Toward a NewMenda for the Study

ofReligfonin the Americas

Manuel A. Visquez

rom March 26 to 28, 1998,the Center for Latin American Studies at the
F University of Florida held its 47th annual conference, with the title
“Religionand Social Change in the Americas: New Perspectives.”The aim
of the conference was to bring together scholars in various disciplines from
both Latin America and the United States to discuss the evolving relation-
ship between religion and society in a hemispheric framework and to map
out the emergence of new approaches and methodologies to study this
relationship.
The conference grew out of a collaborative project supported by the
Pew Charitable Trusts to study Christian churches and their social roles in
Peru, El Salvador, and among Peruvians and Salvadorans in the United
States.’We wanted to provide a forum in which members of our research
team from the various locations could present their findings and join in
dialogue with other experts on religion in Latin America and among U.S.
Latinos. The articles in this issue are all based on presentations given at that
conference. Ileana Gbmez, Hortensia Muiioz, and Larissa Ruiz Baia were
all principal investigators on our research team, and here they present
some of their findings. Another case study, by Carol Ann Drogus, and two
essays, by Phillip Berryman and Rowan Ireland, reflect on the larger
aspects of the study and the current state of religion in Latin America as
a whole. This introductory essay will situate the articles in the field and
highlight their contributions. Along the way, it will raise some of the
questions that are likely to dominate the study of religion in the Americas
in the coming years.

PLURALISM, DEMOCRATIZATION,
RELIGIOUS
AND CITIZENSHIP

Much has changed in Latin America since the 1970s,when, in the wake of
dramatic transformations within the Catholic Church as a result of the
Second Vatican Council, or Vatican I1 (1962-651, scholarship on religion
in the area focused primarily on progressive Catholicism, particularly on
the rise of liberation theology and la iglesiupopulur(the popular church),
as represented by base Christian communities (in Portuguese comunidudes
eclesiuis de base, CEBs). In the face of authoritarian military regimes that

1
2 JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS 41: 4

often were bolstered by the United States,progressive Catholicism became

one of the few significant oppositional forces, one of the few participatory
spaces to develop voice, citizenship, and democratic practice at the
grassroots. Indeed, in countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador,revolution-
ary ideology and activity melded with the “preferentialoption for the poor”
(a term formally adopted by the Latin American bishops in 1978),
consciousness-raising pastoral work, and the prophetic stance of local
churches (Lancaster 1988, Dodson and O’Shaughnessy 1990, Peterson
1997).
Since the mid-l980s, however, the Latin American political and
religious landscape has changed drastically. Throughout the region,
military regimes have given way to civilian-led representative democra-
cies. This transition is the result of a complex interaction of global and local
factors, the most important of which is arguably the crisis of existing
socialist countries, illustrated in the region by the electoral defeat of the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the continued isolation of Cuba. The fall of
the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, moreover, brought a
redefinition of the concept of U.S. national security, shifting away from an
exclusive focus on counterinsurgency toward a wider range of issues like
trade, drugs, immigration, and the environment. Deprived of the interna-
tional support and attention they had been receiving, many revolutionary
movements, such as those in El Salvador and Guatemala, also chose to lay
down their weapons and join the electoral process.
Along with democratic transition and consolidation have come
pluralism and fragmentation, opening up new spaces for contestatory
discourse and practice while challenging traditional opposition actors,
such as trade unions, political parties, and, not surprisingly, the Catholic
Church. The church, despite its uggiornumento (updating) in Vatican 11,
is still a hierarchical, centralized, and rigid institution. The emergence of
so-called new social movements, centered in everyday concerns like the
environment and identity-a complex category that condenses racial,
ethnic, and gender dynamics, often manifested in issues of meaning and
representation and magnified by the mass media and popular culture-has
led to a “secularization” of the public sphere, displacing the Catholic
Church from its highly visible position as chief critic of authoritarian states
during the 1970s. Even the popular church has found that its talk of class-
driven, long-term structural transformation must compete, many times
unfavorably, with the complex chorus of voices from the grassroots.
Taking the secularization concept one step further, it is not just civil
society that has pluralized and fragmented; the religious field itself has seen
the proliferation of players. This is illustrated not only by the rapid growth
of Protestantism but also by the renewed interest in g mediumship-based"
religions, including African-based (Candomble, Santeria, Umbanda, and
 VASQUEZ: AGENDA 3

