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Paper short abstract

The Baptist Revival Movement in San Andrés Island advocates for a dependence on God, while calling for Raizal self-determination. Yet, it clashes with other sovereign claims, revealing the role of contested and scalar questions of responsibility and salvation in constructing island sovereignty.

Paper long abstract

The Revival Movement of the Raizal Baptist Churches in the Island of San Andrés, Colombia, seeks to resolve the Archipelago of San Andrés’ moral crisis through individual spiritual transformation. As a small island, San Andrés faces overlapping challenges of over-tourism, overpopulation, narcotrafficking, geopolitical disputes, and tensions between the Colombian state and the Raizal community, the majority-Baptist descendants of Northern European colonists, African slaves, and Miskito Indians. Reframing these challenges as a crisis of spiritual corruption, Raizal Revivalists call for a greater dependence on God, acknowledging God’s sovereignty over human action, while simultaneously advocating for greater autonomy from the state.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, I argue that the Revival Movement structures the possibilities of political action, constructing the Archipelago as a political space through material, discursive, and relational practices of scaling. Raizal Baptist churches scale up individual revival to the global Christian community, drawing on transnational Baptist networks. Yet these practices of scaling are contested and do not correspond neatly with San Andrés’ physical boundaries. Christian universalism clashes with demands for ethnically exclusive Raizal sovereignty, framed through Colombia's multicultural constitutional reforms, and Raizal affiliation with a trans-Caribbean Creole-speaking ‘maritorio’ (sea territory), built on ties of interdependence. At the heart of these tensions are questions of responsibility and salvation: who is spiritually corrupt, who or what can be saved, and what are the outcomes of salvation, revealing the contested and relational work of constructing sovereignty in and beyond the Island of San Andrés.