, lying prone or kneeling with one's face to the floor in deeply silent prayer that came to alternate with periods of loud praise. Honor and respect for others was ritualized by the adoption of foot washing, and children began to be taught not to address adults by their first names.

The trend toward world renunciation gained momentum when the public prayer meeting, a feature of the group's ritual throughout its ten-year career, was restricted to members and their guests or prospective members and rechristened a general community gathering. Members were to further simplify their lifestyles, use less meat in their diets, and contribute more to the financial support of the community's mission. In 1979 the community instituted four denominational "fellowships," each with its own chaplain to provide liturgy and church services for members from the Catholic, Free Church, Reformed, and Lutheran traditions. A majority of members, representing approximately twenty denominations, withdrew from local congregations into the community fellowships. This move caused some controversy in the broader Ann Arbor Christian community, given that they took both their volunteer energies and the half of their tithe that they had been contributing to their churches. Also in 1979, a rural district of the community was established on a 260-acre farm purchased by The Word of God.

In spite of the latter development, the community's distinctive style of world renunciation has consistently entailed economic self-sufficiency and sharing of personal resources, rather than withdrawal to rural poverty. Members who own businesses such as a computer firm and a grocery store often employ other members. Members recognize that skilled and white-collar work outside the community both strengthen its financial position and provide opportunities for recruitment. The world renunciation that characterizes this "college-educated community of yuppies," as one of its officials described it, is of a kind that is financially sound.

Yet world renunciation it is. This was nowhere more evident than in the efforts by coordinators to endow their people with a distinct and disciplined culture adequate to the community's perceived mission, by instituting an intensive series of teachings in 1980–1981. Known as

the Training Course, the teachings were based on a massive tome by Steven Clark entitled Man and Woman in Christ (1980). Clark's course made minutely explicit prescriptions for proper comportment, gender-appropriate dress, child-rearing practices, and the domestic division of labor. In addition, it identified global trends presumed to threaten the community mission of building the Kingdom of God—Islam, communism, feminism, and gay rights. With knowledge of its contents withheld from the majority of publicly committed members, the Training Course was initially given only to coordinators and district heads and their families. This strategy for the first time created explicit recognition of the existence of a true elite within the community—and stirrings of apprehension about the coordinators' motives for secrecy. The greatest immediate repercussion of the new formulations was not discontent within the community, however, but the already described split from the People of Praise and the breakup of the Association of Communities, whose members were unwilling to follow the "vision" and "mission" of The Word of God.

Retreat from the "ways of the world" continued in 1982 with the founding of a community school encompassing grades 4 through 9, judged to be the most formative years for community children's morality and spirituality. Partly because many families now had young children, multiple-resident households became less pragmatic and began to be replaced by nuclear family dwellings organized into "household clusters." Meanwhile, The Word of God's distinct vision was promulgated to the broader Catholic Charismatic Renewal through the series of FIRE rallies (see chap. 1 n. 3) conducted independently of the national movement organization, in which the People of Praise remained prominent. Most important, leaders reconstituted around themselves a new network of like-minded communities and formally inaugurated the supercommunity the Sword of the Spirit. Member communities came under the jurisdiction of a translocal governing council with Steven Clark at its apex, and the communities' word gifts groups became a single translocal "prophecy guild" under the headship of Bruce Yocum. In the following year, the Servants of the Word brotherhood built the International Brotherhood Center as their global headquarters in Ann Arbor. The brotherhood zealously assumed the bulk of training and cultivating those affiliated groups who aspired to become full Sword of the Spirit branches.

Both external and internal difficulties arose in 1985–1986. Externally, an episode occurred that marked the moment of greatest tension

between the Catholic church hierarchy and the Charismatic Renewal in the nearly twenty years of the movement's history. The episode concerned, not Pentecostal ritual practices such as speaking in tongues, faith healing, casting out of evil spirits, or resting in the Spirit, but ecclesiastical jurisdiction over communities bound by covenant to the authority of the Sword of the Spirit. Branches in Akron, Miami, Steubenville, and Newark all encountered difficulties with the bishops in their local dioceses, but it was the latter that drew the broadest attention. The episode originated with the aforementioned creation within The Word of God of denominational fellowships equivalent to parishes but entirely contained within the covenant community. The Catholic fellowship was approved by the local bishop in the Ann Arbor case, and with the formation of the Sword of the Spirit as a single international community its governing council petitioned the Pontifical Council for the Laity in Rome for official recognition of such "fellowships" for Roman Catholics within covenant communities. Since in effect this was a request for creation of an entirely new ecclesiastical category, the Church moved slowly in its deliberations on the petition, and in the meantime each Sword of the Spirit branch had to request independent approval from its own local bishop.

When in 1985 the People of Hope branch submitted the statutes for their Catholic fellowship for approval to the bishop of Newark, they were rejected. Prominent among the reasons were irreconcilability between "submission" to any transdiocesan authority and the expectation of a bishop for authority over all Catholics within the geographic territory of his diocese. Also of concern was the ambiguous meaning of a "covenant" between Catholic and non-Catholic members of a community. The People of Hope appealed to Rome, which deferred to its yet incomplete consideration of the overall Sword of the Spirit petition. In the process the Newark bishop resigned, but a new bishop adopted essentially the same position, and the situation remained in a stalemate. Ten years earlier Clark (1976) had written that based on the precedent of "renewal communities" in earlier centuries of Church history, a covenant community challenged by a local bishop should consider moving to a more receptive diocese. However, the eventual possibility of a favorable outcome, combined with the practical dilemma of disposing substantial community property and moving more than a hundred adults, militated against this solution.^[4]   The People of Hope partially acquiesced, formally withdrawing from the Sword of the Spirit while continuing to send its coordinators as observers to meetings of the supercommunity's leadership.^[5]

Internally, tensions provoked by implementation of the Training Course mounted. The intensity of behavioral restrictions created family tensions, particularly in two respects. First was the increasingly specific prescription of male headship and gender discipline. Second was the requirement on parents to supervise community children and teenagers, who were expected to refrain from worldly activities such as attending dances, listening to rock and roll music, or wearing blue jeans. The result was an exodus of community members comparable to that during the recommitment of 1975. One community district whose coordinator was especially strict in implementing Training Course teachings lost not only rank-and-file members but also the majority of its district heads. Ultimately even one of The Word of God's longtime head coordinators resigned and left the community. Circumstances were such that for the first time coordinators publicly "repented" for the secrecy and speed at which they had implemented the Training Course, though notably not for any of its contents or intended goals. In an effort to protect the community's reputation, Martin also held a meeting for "reconciliation" with former community members and formally repudiated what had become a de facto practice of shunning those who had renounced their public commitment.

However, the crisis over the Training Course had left a mood of self-assessment about the community's effort to create a culture for itself as a people. The interpersonal demands created by household clusters proved unworkable, and a return was made to small interpersonal groups, now segregated by gender, as the principal mechanism of intimacy. Certain elements of community practice perceived as isolating it and inhibiting its growth began to be modified. There were no longer community-sponsored block parties with evangelistic intent. Opposition to women working outside the home and to marriages outside the community began to ease somewhat. The term "head" was replaced (in official terminology if not in popular usage) by "pastoral leader" or "long-term elder." The stated reason for this change was the archaism of "headship," and, in the words of one head coordinator, its connotation to outsiders of "more substantial directive authority than we see in pastoral relationships." The physical aspect of the domestic environment was also moderated, with the decline of inscribed wall banners and the reintroduction of televisions, stereos, and videotape players, even if used only for religiously acceptable programming.

Coincident with the reaction to the Training Course, however, these years also saw the infusion of new energy into the ritual life of the community. As Derek Prince and Robert Mumford had done earlier in the

community's history, around 1985 Protestant evangelist and healer John Wimber visited The Word of God, bringing the practice of "power evangelism."^[6]   Wimberite prayer encourages manifestations of divine power in the form of "signs and wonders" such as healing, spontaneous waves of laughter or sobbing that spread through an assembly, and the falling in a sacred swoon known as resting in the Spirit. Wimber's emphasis on participants' laying on of hands for each other initiated a renewed interest in healing prayer among the community rank and file. This enthusiasm extended beyond already typical practices of informal healing prayer in households, within the personal headship relation, or by district heads and coordinators visiting the sick in their biblically defined role of community elders. Advocacy for making spiritual gifts of power more accessible to the rank and file also played a part in the initiation in 1986 of Charismatic prayer meetings for children at some Sword of the Spirit branches. Perhaps encouraged by the Wimberite influence, and acting on a longtime awareness that their retreat from the world to consolidate a Charismatic culture would make them less accessible to the general public and slow their rate of growth, the coordinators in 1987 also once again began to hold an open prayer meeting.^[7]   A new experiment was inaugurated in 1989 as several members of The Word of God relocated to Colorado to live alongside members of John Wimber's Vineyard Ministries, developing an order of life synthesized from covenant community pastoral forms and power evangelism forms of access to divinity.

