Caribbean & Central America - July 2018 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Three decades ago anthropologist David Stoll shone the spotlight on the meteoric growth of evangelical Protestantism in Latin America with his provocatively titled book, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? Almost 30 years later, Latin America as a region has not turned Protestant in terms of most countries being majority Evangelico (the standard term for Protestant both in Spanish and Portuguese). However, in the ensuing three decades, Pentecostalism (the branch of charismatic Protestantism that accounts for 70% of all Latin American Evangelicos) has mushroomed to the point that eight countries are no longer majority Catholic, and one, Honduras, has become the region’s first in which Protestants outnumber Catholics (39% to 37%). And while Honduras is somewhat of a Latin American outlier at this point, the violence-plagued nation is well within the Central American norm in which the isthmus has become the first sub-region of Latin America to no longer be majority Catholic.

Though the main focus here is Central America, the Pentecostal boom in the sub-region can only be understood as part of larger religious and political trends impacting the entire Latin American region. Since the early 1970s there have been five interrelated trends that have radically transformed the regional religious landscape. First is precipitous Catholic decline. Over the past five decades the Catholic population of Latin America has plummeted from 92% in 1970 to 59% in 2017. Barring a sudden reversal of this long-term trend, the region will probably no longer be majority Catholic by 2030. Brazil, home to the world’s largest Catholic population, is now only 55% Catholic, so it’s very likely that the South American giant will no longer be majority Catholic by 2025.

Second, a good chunk of Latin Americans who have left the Catholic Church over the past five decades have converted to Pentecostalism. Over the past half-century, the Protestant population has nearly quintupled from 4% in 1970 to 19% in 2017. Since 70% of Protestants are specifically Pentecostal, belonging to such denominations as the Assemblies of God and Brazil’s Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, 13% of Latin Americans today adhere to the dynamic branch of Protestantism, which was born in the US in 1905-1906. The unprecedented success of Pentecostalism in competing for Latin American souls has resulted in the third interconnected trend, the pentecostalisation of Latin American Christianity. In order to compete with the dynamic Pentecostals, both mainline Protestants and the Catholic Church have been compelled to offer their own brand of charismatic worship in the region’s new free market of faith.

In the Protestant camp, Presbyterians and Methodists, for example, have formed ‘renewed’ congregations in which worship focuses on the transformative role of the Holy Spirit. In a similar vein, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, the Church’s own brand of Pentecostalism, which was only imported to Latin America from the US in the early 1970s by American priests, mostly Dominican and Jesuit, has become so popular that a majority of Brazilian and Guatemalan Catholics identify as Charismatics. Not all of those who have abandoned Catholicism have become Pentecostals.

The fourth major trend on the Latin American religious landscape is the surging number of people, especially Millennials, who are opting for no religious affiliation whatsoever, the Religious Nones; most of them not atheists, rather young people who believe in the supernatural but don’t belong to any specific faith tradition. In 2014 US-based Pew Research Centre reported that 8% of Latin Americans were Religious Nones while the respected Chilean polling firm Latinobarómetro found that 17% claimed no religious affiliation in 2017. Chile, where Pope Francis recently experienced the most challenging national tour of his papacy, has rapidly become one of the most secularised nations in the region with a whopping 38% of Chileans reporting to be Religious Nones.

That Latin Americans now have a wide array of options from which to choose in the relatively free market of faith leads to the final significant trend, the pluralisation of the regional religious landscape. Even though Latin America is still overwhelmingly Catholic and Protestant, by far the most Christian region on earth, Costa Ricans and Colombians, among others, now have a wide range of religious choice, which includes folk saints, such as Santa Muerte and Jesus Malverde, African Diasporic faiths, such as Santeria and Candomble, as well as opting for no religious practice at all.

Turning to Central America, some of the five major trends are more pronounced than in the rest of Latin America while others are less. Most importantly the sub-region as whole has experienced the greatest Catholic decline and the fastest Pentecostal growth. Excluding Belize, which was not included in the Pew and Latinobarómetro surveys, Costa Rica and Panama are the only countries on the isthmus that are still majority Catholic, and barely at 57% and 55% respectively.

At just 37%, Honduras has Latin America’s smallest Catholic population (Cuba’s is actually the smallest but wasn’t included in the two surveys) in Latin America, while Central America’s most populous nation, Guatemala is 43% Catholic and 41% Protestant. Interestingly there is a great degree of national variation in the percentage of Religious Nones. On the low end are Guatemala (13%), Costa Rica (15%), and Panama (16%). At high end are El Salvador (30%) and Nicaragua (25%). At 21% Honduras occupies the middle range of Religious Nones in Central America.

In the Latin American political realm, and particularly in Central America, the Pentecostal boom has been one of the driving forces of a long-term shift toward the right. The comprehensive Pew survey shows how on major social issues, such as same-sex marriage, gay rights, and abortion, Latin American Protestants are significantly more conservative than both Catholics and Religious Nones. Guatemala was the Latin American trailblazer in Protestant political engagement in the early 1980s when General Efraín Rios Montt (1982-1983) became the world’s first Pentecostal head of state through a military coup in 1982.

Declaring a Holy War on Guatemalan leftist guerrilla groups, Rios Montt, generously supported by US evangelical groups, slaughtered some 30,000 compatriots, mostly Mayans who had entire villages wiped off the face of the Guatemalan map. Rios Montt would sermonise every Sunday on national TV justifying his ethnocidal campaign as a defence of Western Christian civilization against the godless Marxist insurgency. Since then, Guatemala has had several Protestant presidents, including current head of state, former comedian Jimmy Morales, who was first to follow US President Donald Trump’s lead in recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

To the south in Costa Rica, Pentecostal singer Fabricio Alvarado Muñoz, of the once tiny Protestant-based Partido Restauración Nacional (PRN), won the first round of presidential elections in early February on a platform opposing the recent ruling of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights telling Costa Rica to implement same-sex marriage.

Alvarado Muñoz’s party also made huge gains, becoming the second-largest voting bloc in the 57-member unicameral legislature with 14 seats. While there is a large gap between Costa Rican Protestants and Catholics in opposition to same-sex unions, 78% and 57% respectively, the majority of citizens (61%) oppose it, even more so because the ruling was made by an international court and not a Costa Rican one.

Alvarado Muñoz ultimately was defeated in the 1 April presidential second-round run-off by Carlos Alvarado Quesada of the centre-left Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC). Yet the momentum behind Alvarado Muñoz, his party’s presence in the legislature along with the collapse of traditional two-party rule in Central America’s most stable nation, and majority opposition to gay marriage and sex education in the public schools suggest the strength of evangelical influence in the country albeit while insufficient yet to win an election.