Speaking in Latin tongues: the Protestantization of Latin America is a most phenomenal phenomenon, changing lives by the millions, all but unnoticed north of the border.

The Protestantization of Latin America is a most phenomenal phenomenon, changing lives by the million, all but unnoticed north of the border. One thing it is not is a euphemism for gringo imperalism.

For some while anthropologists, and sociologists interested in religion, have known that something almost entirely unexpected is happening in Latin America. Suddenly the great Catholic continent, home of almost half the Catholics in the world, is swarming with evangelicals, above all with Pentecostals. For three centuries Latin America was out of bounds for Protestants. Even when they were allowed in on sufferance they were tucked inconspicuously under the wing of liberal anti-clericals. Clearly they were a sort of appendage to the liberal idea which would wither away when proper revolutionary mobilizations got under way. Time and social evolution could be relied upon to empty their back-street chapels.

Nothing of the sort has happened. It is clear that over the last few decades social evolution has turned whimsicaland not only in Latin America. The Protestant revolution now occurring is a massive shift in people's identifications and in their priorities. The poor and the fairly poor have created a free market of faiths in which rival organizations compete for survival. These organizations offer services and demand personal commitment. What they offer is participation, a healing of body and soul, and a network of mutual support. What they demand is discipleship and discipline, at work, in the family, and in the church. Suddenly it looks as if Max Weber might be alive and well and living in Guatemala City. According to the New York Times, the Protestant constituency in Brazil alone probably amounts to some 25 million people.

Of course, Brazil is a special case. Historically the Catholic Church in Brazil was coopted by the state, which conscientiously hollowed it out from the inside. When Rome recovered control of the Brazilian Church, it had to draft in thousands of foreign priests, which gave Catholi-

cism an alien accent. But now the special cases are multiplying till they look more and more like a norm. Chile is clearly a very special case. So is Guatemala and, for that matter, most of the Central American republics. Even Nicaragua is unexpectedly turning into a special case; it has a burgeoning evangelical population of 15 to 20 per cent. For a long time Argentina looked as if it might be graced with immunity, given the connection between ethnicity and religion fostered by vast numbers of European migrants. But since the ending of the dictatorship the graphs of conversion have started to rise dramatically. Even in the Andean republics Protestantism nibbles at the edges: perhaps a million in Peru, and over a million in Colombia; there are over three hundred rival denominations active in Bolivia. The native Quechua peoples, so numerous in the Andes, are very clearly vulnerable to evangelical conversion-as well as to conversion by Witnesses, Mormons, Adventists, and Bahais.

The remarkable fact is that in the course of a generation or so, one Latin American in ten has become an evangelical believer," most likely a Pentecostal. In many parts of the continent, active committed evangelicals are as numerous as active committed Catholics. So massive a switch was about as likely as the radicalization of the Catholic Church. Yet that too has come about, at least in some countries. Some people have even suggested a connection between these two incredible developments.

If the Protestant revolution is incredible, so too is the way it has been ignored. There are numerous individual and localized studies, but no general account-although my forthcoming Tongues of Fire attempts to address this need. The classic studies by D'Epinay and Willems are nearly a generation old. If the theories didn't predict the revolution, then clearly the mere accumulation of fact is not enough to substantiate it. The phenomenon is phenomenal but remains massively invisible, stolidly unreal.

Nobody acquainted with the mandatory skew of percep-

tion in the social sciences need be surprised. It has, after all, been possible to write books about Latin America which totally elide the existence of the Roman Catholic Church, let alone Protestantism. Most of the cognoscenti have regarded religion as a miasma rising up from more real phenomena, so why waste time on illusory outward forms when you can go straight to the underlying political and social substance? Even the encyclopedias do not count the continuing presence of the churches in Latin American societies as providing recordable Knowledge." Like T. S. Eliot's famous cat Macavity, they simply are "not there," even when they are patently active in the acknowledged reality of politics. Such are the partitions set up in the house of the intellect that it is possible for a phenomenon to be simultaneously invisible and the object of ferocious public debate. In the course of my researches, I encountered most of the ferocious debate in Latin America and

most of the invisibility elsewhere. I first noticed the film of invisibility when traveling with other social scientists in a bus in Guatemala. In Guatemala City you can hardly fail to notice the number of public buses decorated with evangelical texts. Close to the tall iron tower commemorating the 1871 liberal revolution are a converted cinema with "Jesus salva" on its marquee and the tent-like structure of an independent church called Verbo. As you trundle and bump through the barrios there is a storefront church every two or three hundred yards: Calvary, Jerusalem, Bethesda, Galilee, Tabor, Ebenezer, Prince of Peace.

