Latin America: Challenge of a New Day

In a colorful village of Guatemala, nine witchdoctors destroy their amulets and accept the Christian Gospel. At the same time, 40,000 of their countrymen enthusiastically join in an unprecedented year-long evangelistic thrust that still goes on. Deep in the Ecuadorian jungle an Auca assassin is won to the faith by the widow and sister of his victims. Simultaneously, at the other end of the continent Billy Graham draws the greatest crowds of his career. Over radio, by television, and on street corners, thousands of Latin American evangelicals bear their sustained witness to Jesus Christ.

These tokens—still sporadic, still spotty, to be sure—reflect a vital, growing Protestant Christianity in the great continent to the south of us. Rising up like Gulliver to burst its Lilliputian bonds, it promises to stretch and cast its shadow not only across Latin America but to the world outside.

For centuries Latin America was a castle fortress with the ocean as its moat. Spanish galleons fought off the marauding attacks of Francis Drake and Henry Morgan and moved in stately convoys to transport the New World’s wealth back to Hispanic shores. The Spanish Armada was intended primarily to defend a commercial monopoly. But it served also to make the Latin American castle as impregnable to alien missionaries as to alien merchants, effectively isolating it from “foreign” culture and religion.

Within its castle walls, Roman Catholicism suffered from both lack of priests and lack of competition. Aided by the “Holy Inquisition,” Romanism evolved in peculiar Latin American forms, with syncretistic tendencies and emphasis on the visible and sensual forms of worship and practice. Its political and cultural entrenchment became absolute, despite its minimal spiritual impact on the inner life of the people.

The hierarchical structure and authoritarianism of the Roman Catholic system, together with the Spanish tendency to personalize all movements and loyalties, prepared Latin minds for easy acceptance of the dictatorships that have plagued most of their nations at one time or other. Although there is almost universal commitment to the ideals of democracy, constitutional government remains largely an unsatisfied aspiration. Violent revolution is the accepted pattern of power transferral from one regime to the next. And some countries have had more revolutions than elections—or even more than their years of history!

The medieval concept of education for the elite only, practiced by the Roman Catholic Church, not only kept the masses submissive but tended as well to stratify society, perpetuating the evils of feudalism in the patrón-peón pattern.

The moral laxity of priests, conquistadores, and colonists—easily condoned in the remoteness of colonial life—found equally easy absolution in the superficial treatment of sin in Catholic thought and practice. A further tragedy was the syncretism whereby in many instances the pagan rites of the natives of the land were incorporated into Catholic worship and practice.

Most significant for the colonies of Latin America was the unfortunate Roman Catholic divorce of religion and life. Most Latin Americans today would not embrace Catholicism if doing so were to restrict their red-blooded self-indulgence. But Roman Catholicism has a remarkable talent for appealing to the imagination of its people without laying too great a burden upon their will. Thus, while 88 per cent of the population is claimed by the church, in reality the number of practicing Catholics averages about 17 per cent, according to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. Latin America is not nearly so Catholic as is claimed.

As might be expected, these conditions, together with the phenomenal growth of Protestantism in recent years (see page 5), have occasioned in Roman Catholic circles considerable alarm and no little activity. On the one hand, there are signs of inner renewal, new interest in the Bible, and a Vatican Council-inspired thaw towards the “separated brethren” of Protestant camps. On the other hand, a sharply stepped-up tempo of Catholic missionary activity and entrenchment can be noted as Romanism is awakening to its compromised posture. Of the Catholic missionaries sent abroad from the United States, 38.5 per cent are now in Latin America, their number having increased during the last two years by 24 per cent in Central America and 27 per cent in South America. Yet even these 2,751 American Catholic missionaries represent only 7 per cent of the total Catholic missionary force in Latin America. From Spain alone there are more than 18,000. And the cry is for still more.

