PRIMA Volume 3, Issue 1

A Church Responsive: Understanding and Interpreting the Changing Composition of Christianity in Latin America

John Foster

I am glad that a serious examination of living the gospel is being made among Protestants.  There is conflict – God be blessed.[i]

                                   --Archbishop Oscar Romero

Latin America has long been steeped in a spirit of authoritarian rule.  From the times when swashbuckling conquistadors conquered the native inhabitants in the name of the Catholic Church and the Crown to the current era in which capricious technocrats embezzle the scarce revenues of the state, the poor majority of Latin America has had little say in how its government works.  An elite oligarchy, which has been intact since colonial times, still dominates the economic and political institutions of the region while the numerous poor are forced to eek out an existence on frightfully limited resources.  In the wake of brutal wars, gross income inequality, abject poverty and other ingrained social injustices, paradigms of centralized leadership, collectivism, and passive resistance remain deeply etched into Latin American culture.

Amidst this cultural legacy, the churches of the predominately Christian population of Latin America have evolved over the past 500 years.  Under the sole dominion of the Catholic Church in league with the oligarchy, Latin American churches remained relatively unchanged for three-and-a-half centuries.  In the colonial and post-independence contexts, the Catholic Church enjoyed a monopoly over religious life in Latin America.  Embodying the ideals of centralized leadership and collective harmony, the Catholic Church served as a legitimizing agent for the state.  The religious composition of Latin America began to change, however, in the late 1800’s with the first incursion of mainline Protestant missionaries, who exported distinctly different mores from the United States and Europe.  These missionaries and the churches they established foreshadowed even greater changes with the advent of conservative evangelical and Pentecostal groups in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Significant alterations in Latin America’s religious landscape have occurred over the past fifty years.  A region once dominated by the Catholic Church in league with the oligarchy is now home to a lively popular religion, largely Pentecostal in nature, that embodies a set of characteristics overwhelmingly geared toward the poor.  In contrast to the majority of Latin American institutions that a preponderant oligarchy dominates, the Christian churches, with their autonomous organization, indigenous leadership and explicitly apolitical stance, now appear to be under the influence of the region’s vast population living in poverty.  Whereas most poor Latin Americans were once born into the Catholic Church, they now have a series of religious options competing for their membership.  In light of such religious options, many poor Latin Americans are gravitating to the churches that resound with their cultural heritage.  As a result of their competition for members, Latin American churches, in comparison to other civic, economic, and political institutions in the region, are more responsive to their popular constituents.  

This popularization of Latin American Christianity generates a series of important questions: why has Protestantism exploded in a region that has traditionally been a Catholic mainstay?  Why have Latin American churches in general become more responsive to the poor and what does their religious realignment signify for Latin America?  Will Protestantism and its populist attitude advance social change and promote democratic consolidation?  These inquiries have spawned voluminous amounts of scholarship over the past twenty-five years.  Latin American dependency theorists claim that the Protestant explosion directly correlates with the penetration of the United States’ cultural imperialism, while North American scholars argue that the Protestant movement represents a genuine groundswell movement on the part of the Latin American poor.  Whereas some scholars propose Protestantism as a panacea for Latin America’s economic, political and social woes, others argue that Protestantism is a tool of oppressive forces in the region. 

What renders the majority of these scholars’ analyses incomplete, however, is their inability to connect current Protestant trends with the historical role of the church in Latin America as an extension of the state apparatus.  In addition, they do not fully evaluate Protestantism’s intimate evolution in Latin American culture and its role in precipitating competition for converts among the region’s churches.  Without such analyses, interpretations of Protestantism’s effects on democratic consolidation and society remain inadequate and unsatisfactory.  My thesis will contend that: 1) Protestantism introduced iconoclastic mores of autonomy, individualism and, occasionally, active resistance into the Latin American religious marketplace; 2) these mores have interacted and evolved with Catholic cultural norms of authoritarian leadership, collectivism and passive resistance; 3) the evolution of Protestant and Catholic cultural and religious forces has brought about religious competition resulting in Latin American churches, both Catholic and Protestant, realigning with the poor. 