The voluble guide assigned to our tour informed us that 66 per cent of Guatemalans were Catholics, but not even the sheer oddity of this figure

stirred the antennae of the academics. Where, after all, was the other third? And where had the controversial evangelical President Rios Montt come from? Of course, some people in the bus were concentrating on volcanic ash and some on guerrillas, but it did begin to strike me that Thomas Kuhn was right about paradigms: implicit theory rules by staying implicit and so not revealing what it conceals. A plane journey over the mountains to El Peten should have been an eye-opener: dozens of texts on the exteriors of the ramshackle huts. I do not believe that anyone remarked on it. If those actually seeing the phenomenon do not note it then the reaction of British colleagues back home is hardly surprising. "A book on Latin American Protestantism?" queried the Regius Professor. "A very small book, surely?"

On the other side of the partition from invisibility is ferocious contention. When I visited Merida in the Yucatan I was immediately asked, "Whose side are you on?" Benevolent neutrality hardly seemed to be one of the options. A hospitable Mexican anthropologist kindly took me to Chichen Itza and then to the nearby Protestant village of Xochenpiche. The existence of a completely Protestant village was itself instructive: conversions often occur by whole families or by social segments falling away, rather than by individual decision. The first thing we saw

in the village was the Catholic church, with doors locked and roof fallen in, as desolate as an early-Christian ruin in Syria or Nubia. A short distance away was a neat little dispensary called "Bethesda" and a rather nicely ordered village green with shaded stone seats. In the center of the village a Presbyterian bible school stood quietly in the shimmering heat and, most amazing of all, a chapel painted in pastel colors which had strayed straight out of the landscape of Presbyterian/Methodist Wales. Here, in this remote Maya margin of Mexico, was the clearest possible reminiscence of the Celtic margin of Britain. However, the distaste of my friendly anthropologist was very evident. "I do not like to see it," he confessed. I was given to understand that the souls in the village had been bought not so much by Jesus Christ as by American money, agricultural know how, and facilities. There is as it happens much more to it than money

and clinics, as I found out when I visited the Girls'Bible School in Merida Sixteen-year-olds tumbled across the threshold to sing spiritual songs to me in Mayan and Spanish, to the accompaniment of a small guitar. After the reminiscence of the Welsh chapel came this startling transposition of a Welsh chapel choir. Clearly the message is spread by popular music. And it also offers roles and opportunities to young women. I was told that next day the girls would be out together in the villages singing-and preaching. I was given to understand that the words were soundly Presbyterian but the tunes were on permanent loan from the Pentecostals.

The pastor then handed me his most potent weapon: his translation of the psalms into the Mayan tongue. Every-

where in Latin America there is a connection between

saving souls and salvaging languages.   From Chimborazo
to Cotopaxi to Popocatapetl people's    hearts are stolen

away by messages sung and spoken in the vulgar tongue.

You can find the same happening all along the coast of

West Africa, in the interior of the Philippines, and among remote tribes in Southeast Asia and India. It is part of a worldwide process of making orthographies, grammars, and ethno-histories, which simultaneously salvages part of the infinite variety of human speech and transmits messages of inner transformation. Yet even this has become a matter of violent controversy. Once you interest native Latin American peoples in literacy and offer them contacts and means of communication, you also open them up to wider worlds, to Spanish, and even maybe to the depredations of "internal colonialism" and divided loyalties. That has been vigorously put down to the discredit of those concerned. And it is bound to be the case that opening up a culture introduces dangers as well as opportunities. But the missionaries for their part see no possibility of keeping peoples in permanent linguistic and cultural isolation. For them it is enough to say that no group has ever demanded a return to pristine isolation.

When I went to Rio de Janeiro I encountered more controversies. Certainly the journals showed signs of

warm debate. It is true that one young scholar who had escaped from Brazil to Poland (sic) during the dictatorship referred to the remarkable courage and stamina of evangelical missionaries going to work under appalling conditions among remote tribes. But another scholar, an ex-priest, was less irenic, and plainly saw the followers of the new faith as deluded defaulters from the duty of political revolution, walking examples of false consciousness. The Pentecostals might be poor, but they were hardly in the real proletariat-just personal servants, craftsmen, day-laborers, nightwatchmen, small shopkeepers, people in transport . . . Before I had time to pursue my enquiries in detail, he said, "I suppose you believe the United States is a democratic country." To me it hardly seemed relevant, but to him it was clearly the symbolic focus of the whole issue.

My last research trip took me to Mexico City.