Spiritism in its various embodiments) and the so-called New Age religions.
Even within Catholicism, considerable differentiation has appeared. With
a conservative “Catholicrestoration”under Pope John Paul I1 (Della Cava
19921, charismatic and neocatechumenal movements, alongside other
international initiatives like Opus Dei, have eclipsed the work of the
popular church, save for instances like Chiapas, where a combination of
acute social problems, a rising ethnic consciousness, and a vocal “liberal”
bishop has given currency to a strong liberationist line. In Catholic circles
today, one is more likely to hear references to a ‘hew evangelization,”“a
new civilizationof love,”and “inculturation”than to liberation, the struggle
(in Portuguese, a luta), or the path (caminhada) toward the kingdom of
God. All these changes have led historian Jean-Pierre Bastian (1998) to talk
about the “deregulation” of the Latin American religious market.
Although religious pluralism in Latin America stems from multiple
sources, it is closely related to the process of uneven industrialization and
rapid urbanization that began in the late 1940s. By undermining the
“mechanical solidarity” of the rural social order, which was intertwined
with an organic, hierarchical Catholic “cultural system” (in the Geertzian
sense), industrialization and urbanization opened up spaces for the
emergence of new, competing religions. This is precisely what Christian
Lalive D’Epinay (1968) and Emilio Willems (1967) documented in their
pioneering studies of Protestantism in Brazil and Chile. Paradoxically, the
dominance of Catholicism was further weakened by post-Vatican I1
initiatives, such as CEBs and liberation theology, whch originally sought
to strengthen the church’s presence among the growing urban working
classes. La iglesiapopulau‘s emphasis on decentralization, lay autonomy,
and freedom of conscience legitimated the notion that authentic religion
is more a matter of conscious choice than of birth and received cultural
identity (compare de Theije 1999). The way was thus paved for the
proliferation of alternative religious affiliations.
Recent scholarly work on Latin American religion has reflected the
pluralism and fragmentation of both civil society and the religious field. It
has moved beyond the institutionalist approaches of the 1970s and early
1980s (Bruneau 1974, 1982; Smith 1982; Levine 19811,which focused on
ecclesial elites and their relations with the state apparatus, to produce
nuanced, empirically rich, often comparative studies of various communi-
ties and their lived religions (compare Levine 1992;Burdick 1993a;Ireland
1991; Peterson 1997). Two subjects have benefited especially from this
fresh focus: the role of religion in ethnic identity and conflict and the
relationship of religion and gender. In these areas, evangelical Christianity,
and particularly Pentecostalism, which, since the 1960s, has grown
remarkably throughout the region, have received most of the attention.
Stoll (1993), Green (19931, Earle (19921, Muratorio (19801, and Bastian
4 JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS 41: 4

(1996) have documented how evangelical Protestantism shapes and is

shaped by ethnic solidarity and conflict in Guatemala, the Andes, and most
recently, Chiapas.*
The picture that emerges from these studies is a contradictory one.
On the one hand, Pentecostalism leads to religious sectarianism and
division in indigenous communities (with deleterious consequences for
collective mobilization), along with a rejection of ritual practices central to
native American spirituality, such as religious festivals and the use of
tobacco, alcohol, and images,all of which Pentecostalsconsider pagan and
idolatrous. On the other hand, autochthonous Pentecostalisms are emerg-
ing that blend the mysterious work of the Holy Spiritwith indigenous views
of the world as animated by supernatural forces. Such a blend has made
it possible, in many cases, to reassert the authority of the shaman, now as
a Pentecostal pastor who can heal and exorcise evil spirits.
It is, nevertheless, the study of religion and gender that has, of late,
reaped the benefits of the focus on the “micropolitics”of evangelical
Christianity, as demonstrated by a recent slew of studies of how religion
empowers and disempowers women in the private and public spheres
(Gill 1990; Brusco 1995;Mariz and Campos Machado 1997; Drogus 1997a,
b). One of the most interesting findings of this line of inquiry is how
evangelical Christianity works as a “strategic women’s movement,” “re-
forming” machismo and enhancing women’s position in the household
(Brusco 1995,135461. Evangelicalism redraws and redefines the “bound-
aries of public (male) and private (female) life.” It curbs male “aggression,
violence, pride, self-indulgence and . . . individualistic orientation in the
public sphere”and directs men’s attention and energies to the preservation
of the household, women’s traditional province. Liberationist Catholicism,
in contrast, seems to focus more on the transformation of structural and
institutional inequalities in the public sphere, often failing to address issues
like intra-household strife and domestic violence (Burdick 1993a,87-1 16).
According to Carol Ann Drogus, the key difference between the popular
church and Pentecostalism is that the latter does “moreto promote equality
in the private and religious spheres while CEBs demand women’s public-
sphere participation [and provide] some opportunities to act on that
demand” (1997a, 66).
Drogus’s article on women CEB activists in this issue builds on the
insights of this growing literature. She poses a question that links lo
cotidiano (everyday life) to Politics with a capital P : What would it mean
for the consolidation of democracy in Brazil if the progressive church were
to take seriously women’s needs and aspirations? Put differently, the
question is whether the popular church can form alliances with feminists
and evangelical Protestant women that will restore its former role as a key
protagonist in social movements. Can it offer a viable forum for common
desires for action where individual activists can speak? A further question
 VASQUEZ: AGENDA 5