By 1990 The Word of God branch of the Sword of the Spirit included fifteen hundred adults and an equivalent number of children, first among equals within the Sword of the Spirit and a powerful voice within Charismatic Christianity (see tables 6–8). In 1990, however, enduring tension within the international leadership of the Sword of the Spirit surfaced over, in the words of one community official, "differing visions of community structure and differences between strong, zealous personalities." Ralph Martin and Steven Clark represented the two factions, with Martin proposing that those communities who wanted more local autonomy but who wanted to remain within the supercommunity be allowed to assume a new status of "allied" communities. Through the traditional means of a "community consultation," the plan was submitted to The Word of God members, who reportedly had little forewarning that a serious rift had developed within the community elite. The majority of members and coordinators agreed on the move to allied status. However, Clark's brotherhood, the Servants of the Word, announced that they were an autonomous body not bound by

the community decision and that they would remain within the Sword of the Spirit. Several of the coordinators and a core of rank and file rallied around them and reconstituted as a new branch of the Sword of the Spirit. A schism had occurred.^[8]

In 1991, of the presplit membership of approximately 1,500 adults, the Sword of the Spirit branch claimed 230 members. The Word of God claimed somewhere between 600 and 800. Perhaps reflecting the family tension over personal conduct associated with the Sword of the Spirit Training Course, it appeared that families with older children tended to remain in The Word of God and those with younger or grown children constituted the bulk of the new Sword of the Spirit branch. It also appeared that the diminished Word of God membership was roughly evenly divided among Protestant and Catholic (see table 9 for presplit proportions). The smaller Sword of the Spirit appeared to become predominantly Catholic in reaction to a perception of inordinate Protestant influence in The Word of God.^[9]   Rank-and-file Catholics from both communities continued to attend the denominational Christ the King fellowship, which as a result of the schism had been removed by the local bishop from within the community and declared to be a kind of non-geographic floating parish under direct diocesan jurisdiction. Perhaps 150 former community members chose to remain active in the fellowship without allegiance to either The Word of God or the Sword of the Spirit. From all indications the remaining four hundred to five hundred members, disaffected and disillusioned, terminated participation in any community-related activity.

Several issues underlie the overt split in the Sword of the Spirit over local autonomy versus centralized government. Most appeared to be a legacy of the crisis over the Training Course. The stance of Martin and The Word of God leadership was to "repent" for elitism and arrogance relative to other Christians. They also "repented" for internal abuses of authority in enforcing practices that, because of their rigor and the difficulty of conforming to them, led to unhealthy feelings of inadequacy among members. The stance of Clark and the Sword of the Spirit was

that they would remain faithful to the original divinely inspired community "vision," adhering to the substance of the Training Course while continuing to admit that it was awkwardly implemented. They see themselves as maintaining the structure of a covenant community, including headship, and The Word of God as retreating to the status of a sophisticated prayer group.

The Wimberite influence also proved to be a point of controversy. From the perspective of many members, this influence marked a kind of spiritual renewal within the community. However, Clark's faction construed the embrace of Wimber's power evangelism by Martin and Head Coordinator James McFadden as an abandonment of Catholicism. McFadden's collaboration with the Wimberites in founding a sub-community of The Word of God in Colorado was seen as an abandonment of the covenant community model in favor of Wimber's Vineyard congregations.^[10]

A third issue is the recent popularity among rank-and-file members of twelve-step support groups based on the model of Alcoholics Anonymous and related "codependency" theory. Community interest in these groups coincided with their popularity in the broader North American society during the 1980s.^[11]   The Sword of the Spirit perceived them precisely as alien influences, incompatible with the pastoral structure of the covenant community and potentially creating "confusion" by offering support based on competing principles. Indeed, another branch of the Sword of the Spirit explicitly declared that anyone who joins such a group cannot be in the community. The Word of God saw the popularity of support groups as a sign of inadequacy and need for reform in their own structure of interpersonal support. They speculated that perhaps members were seeking support from tensions generated by community life itself, or that perhaps their mode of life attracted (or at least keeps) the kind of people who are in need of such support. In fact, twelve-step groups are by definition "anonymous," and may thus constitute not only a search for additional support but also reaction against the intense communitarian elaboration of the psychocultural theme of intimacy.

In 1992 The Word of God, while remaining an allied member of the Sword of the Spirit, adopted a dramatic set of reforms. Moreover, rather than use the old community consultation format, these changes were instituted as a result of direct democratic vote. The sweeping changes can be divided into categories of community life and membership, leader-

ship, and symbols of groups identity. I will summarize the changes in each category.

First, in an effort to restore mature responsibility for personal decision making to members, the community abolished the institution of pastoral leadership (headship), long a cornerstone of group organization. The system of "pastoral care" was to be replaced by one of "fraternal support." The Training Course was officially "set aside" as an "ill-advised venture" with much associated "bad fruit." Although its fundamental values were reaffirmed, members were advised to judge for themselves which elements to keep and which to reject. Even beyond this, the long series of initiation/indoctrination courses that prepared people for "public commitment" as full community members was to be modified and streamlined. The community in effect repudiated Steven Clark's formulation of group life by abandoning the key Living in Christian Community course, codified in Clark's book Patterns of Christian Community (1984). In the new model, the basic Life in the Spirit Seminar was to be followed only by a course on the Charismatic spiritual gifts and a course on community membership. Members voted to decrease the demands on the amount of participation and activity required of them. Leaders were to retain the ability to terminate members for denial of "Christian truth" or offense against "Christian righteousness," but termination for inadequate participation was reserved to a board the majority of which was to be rank-and-file members.

In the domain of leadership, it was voted that the current coordinators resign in favor of a newly constituted leadership team of five to eight members. This team would be chosen, advised, and overseen by a council of twenty-five members elected by the general membership. A proposal granting the "senior leader" of the leadership team a veto over team decisions was explicitly defeated in the vote. The most momentous change, however, was that women were to be included as voting members of both the leadership team and the council (six women were subsequently chosen as council members). A male was still to be the senior leader of the leadership team, of the council, and of small-scale support groups ("men's and women's" groups or "growth" groups), "as a way of expressing the leadership of men seen in the New Testament." Nevertheless, the importance of the change was evidenced in the inclusion of a vote about whether to delay inclusion of women as leaders, pending a ruling by the international governing council of the Sword of the Spirit as to whether the proposal would undermine the allied status of The

Word of God. The membership voted not to wait. In the words of one male leader, the consensus was that "in this time and place, it's appropriate to have women as leaders." The time and place, it will be noted, coincided with the confrontation in American society between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas over the latter's Supreme Court nomination and with the confrontation between Desiree Washington and Mike Tyson over the latter's rape of the former, events that led to the emergence of the political scene of many prominent women as candidates for national office in the 1992 election.

The most profound change in symbols of community identity was abandonment of mantles and veils, which had been worn as a sign of public commitment. These items of ritual garb, which had distinguished members from outsiders and different classes of members within the community, were to be turned in "so that they can be disposed of respectfully." In addition, the members voted to consider whether to keep, modify, or drop the formal community covenant. Until such a decision was made, new members were given the option of committing to "simple membership" rather than "full commitment." Finally, members voted to consider changing the community name from "The Word of God" to something like "The Word of God Community." These latter two issues can be understood only by recalling that both the covenant and the community name were understood to have been bestowed directly by the deity and were therefore considered essential to the community's divine mission and its identity as a "people of God." To consider becoming merely a community named The Word of God, rather than continuing to be The Word of God, was anything but mere semantics.

What the possibility of a change in name indicated, along with the other changes in 1992, was the reversal of the rhetorical involution to which I referred earlier in this chapter. For years the community had avoided the process identified by Weber as the routinization of charisma with an ever-escalating rhetoric embedded in practice and performance. The schism in The Word of God was a kind of apocalyptic break, a crisis of the sacred self in which Clark's faction remained on the tightening spiral of charisma while for Martin's faction the tightening discipline, authority, and apocalyptic tension snapped like an overwound watch spring. In the next chapter we will examine the rhetorical process leading up to this apocalyptic break, filling in our ethnographic/historical sketch with a detailed account of the radicalization of charisma and the ritualization of practice.

Plate 1.
Community gathering of The Word of God in 1987. Participants are
arranged in concentric circles, with the central circle visible in the top
center of the image. The disposition of bodies in space retains the original
emphasis in Charismatic prayer meetings on the intimacy of
face-to-face interaction among participants seated in a circle. The
addition of concentric circles as gatherings grew in size, with community
leaders occupying the central one, did not replace the original sense of
intimacy but added that of the center as locus of authority toward which
participants were oriented.
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Peter Yates photograph.

Plate 2.
Head coordinator Ralph Martin addresses the community gathering from
the center of the circle. Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan,
Peter Yates photograph.

Plate 3.
Publicly committed women at the community gathering wearing veils
of Belgian linen.
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Peter Yates photograph.

Plate 4.
Publicly committed men at the community gathering wearing mantles
of Irish linen. Following the community schism in the early 1990s,
use of mantles and veils was discontinued by The Word of God faction
on the grounds that it had contributed to exaggerated exclusivity, isolation,
and elitism. It was retained as a symbol of commitment by the Sword of
the Spirit faction.
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Peter Yates photograph.

Plate 5.
Community members engaged in loud praise, 1990.
Courtesy of Philip Tiews, The Word of God.

4
Ritualization and Radicalization

I have suggested that the Charismatic transformation of self and habitus can be described in terms of a rhetorical involution composed of the dual ritualization of practice and radicalization of charisma. My preliminary example was how psychocultural themes are taken up into ritual life. Working with our example of The Word of God through twenty-five years of its history, we must now take the next step and identify the rhetorical principles that have become involuted. Specifically, the principle that becomes involuted in the ritualization of practice is that God is constituting the members of the community as a people and that as a people they should be actively concerned with developing a distinct culture. The notion of a culture is explicit—and is indeed the way community leaders related to my interest in them as a cultural anthropologist. The principle that becomes involuted in the radicalization of charisma is that there is increasingly more at stake in the expanding threat posed by "the world, the flesh, and the devil," a threat that demands increasingly greater commitment that will be rewarded by increasing access to divine power. In the rhetorical deployment of these principles it is evident that ritualization and radicalization are really two dimensions of the same process, insofar as successive ritualizations went hand in hand with rhetorical escalations that not only proclaimed their beneficiality but also asserted their necessity.

