Stephen Dove
From Catholic evangelization of the sixteenth century to autochthonous Pentecostal growth in the twentieth century, the history of Christianity in Latin America and the Caribbean has been marked by inculturation and hybridity. These characteristics do not, of course, describe every aspect or iteration of Christianity across five centuries, two continents, and hundreds of ethnic groups. However, they do form the basis for understanding the development of Christianity in a region that simultaneously contains a plurality of the world’s Catholics, hosts many of the globe’s fastest growing Pentecostal movements, and is home to several New Religious Movements with an international reach.
Latin America and the Caribbean were relatively late entries into the realm of Christianity. However, by the twenty-first century the region was one of the most Christian areas of the world, having surpassed Europe and North America on most demographic measures and in 2013 even producing the first non-European pope since the eighth century. Despite this, creating a single meaningful definition of regional Christianity is a challenging task. Latin America and the Caribbean contain a mosaic of Christianity that can only be understood in relation to five centuries of historical development. All forms of Christianity in the region, from Catholicism to Pentecostalism, are rooted in missionary efforts from abroad, but they have also been influenced by indigenous spirituality, African cultures, and local institutions that developed alongside Christianity. This mixing has created new but still recognizable forms of Christianity that have in turn exerted their own influence on global religion.
The region’s most dominant form of Christianity, Roman Catholicism, arrived with the first Spanish explorers in the late fifteenth century. The majority of early Iberian Catholics viewed the newly discovered lands and peoples of the Americas as potential targets of evangelism. However, they disagreed among themselves about how to understand indigenous Americans and how to proceed with their evangelization.
In the late 1400s, as the Spanish conquest of the Americas began, the Spanish monarchy was also expelling Jews and Muslims from Iberia, and part of this campaign limited citizenship to people who could prove pure Christian bloodlines. In the Americas, it was clear that indigenous peoples could not claim purity of blood, and so many of the first conquistadors declared them heretics to justify conquest or enslavement. However, other Spanish Catholics led by friars like Bartolomé de las Casas, argued that the indigenous were “most humble, most patient, meekest, and most pacific” and that they were “excellently fit to receive our holy Catholic faith” if only priests would instruct them (de Las Casas 2003: 5–6). Although there was much gray area between these two poles, the latter view became the guiding principle of evangelization efforts for much of the sixteenth century as orders such as the Dominicans and Franciscans set up posts for religious education and conversion across the Caribbean and the American mainland.
As evangelization proceeded in the sixteenth century, it became clear that its effectiveness was uneven. Some indigenous populations became loyal Catholics while others surreptitiously practiced pre-Colombian religions. The church responded to this defiance in several ways. The most direct response was through extirpation campaigns that destroyed indigenous artifacts and sites associated with pagan practices. However, another response was to fold indigenous culture into Catholic practice. The most common form of this was the creation of Catholic confraternities in indigenous communities where these lay organizations became extensions of pre-existing social hierarchies. By merging indigenous practices into Catholicism, the church broadened its base in the Americas and often effectively brought indigenous communities into the faith (Schwaller 2011: 85–87).
In the Caribbean, these processes worked slightly differently since disease and enslavement devastated native populations. Instead, Europeans mainly interacted with enslaved African populations. On Spanish islands, Africans usually practiced Catholicism, and the Spanish not only permitted but also even encouraged lay societies among blacks. In British and Dutch colonies, colonization began only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and many planters opposed the evangelization of slaves because they feared that missionaries would preach abolitionism. This allowed several African-derived religions like Obeah and Myalism to flourish underground in places like Jamaica.
One reason the evangelizing impulse was stronger in Spanish and Portuguese Latin America was that those monarchs operated with a special authority from the pope to oversee the operation of the church. Thus, throughout the colonial period, the religious and secular hierarchies often worked together to maintain their power, although each also competed with the other. Secular authorities gained the upper hand in this competition in the late eighteenth century as the new Bourbon dynasty in Spain and the Marquess of Pombal in Portugal implemented reforms that consolidated royal power. This occurred most concretely in the religious sphere with the expulsion of the Jesuits from Iberian colonies in 1767. However, these reforms also highlighted deeper social and political splits between Iberia and the colonies that would bring about some of the biggest changes in Latin American history, both religious and otherwise (Schwaller 2011: 46–48, 106–116).
