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The Future of Christianity in Latin America*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2009

DANIEL H. LEVINE
DANIEL H. LEVINE
Affiliation:
Daniel Levine is James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MIUSA. Email: dhldylan@umich.edu
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Abstract

The Christianity of the future in Latin America will remain dominant but now plural and competitive. The decline of Catholic monopoly and the surge of Protestant and Pentecostal churches, visible since the 1980s but with deeper roots, are explained in the context of social, cultural and political changes that have drawn churches into public space in new ways. The impact of democracy, violence, and a newly open civil society on churches and religious life is visible in new ideas about rights and associational life and in the withdrawal of the institutional churches from political confrontation, diversification of political positions and multiplication of voices in all churches.

O futuro do cristianismo na américa latina

Síntese: O cristianismo do futuro na América Latina permanecerá dominante, porém plural e competitivo. O declínio do monopólio católico e o surgimento das igrejas protestantes e pentecostais, visível desde a década de 1980, mas hoje com raízes mais profundas, são explicadas no contexto de mudanças sociais, culturais e políticas que levaram as igrejas ao espaço público de novas formas. A democracia, a violência e uma nova sociedade civil aberta impactaram as igrejas e a vida religiosa nitidamente, repercutindo novas idéias sobre direitos e vida em associações, assim como na retirada das igrejas institucionalizadas do confronto político, na diversificação de posições políticas e na multiplicação de vozes em todas as igrejas.

Palavras-chave: Catolicismo, protestantismo, pentecostais, néo-pentecostais, sociedade civil, política, violência, democracia, direitos.

El futuro del cristianismo en latinoamérica

Resumen: El cristianismo del futuro en Latinoamérica seguirá siendo dominante pero ahora plural y en competencia. El declive del monopolio católico y el surgimiento de las iglesias protestantes y pentecostales, algo evidente desde los años 80 pero con profundas raíces, se explican en el contexto de los cambios sociales, culturales y políticos que de formas nuevas han arrastrado a las iglesias dentro de nuevos espacios públicos. El impacto de la democracia, la violencia y una sociedad civil ahora más abierta sobre las iglesias y la vida religiosa se hace visible en las nuevas ideas sobre derechos y vida en asociación y en el retiro de las iglesias institucionales de la confrontación política, en la diversificación de las posiciones políticas y en la multiplicación de voces de todas las iglesias.

Palabras clave: catolicismo, protestantismo, pentecostales, neo pentecostales, sociedad civil, política, violencia, democracia, derechos

Keywords

CatholicismProtestantismPentecostalsNeo Pentecostalscivil societypoliticsviolencedemocracyrights
Type
Commentary
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , February 2009 , pp. 121 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Gustavo Gutiérrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People (Maryknoll NY, 1984), p. 92.

2 On these changes see in particular, Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Austin, 1998); and David Stoll, Between Two Armies: In the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (New York, 1993).

3 Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994) p. 217.

4 I discuss Aparecida in detail in Daniel H Levine, ‘The Future as Seen from Aparecida’ in R. Pelton (ed.), Aparecida: Quo Vadis (Scranton, 2008).

5 For prominent examples of this point of view see Gustavo Gutiérrez, ‘La Opcion Preferencial por el pobre en Aparecida’ Paginas, Lima, no. 206 (August 2007), pp. 6–25; and Cecilia Tovar, ‘Retomando el Camino de Medellin: La V Conferencia General del Episcopado en Aparecida’. Paginas, Lima, no. 206 (August 2007). pp. 42–51.

6 Although conservatives have regularly insisted that this ‘preferential option’ is not ‘socially exclusive’ and embraces attention to the poor in spirit, the documents have generally been taken as intended to focus attention on the materially poor, the oppressed, and the excluded.

7 Fortunato Mallimaci and Martha Villa, Las Comunidades Eclesiales de base y el mundo de los pobres en la Argentina. Conflictos y tensiones por el control del poder en el catolicismo (Buenos Aires, 2007).

