A Latin Great Awakening

Also reviewed in this section:

All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, by Kenneth A. Myers

Keeping the Sabbath Wholly, by Marva J. Dawn

A Stranger in the Kingdom, by Howard Frank Mosher

Dictionary of Christianity in America

The Wizard’s Tide, by Frederick Buechner

The Illuminating Icon, by Anthony Ugolnik

A Latin Great Awakening

Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America, by David Martin (Basil Blackwell, 342 pp.; $39.95, hardcover). Is Latin America Becoming Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth, by David Stoll (University of California Press, 424 pp.; $24.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Samuel Escobar, Thomley B. Wood Professor of Missiology, Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

In the last three decades there has been a remarkable growth of Protestantism in Latin America, especially of evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Yet it has become commonplace among academics in the North and the South to follow the interpretative line of liberation and ecumenical theologians and to attack or dismiss fast-growing evangelical churches as fundamentalists, using that word in an overtly derogatory way. The well-organized communication system of the Catholic Left and the WCC-related bodies have added their quota of criticism by stressing the North American connections and the supposed social passivity of these evangelicals and Pentecostals.

These books by David Martin and David Stoll will no doubt provoke controversy in all these circles. If taken seriously, they will help to clarify some issues and dismiss some myths. Though Martin is well known as a sociologist of religion, the fact that his study has been sponsored by Peter Berger will subject his book to a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in liberal and liberationist circles. On the other hand, David Stoll had very good credentials with the Latin American Left as a result of his previous book, Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire?, allegedly an exposé of Wycliffe Bible Translators, published in Spanish by DESCO, a German-financed leftist think tank in Lima, Peru. I have serious doubts that DESCO will translate this second book of Stoll’s.

Though both authors show deep interest and even enthusiasm about their subject—to the point of having processed patiently an incredible amount of information—for them Latin American Protestantism is basically a subject for research, and neither has a missiological perspective. Both books, however, will be very helpful for the practitioner of mission, the church statesman, and the student of Latin American affairs.

The Facts And Figures Of Revolution

Stoll had two goals when he conceived this book: “I wanted to explain the Evangelical awakening in Latin America to nonbelievers, myself included … [and] I wanted to warn evangelicals … against allowing their missions to be subordinated into the militaristic and immoral policies emanating from Washington.”

The amount of information Stoll has accumulated is considerable and provides a good foundation for the conclusions at which he arrives. The evidence makes him dismiss the “conspiracy theories” with which the Roman Catholic hierarchies, both conservative and progressive, try to explain away the presence and unexpected growth of evangelicals and Pentecostals.

Abundant evidence also gives ground to his conclusion in relation to his second concern. Several Latin American evangelicals, like this reviewer, agree that Stoll’s warning should be taken very seriously: “To the extent that the religious right’s visions of holy war continue to infuse American foreign policy, the activities of all evangelicals will be identified with it. Missionaries will continue to face accusations of working for the U.S. government, and they will have mainly themselves to blame, by failing to take a stand against the perversion of their message.”

David Martin’s book majors in interpretation and has been more selective in the presentation of facts. Martin uses Latin American Protestantism as a broad frame to interpret “the four hundred year clash between the Hispanic imperium and the Anglo-Saxon imperium” and “the dramatically different ways in which Catholic cultures and Protestant cultures have entered into what we call modernity.”

For contrast, he also provides a sociological interpretation of the evolution of Protestantism in Europe, using the rise of Methodism as a model for understanding Pentecostalism in Latin America.

Martin’s conclusions are especially valuable for the missiologist. In relation to the Catholic background, he concludes that “as far as the larger ethnic groupings are concerned their openness to Protestantism depends on the depth of Catholic coverage currently provided.” And in relation to the sociological conditions, “By far the largest conduit for evangelical Protestantism is provided by the massive movement of people from the countryside or hacienda to the mega-city. The new society now emerging in Latin America has to do with movement, and evangelicals constitute a movement.”

As it is to be expected from this type of study, Martin and Stoll are especially interested in the social effect of the evangelical presence and message. Pentecostalism is explained by Martin as a way in which “millions of people are absorbed within a protective social capsule where they acquire new concepts of self and new models of initiative and voluntary organization.” He thinks that like Methodism at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Pentecostalism flourishes today in Latin America as a “temporary efflorescence of voluntary religiosity which accompanies a stage in industrialization and/or urbanization,” but he points out that the European experience may not necessarily provide a universal paradigm.