As these bureaucratic reforms took hold, external forces also buffeted the Spanish and Portuguese empires leading to crises. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Napoleonic invasions, legislative attempts to curtail the royal power, and increasing tensions between Iberian bureaucrats and American-born whites produced a series of independence-focused rebellions across the Americas.
Revolutions in Mexico, Central America, and Spanish South America cast off Spanish monarchy but replaced it with familiar patterns of social stratification that privileged citizens of European descent. Nonetheless, these new nations did adopt a rhetoric of republicanism that opened up a new era of political debate in mainland Latin America. In almost every country, this debate split the elite populations between Conservatives, who advocated for protecting traditional social hierarchies including the privileged position of the Catholic Church, and Liberals, who proposed a reshaping of national economies by removing entrenched privileged groups. Some of the most prominent Liberal reforms across the region in the mid-1800s were anti-clerical programs that curtailed the power of Catholic clergy by confiscating ecclesial property and limiting clerics’ ability to participate in secular politics.
Another facet of this anti-clerical impulse was the re-drafting of many national constitutions to include clauses guaranteeing religious liberty. In reality, Liberal leaders had little concern for promoting the growth of non-Catholic religion among their national populations, who overwhelmingly self-identified as Catholic. Rather, Liberals intended these new laws to undermine the authority of the Catholic hierarchy and to provide a social incentive for Protestant industrialists and investors from North America and Europe, whom Liberal regimes were courting to spur economic growth in the region. Guatemalan president Justo Rufino Barrios explained that his 1873 edict declaring freedom of worship “would remove one of the principal obstacles which has heretofore impeded foreign immigration to our country, for many do not wish to settle where they are not allowed to exercise their religion” (quoted in Garrard-Burnett 1997: 38).
These laws were marginally successful in encouraging investment and immigration, although most Protestant immigrants chose to live in enclave communities rather than mix with the general population. However, the laws were important in that they opened the doors for the first permanent Protestant missionaries to Latin America. Prior to these constitutional changes, a small number of Bible salesmen and peripatetic preachers had visited Latin America as early as the 1810s. However, the first missionaries to establish lasting churches arrived in the 1870s thanks to the legal protections afforded by Liberal presidents and constitutions, who often valued missionaries’ commitment to education and ideologies of progress. In Peru, for example, the government used Methodist schools as laboratories in the early 1900s to develop and implement national education policy (Fonseca 2002: 185–211).
Despite these connections to Liberal leaders, early Protestant missionaries remained largely ineffective in terms of drawing new converts. Nineteenth-century missionaries largely limited their activities to urban areas and “civilizing” projects like education, which left the majority of the region’s people beyond their reach. By 1900, fewer than 1% of Latin Americans were Protestant. However, missionaries had established institutional structures in education and communication that paved the way for expansion during the twentieth century.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the level of dramatic upheaval and change that marked the beginning of the nineteenth century did not repeat itself in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Versions of Liberalism and economic-development-focused politics continued to dominate the ideological landscape, but the majority of the population remained loyal to Catholicism.
With regard to religion, even the most tumultuous event of the early twentieth century, the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), was an extension of nineteenth-century conflicts. Most Mexican revolutionaries were vehemently anti-clerical, and their crackdown on the church even spawned a Catholic counter-revolution called La Cristiada (1926–1929). The result of these uprisings was a victory for the anti-clerical revolutionaries that officially pushed the church to the margins of power. However, the state could not displace the unofficial power of the church among the Mexican people, and from the 1930s onward, the two sides entered into an uneasy peace that was tense but not openly hostile.
