See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/50990868

Challenging Pentecostal moralism: erotic geographies, religion and sexual

practices among township youth in Cape Town

Article  in  Culture Health & Sexuality · March 2011

DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2011.566356 · Source: PubMed

CITATIONS READS

30 118

1 author:

Marian Burchardt
University of Leipzig
93 PUBLICATIONS   717 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Becoming Men: Performing Responsible Masculinities in Urban Africa View project

Edited Volume "Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes" View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Marian Burchardt on 11 January 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

This article was downloaded by: [Burchardt, Marian]
On: 31 March 2011
Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 935835927]
Publisher Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-
41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Culture, Health & Sexuality

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713693164

Challenging Pentecostal moralism: erotic geographies, religion and sexual

practices among township youth in Cape Town
Marian Burchardta
a
Department of Cultural Studies, University of Leipzig, Germany

First published on: 31 March 2011

To cite this Article Burchardt, Marian(2011) 'Challenging Pentecostal moralism: erotic geographies, religion and sexual
practices among township youth in Cape Town', Culture, Health & Sexuality,, First published on: 31 March 2011 (iFirst)
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2011.566356
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2011.566356

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or
systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents
will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses
should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,
actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly
or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
 Culture, Health & Sexuality
2011, 1–15, iFirst

Challenging Pentecostal moralism: erotic geographies, religion and

sexual practices among township youth in Cape Town
Marian Burchardt*

Department of Cultural Studies, University of Leipzig, Germany

(Received 10 September 2010; final version received 22 February 2011)

Research on constructions of sexuality in Pentecostalism often struggles with the fact

that the research setting is defined ex ante in terms of church communities, which
imposes upon ethnographic accounts the same limitations Pentecostal morality
imposes upon church members’ discourse. Taking young Pentecostals operating in a
space that is not explicitly religious as the methodological entrance to the field, this
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

paper explores negotiations over sexuality, intimate relationships and love among
Xhosa-speaking township youth. It introduces the notion of erotic geographies to
consider how possible influences of religious discourses on sexuality are refracted by
alternative cultural orientations and material contexts. Findings suggest that premarital
abstinence appears as a highly exceptional ideal for youth. Even among Pentecostal
youth, notions of sexuality are largely severed from religiosity and faithfulness and
romanticism are dominant ideals. Future research on Pentecostalism and sexuality
should be less religious-centric and rooted more firmly in ethnographies of youth
sexual cultures.
Keywords: South Africa; youth sexuality; ethnography; Pentecostalism

Introduction
In South Africa, the engagement of churches and other faith-based organisations (FBOs)
with the HIV prevention has been decisive in catapulting concern with the links between
religion, youth sexuality, intimate relationships and love onto the agenda of the social
sciences. Particularly in urban centres, during the last ten years churches and FBOs began
offering life-skills courses to church youth focused on issues of love, relationships and
sexual health. Most of these activities focus increasingly on promoting premarital
abstinence and marital fidelity.
As elsewhere in Africa, the urge to promote premarital abstinence, marital fidelity and
‘virtuous’ life conduct is particularly pronounced in Pentecostal Christianity, which is
growing at a rapid pace in urban townships.1 While, historically, conversion to
Christianity did not have major influences on sexual culture, Pentecostals’ public
discourse on sexual morality affords questions about such influences renewed significance.
Pentecostal churches’ calls for sexual abstinence, however, sit uneasily with the social
and cultural realities that structure the lives of most urban youth. Intimate relationships are
a central part of young people immersed in urban consumer culture, and sexual intercourse
is perceived as a taken-for-granted part of such relationships. Moreover, what might be the
perceptions of premarital abstinence messages in a social context where marriage is often

*Email: marian.burchardt@uni-leipzig.de

ISSN 1369-1058 print/ISSN 1464-5351 online

q 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2011.566356
http://www.informaworld.com
 2 M. Burchardt

delayed or completely abandoned? How should Pentecostal youth reconcile religious

teachings on sexuality with other cultural templates for intimate life circulating in
metropolitan townships?
Social science scholarship on Pentecostal moral campaigns in Africa has successfully
documented the rise of new sexual vocabularies and discourses as modes of publicly
speaking about sex in religious contexts (Garner 2000; Smith 2004; Gusman 2009).
However, it has been much less successful in understanding how these discourses relate to
the ways young people, at whom they are primarily targeted, actually experience intimate
relationships, make love and have sex. Most of these studies take religious culture as an
entry point to their studies and neglect to focus on the sexual cultures of youth. This field
of scholarship is generally characterised by a weak theory of socio-eroticism and limited
ethnographic exploration of dating and bodily intimacy. A crucial, yet largely unexplored
question is, therefore, whether and how sexual discourses influence sexual practices and
how they articulate with economic circumstances and the larger cultural contexts in which
the perceptions, notions and practices of sex are shaped.2
This paper confronts these shortcomings in the scholarship by exploring intimate
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

practices of young people who maintain membership in Pentecostal churches in a

township setting. Importantly, it does not take membership in these churches as a defining
category of identity ex ante. The first part of the paper briefly summarises the findings of
recent research on the interface of religion, HIV/AIDS and sexuality in Africa and argues
that future studies should be centrally concerned not with religious communities but rather
with the everyday intimate practices of young people. The main part of the paper explores
links between youth socio-eroticism and Pentecostal Christianity as they emerge from
research with young people aged 16 to 24 in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town. By
socio-eroticism is meant the complex set of imaginaries, desires and practices whereby the
binding energies of the social are cast into erotic moulds that work to generate and
replicate gendered forms of domination (Bourdieu 2001). The paper explores how young
people negotiate cultural scripts for sexual life and how possible links between religion
and sexual style are refracted by alternative cultural frameworks of youth culture, most
importantly romanticism. Diverse models of religious commitment among my informants
range from nominal to strong. The paper is based on participant observation, group
discussions and narrative interviews with Xhosa-speaking, heterosexual youth, carried out
over a field research period of 10 months in Cape Town’s townships of Khayelitsha and
Gugulethu.3

