Beards, Tattoos, and Cool Kids: Lived Religion and Postdenominational Congregations in Northwestern Mexico

This paper analyzes the everyday experiences of 20 individuals from two prominent postdenominational congregations in northwestern Mexico that branched off from Pentecostal and Evangelical transnational churches. Using the life-story method and the lived religion approach will allow for the understanding of how postdenominationalism emerged in the region and why these congregations have been undergoing a series of deinstitutionalizing innovations that ring closer to the expectations that millennials have regarding the emotional, the intellectual, the social, and the cultural aspects of their lives. This phenomenon not only echoes with the idea of the deconstructed church that Marti and Ganiel described among millennials in the US (Marti and Ganiel 2014), it also imposes a challenge for Latin American religious studies, whose trend has been to ignore the postdenominational category, favoring the continued use of Pentecostal and/or Neopentecostal/charismatic to refer to these congregations, which makes it difficult to understand the changes, the innovation, and the deconstructive processes that postdenominational churches have been undergoing in the last three decades.