Protestantism and modernity: the implications of religious change in contemporary rural Oaxaca

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2003 by Toomas Gross

INTRODUCTION

During Lazaro Cardenas's presidency in the 1930s, Catholic priests in rural Mexico were sometimes referred to as the "guardians of culture and traditions," while schoolteachers represented a more modern, progressive, liberal and atheistic world-view (Marroquin 1996:187). As some have argued, the opposition between traditionalists and modernizers also characterizes contemporary rural Mexico. Catholics as a group can still be regarded as the former, while the role of the latter has been assumed by Protestants, who act as modernizers of "traditional" communities (Marroquin 1992; Montes 1997). Protestants are alleged to promote new forms of social organization, encourage changes in communal practices, and introduce new modes of thinking. They break the links with the past that are established through customs and traditions, because for Protestants "custom" (costumbre) often stands for "paganism" and "idolatry." Rural Mexican Protestantism has even been regarded as a "social movement." As Montes (1997) suggests, it is a movement of struggle against Catholic dominance, and Protestants are regarded as new social actors who demand a more pluralistic and modern society. (l)

This paper is an attempt to review the relationship between Protestantism and modernity in the ethnographic example of indigenous Zapotec communities of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca in Southern Mexico, where the rise of Protestant churches coincides with rapid social change. (2) For decades, modernization has been one of the central topics in research on rural Mexico. Most studies, however, have focused almost exclusively on economic change, particularly on the relationship between "traditional" and "modern" economic sectors and the transition from the former to the latter, (e.g. Avila 1969; Cancian 1972; Thompson 1974; Hewitt de Alcantara 1976), while the relationship between modernity and religious change has rarely been scrutinized. The study of Protestantism in Mexico has been concerned mainly with urban contexts (Gimenez 1988; Vazquez 1991) and very few studies have looked at rural Protestantism (Garma 1987; Ramirez 1991, 1995; Sanchez 1995). Yet doing so would offer a considerable contribution to a better understanding of social change in the contemporary Mexican countryside.

In the following discussion I will outline the general dynamics of the process of "religious fragmentation" in Latin America and Mexico and then look at the ethnographic data from the Sierra Juarez to exemplify the apparent social implications of religious fragmentation on rural communities. Is the rise of Protestant churches in rural Mexico and the changes that Protestantism promotes in rural communal life congruent with the transition from "traditionalism" to "modernity" as some studies (e.g. Turner 1979; Garma 1987; Sanchez 1995; Marroquin 1996; Montes 1997) have suggested? To answer this question, I will close with a critical reassessment of the impact of Protestantism on the communities of the Sierra Juarez, arguing that Protestantization and modernization in rural Mexico are parallel but not necessarily congruent processes, and that the social changes that Protestantism "encourages" are often a "collateral" of the Protestant presence rather than an "intended" consequence.

GENERAL DYNAMICS OF RELIGIOUS FRAGMENTATION

Fragmentation of the "religious field," to use Bourdieu's (1971:298) term, and the rise of Protestant churches, have recently become common phenomena in most Latin American countries. This is an intriguing fact considering that in most of these societies Catholicism has generally enjoyed an undisputed hegemony. In reality, Protestantism in Latin America is not recent, dating back at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century (Bastian 1994:80). But Protestant groups at that time were few, the percentage of Protestants in the population negligible, and the growth of their numbers slow. That was the case until the 1960s when membership growth in Protestant churches suddenly exploded. (3) This phenomenon particularly characterizes Brazil, Chile and various Central American countries, where the Protestant population has been growing considerably faster than elsewhere in Latin America and where Protestants now constitute more than twenty percent of the total population (Barrett, Kurian and Johnson 2001). Yet in most other Latin American countries the share of Protestants in the total population has not yet surpassed the level of ten percent. Despite the regional differences, however, the trend towards Protestant population growth, and the dynamics of the process, are similar everywhere, leading Stoll (1990) to famously ask: "Is Latin America becoming Protestant?"

Mexico has "resisted" religious fragmentation more "successfully" than many other Latin American societies. The percentage of Protestants in Mexico is considerably lower than in Chile and Brazil, for example, but the dynamics of religious change, manifested most notably in the explosive growth of the Protestant population since the 1970s, is similar to the rest of Latin America. Mexican General Census data throughout the 20th century demonstrate it vividly. In 1900, the percentage of "Protestants" in Mexico was 0.4 percent and this figure increased at an average rate of two tenths of a percent per decade, reaching 1.8 percent by 1970. In 1980, this figure was already 3.3 percent, and in 1990 4.8 percent. By 2000, the ratio of "Protestants and Evangelicals" in Mexico had risen to 5.2 percent with 7.3 percent of the population identifying themselves as followers of a "non-Catholic biblical religion." (4)