Religion, sexuality and AIDS in (South) Africa

Research has shown that patterns and meanings of sexual practice and attendant
differences in gender, age and class in Africa have been changed in the course of colonial
modernization (Mayer 1980, 33ff; Delius and Glaser 2002; Hunter 2002) and post-colonial
family planning policies (Smith 2001). However, as the vast majority of Africans
identify with some religious tradition that shapes forms of sociality, it is vital to ask how
sexuality is understood and socially constructed in religious contexts. In South Africa,
roughly 80% of the population claims membership in a Christian church (Statistics South
Africa 2004).
Across the world, research has shown that Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is
characterised by notions of rupture and discontinuity crystallising around a series of
binaries such as darkness/light, devil/god, past/present and evil/good. Conversion, faith
in the power of the Holy Spirit, deliverance, personal transformation and disciplined
 Culture, Health & Sexuality 3

‘conduct of life’ are construed as the essential means of moving across these boundaries
and achieving salvation as the supreme state of human existence (Meyer 1998). In this
context, Robbins (2004) notes that Pentecostalism’s:
. . . dualism also brings itself to bear on action through its moral codes, which ban contact
with the satanic world by forbidding drinking and drug use, extramarital sexuality, fighting
and aggressive displays, gambling, ostentatious dress, and participation in secular
entertainments such as cinema and dancing. (128)
Much of the more recent research into the dynamics of religion and sexuality is in line with
these observations and links them to the incipient incorporation of concerns with
HIV/AIDS into the agendas of Pentecostal moralism. If not always explicitly, the
evangelical notion of ‘being saved’ is increasingly taken to include AIDS in the list of
evils from which twice-born Christians are delivered (Gusman 2009). Membership in a
Pentecostal community through conversion is assumed to save individuals from the threat
of HIV, sometimes replacing the biomedical notion of sexual transmission with the idea of
‘immunity by faith’ (Burchardt 2007). There is ample evidence that until 2000 Pentecostal
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

responses to AIDS linked the disease to ideas of sin and divine retribution (Parsitau 2009)
– more recently, attitudes have become more open.
Furthermore, in embracing AIDS as a social problem, religious groups construct their
own sexual discourse, contributing to bringing sexuality into the public sphere as a subject
of debate (Leclerc-Madlala 2005; Iliffe 2007). Here, the most controversial issue is
invariably condom promotion, which many churches equate with the promulgation of
sexual promiscuity (Parsitau 2009, 51). As a result, the focus is almost always, especially
in the Pentecostal field, on preaching morals, abstinence and fidelity. Regarding direct
influences of church teachings on HIV prevention and sexual practices, Garner (2000)
claims that membership in Pentecostal churches safeguards against pre- and extramarital
sex and HIV-infection, while Agadjanian (2005) is rather sceptical.
Research on Pentecostalism and sexuality is characterised by three main shortcomings.
Firstly, most studies focus on church discourses, while conclusions about real practices
and their ethnographic support are sometimes unclear. In her book on Pentecostal churches
in Durban, Helgesson (2006) quotes a church handbook that strictly prohibits premarital
sex: ‘if the leadership discovers that a member is engaged in premarital sex, disciplinary
action would have to follow’ (188). Yet, unfortunately, she does not explore what the
leadership does not discover. Secondly, to the extent conclusions about abstinence and
fidelity are drawn from research into church discourse, studies seem to be based on strong
assumptions: about the centrality of religiosity in people’s lives, about the individual
importance of sexuality for religiosity and about the effectiveness of the church
communities’ social control. Yet the validity of these assumptions is not always proven.
Thirdly, studies sometimes fail to acknowledge that sexual relationships and practices are
not only shaped in religious cultures, especially in urban contexts there is an autonomous
domain of sexual culture per se. As a result, there is a tendency to reify ‘religious
communities’ as totalities whose believers have no social existence outside of them. In his
otherwise perceptive analysis of Pentecostal articulations with intergenerational struggles
in urban Uganda, Gusman, (2009) for instance, notes that ‘control over sexuality is taken
away from adults . . . and it is granted to the religious community, which has the
responsibility of controlling the behaviour of young believers’ (77). While the argument is
compelling for considering discursive shifts, it may be based on an unrealistic theory of
youth sexuality. Significantly, scholars acknowledge that their informants admit they ‘are
of course not free from temptations’ (Gusman 2009, 77) and ‘ . . . “backslide” or “fall”
 4 M. Burchardt

once in a while’ from the ideal of abstinence (Parsitau 2009, 59). Social scientists, then,
must scrutinise whether ‘falling’ is less an accidental or random failure of the flesh than a
systematic effect of orientations towards an entirely different cultural imaginary, for
example romanticism. In other words, it might be that ‘falling’ is a way of packaging and
translating into a religious idiom, encouraged by the religious context in which these
statements are generated, what may in fact be practices associated with, for instance,
romancing, experimentation or transactional sex (Sadgrove 2007).
The hypothetical connections between religious commitment, religious participation
and sexual style emerging from this research are summarized in Figure 1.
Importantly, these assumptions appear abstracted from the social realities of intimate
life characteristic of the wider youth communities in which believers’ ideals and practices
are embedded. In the following I will therefore begin by focusing in on the structures of
youth socio-eroticism as I witnessed them in the township of Khayelitsha. Only as a
second step do I consider how these structures and the sexual styles they reflect articulate
with Pentecostal belonging.4
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

Sexual youth culture and Pentecostal belonging in an urban township

Erotic geographies: bodies and spaces
Moving through the townships of Cape Town, one cannot fail to notice the super-sized
billboards put up by the ‘LoveLife’ national prevention campaign. The billboards carry
slogans that proclaim ‘Protect yourself!’ or ‘You can’t pressure me into sex!’ next to
images of ostensibly fashion-conscious young urban couples; in the past decade, these
billboards have become one of the most visible signs of sexuality in public spaces.
Simultaneously, township youth have also been exposed to faith-based sexual education
campaigns in which secular discourse and iconography are attacked as being ‘sexually
explicit’ without promoting ‘values’. Yet exhortations to sexual Puritanism sit rather
uneasily with the erotic nature of young people’s social spaces.
For young people in the townships the neighbourhood street is the primary space for
eroticized interaction. Given the overall absence of alternative local places for peer
sociality, such as cinemas and clubs, and the widespread lack of financial resources and

Figure 1. Religion and sexual style.

