Gendering the Pentecostal God

Scholarship on gender in Pentecostalism tends to assume that the question of how gender relates to Pentecostalism is the question of what women, and sometimes men, are allowed or not allowed to do. This approach treats gender as a human social phenomenon, and represents humans on a “horizontal” plane, in relation to other humans. In this paper, however, I suggest that placing the human–divine relation front and centre of our analyses exposes more complex and theoretical questions that underpin issues of opportunity. By centring the “vertical”, I explore the ways that sexuality can be used to imagine, experience, and organize relations between Pentecostals and God, as well as between themselves. In the process, I make a broader argument for why sexuality matters to the study of Pentecostalism, arguing that it offers and reproduces models of difference which shape human experiences in a profound way.