Although Catholicism survived these external threats from anti-clerical governments, the conflict weakened the church internally, largely by limiting the availability of priests. In the early 1900s, there was roughly one priest per 9,000 residents in the region, and this meant that the clergy were unable to ensure orthodoxy in outlying regions where nominal Catholics often practiced syncretic forms of the faith that mixed indigenous and Catholic spirituality into forms that were barely recognizable to the hierarchy but highly valued locally. In communities of African descent, especially in the Caribbean and Brazil, African-derived religions like Umbanda experienced a resurgence. In indigenous communities, the confraternities that formed in the colonial period cemented their power by sponsoring locally regulated religious festivals, and among rural mixed race populations faith healers like Juan Soldado in Mexico and millennial prophets like Antonio Conselheiro in Brazil challenged clerical authority. At the same time, in urban areas, Catholicism had to compete with secular rivals like socialism and labor unions that challenged Catholicism’s social roles.
In response to these developments, especially in urban areas, small pockets of lay Catholics began organizing in defense of their faith by forming their own societies dedicated to orthodoxy. In the 1920s, the pope responded to these developments by endorsing Catholic Action, a lay ministry intended to defend the faith and “re-Christianize” society. As the movement spread in Latin America from the 1930s to the 1950s, cells developed among groups as varied as university students, labor unions, and peasant organizations. Although required to report to priests, these cells usually operated without direct oversight because of the lack of available clergy. This produced a two-fold result. First, Catholic Action and similar lay organizations revitalized the church and bolstered the influence of orthodox Catholicism; but second, and perhaps more importantly, they empowered lay Catholics to evaluate political and social issues with some degree of autonomy from the church hierarchy (Schwaller 2011: 207–211).
As the church moved forward with lay empowerment through Catholic Action, two other changes produced a more seismic disruption in the religious landscape. First, the beginning of the Cold War created new ideological and physical battlegrounds in the region that saw the United States closely ally with national militaries to impose “national security” doctrines. These doctrines officially protected countries from the menace of Communism, the danger of which became particularly clear after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, but they also made local dissidents targets of internal violence while at the same time promoting an economic-development paradigm that created strong alliances between regional elites and US business interests. This bifurcation of the hemispheric political system into socialists and capitalists directly affected religion by prompting the rise of Christian Democrats as a political third way, and it also created the backdrop for dramatic religious changes that occurred in the late twentieth century.
The second large change of the mid-twentieth century proceeded from Rome with the reforms instituted by the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). The council’s official mission, as articulated by Pope John XXIII, was “updating” the church, and the changes announced by the Council had profound effects on Catholicism around the world by altering the liturgy and redefining mission work. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council also provided significant momentum to a social-justice-minded group of bishops operating as part of the Latin American Bishops Conference, commonly known by its Spanish acronym CELAM, which formed just a few years earlier in 1955.
At the time, CELAM was internally divided between traditionalists and reformers, and eventually it would drift in the direction of its more conservative wing. However, in the two decades following the Second Vatican Council, CELAM’s reformist members gave birth to two Catholic movements that significantly reimagined the role of the church: Base Communities and Liberation Theology. These two movements share a common commitment to community engagement. However, each played a specific role in altering the direction of Catholicism in the twentieth century.
Base Communities were grass roots organizations of laity that were not technically churches due largely to their lack of priestly leadership but that were church-like in their operation. At their inception prior to Vatican II, Base Communities were similar to Catholic Action because they relied on lay leadership due to the shortage of priests. In fact, many early leaders of Base Communities had been part of Catholic Action. In Base Communities, however, the emphasis was not primarily on enforcing theological orthodoxy but rather on community improvement through programs related to education, sanitation, or child development. These communities were especially strong in Brazil where they built upon the theories of pedagogue Paulo Freire who argued that education was about empowerment rather than knowledge transfer.
In the 1960s and 1970s, church leaders continued to view Base Communities as a means of serving a widely dispersed religious community in a time when state-sponsored violence limited contact between priests and parishioners. However, participants often took a different view. Base communities offered laity in marginalized areas the opportunity to take ownership of their religion. As such, Base Communities became sites to share information and analyze common struggles, especially related to poverty. Much of what happened in particular Base Communities remains obscure because of their decentralized nature. However, the best-documented example is Solentiname, Nicaragua, a community led by priest Ernesto Cardenal that demonstrated peasants’ willingness to push traditional Catholic interpretations of Scripture, including an eagerness to read themselves and revolutionaries into the text of the New Testament (Cardenal 2010).