 Culture, Health & Sexuality 5

access to shopping malls located far from home in more affluent suburbs, streets are an
essential space in the youth social life. Streets provide the cultural scenery where people
get to know each other, make acquaintances, casually initiate sexual liaisons, forge new
relationships and ritually perform existing ones. At almost any time of day, but particularly
in the afternoon, one can observe groups of young women and men sojourning outside in
search of such interactions. Once a promising contact between two individuals has been
forged, groups of young people will, on subsequent occasions, routinely pass where others
are known to linger and provide the ostensibly casual context for an intensified
engagement between potential lovers. The eroticisation of female-male encounters in
public spaces is further reinforced by the fact that after sexual debut, young people rarely
consider members of the other sex as possible friends. Under these circumstances, almost
any close and recurring contact between young women and men outside of formal settings
is potentially invested with erotic meaning.
While kissing in public is relatively rare, other kinds of bodily contact between young
women and men in public are culturally endorsed and key to understanding the gendered
nature of sexual relationships. As is the case in most Western societies, couples hold
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

hands, walk arm-in-arm and occasionally hug in public. In this regard, the street is
rendered a site in which bodily contact serves to perform an intimate relationship and to
showcase a relationship to the peer community. For both women and men, this entails
statements to sexual maturity and articulates claims to the particular partner with whom
one has managed to form an intimate tie. Moreover, the public performance of
relationships is necessary for transforming the value of one’s partner – measured in terms
of beauty and personal coolness – into individual prestige qua erotic capital. Being seen
with a beautiful girl performing such codified bodily rituals increases a man’s erotic
capital, coolness and attractiveness in the eyes of other women and affords him the respect
of his male peers. Among men, achieving a relationship is overwhelmingly defined
through concepts of conquest and public visibility is an essential condition for the social
recognition thereof. For young women, being seen with a ‘cool guy’ is key to evaluations
of erotic esteem by themselves and others but also to keep other aspirants at bay. While
research on sexuality in South Africa has often emphasised that men evaluate conquest in
terms of the number of sexual partners, it has largely overlooked the importance of
economies of attraction and beauty in effecting sexual prestige.5 Within these economies
of attraction, those less endowed with erotic capital may also be self-selected into
alternative cultural spheres such as Pentecostalism where they may capitalise on strong
commitment in a different hierarchy of social value.
Bodily contact is essential within existing intimate relationships but it is also a
modality by which young women and men engage with one another in the first place. In the
course of ‘hanging out’, ensuing social interaction but also routine conversations between
young women and men are often accompanied by bodily touching. The prerogative as well
as the expectation to initiate these physical intimacies lies with men. These bodily aspects
of female-male interaction exhibit a playful character and the younger and the more
intimately acquainted the participants the more bodily play will be at the centre of
collective attention, easily surpassing the themes of the conversation in significance.
However, despite its playful nature such interaction is sometimes infused with subtle
physical violence: women’s resistance against touches are sometimes met with forceful
reactions by men. These are virtually embryonic forms of male assertions to control
women’s mobility that are – according to literally all of the existing studies – typical of
heterosexual relationships in South Africa (Varga 1997; Preston-Whyte 1999; Wood and
Jewkes 2005). It appears that playful rituals of bodily touch in routine street interaction serve
 6 M. Burchardt

as a way of ‘training’ young men to physically exercise masculine domination, diffusely

prefiguring much of the coercive nature of more stable heterosexual relationships. Forced
touches also form the visible gendered horizon, barely hiding the shocking realities of rape
and sexual violence against women that have been reported over many years.
While streets function as a central erotic geography on which intimate relationships are
symbolically performed, places for sexual intercourse are highly limited. For many young
people, rampant poverty and unemployment renders the prospect of residing
independently from their family impossible. If financially feasible, the first step towards
residential independence is often the construction of a shack in the backyard of the family
house. In that case, this is the obvious place for people to have sex. Otherwise, they are
obliged to perform sexual intercourse in their family house during the parents’ absence.
Alternatively, people may resort to having sexual intercourse somewhere in the open
wastelands between the townships, a practice popularly depicted as ‘going to the bushes’.

Religion and sexual style: mediations and cultural refractions

Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

Intimate relationships thus appear as an engrained part of youth sociality producing

