Moving beyond modernity in Latin America

Religion, too, would toe modernity’s line. Liberal dictators from Mexico to Guatemala and Brazil saw in the Protestant missionary enterprise a key ideological ally in their battle with 19th Century Latin America’s most powerful and richest institution: the Roman Catholic Church. The schools and hospitals built by the Protestant missionaries, together with their entrepreneurial spirit, would bring local culture into line with emerging European and US thought. In addition, the text-based liturgy and rational theological discourse of the Protestants would challenge Catholicism’s medieval obscurantism.

Something went wrong on the way to the Enlightenment. Almost two centuries of modernity have taken us through endless political and economic unrest only to leave us where we began: as a source of cheap labour and natural resources for the industrialized North. Some have reaped the material benefits of progress, but today in Latin America the gap between rich and poor, men and women, urban and rural, landed and landless is as wide as any place on the planet.

The system that promised reasoned well-being has brought us exclusion, alienation and exhaustion. Despite the on-going heroic efforts of civil society, security, the rule of law, social tolerance and broad-based economic development have yet to flourish in Latin America. Not surprisingly, our commitment to democracy is only skin deep. According to a recent survey sponsored by the United Nations Development Program, 55% of Latin Americans would be willing to accept a non-democratic government if it proved capable of generating widespread economic development (Latinobarómetro: 2004).

What makes a fundamentalist?

Neopentecostals are not the only fundamentalists in Latin American Christendom. The Roman Catholics have Opus Dei and fundamentalist Presbyterian groups are still squabbling about the Westminster Confession. But with their enormous media presence and increasing political power, the Neopentecostals set Latin America’s religious agenda; everyone else responds. Thus, this brief reflection focuses on the Neopentecostals.

What are the marks of religious fundamentalism? Here are some preliminary criteria rooted in years of participant observation and pastoral practice:

Religious fundamentalism offers simple, universal answers to life’s deepest, most complex questions. Fundamentalists claim these answers come from God and portray themselves as defenders of God’s truth.

Latin American religious fundamentalism has its roots in the United States. To understand Latin American fundamentalism, one must go to the source. At the same time, many new religious movements in Latin America have reinvented themselves in their own contexts. Brazilian Neopentecostals have been especially successful at creating religious symbols and messages that are rooted in the complex milieu of African, European and Indigenous spiritualities that make up that country’s religious heritage.

Fundamentalists build personality cults around anointed leaders. This melds nicely with Latin America’s indigenous shamanic traditions and our ongoing infatuation with authoritarian political leaders.

Christian fundamentalists employ the electronic media in sophisticated ways. Early on US fundamentalists made major investments in media infrastructure, both at home and abroad, with the understanding that the media can be used to evangelize and to create a sense of religious community.

Fundamentalism is patriarchal; it proposes controlling women and limiting their leadership. This is especially important at this moment in Latin American history; in recent decades women have been key actors in creating and mobilizing civil society. Examples range from Peruvian soup kitchens to Argentina’s Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo to Guatemala’s Rigoberta Menchú, Rosalina Tuyuc and Nineth Montenegro.

Rise of religious fundamentalism

In this, that was to have been the secular century, traditional religious institutions, both Protestant and Catholic, are indeed in crisis. Nonetheless, religion is thriving. And fundamentalism, those symbolic goods plied by faith healers and television preachers, is firmly entrenched in Latin America’s Christian family. How did religious fundamentalism spread so quickly in Latin America?

For centuries the traditional churches had enough cultural power to suppress a variety of alternative spiritualities ranging from Spiritism to millenarian sects. Alternately, they could force adherents of other belief systems to adapt to the symbolic spaces proffered by the dominant churches. Witness, over the centuries, how Guatemalan Mayans or Afro-Brazilians reached, in their particular contexts, strained accommodations with Roman Catholicism.

With the globalization of consumer culture and the consolidation of global commercial media systems in the nineties, the cultural power of the traditional churches began to wane. Sociologists in Latin America began to speak of a global religious supermarket that competed with traditional religious institutions by eliminating the intermediary and directly offering individual religious consumers a broad variety of symbolic goods.