By combining elements of imported Protestant values with regional culture, Latin American churches have shifted over time to better respond to the needs of the poor and offer a popular form of religion that resonates with their social circumstances.  Indeed, the charismatic and Pentecostal groups that enjoy popularity today are successful because they do not only offer an individual theology and a lively form of worship that gives them an edge in attracting adherents, but they also draw on longstanding Latin American cultural traditions such as authoritarian leadership.  Most of all, their unconditionally apolitical stance allows repressive regimes to exploit them for political support.  Often glad to receive the favor of governments, charismatic and Pentecostal groups respond kindly to any legitimacy that ruling elites bestow.  This reciprocity represents a return to religion serving as an agent of the state. 

This essay will trace the evolution of Latin America’s churches to their current popular state, which will aid in comprehending why they are growing so rapidly.   Also, the ability to understand the evolution of Latin American churches will facilitate in judging whether or not their realignment with the poor resulting from religious competition will bring about democratic consolidation and social transformation.  Accordingly, I will begin with a history of scholarship on Protestantism in Latin America and qualify my contribution to its evolving study.  Next, I will explain an economic model by which to understand religious competition in the region.  Continuing with an analysis of Protestant typologies and their evolvement in the culture, I will identify the concomitant shifts in Latin America’s religious marketplace.  Drawing on the results from this cultural and historical evolution, I will conclude with my own assessment of whether or not Latin American churches’ realignment with the poor represents a possibility for social change in the region.        

I.  History of the Study of Protestantism in Latin America 

In the United States, when people speak of the religious landscape in Latin America, they visualize a Catholic stronghold.  Examples that reinforce such a perception include current events like Pope John Paul II’s historic trip to Mexico City to canonize the first indigenous saint, Juan Diego, and the fact that the next Pope has a strong chance of being selected from Latin America.  Still, the Catholic Church in Latin America today looks markedly different from the colonial era in which bishops and priests were puppets of the state apparatus. 

In the photos of the Pope’s recent mass to commemorate Juan Diego’s canonization in the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City, the poor constitute a striking majority of the crowd.  Their momentous presence and passionate outpouring for Pope John Paul II seemed to indicate that he is their religious leader.  His words, rife with assurance for those who suffer from poverty and affliction, were slanted toward the audience.  Yet this occasion was not absent of political undertones for the Catholic Church.  By canonizing the Indian peasant Juan Diego, the Pope sent a clear message that the Catholic Church is especially interested in protecting its base among the poor, which he and many others now perceive as threatened by the onslaught of Protestant groups.  In a cautionary address in Guatemala City in 1996, he went so far as to claim that Latin America’s Protestants sects “sow confusion and uncertainty among Catholics.”[ii]  

The aging pontiff has every reason to be concerned about the overwhelming explosion of Protestant groups, the “other side” of Christianity in Latin America.  Since 1930, the number of Protestants in region has skyrocketed more than 1900% to comprise 50 million people, or approximately ten percent of the population.[iii]  Mostly charismatic and Pentecostal in nature, Protestants in Latin America now represent over a quarter of the population in four counties: Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.[iv]  This Protestant explosion has generated an intense study of its origins and its effects on the economic, political and social systems of Latin America. 

Christian Lalive d’Epinay, a French sociologist who authored seminal research about Protestantism in Chile during the mid-sixties, is often cited as the father of the study of this movement.  His book, El refugio de las masas, or the Haven of the Masses,[v] identifies Protestantism as an urban phenomenon that offers recent immigrants from the countryside a shelter from and a structure amidst the harsh reality of Latin American mega-city life.  By creating a social dynamic that closely mirrors their experience on the Latin American plantation, or hacienda, and by providing a Pentecostal or evangelical minister that serves as the caudillo, or community strongman, these groups culturally resonate with Latin America’s poor. 

Though the study of Protestantism progressed throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s on the part of Latin American theologians and lay scholars about what they referred to as “the invasion of the sects,” the two most important pieces of scholarship on Protestantism in Latin America were published outside the region in 1990.  David Martin’s Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America,[vi] a searing analysis of the growth of conservative evangelical and Pentecostal groups in the region, qualifies the movement as the product of a dialectic between what he calls “Ibero-Catholic” and “Anglo-Protestant” cultural forces.  Paralleling Protestantism in Latin America with the ascent of Methodism in England and the United States, Martin qualifies the growth of Protestantism in the region as the poor majority's rejection of the status quo. 

The other important book, David Stoll’s Is Latin American Turning Protestant? : The Politics of Evangelical Growth,[vii] explores the controversy surrounding Protestantism as an agent of the United States’ cultural exploitation and militarism, a view that many Latin American Catholics and secularists still hold.  Though he effectively illustrates the connection between U.S. military and economic involvement in the region with the work of conservative evangelical and Pentecostal groups, Stoll nevertheless indicates that Protestantism’s growth is more attributable to a significant portion of the population’s genuine embrace and transformation of North American religion. 