On the other hand, Stoll believes that “the history of social movements is replete with shifts from a redemptive (saving one’s soul) to a transformative (changing the world) emphasis, or vice-versa, often after the first generation.”

As he speculates about the future social effect of evangelicals and Pentecostals in Latin America, he envisages three possible scenarios: a confrontation with the state that would make them a redemptive force; social mobility that would create a dynamic rising middle sector to change society by negotiation and leadership ability; or, third, a failure to become a major force for social change because of sectarianism and a refusal to assume political responsibilities.

Though he thinks that the third “is the most defensible scenario at present,” he also believes that “evangelical Protestants are giving Latin Americans a new form of social organization and a new way to express their hopes,” thus acting as “survival vehicles” in a time of serious social crisis. “Where traditional social organization is breaking up,” concludes Stoll, “evangelical churches constitute new, more flexible groups in which participation is voluntary, where leadership is charismatic, and which are therefore more adaptable to rapidly changing conditions.”

Bourgeois Liberation

Martin and Stoll also develop a fascinating critique of the legacy and significance of liberation theology. Martin reminds us that “[l]iberation theology is a major rival to Pentecostalism,” a reason that explains why the more cautious members of the Catholic hierarchy have accepted it in spite of its critical attitude toward traditional Catholicism. He then points out that liberation theology has not been successful in stopping the Pentecostal advance. “The reason,” says Martin, “is that however much it represents ‘an option for the poor’ taken up by hundreds of thousands of the poor themselves, that option is most eloquently formulated by radical intellectuals … not usually ‘of the people.’ Liberation theology has a decidedly middle class and radical intellectual accent alien to the localized needs of ‘the poor.’ ”

Stoll agrees with Martin: “The central exercise in liberation theology, consciousness-raising, raises a tangle of issues. To begin with there is a risk of failing to speak to the actual needs of the poor as opposed to idealized versions of those needs.”

Stoll comments that the kind of defiance of the established order that liberation theologians encourage among the poor “have been suicidal in many times and places.” His criticism becomes acid when he points out that “given this fact of life out in the hard places where liberation theology must prove itself, the frequent assumptions of the need for revolutionary upheaval indicate that more or less safely situated intellectuals have had an outsized role in its production.”

Stoll’s description of the alternative role played by evangelicals in these conflicts is worth careful consideration: “Evangelicals also captured the poor emotionally, in ways highly politicized Christians often failed to. In the most difficult situations, calls for revolutionary commitment were not engaging the religiosity of the people and sustaining them through long, hard years of struggle for survival, at least not in the way that evangelical sects could. As revolutionary visions faded into the grim reality of endless political violence, governments encouraged evangelicals to pick up the pieces.”

Not all the conclusions reached by Martin and Stoll will resist the confrontation with facts that they only know partially and that insiders understand better. Evangelical and Catholic missiologists will assess critically interpretations that lack the illumination that theology can provide. Sociological and anthropological studies are not the source from where missiologists derive their agenda, but they can be very helpful to understand better the empirical realities of the Christian mission.

Giving A Bop To Pop

All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture, by Kenneth A. Myers (Crossway, 213 pp.; $8.95, paper). Reviewed by Steve Rabey, a writer living in Colorado Springs.

Asking American Christians to analyze popular culture is a bit like asking a fish to evaluate water. Even if the water is highly polluted, the fish can’t distinguish between the endangered self and the toxic environment.

Into these turbid waters dives Ken Myers, whose book All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes urges Christians to understand pop culture—that omnipresent wall of images, sound, and hot air that includes everything from “Donahue” to Madonna to Cosmopolitan. Myers describes our present challenge not in terms of fish and water, however, but in terms of Christians and lions.

“The challenge of living with popular culture may well be as serious for modern Christians as persecutions and plagues were for the saints of earlier centuries,” writes Myers, who edits newsletters on culture and public policy and formerly served as editor of the now-deceased Eternity magazine. But he is convinced today’s followers of Christ don’t need to be devoured, and the bulk of All God’s Children is committed to helping us get a grip on the brave new world pop culture has given us.

