The Changing Spectrum of Religious Activism in Latin America

Research on religion and politics in Latin America has changed focus dramatically since the second edition of J. Lloyd Mecham's classic Church and State in Latin America appeared in 1966. Originally written in the 1930s, Mecham's book concentrated attention on formal church-state relations throughout Latin America from the conquest to the 20th century. For decades it was the standard work on the subject. However, in the late 1960s the subject itself began to be redefined in the face of growing religious activism and new patterns of social involvement on the part of the Roman Catholic church.' By the end of the 1980s, a substantial body of research offered broad insights into two decades of intense religious activism. This research demonstrated the importance of looking beyond formal issues of church and state to the broader social arenas in which religion and politics interact. It became clear that modernization in Latin America had not led to the irrelevance of the Roman Catholic church or to a decline of religious faith but that, in spite of the reinvigoration of Catholicism, evangelical Protestantism was spreading with astonishing speed.2 Sheer numbers hardly tell the story, but they command attention. In 1968 there were approximately 12 million Protestants in Latin America. In 1980 that figure had doubled to 25 million, and by 1988 it had doubled again to more than 55 million. In Brazil, the largest Catholic country in the world, almost 20 percent of the population was Protestant by the end