This dissertation investigates how Contemporary Praise and Worship Music (CPWM) within Hillsong congregations in São Paulo, Barranquilla, and Buenos Aires functions as a distinct site of musicoloniality. I argue that Hillsong’s globally standardized sound—its timbres, production aesthetics, bodily expectations, and worship practices—forms a colonial ear that aligns Christian imagination in Latin America with White North American theologies of modernity, order, and cosmopolitan identity.
Based on multi-sited ethnography, including participant observation, interviews, and digital media analysis, the study shows how CPWM operates as a theological and political technology. Hillsong’s worship practices discipline bodies, suppress local sonic expressions, and circulate a musical-industrial theology that supports broader colonial and Christian nationalist projects.
Yet worship also becomes a site of resistance. Through antropofagic reinterpretation, improvisation, and alternative networks of circulation, local musicians and congregants reconfigure Hillsong’s sonic materials, asserting agency and crafting decolonial modes of belonging.
The project demonstrates that CPWM is central to understanding contemporary religious life in the Americas: worship is where colonial imaginaries are sounded, embodied, and contested. The dissertation urges a decolonial theological vision grounded in socially located sounds and embodied communities.