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  • Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism
  • Sarah Desai and Elaine Howard Ecklund
Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism By David Smilde University of California Press. 2007. 262 pages. $55 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Evangelical Protestantism is experiencing incredible growth in Latin America. Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism is the culmination of David Smilde’s chronicle of this movement based on three years of fieldwork in Caracas, Venezuela. Specifically Smilde explores how and why men convert in order to address intractable personal problems, such as poverty or drug abuse, and embrace a new meaning system that reinterprets their marginalized status. Although the social and personal control gained through conversion is a compelling solution to life problems, only a small percentage of men experiencing the trials of poverty or addiction, for example, become evangelicals. Smilde finds that contact with family members or very close friends who embody alternative lifestyles through conversion allowed the men he studied to imagine an alternative for themselves. He coins the term, relational imagination, to describe this cultural innovation facilitated through contact with others.

Smilde’s work is both theoretically-driven and methodologically rigorous. While Reason to Believe is a detailed study of conversion among men in Caracas, it has broader relevance for sociologists of religion and culture. Smilde addresses [End Page 464] the uneasy tension in work on religion that provides instrumental explanations for faith alongside observed religious fervor. Through exploring the relationship between these seemingly incongruent aspects of religion, he finds that evangelicalism provides new converts with a meaning system to re-interpret the choice to convert as a situation in which God was acting. Reason to Believe chronicles the stories of men who were comfortable talking about practical reasons for conversion because they came to understand the life experiences that motivated their choices to convert as spiritual “nudging” toward the correct path.

Smilde uses a critique of current treatment of religion as a point of departure for his analysis. He argues that Neo-Marxist arguments overlook cultural mobilization and treat conversion as reactive, while neoconservative analysis often assumes that people can easily mobilize culture to maximize their life situations. His data, however, do not support either of these explanations. Smilde explains that pragmatic choice, cultural innovation and genuine religious faith can coexist in the conversion experience and calls readers to move beyond the false dichotomy of seeing religion as a narrow rational calculation, on one hand, or a distinctive meaning system removed from the constraints of rational behavior on the other. Instead, based on his extensive fieldwork, Smilde offers the alternative of imaginative rationality, in which individuals pursue rational goals through faith but also create meaning systems for getting things done in a world where they are constrained by their own social contexts. The volume would have benefited, however, from a more detailed explanation of how Smilde’s ideas about cultural concepts are different from schemas (referred to briefly in the first chapter), which have become common parlance among sociologists of culture as a way to refer to interpretive frameworks.

Another strength of Reason to Believe is its methodology, particularly Smilde’s reflection on his own social position relative to that of his respondents. Data collection included three years of participant observation in multiple churches in Caracas, in-depth interviews and a follow-up visit with respondents five years after the initial study. He provides a compelling critique of his own role – as both an insider and outsider –rather than accepting the narrow understanding that researchers must embody only one of these positions. Entering the field as a Christian, having two children while living in Venezuela, and Spanish fluency all helped to reduce the impact of his outsider status on his research. Yet, Smilde is the first to acknowledge that he could never disembody his position as a white, comparatively wealthy American, a position that often made it difficult for him to fully connect with the men he studied. One interesting extension of this line of research would be to look at the conversion experience of marginalized women in Latin America.

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