AMEN, ALELUYA, GLORIA A DIOS, HERMANO

When Yanet Bernardino was planning for her quinceanera (fifteenth birthday celebration), she told her mother that she wanted to hire a DJ to play the latest Mexican pop hits during the party. Her mother reacted with indignation, as the entire family is Protestant—“tu que eres, cristiana o mundana?” (“what are you, a Christian or a person of the world?”)

An extremely fundamentalist tradition, Protestants in Mexico devote most of their energies to attacking all that is “worldly”, be it secular music, television, make-up, dancing, Pokemon cartoons, playing cards (see the anecdote in the first post of this site), tattoos, or the old favorite devils of fundamentalism, alcohol and tobacco. Their faith, as that of fundamentalists the world over, is defined by their rejection of “the world” and all that goes with it. When a person becomes an aleluya, he is making a conversion out of the “worldly” culture and into a “Christian” subculture, and any Aleluya’s personal “testimony” is riddled with terminology of this flavor…

“I used to like to watch the telenovelas back when I was in the world, but the Lord convicted me of my sin when I joined the church…”

“I didn’t know any better before I became a Christian, that’s why I was wearing make-up in that photograph…”

Almost any reference to faith includes a reference to one of these rules of behavior:

“Catholics think they’re Christians too, but what do they do after they finish saying their Hail Mary’s and leave Mass? They go back to the same old sinful lifestyle…turn right around and start dancing, and smoking again…”

“That church down the road has a good strategy, they let young ladies wear pants and jeans when they’re just visiting the church for the first time, since they realize that these visitors just don’t yet understand what the Gospel is all about…”

The unique flavor of Mexican Protestantism is found, however, not in the particular restrictions that they place on their followers, but in the “positives” of their faith—the peculiar practices that a person adopts when becoming an Aleluya. Mexican Protestants insist that women wear skirts both inside and outside of church, as this is the way a “true Christian” dresses (some more liberal churches will allow members to wear pants outside of church, though this is discouraged). This is a matter of “showing a good testimony”, giving a good reputation to the “Church”—if your worldly neighbors see you wearing pants just like them, they won’t have any reason to convert, since they won’t see any change in your life.

In the same vein of “acting different for difference’s sake”, young men are often instructed not to dress stylishly, at least not on their way to church. Why would a young man’s peers think he is holy if he dresses just like they do, in the way they think is correct? (i.e., baggy pants, sleeveless undershirt, etc.) The young Aleluya must show them that he is not following their rules, but God’s rules, which require him to wear decent slacks and a nice shirt.

The speech of an Aleluya is pocked with religious catch phrases and vocabulary, and there is a conscious understanding that your speech should change in this way when you become a Christian. Aleluyas address each other constantly as “hermano” or “hermana” (“brother” or “sister”), used in their subculture both as a title of respect for one’s elders (replacing more culturally normal titles such as “Don/Dona” or “Senor/Senora”) and as a synonym for “Protestant” in Mexico (the Morales down the road? Oh, they’re hermanos…). This is one of many cultural rules that enforce the mentality of the spiritual “ins” and the “outs”, the “haves” and the “have-nots”. A person who has confessed his sins and given his life to “God” (i.e., to the Protestant religion) has become an “hermano”. An additional function of this title, when the literal meaning of the term is kept in mind, is the work of desexualizing Protestant youth: “how could you try to hold Florita’s hand? She’s your Sister!” (It is never made clear how exactly a young person is expected to move beyond this mindset after getting married, to somehow make babies with his own “Sister”.)

When agreeing with somebody or expressing affirmation, a truly hard-core Aleluya will replace all acceptable Spanish phrases—“asi es”, “si es cierto”, “si, verdad?”—with the word “amen”. Not just a religious phrase to be used affirming a preacher on Sunday morning, “amen” is to litter the everyday conversation of a true Mexican Protestant believer.

“I need to start pressuring my oldest kid, his grades in school have been dropping lately.”
“-Amen, that’s a good idea.”

All the Mexican phrases that would equal “all right!”, “right on!”, “awesome!”, “good news!” or “great!”—“orale”, “andale pues”, “que bien”, “que buena onda”—are replaced by the phrases “aleluya” and “Gloria a Dios” (Glory to God).