Weber (1947: 370–371) argued that a decisive motive underlying the routinization of charisma is always the striving for security and the most fundamental problem is transition to a form of administration adapted

to everyday conditions. By contrast, ritualization of practice sacralizes everyday conditions and radicalization of charisma suspends security in favor of a grander striving. It is not so much that life becomes extraordinary but that the ordinary is revved up in anticipation of the divine kingdom, power, and glory. Again, most discussion of the routinization of charisma has taken place on the level of organization and movement dynamics. By contrast, the radicalization of charisma becomes analytically accessible on the level of self process, understood as an incremental advance into an imaginative terrain. Ritualization is the complementary consolidation of features in this imaginative terrain by incorporating them into a habitus, endowing the self with dispositions in the sense that it becomes "disposed" within a previously alien but now familiar terrain.

In his study of the Northern African Kabyle people, Bourdieu argues that

one of the effects of the ritualization of practices is precisely that of assigning them a time—i.e., a moment, a tempo, and a duration—which is relatively independent of external necessities, those of climate, technique, or economy, thereby conferring on them the sort of arbitrary necessity which specifically defines cultural arbitrariness. ( 1977:163)

In this passage, Bourdieu is discussing an ethnic "people" in the strict sense, among whom practices were in fact ritualized long ago. He can thus refer to the "effects" of ritualization, but the actual process of ritualization is inaccessible to examination. This inaccessibility also makes it difficult for him to distinguish the sacred in ritualized practices from the purely conventional in habitualized practices. This question is very much at issue in Bourdieu's work on the Kabyle, whose practices presumably are invested with an aura of the sacred. Examining the development over time of a group like The Word of God allows us to see not only the "arbitrary" that persists, and not only the sense of "necessity" that for the Kabyle is shrouded in customary time, but also the way in which Bourdieu's apparent oxymoron "arbitrary necessity" makes sense.

The rhetorical conditions of possibility for this dual process in The Word of God were, first, prophecies in which the deity appeared to call for completely open-ended commitment, with the promise of incremental revelation and preparation for fulfillment of the divine plan. Second, from the time of its adoption, commitment to the covenant was defined as commitment to the life of the community and not to specific ritual or organizational forms. On the one hand, this gave the appearance of preserving spontaneity and avoiding "legalism"; on the other, it gave

coordinators a free hand in determining group organization. The most compelling single item of evidence for existence of the routinization/radicalization process is the acknowledgment by community leaders that successive prophecies and innovations were repeatedly regarded at first as either poetic hyperbole or just plain crazy, but that the more such divine promises come true, or perhaps are made true by actions of the faithful, the more willing they are to believe even larger promises.^[1]

I will describe the dual process of radicalization and ritualization within four dimensions of group life. First, time is sacralized as the community's history is transformed into a mythical charter that plots the creation of the sacred self by its incorporation into a sacred people charged with a divine mission. Second, in the domain of worship, or ritual in the strict sense, we trace an involution and escalation in the meaning and experience of spontaneity and divinity. Third, the domestic sphere becomes increasingly elaborated as the space of intimacy and the arena of gender discipline. Fourth, the organization of personal conduct epitomized by the practices of initiation, headship, and courtship is a highly specific involution and interplay between interpersonal intimacy and control.

Time, Myth, and Identity

The transformation of time in The Word of God took place both with respect to historical time, as the contemporary history of the community was assimilated to "salvation history," and with respect to cyclical time, in the evolution of an annual calendar of ritual events. The creation of mythic time in both respects is closely bound up with development of the notion of a sacred covenant. Prior to 1970 "covenant" was a term that, while prominent in everyday interaction, had not become the central principle for organizing practices. One informant recalled that covenant was virtually synonymous with "agreement," such that covenants were made constantly on any subject. It was common, for example, to make a covenant to meet someone for lunch at a particular time, and individual collective households sometimes were organized around periodically renewed covenants among their residents. By 1970 covenant had become transformed into a synonym of "commitment." On being defined as a formal document adopted in a solemn ceremony, it became not only a covenant among members but also a covenant with God. The commitment progressively became construed as

commitment to a global mission, and this was rhetorically articulated in the "recommitment" of 1975. With the covenant and the people it created redefined by this "making oneself available" for a God-given mission, the rhetorical escalation of the Training Course that would complete the transformation of a people into an army of God became possible. Both the recommitment and the Training Course were sufficiently demanding redefinitions of self and collective identity that significant numbers were unwilling to tread farther into the imaginative terrain they illuminated and toward the horizon of existential engagement they outlined. By performative means that we will examine below in Part Three, the notions of covenant, people, and mission were imbued with a sense of participation in both mythic reality and cosmic time. Insofar as I have defined self process as orientational in nature, their rhetorical function was thus to orient members not only in terms of commitment but also in terms of temporality.

This transformation was also advanced by the way the community "received" its name. Catholic Charismatic groups are typically named either after the place where they meet (a group that meets at Saint James Church will be called Saint James Prayer Group) or by the inspired predication of a particular collective religious identity onto the group (examples are The Word of God, the People of Praise, the Work of Christ). Only in the latter type is there a rhetorical transformation of collective identity, but it is critical that the transformation is not an automatic result of the sign-function or metaphoric predication. The phenomenological component defined by recognizing that the name is willed by God, which in the Charismatic world implies becoming convinced that the name is necessary, contributes something essential to the collective self process. Consider the following description of the naming of a (no longer existing) Catholic Charismatic community:

Our group has a lot of intellectual skeptics (I'm one of them) who thought this whole idea of community names was too much like college fraternities to be taken seriously. Well, about sixty of us went to the 1971 Notre Dame Charismatic Conference; and when we were praying together, there was a prophecy that we were the Lord's "children of joy." It just so happened that one of the group had already written that on his name tag. We got a little excited about the coincidence, but we really didn't want a name so we waited a little longer to discern what the Lord had in mind. At our next prayer meeting, a seminarian who wasn't at Notre Dame and who had not been around for about two months also prophesied that we were the "children of joy." That was even more interesting, but still not convincing. Finally a priest who likewise hadn't been around for months prophesied that we were to be the Children of Joy. At last we decided

that maybe the Lord wanted to give us a name, no matter how dubious we were about it. (Lange and Cushing 1974: 145)

Such a name thus defines not only collective identity but also collective essence as prescribed and bestowed by the deity.

At The Word of God, practical considerations provided the first impetus to naming the group, which others referred to as "the Pentecostals at Saint Mary's," and which referred to itself as "the Ann Arbor community." The campus Newman Center^[2]   was about to publish a booklet listing parish activities, and adoption of some descriptive tag seemed in order. A meeting was called, and several suggestions for names were presented, with the Word of God entered "at the last minute" by a member who found it when inspired to turn to a particular page of the Bible. At the meeting's end two prophecies were uttered. The first said, "You are my people. I formed you—you are mine, therefore you shall be called by my name." The second said that the group was taking the idea of a name too lightly.

Not only did the community's name become, through the performance of ritual language, charged with more than pragmatic significance, but the name was declared already to exist in the mind of God, to be revealed through inspiration to those who "sought" it. The decisive prophecy was uttered at a second meeting.

Listen to me, listen carefully to me, so that you can believe the promises I make to you. The promises which I make to you are far beyond your comprehension. Listen to me so that you can believe them. My promises are certain. I and those who are with me call you the word of God, because you are my word now to the whole face of the earth. I have called you and I have created you not for your own sake but for my sake, and for the sake of all those whom I would gather to myself. I am going to give you my Spirit in a way in which I have never given my Spirit to any people. I am going to make you my people in a way in which I have never before made any people my people. I am going to pour out on you a spirit of power, and of grandeur, and of glory, so that all who see you will know that I am God and that I am among you. Therefore this is my word to you: You have been first in all of my thoughts. Have I been first in all of your thoughts? I have in every way come to you. Have you in every way come to me? I have poured myself out to you and given myself to you without reserve. Have you given yourselves entirely to me? Seek me. I have already sought you. Look to me. Make me first in your lives. I have become your God and I have made you my people. Look to me. Seek me.

In this text the bestowal of a sacred name is couched in the language of open-ended commitment (and hence one-sided domination) to which

I alluded above. Divine promises are beyond comprehension, a global mission is foreshadowed, and the community is implicitly compared with the biblical Israelites as a chosen people. The deity, in the infinity and omnipotence of his thought, giving, and seeking, demands an equivalent response from his mortal listeners.

The naming of Charismatic groups in this way is not merely the choice of a likely metaphor. It is the profound alteration of the very significance of a name, such that it can give form to an "inchoate we" (Fernandez 1974). Collective symbolic action elevates the name from merely practical to fully sacred significance by declaring that it was the deity's idea to name the group. This is more than a rhetorical trick or mystification; it is a creative reorientation of a group's attention to their collective world. Names are thought to express something essential about the community. With respect to the movement as a whole, they identify the particular charism possessed by each community as distinct from other communities, constituting a kind of totemic system by means of which communities are both linked and differentiated. Thus the childlike simplicity cultivated by a community called the Children of Joy contrasts with the evangelistic aggressiveness of The Word of God. With respect to the internal activities of a group, its name defines the nature of collective life, or the mission of the community.