is whether the popular church can fulfill this role, given the constraints that
progressives face in an increasingly conservativeglobal church that, during
John Paul 11’spapacy, is placing more emphasis on orthodoxy, discipline,
unity, and evangelization. Is religion, particularly Catholicism, ultimately
an obstacle to robust grassroots mobilization?All these questions have
gained importance because, Drogus argues, despite the transition to
civilian rule, Brazil’sgovernment is unlikely to deal with the needs of poor
communities unless civil society keeps them in the public eye.
Drogus’s questions also cut to the heart of another important issue
involving religion and politics. Some recent literature suggests that part of
the appeal of evangelical Christianity, especially Pentecostalism and the
Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement, hinges on its ultimate concern
with the reconstitution and redemption of the self. As both Willems (1967)
and Lalive D’Epinay(1968) recognizedearly on, the success of Pentecostalism
in challenging Catholic hegemony is partly that it provides a “safe haven”
from anomic disintegration. Above all, it offers institutional structures,
practices, and narratives that help the self navigate the present baffling,
threatening world. As Burdick (1993a) rightly observes, Pentecostalism,
like African-based religions and Spiritism, is a “cult of affliction”that deals
with concrete, real-life predicaments at the personal and family leveL3
But what effect will this work at the local, “micro” level have on
institutions and structures at the “macro” level-namely, the precarious
process of demo~ratization?~ This question has forcefully reemerged in
debates about Pentecostalism. Thanks to the work of many recent scholars
(Burdick 1993a,b; Freston 1993;Stolll990, 1993;Martin 1990;Mariz 1994;
Cleary 1997; Ireland 1991, 1993, 1997, among others), we have moved
beyond the unproductive, Manichean opposition between politically
active and progressive Catholic CEBs and otherworldly, quietist, or
conservative Pentecostals. It is clear that Pentecostalism, because of its
ideational, organizational, and praxical flexibility, allows for a range of
forms of social involvement that cannot be fully characterized without
reference to specific settings and, perhaps, even to personal life hstories.
Rowan Ireland (1993) sees at least two “ideal-typical’’Pentecostal
dispositions toward politics. The “church crente“ (literally, believer) is
centered more in the reproduction of the institution, and consequently is
more likely to form alliances with secular elites and, in the process, to
“sanctify”“structuresof unequal wealth and power.” The “sect crente,”on
the other hand, conceives of life as an ongoing struggle against sin, against
humanity’s utterly fallen nature. This attitude of permanent critique makes
the sect crenteskeptical of all human efforts at self-redemption-including
politics. Ireland, then, sees in the sect crente the potential for resistance,
for challenging power abuses and corruption. This resistance, however, is
at best local.
G JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS 41: 4

The possible limits to supralocal emancipatory action become an

urgent question in a context such as MorazPn, El Salvador, the setting of
Ileana G6mez’s study. MorazQnwas one of the most turbulent military
fronts during the Salvadoran civil war and the site of large-scale massacres,
including that at El Mozote in 1981.Whole rural communities fled; families
disintegrated. Despite the 1992 peace accords, the civil war’s deep scars
(and underlying causes) remain; intractable poverty, unequal land distri-
bution, and a generalized “culture of violence” demand structural and
institutional transformation well beyond individual moral regeneration.
The limited appeal of El Salvador’s “Protestant”political party, the Unity
Movement, seems to confirm the relative insignificance of the religious
variable for democratization.
Then again, as G6mez illustrates with the Assemblies of God,
morality and a personal relationship with the Lord seem to be highly
effective tools for coping with youth gangs and crime, which are part of
the culture of violence. Many demobilized soldiers and former guerrillas
have also turned to crime, contributing to the highest per capita homicide
rate in the hemisphere (Pan American Health Organization, cited in Latin
American Newsletters 1997). G6mez describes how churches in MorazPn,
particularly evangelical ones, with their strict asceticism and fierce
moralism, might be succeeding-albeit locally-where the peace accords
have proven insufficient. Following Martin (1990: 12-13, 286-88),
evangelicals might be introducing a culture of “peaceability”and mutuality
that, as Habermas (1984) argues, is necessary for the establishment of a
public sphere, where claims are redeemed solely through the use of reason
and not arbitrary force.
I observed a similar situation in VigQrio Geral in the Baixada
Fluminense neighborhood on the outkirts of Rio de Janeiro, known for its
high levels of crime and brutal violence between quudrilbas (gangs) and
the police. Local inhabitants there saw evangelical churches as veritable
havens of peace and security. Indeed, as residents see it, many fuve2u.s
(shantytowns) and buimspopulures (poor neighborhoods) have become
the stage for a cosmic struggle between Jesus Christ’s soldiers and Satan’s
minions, embodied in the figure of the trupcunte (drug lord) and his
cupungas(hred guns), for their collectivesoul. In this context,evangelicalism
might be “healingthe wounds” of the broken social body, in the words of
well-known Brazilian pastor Caio Fabio.
Perhaps, then, we should be more cautious in dismissing the local
impact of religion.Maybe what is involved here is a deeper, simultaneously
more foundational and more encompassing definition of democratic
politics. Perhaps it involves not just the institutions and procedures of
formal democracy but the formation of “cultureof citizenship,”as Elizabeth
Jelin (1996, 102) puts it, in which individuals learn responsibility and care
 VASQUEZ: AGENDA 7