distinctly eroticised social spaces. This, however, contradicts the ways in which
Pentecostal churches of which many research participants are members have fashioned
themselves as carriers of a biblically-based sexual morality. The question is therefore: how
do young people negotiate practices of dating, romancing and sexual intercourse in the
light of Pentecostal sexual discourse and what are the conditions under which differences
in sexual style take shape?
The practices and discourses about forging, performing and validating intimate
relationships described above mutate once we follow young people into the religious
arena. Here, it was clear that the maintenance of Pentecostal belonging required strategies
of performing knowledgeability of Pentecostal tenets and specific competences to show
adequate behaviour in front of different, or differently defined, audiences. This can be
shown with regard to three different settings.
First, during the Sunday services young people would invariably adhere to the
proscription of bodily contact, except for the affectionate hugs members give one another
as a means of expressing belonging. Those who are couples would remain physically
separated even during the casual conversations in front of the church building or the
pastor’s house that follow the services. These rules were also observed, if to a slightly
lesser degree, during the sexual education workshops, which some of the pastors I worked
with had initiated since the middle of the 2000s. During these workshops whose
participants were largely comprised of church youth, Christian understandings of love,
sexuality and marriage would be discussed in great detail, very often through references to
biblical quotes.
Remarkable was the slight change of emphasis when it came to debates on sexual
intercourse and marriage: while in the setting of Sunday services sex was idealised as a gift
from God to be exclusively enjoyed in the Godly union which monogamous and faithful
marriage life represents, in the workshop settings this ideal was construed as particularly
‘desirable’ by both youths and pastors. It was also here that broader notions of ‘responsible
relationships’, emotional commitment between partners and mutual respect were
discussed. The very entanglements of pastors with the youth communities surrounding
them, which are partly a result of the stronger ‘peer’ character of these meetings, allowed
them to transcend the narrow focus on abstinence that is otherwise typical of Pentecostal
sexual ideology.
 Culture, Health & Sexuality 7

One of the ways which enabled young people to address sexuality while
simultaneously ‘masking’ their sexual involvements and employing culturally adequate
registers was to rely on linguistic modalities that were both detached and centred on ideals
(‘one should be careful about relationships’, ‘relationships should be respectful’ etc.). In
the pastors’ discourse, however, rather Manichean Pentecostal ideas of sin and darkness
were also reinforced through direct associations between alcohol, sexual permissiveness
and disease.
Finally, young people’s sociality was transformed and de-eroticised when
conversations between pastors and youth emerged through casual encounters in the
township streets themselves. Whenever I walked with a pastors to someone else’s house
and we had conversations with youth groups in the street, young people would
immediately abandon physical touches, take on more upright bodily positions and
temporarily arrest the playful nature of interaction and the performances of intimacy that
are otherwise pervasive. These practices, just as the adherence to certain registers of
comportment and discourse in church services and church-based workshops, are mainly
driven by the desire to show respect to the pastors and to acknowledge the quasi-religious
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

nature their presence imparts to these social situations. In other words: regardless of their
actual sexual styles or practices, young people had an immediate understanding of the
adequate performance with regard to intimacy or the suppression thereof.
For some members of these youth communities, however, such respectful
comportment reflected a deeply seated habitus and publicly displayed the fact that they
were, according to all available information, abstainers. These were often daughters or
sons of pastors or other adults who belonged to the ‘inner circle’ of churches. Others
sometimes mocked this habitus as ‘too much holiness’, a notion that reflected a perceived
lack of erotic capital and essentially positioned them as outside of the game. The fact that
these young people were permanent church members raises questions about the links
between people’s biographical religious trajectories and sexual style.

Fluid involvements: religious affiliation and sexual style

Outside more affluent settings, premarital sexual abstinence often depends on permanent
church membership. What we find in poor townships such as Khayelitsha instead,
however, are high degrees of fluctuation of affiliation. Together with the diverging places
of church membership in individual biographies, this fluctuation strongly mediates the
effects of church morality on sexual practice.
Fluctuation in church membership is often a result of geographical and social mobility
and migration. If young unmarried people have a strong family background of religiosity,
such as those mentioned above, or the joining a new Pentecostal congregation directly
follows the migratory passage, a strong model of Christian belonging including sexual
abstinence is likely to be sustained. In this case, the value of abstinence is often construed
in terms of ‘following the parents’ path’ while the church community is understood as
safeguarding a pious and orderly life tout court. For others, however, membership is a
result of individual conversion, often ensuing from biographical ruptures. In cities such as
Cape Town, this is typical, for instance, for people who experienced civil war in other
African countries and arrived as refugees or women who experienced violent abuse by
their partners. These experiences may imply that they had sex in the past but cease to be
sexually active upon joining their churches.
The persistence of commitments to premarital abstinence may thus depend on the
duration of either a strong commitment to Pentecostal faith or membership in the church,
 8 M. Burchardt

or both. In some cases, young people would abandon church attendance in their teenage
years because they felt oppressed in their church and had been attracted to other forms of
youth culture; some reassumed membership after some years. Sometimes people returned
to the church once they were engaged in a stable relationship and headed towards
marriage. At this point in the life course, church sexual doctrines were no longer an issue.
Therefore, we must consider how links between religiosity and sexual style evolve in a
context of accelerated social mobility and shifting cultural orientations.
While social continuity and the seamless embedding of young people’s social lives
into religious contexts can favour sexual abstinence, the marked discontinuity of
religiosity and family relations often explains the re-orientation to alternative cultural
models in which sex is not banned but encouraged. People either engage in intercourse
before they convert to Pentecostal Christianity or else membership in the church remains
temporarily limited and finishes before marriage would be due. Thus, people either
abandon the practice of abstinence because they leave the church and the strong Christian
model, or vice versa. Others, as the discussion below will show, become ‘born again’
while the meanings of conversion are largely detached from, and therefore do not affect,
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

their sexual lives (see also Sadgrove 2007).

