Gifts, Weapons, and Values
Central Americans from a variety of religious traditions and social classes speak freely of lo espiritual, or “that which is spiritual,” but they do so in widely diverging ways. This chapter attempts to make sense of the vast and varied ways in which Central Americans reference spirituality by describing four common threads of usage. Evangelical-Pentecostal pastors sometimes frame social problems like gang violence as having both spiritual causes and spiritual solutions. Other Central Americans use the term “spiritual” to describe supernatural entities with a strong bearing on political structures. Meanwhile, some Central Americans have come to use the term “spirituality” to refer to beliefs and practices with roots in precolonial Mayan narratives. A fourth means of utilizing the language of spirituality is as a catch-all term for quasi-religious meditative practices and prosocial values formation. In conclusion, religious background and social class influence how people define and conceive of “the spiritual.”