I have presented the history and ethnography of the Romani evangelicalism in Bulgaria. I told the stories of converts I had met during my fieldwork in the years since 1999, or about whose lives and activities I had read in periodicals, Internet sources, hard-to-reach archival documents, manuscripts, books and brochures.
My informants had various motives for adhering to the evangelical faith; their conversion was not simply a desperate way of solving the problems of social exclusion, poverty, or illness. Beyond that, it led them to fully integrate themselves into the world of believers, the world of faith and acceptance of Jesus Christ as the new center of their lives. It also provided an opportunity for the transformation of the Roma at the individual, family, and communal level, which is their attempt to normalize social relations with the majority population.
While I was writing this book, my goal was to draw a comprehensive picture of how the evangelical Roma strive, succeed or fail, to realize their ideal of a righteous Christian life. The key elements which bring them closer to, or further away from, that ideal are the observance of moral norms, the handling of authority, and the acquisition of knowledge. I have specifically focused on morality as a connecting concept between conversion, leadership, and identity. The struggle for achieving moral perfection is typical for every evangelical Rom or Romni. However, at times, they find this perfection difficult to attain. Nevertheless, the ideal is similar for the various Christian confessions.
Judging by the descriptions of them found throughout this book, in their attempts to behave as good people, my informants do not appear to differ significantly from other Romani or non-Romani believers in Jesus Christ, such as those a number of scholars have studied, e.g., the Spanish Gitanos studied by Cantón Delgado, Marcos Montiel, Medina Baena and Mena Cabezas (2004), the Urapmin people as described by Robbins (2004a) or Thornton’s Dominican evangelical Christians (2016).
From my conversations with informants, I have concluded that their everyday life should be analyzed with an awareness of the power structures that govern the moral hierarchies in the pastor-run churches. The transformative culture of evangelical Christianity is visible in every local neighborhood where Romani churches exist trying to optimize the daily life of the believers. The difficulties which Roma face are rooted both in their changing moral perspectives and in how these perspectives relate to what we call their “Romani/Gypsy” way of life. For them, conversion is a means to re-configure their relationships with believers and non-believers. Their religious transformation can only occur through the domestication of evangelicalism in the Romani milieu with regard to the performance of church activities needed to maintain the sense of blessing among believers.
The bonds between converted Roma and their religious leaders are strong. The pastor and pastoress are the most respected persons. The pastor and his wife perform a number of practices and rituals that help maintain the relational religiosity among the members of the congregation. They alone can justify the concentration of spiritual and moral authority in their hands and are the key figures managing the congregation’s social competences. In examining how converts perceive pastoral authority, my aim was to focus the reader’s attention on the believer’s experience of faith and identity in everyday life, showing how conversion is not only a rite of passage into the religious community but also shapes the social order.
The concept of a converted person includes his/her body and the actions that a person can perform for the benefit of body and soul. The body is related to the morally acceptable type of man and woman, which, among others, includes what they eat and drink, how they dress, the kind of work they do. Communication with Jesus Christ is experienced through change in the physical body. When converts believe strongly in Jesus Christ, they are confident He will support them. In the case of the Pentecostals, they believe Holy Spirit will additionally cast out personal demons. The mutual contradictions each convert may face regarding the decency of one’s own life, or whether other spiritual brothers and sisters are as worthy of God’s love as oneself, are managed by the pastors, who are expected to maintain social harmony in the religious community.
Churches aim for through their identity politics the attainment of self- understanding by the changed men or women, who thereby win spiritual liberation and live in peace while keeping their place among their loved ones. The compromises made between the traditional and the evangelical understandings of morality show how believers continue to belong to the family circle while fully immersing themselves in the demonstration and justification of their faith. In this sense, evangelism provides an approach to dealing with the problems of people, whose doubts and contradictions are construed, and to some extent quelled, through conversations with the preacher and his wife, so that people can remain connected to their families.
Conversion has one other level of meaning that explains why people risk their familial and social comforts in choosing to follow God’s will. That is why, in addition to their personal devotion to God, I focused on the context in which converts and non-converts live. It was interesting to observe how this form of Christianity shaped their everyday and festive relationships with relatives and non-relatives.
My informants often found themselves in the ambiguous situation of wanting to conform to their non-evangelical relatives but also to remain loyal to the Church. Religious conversion alters their way of life and worldview but does not impair their position in the traditional Romani group and in the world of gadže. They become reborn male and female protagonists who come to terms with the inner contradictions of their ethnic selves, arising from their attachment to cultural tradition, and engage in a new kind of social relationship. I have described how this ambiguous situation creates the need for discussions, usually led by the preacher and his wife, but not necessarily conducted in the church building: the Church is where the people and their problems are.
The imagined community of God’s chosen people is founded on the evangelical religion and represents a conscious choice of belonging which all converts make. Men and women declare their decision to convert through the act of baptism, which gives them a sense of shared spiritual kinship with other converts. Spiritual kinship invokes equality between men and women regardless of their actual inequality and the differences between community members, who are of various social, educational, economic, ethnic, or national backgrounds. This is a community imagined as an unfixed membership. It is also an institutional form of powerful actions, thanks to which all evangelical Christians have similar perceptions of morality and an institutionalized way of social behavior. Believers easily imagine God’s chosen people as a legitimate community, but do not always imagine them as God’s nation because challenging the spiritual and moral authority of Romani pastors is a widespread phenomenon and no universally recognized leaders of the church exist. Also, two different opinions circulate in Romani circles as to whether Romani converts belong to a God’s chosen Romani community or to the universal community of God’s chosen, in which people become members regardless of their ethnicity, social status, educational profile, gender or professional qualifications.
