Why are the most popular contemporary forms of Christianity those that envision a radical distance between heaven and earth? Building on theories of the role of alterity in religion, and particularly on axial age theories which emphasize the distinctiveness of religions that posit a profound relationship of alterity between the transcendental and the mundane, I suggest that Pentecostalism is spreading rapidly in part because of the way it highlights such alterity. By rendering so many people in the world ‘off-center’ in their own lives, globalization has produced a deep pool of experienced earthly alterity, a sense that the real powers in this world are different from one’s own and come from elsewhere. Axial religions such as Pentecostalism are, I argue, good to think for those who experience alterity in such global terms because they at once recognize the distance between the transcendental and the mundane and suggest it can be bridged.
Pentecostalism; Heaven; Globalization; Axial Age; Papua New Guinea