8 Catalina Romero, ‘Religion and Public Spaces. Catholicism and Civil Society in Peru’, in Frances Hagopian (ed.), Contemporary Catholicism, Religious Pluralism, and Democracy in Latin America (Notre Dame IN, 2009) argues that the public space emerging within the church is a space of liberty where believers encounter others (both believers and non believers) in voluntary associations, personal development courses, as well as in the arts, music expressive mobilizations the internet and mass media.

9 Mallimaci, Fortunato, ‘Catolicismo y política en el gobierno de Kirchner’, América Latina Hoy Revista de Ciencias Sociales, vol. 41 (December 2005), p. 60Google Scholar, ‘In today's Argentina, people do not believe – be it in politics or be it in religion – more or less than in other periods, but in a different way’.

10 David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? (Berkeley, 1990); Daniel H. Levine, ‘Pluralism as Challenge and Opportunity’ in Frances Hagopian (ed.), Contemporary Catholicism, Religious Pluralism, and Democracy in Latin America (Notre Dame IN, 2009).

11 Devotion to saints and commemoration of apparitions is of course widespread in Catholicism and in the case of Latin America dates back as far as the Virgin of Guadalupe, who appeared miraculously to Juan Diego on a hill outside of what is now Mexico City on 12 December 1531, not long after the conquest of Mexico by Cortez. Long venerated as the patron saint of Mexico, this brown-skinned virgin is a perfect incarnation of the absorption of the faith into the life and culture of subordinate peasant masses.

12 Bruce J. Calder, ‘Interwoven Histories: The Catholic Church and the Maya, 1940 to the Present’ in Edward L. Cleary and Timothy J. Steigenga, (eds.), Resurgent Voices. Indigenous Peoples, Political Mobilization, and Religious Change in Latin America (New Brunswick NJ, 2004), pp. 93–124.

13 It is important to be clear on the meaning of the title. To call these communities ecclesial (as was the case in Latin America) is to evoke the original sense of ‘church’ in Greek, which is ekklesia, or to convoke or call together. It is therefore a profound misunderstanding to refer to such groups as ecclesiastical (evoking images of hierarchical institutions). Although to be sure they arose within the Catholic Church, their basic self understanding is community oriented, not juridical. They were never conceived as mini parishes.

14 William. E. Hewitt, Base Christian Communities and Social Change in Brazil (Lincoln, 1991); and Daniel H. Levine, Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism (Princeton, 1992).

15 The trends applied both to Catholics and later to the newly visible Protestant sector. The perspective is deeply Tocquevillian and inspired David Martin to find echoes of the cultural transformations of the Reformation. See his Tongues of Fire: Protestant Expansion in Latin America (Oxford, 1990). On the parallel to Tocqueville, see Ireland, Rowan, ‘Popular Religions and the Building of Democracy in Latin America: Saving the Tocquevillian Parallel’, Journal of Inter American Studies and World Affairs, vol. 41, no. 4 (1999), pp. 111–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 As Frederick Harris reminds us, participatory ideals can find it hard to survive within theocratic structures. See his Something Within: Religion in African American Political Activism (New York, 1999), p. 183. On gender and barriers to mobilisation, also Carol Ann Drogus and Hannah Stewart-Gambino, Activist Faith: Grassroots Women in Democratic Brazil and Chile (University Park, PA 2005). On the problems of sustaining mobilisation, see Daniel H. Levine and Catalina Romero, ‘Movimientos Urbanos y Desempoderamiento en Perú y Venezuela’, América Latina Hoy, no. 36 (April 2004), pp. 47–77. For a very different point of view on the crisis of liberationist movement see Frank Goetz Ottman, Lost for Words. Brazilian Liberationism in the 1990s (Pittsburg, 2002).

17 Jean Pierre Bastian, La Mutación Religiosa de América Latina. Para una sociología de cambio social en la modernidad periférica (Mexico City, 1997) goes further and argues that, far from laying the bases of a new Reformation with democratising cultural and political elements, the expansion of Pentecostal Christianity in Latin America has reinforced existing cultural and political strains of authoritarianism.

18 In ‘Spectacle and the Staging of Power in Brazilian Neo-Pentecostalism’, Latin American Perspectives, vol. 32, no. 1 (January 2005), pp. 95–120. Eric Kramer describes these leaders and the dramatic staging and spectacle that surrounds them, in terms that recall recalls Paul Gifford's account of prophetic and charismatic leaders in Ghana. See Paul Gifford, Ghana's New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalizing African Economy (Bloomington IN, 2004).