For many, however, the future idea of marriage has been largely obliterated as a
cultural effect of histories of economic change, rendering ineffective the ‘ratchet effect’
that future expectations would have on present articulations of faith and sexual style. As a
result, total abstinence in the strict Christian sense (i.e. virginity until marriage), remains a
comparatively improbable option. In order to make sociological sense of this
improbability, I now reverse my perspective and explore the diverse cultural meanings
attached to practices of dating, romancing and sexual intercourse as they emerged from
group discussions, individual narrative interviews and countless informal talks.
During the group discussions, which usually lasted for more than two hours and were
single-sex, young people described experiences of ongoing or former sexual relationships,
explained why and how they protected themselves against HIV/AIDS and reflected upon
their personal sexual histories.6 Within these peer settings, religion was of little importance
for defining ideas about sexual relationships despite the strong individual religious
commitments of some of the participants. This had to do, first, with a far-reaching disconnect
between religiosity and notions of sexuality and, second, with the methodological decision
not to address the groups as ‘religious groups’ per se. What is more, for all of my informants
in these groups church membership was of a highly shifting nature that reflected their
generally insecure economic situation, frequent changes of residence but also the shifting
nature of interest in church community life. Tracing a few individual cases in detail helps us
to illuminate the multiple forms of social belonging in its complexity.
All but one of the participants were members of Pentecostal churches, particularly of a
church community called El Shaddai located in the neighbourhood Town Two. One of
them is Poppy, a 21-year-old, HIV-positive single mother of a 6-year-old boy.7 Ever since
her mother brought her to Cape Town from an Eastern Cape village in 1990, Poppy has
been a member of her mother’s Pentecostal church. At the age of 13, she fell in love with
a pastor’s son. To her mother and the church, this relationship seemed unacceptable. As a
result, Poppy was sent to live with some distant relatives in another township. This worked
to simultaneously rescue her mother’s reputation in the church and to free Poppy from
parental control. Poppy fell in love again, got pregnant and received an HIV-positive
diagnosis following antenatal exams. She returned to her mother’s house and resumed
membership in the Pentecostal congregation. However, when she was asked to sit on a
separate bench because of her HIV-infection and the pastor forced her to undergo laying
 Culture, Health & Sexuality 9

on of hands ritual healing for her affliction, she decided to leave the church and joined
El Shaddai.
At El Shaddai, Poppy formed a close friendship with Meliziswe, the church’s pastor,
and his family. She regularly attended Sunday services and became a member of the
church’s youth group and choir. Pentecostal faith was definitely central to her life but
nevertheless severed from her ideas about intimate relationships. She strongly expounded
an idea of romantic love as the basis of long-term relationships and viewed marriage as
dispensable. When asked about the meaning of religion for her intimate life, she merely
answered smilingly: ‘We are young people, what do you think?’
At some stage during my field research, Poppy had a short-lived sexual liaison with
Mandla, Melziswe’s 20-year-old nephew who had just moved to Cape Town from his
Eastern Cape native village. When the story was revealed, the liaison resulted in severe
tensions between Meliziswe, Poppy and Mandla. For a prolonged period Poppy stopped
visiting the family and Mandla moved out of his shared quarters with the rest of his family.
The main reason for the conflict, however, was not that the young people had premarital
sexual intercourse but the fact that they had unprotected sex. They did so even though
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

Mandla knew about Poppy’s infection. In this context it is interesting to note that El
Shaddai does cultivate an official discourse that emphasises premarital abstinence and
marital fidelity, prohibits the discussion of condoms in church and encourages young
members to set up a marriage plan if their relationship is, or is made, public. Nevertheless,
there are no sanctions against offenders as is the case in Pentecostal communities in
KwaZulu Natal studied by Garner (2000). Moreover, outside the church setting, Pastor
Meliziswe encourages condom use among the young people around him and is highly
engaged in local activism on AIDS. It appears that the church is able to accommodate a
variety of sexual styles without major internal confrontations.
Similar to Poppy, Mandla is a very active member of the congregation and a lead singer
in the choir. Moreover, he has given sermons during the Sunday services despite his young
age and offers prayers in the domestic family context. Nevertheless, his notion of intimate
relationships and sex were a far cry from those officially endorsed by the church. On one
occasion, he showed me photographs of about 10 young girls, claiming that they were all his
girlfriends and that for an ‘African man’ it was utterly central to have as many girlfriends as
possible.8 He also emphasised the importance of the traditional Xhosa male initiation rites for
accomplishing legitimate manhood and rejected the idea of a ‘white wedding’ as
inappropriate ‘for Africans’, favouring a traditional Xhosa wedding instead.9 The possible
articulations between Pentecostal Christianity and sexual style were thus distinctly refracted
through an emphatic neo-traditionalism, a pattern that seems typical for recent rural-urban
migrants. However, in the urban peer group context these Africanist elements of his
discourse were largely obliterated and transfigured into a secularised masculine hedonism.
As I will show below, however, this ‘Africanist position’ was highly contested.
As a pastor, Meliziswe was aware of the existence of this ‘Africanist’ element amongst
both the congregation and the neighbourhood population at large. Especially as a
politically concerned citizen, the idea of excluding co-religionists due to their Africanist
notions of sexuality would have appeared strange to him. Even though he personally
rejected polygamy, he tended to view alternative ideas as acceptable cultural pluralism, as
a matter of private choice and as secondary to belief in Jesus Christ.
Meliziswe’s openness to accepting people of ‘different walks of life’ was also a result
of his conviction that being Christian was a process that involved constant struggles
against evil forces. People may fail at some point but become more successful through
assistance. In this spirit, in 2008 he decided to accept Matthew as a new church member.
 10 M. Burchardt

Matthew had been a member of a township gang for many of his teenage years. He had
been involved in petty crime of all sorts and spent several months in prison. Again, he
probably would have ended up in the streets after being released from prison if Meliziswe
had not decided to put him up in his own house. He remarked in an interview:
My life was a mess, Marian, but the Lord saved me. I was always after girls, and after drinks
and drugs. Even now, I don’t have a job and I don’t know what will happen. But one day I will
marry.
Matthew’s account of his life was entirely structured by the experience of conversion. For
him, the fact of having become a ‘secondary abstainer’ was part of a broader narrative that
the linked the passage from gang culture into Pentecostalism to a radical change of sexual
style.10 As the following section shows, however, this model was rather exceptional.

Ideals and attainability: negotiating relationships, sex and love

The dominant framework defining young people’s ideals of sexual relations was that of
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

romantic love, characterized by strong emotional attachments and sexual exclusivity.