In addition to the open-endedness of prophetic language and commitment to a covenant, then, the metaphoric potential of a community's name must be added to the rhetorical conditions of possibility for the dual process I am describing. A community in which the sacred self is constituted as the Word of God may tread on imaginative terrain into which the Children of Joy or the Bride of Christ, or even the people of Praise, may not venture. This potential is evident in the series of related images in which The Word of God presented itself to itself over the years. At first an exemplary "shining white cross," it came to be self-described as a "fiery brand," an "army," and a "bulwark" to protect a Church besieged by tides or social currents that assault Christian values. The most telling exploitation of rhetorical potential came with the taking up in 1982 of the militant biblical injunction to be armed with "the word of God which is the sword of the spirit." The essence of the community was transformed with its name as it became a branch of the Sword of the Spirit. A name given by God, so the community's written account of its own naming states, is not meant for mere identification, for "in naming us, God has not only given us a phrase by which men will know

us, but he has established once and for all what our role and purpose is to be in his plan for the universe."^[3]

The place of the community in historical and mythical time is elegantly, and somewhat startlingly, displayed in the following text. It is a call-and-response litany adapted from the Jewish seder and uttered at the community's annual anniversary celebration.

O God our father, if you had only made us in your image . . . (Response: . . . that would have been enough for us.)

If you had only walked with us in the garden . . .

If you had only promised to redeem us after we fell from your grace . . .

If you had only showed yourself to our father Abraham . . .

If you had only made a covenant with us . . .

If you had only made us strong in Egypt and not given us Moses to lead us . . .

If you had only given us Moses to lead us, and not brought us through the Red Sea . . .

If you had only brought us through the Red Sea, and not fed us in the desert . . .

If you had only fed us in the desert, and not made a covenant with us at Sinai . . .

If you had only given us the covenant, and not brought us into the promised land . . .

If you had only brought us into the promised land, and not given us the prophets . . .

If you had only sent us the prophets, and not given us your word in the scriptures . . .

If you had only given us your word in the scriptures, and not sent us your word in the flesh, Jesus the Lord of Glory . . .

If you had only given us Jesus, and not given him up to death for our salvation . . .

If you had only brought us to life in the death of Jesus, and not given us the Holy Spirit . . .

If you had only given us the Holy Spirit, and not left us the gospels . . .

If you had only taught us about the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, and not brought us to Ann Arbor . . .

If you had only brought us to Ann Arbor, and not given us the Thursday night [prayer] meetings . . .

If you had only given us the Thursday night meetings, and not added to our number day by day . . .

If you had only added to our number, and not given us the gifts of the Holy Spirit [charisms] . . .

If you had only given us the gifts, and not taught us how to pray together in unity and power . . .

If you had only brought us together to pray, and not spoken to us about being a people . . .

If you had only taught us to be a people, and not spoken to us about a covenant . . .

If you had only made a covenant with us, and not shown us how to live together in households . . .

If you had only taught us how to live together in households, and not spoken to us about sharing our resources . . .

If you had only taught us to share our goods with one another, and had not given us wisdom about family life . . .

If you had only given us wisdom about family life, and not baptized our children in the Holy Spirit . . .

If you had only baptized our children in the Holy Spirit, and not spoken to us about being your servants in the whole world . . .

O Lord you've done so much. And you haven't stopped there, you've continued to do more and more.

This collective prayer^[4]   achieves the rhetorical and mythopoetic task of situating the community in the flow of "salvation history." The abrupt yet seamless transition from mythical to contemporary events assimilates the community to ancient Israel, identifying it as a New Testament chosen people. Not only is the pattern of life sacralized by making it, ex post facto, an act or initiative of God, but successive developments are characterized as unexpected, spontaneous surfeits of divine beneficence. The anniversary celebration from which the text is drawn is also an occasion for recitation of the group's history as a kind of mythical charter.^[5]   A narrated slide show of the community's "early days" shows its "four founders" as blue-jeaned hippies, in sharp contrast to their present business-suited demeanor. Although on the surface this is an endearing retrospective with the ostensive message "We head coordinators have had our ups and downs and are really not much different from you," the narrative dramatizes their current distance from the rank and file with the rhetorical subtext "Look at the amazing thing God has made of us from such humble beginnings."

The anniversary celebration itself belongs to a ritualization of cyclical time that began with the original weekly prayer meeting, mentioned in the litany as the Thursday night meeting. Originally set for that night

because it fit the schedules of all the original members, it came to be endowed with a surplus of meaning and regarded as a gift from the deity, a kind of extra Sabbath. Likewise, the second weekly meeting for the inner circle of committed members began on Monday, but was eventually changed to Sunday, the actual Christian Sabbath. By the late 1970s an implicit annual cycle was in place, with a national Charismatic conference in the summer, a community conference early in the fall, the anniversary celebration coinciding with Thanksgiving, and the ceremony for public commitment of new full members shortly before Christmas. In the field at the time, I asked whether the emerging "people" was cultivating a ritual calendar such as was familiar among many peoples studied by anthropologists. A coordinator responded that no such cycle was explicitly recognized, but soon thereafter it was reported that talk was afoot about declaring a "season of celebration" that would roughly coincide with the Christmas season and extend from the community anniversary to the public commitment. Acknowledging that my own presence may have stimulated an ethnographic development, I would emphasize instead the eagerness of The Word of God for any innovation that would support its aspiration to a "culture" of its own.

Worship and Embodied Charisma

To speak of ritual or worship in the strict sense may be somewhat misleading, since the comprehensive ritualization I am outlining eventually leaves no room for distinction between sacred and secular action even in everyday life. By the same token, it is not always relevant to distinguish between everyday practice and formal performance. Nevertheless, it is possible to demonstrate that as charisma became radicalized, practices of collective and individual worship increasingly became techniques of the body in the sense defined by Marcel Mauss (1950). In the language of textuality, we might say that charisma was inscribed in the body through discipline of the body at prayer. In the language of embodiment, we might say that the charismatic self process was generated by bodily experience. For either articulation (see also Csordas 1994b), it is accurate to say that the inculcation of dispositions within a ritual habitus corresponded to the disposition of bodies in space.

Let us begin with the following two ethnographic observations. First, the dominant purposes of Charismatic prayer, whether in glossolalia or

in the vernacular, are praise of the deity and petition for divine intercession. Praise is understood to be a spontaneous expression of exuberance about an all-good and glorious deity. Petition is directed toward a deity understood as paternally and intimately responsive to and concerned for the well-being of his creatures. Second, the palms-up prayer posture and the laying on of hands are universal techniques of the body in Charismatic prayer. While outsiders most often associate laying on of hands with prayer for healing, it can be used in any situation in which a person is being prayed for or "prayed over," including consecration of prayer group leaders or coordinators. As I mentioned above, the palms-up posture has been supplemented by a variant in which hands are raised with palms facing outward, a posture that appears to assertively direct the power of prayer outward rather than inward toward the supplicant (see pl. 5). A shift from spontaneity to convention in use of the prayer posture can be observed in The Word of God when it was taught to children, who were sometimes reprimanded for not raising their hands in prayer during community gatherings.

The Word of God's first major radicalization in the domain of worship came with the introduction of loud praise. The principle behind loud praise is that collective praise for God is more "edifying and expressive of real feeling" the louder it is. Worshipers should thus attempt to "raise the roof" with loud vocalization and hand clapping. In this practice, Charismatics have rediscovered a virtually universal connection between sound and spirituality first formulated by Rodney Needham (1972). Needham's thesis would have us focus not on the general clamor of loud praise but on its percussive element, the expression of praise by tumultuous clapping or applause. He argues that "practically everywhere it is found that percussion is resorted to in order to communicate with the other world," specifically in rites of passage from one social status or condition to another (1972: 395–396), such that the impact of percussion in effect impels persons across the boundaries of social categories.

If we were to apply this interpretation to The Word of God, we might say that loud praise effects a transition from a collectivity of selves to a single people. However, the differences between our case and Needham's discussion must be pointed out and must suggest modification of his position in certain respects. For Needham, the onset of percussion marks a transition from everyday silence to sacred sound, whereas in our case the onset of percussion marks the escalation of sacred sound. In addition, whereas in Needham's example the transition takes place once

and for all within a single ritual event, in The Word of God the transition is an ongoing one, sustained by the practice of percussive praise as a regular feature of collective ritual. Finally, whereas Needham was preoccupied with an apparent incompatibility between the affective impact of percussion and the logical structure of category change, we must emphasize the unity of affect and cognition in the percussive generation of a phenomenological shift for participants. That is, loud praise not only moves people across category boundaries, it also helps to create those very categories.

Putting these three points together, we are able to be quite specific in elaborating Needham's point that what is at issue in ritual percussion is "aurally generated emotion." In our case, percussion must be considered as an accompaniment to vocalization in two respects: first, insofar as applause is a form of praise; and second, insofar as the aural is the privileged sensory modality for transmission of the divinely inspired "word." An escalation of volume is then quite literally an escalation of enthusiasm. My own impression on hearing loud praise continue uninterrupted for a period of minutes was that the louder the collective clamor becomes, the more it appears to have a life of its own. It is an unmistakably Durkheimian occurrence, in which the reality of the collectivity becomes more vivid than the reality of its individual members. The sense of spontaneous outpouring that characterizes quiet collective prayer of praise is transformed to one of self-sustaining transport, and hierophany occurs. The ritual practice is a vehicle of radicalization, upon which people enter an imaginative terrain as a divinely constituted people and advance toward the horizon of a divine plan for their lives.

The phenomenological immediacy of this effect is enhanced by the fact that loud praise is a technique of the body. It is thus existentially engaging insofar as it requires that effort that we have seen as essential to a definition of self grounded in embodiment. Needham is correct in observing that sound has "not only aesthetic but bodily effects," but he conceives these effects in terms of sensory reception (representation) rather than of physical production (bodily experience). Just as the phenomenological effect of speaking in tongues is as much in the vocal gesture of the speaker as it is in audition of the syllables produced (Csordas 1990a), the effect of loud praise has its locus in the physical engagement of the body in the act of worship. In this connection, the Charismatics' own phrase "raising the roof" should be understood as an image of strenuous effort (see Knauft 1979).