This Is Not Your Father’S World

The story of Lot in Sodom and Paul’s discussion of meat offered to idols in 1 Corinthians 10 provide the theological framework in which Myers discusses how twentieth-century Christians should cope with our culture. Like Lot and his family, American Christians have submitted themselves to the influences of a godless culture. While we haven’t joined a coven or New Age cult, he claims that we have bowed down to the gods of immediacy, diversion, and distraction. We haven’t endured death, violence, and rape, but we have stood idly by as the culture merchants have persuaded us to sacrifice art for entertainment and to give up personality for “celebrityism.” The surprising thing is that all this has happened with our permission and at the electronic hands of the very gadgets we trust to help us relax.

Not that Christians aren’t concerned; they are. Some boycott mainstream culture, while others create a “parasite” parallel Christian culture. But both strategies make the same mistake: focusing on pop culture’s content while ignoring its greater, nastier power—its sensibilities.

Advocates of the boycott approach won’t find a handy hit list here. Myers calls us “not to change the world, but to understand it,” a rare challenge in these days of shoot-from-the-hip evangelical culture critiques.

Nor will advocates of a copy-cat Christian subculture find much support. Whether it’s “Christian” rock music, “Christian” soap operas, or worship music that takes its cues from Barry Manilow, Myers argues that this carbon-copy approach “takes all its cues from its secular counterpart, but sanitizes and customizes it with ‘Jesus language.’ ” Myers effectively argues that such efforts further reveal the church’s enslavement to cultural forms that “effectively cancel out the content you’re trying to communicate.”

Balanced Diet

How, as cultural beings, should we then live? Myers has plenty of good advice. He begins with Paul’s exhortation to the troubled believers in Corinth: all things are permissible, but not everything that is permissible is constructive. He calls us out of our comfort and couch-potatoism into a “culture of transcendence.” He begs us to consider our ever-growing appetite for cultural junk food, urging us to expand our tastes by substituting our unhealthy diet of TV sitcoms and movies of spectacle for a balanced diet that includes art, music, literature—and even TV shows and films—whose quality and values reflect our inherent sense of nature’s ordered beauty and our Spirit-illumined sense of truth.

Along the way, Myers delivers a solid analysis of folk, high, and pop cultures. He reaffirms the validity of making qualitative aesthetic judgments, and as if to prove his point makes quite a few himself. And he challenges those who have given in to cultural relativism, sounding a bit like Allan Bloom when he holds classical and contemporary music to the same high standard: “When I say I ‘like’ Bach, and you say you ‘like’ Bon Jovi, are we really using the same verb?”

Myers clearly shows that our cultural choices mean more than the difference between “The Simpsons” and “Roseanne.” They are part of a bigger whole. “If our cultural lives are sick, it is likely to be an impediment to our spiritual lives.”

While Myers has not offered an approved list of TV shows, films, and CDs, he has performed a greater service to the church. He has articulated the major concepts in which each of us can work out our life between the “eschatological parentheses” of Christ’s resurrection and his return. “The main question raised by popular culture concerns the most edifying way to spend one’s time,” writes Myers. “If we cannot expect our culture to be a holy enterprise, we can at least try to avoid participating in its profanities.”

Book Briefs

God’S Health Plan

Lutheran theologian Marva Dawn wants Christians to rediscover the Sabbath. In Keeping the Sabbath Wholly (Eerdmans, $10.95), she argues that by focusing on beauty, worship, and rest on one day, we can be more aware and faithful on the other six days of the week. The Sabbath can become a garden park amid “the technization of life,” returning us to a place of tranquillity and intimacy with God.

Even in the midst of the current renewal of interest in spiritual disciplines, the importance of Sabbath practices sometimes gets overlooked. And we are the poorer for it. We have forfeited the wholeness that comes from observing God’s intended rhythm of working six days and setting apart one day for worship, rest, festivity, and relationships. The solution Dawn offers is a “quartet” of Sabbath functions: ceasing, resting, embracing, and feasting.

In this popularly written and practical book, Dawn is more reformer than scold. She weights her discussions on the side of the benefits of Sabbath keeping, not the perils of neglect. Anecdotes from her years of personal grappling with finding a place for Sabbath show that the battle to guard a Sabbath time of rest, worship, and recreation will be hard won. She has found that abstaining from work weekly (the Hebrew shabbat means primarily “to cease or desist,” she notes) not only allows her to honor God but also provides a means for keeping her values on track.