19 In Chesnut's terms, the CCR is virgophilic, while Protestant Pentecostas are generally virgophobic and pneumacentric. See R. Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits Latin America's New Religious Economy (New York, 2003). Note that more than imitation is at issue here. Steigenga documents a broad pattern of ‘Pentecostalisation’ of religious belief and practice with elements like the direct experience of charismatic power, a judgmental image of God, pre millenarian beliefs, and speaking in tongues diffused throughout in the Christian community without regard to denominational boundaries. See Timothy Steigenga, The Politics of the Spirit: The Political Implications of Pentecostalized Religion in Costa Rica and Guatemala. (Lanham MD, 2001), pp. 44–8.

20 Information on Santa Muerte or Difunta Correa is mostly available via the internet. (eg. http://www.speroforum.com/site/print.asp?idarticle=1283). On the Israelites of the New Universal Pact, see Manuel Marzal, Los Caminos Religiosos de los inmigrantes de la Gran Lima el caso de El Agustino (Lima Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1988), pp. 342–72; on new indigenous movements, see contributions to Cleary and Steigenga, Conversion of a Continent. Religious Change in Latin America; on Padre Cicero, see, Ralph Della Cava, Miracle at Joaseiro (New York, 1970). There is also a small Jewish community scattered across the region (with significant, if shrinking numbers, only in Argentina) and small numbers of Muslims and Hindus, mostly attached to immigrant communities. There have been no significant millenarian movements in Latin America since the nineteenth century; the Canudos in Brazil or the Caste War in the Yucatán.

21 Parker, Cristián, ‘¿América ya no es católica? Pluralismo cultural y religioso creciente’, America Latina Hoy Revista de Ciencias Sociales, vol. 41 (December 2005). pp. 33–56Google Scholar; Mallimaci, Fortunato, ‘Catolicismo y política en el gobierno de Kirchner’, América Latina Hoy Revista de Ciencias Sociales, vol. 41 (December 2005), pp. 57–76Google Scholar.

22 Statistics on church growth are controversial but there is general agreement on the overall pattern of Catholic decline from overwhelming domination to around 80% across Latin America as a whole. Pentecostal and Neo Pentecostal churches constitute the leading edge of Protestant growth above all in the region's megacities and poor barrios that surround them, and countries that have been through massive violence and civil war (R Andrew Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (New Brunswick NJ, 1997), and also his Competitive Spirits; Paul C. Freston, Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America (New Cork, 2006); Virigina Garrard Burnett, Protestantism in Guatemala; Darío López, Los Evangélicos y los Derechos Humanos. La Experiencias del Concilio Nacional Evangélico del Perú 1980–1992 (Lima, 1998); David Smilde, Reason to Believe. Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism (Berkeley, 2007); and David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? There is much variation among sources (World Values Survey, national censuses, World Christian Database), and little consensus on details such as growth numbers for specific groups or denominations, persistence or conversion vs. losses or slippage over time, or precisely how recruitment works. The very dynamism of the field undermines the validity of snap shot accounts. Whatever the trend lines, Edward Cleary urges caution in making future projections. There is too much inconsistency between sources, a lot of double counting, and misinterpretation of statistics. See Cleary, Edward L, ‘Shopping Around: Questions about Latin American Conversions’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, vol. 28, no. 2 (2004), pp. 50–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

23 Protestant churches and missionaries were invited by nineteenth century anticlerical governments, as part of their dual campaign against the local power of the Catholic Church and their desire to ‘civilise’ their own country by making it more appealing to Northern European (white and Protestant) immigrants. Garrard-Burnett Protestantism in Guatemala details how Guatemala was divided up into mission zones allocated to distinct Protestant groups.

24 R. Andrew Chesnut, Born Again.

25 Eric Kramer, ‘Spectacle’, p. 97. The dramatic staging characteristic of some Neo Pentecostal churches is a significant part of their public impact, which is magnified by astute use of the media and regular public rituals of exorcism (in Portuguese, descarrego means literally discharging or unlocking, that is, releasing a person from a spiritual affliction caused by possession). All of these elements greatly enhance the power of the pastor who is the medium for channeling, through the congregation, the divine power that makes release possible (Kramer, 2005).