The bodily effect in question comes not only from the vibrations of

sound but also from the motion and from the heat and redness generated in one's hands as they repeatedly strike one another. Adding to this dimension of bodily engagement, along with loud praise, members began to gingerly jump or hop in place while praying, both in solitary devotion and in collective worship. The result was a virtually calisthenic spirituality of corporal commitment, and furthermore one that explicitly reinforced the social principle of male headship with a cultural celebration of masculine energy. The masculinization of practice that characterizes covenant community gender discipline will be more apparent in our consideration of domestic life and personal conduct. In the case of loud praise, the kind of bodily engagement required was designed to aid the recruitment of men by offering an alternative to the female-dominated spirituality of Charismatic prayer groups that was perceived as too introspective and emotional.^[6]   According to one Sword of the Spirit coordinator, "You had to be manly to do what we were trying to do," and "grunting, lifting heavy objects, and spittin' was the thing to do" for covenant community men, so that one did not have to "feel like you had to be a sissy to be holy." Members entered the imaginative terrain with their bodies as well as their minds.

The next step toward radicalization was made the following year with the "recommitment" and adoption of mantles and veils to be worn as symbols of public commitment during community gatherings. Members reflected that this was not the first occasion in which an idea that at first appeared "crazy" came to be accepted and cherished as a symbol of a covenant with God. It was, however, the most controversial, both because of the new requirements that went along with recommitment and because overt ritual adornment of the body was felt by some to be a potentially elitist and even odd practice. Familiar enough to students of ethnology, such ritual garb is incongruous in the cultural context of middle-class North America. Some objected that the practice was too radical for sensible people and that its adoption would make members appear foolish, alienating outsiders. When the community prophet, Bruce Yocum, then uttered a prophecy declaring that the wearing of mantles and veils was the will of God, for the first time some objected that this was an unfair coercive use of ritual language, since it is unthinkable to contradict a word spoken directly by God. Divinely construed authority prevailed, and a practice began which reinforced both the sense of the community as a people and the growing trend to become "free from the world."

In 1977, along with the series of "teachings on honor and respect,"

kneeling, prostration, and foot washing were added to the repertoire of ritual techniques of the body. Although Catholics are accustomed to kneeling at prescribed times in liturgy, prostration is a much more thorough and much less familiar engagement of the body. Moreover, these practices offered a new venue for interplay between spontaneity and control in ritual. Members could be requested to prostrate themselves at any time during a collective gathering (or choose to do so if in solitary prayer) and be commanded at any time to kneel to "receive" the divine word in prophecy. Foot washing is customary in certain Christian sects such as the Mennonites, but is again a radical innovation among middle-class Catholics.^[7]   Thus, in the context of The Word of God development, these innovations fit the pattern of radicalization of charisma through ritualization of bodily practice.

The final major development came with the adoption around 1985 of a Wimberite spirituality of signs and wonders. These include waves of spontaneous laughter or sobbing that spread through an assembly, waves of power visible as trembling or vibration in the hands of individual participants, spontaneous healing, and resting in the Spirit as a person falls under the influence of divine power and presence.^[8]   Resting in the Spirit is of particular interest in this respect, for while it had already been popular in the broader Catholic Charismatic Renewal for some ten years, it had never been prominent among covenant communities. Only within the complex of Wimberite practices of divine empowerment did it become widely accepted in the Sword of the Spirit. Some light is thrown on this change by recalling that it occurred precisely at a time when the Sword of the Spirit's influence in the Charismatic Renewal was somewhat in eclipse, when it was beleaguered by the ecclesiastical difficulties of its People of Hope branch, and when it was living through the internal repercussions of the Training Course. The innovation appeared to diffuse the experience of divine empowerment throughout the community, and some coordinators sensitive to their own reputation for authoritarianism were quick to emphasize that the discovery of Wimber's approach was a "grassroots movement" in the community not initiated by themselves. The direction of spiritual experience toward ritual healing and corporeal manifestations appeared to reinforce a relative turning inward. In general, a more devotional turn was evident, and even the tempo of the typical repertoire of Charismatic songs was observably slower. This shift is not incidentally related to bodily engagement, since its effect appeared not only to enhance a sense of duration and solemnity but also to endow the vocalization of song with a sense of physical deliberation and ponderousness.

Along with these changes, leaders acknowledged a swing of the pendulum away from urgent and aggressive masculinity, an orientation that had militated against devotional and passive practices such as resting in the Spirit. This gendered definition of the collective self had been evident in the contrast between covenant communities and the larger movement composed of Charismatic prayer groups, which were understood to practice a more "feminized" spirituality. Evangelization of fellow Charismatics by means of the FIRE rallies, and the notion that covenant communities were exemplary models, a vanguard of the movement, and protectors of the church, conformed to the cultural principle of male headship. Stated in more theoretical language, the Sword of the Spirit's claim to leadership among Charismatics had been predicated on an implicit structural opposition between dominant male and submissive female. The mode of bodily engagement invoked by Wimberite practices points to the increasing tension that characterized collective gender identity in the post-Training Course period. That is, although it was clearly an upsurge of empowerment, it was in a form that was relatively altered from the established notion of empowerment as aggressive masculinity.

Whatever their gender symbolism, introduction of the Wimberite practices continued the trend toward progressive engagement of the body. We can understand how this constituted a radicalization of spontaneity by contrasting the spontaneity of Wimberite signs and wonders with that characteristic of the long-accepted practice of collective singing in tongues. During prayer in tongues one member of the assembly will begin a glossolalic chant, or in a large gathering instrumentalists may provide a suggestive tonality. Participants will gradually take up the chant, blending and harmonizing improvisation around the initial tone. The result is a swelling of glossolalic song that gradually subsides again into the accustomed babble of glossolalic prayer. A sense of spontaneity is derived both from the collective taking up of the chant and from the improvised vocalization around the initial tonality. However, this is an intentionally coordinated spontaneity, much like that observable in the "wave" of spectators in an American sports arena who serially stand, raise their arms high, and sit, usually (for some reason doubtless grounded in their habitus) in a clockwise direction around the arena. By contrast, in the signs and wonders phenomenon there is, first, a variety of possible responses with no established order or precedence. Second, these responses are generally understood to be inherently more "somatic" than is singing or speaking in tongues—and therefore more inherently spontaneous than any form of speech. Thus even when a wave of laughter begins with a single person and spreads, the spread can be perceived only

as spiritual contagion and not as intentional uptake, for an "authentic" laugh can only be spontaneous. In this case, spontaneity is doubly and necessarily a criterion of authenticity, since the laughter is understood to be divinely inspired and not the result of a human stimulus such as a joke. As with all the developments we have examined in this section, the sense of charismatic empowerment grows with the embodied advance into imaginative terrain.

Domestic Life

In the domestic domain ritualization occurred in two ways. First, practices were not only incorporated into habitual behavior, they were elevated beyond habit by being invested with the sacred. Second, ritual in the strict sense (e.g., prophecy or healing) was extended beyond the boundaries of ritual events, eventually permeating everyday life. The principal arena for ritualization of domestic life was the living situation. Most Charismatic prayer groups and early covenant communities included "growth groups" of seldom more than ten people who would meet weekly for prayer, Bible reading, discussion about life problems, and support in their process of "spiritual growth." These were the loci of interpersonal intimacy, and precursors of the community residential household. That households were the direct successors to these groups as more permanent settings for intimacy is demonstrated by the existence of the intermediate and curiously named "nonresidential households," which were in effect formalizations of the growth groups. Residential households were intended to provide both intimacy and a supportive environment for the "Christian life." In addition, unmarried youths were expected to learn from the household head and his wife as role models for "mature" Christian family life. The largest residential households at The Word of God numbered as many as twenty. Such large groupings were quickly found to be unwieldy, however, and were abandoned.

The evolution of living situations illustrates what Bourdieu (1977) refers to as "regulated improvisation" within a habitus, in this case the generation of alternatives with respect to the disposition of bodies in domestic space. Members repeatedly affirmed that "nothing is set in stone in The Word of God." This referred in part to the flux and diversity in living situations, as coordinators shifted personnel and experimented with different household compositions.^[9]   It also referred to the

fact that each district or subcommunity has a slightly different pattern of organization worked out by its coordinator and district heads. Coordinated within a totality of tacit understandings and explicit principles, the generation of domestic alternatives gave members the vivid impression of spontaneity and thus enacted a critical psychocultural theme for the Charismatic self. This is also in conformity with the open-ended commitment discussed above, in which members were reminded that their commitment is to the covenant rather than to specific forms.

By the mid-1970s, of 1,243 members, 600 were living in apartments or single-family dwellings. Most of these participated in nonresidential households under the headship of a man who was typically also the head of his own residential household. "Dorm households" composed of students at the two local universities accounted for another 157 members. "Christian living situations" composed of unmarried men or women under the headship of one of the residents or a "more mature" outside person accounted for 165 members. Residential households accounted for 314 community members, and of these 140 lived in the most "committed" of living situations, the "common offering household." Members of common offering households owned no personal property. They gave all their earnings to the household head, who tithed the community on behalf of the household, paid for food and household maintenance, and distributed personal allowances to residents.

Let us take a closer look at the ritualization of domestic life in a common offering household in which I was permitted to live for a week in 1976. The household consisted of a married couple, their infant child, and eight single men and women. All were in their mid-twenties. The house itself appeared in most respects to be a typical small-city or suburban dwelling, with the major exception that one room was designated a prayer room to which residents could retreat for undisturbed devotion. Banners with slogans such as "Jesus Is Lord" or "Praise Him in All Things" were hung in the prayer room and dining room, and every room had a crucifix or devotional picture on the wall. As was the case with most community households, a television was kept in a closet and brought out only when a morally acceptable program (such as a sporting event) was to be watched. The household was designated a "service household," because aside from the household head, who was looking for employment as a banker, others worked for the community itself (in Charismatic Renewal Services, New Covenant magazine, or at The Word of God community offices). The head's wife was a community handmaid, another resident headed the Works of Mercy (charity) service

group, and another worked in the Initiations (seminars for prospective members) service group. Two household residents were themselves heads of all male or female Christian living situations.