This coincided with the explosive growth of the Neopentecostal megachurches. By the late eighties, these groups had begun to stage and broadcast elaborate religious spectacles on radio and television. Such churches offered spiritual catharsis to thousands in an attractive theatre setting with high production values. They provided high drama in the form of exorcisms, powerful personal encounters with transcendence and the promise of material blessing.

In the current context of global consumer culture, the concept of material blessing merits special comment. Classic Pentecostals tend to be churches of the poor: people on the margins of society, often rural, who find in their faith groups a space where they can seek community and petition God for healing and forgiveness. It is a space where the silenced come to find their voices. God’s blessing, to a community living on the margins of consumer culture, is found in healing, a sense of community and a general sense of well-being.

Neopentecostals, on the other hand, insist that blessing must be material. If your God isn’t big enough to grant you a better job, a new car or a bigger house, they say, try mine! As children of the King, you have the right to expect the best! They insist that material blessing is documentary proof that one enjoys God’s favour.

The symbolic goods offered by the Neopentecostals have proved attractive to several constituencies. Some traditionally Roman Catholic urban professionals have felt betrayed or abandoned by that church’s dramatic embrace of the poor and the liturgical reforms introduced after Vatican II. These urban elites have found in Neopentecostalism a new belief system that justified their position of relative privilege within society. Neopentecostalism also offered the elites a renewed divine mandate for their ongoing exercise of political and economic power.

At the other end of the social spectrum are the precarious urban masses who have fled rural violence and poverty to seek survival in the cities. As they confront the anomie generated by life in the city, these people have found in the megachurches a sense of personal empowerment, discipline and self-esteem that has helped some to survive in a hostile economic and political environment.

People in the North frequently find the religious intensity that is prevalent in Latin America to be intimidating or incomprehensible. Those of a highly rational bent sometimes mistakenly dismiss such vibrant spiritual sensibilities as a sign of weakness. One cannot understand Latin America’s history or culture without taking into account the universal immediacy of religious devotion in the region. Clattering about in Latin America’s collective subconscious is a rich diversity of symbolic systems and religious traditions: African, Amerindian, European, Asian. Secularism has had only limited impact on Latin American culture.

A new generation of religious entrepreneurs has understood how to tap into the collective spiritual resources of the region, package them in drama, and cloak them in authority and mystery. Then they offer them to a populace mired in permanent crisis and hungry for meaning, hope and a sense of transcendence; a young populace that has been taught since the cradle that all of human experience, including ethical values, intimate relationships and encounters with the numinous, can be commodified, packaged, and sold as consumer goods.

The Neopentecostals market individualized consumer religion. Pursuing the supermarket analogy, consumers, whatever their social class, enter the marketplace and take from the shelf those symbolic goods they need to get them through the week: an ounce of self-esteem, a packet of hope, a portion of pardon, essence of encounter with the divine. All this is mixed according to one’s personal recipe and used as needed.

As systems for marketing new spiritualities and mediated symbolic spaces become broadly available, the traditional churches are losing their historic monopoly on dispensing sacraments. Simultaneously, their power to stigmatize ‘unorthodox’ religious belief and practice has been weakened.

Today about 80% of Latin America’s Protestants are either Pentecostals or Neopentecostals. Add to this numerical dominance the overwhelming pentecostalization of liturgy in both Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions, their increasing political activism and the widespread presence of Neopentecostal programming on radio and television stations throughout the region and one begins to understand the growing cultural power of these groups.

Religious fundamentalism and cultural power

Religion, like politics, is a messy enterprise. When people traffic in raw power, some are corrupted, others are hurt. An encounter with transcendence can unlock within one a vast reservoir of wisdom and tenderness. But that same encounter unlocks within others bottomless reservoirs of ambition and avarice.

What is clear is that when a religious leader is perceived as being a channel to divinity, a mediator of sacred space, people will seek that person out. People do not expect that person to be free of human foibles; they don’t even expect that person to be enlightened or altruistic. It is enough that the person has become a steward of sacred space.