As the study of Protestantism in Latin America continued to evolve during the early 1990’s, scholars began to focus more on the poor among whom the religion was spreading most rapidly.  In 1993, David Stoll teamed up with Virginia Garrard-Burnett, an important writer on the topic whose research is centered in Guatemala, to edit a series of essays entitled, Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America.[viii]  These essays, which cover a broad range of case studies in Latin American countries, analyze the various forces that affect the poor and why they might be attracted to the religious experience that Protestant churches offer in Latin America. 

That same year, French sociologist Jean-Pierre Bastian published an essay, “The Metamorphosis of Latin American Protestant Groups: A Sociohistorical Perspective,”[ix] which posited that Protestantism represents a revitalization of folk or popular religion.  In his view, which is similar to that of Lalive d’Epinay’s, Protestantism’s success lies in the fact that it recreates the old rural patterns of life for urban poor and provides them with a logical worldview by which to interpret their new environs.  Despite their differences in approach, Bastian, Garrard-Burnett and Stoll all agree that Latin American churches are now primarily of the poor. 

Though authors ranging from Lalive d’Epinay to Garrard-Burnett seek to explain the origins the Protestant explosion, most them shy away from forecasting its effects on Latin American politics and society.  Such a task first fell to Christian Smith, who analyzed the political implications of the movement in his essay, “The Spirit and Democracy: Base Communities, Protestantism, and Democratization.”[x]  He proffers that because of its stress on individualism, visions of moral transformation and development of organizational skills among its adherents, Protestantism will inevitably foster democratic consolidation in Latin America.  Smith’s comments are echoed in Lawrence E. Harrison’s book about Latin American culture, The Pan-American Dream,[xi] which asserts that the spread of Protestantism is a positive development for Latin American society.  Newton J. Gaskill countered these claims in his essay, “Rethinking Protestantism and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America.”[xii]  Citing the authoritarian nature of Latin American Protestantism and the facility with which repressive ruling elites are able to co-opt its leaders, Gaskill contends that the movement will not have any great impact on democratic consolidation.         

All of these authors offer important thoughts and insights into the development of Protestantism in Latin America.  However, they fail to fully tie in the multiple influences that have shaped Protestantism over time.  By not completely identifying the extent to which Catholic cultural influences have interacted with Protestantism and by ignoring the traditional role of the church serving as a legitimizing agent for the state, these authors’ analyses of the growth of Protestantism and their projections about the movement’s effects on politics and society remain incomplete.  As I contend, highlighting the cultural factors that have molded Protestantism in conjunction with tracing the religious competition that it has precipitated in the region demonstrate why Latin American churches are increasingly linked with the experience of the poor.  My approach will provide insight into the dynamic development of Latin American churches over time, which will in turn help qualify what effect, if any, their siding with the poor will have on democratic consolidation and social transformation in Latin America.     

II.  The Model of Religious Economies

A helpful lens for viewing this transformation in Latin American churches is Roger Finke and Rodney Stark’s model of “religious economies,” which they proposed in their 1992 study, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy.[xiii]  Their theory states that:

Religious economies are like commercial economies in that they consist of a market made up of a set of current and potential buyers and a set of firms seeking to serve that market.  The relative success of religious bodies (especially when they are confronted with an unregulated economy) will depend upon their clergy, their religious doctrine, and their evangelization techniques.[xiv]

For the intents and purposes for this study, the firms in the religious economy of Latin America are Christian churches and the potential buyers are the multitude of possible parishioners, mostly the poor.   

One benefit of using this model of religious economies is that it demonstrates that changes in the Latin American religious marketplace have taken place over time.  In such a marketplace, perfect competition, or the economic concept stating that buyers are fully informed about and have universal access to the products that competitive firms are offering, could never occur.  At no one time was mainline Protestantism, liberation theology Catholicism, Pentecostalism, etc., available to every Latin American.  Instead, a dynamic evolution in the Latin American religious marketplace occurred over a span of approximately 150 years to bring about the present alignment with the poor.  