The daily routine began at ten minutes before seven, when everyone woke or was awakened with a knock on his or her door. Breakfast began promptly at seven. Cooking was done by the housewife, as was most housework, although the household head occasionally delegated other women residents to help her. All meals were taken collectively, beginning with prayers and ending with a religious song. At breakfast everyone reported how they felt that day, and whether they were in need of special prayer because of being tired. Only one person was permitted to speak at a time, with the stated purpose that everyone's words would be attended to and recognized as worthwhile by all. Guests were received for dinner one night per week, and one night was free for eating outside the household. Once a week the heads of Christian living situations were dismissed to eat with their charges. At the time, some households were transforming Sunday meals into a Sabbath ceremony with prayers adapted from the Jewish seder.

Between meals each person pursued his or her occupation. Collective household prayers were held each evening. Saturday evenings were set aside for nuclear family activities and independent activities by unmarried residents. An essential part of everyone's day was a period of private personal prayer in the prayer room. In addition, each member had a chart describing a weekly schedule, devised in consultation with his or her personal head. This schedule included weekly community gatherings on Sunday and Thursday nights, service to the community, and meetings with heads or with those over whom one had headship responsibility. The most active and committed members had little personal interaction with non-Charismatics and hence little activity that did not presuppose and reinforce Charismatic forms of experience and discourse.

This ritualization of time and space in households is far easier to describe than is the ritualization of conduct and interaction in the casual interactions of daily life. Household members in passing may pause to pray for deliverance from an evil spirit of Anger that began harassing one of them after an unpleasant incident at work in the secular world. One person may utter a few words of prophetic encouragement and reassurance to a fellow household member who expressed unusual fatigue at that morning's breakfast. A housewife pursuing her daily tasks may break out in a few bars, not of a "top 40" song, but of one from the community's Charismatic repertoire. These vignettes are no more than clues to,

paraphrasing Alfred Schutz (1970), the sedimentation of ritual knowledge in the covenant community life-world. They color the interactive dimension of the everyday behavioral environment with the themes and motives of ritual reality.

On the more easily observable level of lifestyle, the cultural contrast between conventional and Charismatic households was not lost on non-Charismatic neighbors. In particular, the composition of community households led to protests against zoning violations in neighborhoods restricted to single-family dwellings. In 1975 The Word of God appropriated money for legal defense of a household faced with litigation on these grounds, and a similar situation arose at the People of Praise. There in South Bend a public hearing was held to discuss an ordinance the purpose of which was to prevent college students and hippies from invading suburban neighborhoods. Since this would directly affect them, People of Praise members presented a case for their own respectability and the sufficiency of their property upkeep. The hostile reaction by other citizens surprised them and served to reinforce a sense of persecution at a time when a principal message of prophecy and teaching was already to "get free from the world."

The radicalization promulgated in the Training Course at the beginning of the 1980s also included a reorganization of living situations, with the institution of household clusters. This innovation was in one sense a retreat from the single large household. It had a pragmatic side, since as the membership aged there were fewer unmarried people to be assigned to households, and as nuclear families grew, parents found it increasingly difficult to both care for children and maintain large domestic groupings. While there remained a few households of single men or women, and situations in which a single man or woman lived with a married couple to prepare for their own married life in the community, clusters were to be composed of nuclear families living adjacently. Geographic proximity had for some years been recognized as a goal for members of covenant communities, but The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit now began an ambitious disposition of members in what was anticipated to be a permanent space of interdomestic intimacy.

The stated ideal of intracluster relations was free ongoing social involvement, mutual aid in sickness and with child care, collective recreation for children, and reinforcing faith and Christian/community ideals as a group of people whose lives would be substantially intertwined. Men were expected to exercise self-regulating social control in the form of "fraternal correction" and encouragement of one another. Equivalent

sororal relations were, however, discouraged by a gender ideology that explicitly subordinated women to men. Mutual encouragement and support were expected, but mutual social control among women was restricted to "light correction." One coordinator explained the cultural logic of this discrepancy as follows: "The men are responsible for their wives, so that some part of what is transacted among men doesn't get transacted among the women." In other words, men were responsible for themselves and their fellowmen, but women were responsible to their husbands.

The expected benefit of combining proximity with intimacy in clusters was predicated on the expectation that members would be "mature Christians" who could take a great deal of "pastoral responsibility" for one another, thereby reducing the "burden" on district heads and coordinators. In addition, members of a cluster were expected to share resources in a way reminiscent of the common offering household. The "vision" for transformation of domestic space extended to the idea of building interconnected houses. Problems quickly arose, however. Clusters were formed by assignment, based on questionnaires soliciting members' preference for living under particular district heads and coordinators. This frequently resulted in clusters with significant personal incompatibilities, not only of temperament but also of age and financial means. What I referred to above as regulated improvisation was put to the test as clusters were reshuffled: one person reported being in three "long-term" clusters within two years. The most serious difficulties arose when nuclear families, having purchased neighboring homes, found themselves unable to get along. One cluster of four families built four adjacent homes in the $200,000 to $300,000 price range, only to have their cluster disband (to their good fortune they remained on neighborly terms).

Of the few clusters that survived when I visited The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit in 1987, one included a couple who had been my friends and informants since 1973 and who had been among the community elite who first took the Training Course. They were invited to be in a cluster with three other families, so they put their house on the market and moved from the community district in neighboring Ypsilanti to Ann Arbor. The cluster built two new houses and helped them buy since they were not in a financial position to build. When the sale of their old house fell through, the men in their cluster chipped in, and for five years they were able either to make double house payments or rent it to others. Eventually, one of the original four families decided to leave

the cluster, in part because they felt that they would fit better in a community district where there were more older children like their own. They sold the house they had built to another community family. The cluster's final composition was attained when two other community families who lived in the same neighborhood subsequently joined.

My friends described the financial generosity of their cluster not only with the example of how they were helped to support the expense of their former house but also in terms of everyday affairs. When one man was out of work, a cluster woman who buys food in bulk observed that since her bins were always full, it seemed silly for the other family to go to a store and pay. "Fill your bins from mine," she said. Cluster women reported they had a close working relationship even though they saw themselves as "very different from one another, and would never be together based only on what they have in common. One likes to can vegetables and be a homemaker, while others wouldn't dream of it; one is very athletic (aerobics), while the biggest exercise for others is chasing children around." Similar differences were perceived among cluster men, with the implicit assumption that since they would never be drawn together by natural compatibility, their intimate ongoing relationship was divinely ordained. Particularly in comparison to other clusters, they saw their cluster's success as "God's blessing." However, they also attributed their cluster's longevity to bonds established during the period of my friends' real estate troubles, to the fact that all the couples were more or less in the same age cohort, and to the presence from the outset of "a lot of combined pastoral wisdom" among the men.

By the end of the 1980s, the general failure of geographic clusters led to the development of men's and women's groups as the principal extrafamily structure of intimacy and social control. The groups are addressed in part to the culturally defined needs of men to experience "brotherly" ties and of women to experience "sisterly" ties, both of which are perceived to be weak in secular society. Community thinking on the role of these groups was expressed by a community head coordinator in 1987:

[They are] meant to counteract spouses being everything to one another and men having no male associates. Some men tend to be on the passive feminized side and [in men's groups] they get a good dose of influence from other men who are more established in their masculinity—[that's] of significant help. A lot of women in society today are pretty edgy about relating to other women, some kind of competitiveness or withdrawal or something—I don't understand the ins and outs of it completely. So we felt people often need help in learning to

relate in a trusting way to other woman sisters. The second objective was, particularly for the men, that you can more decisively pastor them as a group of men separately [from women]. You know, you don't want to give some guy hell for some of his sins with five other guys' wives there in a group, or something like that, so just practically you can do a different kind of pastoring in that situation.

A given men's group is not necessarily paralleled by a women's group composed of their spouses.

When there's the right group of men it's not guaranteed that their wives will be the right group. . . . It seems to be a characteristic of human nature that you can get most any group of guys to do pretty well together, but that's not true for most any group of women, I think maybe because women are more sensitive and personalized or something, but the guys, you know, maybe they talk about baseball instead of their personal lives (chuckle). . . . I don't know, there's some reason that men can just accommodate one another better than women. So getting a good fit for a group of women is more of a challenge, we find. . . . That is, some of the women's needs you'd think of as being met through their husbands, where there isn't a counterpart in the life of the men within the group, so the men would probably meet more one another's needs in a certain sense, particularly in respect to direction, and correction, and encouragement.

These remarks clearly exhibit a gender ideology in which women need to be controlled and in which women's "needs" are expected to be met by their husbands, while husbands' needs cannot be completely fulfilled by their wives. Thus, in addition to being a domain in which regulated improvisation maintains the appearance of spontaneity, the extrafamily groups can be understood as additional arenas in which the themes of intimacy and control are played out in the idiom of patriarchal gender discipline. Specifically, intimacy and control are redistributed across cultural boundaries between the private and public domains. To understand this critical observation, three points must be made.

First, we must conceptualize cultural definitions of public and private with respect to the relation both between household and community and between household and the broader middle-class North American cultural milieu—the world, in Charismatic ritual language. The former of these relations is symbolically articulated in the representation of the community as a distinct people. If in microcosm the community is a people, then what is public is what occurs among this people. The mystification in this cultural definition is evident in the practice of referring to the community's initiation ceremony as a public commitment, when from a broader perspective it is in fact a private ritual for members only.

