Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America

1: Understanding Conversion in the Americas

3 1 VVVVVVVVVVV Understanding Conversion in the Americas TIMOTH Y J. STEIGENGA AND EDWAR D L. CLEARY When two noted anthropologists canvassed colonization projects in Bolivia’s lowlands, they reached the last house on the newly constructed dirt road. The owner heard them coming and ran out of the house yelling as they approached, “Soy católico. Nunca van a convertirme” (I’m Catholic. You’re never going to convert me). As they soon discovered, he was the last Catholic left in the project. Although this story represents the extreme case, it reflects a larger social reality in Latin America and the Caribbean. In a region that was nearly all Catholic just forty years ago, evangelical Protestants now represent approximately 15 percent of the population. In Guatemala estimates of the evangelical population are closer to 30 percent, with the vast majority belonging to Pentecostal or neo-Pentecostal churches.1 The impact of these religious changes extends beyond the numbers, as many Catholics and Historical Protestants have also adopted some of the religious beliefs and practices of “pentecostalized” religion.2 These remarkable and largely unforeseen religious transformations extend to other religious groups as well. Indigenous religious movements and Afro-diasporan religions have also recently gained adherents in the region. Changes within traditional religious categories have accelerated as well. While many Catholics are becoming Pentecostal, many Mainstream Protestants and Classic Pentecostals are also converting to “health and wealth” neo-Pentecostal groups. At the same time, many Catholics have joined more Charismatic Catholic congregations. Among the indigenous 4 ST EIGENGA A ND CLE A RY groups of the region, millions of “officially” Catholic individuals now openly embrace some form of Mayan or Andean spirituality. To a large degree, the process and meaning of conversion have been taken for granted in media coverage and many academic accounts of these recent religious changes. After all, if an individual in a survey reports being Catholic last year and a Protestant this year, that individual must have adopted a new set of beliefs along with a new associational participation somewhere in between. A central goal of this volume is to understand what happens in that area in between and to explore the implications for the convert and the surrounding society. While researchers have made great strides in understanding the macro-level factors that set the context for religious conversion (such as major social and economic upheavals, changes within the Catholic Church, increased Protestant missionary activity, and changes in state policies on religious freedom), they have paid far less attention to questions of exactly who converts and under what circumstances, what the process of conversion entails, and how conversion impacts beliefs and actions. These are some of the key questions we seek to answer in this volume. This book addresses these gaps in the literature on religious change in the Americas in four primary ways. First, we begin with a critical appraisal of the meaning of conversion. Understanding conversion requires a multidimensional and interdisciplinary approach. Rational actor theories, sociological analysis, anthropological perspectives, and psychological factors all provide insights, but should not be reified or treated as singular explanations for the conversion process. Instead, the authors in this volume adopt a conceptual model that allows us to examine different levels of conversion along a continuum, rather than treating conversion as a single event or static state. Such an approach places greater emphasis on the interactions between agents and contexts, rather than the more traditional “passive” interpretations of conversion. Drawing on empirical and qualitative case studies from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua , and the United States, we present an integrative perspective that can be used to guide research on conversion across different contexts and within multiple disciplines. The second contribution follows from the first. If the definition and process of conversion are more problematic than has been previously suggested, the effects of conversion are as well. The political, economic, and social effects of conversion are multiple, complex, and even counterintuitive. From the indigenous Mexican woman who gains personal empowerment through her conversion and involvement with a local Pentecostal congregation to the Guatemalan presidential candidate who preaches the “health and wealth gospel” to a neo-Pentecostal congregation in Houston, conversion holds UNDER STA NDING CON V ER SION IN T HE A MER IC A S 5 different meanings to different individuals across contexts. Crude generalizations linking...