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Every Western intellectual knows, or used to know, what to think about the Latin American base communities. But as soon as the peak of their influence in the seventies in confronting the "national security state" was over, a cloud of unknowing settled over them. Though clearly important as a channel for democratization, once that was partially achieved other popular movements emerged. Base community influence on these was slight, and members who had taken prudent shelter under religious aegis departed for more congenial venues. Naturally, where the Church still provided the principal means of protest, for example, in rural Brazil, base communities retained their role, as Madeleine Adriance's Promised Land (1995) convincingly demonstrates.
One problem has always been rhetorical inflation. Liberation theologians writing for a Western public found it anxious to believe in the miracle of a Roman Catholic conversion to the Left. As a result, when one harbinger of deflation, the Canadian William Hewitt, produced quite modest empirical findings, he did so almost sotto voce, as if not quite wanting to be heard. In his Base Christian Communities and Social Change in Brazil (1991), Hewitt reported on research into base communities undertaken from 1984 to 1988 in the progressive diocese of Sao Paulo. He showed that they had indeed encouraged a sense of empowerment, for women as well as for men, and had many achievements to their credit, at least in local politics with respect to issues such as education and sewerage. But he also stressed how many kinds of community there were along a spectrum from the devotional to the political and noted their dependence on pastoral agents and sympathetic bishops. Clearly they were vulnerable as the alliance of progressives and moderates weakened and the Church was no longer engaged with a clearly defined political antagonist. Moreover, the women who made up the majority of the 4 million or so members did not always find their special interests welcome. This is not at all to say that Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism (the title of Daniel Levine's important 1992 study) were not being raised and heard. They were, but expectations needed adjustment.
The impact of John Burdick's study Looking for God in Brazil (1993) was maybe more direct. Burdick analyzed small groups in a working-class community in a neighborhood of Rio, comparing the relative impact of base communities, spiritists, and Pentecostals. Though he was clearly sympathetic to the base communities, his comparisons were in many ways favorable to the Pentecostals. Whether one looked at the barely literate, the impoverished, women in difficulty, or colored people experiencing discrimination, Pentecostals could be more effective. Just because base communities were continuous with Brazilian culture, they worked with more established sectors of the poor and found it less easy to create a space for transformation through conversion and group discipline. By contrast, Pentecostals built on a dualism between the household of faith and the corrupt world and so were better able to tame machismo and to secure the integrity of the family, as well as to internalize conscientious self-discipline with respect to work, domestic violence, drugs, and drink. The problems of women were more effectively dealt with by pastors than by a celibate priesthood, and the guilts of both women and men could be discharged and remitted elsewhere. These were radical changes. David Lehmann in his Struggle for the Spirit (1996) characterized it as a new indifference to whether or not the Brazilian intelligentsia pronounced their way of life "authentic" popular culture.
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