All Religions Are Good in Tzintzuntzan: Evangelicals in Catholic Mexico

Preface: Confronting Interreligious Violence

P R E FA C E Confronting Interreligious Violence Threats of interreligious conflict have replaced cold war tensions as the major source of global instability in the twenty-first century. From Northern Ireland to Kashmir to the West Bank, the irreconcilable coexistence of two faith traditions has the potential to spark bloody confrontations. Motivated by doctrinal exclusivity, religious partisans see the destruction of nonbelievers as the only way to ensure the purity and survival of their way of life. On news broadcasts, journalists track the latest arrests of religious extremists plotting to do the United States harm. On college campuses, pro-Israeli and proPalestinian factions hurl punches along with invective. The regular reports of religious violence from around the world moved my eighty-seven-year-old grandmother to ask, ‘‘Wouldn’t we all be better off without religion?’’ In this book, I answer her and others who blame religion for fomenting violence and promoting intolerance. I argue that conflict is not a necessary outcome when adherents of different religious backgrounds live together, and, when disagreements do arise, religion is only a proximate cause. Taking the example of a region where new evangelical Protestant congregations have emerged to challenge the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church, I show how members of both groups adopt beliefs and practices of the other so as to minimize denominational discord. This mutual borrowing does not diminish the fervency of a person’s chosen faith but rather strengthens it by connecting the spiritual realm with the conditions of daily life. Seen in this light, religious affiliation is not a fixed category but a vibrant, lived experience that v i i i All Religions Are Good in Tzintzuntzan responds to specific social, economic, and political contexts over the course of a believer’s lifetime. Between 1998 and 2001 I conducted fieldwork in Tzintzuntzan and its neighboring communities on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro in the centralwestern Mexican state of Michoacán. Previous studies of conversion from Roman Catholicism to evangelical Protestant denominations in Latin America have taken place in countries with a high proportion of converts, such as Guatemala or Brazil. When scholars have conducted such research in Mexico, they have tended to focus on the southern states, which have the largest number of evangelicals. This approach allows the field-worker to participate in a full range of churches, but it also can produce overly deterministic conclusions about why Catholics have left their natal church. Talking to the many evangelical converts in Chiapas, for instance, one would get the impression that the only explanation for remaining in the Catholic Church is ignorance. This skewed perspective ignores the continued vitality of the Catholic Church in most of Mexico. Moreover, it does not take into account the interactions between Catholics and their converted relatives and friends. During my fieldwork around Lake Pátzcuaro, the phenomenon of evangelical churches was still recent and relatively limited. Because this area remained a predominantly Catholic community, I was able to document both why converts have left the Catholic Church and why most Catholics have not. The Tzintzuntzan area also afforded the additional advantage of more than half a century of ethnographic data. As a result of the ongoing presence of anthropologists in Tzintzuntzan, of which I am the third generation, nearly everyone in the community is a willing collaborator with inquisitive outsiders. Their familiarity with anthropological methods enhanced my access to expressions of personal spirituality. For most of the fifty-five years that anthropologists have studied in Tzintzuntzan , the Catholic Church has been the sole organized religion. Despite the arrival of missionaries from mainline Protestant denominations during the nineteenth century, serious challenges to the dominance of the Catholic Church in Mexico have appeared only in the last few decades. The nonCatholic Christian faiths that began to register since the1960s in government census figures were not mainline churches like Presbyterians and Methodists but evangelical ones like Pentecostals and Jehovah’s Witnesses. These more successful churches proselytize enthusiastically and rail against the perceived sins of the secular world. Their proportion of the Mexican population consistently remained under 2 percent until 1980, when it reached 3.3 percent. Preface i x Then, by the 1990 census, evangelicals totaled nearly 5 percent (Giménez 1996:230–242). By 2000, the number had reached 7.4 percent. With an overall population of nearly 100 million, this meant more than...