Liberation Theology was a more systematic way of questioning how the church should approach Latin American social issues, and its core tenet expressing a “preferential option for the poor” was first articulated at CELAM’s 1968 meeting in Medellín, Colombia and more fully laid out in 1971 by the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez explained this preference as “sharing the life of the poor” rather than simply providing charity (Gutierrez 1988: xxxi, 160). Liberation theologians like Gutiérrez pushed the Catholic hierarchy of CELAM, and later the Vatican, to take an active role in addressing pressing social issues related to poverty, health, and inequality. In doing this, they argued that the church should move away from alliances with those in power and instead approach social issues along side those who suffer most. The result of this methodological approach was a focus on “structural sins,” institutionalized inequities that liberation theologians believed the church should speak and act against.
The liberationist condemnation of structural sins identified the leading cause of poverty to be the neo-colonial economic system that promised economic advancement through development and foreign investment. Liberationists argued that development paradigms did not help lift people out of poverty but rather furthered the exploitation of the poor. In the early- to mid-1960s, before the official articulation of Liberation Theology, a small faction of South American priests began publicly and radically challenging the church’s complicity in the development paradigm. This movement reached its peak in 1968 when sixty sympathetic priests met in Golconda, Colombia, and committed themselves to “every manner of revolutionary action against imperialism . . . and . . . setting up a socialistic society” (quoted in Smith 1991: 138).
Although this revolutionary fervor continued to play a role in certain quarters of Liberation Theology, the first concrete steps toward the more mainstream version came from the more moderate CELAM meeting the same year in Medellín. The conference opened with an address by Pope Paul VI, the first pope ever to visit Latin America. His presence stoked pride among Catholics in the region, but it also highlighted the difficult issues that divided the bishops’ conference. The pope arrived in a Colombian army helicopter, a machine that had become synonymous with military raids on poor villages, and his speech referred to poverty as “inherent discomforts,” which many perceived as a purposefully mild description that protected the elite while diminishing the harsh realities of daily life for millions in the region. After the pope departed, the bishops produced several statements that directly addressed poverty, and although these documents explicitly opposed armed revolutions, the bishops also called for drastic reforms to land ownership, business practices, and politics in Latin America, all of which challenged the region’s basic power structures.
Building on this framework, theologians like Gutierrez and Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff moved forward in the 1970s with a more systematic prescription for how the Catholic Church should engage with the poor. This emergence of an activist Catholic theology in Latin America coincided with the growth of Marxist political groups that revolted against US-aligned military governments. Many liberation theologians openly relied on Marxist theory in their theological writings, and so their more conservative opponents began linking them to the armed Marxist revolutionary groups of Central and South America.
This correlation was usually unfair since the majority of liberation theologians opposed violence in any form. However, the rhetorical connection did invite harsh results for liberation theologians who found themselves at odds with both church leaders and secular authorities. Within the church, the majority of bishops either actively supported or silently assented to the national security doctrines of Latin American militaries against atheistic Communism. This cooperation most often occurred when church leaders chose not to comment on human rights abuses, but in some cases the support was much more explicit. For example, Catholic priests in Chile held thanksgiving services to mark dictator Augusto Pinochet’s rise to power in 1973.
In the 1979 meeting of CELAM in Puebla, Mexico, Latin American bishops issued statements supporting more conservative theological positions, and in 1984, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) issued a direct denunciation of Liberation Theology on behalf of the Vatican that referred to it as a “deviation” from historic Christianity. Finally, in 1985, Ratzinger silenced Boff for his writings on Liberation Theology.