The latter relation is not symbolic, but is the material articulation between community households composed of wage earners and the public at large. Despite their rhetoric of world renunciation and their apparent social isolation in some respects, community members participate in an economic arena and inhabit a civic space with which they are oppositionally engaged.

Second, gender discipline is nowhere else in this conservative movement elaborated as explicitly as in covenant communities like The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit. I have already noted the community's explicit antagonism to feminism, classed as one of the four major threats posed by the world. In the symbolic redistribution of intimacy and control across boundaries between public and private we can perceive that the rhetorical underpinnings of gender discipline go beyond the contemporary clash between feminist and patriarchal values. Gender difference is a prime example of what Mary Douglas (1973) has called a "natural symbol" that can be taken up to articulate social categories. Specifically, with regard to gender symbolism in the domain of religion, Caroline Walker Bynum (1986a) has noted that it is profoundly polysemic and can be about values other than gender. For The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit, gender is both an issue in its own fight and a rhetorically efficacious symbol that articulates a broader agenda. In its own right, for example, leaders of the community once observed that the Bible declared we are all "sons of God." They magnanimously concluded that women, too, must then be considered "sons of God"—but not sons who could serve as community leaders.^[10]   The broader agenda articulated by the symbolism of gender includes emphasis on discipline, authority, hierarchy, natural/divine law, conformity, sexual morality, primacy of loyalty to the collective project over loyalty to a spouse, and the regulation of psychological dependence between spouses.

Third, the distribution of intimacy and control between public (civic) and private (domestic) space must be understood in the context of the historical development of those spaces.^[11]   This is especially the case since the rhetorics of" traditional Christian" and even "early Christian" values are invoked in covenant community thinking. Bryan Turner formulates this development as follows:

The division between female passion and male reason is thus the cultural source of patriarchy. While patriarchy exists independently of the capitalist mode of production, being a specific distribution of power, capitalist society has articulated this division by providing a spatial distribution of reason and desire

between the public and private realm, institutionalized by the divorce between the family and the economy. (1984: 37)

The "arbitrary necessity" required for the ritualization in contemporary society of archaic affective distinctions between male and female is evident in the rationale for male headship given by a Word of God/Sword of the Spirit woman who, years before, had been joint leader with her husband of a prayer group in another city. She abdicated the position and accepted male headship, she said, because when problems arose she found herself getting more upset and emotional than her husband and because she found that men became uncomfortable and resistant when faced with leadership by a woman. The cultural arbitrariness of the principle is evident in its contradiction with the often articulated notion that Charismatic spirituality is a "religion of the heart, not of the head," a principle that, based on the same cultural logic, would appear to favor female headship (or perhaps heartship).

According to the historical interpretation put forward by Turner, the superimposition of capitalism on patriarchalism displaced economic productivity from the domestic unit and left it primarily as a space of intimacy. In the covenant community intimacy is expanded beyond the nuclear family, either by expanding the size of households or later by linking domestic units in clusters or men's and women's groups. Conversely, control is expanded within the domestic unit with the adoption by the husband of a ritualized role as head of the household, personal head of his wife, and executor of varying degrees of behavioral austerity at the behest of the community and its covenant. This redistribution of "passions" and "reasons" can be further specified, borrowing Turner's (1984: 38) terms, as a partial transfer of gemeinschaft, affectivity, and particularity from the private domain to the public domain of the entire "people," with a reciprocal transfer of masculinity, formality, specificity, asceticism, and productivity from the public to the domestic sphere.

The element of this transformation that requires elaboration beyond what I have already said is the recasting of the covenant community household in the image of the preindustrial unit of production. This is achieved first through gender discipline, which reached its most radicalized form in the sexual division of labor implemented through the Training Course. The course taught that husbands were to perform all yardwork and household tasks regarding the care of animals (the latter an echo of Old Testament pastoralism even if it was a question only of house pets) and were to teach their sons manly activities such as hunt-

ing and fishing. Wives were to do all housecleaning, cooking, dishwashing, and child care and were to teach their daughters feminine activities such as cooking and sewing. A man at home alone with an infant was instructed to call on another community woman if the child required a change of diapers. Pregnant women were assigned other experienced women as coaches in labor and delivery; although the husband was to be the general overseer, he was excluded from the actual birth. These prescriptions gave behavioral substance to the community's longtime masculine motto "Seize the territory" and its feminine equivalent "Make a place." The patriarchal disposition that accompanied and justified the inculcation of pseudo-preindustrial gender discipline was expressed by community men, not in terms of their power, but in terms of the demands placed on them: "I'm taking care of my family much better than before. I have so many more responsibilities, believe me it's not easy."

In addition, the community household became a productive unit within the religiously constituted people in the sense that the tithe in fact produced the community's subsistence. In this age when even the New York Times can refer to "money and other commodities,"^[12]   it requires no greater symbolic imagination to understand the wages generated by household heads as the community's principal commodity than it does for members to understand themselves as a "people." However, the entire effect is illusory in the broader social context beyond the community. In this broader context, members' productive activities appear in a distinctly postmodern way, embodying, if anything, a transition from the work discipline of industrial capitalism to that of corporate multinationalism rather than a return to the work discipline of a preindustrial pastoral people. Members are not trained as herdsmen but as teachers, physicians, engineers, and accountants. The Sword of the Spirit is a multinational concern in which families as well as individuals experience mobility among branches, and whose resources are arrayed against competing global ideologies. Indeed, the apparent success of men's and women's groups in contrast to both extended residential households and household clusters may be related to their organizational affinity to corporate work groups and task forces free from the necessity to accommodate shared residence or spouse relationships. ^[13]   None of this is to say that The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit members live an entirely illusory existence, for community members themselves would not be surprised at being compared to a multinational corporation. Our emphasis must be on the phenomenological effort and consequences of

sustaining the collective sacred self of a preindustrial people in a post-industrial world. This leads to a consideration of the ritualization of personal conduct.

Personal Conduct

Let us begin with an ethnographic fact that in my view illustrates virtually all the issues with which we have been concerned thus far. It is the transformation of the Charismatic practice of greeting by embrace, the holy hug that from the very beginning of the movement was important as a spontaneous gesture of intimacy and thus instantiated important psychocultural themes in a specific technique of the body. By the middle to late 1970s at The Word of God, the direct face-to-face embrace had been partially replaced by a side-to-side embrace with each person putting an arm over the other's shoulder. In self-observation, and not without humor, community members noticed the evolution in their own behavior and began to distinguish between "full front forward" and "sidearm swipe" types of embrace. I have no reason to believe that this change was promulgated by the teaching of coordinators, and it appears to mark the emergence of what Bourdieu (1977), in a characteristic oxymoron, refers to as a "spontaneous disposition" within the habitus.

To understand this change as a product of ritualization and radicalization, we must distinguish at least three relevant conditions. First is that of economy of motion, really an issue of convenience and habit, as with continued daily interaction with other community members the meaning of the gesture came to be conveyed by an abbreviated motion that required less time and effort. Second is the trend toward masculinization, which at least in North America is reinforced by a conventional bodily technique that consists in two men slinging their arms over each other's shoulders as opposed to joining in an affectionate hug. Third, and standing as a radicalization of the psychocultural theme of control, the face-to-face embrace has an erotic potential that was increasingly problematized along with the radicalization of gender discipline. As the community became ever more mobilized against "worldly and fleshly" trends, the holy hug became an occasion of temptation to sin. Its place within the habitus became modified, no longer being a disposition only of spontaneity and intimacy but of control as well.

Within this intensely intimate interpersonal context, the first major ritual innovation was the 1969 introduction by visiting Protestant evangelists of deliverance from evil spirits. As is typical in the Protestant style of deliverance, the expulsion of demons took place through pronounced somatic reactions in the forms of screaming, writhing, coughing, weeping, and vomiting. At first an explicitly cathartic release of interpersonal tension among members, deliverance became ritualized as part of the community's initiation process. The radicalization in this case was not defined by an increase in somatic manifestations, for in fact prayer for deliverance became increasingly tame. Instead, group initiation was radicalized insofar as, to the simple rite of instruction and laying on of hands for Baptism in the Holy Spirit, there was now added a rite of purification in which inductees were purged of satanic contamination.

Also from an early date, the ritualization of personal conduct extended to practices of everyday speech, with teachings on "speech and wrongdoing" included in the initiation seminars attended by every member. Thus someone who does wrong should never say "I'm sorry," a phrase that constitutes a one-sided gesture, but should say "Will you forgive me?" to obtain a response and establish a relationship with the offended person. Speech should always "lead our listeners to love and respect those we are speaking about," and the proper mode of reprimand or correction was to "speak the truth in love." Nothing leading to mistrust or conflict, or reflecting on another's righteousness or competence should be said, with complaints addressed only to the person responsible or to that person's head. Even worse is "speaking against," defined as negative or hostile criticism of another person, family, household, or community. Care was taken to specify that it is not speaking against to report wrongdoing to a head, to ask a mature person how to deal with wrongdoing, or for a head to explain at a community gathering that a person is being disciplined or has become unwelcome at such gatherings.

It is said that these restrictions should not prevent one from speaking about good things or even misfortunes that befall others, unless such utterance could cast another in a negative light. People should be open about sharing their problems but should not pass on to others knowledge thus gained. They should say nothing about courtship matters (e.g., "John likes Mary") until an announcement has been made about a relationship, for this is unacceptable "gossip." Although it is acceptable to request or instruct someone not to relate certain information to others, no one should ask for or make a promise of confidentiality, since

a potential gossip should not have been trusted in the first place and since in some cases one may have a responsibility to reveal something once one knows about it. People should not reprove others for actions they did not witness, or evaluate activities in which they were not involved, or look into another's affairs unless they are that person's head. Problems in a work or service group should not be mentioned outside that group, and problems in the community should not be mentioned to outsiders. No one should listen to either speaking against or gossip, and necessary complaints or criticisms should never be expressed in a "negative spirit."