Mexico City is, of course, one of the two or three largest conurbations in the world, and in 1986 it had a Protestant population of about 2.5 per cent-that is, something under half a million. Mexico as a whole had two and a quarter million evangelicals in 1980, concentrated in the southeastern states, and observers believe the number has since risen very rapidly. While in Mexico City I met a young Chicano, who had been trained as an anthropologist in Chicago, and had gone to Mexico to renew his roots in his father's native land. That might seem to provide him with impeccable credentials, but not as it turned out, sufficient to escape calumny. He had intended to carry out research on healers among Totonac Indians. But when he actually went to live with them he found the healers had turned into pastors and preachers of Sanidad Divina. Where the old spirits of Christo-paganism had once reigned was now a new and all-powerful Holy Spirit.

Taking this enforced change of subject in good part, he came across facts which turned out to be socially and academically unacceptable. The evangelicals had fought against exploitation practiced by coffee growers and had challenged the power of the creole middlemen. Finding themselves resolutely opposed in these endeavors they had joined the United Mexican Socialist Party. At that point information petered out because the army moved in. But as a result of his incautious attention to the truth the young anthropologist found himself labeled a CIA agent.

Another, more senior scholar, Jean Pierre Bastian, agreed that anthropologists burdened with findings of this sort might encounter problems. In his view some recent books on the subject inflamed nationalist feelings without in any way contributing to an understanding of why Indians might embrace this kind of radical, primitive Protestantism. He himself stressed the political variability and ambiguity of evangelical Christianity in Mexico. On the one hand there had emerged an urban Protestant network, with modern bureaucratic and technical facilities, which had strong North American links and often took a neo-conservative view. On the other hand were all kinds of spontaneous eruptions, evangelical or Adventist or Mormon, wherein people sought to revise their lives and find a distinctive and autonomous identity outside the structures in which they were encased. His own work had been mainly on the historical role of Protestantism in

Mexico (as well as in Latin America generally) and it showed a Protestantism aligned with liberal Mexican aspirations and overlapping the vanguard of the Mexican revolution. Methodism, for example, had introduced a lay democratic spirit and brought facilities for self-improvement, as well as ferrying people across the turbulent waters between the old world of the countryside and the new world of railways and textile manufacture. Once again the link with the role of evangelical faith in the history of industrial change in Britain was quite clear. In the Yucatan I had stumbled across a Welsh Presbyterian chapel; in the environs of Mexico City I was now stumbling across a Methodist circuit doing exactly what it did in the North of England in the late nineteenth century. The social landscape once again seemed very familiar. All the resonators in my head were perfectly equipped to pick up these messages.

Yet I was conscious of a conflict, this time in myself. As a Briton I was ideally, yet awkwardly, placed both to "hear" the outrage of Hispanic cultural nationalism and to understand the kind of enthusiastic evangelical faith which encourages people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. I could talk to an American missionary with a Scots name who had devoted his whole life to providing a hospital called La Esperanza, and the hope to go with it. I could talk to cultural nationalists alarmed at the hollowing out of their inheritance. Like the Pentecostals I became double-tongued; I used my lay Protestant ear in one conversation and my Catholic European cultural ear in another. I was a strange two-eared, two-tongued creature trying to be fair and above all to understand a faith "everywhere spoken against." I was walking, after all, along a San Andreas fault where the tectonic plates of two massive civilizations, the Anglo and the Hispanic, were passing into and over each other, and a certain amount of discomfort was only to be expected. Like the Hispanics I belonged to a great and ancient imperial civilization; like the Pentecostal preachers I was equipped with the demotic language of enthusiastic faiths.

When I talked over my research with a Puerto Rican writer I needed only my European Catholic cultural ear. She quickly characterized the arrival of Protestantism in Puerto Rico as one of many cultural invasions following on the economic and political aggression of the "Anglo" world against the Hispanic imperium. The Spanish-American war of 1898 had been the shameful conclusion of successive conflicts, and Protestantism in Puerto Rico, as well as in Cuba and the Philippines, was part of the cultural thrust designed to complete the political takeover. Of course, this is patently true and it is a strategic and central part of my own argument: the contemporary Protestant crossing of the Rio Grande del Norte is part of the long-term clash of two major world civilizations.

