If the miles have been long, the years have been longer. This book has been twenty-five years in the making, so it isn’t any instamatic picture of ‘Campo Allegre’. It is years of separate visits to Brazil in dialogue with years of teaching, writing, reflecting at La Trobe. I like it like that.’ A curse on all instant replays. These images are all filtered through the changing and cumulative understandings of ‘Seu Henrique’, husband, father, lecturer, writer, researcher, respectful apprentice to purveyors of foreign and ancient wisdom – ah yes! – and marathon runner. It shows. He knows how to meet The Wall and run through it.

Have you ever read Oscar Lewis’s Children of Sanchez? The lives of the poorest of the poor in Mexico City are there presented as they spoke them into the tape-recorder. Their own stories are the theatre of their lives. Anthropologists will grump about Lewis’s hidden presence, but nonetheless we sit at the feet of these Mexican storytellers and are awed at their interpretative skills, how they control their lives by knowing the layers of its meaning.

Rowan Ireland’s ambitions were much the same as Lewis’s, although he is a world away in method and technique. We sit at the feet of crentes (Protestant Pentecostal believers), Afro Brazilian spiritists, and Catholics. We join them in all of the occasions in which they show their creative mastery over their mythic environment – their conversions, their sacrifices and possessions, their fiestas and masses. But we are not alone as we listen and watch. Max Weber, Alain Touraine, Erving Goffman, Marshall Berman, Clifford Geertz and many others are beside us. One of Ireland’s graces is that he can converse with his townspeople, with these greats of social theory – and with us – all the same time.

Religion and politics are the easiest thing and the hardest thing to write a book about. Religion is easily explained away by all the psychological, economic ‘factors’ the comfortable theoreticians can create. ‘Ideal types’ of prophets, priests, sorcerers, and puritans can be invented to fake an understanding by typologising them. There is always an expectancy that religious believers should be more pious, more honest, unchanging. The facility by which many different Kingdoms Come, the way they adapt their deepest selves to changing circumstances is always seen as an escapism and a sign of their superficiality to something more ‘really real’. Their politics are seen as unreal, ineffective manipulations of a world that does not matter.

The hard thing is to take believers as they see themselves, to accept their inner freedoms, to understand their world as they see it. You cannot read this understanding in the library. You have to hear them perform their stories. You have to attend their theatre.

Meet some of the performers in this theatre. Meet Padre Eduardo. Padre Eduardo was trained in liberation theology. He has a vision of social justice, of communalism, in which the old patronage bonds have been broken. Everywhere he looks – in the clutter of statues in his church, in the arrangements for town fiestas; the songs they sing, the bands that play them; in the social map of a procession – the Old Way lives on. He wants to change the signs. The town’s fiesta for its patron saint is his great didactic moment. Ireland’s chapter on Padre Eduardo’s efforts to make a symbolic environment for his New Order is one of the most brilliant in the book. Believe me, it is no easy task to describe the ritual process as it actually happens. It cannot be done merely through the priest’s eyes. There has to be a view from the street, from the pews. There has to be a view from the past and how it might have been otherwise. Concalo, an underemployed farm worker, has a pair of eyes that sees things differently. He has not left the church, he says, the church has left him. His mythic heroes are the priests who played the patronage system, who had the power of their presence and protected the poor. The New Order won’t change the world. It will strip the poor of their only wealth -patronage in return for their loyalty.

Meet Severino, municipal street cleaner for twenty years, a believer in the Assembly of God. He is eager to teach ‘Seu Henrique’ about religion, not polemically, but theologically, explaining the relationship between knowledge and belief, exploring the function of sacred history, making a science of his discernment of spirits for those who are possessed by God or Satan. His politics are conservative in the sense that he weighs the cost of change and resistance, but they are no surrender for all that. Ireland treats the texts of Severino’s religious-political philosophy – his stories – with the same respect as any political commentator treats the texts of a Hume or a Marx. It is this respect that will in the end allow Ireland to be optimistic about the possibilities of democracy in Brazil.

Meet Maria Pretinha. ‘Little Black Mary’ is a medium. She helps the spirits develop their own destiny and the ordinary poor theirs. She has suffered terribly through her family. She knows how competitive mediumship is. She educates Ireland into espiritismo.

It is hard to say that hers is a political voice. But Ireland looks behind the rationalisations of suffering and the doping effect of preoccupation with life other than this real world. He pulls out of her reflections the positive images of what community might be without the corruption of the patronage-clientage system, or the violence of bureaucratic authoritarianism. It is this vision of how the real world might be that he calls political, and has a sense that it is far more educational for political action than it is enervating for the status quo.

‘Much of the religious work we have reviewed’, writes Ireland in conclusion, ‘builds the Kingdoms of the powers-that-be, within which the workers are to be contained by their conditions. But we have seen something, too, of the constructions of Kingdoms of challenge ... Brazilians at the grass roots ... are contestants in a continuing political transition.’ His last sentence suggests that if we are really to understand Brazil’s or any other nation’s politics, ‘that analysis should start again with the religious Kingdoms constructed at the grass roots’.

By the measures of relevance that our masters in Canberra use, Kingdoms Come will be counted too exotic to be seriously supported. Why study ‘Campo Allegre’ when there are so many Australian navels to be gazed at? The truth is that all these Australian Centres that are blooming like a thousand flowers should set Kingdoms Come as a textbook. In such an exquisite display of otherness, they might learn more about Australia.