toward self and others. We may be witnessing the making of “moral,civil

agents,” with “moral”and “civil”taken at their most literal.5
This is actually a key point that Ireland makes in his essay in this issue,
when he advocates saving the “Tocquevillian parallel.” In Ireland’s view,
the Latin American religious “infrastructure”plays an important role in
molding “popular subjects”imbued with “an ethic of public involvement”
and the capacity to propose alternatives to authoritarianism and clientelism.
The result is an increasingly textured and nonhierarchicalassociational life,
an essential ingredient in the emergence of a civic community.
One can then argue that in this framework, evangelical Christianity
may be one of the new social movements that are defining “theparameters
of democracy . . . the very boundaries of what is properly defined as the
political arena: its participants, its institutions,its processes, its agenda, and
its scope” (Alvarez et al. 1998,l). What these movements show is that, after
all, the micro and the macro, the politics of culture and everyday life and
public, electoral Politics are not two isolated, reified levels of social action,
privileging the macro. To go beyond unproductive dichotomies, recent
social movement theory has suggested the use of terms like networks and
webs, which convey “the intricacies and precariousness” of interrelations
among “movementorganizations,individual participants, and other actors
in civil and political society and the state” (Alvarez 1997, 90). These
multiple linkages “expand the movements’cultural and political reach far
beyond local communities and family courtyards”4ountering critiques
that see the movements as “parochial, fragmentary, and ephemeral”
(Alvarez et al. 1998, 15).
Hortensia Muiioz would certainly agree with the need for a more
nuanced and dynamic reading of the role of Pentecostalism in social
change. Her report on evangelicals in HuaycAn, Peru, building a new
barriopopular for settlersprovides yet another example of how evangelicals
can mobilize, sometimes with even more conviction than traditional and
progressive Catholics, in actions that have structural, long-term implica-
tions. More interesting in Muiioz’s account, however, is how closely these
evangelicals link social action and their collective and individual identities,
challenging our earlier distinction between “new,”identity-based actors
and old, class-based ones.
The construction of a physical community, the clearing of a new
geographic space, draws Huaycgn’s evangelicals into the political arena,
forcing them, in their work beside the numerically dominant Catholics, to
define themselves. Drawing from the insights of symbolic interactionism,
Muiioz shows how the production of such a space is inextricably
connected to the construction of “common sense,” a taken-for-granted,
intersubjective world, through which competent (political) agents learn
their proper place and thus their limits, rights, and responsibilities.
8 JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS 41: 4

Evangelicals force a reconstruction of the local “commonsense”;they also

challenge the automatic assumption that Catholicism is the lingua franca
in the public sphere, thus making religious difference an important
variable in forging a unified neighborhood movement.
Muiioz’s case study, then, shows how unwise it is to separate
“structural” struggles from those based on identity and meaning. For
evangelicals in Huayc5n, the exercise of citizenship to advance communal
interests not only complements evangelical identity but actually requires
it. Muiioz is nevertheless careful to point to the limitations of evangelical
involvement in politics. The everpresent tension between Zas cosas deZ
mundoy Zus cosas de Dios, sectarianism, and intraecclesial,socioeconomic
stratification make sustained, large-scale mobilization difficult.In her study
of Protestantismin Guatemala, Virginia Garrard-Burnettobserved a similar
phenomenon.
Evangelical mobilization [to defend Efrain Rios Montt, Guatemala’s
born-again president, against a coup] failed because of the very
qualities that made evangelicals such good citizens of military
governments-sectarianism, passivity, apoliticism, and a lack of
articulated politics. (1998a, 159)

RELIGION,ECONOMICS,
AND GLOBALIZATION

Changes in Latin America have not been restricted to politics. Many of the
everyday predicaments that religion seeks to address arise from pressures
created by economic transformation. Much has been written about the
failure of the import substitution model, dramatized by the “lost decade”
of the 1980s, with its reliance on the Fordist-Keynesian model of
centralized, state-sponsored industries. The literature on economic re-
structuring and the neoliberal policies that have replaced the IS1 model is
also substantial. Our interest here, however, lies in the social implications
of these changes and their effects, especially for poor people. Chief among
these is the opening of local markets, which Latin American governments
have achieved with the aim of facilitating a competitive insertion in an
increasingly globalized economy.
The deregulation of markets has meant the downsizing of the state
and particularly of its welfare programs. The curtailment of these, together
with the relative decline of the industrial sector, resulting unemployment,
and austerity measures like wage freezes and currency devaluations, has
had, at least in the short term, a “social cost.” This can be seen in the
increase in poverty and inequality indexes, particularly in countries like
Brazil, Peru, and El Salvador.The Latin American poor have responded to
the situation by deploying their own grassroots survival strategies, leading
to what a report of the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica
 VASQUEZ: AGENDA 9