This model is also advantageous because it underscores the fact that shifts in the Latin American religious market have occurred as a response to intense competition for converts.  When the Catholic Church was the only religious institution in Latin America, it did not have to compete for parishioners.  As an extension of the state apparatus, it enjoyed unchallenged spiritual dominion over the population.  However, since the breakup of the Catholic monopoly during the liberal reform movements of the late nineteenth century, an “unregulated economy” has permitted different churches to vie for the loyalty of parishioners.  Catholics and Protestants offer various “goods and services,” to “potential buyers” such as leadership, pastoral care, and theology.  In turn, parishioners gravitate to the churches that “serve” them best.  In this sense, the very nature of competition in the religious marketplace mandates that churches be responsive to their parishioners in order to maintain their membership.

In Latin America, this contest for membership has caused churches not only to be responsive to their constituents but also to each other.  If a particular “product” is successful in attracting parishioners, the entire array of Catholic and Protestant churches is wont to respond in a similar fashion.  In this manner, the religious marketplace is a fluid one in which sweeping changes have taken place over time.   

Also, an integral component of this responsiveness in competition is cultural resonance.  To be successful in Latin America’s religious marketplace, churches must respond to market forces, which require that their offerings cater to the poor whom they are trying to attract.   In the second component of the thesis of this essay, which states that Protestant mores have evolved in and interacted with Catholic cultural norms, the terms “evolve” and “interact” necessarily mean that elements of both value sets have fused together to create a product more amenable to the poor. 

In this manner, the story of the popularization of Christianity in Latin America is synonymous with the advent of a religion that successfully combines elements of the culture with components that make it suited to spread.  Again, the Pentecostal sects that now constitute a majority of Protestant churches in Latin America, not to mention the “Pentecostalized” mainline Catholic and Protestant denominations, are highly successful because they offer individual theology and lively worship that attract congregants and draw upon culturally ingrained paradigms of authoritarian leadership.  Also, paralleling the historic function of the church in Latin America, these churches are easily susceptible to the co-optative efforts of Latin American rulers.                

In their book, Latin American Religion in Motion,[xv] Christian Smith and Joshua Prokopy use this model of religious economies to analyze religious competition in the limited context of an urban area.  They present the example of a current Catholic diocese struggling to redraw parish lines in the wake of rapidly spreading Pentecostal churches.  In this specific case, they emphasize how Pentecostal groups are more apt to survive in an urban context.  In my study, however, I will take the model of religious economies and apply it to the churches in Latin America since the breakup of the Catholic monopoly to demonstrate that Protestantism introduced foreign values into Latin America’s religious marketplace, which ultimately interplayed with the Catholic culture.  This interaction generated religious competition for converts that resulted in Latin American churches realigning with the poor. 

Using typologies of Latin American Protestantism adapted from Samuel J. Escobar’s essay, “A Missiological approach to Latin American Protestantism,”[xvi] I will show how the two waves of Protestantism along with their historical circumstances brought about this religious competition that caused Latin American churches to better respond to the needs of the region’s impoverished majority.  In each successive wave, Protestantism brought a new dynamic to the religious marketplace and elicited a competitive response from the Catholic Church.  Analysis of this competition will also be instructive about the current role of Protestantism in Latin America and aid in qualifying the significance of the movement for the region in the final component of this essay.    

III.  Typologies and Shifts in the Latin America’s Religious Marketplace

A. The Colonial Economy and Catholic Dominance

The same year that Columbus arrived in the New World, the fanatic Catholicism that helped to consolidate the Spanish empire finally triumphed as the motivating force for the Spanish in driving out the Islamic Almohad dynasty from Granada and expelling the Jews from the country.  After a 700-year war of reconquest under the aegis of the Catholic Church, the operations of the Spanish crown were deeply involved with the mission of the church.  As Spain established colonies throughout present-day Latin America, it governed along with the Catholic Church.  For almost three-and-a-half centuries after Dominican friars justified the conquistadors’ claims for the kingdom of Spain in return for the ability to set up missions, the Catholic Church commanded unparalleled influence as the legitimizing agent for the state.  Concomitant with this role, the Church held a religious monopoly over the public. 