And yet this patent truth is only half true. If you read Sidney Mintz's Worker in the Cane, he presents there the sense of transformation experienced by those Puerto Ricans caught up in the Pentecostal movement. He shows people crippled by personal defeat, by guilt and by disease, suddenly restored and in their right mind. They leave a Catholicism reduced to one or two external markers, to godparenthood and the fiesta, and they enter an active, lively, and confident community. They may also learn how to speak, lead, and organize, skills which they can

transfer to other more secular contexts. Alex Westfrieds's Ethnic Leadership in a New England Community illus- trates just how that training and experience may find outlets in communal leadership. It also illustrates how discipline stabilizes and energizes the family so as to help its members become good citizens and acquire professonal status. Evangelical conversion may well stimulate migra- tion to the U.S. and once there may make easier the transition to Amercian culture. Indeed, this is one of the great themes of the socilogy of religion: the role of conversion and dissent not only in helping people pick themselves up but in setting them on the move. As the evangelical and radical Scots-Irish made their way to America in the early eighteenth century, so evangelical Hispanics make their way today. Radical, primitive Christianity really is a movement, and belongs to societies on the move.

In Jamaica I did not need to be double-tongued or use a European Catholic ear and then an ear tuned to an erupting demotic. There could be nothing inherently controversial about studying a movement which took over where Methodism left off, just as Methodism took over where Anglicanism left off. And if the Pentecostals were more inclined to Mr. Seaga than to Mr. Manley, that was just part of ordinary political choice, not part and parcel of pro-gringo treachery. My most complicated ideological encounters came in the United States, and there I had-and have-to be ready with some very quick footwork indeed. I think the worst problems came with American liberals. Talking to American liberals I had, like Agag coming before the prophet Samuel, to "tread softly." My European Catholic cultural ear was useless and my demotic ear rendered equally useless, by the association of Pentecostalism with such as Jimmy Swaggart and the Bakkers. A librarian at Boston University plainly concluded I was a cognitive stray and waved me back to where I really ought to be, in liberation theology. I was suspected of the wrong sympathies in spite of not wobbling my hands in the air, and in spite of my patent inability to see the connection between accepting Jesus Christ and keeping a tight hold on the Panama Canal. More charitable friends indulged my idiosyncrasy by sending me items in the New York Times which at least proved my subject existed.

But I could see that a sympathetic treatment of the current religious option of the Latin American poor would do me no good. This time the poor deserved a wigging for taking the wrong option. Had I concerned myself with the burgeoning independent churches of Africa I would have been safe enough. They are known to be against ex-colonial religion. The trouble with the Pentecostals is that they are not only against the ex-colonial religion of Latin America, but can also be accused of alignment with the current colonialist religion of North America. The African independent churches and the South American Pentecostals are roughly equivalent in their origin and social role, but liberals set them in different ideological sights. As a result the African independent churches retain their liberal accreditation and the Pentecostals do

The trouble with American liberals, if I may make so bold, is that they are inclined to see everything in the world as the consequence of their own malign imperialism. They foster and entertain a delicious sense of power and guilt, such as was also entertained by Britons when they too had a lot of power to be guilty about. Yet I believe it is possible to exaggerate both American power and American guilt. I have had to put it to my American liberal friends, with appropriate circumlocution, that Latin American Pentecostals are running a very successful indigenous movement, and that they are able to do that without any American support whatever. Of course, they are to some extent drawn by images of betterment which have their major point of origin in the United States, but it is not clear to me why such aspirations should of themselves attract condemnation.

Naturally, if it is all due to the CIA, and if William Casey et al. have converted fifty million people to evangelical Christianity, then it must rank as one of the most extraordinary, not to say roundabout, intelligence operations in history, as well as one of the more

outrageously mysterious ways of Almighty God. It also severely damages prevailing models in the sociology of religion. We have, after all, studied several parallel movements like the African independent churches, the neo-Buddhist movements in Japan, the evangelical explosion in Korea, and they all seem explicable without invoking the omnipresence and omnipotence of American intelligence.

But what of my ideological encounters with American religious conservatives? Naturally enough my fluency in the religious demotic opened lots of evangelical doors, especially in Dallas, where many of the key organizations have their headquarters. But fluency in a language can have its difficulties. You may, after all, be invited to speak in tongues or else to join in passionate prayer from 5 A.M. to 8 A.M. Pentecostals-and the various independent

churches, like the Church on the Rock-are "instant in prayer." Participant observation has its limits. But at least American religious conservatives do not regard the subject as surprising or improper. It is entirely right to study the empirical manifestations of the coming Kingdom. That is precisely what evangelicals themselves do, planning the glorious future with proper business acumen and attention to technical detail and sophisticated technology. The "Church growth" experts have many theses piled up, for example, in Pasadena, California, statistically and analytically tracing the work of the Holy Spirit in Indonesia, or South Korea, or Ecuador. Such information is very useful, providing you do not blink too hard at the kind of statistics which record the expulsion of 36,437 demons or 7 people raised from the dead. Indeed, you may discover things you did not know, such as the existence of 707 plans to convert all humankind since A.D. 30, and further plans for the extension of the Kingdom until the arrival of universal megadeath. Here statistical science, futurology, and faith have come together in a typical American union and with a deadpan literalism that takes your European breath away.