describes as an “expansion of the precarious activities traditionally

included in the so-called informal economy” (quoted in Oliveira 1993,231.
A central component of this growing informal sector are self-helpand
survival initiatives among the poor, such as creches (childcare centers) and
comedorespopulares(soup kitchens). Many of these have drawn resources
from churches. The churches function as flexible networks of mutual aid,
where poor people not only receive charity but also pool their own
resources and draw from institutional ones. The resources range from
physical space, job referrals, initial credit, and vocational training to
alternative healing systems-to cope with poverty-induced psychosomatic
illness (Chesnut 1997). An additional factor is the way the evangelical
churches “domesticate” the typical Latin American male, as described
earlier. Because poor women and children have been among the groups
most severely affected by economic restructuring (Beneria and Feldman
1992; Lustig 19951,this is another essential reason for the predominantly
female face of grassroots evangelical churches.
Although we cannot deduce rates of religious conversion from the
success of a church’s social functions-as social initiatives do not always
mesh well with doctrinal and pastoral demands-a church’s ability to
respond to local economic pressures may enhance the relative appeal of
its particular religious tradition. At the very least, offering successful
strategies to cope with socioeconomic change gives churches a way to
draw in potential members; affiliation and conversion are another matter.
Phillip Berryman’s short but provocative piece focuses on precisely
those links between the pastoral and pragmatic aspects of religious life. He
addresses what could be called the economics of religious choice and
participation. He also highlights the concept of network; in this case,
drawing from Manuel Castells’srecent trilogy, 7be Information Age (1996,
1997, 1998). This might, prima facie, seem counterintuitive, given that
Castells contrasts the self, with all its expressive and performative aspects
(including religion), to the Net, and its instrumental rationality, in ways
reminiscent of the Frankfurt School. According to Castells, there is “a
fundamental split between abstract, universal instrumentalism, and histori-
cally rooted, particularistic identities. Our societies are increasingly struc-
tured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self‘ (1996,3).
It is in this context that Castells situates the resurgence of religion: in a
“world of uncontrolled confusing change, people tend to regroup around
primary identities: religious, ethnic, territorial, national. Religious funda-
mentalism, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, and even Buddhist. . . is
probably the most formidable force of personal security and collective
mobilization in these troubled years” (1996,3). Thus, for Castells, religion,
particularly fundamentalism, is an attempt to reconstruct “defensive
identities around communal principles,”to “reassertcontrol over life . . . in
10 JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS 41: 4

direct response to uncontrollable processes of globalization that are

increasingly sensed in the economy and in the media” (1997, 11, 26).
Castells has a valid point here, and I concur with it in my work on
the crisis of progressive Catholicism in Brazil (VAsquez 1998). He might be
overstating the opposition between religion and globalization, however.
In many instances, religion thrives precisely because churches use the
tools of globalization-namely, fluid transnational networks-to project
their messages from the local to the global. What if we challenged the tidy
dichotomies that Castells defends and applied the insights gained in the
study of the Net to the production of Self? After all, religious organizations
might be described as enterprises in the business of conversion and
salvation. This is precisely what Berryman invites us to do.
Extending this metaphor and drawing from institutional and
regulationist economics (Piore and Sabel 1984;Amin 1994; Harvey l989),
we might hypothesize that the Catholic Church, with its continued reliance
on the parish structure, is operating under an outdated corporatist, Fordist
model, a religious economy of scale that impersonally dispenses “one size
fits all” products. In contrast, Pentecostalism, which grows primarily
through small, syncretic, indigenous congregations, works in a post-
Fordist mode, engaged in the flexible production of personalized goods
tailored to deal with the fragmentation and dislocation brought by
globalization. The so-called neo-Pentecostal churches-exemplified by
Edir Macedo’s controversial Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal
Church of the Kingdom of God), with its radio and TV stations and its
transnational congregations in Brazil, Portugal, England, and the United
States-have deployed religious post-Fordism with particular skilL6
What about the “Pentecostalization”of Catholicism (Bastian 1998),
the emergence of initiatives such as Charismatic Renewal and Opus Dei,
seen as lynchpins in a new movement to counter Protestant growth?
Pursuing the economic metaphor, it is plausible to argue that the new
evangelization, with its simultaneous emphasis on inculturation and unity
with the hierarchial church, can be understood as an example of religious
“glocalization”:the “tailoring and advertising of goods and services on a
global or near-global basis to increasingly differentiated local and particu-
lar markets” (Robertson 1995, 28). The stress on spiritual and emotional
renewal, devotion, and small-group experience, together with the respect
for clerical authority and orthodoxy that characterizes charismatic and
neocatechumenal groups, allows the Catholic Church to respond to local
and individual needs while simultaneously reaffirming its claim to unity
and universality. (The parallels with neoliberal capitalism here are striking;
see Hopenhayn 1993.) Judging by the rapid growth in the number of
charismatics in Latin America, this strategy might prove highly successful.
The use of economic categories to understand religion is not without
its perils. One is the danger of making reductive generalizations. To say,
 VASQUEZ: AGENDA 11