Protestant Christians (or “evangelicals,” as they are synonymously called in Latin America) likewise reflect their environment. As a natural reaction against the traditional Romanism of his pre-conversion period, the Protestant tends thereafter to be anti-ritualistic in his worship, puritanical in his ethic, and democratic in his exercise of the priesthood of all believers. More thoughtful evangelicals find in their own convictions and ministry the fulfillment rather than the contradiction of Rome. They see themselves as heirs of the great tradition of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystics, whose evangelical flame was snuffed out by the Inquisition, and of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, immortal missionary to the Indians.

Into this heritage the evangelicals have introduced positive elements of their own. First and foremost, they are biblical in their theology and evangelistic zeal. This spiritual vigor stems from the pioneering work of the Bible societies and from the fact that Protestant work in Latin America was sired by either Pentecostals, evangelically oriented “faith” missions, or evangelical elements in the historic denominations. Except for a few small “pockets,” theological liberalism is absent.

Apart from its tremendous unfulfilled task of evangelism, the Church’s principal problem today is to effect a successful transition from a tiny minority group to a self-reliant and responsible segment of Latin American society. This process involves adoption of continually expanding evangelistic goals, for this is why the Church exists; its purpose is redemptive. It also involves the achievement of self-support and self-direction. But it includes something more: the assumption of social responsibilities hitherto neglected, and the definition of attitudes towards other social sectors and movements long ignored. Protestant Christians cannot in scriptural conscience wash their hands of the enormous social problems facing Latin America:

Poverty. Two out of every three Bolivians, for example, have never touched money. Only 1 per cent of the population of Latin America is affluent, and 65 per cent live in what we would call extreme poverty.

Ignorance. José Figueres says that there are seventeen million school children of primary-school age in Latin America who are not in school. More than half the adults cannot read or write.

Sickness. Average life expectancy is between thirty-five and forty years (as compared with about seventy in the United States). One who is living on less than half the daily required minimum of calories is especially prone to parasites, tuberculosis, and other diseases. More than half the population goes to bed hungry every night.

Illegitimacy. Nearly 80 per cent of the births in El Salvador are outside wedlock. Jamaica and many other countries are not far behind.

Economic feudalism. In Chile 1 per cent of the property owners possess 43 per cent of the land in cultivation. In Bolivia, 6.3 per cent own 91.9 per cent. More than 50 per cent of Latin American wealth is in the hands of 2 per cent of its population.

Militarism. Latin America spends $967,000,000 annually—more than 50 per cent of the aggregate national budgets—to maintain armed forces. Argentina has not fought a war since 1870, but has a well-armed force of 150,000 which controls the government.

To these could be added an interminable list of other problems: industrialization, slums, inflation, alcoholism, prostitution, governmental corruption, bribery, an antiquated penal system, inequitable taxation, and the like. These clamor for attention. And while they must never supplant the primacy of evangelism, the Latin American is discovering that he cannot be unmoved by the problems of social justice.

Equally urgent is the need for defining evangelical attitudes towards Romanism, Communism, and the Protestant ecumenical movement.

As long as evangelicals were a small and persecuted minority, they were forced to fight for their lives. Now they find themselves caught in the Roman Catholic thaw, and they are insecure. Should they continue to indulge in polemics and present an embattled front to Rome? Or should they try a more positive witness?

In the light of lessons learned in Cuba, what attitude should evangelicals take towards Communism and the social benefits it purports to espouse? Can they help prevent the anarchy of another Red revolution?

Within the fold of Protestantism itself, an issue of growing significance is the “ecumenical movement,” whose agencies and representatives show increasing interest in Latin America. Will Latin American Protestants react against the divisiveness of their brethren in the United States by welcoming the ecumenical embrace? Or will they continue to import a doctrine of “separation” that builds lines and divisions where now there exists fraternal unity and doctrinal harmony? Or is there a third way?

The Latin American evangelical church has come of age. The scale of priorities which it establishes in the areas of evangelism, social action, and religious relationships will, in God’s hands, determine to what extent the present phenomenal growth of the Gospel can be projected into the future. The essays in this issue trace the Church’s development to the present and its current posture in facing new responsibilities.

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