Religion at Play: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of a Secular Age

This article engages with Charles Taylor’s seminal proposal made in A Secular Age regarding the central conditions of premodern life that have made room for our modern, secular world. I demonstrate how and why these conditions are not met in Pentecostalism. I then examine the notion of play in Taylor’s genealogy in order to illuminate more closely the ill-fit of Pentecostalism in the history of the secular. I conclude that Pentecostalism represents a condition of religion which resolves the tension between sacred and secular unaccounted for in Taylor’s work.