Believing in Non-Places and Counter-Places: Pentecostalism and Migration in Stockholm’s Cityscape

Based on 20 months of fieldwork in Stockholm’s Arabic-speaking and Spanish-speaking Evangelical and Pentecostal churches between 2017 and 2020, this article intends to give an account of the different ways in which the figures of the “immigrant” and the “refugee”, as well as the question of migration at large, are conceived in the Pentecostal congregations I visited between 2018 and 2020 in Stockholm and its outskirts. I propose to reflect further on the effects of urbanity on Pentecostalism, and reciprocally on the interpretations that Pentecostals make of the city. In so doing, this paper aims to contribute to one of the research questions raised by the collective project “Pentecostal Migrants in Secular Sweden”, which was concerned with highlighting the fluidity of the contemporary logics of religious belonging in a late modern cosmopolitan landscape such as the contemporary urban Swedish society.