Alleluia: an ethnographic study

Review

The Alleluia Community located in Augusta, Georgia, is an alternative charismatic community consisting of Christian families living together and sharing common resources as an expression of love and service. Don Swenson’s important study draws on O’Dea’s five dilemmas of the institutionalization of religion to probe how Alleluia navigates the tensions between the sacred and the secular, charisma and its routinization, and the prophets of renewal and renewal movements. Swenson discovers that the community has built safeguards that enable it to resist the forces of secularization. Interestingly, Swenson proposes a sixth dilemma—the interpretative dilemma, or order of belief—in which the human experience of the sacred is structured around myth, story, belief, ritual, experience, and community. This book is valuable for those interested in Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity, the sociology of religion, and theories of secularization. -- Peter Althouse, Southeastern University

In his best-selling and much discussed work The Benedict Option (2017), Rod Dreher points to Alleluia, an ecumenical charismatic covenant community in Georgia, as an example of a Christian community resisting the secularizing pressures of modernity. Swenson (Emeritus, Mount Royal University, Calgary) provides a thorough ethnographic study of this community. Swenson’s data includes in-depth interviews, field research, analysis of community documents, and surveys of community members. He analyzes the data using a framework drawn from Thomas O’Dea’s theory of the dilemmas of institutionalization of religion. Swenson investigates community leadership styles, prayer practices, gender roles, ethics, and beliefs. A key finding is the significance of social support for ongoing conversion. Swenson’s conclusion describes Alleluia as a sacred community that successfully resists secularization. Social scientists will appreciate the structured presentation of each chapter: a review of literature, qualitative and quantitative analysis of data, and helpful charts and tables followed by conclusions. General readers may wish for more narrative description but will not find the study inaccessible. Swenson’s study is highly recommended for schools with programs in sociology of religion, or having interests in charismatic movements or intentional Christian communities.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through practitioners. ― Choice Reviews, vol. 56 no. 10

Product Description

The Alleluia Community is a unique Christian community of over three hundred committed charismatic Christians in Augusta, Georgia, who live a covenant and ecumenical lifestyle. Emerging from the Charismatic Renewal Movement of the 1960s, members of Alleluia have maintained a lively charismatic dimension of the Christian tradition with a willingness to make a life-time covenant commitment to each other. Since 1973, this group of people has exhibited heroic virtue, self-sacrifice, humility, deference for one another, and service to others outside their boundaries. They claim to be guided by the Holy Spirit in their daily lives. Their leaders lead with a strong sense of service and Christian love and a willingness to lay down their own agendas. A major feature of these covenant makers is that they strive for daily Christian unity while being committed to one of the twelve-plus various denominations and fellowships. Swenson had the opportunity of living among these people for twenty months. During this time, he used a mixed method approach involving over one hundred interviews and three hundred instruments to create both qualitative and quantitative measures of the lives of these people. To structure their story, he used the dilemmas of the institutionalization of religion from the scholarship of Thomas O’Dea and secularization theory. The data gathered give abundant evidence that these Alleluia faithful have substantively resisted the secular influence so common in Wes