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  • Religion and Global Affairs: Religious Activation and Democracy in Latin America
  • Matthew Marostica (bio)

The vigorous reactivation of religion in Latin America is closely tied to the current wave of democratization there. The increased civil liberties that accompanied the transition to democracy facilitated a dramatic period of religious innovation in the 1980s. The new religious movements that appeared during that era are now in a position to push for increased civil liberties in the era of democratic consolidation.

Religion is on the rise in many different regions of the world. The current upsurge in global religious activity is one element of a complicated trio of distinct, yet clearly inter-related global phenomena: the revitalization of religion; the third wave of democratization; 1 and the spread of neo-liberal economic policies. Perhaps more than any other region of the world, Latin America has been at the crest of all three waves of social change. One indicator of the current importance of religion in Latin America is the exponential growth of scholarly interest in religion there. 2 Serious attention to religious phenomena by Latin American scholars has increased for the relatively straightforward reason that religion has become an interesting object of investigation. My research, which examines the intersection of religious activation and political democracy in Latin America, suggests that the increase in civil liberties during the transition to democracy in the 1980s catalyzed an explosion of religious innovation.

The revitalization of religion was particularly true for Evangelical Christians. Free to hold mass crusades for the first time in decades, they created new forms of charismatic worship that resonated deeply in the Latin American popular sector and generated important levels of church growth. 3 In Argentina, a [End Page 45] country in which Evangelical churches had been historically small, more than one million people joined local churches between 1985 and 1987. In addition to the popularity of the Evangelicals, other vibrant religious phenomena include: the spread of Afro-Brazilian religions to Spanish America, the success of proselytizing North American churches like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, and Catholic responses to these new currents in Latin American religion, such as Charismatic Catholicism and healing priests.

The cultural hegemony of Catholicism explains some of the previous homogeneity in Latin American religion. However, authoritarian regimes were also instrumental in restraining nontraditional religious practices. The violent repression of those sectors of the Catholic Church that publicly criticized human rights abuses and social inequalities has been well-documented. 4 Though they received less attention, non-Catholic religions were also controlled, repressed, or outlawed by authoritarian regimes. For example, the last military regime in Argentina (1976–1983) prohibited any type of non-Catholic mass meetings, banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses from the country, and jailed both Pais Santos of Afro-Brazilian religions and Pentecostal ministers. With the notable exception of the Protestant denominations and the sectors of the Catholic Church that formed the MEDH (Ecumenical Movement of Human Rights), the effect of this religious repression in Argentina was the privatization of religion and the elimination of religious innovation.

Though authoritarianism does not explain fully the previous lack of religious innovation experienced in Latin America, and its collapse does not account entirely for the subsequent burst of religious innovation, these phenomena do suggest that new forms of public religious practice are unlikely to emerge under conditions of dictatorship. Similarly, religious reactivation is more likely to succeed when it is accompanied by a broader social and cultural ferment. The increase in Evangelical activity in Latin America in the mid-1980s was part of a much larger social and cultural phenomenon that O’Donnell and Schmitter call the “reemergence of civil society.” 5 As civil society reappeared after years of repression, Latin America experienced a flowering of social and cultural experimentation.

This period of openness in the 1980s produced the core innovations that continue to drive the popularity of Evangelical [End Page 46] Christianity in the region. In the span of a few years, a cohort of Latin American evangelists created a new set of mass-scale charismatic practices (including healing, spiritual trances, and demonic liberation) that have proven to be extremely appealing in the Latin American popular sector. These practices...

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