While Dawn writes with the fervency of a convert, she avoids the temptation of legalism. Hers is a an attractive, sane vision of Sabbath rhythms. It grows out of her reading of Scripture, research into a wealth of Jewish Sabbath traditions, and reflection on her own Christian experience.

But some things would have helped this volume. For all its helpful suggestions about practice, the book avoids almost completely the issues surrounding the when of Sabbath keeping. At least some discussion about the controversies of church history could have strengthened her approach.

Overall, Dawn gives the interested Sabbath keeper wise advice on how to honor a day Jewish tradition greets with the anticipation reserved for a queen or beloved bride.

By Timothy K. Jones.

Troubled Kingdom

The United Protestant Church of Kingdom Common called a new Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Walter Andrews. It had not been easy to find someone willing to come to the remote village in Vermont, but the former chaplain in the Royal Canadian Air Force seemed eager. He was so qualified the search committee made its decision after only a few telephone interviews. They were in for a surprise.

Their new pastor was black. By bringing his teenage son, he raised the black population in Kingdom County to two. Thus Howard Frank Mosher sets up the narrative tension in his novel A Stranger in the Kingdom (Doubleday, $18.95).

The story is told from the point of view of Jim Kinneson, 13-year-old son of the local newspaper editor, and it is richly evocative of small-town boyhood in 1952. That summer, though, brought more than the gentle joys of baseball and trout fishing.

When a 17-year-old runaway comes to Kingdom, Andrews tries to find a place for her to stay. But no one in the congregation will have her, so he must take her in until another arrangement can be found. Tongues wag, but gossip is just the start of the trouble.

The girl’s brutal murder opens the door of the town’s soul, as it were, allowing ugly demons of racial hatred to escape. The trial, reminiscent of the one in To Kill a Mockingbird, becomes a study in fear and prejudice.

Mosher’s well-written story engages the reader at several levels. First, it is a page-turner. And just below this narrative lurk questions that insist on breaking through to trouble the reader: Why do we fear strangers? What accounts for the prejudice within us that seems more than ready to express itself given the slightest excuse?

But what the novel really offers is a sense of community. Mosher populates his town with characters that would please Dickens—they are not only memorable but true, faithful to both the blessedness and cussedness of ordinary humanity. But for all their individual peculiarities, they are tied together. Invisible bonds of a shared history somehow hold them and won’t let them go. The story of Kingdom Common, therefore, becomes a parable of the common life of another kingdom, of the way a certain history binds together selfish individuals, so often strangers to one another, into an extended family that witnesses to the power of grace over human brokenness.

By Donald McCullough, author of Finding Happiness in the Most Unlikely Places (InterVarsity).

A Dazzling Array

Normally, if you opened a book and found the Huguenots, Humanae Vitae, and Rex Humbard all discussed within two pages, you would assume someone at the book bindery had made a colossal mistake. Further, if you discovered that the book could describe a Reformed church body, papal encyclical, and Pentecostal televangelist with the same accuracy and evenhandedness, you would assume the book would be too bland to attract attention or sell well.

In the case of the recently released Dictionary of Christianity in America (InterVarsity, $39.95), however, both assumptions would be wrong. The DCA is instead a welcome surprise in a field (American religious history) crowded with reference works.

The volume’s 2,400 entries cover everything “from Christopher Columbus to the Crystal Cathedral,” the book jacket claims, and once inside, the reader will find the diversity impressive. With few exceptions, the DCA describes the movements (like Black Catholics), people (like Aimee Semple McPherson), and practices (like foot washing) that have shaped American Christianity. The list of over 400 contributors is virtually a catalogue of active scholars in American religious history.

In the preface, coordinating editor Daniel G. Reid admits the book’s bias toward evangelicalism and the United States; readers with expertise in other traditions or from Canada or Latin America will find gaps. And sharp-eyed historians will quibble over occasional omissions (for example, James Caughey, the enormously popular nineteenth-century Methodist evangelist who greatly influenced Salvation Army founders William and Catherine Booth).

Forget all that. The Dictionary of Christianity in America provides clear, concise information on a dazzling array of items and packages it attractively in one volume. And the cross references, occasional diagrams, and introductory overviews take you from merely consulting it to roaming around in it for fun. InterVarsity Press, not known for reference books, has created a lasting work for historians, pastors, and any American who needs to understand his or her religious heritage or settle a bet.