Compared to that, both Christian and neo-traditionalist notions were highly marginal and
premarital abstinence beyond imagination, even for regular churchgoers. Discussions
revealed that abstinence was considered part of a ‘monkishly existence’ that was only
attainable for those who had chosen an other-worldly path. This ‘exceptionalism’ in the
public perception of both Christian and neo-traditionalist models mirrors the long history
of the de-institutionalization of marriage, which is the combined outcome of labour
migration, forced evictions and urbanization, in other words: mobility (Thornton 2008).
Furthermore, as a result of shrinking wages but stable levels of bride-wealth the costs of
marriage increased (Hunter 2002). Therefore, already in the 1950s ‘marriage became too
expensive for the average working class family and alternative structures of cohabitation
and child-rearing were increasingly tolerated, even encouraged’ (Delius and Glaser 2002,
46). All of that could not but transfigure the meanings of premarital abstinence and fidelity.
For both women and men, not abstinence but faithfulness to one partner was a major
value and intrinsically related to concepts of love. Sexual intercourse has its exclusive
place within romantically conceived couple relationships and protecting sexual
exclusivity was tantamount to preserving the love relationship as such. Moreover, there
was a definite orientation towards a long-term, stable relationship even if this seemed
difficult to achieve. For those who did not have a stable relationship at present, it was part
of an envisioned future and cast alongside a broader notion of stability that encompassed,
for instance, employment and residence. Faithfulness was also construed as a major means
of protecting oneself against HIV/AIDS.
Concerns with relationship ideals and HIV/AIDS were merged within a highly scripted
idea of the dating process and the notion of a safe relationship. This involved checking the
potential partner’s character and lifestyle, and importantly ‘taking one step at a time’:
dating begins with (mostly women’s) awareness of (a man’s) interest and continues by
‘going out’ for a while. Lastly, the couple engages in sexual intercourse. Especially for
women, the specific value accorded to sexual intercourse lies less in the act of sex itself
than in its character of symbolically validating and performing the personal
relationship. Even when they had reached the stage of dating, however, women viewed
men’s promises of love or their building up of façades of romance as cheap attempts to
trick them into sexual intercourse. In order to avoid such traps and to test a man’s real
determination women stretched out the dating process and often withheld sex until they
 Culture, Health & Sexuality 11

were convinced of their male partner’s commitment. There is definitely an elective affinity
between women’s heightened concerns about engaging in sexual relationships and the
gendered nature of religious participation, that is, their concerns with sex are reinforced by
their greater involvement in church life.
Men who were in the dating stage, on the other hand, were most concerned with
ensuring that their potential partner was not too closely ‘in touch’ with too many men, they
would view this as telling of her future faithfulness (or not). The more a woman appeared
to remain at a certain distance from men, the more a potential relationship seemed safe,
both in terms of preserving sexual exclusivity and with regard to HIV and AIDS.
One particularly emotionally charged issue was infidelity. Women and men levelled
constant mutual accusations of cheating. Especially among men, however, these
accusations were formulated in general terms. The fact that none of my informants
accused his current girlfriend of infidelity corroborates the argument that securing female
fidelity, both in practice and public perception, is key to successful masculine ‘face-work’
(Goffman 1963, 5) and to accumulating gendered symbolic capital. Equally important,
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

however, was the fact that their girlfriend’s cheating would hurt their feelings and the men
were acutely aware of the dangers love and emotional attachments becoming too strong.
Likewise, emotions were seen as critical in motivating men to have casual sex. As a result,
the meaning of emotions remained highly indeterminate: romantic feelings are important
for authenticating the personal bond but they may also be detrimental in possibly eroding
rational concerns.
If both young men and women admitted to engage in casual sex they did so on different
terms. Whereas the women definitely agreed that ‘there is something wrong’ with their
love relationship if they ‘cheat’, men saw ‘cheating’ as something that happens now and
then but not as necessarily breaching their emotional bonds. The men’s discussion
revealed that the adherence to faithfulness is to some degree a strategic adaptation to
women’s demands. If they did not produce the impression of sexual exclusivity they knew
they might face difficulties in sustaining or initiating relationships with desired women.
The female participants, in turn, lamented such adaptation by complaining about men
building up facades of romance, which they knew ‘are nothing but lies’. Importantly, they
maintained the intrinsic connections between sexual exclusivity and love by stating that if
they ‘cheated’ it was because of disturbed emotions and that they would only do so if their
relationship was ‘nearly dead’.
Despite young people’s overwhelming endorsement of notions of romantic love,
faithfulness and serial monogamy, they acknowledged that they also engage in casual
sexual encounters. Although framed as ‘stupid things’, casual sex and the situations in
which it happens turned out to have logics of their own. In men’s accounts, these situations
were associated with parties, music, dance, alcohol consumption, the collective smoking
of marihuana – these nightlife terrains are a sphere of reality that is ontologically different
from the ‘normal reality’ of everyday life. In popular imagination and practice, nightlife
comprises and produces heightened levels of sensuality – the above-mentioned props are
core material resources in this regard. Furthermore, nightlife is a cartography of
designated locales (street parties, shebeens) and has its own rhythm. All of these aspects –
place, time, sensualised atmosphere and interaction – propel nightlife into a different
province of meaning in the Schützian sense. Nightlife also has its own logic with regard to
sexual encounters ensuing from these interactions. Under darkness, people engage in
sexual encounters they would not condone under different circumstances because of
relationship ideals.
 12 M. Burchardt

What we find here is a carnal logic of sex characterised by a rejection of concern over
fidelity and HIV, an ideal of immediacy and expressiveness and a mode of experience and
practice that is construed as ‘flows of events’ rather than as choice. Because of the
heteronomy intrinsic to religious teachings about sex, religious groups are mostly unable
to offer similar experiences of sensual immediacy – young people who have ‘smelled’
township nightlife culture often long for these releases. In this way, deviations from
relationship ideals, even if at some level construed as random, are of a systematic nature.11
They also reveal that, especially for men, the real dilemma is the choice between
faithfulness and multiple concurrent partnerships while concerns with their Pentecostal
faith are rather about showing respect in specifically religious settings.