These different opinions depend not so much on the personal agency of their religious leader, but on their group affiliation, especially in cases when they speak Romani language and have a Romani identity; in some cases the spiritual leaders are also influenced by their contacts with international evangelicals, who may choose to support their activity only because they are Roma and their followers are the object of missionary activity. There is no universal rule as to which pastors would support one view or the other: there are plenty of examples of preachers with a Romani identity supporting the idea that the Roma are part of God’s chosen global community; for these preachers, the Christian identity predominates over the ethnic one as the only successful way to integrate the Roma into society. But still, pastors whose congregation identifies as Roma tend to believe the faithful belong to God’s chosen Romani community, while those who identify as Turks, Rumanians or Bulgarians feel ethnicity does not matter at all for the maintenance of God’s chosen community.
The Romani converts integrate themselves into the community of God’s people in a non-ethnic way, although they still make sense of the world around them through the ethnic lens, a fact that helps us understand how they live their lives in the world and why they reconcile themselves with their sinful past. In this regard, the reality of God’s chosen does not depend on their ethnic affiliation. The evangelical missionaries bring to the Roma a universal message of salvation through faith, which their ethnic origin or low economic and social status do not burden. Those who receive Christ into their hearts are not blamed for the nature of the sins they may have committed; this tolerance somehow facilitates the formation of the new category of God’s chosen Roma.
I have also described the community of God’s chosen people using the believers’ own ideas about other evangelical people who live in places where the community members have never been and may never go, while remaining confident those other people have the same commitment to Jesus Christ as they do. These imaginings do not destroy the foundation of Romani social and cultural life or the consciousness that they are Roma. Identification with the Romani group to which the converted person traditionally belongs coexists with their sense of belonging to God’s people and with various other non-religious identifications (kin-related, local, regional, national or supranational). The clear marker of identity for converts within the Romani group is that they have “a new way of life”, comprising visible material and spiritual practices, and new narratives about themselves as evangelical Christians. All converts feel that they belong to God’s chosen people, the people who will gain salvation through their belief in Jesus Christ; this is the basis on which they define themselves as believers. Conversion to evangelicalism changes their religious identity and, along with this, consolidates the identity of the separate Romani groups. The converts continue to be “Roma”, “Turks”, or “Rudari”, but now have a new way of life that distinguishes them from non-converts.
Through its frequent rituals and practices, evangelism strengthens the individual’s decision to repent. Through religious practices, preachers manage the converts’ inner confidence that the Roma are God’s chosen people. Because when engaging in these practices, believers know that other evangelicals around the world are performing the same rituals. For example, in the past, the pastor in the village Golintsi would call the congregation to religious service by striking a rail hanging from a tree by the church fence. After people have gathered, the service would begin with prayer. Today everyone arrives in the church hall at the hour of service without being summoned by a bell, but all have the same awareness that in participating in the evangelical rituals, they are contributing to their own and their family’s well-being and to the well-being of all evangelical Christians around the world.
The identity of God’s chosen Roma is supported by pastors by virtue of their religious and social commitment, which represents a highly developed sense of solidarity with other spiritual brothers and sisters. The way the Roma incorporate themselves into the imagined community upturns their previous way of self-identification. The contradictions involved need to be ironed out to ensure intra-group communication and inter-ethnic tolerance. This concerns not only the boundaries between individual groups and between Roma and non-Roma, as San Román (1976), Okely (1983), Sutherland (1986), Williams (1993), Marushiakova & Popov (1997), Stewart (1997), Gay y Blasco (1999) and Miller (2010) have emphasized with regard to the Spanish Gitanos, English Travelers, French Manuš, or American, Bulgarian and Hungarian Roma; it is expressed in terms of spiritual superiority over non-evangelicals.
Today, religious conversion continues to play a fundamental role for the Roma’s resistance to the attempts of society to marginalize them. However, there is a visible tendency to “get used” to religion, or to employ its practical function more than its spiritual power. The Romani pastor has access not only to the spiritual power by which he supports, blesses, or heals, but also to diverse practical information coming from religious networks; he may thereby assist his followers in the search for jobs and more prestigious and highly paid positions. The Romani pastors claim that some converts are mostly interested in finding a job or satisfying their social needs through the church and do not devote enough time to attain deep rootedness in the faith. Of course, evangelicalism is not just a constructive way to achieve social and cultural change; it can provide an extraordinary spiritual life for all converted individuals. Scholars and specialists should definitely focus on the new trends in Romani evangelicalism, because so many people around the world believe in this spiritual life and look upon it as a social reality.
The Roma have the opportunity to move into the center of life and prosper through discipline, zeal for educational advancement and professional mobility. Many different ways exist to do this. Remaining steadfast in the faith is not easy: some Roma persist in remaining righteous Christians, while others give up and return to secular life. To remain an evangelical Christian often involves obstacles that test individual and group beliefs; however, acquiring and using knowledge is an important element of evangelical identity. The accumulation of knowledge is a source of opportunities for the Roma today to take their spiritual growth into their own hands and manage on their own without the patronage of the missionaries. For the Roma, evangelicalism is a way to find their rightful place in society and be able to justify their own vision of the development of the community (-ies). At the same time, it enables them to participate, through the voices of their spiritual leaders, in decision-making processes that improve the life of the whole society.