In league with the Crown, the Catholic Church lent authority to the operations of the empire.  When Spanish settlers initially needed labor to construct their colonies, the Catholic Church sanctioned the slavery of the native peoples through requiring plantation owners to convert them to Catholicism.  As the colonial viceroyalty system of governance emerged, the Catholic Church served as an important administrative arm of Latin American governments.  Both the Crown and the Catholic Church were highly centralized patriarchal institutions whose authority went unchallenged for three hundred and fifty years in the region.  They embodied what Christian Smith calls “monistic corporatism,” which,  

[. . .] maintains, in short, that humans find true fulfillment in a well-ordered, organic community, the components of which are harmonized by a central authority to achieve the collective goal of the common good. In this view, a good society does not check and balance opposing social and political factions through competition, but integrates or eliminates them in the name of collective harmony. Accordingly, a well-ordered society is regulated from the top down by a centralized, patrimonialist state that structures the community, horizontally, as a hierarchy of class and caste and, vertically, as a coordinated arrangement of pillared social sectors corresponding to the traditional estates of Church, army, landowners, universities, organized labor, and so on.[xvii]

Monistic corporatism, a synonym for authoritarian collectivism, describes the Catholic Church’s monopoly over religious life Latin America during the colonial and post-colonial contexts.  Monistic corporatism is a profoundly undemocratic force and social paradigm that has prevented democracy from taking hold in both the economic and political spheres of Latin America.  Its influence remains visible in the region in the form of communist strong men such as Fidel Castro in Cuba and socialist presidents like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.   Still, Latin American churches have been forced to reckon with the culturally ingrained forces of monistic corporatism in an effort to maintain relevance for the people to whom they are evangelizing.  

Even after the wars of independence from Spain during the early 1800’s, the Catholic Church served as a strong consolidating force in the vacuum of power that ensued in absence of the Crown.  According to Bastian, “The radical preeminence of whites over Indians and people of mixed race continued virtually unchanged by the political independence movements of the early nineteenth century, when elite Creoles (who were white) supplanted Iberian power.”[xviii]  These Creole landowners used the Church as a mechanism to maintain social order.  Socially stratified in a hacienda system, the landed elites kept any form of heterodox religion, defined as deviating from the Catholicism that they controlled, at bay from their peasant workers.[xix] 

This colonial and post-independence legacy of the Catholic Church demonstrates its role as an agent of legitimacy for the state.  It also draws to the fore how this intimacy with the state allowed the Catholic Church to maintain its monopoly over religion in Latin America.  Profoundly centralized and authoritarian like the governments it served, the Catholic Church played an important role in maintaining order and tradition in the region.  In such a capacity, the Catholic Church was apathetic to needs of its popular elements.  Even when cyclical economic and natural disasters took a heavy tool on Latin America’s poor, the Catholic Church remained aloof and complacent in its status of favor with the state.     

B.  Economic Changes and the Arrival of Mainline Protestant Missionaries 

The religious landscape began to change, however, when Latin America became increasingly integrated into the global economic system as a provider of commodities and other raw materials.  As the region’s economies became more reliant on the investment of foreign capital, Latin American leaders grew in receptivity to external influences.  Their authority often rested upon the maintenance of export markets for the resources that the economic elite controlled.[xx]  Because of these changes in the source of their legitimacy, government officers became less concerned about their relationship with the Catholic Church.  Attendant with their desire to strengthen financial ties with powerful trading partners such as Britain and the United States, many liberal Latin American leaders deliberately sought to bolster cultural exchange, which included religion.      

Early on, Protestantism was identified as a progressive force in Latin America because of its promotion of democratic ideals and correlation with economically prosperous nations.  For the first time since colonization, Latin American leaders welcomed Protestant missionaries.  In assessing this shift in Central America, Garrard-Burnett writes:

It was only during the last decades of the nineteenth century that liberal leaders withdrew the legal restrictions on limited religious diversity and allowed missionaries to proselytize the general population.  This change occurred because liberal leaders and missionaries shared a similar vision for modern Central America: they hoped to see increased political stability, economic development, and cultural evolution resembling that of the United States.[xxi]

These favorable impressions on the part of Latin America’s leaders allowed mainline Protestant groups to introduce their heterodox values into an otherwise monolithic Latin American culture and religious marketplace. 