Conclusion
In urban South Africa, as elsewhere, details about sexual life are generally considered a
private matter. People carefully decide what and to whom they disclose and routinely
transfer this attitude of concealment to into all sorts of research conversations. The
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

resulting difficulties for research are further exacerbated in religious contexts where there
is much ‘face’ to be lost. Researchers may be easily and subconsciously inclined to take
the overwhelming force of, especially evangelical, discourse as evidence of what people
practice. In order to arrive at a more differentiated and realistic conceptualisation of the
interface of religion and sexuality, I have called for rooting these inquiries more firmly in
ethnographies of youth sexual culture.
In this regard, this paper illuminates the numerous social forces that mediate possible
influences of religion on sexual practices. In addition, I challenge popular and academic
assumptions about linear connections between religious membership and sexual style and
consider how methodological decisions might condition findings. Entrance to the field
through religious groups inevitably highlights forms of moral self-presentation and
imposes upon the ethnographic account the same limitations that religious groups impose
upon their discourse. Entering the field through ethnographic work with young people
outside religious contexts, by contrast, lowers moral barriers against sexual disclosure and
reveals that such direct influences are far from standard, even among strongly committed
young Pentecostals. In the highly dynamic context of urban South Africa, Christian
notions of premarital abstinence compete with orientations towards romantic love and
neo-traditionalist understandings of sex. Against this backdrop, premarital abstinence
stands out as a possible but highly exceptional sexual style. One of the major reasons is
that, at least in metropolitan Cape Town, Pentecostalism does not constitute a tightly
segregated cultural world. Pentecostal youth comprises both nominal and strongly
committed adherents and both tend to traverse and be embraced by the same erotic
geographies as others, unless family religiosity provides for major social continuity. This
may lead to a situation in which religion and sexual culture exist as two relatively separate
domains despite Pentecostal church leaders’ endeavours to define sexuality virtuousness
as central to being ‘born again’.
Within these erotic geographies, however, sexuality and intercourse rarely appear as
reified objects to be chosen or rejected. Rather, they are embedded in sophisticated
strategies of dating and intimate aspirations where romancing and faithfulness are more
central to practice than are issues of marriage or sin. In this context, faith-based sexual
education and HIV-prevention programmes focusing on premarital abstinence may be
‘preaching to the converted’. They confirm what (some of the) firm believers knew all
along but, despite admirable efforts to speak the language of youth, fall short of engaging
 Culture, Health & Sexuality 13

with the material and cultural structures in which conceptions and practices of dating and
sexuality are shaped.

Acknowledgements
The research on which this paper is based was generously supported by Evangelisches Studienwerk
Villigst and the Irmgard Coninx Foundation at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB).
For critical discussions and thoughtful comments of earlier versions of the paper and the
ethnographic material I wish to thank Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, Jim Beckford, Crystal Biruk as well as
four anonymous reviewers. For insightful discussions on sexuality and religion I wish to thank the
members of the International Research Network Religion and AIDS in Africa, particularly
Alessandro Gusman, Rijk van Dijk, Eileen Moyer and Hansjoerg Dilger. Finally, I am indebted to
Monwabisi Maqgoki who facilitated most of the field research.

Notes
1. According to census data of 2001, 78.522 of Black Capetonians identified as members of
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

Pentecostal or Charismatic churches (Statistics South Africa 2004). However, this might be an
underestimation as we may assume that a fair share of those who identify themselves as
belonging to ‘other Christian churches’ (79.143) might in fact also be Pentecostals.
2. For an important exception see Sadgrove (2007).
3. Group discussions and interviews were carried out in English while casual peer conversations
were translated to me by a Xhosa-speaking research assistant.
4. I use the notion of ‘sexual styles’ as a subcategory of ‘cultural styles’ (Ferguson 1999) and as
one of its manifestations.
5. On the importance of numbers of sexual partners for negotiations of masculine peer hierarchies
see Preston-Whyte (1999); on the ways personal wealth is invested into entertaining multiple
sexual relationships producing the sugar-daddy phenomenon see Hunter (2002); on male and
female taxonomies see Wood and Jewkes (2005).
6. The group discussions included 6 – 8 individuals, took place in family homes in the absence of
parents and were based on ‘natural groups’, i.e., groups of friends with a vast stock of common
experiences.
7. All names in the article have been changed.
8. For Mandla, a girlfriend appeared to be any woman with whom he had some kind of sexual
liaison.
9. Africanist orientations, forming a cultural style which Mayer (1980) called ‘Red’, were also
revealed in his numerous invocations of unprotected sex as ‘flesh-to-flesh’.
10. He also declined to participate in the group discussions.
11. For a detailed discussion of gender differences in interpreting notions of romance in Christian
discourse in South Africa see Burchardt (2010).

References
Agadjanian, Victor. 2005. ‘Gender, religious involvement, and HIV/AIDS prevention in
Mozambique’. Social Science & Medicine 61: 1529– 39.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2001. Masculine domination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Burchardt, Marian. 2007. Speaking to the converted? Religion and the politics of gender in South
African AIDS discourse. Comparativ 17: 95 – 114.
Burchardt, Marian. 2010. Ironies of subordination: Ambivalences of gender in religious AIDS
interventions in South Africa. Oxford Development Studies 38: 63 –82.
Delius, Peter, and Clive Glaser. 2002. Sexual socialisation in South Africa: A historical perspective.
African Studies 61: 27 – 54.
Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of modernity: Myth and meaning of urban life in the Zambian
Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Garner, Robert C. 2000. Safe sects? Dynamic religion and AIDS in South Africa. Journal of Modern
African Studies 38: 41 – 69.
 14 M. Burchardt

