Latin American Religion in Motion (review)

Despite its title, this edited volume of collected studies contributed by some of the up-and-coming scholars of religion in Latin America is an outstanding work. It should be read--immediately--by anyone who is interested in religion and modern spirituality. The editors of this work, Christian Smith and Joshua Prokopy, are primarily interested in how religious behavior, if not necessarily faith, is shaped by the increasingly pluralized cultural and religious environment, and how religious decisions are made in such a fluid milieu.

In a very strong early chapter with the clever title of "Roman Catholicism: The Struggle to be Soul Provider," Anthony Gill places the institutional strategies of the Catholic Church within the theoretical construct of market theory. Within the framework of the "religious marketplace"--a notion hardly original to Gill, but which is laid out quite effectively here--he suggests that the Church, in order to retain "market share" for its principle products (salvation), must either demand government support or subsidies to retain its "monopoly" (a strategy which, while effective two centuries ago, seems unlikely to succeed in the 21st century) or, alternatively, it must "restructure" to retain and regain parishioners from the competition (pp. 20-22). It is this notion of competition and market strategy that forms the focus of this volume, as the chapters explore the nature of religious pluralism in Latin America and the implications of this pluralism on identity and internal definitions of culture.

The editors of this volume are careful to note that Protestantism, a subject that has attracted a considerable amount of scholarly attention over the past decade, is not the only religious movement to threaten what rather imprecisely might be termed Catholic spiritual hegemony in the region. First, while Protestant churches may share certain similarities in terms of baseline theology and social efficacy, particularly for women (a notion borne out by two well-researched chapters in this book, one by Cecília L. Mariz and Clara Mafra on family planning in Brazil, and the other by Timothy J. Steigenga and David A. Smilde on gender equity among conservative Christians in Central America), they are so divided along theological and denominational faultlines that it is perhaps more useful, as Jean-Pierre Bastian has suggested elsewhere, to think in terms of "protestantisms" than of "Protestantism" in the singular. But a chapter here by Matthew Marostica suggests that as the Protestant phenomena starts to mature in Latin America it is starting to lose this centrifugal quality. Marostica offers evidence that denominationalism (or, as he calls it, "hyperdenominationalism") among Protestants in Latin America may be on the decline, subsumed beneath the larger wave of Pentecostalism and the pull of charismatic non-denominational evangelists such as Argentina's Carlos Annacondia.

Secondly, the editors challenge us to scrap whatever misconceptions we might have indulged about the monocentric, institutional intractability of the Catholic Church. Viewed through the lens of market strategy, the Catholic Church, which in fact has always permitted a wide variety of beliefs and practices to flourish within the "big tent" of universal Catholicism, has "restructured" itself in Latin America through the expansion of "Renewal," or charismatic Catholicism. Catholic Renewal emphasizes the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and borrows freely from the music, healing, and liturgical styles used in Protestant Pentecostal worship. While the congruencies between charismatic Catholicism and Pentecostalism may suggest a similarity in political outlook and social behavior, Margo de Theije, an anthropologist, suggests that the opposite is true, at least in the area of Brazil which is the focus of her study. Theije finds that members of these two subsets of Catholic lay participation often overlap, and that participation in one group often informs the other, to the extent that CEB members who become charismatic are more likely to be "more Catholic" than they were before. Specifically, they define the "credence good" of membership in the Roman Catholic Church as integral...