Although ecclesial pressure against Liberation Theology was strong, secular pressure proved deadly. The most infamous military assassinations of liberation theologians and their sympathizers occurred in El Salvador, including the 1980 assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero while he was celebrating mass. Early in his career, Romero sided with the more traditional faction of the Latin American episcopate, but after several of his parishioners died in Army massacres in the late 1970s, he offered refuge to those fleeing the army, excommunicated members of military death squads, and refused sacraments to many of El Salvador’s business and political leaders. The result of this resistance was an increase in violence against priests and the assassination of the archbishop.
Although rebukes from church hierarchy and violence from outside forces buffeted reformist Catholicism in the late twentieth century, Base Communities and Liberation Theology remained important public aspects of Catholic identity. After Romero’s assassination, 250,000 Salvadorans attended his funeral, and Salvadorans continue to treat Romero as an unofficial saint. The persistence of Romero’s memory is a concrete symbol of the legacy that Liberation Theology left on the church even as its official influence declined after the end of the cold war. In the 1990s and 2000s, many of the more moderate elements of Liberation Theology such as lay empowerment and theological responses to poverty became part of mainstream conversations within Latin American Catholicism, as evidenced by the priority Pope Francis gave to poverty at the beginning of his papacy.
The tumult of the twentieth century also produced new directions for religion beyond Catholicism as Protestantism grew from a marginal movement into a dynamic force. The legacy of the first wave of Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century was primarily a network of small congregations that relied on North American organizations for both ideological and financial support. However, in the early decades of the twentieth century, several factors challenged that model and paved the way for the emergence of autochthonous movements that came to dominate Latin American and Caribbean Protestantism.
The first of these factors was a foreign one – the arrival of faith missions. Faith missions were non-denominational missionary groups that relied on individual donors rather than institutional budgets for funding. This de-centralized structure produced two important results that encouraged Latin Americans to take on more significant roles in Protestant communities. First, because their funding levels were often low and uncertain, faith missionaries typically were more willing than their denominational counterparts to grant converts leeway in preaching and evangelizing without direct missionary oversight. This gradual change throughout the first half of the twentieth century meant that a new generation of local leaders not only gained experience but also were able to begin adapting both methods and theology in ways that North Americans could not. Second, because faith missionaries’ professional connections were predicated on networks rather than institutional hierarchy, they were more able to take methodological risks in their approach to evangelization.
The best example of these methodological risks is the formation of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, also known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which began in a small indigenous town in Guatemala in the 1920s and grew to become the one of the largest Protestant missions in the world by the twenty-first century. Wycliffe’s founder, Cameron Townsend, came to Guatemala with the Central American Mission in 1917 when most mission agencies taught Spanish to indigenous converts as part of the evangelization process. This was a practical policy since it streamlined operations, but it was also a judgment on what constituted “civilized” language and culture. Townsend, however, began translating the New Testament into Cakchiquel Maya against orders from his superiors. When that project neared completion around 1930, he proposed a hemisphere-wide program to translate the Bible into native languages, which his superiors summarily rejected. Unfazed, Townsend set out on his own, lured new financial backers, and negotiated a partnership with the Mexican government that allowed him to open his new faith mission in southern Mexico in 1932. Over the rest of the century, Townsend’s focus on evangelizing people in their own language became the de facto approach of Protestant missionaries around the world (Hartch 2006).
However, Protestants did not rely only, or even primarily, on foreigners to introduce innovations that propelled them toward greater agency in determining the direction of their religion. As early as the 1910s, but especially beginning in the 1960s, local believers began adapting Protestant theology to fit their contexts by creating religious organizations that were independent of foreign economic or political control. This happened in many different types of Protestant churches, but by far the most prominent of these was Pentecostalism.
Pentecostalism is a branch of Christianity that emphasizes the individual’s direct experience of the Holy Spirit and the expectation of physical signs such as speaking in tongues, healing, and visions to accompany that experience. In the late twentieth century, Pentecostalism grew into a global phenomenon with as many as 500 million adherents by 2000, and Latin America was one of the leading regions in this trend, home to roughly one-quarter of all Pentecostals. Unlike Catholicism and most Protestant denominations, Pentecostals’ bonds to one another do not rely on institutions, leadership structures, or even common systematic theologies but rather on a shared understanding of how faith is experienced.