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliff, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
Gusman, Alessandro. 2009. HIV/AIDS, Pentecostal Churches and the ‘Joseph Generation’ in
Uganda. Africa Today 56: 67 – 87.
Helgesson, Kristina. 2006. ‘Walking in the spirit’: The complexitiy of belonging in two Pentecostal
churches in Durban, South Africa. Uppsala, Sweden: DICA.
Hunter, Mark. 2002. The materiality of everyday sex: Thinking beyond ‘prostitution’. African
Studies 61: 99 – 120.
Iliffe, John. 2007. The African AIDS epidemic: A history. Oxford: James Currey.
Leclerc-Madlala, Suzanne. 2005. Popular responses to HIV/AIDS and policy. Journal of Southern
African Studies 31: 845– 56.
Mayer, Philip. 1980. The origin and decline of two rural resistance ideologies. In Black villagers in
industrial society, ed. Philip Mayer, 1– 79. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
Meyer, Birgit. 1998. ‘Make a complete break with the past’: Memory and postcolonial modernity in
Ghanaian Pentecostal discourse. Journal of Religion in Africa 28: 316– 49.
Parsitau, Damaris Seleina. 2009. ‘Keep holy distance and abstain till he comes’: Interrogating a
Pentecostal church’s engagement with HIV/AIDS and the youth in Kenya. Africa Today 56:
45 – 65.
Preston-Whyte, Eleonor. 1999. Reproductive health and the condom dilemma: Identifying
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

situational barriers to HIV prevention in South Africa. In Resistances to behavioural change to

reduce HIV/AIDS infection, ed. John Caldwell et al., 139– 55. Canberra: Health Transition
Centre.
Robbins, Joel. 2004. The globalization of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. Annual Review of
Anthropology 33: 117– 43.
Sadgrove, Jo. 2007. ‘Keeping up appearances’: Sex and religion among university students in
Uganda. Journal of Religion in Africa 37: 116– 44.
Smith, Daniel Jordan. 2001. Romance, parenthood and gender in a modern African society.
Ethnology 40: 129– 51.
Smith, Daniel Jordan. 2004. Youth, sin and sex in Nigeria: Christianity and HIV/AIDS-
related beliefs and behaviour among rural-urban migrants. Culture, Health & Sexuality 6:
425– 37.
Statistics South Africa. 2004. Census 2001: Primary tables South Africa. ’96 and 2001 compared.
Pretoria: Statistics South Africa. http://www.statssa.gov.za/census01/html/RSAPrimary.pdf
Thornton, Robert J. 2008. Unimagined community: Sex, networks and AIDS in Uganda and South
Africa. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press.
Varga, Christine A. 1997. Sexual decision-making and negotiation in the midst of AIDS: Youth in
KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Health Transition Review 7: 45 – 67.
Wood, Catherine, and Rachel Jewkes. 2005. ‘Dangerous love’: Reflections on violence among
Xhosa township youth. In Changing men in South Africa, ed. Robert Morrell, 317– 36. Durban:
University of KwaZulu Natal Press.

Résumé
Les recherches sur les constructions de la sexualité dans le pentecôtalisme se heurtent souvent au fait que
le contexte dans lequel elle sont conduites sont définis ex ante par les communautés d’église, et que cela
impose aux récits ethnographiques les mêmes limites que celles imposées aux discours des pentecôtistes
par la moralité de leur église. En prenant pour point d’entrée méthodologique dans ce domaine de jeunes
pentecôtistes évoluant dans un espace non explicitement religieux, cet article explore les négociations
autour de la sexualité, les relations intimes et l’amour, parmi des jeunes des townships qui s’expriment en
xhosa. Il préconise le recours à la notion de géographies érotiques pour évaluer jusqu’où les possibles
influences des discours religieux sur la sexualité sont reflétées par les orientations culturelles alternatives
et les contextes matériels. Les résultats suggèrent que l’abstinence pré maritale représente un idéal très
exceptionnel pour les jeunes. Même parmi les jeunes pentecôtistes, les notions de sexualité sont
largement séparées de la religiosité, et la fidélité comme le romantisme sont des idéaux dominants. Les
futures recherches sur le pentecôtalisme et la sexualité doivent être moins centrées sur les aspects
religieux et plus fermement enracinées dans les ethnographies des cultures sexuelles des jeunes.
 Culture, Health & Sexuality 15

Resumen
Los estudios sobre las construcciones de la sexualidad en el pentecostalismo se suelen ver
obstaculizados por el hecho de que el entorno de la investigación está definido ex ante en lo que
respecta a las comunidades eclesiásticas, lo que significa que los relatos etnográficos están sujetos a
las mismas limitaciones que también impone la moralidad pentecostal al discurso de los miembros
de la iglesia. Trabajando con jóvenes de la iglesia pentecostal en un espacio no explı́citamente
religioso para entrar en este campo de forma metodológica, en este artı́culo analizamos de qué modo
negocian los jóvenes de un municipio de habla Xhosa la sexualidad, las relaciones ı́ntimas y el amor.
Introducimos la noción de las geografı́as eróticas para considerar cómo las posibles influencias de los
discursos religiosos en la sexualidad están refractadas por orientaciones culturales alternativas y
contextos materiales. Los resultados indican que la abstinencia prematrimonial aparece como un
ideal sumamente excepcional para los jóvenes; e incluso entre los jóvenes de la iglesia Pentecostal
las nociones de sexualidad están en gran medida disociadas de la religiosidad, y la fidelidad y el
romanticismo son ideales dominantes. Los futuros estudios sobre el pentecostalismo y la sexualidad
deberı́an estar menos centrados en temas religiosos y más firmemente arraigados en las etnografı́as
de las culturas sexuales de los jóvenes.
Downloaded By: [Burchardt, Marian] At: 16:27 31 March 2011

View publication stats