The least trouble is given by a certain kind of American conservative atheist. A sociological friend of mine in this category-Professor X-thoroughly enjoys taking robust and rather wicked views. He has very clear and distinct ideas on the subject of evangelical expansion in Latin America. Evangelicalism, he says, is a social process and system of ideas calculated to turn South Americans into North Americans. Anything that turns the ideologically saturated, rhetorically vacuous, and generally lunatic Latins into neatly suited pragmatic Yankees is much to be applauded. It is another case of the cunning of sociological reason coaxing resistant cultures into the modern world. After all, if Calvinism helped the West turn the corner of capitalism, then Pentecostalism might well perform a similar service for Latin America. If the price is some rather unusual behavior, like waving your hands about and talking gibberish, so be it. Progress, like God, is notorious for working in mysterious ways and taking what look like indirect routes. I may add that British atheists have similar views. "Be the making of them," murmured the All Souls Fellow. "Best news I've heard for a long time," said the man at the London School of Economics. But stout-hearted certainties of Professor X make the equivocating Briton quail. And I have to comment that his view represents yet another half-truth, and one which has most to be said for it if you are talking about the Mormons. What is specially interesting about Pentecostalism is that it is truly indigenous and represents a Latin Americanization of American religion as much as a North Americanization of Latin religion. Indeed, some commentators see the authority exercised by the Protestant pastor as another version of caudillismo and the Protestant network of mutual support as operating within the age-old framework of clientelism. To go successfully native is to be in part subverted by your environment as well as, in part, to convert it. Subversion and conversion go together.

It might seem that American Methodists at least would respond positively to the idea that Methodism was alive and well and living under a new name in Guatemala City. Such was not the case; indeed, rather the reverse. I spoke to a livel Methodist group in North Dallas and had the

impression that they wanted to repudiate any genealogy which linked them with the latest generation of hedge preachers. I cited several respected authorities who had stressed the Methodist-Pentecostal connection by way of American holiness movements in the late nineteenth century, but the response was quite restrained. I showed the way the old religious enthusiasms of the North American frontier, were now revived in the new religious enthusiasms of the South American frontier but I was not the bearer of good tidings. I would have encountered hearts "strangely warmed" had I gone in for stressing the relationship between early Methodist class meetings and the base communities of liberation theology. That would have been the good news; mine was the bad. The trouble is parents in their respectable maturity do not entirely welcome the untoward vigor of their progeny. Religions are as often committed to forgetting their origins as to conserving them. It was not my most successful evening.

Yet the long-term roots of the current upheaval in

       Methodism and ultimately       in early industrial
  England are patent. As the          wheels of England's

industrial revolution turned, so the Methodist revolution turned in a parallel movement. The Methodist " circuits" corresponded to the social and geographical mobility generated by industrial society. The mutually supportive networks and fellowships of Methodism provided rafts of social and psychological support for navigating the most significant upheaval in history. And the "method" of Methodism engendered personal discipline and habits of work which paid off in industrial employment. What happened in England from 1760 onward has happened now in South America from 1960 onward. As Claudio Veliz has commented, there is a sense in which we all live in a world made in England two centuries and more ago. This is a case in point.

Religious voluntarism and religious competition in a free market in souls was invented in England even earlier than the mid eighteenth century-in the 1590s to be precise-and the most potent seeds of revivalism were sown in the North of Ireland in the 1630s. Both achieved their fullest realization in British North America and the United States. Methodism and evangelicalism generally took over and expanded those traditions, and likewise both achieved their fullest realization in the United States. So my argument is that what was invented in England and went into full cultural reproduction in the United States has now been successfully exported across the Rio Grande del Norte and finds its best market in Sao Paulo.

If I want to stand at the very beginnings of those vast changes I can do so either in the North of Ireland or else in London itself. Just north of the Thames, in what is known as "the City," is Aldersgate Street, where the Wesleyan revival of enthusiastic and participatory religion took place in May 1738. Just south of the Thames, in Southwark, between Shakespeare's Globe and the prison known as the Clink, there is an almost unreadable board put up to honor three men who died there in 1593 for the principle of independency and voluntarism in religion. I look at this board sometimes and stare across the turbid water, knowing that from this place and from that moment begins my subject and, for that matter, the United States of America.