Latin America and World Christianity
Editors: Manoela Carpenedo and Pedro Feitoza
Despite its globalising and ecumenical aspirations, there remain significant geographical and confessional blind spots in the literature in World Christianity. As the leading sociologist of religion, globalisation and politics Paul Freston has remarked in an interview for this special issue, Latin America is the Cinderella of World Christianity, the continent left out of the party. We believe there are a number of reasons for that. The first has to do with the genealogy of the field. The study of Christianity in Africa generated much of the initial intellectual impetus for World Christianity. The key architect of the field, British mission historian Andrew Walls, before establishing the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at the University of Aberdeen in 1982, also founded the Journal of Religion in Africa in 1967, an important venue for the study of local seizures of the Christian faith in the continent and its interactions with Islam and traditional religion. Since the interest around World Christianity emerged in part out of a critique of the links between mission and empire, the initial intellectual capital and interest for it flourished in former British colonial territories. Notably in Britain, some of the leading scholarly influences of the field spent part of their careers in colonial and post-colonial Africa as lecturers, teachers and researchers, including Adrian Hastings, Terence Ranger, John Peel, David Maxwell and Emma Wild-Wood. Specialists in South and East Asia, most of them theologians based in North American institutions, also joined the party and made decisive contributions to World Christianity literature, including Robert Frykenberg, Kirsteen and Sebastian Kim, Peter Phan, Alexander Chow and Chloë Starr. Although there have been recent attempts to correct this imbalance, such as the appointment of Brazilian theologian Raimundo Barreto, Jr, as co-editor of the Journal of World Christianity, scholarly attention to Latin America still lags far behind the academic literature on Africa and Asia. Second, another crucial stream that shaped the concerns of World Christianity scholars and students was a focus on Protestantism, especially its evangelical variants. The first two generations of scholars who built up the field, such as Walls, Brian Stanley, Dana Robert, Mark Hutchinson, Mark Noll and Ogbu Kalu, came from Protestant backgrounds and were experts in mostly Protestant and evangelical history and theology: Lamin Sanneh was the notable exception. Catholicism, the form of Christianity that has historically predominated in Latin America, also lags behind, while Orthodoxy only makes occasional appearances in the literature and conferences.
The other reasons for the marginality of Latin America in World Christianity are not directly related to the genesis of the field, but to linguistic and intellectual issues. ‘World Christianity’ is too Anglophone as a concept, and does not translate easily and as meaningfully into other languages. The Spanish and Portuguese versions of the term, cristianismo mundial, do not convey a similar meaning or sound immediately familiar to readers. As historian Brian Stanley, another key architect of the field, has noted, even though the global evangelical culture that emerged in the post-World War II era reached across national boundaries and engaged a wider range of voices from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, it nevertheless was a movement whose lingua franca was English. Finally, the intellectual elites in Latin America, both Catholic and Protestant, that decisively influenced theological and missiological discourse in the continent were highly suspicious of globalisation as both an analytical concept and a social process. Catholic thinkers such as Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez and Argentine Enrique Dussel grounded their theological and philosophical reflection on a critique of the evolution of capitalist world-systems and the globalised political economy informed by social scientists such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Guillermo O’Donnell and Immanuel Wallerstein. Similarly, evangelical theologians such as Ecuadorian René Padilla and Peruvian Samuel Escobar developed their concept of missión integral out of a critique of the globalisation of ‘American culture Christianity’, which in their view wove evangelical identities and American culture together and served as a homogenising religious force.
Yet, Latin America has long been a site of intense religious experimentation and creativity, where both the Counter-Reformation model of Iberian Christendom and popular Catholic religiosity penetrated the religious landscape of the region; where both mainline Protestant and charismatic evangelicals spread rapidly and created a powerful institutional machinery that enabled self-reproduction and public projection; and where a wide variety of religious practices and beliefs interacted and mixed together. The continent is also an important religious force on the global stage: the radio channels and television programmes of charismatic Catholics are transmitted widely across the world and inspire transnational devotions, while Neo-Pentecostal churches founded in Brazil have been remarkably successful internationally, notably in southern Africa. The region exudes a religious vitality that dissolves the boundaries between religious belief and practice, political action and social activism, and permeates human relations.
This special issue addresses some of these conundrums by looking at the multifaceted role played by Christian religion in the historical and contemporary socio-cultural formations in the continent. The essays that follow examine the embodiments of Catholic and evangelical faith in the region, carefully considering the multiple entanglements between Christian religion, social change, globalisation and politics. Our contributors examine the impact of traditionalist Catholic ideas in shaping conceptions of gender and nationality in contemporary Argentina; the surprising emergence of Zionist symbols and images in Brazilian favelas controlled by evangelical drug traffickers; the complex political and transnational entanglements involved in processes of saint-making in colonial Spain and Spanish America; and reconsider the relationship between eschatological expectations and political action amongst Chilean Pentecostals in the twentieth century.
- Eduardo Ángel Cruz, ‘Entangled Sainthood: Imperial Canonisations and the Invention of Saints in Colonial Latin America’
- Joseph Florez, ‘Pentecostal Eschatology, Public Discourse and Political Engagement in Chile’
- Christina Vital da Cunha, ‘Pentecostal Culture and Imaginaries about Jews and Israel in Favelas: The Case of Complexo de Israel (Rio de Janeiro)’
- Maria Bargo, ‘Traditionalist Catholicism: The Case of the Society of Saint Pius X in Argentina’
- Paul Freston and Pedro Feitoza, ‘An Interview with Paul Freston’
Taken together, these articles extend the argument of Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston and Stephen Dove, who suggested viewing the entire history of Latin America as religious history by tracking precisely the varieties of Christian religion that took root in Latin America and examining how they evolved, adapted and have been mobilised in multiple cultural, social, economic and political settings. Finally, our contributors combine, in varying degrees, rigorous and thorough ethnographic study and analysis of primary historical sources with the theological sensibility that has long characterised the scholarship on World Christianity, looking at how Christian theological ideas are filtered down to the daily lives of ordinary converts.
This is an excerpt from the editorial of SWC 30.3 by Manoela Carpenedo and Pedro Feitoza, entitled ‘Latin America and World Christianity’.