for example, that the Catholic Church in Latin America operates exclusively
according to Fordist principles obscures the efforts of urban parishes, as
part of the legacy of Vatican 11, to decentralize pastoral work and give the
laity more opportunities to participate. What’s more, parish loyalty is no
longer as strong as it used to be; many people travel to other parishes to
attend masses, especially charismatic healing services. Similar qualifica-
tions apply regarding Pentecostalism, which encompasses churches of
varying degrees of centralization and bureaucratization.
Economic models can also be mechanistically applied in abstract and
ahistoricalterms, a tendency that denies the inherent messiness of personal
affiliations and choices, reducing them to simplistic principles of supply
and demand and free-ridership. This reductionism seems to be one of
weaknesses of rational choice theories of the religious market, which are
gaining some visibility in Latin America (Gill 1998). While rational choice
may prove helpful in making sense of religious competition at the local
level, its “methodologicalindividualism”probably cannot fully account for
the behavior of religious institutions, which have complex habits, internal
divisions, organizational structures, and modes of leadership.’ They are
also subject to multiple global economic, political, and cultural processes,
which are not reducible to individual persons’ actions or choices.
Social complexity, however, should not preclude serious study of the
specific interactions among religion, society, and economy. One can, for
example, build on Weber and focus on “elective affinities” among “ideal-
types” of economic and religious life at the level of organization, practice,
and ideology. Because of their ethnographic thrust, many of the recent
works on religion in Latin America have tended to ignore these dimen-
sions. But just as Weber, Marx, Simmel, Sombart, and others fruitfully
theorized about the role of religion in modern capitalism,it may be helpful
to ask about the specific local, national, regional, and global links that
religion sustains with what some people have identified as a new regime
of capitalist accumulation. As the market becomes the central organizing
principle of social life, research on “economies of faith may actually be
necessary.

TRANSNATIONALISM,
RELIGION, AND IDENTITY

Globalization refers not just to the flow of capital and goods; people also
move back and forth in response to changes in world labor markets and
social and political upheaval in their home countries (Portes 1996, Sassen
1995). Latin American immigrants to the United States, instead of seeking
rapid assimilation, as did their European predecessors, choose to live
“transnational lives,”experiencing simultaneous “embeddedness”in their
societies of origin and of settlement (Basch et al. 1994; Rouse 1991;
12 JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS 41: 4

Kearney 1995). Advancing technology in communication and transporta-

tion allows Latin American immigrants to engage in regular and sustained
contacts across two or more national borders through frequent travel,
phonecalls, and electronic mail, not to mention monetary remittances.
This “grassroots”form of transnationalism, according to Alejandro
Portes (1998), is truly novel. These migrants can navigate the sociopolitical
and cultural systems of both countries. Latin American governments have
noticed the potential benefits in the immigrant communities in U.S. urban
neighborhoods. Salvadorans, for example, send home $1.2 billion annu-
ally, the equivalent of 50 percent of the country’s total export earnings
(Economic Intelligence Unit 1998).* Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, among
other countries, have made it possible for hermunos y hermanas en el
extrunjem to vote and run for office in local elections. The Dominican
Republic recently granted dual citizenship to children born of nationals
outside the country.
At other times, however, transnationalism leads to a kind of dual
disenfranchisement. On the one hand, immigrants are not fully accepted
in the United States, sometimes living under the stigma of illegality. On the
other hand, they no longer accept the patrimonial politics of their sending
countries once they experience the U.S. political system.
The religious dimension of this problem is illustrated by Larissa Ruiz
Baia’s study, which focuses on Peruvian Catholic lay brotherhoods in
Paterson, New Jersey. Lay brotherhoods exemplify the enduring vitality of
pre-Vatican I1 Catholicism with their strong emphasis on devotion,
preserving traditions, and maintaining hierarchical religious and social
arrangements. This deep-seated traditionalism shows as the Paterson
brotherhoods try to celebrate their patron saints the same way the original
hermundades in Lima did.
The ritual efficacy (that is, success) of the celebrations is predicated
on their direct reference to the home country. Nevertheless,the challenges
of organizing the festivities outside Peru have led the brotherhoods to
modify some key ritual aspects, such as allowing women to carry the saint’s
image during the annual procession. This change has begun to alter the
balance of symbolic power between men and women in the brotherhood,
not just in the United States but also in Peru, as emigrants come back to
visit. The reception in Lima of this new practice has not been universally
favorable, but the Paterson brotherhoods have at least turned the tables:
they are now the reference point for debates about the role of women in
what has been hitherto a male-dominated organization.
Scholars are slowly recognizing religion’s role in transnationalism
(Levitt 1998; Mcdister 1998; Garrard-Burnett 1998a, b; Rudolph and
Piscatori 1997). This is not surprising, given that churches are one of the
key places where immigrants, particularly those newly arrived, build
community and identity. Ruiz Baia adds to this growing recognition by
 VASQUEZ: AGENDA 13