Global Pentecostalism traces its roots to a series of parallel but autonomous revivals in the first decade of the twentieth century, with the 1906 Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, considered the watershed moment. Most Pentecostal churches in Latin America and the Caribbean trace their history to US missionaries who arrived in the decades following the Azusa Street Revival, but the first Pentecostal movement in Latin America has more complex roots. In 1909, a Methodist missionary in Valparaiso, Chile named Willis Hoover adapted a style of charismatic worship that he learned about from a Pentecostal revival in India. When the Methodist mission declared this new worship unacceptable, the members of Hoover’s congregation formed their own church, which they christened the Methodist Pentecostal Church. Although the MPC invited Hoover to serve as pastor, from 1910 onward it operated as a completely autonomous national church. The largest congregation in the new denomination even added the word “National” to its name, and when foreign Pentecostal missionaries arrived decades later, the original Pentecostals differentiated themselves from the newcomers by referring to themselves as criollo pentecostales (home-grown Pentecostals).
The origins of Chilean Pentecostalism were typical for the region in its emphasis on local leadership and national identity. However, it was exceptional in its minimal reliance on foreign missionary personnel from an early stage. In most Latin American countries, the earliest Pentecostal congregations were products of international mission programs. In Brazil, an Italian-American missionary established the Christian Congregation of Brazil in 1909, drawing largely from existing Presbyterian converts, and just two years later, Swedish-American missionaries opened a mission that siphoned off numerous members from a Baptist church. This mission later became the Assemblies of God in Brazil, which like the Christian Congregations grew into one of largest Pentecostal denominations in Latin America. Despite their foreign origins, both of these denominations quickly adopted national organizational structures, and they established models for partnering with foreign Pentecostal groups like the US-based Assemblies of God, yet without subordinating themselves to outside groups.
Beyond Brazil and Chile, the origins of national Pentecostalisms are more obscure. The general pattern that emerged in the 1910s and 1920s was that a series of loosely connected and highly independent North American missionaries traversed Mexico, Central America, and South America leaving behind a scattered collection of congregations, often in rural areas. By mid-century, however, these loosely affiliated churches had coalesced into organizations with distinctly national characters compared to their more traditional Protestant cousins who still relied on foreign funding and personnel.
Pentecostalism altered the religious landscape of the region dramatically by combining this local character with an emphasis on the agency of individual believers, an ability to create alternative social structures in marginal communities, and promises of physical healing. By the end of the century, estimates of Pentecostal membership ranged as high as 20 to 30% of the population in places like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Brazil, and including many from poor and marginalized communities. Pentecostalism’s rapid rise also coincided with increasing levels of violence, displacement, and anomie across the region. From the urban favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the indigenous highlands of Guatemala, Pentecostalism became a leading social and religious force among the populations most affected by economic inequality and state-sponsored violence. These were same forces that liberation theologians spoke out against, but unlike Liberation Theology, Pentecostalism drew huge numbers of marginalized followers into its ranks. As historian Andrew Chesnut has neatly summarized this period, “The Catholic Church has chosen the poor, but the poor chose the Pentecostals” (Jenkins 2004: 156).
However, Pentecostalism was not just a religion of the poor. Beginning in the 1970s, it also began attracting middle-class and aspiring middle-class urbanites who built mega churches and shifted the movement’s theology away from enduring poverty and toward the promise of material betterment on earth. Often these urban Pentecostals entered social and political discourse by offering new visions of citizenship that replaced secular models with spiritual ones. As Kevin Lewis O’Neill has described, urban Pentecostals in Guatemala “are more likely to pray for Guatemala than pay their taxes; they tend to speak in tongues for the soul of the nation rather than vote in general elections; and they more often than not organize prayer campaigns to fight crime rather than organize their communities against the same threat” (O’Neill 2010: 201).
