Conservative Christian Competitors: Pentecostals and Charismatic Catholics in Latin America's New Religious Economy (original) (raw)

Competitive Spirits: Latin America's New Religious Economy (Oxford University Press)

Oxford University Press, 2007

For over four centuries the Catholic Church enjoyed a religious monopoly in Latin America in which potential rivals were repressed or outlawed. Latin Americans were born Catholic and the only real choice they had was whether to actively practice the faith. Taking advantage of the legal disestablishment of the Catholic Church between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, Pentecostals almost single-handedly built a new pluralist religious economy. By the 1950s, many Latin Americans were free to choose from among the hundreds of available religious "products," a dizzying array of religious options that range from the African-Brazilian religion of Umbanda to the New Age group known as the Vegetable Union. R. Andrew Chesnut shows how the development of religious pluralism over the past half-century has radically transformed the "spiritual economy" of Latin America. In order to thrive in this new religious economy, says Chesnut, Latin American spiritual "firms" must develop an attractive product and know how to market it to popular consumers. Three religious groups, he demonstrates, have proven to be the most skilled competitors in the new unregulated religious economy. Protestant Pentecostalism, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and African diaspora religions such as Brazilian Candomble and Haitian Vodou have emerged as the most profitable religious producers. Chesnut explores the general effects of a free market, such as introduction of consumer taste and product specialization, and shows how they have played out in the Latin American context. He notes, for example, that women make up the majority of the religious consumer market, and explores how the three groups have developed to satisfy women's tastes and preferences. Moving beyond the Pentecostal boom and the rise and fall of liberation theology, Chesnut provides a fascinating portrait of the Latin American religious landscape.

Future Perspectives for Latin American Pentecostalism

International Review of Mission, 1998

The context As the 21st century draws near, Latin America is leaving behind a long period of authoritarian governments and military dictatorships inspired by the ideology of National Security. Beside the peculiar situation of Cuba, formal democracies are more or less firmly established in all Latin American countries. In nations long divided by bloody civil confrontations, hopeful peace processes are now taking place. Some Latin American countries are exhibiting successful macro-economical results. To what extent this new scenario means good news for the majorities of the Latin American people is not easy to say. The other side of the coin is the increasingly deep gap between the many poor and the few rich. While in most Latin American cities the few rich enjoy as many of the benefits of modernity as the most affluent people of the North, misery continues to be the daily bread of the many poor. Traditional bonds of fraternity and solidarity are undermined by the individualistic thrust of the market economy, and problems, both new or old, take their toll of the most vulnerable: drug addiction and trafficking, street children, diseases spread by sexual promiscuity, increasingly violent delinquency, etc. *JUAN SEP~LVEDA is a Pentecostal minister in Santiago, Chile; on the staff of the Evangelical Service for Development (SEPADE), and a lecturer on Missiology and Pentecostalism at the Evangelical Theological Community (CTE).

PENTECOSTALISM IN LATIN AMERICA

PURPOSE • To enable the student to better understand the history, development and fragmentation of the Pentecostal movement in Latin America. • To cause the student to reflect upon the positive and negative contributions that the Pentecostal movement has brought to the evangelical movement in Latin America as a whole. • To equip the student to formulate a strategy for church planting in Latin America that will take into consideration the tremendous influence of Pentecostals.

Changing Landscapes of Faith: Latin American Religions in the Twenty-First Century

Latin American Research Review, 2018

Latin America today is much more than simply Catholic. To describe it as such would obscure the complicated cultural history of the region while belying the lived experiences of believers and the dynamic transformations in the religious field that have distinguished the longue durée of colonial and postcolonial Latin America. Diversity, heterodoxy, and pluralism have always been more useful descriptors of religion in Latin America than orthodoxy or homogeneity, despite the ostensible ubiquity of Catholic identity. Indeed, deep indigenous Amerindian, colonial European, and displaced African roots have intermingled for centuries and vie today for status and influence among the myriad believers who make up the multicultural tapestry of New World faith and belonging. At the same time, new religious movements along with extremely successful Protestant proselytization campaigns have come to shape the diverse character of religious life as we know it from the Caribbean to Central and South America. The four volumes reviewed here offer a snapshot of this diversity and indicate the trends in scholarship that attempt to render it comprehensible in comparative terms. While acknowledging the diversity of Latin American religious cultures, no discussion of contemporary religion in the region seems adequate without first situating Christianity as, for better or worse, the gravitational nexus of moral and religious life in countries from Mexico to Brazil. For perfectly good reasons, the literature on religion in Latin America has been dominated by studies on the history of Christianity, particularly Catholicism, and reflections on the role of the Christian church in power politics. Besides perhaps capitalism, since the modern era began no cultural institution in the Americas has been more influential than the Christian church. Today, Catholic and Protestant churches predominate almost everywhere in Latin America, prevailing in moral and political authority from neighborhoods and municipalities up to state and national governments. From popular enthusiasm at the community level to wider trends in aesthetic, economic, and political transformation, Christian culture-and increasingly, charismatic evangelical Christian culture in the form of Pentecostalism-has featured prominently in shaping Latin American society. While one version or another of Christian culture endures and advances, the churches themselves are in transition and, as a logical result, so too are the societies and peoples who have embraced them. Protestant inroads into Latin America have transformed the landscape of faith to a degree many scholars have described