The Word Read, Spoken, and Sung: Neo-Protestants and Modernity in Interwar Romania

Abstract

ABSTRACT The neo-Protestants- Baptists, Brethren, Pentecostals, and Seventh-day Adventists- were rapidly growing religious minorities amidst the ethnic majority in interwar Romania. Using a combined anthropological and historical approach, the study unpacks the way these groups constructed their communities in response to internal and external pressures, changing the way they interpreted the Bible and how they used these interpretations to create space for themselves in the religious and cultural spheres of Greater Romania. By reading the words of the Bible, speaking them through conversion accounts, and then singing the words, they revealed an entanglement between increased personal agency and community dependency. An analysis of the concepts of ritual, aesthetics, and language contribute to a better understanding of the complexity of interwar Romanian society through the lens of neo-Protestant religious communities. Their development and the ensuing reaction from authorities in the form of legalized suppression reveal them to be an important expression of religious modernity in twentieth-century Europe.