Protestantism first sprang up in Latin America in the form of what Escobar calls “transplanted” congregations such as Lutheran churches in Chile and Anglican enclaves in Argentina during the 1850’s.[xxii]  These congregations mostly arose from the demand of immigrants and visiting businessmen from primarily Protestant countries.  Mainline denominations such as the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians ushered in the first real wave of Protestantism when they sent missionaries en masse to Latin America during the 1930’s and 1940’s.  Their inroads represented a watershed erosion of the Catholic monopoly over the Christian Church in Latin America.  Though its impact in the general population was initially small, the first wave of Protestantism sowed the seeds of pluralism that would later burgeon in Latin America.  Above all, these mainline missionary groups thrived in meeting the needs of the shifting demographics of the region’s populace experiencing rampant urbanization.  Denominational missionary groups such as the Central America Mission, the Gospel Missionary Union, the Latin America Mission, and the Christian Missionary Alliance witnessed their greatest success in Latin America’s cities.[xxiii] 

In the first half of the twentieth century, the port cities and capitals of Latin American countries witnessed exponential growth.  Smith and Prokopy cite the following statistics: “between 1930 and 1940, the urban population of Latin America increased by 39 percent.  Then it grew again by another 61 percent from 1948 to 1950.”[xxiv]  Emphasizing this trend’s significance for Protestant groups, they write, “It was not until the masses of Latin Americas began moving out of the villages, escaping the power of the landed elite by migrating to the cities, that religious pluralization was able to begin in earnest.”[xxv]  Protestant missions in Latin American cities gladly welcomed the multitude of new immigrants from the countryside. 

Witnessing their apogee after World War II, the first wave of Protestantism laid the foundation for the more conservative groups that would explode later.  Before the War, the U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt implemented a “Good Neighbor Policy” toward Latin America in which he pledged to respect the sovereignty of the region’s states in addition to increasing their cultural and economic ties with North America.[xxvi]   Mainline Protestant churches’ spirit of democratic values seemed to mesh the hopes of Latin America’s poor that their countries could one day become more democratic.  In addition to encouraging greater lay participation in the life of the church, Protestant groups’ individualistic theology centered around the concept of the priesthood of all believers, which recognized the inherent sanctity of each individual and his or her ability to have a personal relationship with God.  Such a concept sharply contrasted with the patriarchal theology and ecclesiastical life of the Catholic Church, which enshrined collective values and did little to actively address the concerns of the poor. 

Protestant churches’ organizational structure also offered a markedly different approach than their Catholic counterparts.  Independence from a hierarchy allowed Protestants to better meet the needs of the swelling urban population while the Catholic Church strained to expand parishes and provide enough clergy.  Although denominational bodies in the United States sponsored Protestant groups, they enjoyed a considerable amount of autonomy in comparison to Catholic churches. 

With their introduction democratic theology, participatory worship, and autonomous organizational structure, mainline Protestantism represented the first real challenge to the Catholic monopoly in Latin America.  Their ethos drastically departed from the spirit of monistic corporatism and brought extraneous mores into the religious marketplace of Latin America.  The mainline Protestants made limited gains in converts, mostly in urban areas.  Their ranks did not swell, however, because of their lack of cultural resonance.  Mainline Protestants’ emphasis on religious texts and moderated forms of worship did not attract the largely illiterate, indigenous poor of Latin America, who were accustomed to animated forms of worship. 

The political situation of these countries also did not aid in the spread of mainline Protestantism.  Shortly after World War II, the pace of economic change severely slowed in Latin America.  By the early 1960’s, the policies of populist leaders such as Cardenas in Mexico, Perón in Argentina, and Vargas in Brazil, were flagging.[xxvii]  Hopes that the nascent middle class could gain political power and economic prosperity were dashed in the reality of quadruple digit inflation and soaring foreign debt.  Economic policies that tried to make Latin American countries more self-sufficient were structurally incomplete and ironically brought about an increased reliance on foreign powers like the United States.  As economic bedlam took hold, pressure mounted on the part of the elite and international investors to control the situation.  Also, communism had become a greater threat in Latin America after the successful Cuban Revolution of 1959.  Again, the culturally ingrained concept of monistic corporatism surfaced as members of Latin America’s oligarchy sought a solution to their problems in the instillation of powerful bureaucratic authoritarian regimes.   

In this political climate, the progressive ideals that these mainline Protestant groups vaunted and the civic mobilization that they encouraged seemed increasingly dangerous.  Some mainline Protestant churches that criticized the government and encouraged their parishioners to join guerilla fronts suffered became the victims of state-sponsored counterrevolutionary campaigns.[xxviii]  But even in the wake of persecution, mainline Protestant churches identified their role as one of service to the oppressed.  In the spirit of competition in the religious marketplace, the Catholic Church took notice of these Protestant values and formulated their own response to compete with mainline Protestantism’s inroads with the poor. 

To Part II of A Church Responsive

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