26 Darío López, La Seducción del Poder, documents a transition in leadership among the evangelical churches in Peru from foreign missionaries to Peruvian natives starting in the 1970s.

27 Chesnut, Born Again and Competitive Spirits; Tomás Gutiérrez Sánchez, Evangélicos, Democracia y Nueva Sociedad. Ensayos de historia política (Lima, 2005).

28 Virginia Garrard Burnett discusses IURD missionary outreach in the United States. The church is also active throughout Latin America, and in parts of Africa. Virginia Garrard-Burnett, ‘Stop Suffering? The Igreja Universal del Reino de Deus in the United States’ in Edward L. Cleary and Timothy J. Steigenga (eds.), Conversion of a Continent. Religious Change in Latin America (New Brunswick NJ, 2007), pp. 218–38.

29 These include the International Church of the Four Square Gospel (Igreja do Evangelho Quadrangular), established in 1955 with links to the famous North American evangelist Aimée Semple McPherson, Brazil for Christ (Brasil Para Cristo, BPC) established in 1955, and God is Love (Deus É Amor) established in 1962.

30 Chesnut, Born Again, p. 46 quotes Edir Macedo, who contrasts his church with traditional Pentecostals: ‘We have few relations because other Pentecostals are too fanatical mixing faith with customs. One thing has nothing to do with the other. Traditional Pentecostals for example, base themselves on doctrine rooted in the time of Jesus. We, on the contrary, do not prohibit anything. In the IURD it is prohibited to prohibit. People are free to do what they understand to be right. Our obligation is to teach them that they, on their own accord, have to make the decision whether or not to do this or that’ (quoting a document entitled ‘O dinheiro é um bem’ or ‘money is a good thing’).

31 I exclude arguments that rely on suppositions of anomie, ‘loss of culture’, or dislocation. On this point, see Steigenga, The Politics of the Spirit chapters 1 and 2.

32 Chesnut, Born Again.

33 This is similar to the general thesis advanced by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics World Wide (Cambridge, 2004) that religious belief is tied to levels of existential security, but makes the argument in much more fine-grained terms.

34 Ivan Vallier, Catholicism, Social Control, and Modernization in Latin America (Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1970).

35 There are, to be sure, exceptions. One notable instance was Argentina, where the Catholic hierarchy collaborated with and legitimated the military's ‘dirty war’ against subversion through the 1970s. See, among others, Fortunato Mallimaci, ‘Catolicismo y política en el gobierno de Kirchner’, América Latina Hoy Revista de Ciencias Sociales, vol. 41 (December 2005), pp. 57–76; Fortunato Mallimaci, Humberto Cucchetti and Luis Donatello, ‘Caminos Sinuousos. Nacionalismo y Catolicismo en la Argentina Contemporanea’, in Francisco Colom and Angel Rivero (eds.), El Altar y El Trono. Ensayos sobre el catolicismo iberoamericano (Bogotá, 2006), pp. 155–90; Emilio Mignone, Witness to the Truth: The Complicity of Church and Dictatorship in Argentina (Maryknoll NY, 1988); Horacio Verbitsky, Doble Juego. La argentina católica y militar (Buenos Aires, 2006); and also his El Silencio. De Paulo VI a Bergoglio. Las relaciones secretas de la iglesia con la ESMA (Buenos Aires, 2005).

36 Such as Thomas C. Bruneau, ‘Church and Politics in Brazil: The Genesis of Change’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 17, no. 2 (1985), pp. 271–9, and also his The Church in Brazil: The Politics of Religion (Austin, 1982); and Anthony Gill, Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America (Chicago, 1998).

37 Freston, Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America, provides a broad survey on this point.

38 Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People (New Cork, 1982); Daniel H. Levine, ‘Pluralidad, Pluralismo y la creación de un vocabulario de derechos’, America Latina Hoy Revista de Ciencias Sociales, vol. 41 (December 2005), pp. 17–34; Anna Peterson, Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador's Civil War (Albany, 1997).

