Religion and Religious Scholarship in Changing Social Contexts

Jews of the Amazon: Self-Exile in Paradise. By Ariel Segal. (Philadelphia, Penn.: The Jewish Publication Society, 1999. Pp. 341. $29.95 Cloth.)

Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean. By Luis MartÍNez-Fernández. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Pp. 246. $30.00 Paper.)

Secret Dialogues: Church-State Relations, Torture, and Social Justice In Authoritarian Brazil. By Ken Serbin. (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Pp. 312. $50.00 Cloth, $24.95 Paper.)

The Politics of the Spirit: The Political Implications of Pentecostalized Religion in Costa Rica And Guatemala . By Timothy J. Steigenga. (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2001. Pp. 201. $56.00 Cloth.)

The Sacred World of the Penitentes. By Alberto López Pulido. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. Pp. 108. $40.00 Cloth, $17.95 Paper.)

U.S. Protestant Missions in Cuba: From Independence to Castro. By Jason M. Yaremko. (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2000. Pp. 200. $49.95 Cloth.)

A growing realization has emerged that the religious sphere is both internally dynamic and profoundly affected by changes in the secular sphere. As scholars have abandoned the idea that religion is incompatible with modern life or the values of modernity, they are discovering that religious beliefs and identities undergo significant adaptive change and subjective reinterpretation across time and cultural boundaries. This focus on the adaptation of religion to changing social circumstances is leading scholars to search for explanations for religious behavior outside of the religious sphere or at the sites of interaction between the religious and secular spheres.

Six recent works on Latin American religion offer significant new insights on the historically and socially contingent processes that generate religious diversity, structure religious choice and religious identity, and drive religious competition. The complex relationships between religious and secular processes, particularly the relationship between religion and politics and religion and identity formation, are at the heart of these new books.

Religion and Political Behavior

Timothy Steigenga's Politics of the Spirit is one of the first systematic, quantitative, and comparative investigations of the relationship between religious affiliation, religious beliefs, and secular political structure. Using data from over 1,200 interviews in Costa Rica and Guatemala, Steigenga tests many of the hypotheses generated by the recent literature on evangelical Protestantism. Steigenga's quantitative, comparative approach allows him to control for the effects of political structure on the behavior of religious persons. Controlling for cross-national effects is particularly important since it reveals what aspects of religion are socially conditioned and which are universal.

Steigenga has chosen a strategy of most different cases to investigate the effect of political structure on political behavior. If political structure affects religious behavior, Costa Rica's more open political structure should encourage higher levels of political participation among religious groups than Guatemala's relatively closed political structure. The data, while bearing out the general proposition that political context matters, show that the relationship between social context and political participation is complex. All religious groups have higher levels of political participation in Costa Rica than in Guatemala, but the differences are significantly higher for Catholics than for Protestants. That finding undermines both arguments: that evangelical Protestants are intrinsically quiescent politically and that evangelical Protestantism has an intrinsic affinity with liberal democracy. If the former were true, we would expect little variance in levels of political activity between the two nations. If the latter were true, we would expect Protestant political participation to outstrip Catholic participation in Costa Rica's liberal, democratic political environment.

Perhaps the most significant finding to emerge from Steigenga's analysis is that religious beliefs have a much stronger effect on political behavior than religious affiliation. This suggests that the denomination- or affiliation-oriented studies that dominate the literature are bound to miss the most important religious determinants of political behavior. Because some of the most politically relevant beliefs are shared across denominations...