Abstract

For many local Pentecostals, Myanmar’s fraught “transition” was a moment when God was saving the country—bringing it from dictatorship to democracy, just as he was bringing its population, about ninety percent Buddhist, to Christ. Taking advantage of a public sphere emerging from decades of censorship and surveillance, some believers took up new opportunities to share the gospel with Buddhists, even as they confronted new obstacles arriving with liberalisation. This short talk discusses some of the politics and poetics of their evangelism during this time, a period that ended with the military coup of February 2021. I will conclude by introducing my new project, which shifts from salvation to solidarity, focusing on some responses by transnational religious networks to the revolution in Myanmar that is unfolding in the coup’s wake.