Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America

4 Education and Increasing Religious Pluralism in Latin America

131 4 Education and Increasing Religious Pluralism in Latin America The Case of Chile cristián parker gumucio At the end of the 1980s, according to some scholars, Latin America was becoming Protestant (Martin 1990; Stoll 1990). However, in the first decade of the twenty-first century the growth of evangelical churches has stopped, or at least their rate of growth has slowed. At the same time, it is evident that in the last century the rate of growth of Catholics has systematically declined. The Latin American context has changed: it has passed from being a “Catholic continent” to being an increasingly religiously pluralist region. Indeed, Latin America has ceased to be “Catholic” in the traditional sense of the term. The decline of Catholics has been paralleled by the increase in other religious expressions. Latin American countries vary considerably in their history and in the social and political weight of the institutional Roman Catholic Church and of Christian traditions in the collective mentality and civil society. Nevertheless, some general and common dynamics must be examined. With the exception of Cuba and Uruguay, in the last three or four decades the alternatives to Catholicism have come not mainly from the growth of nonbelievers and atheists but from the expansion of evangelicals, in particular, Pentecostals. Nevertheless, Latin America 132 | Cristián Parker Gumucio is more “evangelical” only in relative and partial terms. The continent still remains a privileged space within world Catholicism: in 2004 the Catholic population of nineteen Latin American countries was approximately 447 million, or 48 percent of the nearly 932 million Catholics in the world. Yet, if Latin America has not become “Protestant,” neither does it continue to be “Catholic” in the same sense that it was at the beginning of the twentieth century.1 These data suggest that the continent is becoming increasingly religiously plural. In other words, Latin America is still a majority-Catholic­ region—its religious and cultural mainstream is neither Protestant nor­ secular—but it is becoming more religiously diverse. The Catholic Church has recognized the challenges it faces. Using new methods, it has renewed its classical skirmish against secularism (“evangelization of culture”), and, beginning with the Medellín bishops’ conference (1968) and continuing with the Puebla (1979), Santo Domingo (1992), and Aparecida (2007) conferences , the church has acknowledged the threat of competition and religious pluralism (for example, the challenges of sects, new religious movements ,andPentecostals).Butbeneaththesurfaceandlesswidelyrecognized in the media and in academic and public debate is the rise of such non­ orthodox religious expressions as “diffuse religiosity,” “popular religiosity,” and other hermetic and New Age expressions. These have developed not as independent institutions, churches, or cults but often as syncretic mixtures in the minds of the faithful, who identify themselves as nominally “Catholic” and even “Protestant.” Throughout Latin American history popular Catholicism has coexisted with various forms of syncretisms.2 This is in fact one of the distinguishing features of Latin America’s history and sociology. In another work (Parker 1996b) I analyzed the emergence of new syncretisms, which aggregate traditional and historical forms. These new syncretic forms are, of course, much more tied to the process of modernization and educational reform than traditional and popular syncretisms whose origins lay in a distinct sociohistorical dynamic. How do we explain these changes? What are the main social and cultural factors that are influencing these new tendencies toward religious pluralism among Latin Americans? Among the cultural factors that influence religious change are the consumer culture promoted by the market and the Education and Increasing Religious Pluralism | 133 new economy; the mass media and the revolution in communications and electronics; rapid changes in education; and the renewal of social and ethnic movements that affect the religious field (see Parker 2005). All these social and cultural factors are affecting the way the people represent themselves in their religious beliefs and practices—the social construction of their symbolic reality (see Berger and Luckmann, 1966)—with the consequence that many of the Catholic faithful no longer reproduce conventional forms of religious affiliation or adhere to the faith received from their­ parents. As we shall see, there has been a boom in new “underground currents” of “superstitions” or “neopagan” contemporary religious tendencies.3 Nearly a third of Catholics, and even those who practice regularly, now adhere to these tendencies (see Parker 1999). There is not merely growing pluralism within institutional Catholicism and an increase of new religious movements or...