DCA will not replace the monumental Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience or the colorful Handbook to Christianity in America. But it deserves a place beside them. How else will you find out that in seventeenth-century Florida, Franciscan friars worked with an astounding 30,000 Christian Native Americans? Or that in 1971 evangelist Billy Zeoli changed the spiritual outlook of Gerald Ford?

At $39.95, DCA’s price may seem steep. But skip your next dinner for two and buy it.

By Kevin Miller, editor of CHRISTIAN HISTORY magazine.

A Wintery Journey

“And as they traveled the soft, steep way downward into their dreams, it was always snowing.” It seems to me that this sentence, which ends the first chapter of The Wizard’s Tide (Harper & Row, $13.95), represents not only the essence of this book, but also provides a fitting epigram for Frederick Buechner’s entire corpus.

The “they” of the quote are Teddy Schroeder and his younger sister, Bean, and this short novel takes these children, their parents, and their grandparents from summer to Christmas in 1936. It is a Depression-era story that explores the complex relationships and tensions within a family whose men have lost their jobs and their dignity.

Though Buechner ostensibly retells the story told by Teddy as an adult, the narrative comes from the perspective of Teddy as an 11-year-old. It is therefore straightforward and unsophisticated. With Teddy we experience the specialness of daily life, the magic of birthdays and holidays, and the once-in-a-lifetime event that widens and deepens Teddy’s consciousness—both emotionally and spiritually.

Particularly through Teddy’s observations and his father’s actions, the book portrays a special kind of sadness, one present in both Buechner’s life and in our age as a whole. But, as in most of Buechner’s work, there is a level of faith that undergirds—or perhaps haunts—the narrative and mitigates the sadness, leaving us hopeful (if not actually cheerful).

That Buechner accomplishes all this in only 100 pages is remarkable. The book is very finely crafted, with a strong sense of emotional accumulation and a climax that comes inevitably, though without any sense of authorial intrusion. After many years of successful experimentation, Buechner has here attempted and achieved the hard-won simplicity reminiscent of The Old Man and the Sea and The Great Gatsby.

At its heart, Buechner’s artistic vision tends to explore cold and darkness rather than warmth and light; Buechner’s work moves downward rather than upward. He does not make the confident assertion of Peter, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” but echoes the puzzled, fearful cry of the disciples in the boat, “Who then is this, that the wind and sea obey him?”

By Pat Hargis, assistant professor of literature, Judson College, Elgin, Illinois.

Orphaned Orthodox

The Orthodox church has been called an orphan on American shores. While Catholic, mainline, and evangelical churches battle for the spotlight, Orthodoxy remains on the sidelines. Peter Ugolnik is trying to change that.

Professor of English at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Ugolnik wrote The Illuminating Icon (Eerdmans, $18.95) “to introduce Americans to the spiritual wealth of the Russian [Orthodox] Church.”

Ugolnik feels that because of its theology and recent history, the Orthodox church has four things to teach us. First, Orthodoxy can remind our culture, oriented as it is to the printed word, of the importance of image. Second, Russian Orthodoxy can show individualistic American Christians the wonder and glory of Christian community. Third, Ugolnik believes that Orthodox liturgy can bring a better balance to sermon-centered services of the West, with their undue emphasis on the intellect. And fourth, Russian Orthodoxy can teach us about beauty, which they see as an aspect of holiness.

Ugolnik’s arguments are elaborate and nuanced. The themes of individualism versus community, rationalism versus mystery, and dominance versus submission reverberate throughout the book. In fact, there are moments when the veil is momentarily lifted, and the Western reader is awed by the mystery of Eastern Orthodoxy.

Ugolnik, unfortunately, fails to correlate some of his lofty descriptions of Orthodoxy with the stubborn facts of history. In truth, the Orthodox can be just as factious as the rest of us. Furthermore, in spite of Orthodoxy’s sympathy with theologies that exalt the image and castigate the word, evangelicals must continually probe which images are good, how they affect us, and when they become idolatrous. Protestants may tend toward rationalistic religion, but the Orthodox can promote a foggy faith that turns theology into a warm fuzzy. Our Lord is probably unhappy with both extremes.

By Mark Galli, associate editor of LEADERSHIP journal.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.