In other cases, Pentecostals have entered into national discourse more directly. In Brazil, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God operates one of the country’s largest television networks, and since the 1980s, both the Assemblies of God and the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God have endorsed or run candidates in elections. In Guatemala, a Pentecostal who was also an army general, Efraín Ríos Montt, took charge of the country for seventeen months in 1982 and 1983, during which time he oversaw the violent repression of Guatemala’s indigenous population in the name of national security. Ríos Montt’s religious affiliation was an integral part of his short dictatorship as he offered moralistic presidential sermons each Sunday and sought policy input from a close group of advisers in his church (Garrard-Burnett 2010).
Despite these visible and large-scale insertions of middle to upper class, urban Pentecostals into national politics, Pentecostalism as whole remained a largely grassroots religious expression. It was this aspect of Pentecostalism that most threatened the dominance of Catholicism and led to a direct response from the Catholic hierarchy. In 1992, Pope John Paul II famously referred to Latin American Protestants as “voracious wolves” who targeted sheep in the Catholic flock and called for a renewed evangelism in the region.
In actuality, that response was well underway in one corner of the Catholic Church even before the pope’s call to arms. While most public attention to regional Catholicism in the late twentieth century focused on Liberation Theology, one of the most vital movements within Catholicism was Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR), a priest-led program that openly adopted Pentecostal practices ranging from small-group Bible studies to ecstatic worship in order to diminish the appeal of Pentecostal proselytism among Catholics. CCR began in the United States in the 1960s and received its first official recognition in Latin America from the Panamanian bishops’ conference in 1975. As it grew in the 1970s and 1980s, CCR retained core Catholic doctrines while adopting new styles and methods ranging from stadium crusades to television programs. The end result was an internal revival in local churches (Chesnut 2003: 61–64). According to a 2006 study by the Pew Forum, the rate of Catholic self-identification as charismatic was 62% in Guatemala, 49% in Brazil, and 30% in Chile (Pew Forum 2006: 4).
Pentecostalism also spawned a number of new religious movements that self-identify as Christian but whose theology or elevation of key leaders to near-divine status places them on the fringes of orthodoxy. One of the leading examples of these movements is Luz del Mundo, the largest non-Catholic denomination in Mexico. Luz del Mundo defines itself as the restoration of the New Testament Church and claims that its founder and his son are modern apostles chosen by God to restore truth on earth. Luz del Mundo also highlights a growing trend among Pentecostals to export their faith beyond the region, particularly to the United States. Luz del Mundo was one of the earliest groups in Latin America to initiate mission work in the United States, beginning its efforts in the 1950s, and in recent years the majority of Pentecostal and Protestant groups have begun similar efforts either by preparing emigrating members to start new churches in North America or by training pastors to preach to North Americans in much the same way that North Americans did to Latin Americans a century prior.
In the early twenty-first century, new religious movements, Pentecostalism, resurgent indigenous and African religions, and Catholicism have created a crowded and fluid religious landscape in Latin America and the Caribbean. Although Catholicism is still the region’s majority religion, its position is no longer unassailable. “No religion” was among the fastest growing affiliations listed in Mexico’s 2010 census, and in nations like Brazil, Cuba, and Guatemala, more Protestants attend weekly services than do Catholics.
This movement is not unidirectional, however. In Mexico, for example, sociologists have found that the Pentecostal conversion boom in the late twentieth century was accompanied by a spike in apostasy rates that ran as high as 68%, meaning that many converts left their new faith searching for other religious options (Bowen 1996: 225). This fluidity means that delimiting the current religious landscape in Latin America and the Caribbean is not a matter of simply counting membership changes over time but also recognizing that individuals may themselves be changing religious identities multiple times in their lives. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this is not only a matter of passing through various types of Catholicism and Protestantism but in some cases can include choices as varied as African-derived religions, Judaism, Orthodox Christianity, and even Islam, which emerged in the early twenty-first century as a religious option in parts of Chiapas, Mexico. As individuals make these moves between religions, they are not only opting into new systems, they are also bringing with them their experiences from past affiliations and creating new forms of Christianity, continuing the pattern that has defined Christianity in the region since its arrival with the Spanish in the 1400s.