specifying the various relationships, formal and informal, institutional and

personal, involved in building transnational linkages. Her most important
contribution is to problematize the concept of transnationalism further by
pointing to its penetration, along with the notions of cosmopolitanism and
pan-ethnicity, among Latino immigrants.
Thus far, transnationalism has been conceptualized as applying to
phenomena that involve the transgression of two or more international
borders (for example, Portes 1998).As such, the concept still operates with
an understanding of a nation as based on a unified community with an
overarching culture in a bounded geographical space.9 As Benedict
Anderson shows in his influential Zmagined Communities (19831, the rise
of the nation-state was closely connected to the historical articulation of
a national identity, a sense of unity and of belonging to a particular
territory, facilitated by growing mass media. Geographical borders there-
fore do not define nationhood or nationality; instead, it is national identity
that makes possible the fixing of borders: “nationality . . . nation-ness, as
well as nationalism are cultural artifacts” (Anderson 1983, 4).
Applying this insight to transnationalism,we might say that it is not
just a matter of transgressing physical borders the way Peruvians, their
capital, goods, and ideas move back and forth between Lima and Paterson.
Transnationalism can also apply when Peruvians imagine themselves and
their identity in the context of a plurality of Latino and other immigrant
groups with whom they build lo cotidiano. Peruvians, Ruiz Baia shows,
can be “honorary Dominicans”;they can also be Latin Americans, Latinos,
or Hispanics; they might even extend their own nationality to the
Colombians and Salvadorans who participate in their organizations and
special events. In multiethnic contexts like Paterson, moreover, nationali-
ties are transgressed, extended, reformulated, and combined, giving rise
to multiple identities.
In relation to the earlier discussion of religion and democratization,
we might argue that with new notions of nationality such as these come
fresh understandings of citizenship, solidarity, and collective action. This
has implications for hemispheric politics. Could we, for example, imag-
ine-as a counterpart to the process of hemispheric economic integra-
tion-the arduous articulation of a cosmopolitan or even pan-ethnic
identity among Latino immigrants through their churches?After all, as Ruiz
Baia shows, various Latin American identities are sometimes “sublated,”as
Hegel would say, both included and subsumed under a Hispanic Catholic
identity. By the same token, it is not impossible to imagine Pentecostal
churches in which national differences are erased because “we are all
brothers and sisters in Christ.”’O
Would this be a truly civic pan-Latino identity or a sectarian,
intolerant one, grounded on divine principles beyond rational dispute?
Would it help to foster substantive democracy in the Americas?Actually,
14 JOURNAL O F INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS 41: 4

Ruiz Baia shows how the growth of such an identity in one parish has come
at the cost of economic and political autonomy for the brotherhood and
other grassroots organizations.”
A related dimension is the recent work on the formation of a
“transnationalcivil society,”facilitated by the new communication technol-
ogy. Although the nature and outcome of this process are still under
contention, one thing is certain: “religious communities are among the
oldest of the transnationals”(Rudolph 1997, 1 ) . Religious actors, such as
the Catholic Church and evangelical missionary groups, have both the
traditions and the institutional capacity to operate transnationally. Often,
all local actors need to do is draw from these established traditions and
practices. We see this clearly in the Paterson case, where Peruvians have
formed OHCAPERUSA (Organization of Peruvian Catholic Brotherhoods
in the United States), bringing together hermandudes from around the
United States and also Canada to deliberate liturgical issues. Is this a
prototype for an incipient “grassroots hemispheric civil society”?What,
then, is religion’s specific contribution?

CONCLUSIONS
In an increasingly global context, the study of religion and social change
in Latin America and among U.S. Latinos needs to take a comparative, truly
interamerican approach. In my view, the most successful future work in
religion in the Americas must combine a strong sensitivity toward lo
cotidiano, with its myriad struggles for identity, meaning, and quality of
life, and a clear sense of the hemispheric and global political and economic
processes in which everyday life takes place. This would require not only
detailed knowledge of the diverse local religious scene but also multisite
research to explore how macro and micro social processes frame various
patterns of religious experience throughout the hemisphere. This is
precisely what our research project set out to do.
In his keynote address at the Florida conference, Rowan Ireland set
forth an injunction not to ignore religion in making sense of what is
currently happening in the hemisphere. Recent social movement literature
has tended to marginalize religion. A case in point is the collection by
Alvarez et al., CulturesofPoliticdPolitics of CuZtures(1998),which updates
7he Making of Social Movements in Latin America (Escobar and Alvarez
1992). For all the authors’ theoretical and methodological sophistication
and sensitivity to differentiation within and among social movements,
religion is barely mentioned. To the extent that it appears, it bears labels
like “fundamentalistchurches,”which are seen as part of a cluster of forces
seeking to disarticulate emancipatory movements.
Berryman’s creative reading notwithstanding, Castells’swork exhib-
its a similar weakness. For Castells (1997, 1-27), religion is purely reactive,
 VASQUEZ: AGENDA 15

the source of “resistance identities” dug into exclusionary “trenches,”