I was discussing this issue recently with a Catholic colleague, a Jesuit-trained radio producer who has no illusions whatsoever about the personal contradictions embodied in many religious leaders. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘our encounter with the sacred has often been that way in Latin American history. In how many Catholic parishes have people not understood that the priest is a deeply flawed human being? Yet Sunday after Sunday people keep coming to hear that priest celebrate the mass. He has the key to the sacred space.’

One cannot deny that many have found in these dramatic religious spectacles a renewed sense of self-esteem. But many others end up fleeing this environment feeling spiritually violated. My personal observation is that many Latin Americans are engaged in a spiritual pilgrimage that has taken them out of traditional Catholicism through traditional Protestantism and out the back door of Pentecostalism into an uncharted territory characterized by the privatization and fragmentation of religious belief.

How does one respond to the failures of modernity? Jesús Martín Barbero, one of Latin America’s most important communication theorists, states that: ‘Modernity has not fulfilled many of its promises of social, political and cultural liberation. But one promise it has fulfilled: that of disenchanting our world. It has rationalized our world and left it without magic or mystery’ (1995: 71).

Humans are capable of surviving grave limitations, but take away the sense of mystery and transcendence and our very humanity is at risk. Confronted with disenchantment, humans always build mechanisms of re-enchantment. One of those mechanisms is the electronic church. Martín Barbero comments:

‘To me, the electronic church is restoring the magic to intellectualized religions; religions that had lost their ardour, that had become disenchanted... it employs the technology of the image and sentiment to capture messianic, apocalyptic exaltation, while at the same time giving a face and a voice to new communities that are, in essence, ritual and moral, not doctrinal’ (1995: 76).

Today’s mediated spectacles restore to public religious discourse the dominance of symbol, gesture and sentiment, all wrapped in mystery, authority and transcendence. Many people have been deeply hurt by the manipulative merchandising of symbolic goods. Others have lost their sense of self-worth to the incessant mercenary pounding of commercial advertising. That is the world we live in. These are the challenges to which we must respond as communities of faith and as civil society.

One lesson we have learned in Latin America is that people and communities can move from being the objects of commercial messages to becoming the subjects of their own stories. People can resignify the messages that flood their senses and create their own symbolic spaces, building hope, constructing community. Consumer watchdog groups are springing up throughout the region, engaging commercial broadcasters and government policy makers in an energetic debate on key issues like local content, violence and the presence and representation of women in the media. Community radio and video projects are celebrating local culture and demanding accountability of local elected officials and transnational corporations.

Faith communities, too, must respond creatively to the demands of the current moment. The global consumer society, of which Christian fundamentalism is an active part, breaks community, silences and makes whole cultures invisible. Christians can offer spaces where community is celebrated and where brokenness is healed.

Finally, even religious fundamentalism has its limits. Just because the leader of a religious group is an authoritarian fundamentalist doesn’t mean that all local congregations and all pastors in that denomination follow suit. One must take time to discern local pastoral practice. Colleagues in Brazil describe local churches belonging to a notorious fundamentalist group. These particular local churches, led by women, are located in very poor, very marginalized urban neighbourhoods and are creatively addressing complex community issues such as drug trafficking, gang violence and violence against women.

While many local pastors parrot the fundamentalist line, others understand that the ambiguity that permeates real human relationships demands nuanced pastoral practice rooted in flexibility, forgiveness and tenderness. People from traditional Christian groups must learn how to build alliances with such local church leaders.

Bibliography

Latinobarómetro 2004: Una década de mediciones.

13 Aug 2004. www.latinobarometro.org

Martín Barbero, Jesús (1995). Secularización, desencanto y reencantamiento massmediático en Diálogos. Lima: FELAFACS. 41 (1995), 71-81.

Dennis A. Smith, a Mission Co-worker of the Presbyterian Church (USA) since 1977, coordinates the Publications and Communication Training Program of the Central American Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies (Cedepca) in Guatemala City, Guatemala. He is an active member of the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC).