Activist Christians, the Human Rights Movement, and Democratization in Latin America

This chapter is a critical literature review of recent social science research describing and analyzing the participation of Christian churches in various phases of the human rights movement in Latin America. Spanning the period from 1964 to the present, such human rights activism took place in the contexts of authoritarian rule, civil war, democratic transitions, and the consolidation of democracy. The chapter focuses on the influence of Christian church leaders, laity, organizations, and resources on the origins, growth, and maturation of human rights-oriented social movement organizations (SMOs). Drawing on Douglas McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly’s work on political process theory, this literature emphasizes the invaluable role of religious organizations in providing space, resources, protection, and framing to nascent human rights movements in the region during the 1960s-70s. Even so, the literature also grapples with the diverse range of political stances taken by Christian church leaders and activists, both within and across national-level cases. With the maturation of the movement and the transition to democracy, political process theory remained relevant, but failed to capture some of the key challenges and opportunities experienced by Christian activists, as opposed to social activists in general. Thus, scholarship shifted focus to organized religion’s capacity to build social capital and sustain meaningful Christian social and human rights activism.

Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism in Latin America

Pentecostalism, a Christian renewal movement that emphasizes ecstatic bodily worship and charismatic practices, transformed Latin American Christianity over the course of the twentieth century. While they were influenced by the disruptive North American Holiness movements from which their piety originated, converts adapted Pentecostal Christianity to local economic and political realities that generated new, Latin American forms of Pentecostalism. This chapter traces the dynamics of Pentecostal transformation in Latin America across two case studies: Guatemala and Brazil. Both countries underwent enormous shifts in religious demographics and practices that reveal similar trends amid substantial diversity in the Pentecostalization of Latin America. Guatemala’s Pentecostal boom occurred through the country’s tumultuous thirty-year conflict between leftist guerrillas and an intractable military government. Pentecostalization crescendoed while military general Efrain Ríos Montt, a Pentecostal, came to power and oversaw the violent deaths of as many as 200,000 civilians who were predominantly indigenous Maya. Vast numbers of conversions to Pentecostalism followed, revealing its power to re-enchant destroyed and seemingly hopeless worlds. Brazilian Pentecostalism maintained a subdued, conservative critical presence within Brazilian society until neo-Pentecostal evangelists asserted themselves in the public sphere, taking on popular African diasporic religions, Spiritism, and established Catholicism in equal measure. After democracy was re-established, neo-Pentecostal churches—magnified by their immense fortunes garnered from prosperity theologies—reshaped the Brazilian relationship between Christian piety, national culture, and secular government. Today, Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches sustain a transnational culture that connects Christians across Latin America, dynamically reshaping both social relations and Latin American Christianity itself.

The Making of Colonial Christianity in Hispanic America

The Catholic Church was one of the most important institutions of colonial Latin America; yet, it is poorly understood by many scholars. This chapter outlines the important features of the Catholic Church both from the point of view of institutional structure and the impact of these on the society at large. While generally considered a monolithic institution, the Church consisted of many disparate and often competing units. The clergy itself was divided between those who were members of religious orders and communities and those who were directly under the administrative control of bishops and archbishops. The Church also touched the life of nearly every resident of the colonies, from baptism until death. The Church also had an important impact on the finances of the colonies. In short, this study looks at the broad scope of the actions and activities of the Catholic Church in colonial Latin America.

Christianity and Ecology in Latin America

This chapter explores Christianity and ecology in Latin America by charting the religious beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church and liberation theologians, ecofeminist movements, and Protestant faith traditions (emphasizing evangelical and Pentecostal Protestantism). In each case, religious symbols, theologies, rituals, and movements are analyzed as they relate to the nonhuman world. The chapter begins with initial contact between Roman Catholicism and indigenous religions and the consequences for the environment. The ecotheology emerging from liberation theology is explored as well as Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si (Praise be to you): On Care for our Common Home. Environmental movements and activism rooted in both Catholic and Protestant beliefs are also explored.

Time and Christianity in Early Latin America

The arrival of Christianity in the Americas and its long-term development throughout the colonial era were closely connected to questions of time—whether the human experience and manipulation of time, the crafting of historical memory, or the imagining of potential futures. Exploring classic and recent scholarship on the colonial era, this chapter considers some of the ways that the history of Christianity in early Latin America is also a history of time. This chapter focuses on the viceroyalty of New Spain—Central Mexico in particular—but also makes some references to scholarship from other parts of Spanish America. The centering of attention on time starts a productive dialogue within the historiography on early Latin American Christianity—a conversation that steps beyond a tired debate about the relative “Europeanness” or “indigeneity” of post-conquest cultures, focusing, instead, on unique ways of being that emerged out of the remarkable convergence of intellectual traditions and cultural practices in the colonial world.

Prophetic Martyrdom in Modern Latin America

Following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), over a thousand priests and religious sisters and brothers were exiled, imprisoned, tortured, or murdered in Latin America by authoritarian governments. A much larger number of lay Church workers were also incarcerated, brutalized, or killed. Most suffered or died because, following the ideals of Vatican II and the Second Latin American Bishops Conference at Medellín, Colombia (1968), they committed themselves to the amelioration of the marginalized in their countries, even though they were fully aware that to do so placed their lives in great peril. This chapter treats a select number—mostly priests and nuns—who were killed because of their prophetic devotion to the poor. It is limited to the nations of Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Central America. It also touches on the bitter divisions that resulted in the Church as a consequence of this new religious activism. Finally, it demonstrates why the deaths of so many religious-based social justice activists forced the institutional Catholic Church to reexamine its outdated criteria for martyrdom.

(Un)Making Christianity

This chapter argues that although colonial authorities and church officials in the Iberian Americas limited Afro-Latin American participation in Catholic religious practices, men and women of the African Diaspora shaped colonial Latin American Catholicism. The Iberian Crowns, as well as early modern colonial clerics, profited from the transatlantic slave trade and the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants. As a major financial and political institution of the early modern world, the Catholic Church participated in and developed the idea that black people could be sold and purchased because of their racial identity. Furthermore, early modern clerics, as well as the Spanish Crown, engaged in a Foucauldian governmentality of incorporation and control that included Afro-Latin Americans, enslaved and free, as Catholic subjects. Nevertheless, men and women of the African Diaspora in colonial Latin America employed Church structures to organize their communities. Africans and their descendants placed the worship of black saints at the center of colonial municipal celebrations and called on Iberian ecclesiastical courts to defend their families against the definitions of property by slaveholders. As a result, Afro-Latin Americans played a central role in the formation and development of Latin American Catholicism.

The Course of Catholic History in Latin America

The chapter presents a general narrative of 500 years of Christian history in Latin America, placing particular emphasis on the most controversial developments and debates. Among them are the “struggle for justice” and questions concerning acculturation and “syncretism” in the sixteenth century; the links between popular piety and Baroque spirituality and their clash, first with Jansenism and then with Bourbon reformism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the challenges of independence, liberalism, and the secular state in the nineteenth century; social Catholicism in the first half of the twentieth century; liberation theology and the growth of Protestantism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The chapter pays particular attention to the resilience and legacy of early mendicant evangelization in the formation of an often-neglected Christian culture that can be described as both indigenous and genuinely Christian.

The Sacred Art of Counter-Conquest

From works of monumental architecture to vernacular expressions of “folk” religion, objects of material religion secure and orient lived faith in Latin America. Sacred power in Latin America emanates from a particular web of connection between image, altar, and chapel. These material manifestations of the sacred reflect the pain and paradox of their colonial origins and thus must be contextualized and historicized in relation to the structures of colonial power and domination that define the context of their creation. This chapter traces the historical emergence of Latin American Christian material religious cultures in the circumstance of indigenous and African struggle and survival. A tremendous ritual, spiritual, and cultural labor was required to imbue adopted artistic forms, and the imposed Christian religion itself, with sacred meaning and power. This act of redemption was, by necessity, a labor of contraconquista, the sacred art of counter-conquest. Lay Catholic devotional labor functions to create continuity between monumental and vernacular works of Christian art and architecture, lending coherence to seemingly disparate forms.

A New Pentecost

This chapter deals with a classic anthropological study in Latin American religious history: the conversion, in the middle of the twentieth century, of a Puerto Rican sugarcane worker to Pentecostalism. The author expands that study to analyze the geometrical expansion of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in Latin America. It discusses issues like glossolalia, divine healing, charismatic worship, missionary expansion of the Pentecostal churches, and the consequences for a meaningful but scarcely studied cultural transformation of Latin America. Pentecostalism, in its diverse manifestations, is now a meaningful religious, social, and political movement in several nations of the Latin American continent, as the election of Jair Messias Bolsonaro to Brazil’s presidency has dramatically demonstrated.