Speaking in Latin tongues: the Protestantization of Latin America is a most phenomenal phenomenon, changing lives by the millions, all but unnoticed north of the border - includes related article

National Review, Sept 29, 1989 by David Martin, David Lee

The Protestantization of Latin America is a most phenomenal phenomenon, changing lives by the million, all but unnoticed north of the border. One thing it is not is a euphemism for gringo imperalism.

For some while anthropologists, and sociologists interested in religion, have known that something almost entirely unexpected is happening in Latin America. Suddenly the great Catholic continent, home of almost half the Catholics in the world, is swarming with evangelicals, above all with Pentecostals. For three centuries Latin America was out of bounds for Protestants. Even when they were allowed in on sufferance they were tucked inconspicuously under the wing of liberal anti-clericals. Clearly they were a sort of appendage to the liberal idea which would wither away when proper revolutionary mobilizations got under way. Time and social evolution could be relied upon to empty their back-street chapels.

Nothing of the sort has happened. It is clear that over the last few decades social evolution has turned whimsicaland not only in Latin America. The Protestant revolution now occurring is a massive shift in people's identifications and in their priorities. The poor and the fairly poor have created a free market of faiths in which rival organizations compete for survival. These organizations offer services and demand personal commitment. What they offer is participation, a healing of body and soul, and a network of mutual support. What they demand is discipleship and discipline, at work, in the family, and in the church. Suddenly it looks as if Max Weber might be alive and well and living in Guatemala City. According to the New York Times, the Protestant constituency in Brazil alone probably amounts to some 25 million people.

Of course, Brazil is a special case. Historically the Catholic Church in Brazil was coopted by the state, which conscientiously hollowed it out from the inside. When Rome recovered control of the Brazilian Church, it had to draft in thousands of foreign priests, which gave Catholi-

cism an alien accent. But now the special cases are multiplying till they look more and more like a norm. Chile is clearly a very special case. So is Guatemala and, for that matter, most of the Central American republics. Even Nicaragua is unexpectedly turning into a special case; it has a burgeoning evangelical population of 15 to 20 per cent. For a long time Argentina looked as if it might be graced with immunity, given the connection between ethnicity and religion fostered by vast numbers of European migrants. But since the ending of the dictatorship the graphs of conversion have started to rise dramatically. Even in the Andean republics Protestantism nibbles at the edges: perhaps a million in Peru, and over a million in Colombia; there are over three hundred rival denominations active in Bolivia. The native Quechua peoples, so numerous in the Andes, are very clearly vulnerable to evangelical conversion-as well as to conversion by Witnesses, Mormons, Adventists, and Bahais.

The remarkable fact is that in the course of a generation or so, one Latin American in ten has become an evangelical believer," most likely a Pentecostal. In many parts of the continent, active committed evangelicals are as numerous as active committed Catholics. So massive a switch was about as likely as the radicalization of the Catholic Church. Yet that too has come about, at least in some countries. Some people have even suggested a connection between these two incredible developments.

If the Protestant revolution is incredible, so too is the way it has been ignored. There are numerous individual and localized studies, but no general account-although my forthcoming Tongues of Fire attempts to address this need. The classic studies by D'Epinay and Willems are nearly a generation old. If the theories didn't predict the revolution, then clearly the mere accumulation of fact is not enough to substantiate it. The phenomenon is phenomenal but remains massively invisible, stolidly unreal.

Nobody acquainted with the mandatory skew of percep-

tion in the social sciences need be surprised. It has, after all, been possible to write books about Latin America which totally elide the existence of the Roman Catholic Church, let alone Protestantism. Most of the cognoscenti have regarded religion as a miasma rising up from more real phenomena, so why waste time on illusory outward forms when you can go straight to the underlying political and social substance? Even the encyclopedias do not count the continuing presence of the churches in Latin American societies as providing recordable Knowledge." Like T. S. Eliot's famous cat Macavity, they simply are "not there," even when they are patently active in the acknowledged reality of politics. Such are the partitions set up in the house of the intellect that it is possible for a phenomenon to be simultaneously invisible and the object of ferocious public debate. In the course of my researches, I encountered most of the ferocious debate in Latin America and