Any normal greetings and goodbyes such as “como andas?” (“how’s it going?”) or “que te vaya bien” (“have a good one”) are replaced with the proper Christian salutation, “Dios te bendiga” or “que el Senor te bendiga” (“God bless you”).

Add all this together, along with some other common catch phrases, and a typical conversation between two Aleluyas would go something like this:

“God bless you, Sister Norma.”
-God bless you, Brother Alejandro.
“How is your Sunday School class that you’re teaching, Sister?”
-Glory to God, it’s a powerful blessing, Brother.
“Amen, praise the Lord. I will see you in church this Wednesday, then?”
-Amen, Brother.
“God bless you, Sister.”

For most Aleluyas, however, the delivery of such speech comes across as wooden and somewhat forced. It’s the same reason that in movies like the recent film “the Village”, the actors’ attempts to speak in 18th century English make their delivery sound less-than-natural. Not only is it difficult to make oneself feel totally at ease with what is effectively an unnatural religious “dialect” of ordinary conversational Mexican speech, but these religious phrases are used even more frequently when speaking with those outside the Protestant faith in an attempt to impress them with one’s piety. The believer consciously drops in “amens”, “aleluyas” and “Gloria a Dios” when speaking with a neighbor, making a real effort to make their religion visible to the worldly non-Protestant.

Imagine, though, the poor young Aleluya who, after his hip classmates greet him with “que onda?”, (“whassup?”) follows his pastor’s instructions and answers them with a starchy “may the Lord bless you”, all the while trying his best not to feel like a complete freak. Above all, this young Aleluya must have the faith to believe that he is the one who has found the truth, he is in the right in greeting people with “God bless you” rather than “how are you doing”, it is them who still live in the darkness of the World. Indeed, if somebody thinks it strange that he doesn’t just greet them like any normal human being, that is because they are still full of sin and in the World, and cannot accept the light of God’s truth. Doesn’t the Bible say that we will be persecuted because of our Faith? When his peers make fun of him for his odd speech and behaviour, this is only proof that the World hates all that is holy and good. One can only hope that someone will be impressed with how much his life has changed after conversion—he rejected normal styles of speech and dress—and will agree to accompany him to church.

Yet the Mexican Protestant church service itself is full of its own bizarre practices, and often becomes a conscious attempt to act as ridiculous as humanly possible…
  ¶ 1:32 PM

  PART I:
THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF THE HALLELUJAH COMPLEX

DIMENSION I – THE CULTURAL HALLELUJAH COMPLEX
or…
“I NEED A UNIFORM SO SOMEONE WILL SALUTE ME”
or…
“TSERKOV ILI TSIRK?”

The last title to this chapter translates as “church or circus?” the Russian words for “church” and “circus” coinciding as conveniently similar to each other. When a religion develops its own strange subculture, defining “faith” as a list of peculiar practices and drifting into the realms of the Hallelujah Complex, it begins to resemble a circus of clowns more than a community of the faithful.

Before giving some “case studies” of the Cultural Hallelujah Complex to describe in more detail what I mean by this term, I need to lay out some basic definitions of it. As long as we’re using such very general terms as “strange cultural practices”, it would be possible to imagine practically any religion as qualifying for the Hallelujah Complex—praying, worshipping and believing in God, after all, are not “normal” practices of the unbeliever, and as such would be considered “strange” by him. In addition, there are certain religious “cultures” that I do not include in the Hallelujah Complex although they certainly have their own peculiarities, such as Catholic / Orthodox monastic orders or Hasidic Jews.

Some basic definitions of the Cultural Hallelujah Complex, then, are:

1) The religion contains a number of bizarre cultural practices, making its followers culturally very different from the mainstream culture. These include peculiarities of speech, dress, behavior, music, etc.

2) the believers’ very faith is defined by these peculiarities—i.e., a “true Christian” is someone who talks, walks, dresses, this strange way.

3) These peculiarities are seen as the only “good” way to act; those who do not live the peculiar life are living “in sin”. They are not merely symbols of the people’s special heritage, as the Jewish Mosaic law is, nor symbols of an individual’s religious vocation, as a Catholic nun’s habit is. The standards of the strange subculture are imposed on everybody and are the dividing line between sinners and the faithful.

To give a more clear idea of what I’m talking about, however, we’ll have to look at two concrete examples of the Cultural Hallelujah Complex: Mexican Pentecostals and Russian Baptists.
  ¶ 11:55 PM