Ser crente: experiência e linguagem religiosa da vida pentecostal

Abstract

This thesis proposes to know and discuss the modes of construction of the religious reality of the Pentecostal life defined by the religious experience concerning Pentecostalism, having as theoretical reference a more essential definition of religion which arouses homo religiosus inherent to man. This proposition is assumed to be best suited to research in the Science of Religion in order to focus on the religious object and its intentions concerning the underlying practices of Pentecostal culture. The approach was qualitative, through a field survey conducted in the city of Juiz de Fora-MG from October 2014 to November 2015. A total of thirty-four believers and former believers from nominally Pentecostal institutions were interviewed. The data collection was done using a comprehensive interview method, which allows a better approximation to the interviewee and promotes better conditions to establish theoretical perspectives and synthesis about the analyzed object. This discussion allowed a deep and constitutive knowledge of this religiosity, a necessary result for the analysis of religion as a promoter of significant and last realities that tend to question other competing perspectives. Thus, religion is considered in this work not nominally but qualitatively, having in Pentecostalism its formal representation and in Pentecostal life its dynamic and substantial aspect. This approach allowed both the visualization of the Pentecostal religion and the collection of records that indicate its properly religious constituents, presenting its religious language, and, from the consideration of this human prerogative of the religious being, the discussion and verification of the power of definition and normalization of religion, producing the believing person.