The Personal is Political:Pentecostal Approaches to Governance and Security

In this essay, I explore Pentecostal approaches to governance and security, taking an anthropological approach. I focus on Pentecostalism as a distinctive way of looking at and being in the world, one that understands the family as central in its approach governance and security. I highlight the paradox between Pentecostalism’s strong orientation towards individual and family moral conduct and practices of female leadership in Pentecostal contexts. I conclude with some broader reflections on the implications for diplomacy and other practitioners of foreign policy

Advocating the value-add of faith in a secular context:The case of the Knowledge Centre Religion and Development in the Netherlands.

This article analyses how faith-based civil society organisations have advocated the value-add of faith to governmental and non-governmental development actors in the highly secularised context of the Netherlands. Its social value lies in the space for reflexivity it opens up on how the religious and the secular are entangled in the field of development through shifting the gaze towards secularised Europe. Its academic value lies in how it combines the study of faith and development, with a critical analysis of the secular formations in which much of the thinking around faith and development is shaped. The article builds on an academic study of and long-term engagement with the Dutch non-governmental organisation (NGO)-based Knowledge Centre Religion and Development (KCRD), offering a critical overview of the KCRD’s work between 2006 and 2016. Data were gathered through interviews, document analysis and participant observation as part of the academic research, as well as informal observations and analysis through professional engagement. The KCRD, because of its institutional setting, had to adopt an instrumental approach towards the role of religion in development, which prevented it from challenging the reigning secular paradigm in development and its biases towards faith-based actors. The article will recommend that future initiatives on faith and development more consciously anchor their approach to faith in their institutional practices and mainstream discussions on the European continent

Why the Dutch (Think They) Break Taboos:Challenging Contemporary Presentations of the Role of Religious Actors in Narratives of Sexual Liberation

In contemporary approaches to sexual health in the Netherlands, religion and culture are often framed as a source of taboos that need to be broken in order to create more openness around sexuality. This view is often projected onto migrants with a religious background and onto other parts of the world that are ‘still’ religious. In this article, we suggest that one element to developing a more inclusive approach is to question existing narratives of ‘sexularism’ and to acknowledge that both religious and secular actors have historically been involved in the search for better ways of approaching sexual health and sexuality in the Netherlands. In contemporary characterizations of Dutch culture, the sexual revolution is referenced as a time in Dutch history when religious small-mindedness around sexuality was dismantled through a series of transgressive media events. Iconic moments in the sexual revolution have become ingrained in a collective memory of the 1960s as liberation from the firm grip of religion on peoples’ intimate lives. In this article we argue that the contemporary Dutch equation of secularization with openness around sexuality obscures a more complex dynamic between conservative and progressive forces within Dutch religious history. Based on existing research, we show that openness around sexuality was taking shape from within Catholic and Protestant communities and being materialized in new discourses, services and practices around sexuality in the 1950s and 1960s. Frictions between Protestants and Catholics, the clergy and the people, and liberal and conservative circles were part and parcel of some of the iconic moments that are now considered to have shaped Dutch culture