hoping for some apocalyptic event to overturn the evil and bewildering
world around them. Religion, unlike the feminist and environmental
movements, cannot yield real “subjects,”capable of transforming personal
and collective history. We see, however, how in El Salvador, Peru, and
elsewhere in Latin America, religion plays far more complex roles in the
process of democratization.
In my judgment, the persistence of reductive stances toward religion
in the Latin American social sciences issues from the remnants of a
modernist, Enlightenment-based prejudice. Save for brief episodes of
turmoil, as in the heyday of liberation theology, religion is always
associated with premodern, conservative patterns oppressive to women,
people of color, and others at the margin. But religion continues to be one
of the central “structures of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams’s term
(19771, through which the “popular sectors” of society try to make sense
of their lives and their surrounding reality. While it is important to
understand how religion interacts with race, gender, ethnicity, and other
identity-linked dynamics, however, we must be careful not to reduce it to
other more “essential” cultural variables. The enduring vitality and
increasing polymorphousness of the religious field in the Americas call us
to continue to give serious attention to religion in all its specificity, as it
shapes and is shaped by other social forces.

NOTES
I thank Ed Cleary, Alex Dupuy, Eleanor Lahn, James McGuire, Carmen
Meyers, Anna Peterson, William C. Smith, Philip Williams, and Ann Wightman for
their helpful suggestions and assistance in putting this special issue together.
1. The study, “Negotiating Political and Economic Crises: Peruvian and
Salvadoran Christians in Latin America and the United States,” was conducted
between May 1996 and August 1998. Its main goal was to examine how religious
institutions, practices, and beliefs help people and their communities cope with the
micro-, or everyday, consequences of macroprocesses, such as democratic
transition, economic restructuring, migration, and political violence. Six or seven
congregations each were selected in El Salvador, Peru, and the United States, taking
account of denominational variation, location (urban, suburban, rural), degree of
political involvement, and configuration (size, class, gender, ethnic composition).
In the United States, we chose three churches in Washington, D.C., a city with a
high concentration of Salvadoran immigrants; and three in Paterson, New Jersey,
the preferred destination of many Peruvians.
2. It should be noted that the study of religion and race among Afro-Latin
Americans has received very little attention. For an interesting approach to the
issues involved, see Burdick 1993a, 1998.
3. Williams and Peterson (1996) show a turn to the ‘‘local’’within the Catholic
Church as pastoral and social work has concentrated more on household and
personal matters than on structural and bread-and-butter issues, which dominated
16 JOURNAL OF INTERAMENCAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS 41: 4

the liberationist approach. See also Berryman 1996 for the development of
pustoruts arnbientuts (environmental pastoral outreach) in SPo Paulo.
4. One can reasonably challenge the appropriateness of this question; why
not consider locally based social movements on their own merits as they serve local
purposes? (For this argument, see Hellman 1994.) Still, we should be careful not
to think of locally based movements as isolated from, or unaffected by, unavoidable
global processes.
5. For Jelin, the construction of citizenship requires a critique of the “culture
of domination-subordination” that is the legacy of authoritarian regimes and the
violent movements that opposed them. While evangelical Christianity might be
producing “peaceable,”disciplined subjects, it may not be successfully eroding that
culture.
6. In contrast to the “classical” Pentecostal churches, neo-Pentecostalism
tends to focus on the dispensation of finished religious products, such as miracle
cures and exorcisms, to a fluctuating, mass clientele. As such, neo-Pentecostal
churches have fluid organizational and doctrinal structures. They also rely heavily
on the use of mass media (to maximize the collective emotional impact) and stress
the cash nexus.
7. For a critique of Gill’s rational choice approach see V5squez (forthcoming)
and the discussion on the website Religion in America (1999).
8. An estimated 26 percent of Salvadoran families depend on remittances
from abroad (Economic Intelligence Unit 1998). These funds have had a pervasive
influence throughout the Salvadoran economy. Similar effects have been observed
in studies of transnational business networks and labor markets among Dominican
(Portes and Guarnizo 1991,Guarnito 19941,Ecuadoran (Kyle 19951,and Honduran
immigrants (Matthei and Smith 1996).
9. In fairness to Basch et al., it should be noted that their original definition
of transnationalism was open enough to include the sort of dimension that Ruiz
Baia explores. It is the later literature on transnationalism that has taken a more rigid
course.
We define “transnationalism”as the processes by which immigrants
forge and sustain multi-strandedsocial relations that link together their
societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes
transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build
social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders. . . .
An essential element. . . is the multiplicity of involvements that
transmigrants sustain in both home and host societies. (1994, 7).
10. In the United States, a related but key question is how religion contributes
to the deployment of a strategic racial essentialism (Omni and Winant 1986hthe
banding together of subordinate groups like Latinos under pan-ethnic construe-
as a result of white hegemony and bipolar (black-white) models of race.
11. For a similar case among Dominican immigrants in Boston, see Levitt
1998. About Dominican migrants on a more general level, see Guarnizo 1997.
 VASQUEZ: AGENDA 17

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