CT Institute: Why Is Latin America Turning Protestant?

In the midst of the region’s economic and political upheaval, God may be creating nothing less than a new Reformation.

The Pope is concerned. In the aftermath of his second visit to Brazil, his eleventh to Latin America, it is clear that he doesn’t pull people in as he used to. In Brazil—supposedly the most Catholic nation in the world—the usual throngs just did not materialize: for one scheduled event, 500,000 people were expected, but only 100,000 showed up. In contrast, on the morning of the Pope’s arrival, 200,000 evangelicals packed a soccer stadium for a rally sponsored by a local church, underscoring the fact that over a half-million Brazilians are leaving the Catholic church for evangelical churches each year.

A tidal wave of change is sweeping Latin America and transforming the face of an entire continent. Two recent books (David Martin’s Tongues of Fire and David Stoll’s Is Latin America Turning Protestant?) have created a stir by telling the story almost everyone else missed. While the press and religious establishment focused on the drama of liberation theology and its potential to bring the church back to the people, evangelical churches were proliferating at a staggering rate among the poor.

In nearly every nation in the region, the number of Protestants has increased significantly. According to Patrick Johnstone of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, the number of evangelicals has tripled regionwide in the past 25 years and in some countries has even sextupled. Stoll extrapolates from these numbers: “If it triples again over the next 25 years, by 2010 evangelicals will be a third of the population. At that point even slowed growth would soon make Protestants a majority in Latin America.” According to Brazilian Catholic Bishop Boaventura Kloppenburg, Latin America is becoming Protestant more rapidly than central Europe did in the sixteenth century.

The more than 400 groups planting churches in Guatemala might make it the first predominantly evangelical country in Latin America. The 30 percent of Guatemalans professing evangelical faith were largely responsible for the election last January of Jorge Serrano Elías, the first evangelical president elected in Latin America. Stoll predicts that by the year 2000, Brazil, El Salvador, and Honduras will join Guatemala as predominantly evangelical nations.

As Rome grapples with stemming the tide, evangelical successes don’t seem to stop:

• An estimated 259,500 flocked to Billy Graham’s Buenos Aires crusade last November. The choir alone in this crusade would almost have filled the 5,000-seat stadium that was the site of Graham’s first Argentine crusade in 1962.

• The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, an independent Pentecostal church started 15 years ago with a handful of people by self-appointed bishop Edir Macedo de Bezerra, now has two million worshipers meeting in 800 temples throughout Latin America, Portugal, Angola, and the U.S. The flock is nurtured through 2,000 pastors, a TV network, and radio stations.

• Nilson Fanini’s First Baptist Church of Niterói in Brazil began 28 years ago when Fanini established free schools for poor children. His ministry now adopts thousands of babies a year and operates clinics, a seminary, schools, and 20 churches with about 10,000 believers.

• Stories abound of guerrillas throughout the Latin jungles and sierras exchanging their guns for Bibles. One of these, a founding member of Peru’s brutal Shining Path, became a Christian and now serves as a missionary to another country.

The Protestant explosion in Latin America is not just about numbers, though. It is also about an entire culture changing.

For centuries, to be Latino was to be Catholic. You were born and baptized, you lived and died with everyone making the sign of the cross. Now young people toting Bibles can be seen in the crammed public buses (Latin Catholics tend to keep their Bibles at home); whole families go to former movie theaters and storefront churches peppering the cityscape, not for mass, but for el culto (worship); families split over religious differences; and to cap it off, in Peru, a president has been elected with the help of evangelicals. “What are they doing to our culture?” many Catholics cry.

Lest Protestants grow smug over evangelical gains, there are sobering issues as well:

• Catholic backlash. Catholics are often resentful, appalled, or confused about evangelical strategies. Hear the voices of two Latin American Catholic families: “They burned the Virgin of Coricancha!” “They take advantage of our Catholic holidays to proselytize.” “They make their churches more important than our families.” “They take advantage of the poor through false promises and then indoctrinate them.” “They have vast financial resources to use radio and TV to gain political power.”

The Catholic church counterattacks evangelical criticisms with paid ads, street marches, and sermons denouncing los evangélicos. The strained relations leave little room for the two churches to work together against common enemies of secularization, injustice, hunger, terrorism, and cults.

• Terrorist threats. In several Latin countries, national and foreign workers have been killed by both the guerrillas and the military fighting them. Though Catholic and evangelical Christians are doing heroic work in the emergency zones, one mission leader told Pacific News Service’s Robin Kirk, “As long as we can remain peaceably in areas the Shining Path controls, we will stay. But when my missionaries think they have to arm themselves to stay, then I am going to take them out.”

• Competition with false religions. It is not just evangelicals enjoying the spiritual bull market. Spiritists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and indigenous sects are bursting with new members, many of whom come from evangelical churches. Last year the Witnesses packed the same stadium Billy Graham filled in his triumphant Argentine crusade. Also, to the evangelicals’ chagrin, the media often lump them together with the cults.

• An immature church. The abysmal lack of formal training (175,000 pastors without it, according to John Maust of the Latin America Evangelist) exposes churches to bickering, splintering, and inadequate nurture of new believers. Latin America Mission missionary John Stam told Stoll that many “churches are arrogantly calling themselves biblical and Christian, with no idea of what those words mean.” And many churches are experiencing the revolving-door phenomenon where many convert but do not stay in the church. The church’s need for mature leaders has stimulated the emergence of various creative theological education programs, such as Milton Pope’s Bible Institute in Argentina, with 3,800 students enrolled in evening and weekend programs. However, many of the most gifted leaders get recruited by U.S. mission agencies to work in their headquarters, away from the leaders’ congregations.

Evangelical churches have also been slow in responding to the social and economic plight of the people around them. Elena Segura, a social worker in the Episcopal Church in Chicago, said after a recent visit to Latin America that the reason Pentecostals are doing more social service after years of passivity is that “Shining Path’s message of justice has affected them.”

The articles that follow demonstrate that much is happening in and through Latin evangelicals. If it can surmount the dangers, the Latin evangelical church could be uniquely qualified to respond to the region’s social, political, economic, and spiritual convulsions.

By Andres Tapia, a technical writer and journalist of Preuvian and Anglo descent.

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