39 López, Los Evangélicos y los Derechos Humanos.

40 Verbitsky, Doble Juego and also El Silencio, Mignone Witness to the Truth.

41 Mallimaci, ‘Catolicismo y política en el gobierno de Kirchner’.

42 Garrard-Burnett, Protestantism in Guatemala; Peterson, Martyrdom; Steigenga, Politics of the Spirit.

43 See Chesnut, Competitive Spirits; Smilde, Reason to Believe.

44 Daniel H. Levine and David Smilde, ‘The Church and the Chávez Government in Venezuela’, Catholic Herald (London), September 2006.

45 Hannah Stewart-Gambino, ‘Las Pobladoras y la Iglesia Despolitizada en Chile’, América Latina Hoy Revista de Ciencias Sociales, no. 41 (2005), pp. 121–38.

46 Ani Pedro Oro, ‘A Igreja Universal e a política’, in Joanildo A. Burity and Maria das Dores C. Machado (eds.), Os Votos de Deus. Evangélicos, política, e eleiςoes no Brasil (Recife, 2005) pp. 119–48.

47 Paul C. Freston, Evangelicals and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Cambridge, 2001).

48 Drogus and Stewart-Gambino, Activist Faith; Ottmann, Lost for Words.

49 Casanova, Public Religions, p. 217.

50 Romero, ‘Public spaces’, p. 22 (manuscript).

51 Ibid., p. 41 (manuscript).

52 For such expectations, see among others Martin, Tongues, or Amy Sherman, The Soul of Development: Biblical Christianity and Economic Transformation in Guatemala (New York, 1997).

53 Warner refers to such churches as nascent and spirit filled, more movements than institutions. R. Stephen Warner, New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a Small Town Church. (Berkeley, 1988).

54 Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth. The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, 2004), p. 170.

55 Ibid., p. 186.

56 For too many academics, Orsi writes, ‘True religion, then, is epistemologically and ethically singular. It is rational, respectful of persons, non coercive, mature, non anthropomorphic in its higher forms, mystical (as opposed to ritualistic), unmediated, and agreeable to democracy (no hierarchy in gilded robes and fancy hats), monotheistic (no angels, saints, demons, ancestors), emotionally controlled, a reality of mind and spirit, not body and nature. It is concerned with ideal essences not actual things, and especially not about presences in things. Students of mine over the past twenty years in classrooms in New York City, Indiana and Massachusetts have unfailing refused to acknowledge as ‘religious’ the practice of putting holy water into an automobile's transmission (as pilgrims to a Bronx Lourdes shrine commonly do). Whatever this is, it is not ‘good religion’? All the complex dynamism of religion is thus stripped away, its boundary-blurring and border-crossing propensities eliminated. Not surprisingly, there is only one methodology and one epistemology for studying this ‘religion’ – critical, analytical, and ‘objective’ (as opposed to subjective, existentially engaged, or participatory), Between Heaven and Earth, p. 188.

57 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989).

58 Gender issues had a prominent place in the Catholic bishops' 2007 meetings at Aparecida. The bishops lamented growing cultural upset and confusion (desconcierto, 10) that undermine the unifying legacy of the faith and the normative guidelines it provides. In their view, such confusion is nowhere more evident than in an ‘ideology of gender’ (40) brought to the region and diffused by global cultural forces, which undermine family, community solidarity, and unleash an uncontrolled individualism (36, 47, 51, 503). References are to numbered paragraphs and sections of the Aparecida documents, in Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano, CELAM, V Conferencia General del Episcopado Latinoamericano y del Caribe, Documento Conclusivo (Bogotá, 2007). Citations from the documents use two formats. Translations from the Spanish are mine. The Catholic Church has remained active in efforts to lobby legislatures and executives to ban abortion in all cases, most recently in Nicaragua and El Salvador. For a general view of the dynamics of church and state around issues of sexuality, family law, divorce and abortion, see Mala Htun, Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family Under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies (New York, 2003).

59 The phrase comes from Marx's description of the impact of capitalism on traditional life. See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London, 1982), for a stimulating discussion of the cultural aspects of modernity.