As has been observed in the domain of worship, the ritualization of personal conduct progressed from such predominantly linguistic to increasingly somatic behaviors. The notion that gentlemanly respect for women should be part of a Charismatic culture led to ritualization of men rising when a woman enters a room, which elsewhere in North America has become an optional gesture of politeness used by both genders. While conservatism in dress was increasingly the norm, and it was common especially for children to wear used clothing from the community storeroom, dress was formally thematized as an aspect of gender discipline in the Training Course. Androgynous and unisex dress was forbidden, and clothing had to be "identifiably feminine or masculine." Teenage and adult women should not wear blue jeans, and pantsuits as opposed to skirts or dresses were frowned on for community handmaids. Men should avoid certain colors, patterns, fabrics, and jewelry: as one informant put it, "Pink flowered shirts were out for men."

The principal device for ritualization of conduct was personal headship (pastoral leadership). Only members of the Servants of the Word and community leaders at the rank of district head and higher were bound by full-scale "obedience" to headship. Other publicly committed members were in a relationship of"submission." In the words of a community head coordinator, a person in submission is

committed to receiving the advice of the pastoral leader [head] but not bound by obedience to act on it except in matters of serious sin. Finances is an example where we'd give direction if a person needed it, and the person, unless it's a matter of sin, could choose not to follow our advice. Refusal might not be greeted with wild acclaim, but they could refuse and it wouldn't be unrighteous. If it's gross negligence of their family, that's different.

Headship incorporates an essential psychocultural theme in its premise that spiritual growth is predicated on the kind of control and order in-

troduced into personal life by submission to the advice of an elder. Of equal importance is the appeal to intimacy that is used to justify submission to the authority of headship by those subject to it. Members typically say that they do not fear loss of personal control in subordinating themselves to a head precisely because the relationship itself is predicated on intimacy: "My head really knows me, and therefore would never advise me in a certain way unless he was really convinced it was best for me."

An example of how headship works can be drawn from the ritualization of courtship practices that occurred during the mid-1970s. Covenant communities tend to be endogamous, and matches are sometimes arranged by community leaders, recently even between members of different Sword of the Spirit branches. If an unmarried man is interested in a particular woman, he may on his own initiative suggest to his head that their living situation and hers plan a joint social activity. This practice is explicitly directed at allowing the two to meet without the social pressure and emotional trauma that members feel is often generated by the North American custom of the "date." It is presumed that if the prospective couple do not "hit it off," no one else will know about it, and hence no one will be embarrassed. If the couple gets along they enter a "dating relationship," a period of getting acquainted that should last no longer than a few months, so that neither party is "led on" into expecting greater commitment. The couple then decides, in consultation with their personal heads, whether to enter a "serious relationship" entailing a commitment to seriously consider marriage. A couple that progresses to the stage of "engagement" is understood already to have made a commitment, and an engagement should not be broken without good reason. Weddings are regarded as community events, the couple entering not only a commitment to each other but a phase of commitment to the community anticipating the founding of a nuclear family.^[14]   These practices can be understood as a feature of gender discipline directly addressed to the control of sexuality and its associated emotions, as well as to the reproduction of a new generation of community members.

Child-rearing practices and the personal conduct of children were also subject to ritualization, both in the home and in the community school that was founded in 1982. Children four years of age and older also learn by attending prayer meetings with their parents, who encourage them to participate and explain the proceedings in terms such as "This is what God is telling you," "This is what the words of the song mean,"

"That was a prophecy," and so on. The story is told of a toddler who was learning to ask forgiveness instead of saying he was sorry. He became angry while alone in the bathroom and violently slammed the lid of the toilet. From the next room he was then heard to say, "Will you forgive me, Mr. Toilet?" After a moment's pause the verbal formula was completed as, in a deep voice, the child said, "I forgive you, Tommy." Thus the child was able to identify a morally inappropriate reaction on his own part and employ the ritual remedy before he was able to discriminate between sentient beings and inanimate objects.

The incorporation of community values in play (the ritualization of play) is illustrated in the following examples. One community woman described a typical situation in which a group of little girls imitating adults would be competing "to be the mommy." A woman caretaker suggests that "they all be mommies, like the women's group," and the girls restructure their play to have tea together and care for their doll babies. Some girls have been observed to refer to their play group as a "girl's group." Another example illustrates the inculcation of social boundaries between community children and outsiders. A former neighbor of a community household observed that noncommunity children were unable to get along in play with young Charismatics engaged in building a snow fortress, because they were unprepared to understand the play in terms of the biblical scenario of the walls of Jericho.

Community children were deeply affected by the Training Course, which specified respectful terms of address for adults instead of first names, rising or explicitly greeting their father when he returned home from a day's work, avoidance of "worldly" influences such as rock music, and restrictions on clothing such as blue jeans. According to some, the overprotective strictness of Training Course requirements led to an exacerbation of North American "teen rebellion" and attendant problems associated with drugs, sex, and rock and roll. These developments were apparently central to the reevaluation of community structures and the split between The Word of God and the Sword of the Spirit. By the early 1990s there was a substantial degree of uncertainty over whether the "people" they had created could or should be perpetuated into a second generation.^[15]

The radicalization of control over personal conduct has without doubt progressed farthest within Steven Clark's elite brotherhood, the Servants of the Word. Young men who aspire to the brotherhood have already been instilled, through seminars leading to their public commitment, with a Pauline idealization of celibacy, or "living single for the

Lord." One young man, concerned about whether one could "be on fire for the Lord" when faced by the demands of caring for a family and for the "spiritual development of his wife," abandoned his desire for celibacy only when a trusted older man prophesied that he should marry instead. Those who complete the lengthy trial period are initiated in a special commitment ceremony to which noncommunity family members may be invited as to an ordination. Brothers adopt not only celibacy but other aspects of asceticism as well. They frequently sleep on the floor instead of in beds, and own no personal property—it is said that each owns only a few shirts and pairs of trousers. Working full time in service to their religious goals, they rely on financial support from the community and on solicitations from family and friends.

Servants of the Word typically travel in pairs on the model of the biblical disciples of early Christianity. This appears to be the case even when brothers visit their families outside the community, suggesting that constant companionship is also a protection from doubts likely to be planted by relatives concerned about the young men's abandonment of independent lives and careers to the total commitment demanded by the brotherhood. Vows of lifelong obedience to the leaders of the brotherhood and of willingness to be martyred in pursuit of their mission require that members be prepared for assignment to any Sword of the Spirit branch or affiliate in the world, as well as for even life-threatening adversity. Although entire community families may occasionally be assigned to live in a developing branch for a period, the unmarried brothers are organized into ongoing "outreach teams," a permanent "mobile field force" for the growth of the Sword of the Spirit.

Little else is known about the inner workings of the brotherhood, but one practice is ethnologically relevant to the present argument. This is the chewing of tobacco, an act that within the behavioral environment of the brotherhood takes on a meaning beyond that which it possesses in the broader contemporary culture. Tobacco was traditionally in widespread use among American Indian tribes for both secular and religious purposes—as medicine, as a marker of ceremonial solemnity, and as a psychotropic that assisted shamans to enter the altered state of consciousness in which they could contact their spirit helpers (Driver 1969; La Barre 1970). In contrast, in contemporary North America chewing tobacco establishes an ethos of rugged masculinity (most evident in its prevalence among professional baseball players). The popularity of tobacco chewing among the Servants of the Word lies between these types of use epitomizing the blurred boundary between ritual performance

and habitual practice in the Charismatic world. Although there is no evidence that the brothers intentionally seek an altered state of consciousness, the ethos of masculinity itself possesses a ritual significance defined by divinely sanctioned male headship, gender discipline, and the requirement of male toughness for building the Kingdom of God in a climate of spiritual warfare. As the elite advance guard of this enterprise, the brothers are thus not Bible-reading nerds but tobacco-chewing soldiers of Christ. They are the ones committed, should it be called for, to the most radicalized engagement of the charismatic body, subjection to martyrdom.

This is indeed how they are seen in the community. The purpose of the Training Course was to get the rest of the community "up to speed" not only for the collective mission but with the vanguard Servants of the Word. The repudiation of the Training Course by The Word of God was a repudiation of the radicalization of charisma and ritualization of life, processes whose locus had become the Servants of the Word. It was in this context that the brotherhood declared itself independent and formed the nucleus of the schismatic Sword of the Spirit branch.

Conclusion

At a much higher level of ritualization and radicalization, the issues that led to The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit schism in part reiterated those that split the prayer groups from the covenant communities in 1977, and The Word of God from the People of Praise in 1981. This suggests an enduring consistency of themes that, as we will see in Part Three, is grounded in an authoritative system of ritual language. It also suggests two apparently contradictory conclusions about ritualization and radicalization as dominant collective self processes. On the one hand, they can generate a kind of centrifugal force that results in the spinoff of those unwilling to follow the tightening spiral of charisma. On the other hand, they can be interrupted at different points by moments of self-reflection. The apparent contradiction is reconciled by a disjunction in attribution, for while radicalization is experienced as an inherently sacred process, retreat from radicalization is based on attribution of human error. In The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit schism, the "true," that is, divine, source of charisma was never questioned by either party. It is this fact that leads us to theoretical consideration of the nature of the "charisma" that drives these processes.