Sunday, March 16, 2014
Chairman's (Omni Shoreham)
“Gypsies don’t pay their bills, but do their lights get turned off?” Using this common Bulgarian refrain as a starting point, this paper addresses how evangelical churches use discourse about—and material assistance with—public utilities as a means of attempting to transform Romani congregants into moral, modern Europeans. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in evangelical churches in Bulgaria, this paper focuses on the role of formerly state-owned public utilities in (a) church sermons invoking the socialist past via discussions of access to water, electricity, and urban infrastructure, and (b) the charitable church projects pastors initiate to help congregants and fundraise from foreign sources. Over the past twenty years, public services, previously owned and run by the state, have been privatized. In the wake of privatization, Bulgarians’ difficulties in paying for public utilities have become ubiquitous, recently serving at the catalyst for countrywide protests. However, the portrayal of certain citizens’ –primarily the Roma—inability to pay their bills, and “keep up with European progress,” has become fodder for mass anti-Roma sentiment. In this framework of diminishing access to formerly state-owned services, foreign-funded evangelical churches are growing exponentially throughout the country. Targeting the increasingly segregated and poor Romani minority, pastors materialize moral transformation through discourses relating social and economic struggles to those of Jesus as they also materially provide access to utilities that otherwise would be beyond reach. In turn, preachers, discursively and through practice, link nostalgia for access to state-run public utilities with future access to heaven.
