Latin-American and Asiatic neo-Protestantisms: A comparative study

Abstract

Throughout the 20th century, the expansion of North American Pentecostal and neo-evangelical movements was greatest in the traditionally Catholic countries of Latin America. And in the 1960s the first scientific analysis related to the overseas development of this movement was of Brazil, Chile and Argentina. More recently the conversion process has spread into Africa and as far as Asia. The various dynamics perceptible in the Pentecostal movement today in Southeast Asian cultures clearly made it pertinent to undertake a comparison between the Latino-American and Southeast Asian situations by considering, as the author proposes, the various methods and concepts developed over the last seventy years in the study of the neo-evangelical movements.

Over the past seventy years social scientists working with religious facts have observed a worldwide expansion of the Christian faith, particularly through the spread of the Holy Spirit Pentecostal movement. Throughout the 20th century this dynamic of enlargement from the U.S.A. was strongest in the biggest Catholic countries of Latin America and the first scientific analysis related to the overseas expansion of this movement came from Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. More recently, the movement has spread rapidly into Africa and as far as Asia. In these distant parts of the world the various dynamics registered in the traditional underlying cultures made clearly pertinent a comparison between the current scientific works presented in this academic journal and other publications, as well as the various methods and concepts developed over the last seventy years in Latin America around the neo-evangelical movements. The texts about Asian countries published in this issue of Social Compass, and other edited papers on the same topic, provide a good opportunity for fruitful and productive comparisons concerning the diffusion and transformations of Protestant religions, in both Latin American and South East Asian countries and of the various social scientific approaches adopted in these regions. So, in spite of the very different national and colonial histories in these two continents, we find situations that lead to an interesting comparative analysis in order to arrive at a better socio-cultural, economic, and political understanding of recent phenomena surrounding conversions to various Protestantisms in countries whose centuries-old religious traditions are quite different from Christianity.

For my part, I have been working as an anthropologist for more than thirty years on the developments and alterations of the various Protestant traditions that spread from Europe and the U.S.A. in the 19th century into the Latin American countries after these became independent. A lot of analysis had been carried out by socio-anthropologists throughout Latin America and also in Africa, but my own fieldwork focused first on Brazil and, from the year 2000 onwards, on Mexico with the view of a doing comparative work between these two big countries with such contrasted histories. Reading the various papers presented in this issue of Social Compass and some others has been for me an opportunity to widen out to Asia my knowledge of evangelical phenomena in general, and Pentecostal phenomena in particular. My paper will be divided into three parts, in which I shall compare the two regions (Latin America and South Asia), in the following order: the historical and political conditions, a social and cultural analysis, and, finally, the economic repercussions of the spread of evangelism.

History and politics

The different papers published in the present volume could be separated into two analytical blocks dealing, on the one hand, with the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia (Hoon) and its neighbor Singapore (Yip and Ainsworth) and, on the other, with the Indochinese peninsula (Ware, Jammes). To make some initial comparisons we can take a look at Brazil (which is still today the biggest Catholic country in the world) and Indonesia/Singapore; we shall then compare Mexico and the small countries of Central America with the Indochinese peninsula, because of the ethnic parceling that is analogical in both areas.

The independence of Latin America was officially gained in the 19th century, but we all know how dependent they remained on the United States during the 20th century. Besides, from 1950 a number of these countries were ruled by military dictatorships that had the support of the United States. In Asia, the recent independence of most of the countries resulted in war and disorder, which particularly affected the border populations, as is clearly revealed in works about Vietnam and Cambodia.

On the religious level we can say that the attitude of authoritarian governments when faced with evangelical penetration is completely oppositional in both geographical regions. In Latin America, owing to the governments’ positive feelings towards the U.S.A., as evoked above, and also to the fact that the constitutions of these new states – often inspired by the French Revolution – boosted religious freedom, there were very few impediments to the North American evangelical groups’ proselytizing. We have only to point to the rejection by various countries, during the 1970s and 1980s, of the Oklahoma University Summer Linguistic Institute (Wycliffe Bible Translators), after diverse governments had perceived that the volunteer students sent to translate the Bible into vernacular languages were taking advantage of their stay in remote territories to produce secret topographic and mineralogical documents, very far from the diffusion of Gospel (Stoll, 1982). In Asia, on the contrary, the wars of independence signified a strong rejection of the North American model and resulted in persecution of the churches that had already been established and resistance to the desire for conversion among aboriginal people wanting to embrace a Christian God. This has been much emphasized for the Cambodia/Vietnam/China triangle in various studies about the Hmong (Ngo, 2011), Bou’nong (Scheer, 2011), and other Montagnard ethnic groups (Jammes, 2013).

As for Indonesia, a parallel can be made with Brazil concerning the pluralism of the recognized religions and the search for harmony among the various confessional components of the nation. In Brazil, when I arrived at the end of 1970s, the religious pluralism (Catholicism, Judaism, Afro-Brazilian religions, Kardecist spiritualism, Protestantisms, and para-biblical religions, as well as a great number of Buddhist and oriental denominations) was evident in the urban milieu. It was accompanied by a true tolerance of other people’s faiths. Even if the tradition was Catholic and the majority of the population adhered to that confession (92% according to the 1970 census), many of them used sporadically to practice other religions, such as Spiritualism, Buddhism, and the Afro-Brazilian religions imported by African slaves and blended with some Amerindian elements. This resulted in a new analytic category called ‘transito religioso’ (religious transit), a term used to describe the coming and going and twists and turns between diverse credos that marked the religious practice in this country. The majority of the believers affirmed that belonging to various religions is not a sin because it means being under the protection of various supernatural entities, and that this plurality of protective devices should allow one to lead a much better life (Soares, 2009).

Over the past forty years Catholicism has lost 20% of its flock in favor, mainly, of the evangelical movement and, particularly, of Pentecostal/neo-Pentecostal churches. This shift has resulted in some rigidity to accept religious difference and gave birth to a strong competition on the ‘symbolic goods market’ (marché des biens symboliques) (Bourdieu, 1994). In the same sense, Indonesia, just after Independence, sought the affirmation of harmony between the various confessional populations through the ‘Pancasila doctrine,’ a vision which tends to conciliate religious pluralism and national unity. It seems that in both countries, the expansion of big evangelical churches had positive results in the great urban centers, which exploded rapidly in the 1940s, receiving a large rural population who found in the very structured ethos of the new evangelical communities a form to replace their former social references lost in the boundlessness of the metropolis.

We can observe a similar development in Brazil and in Singapore (Yip and Ainsworth), over the last twenty years, of neo-Pentecostal mega-churches with their use of business techniques and marketing discourse to recruit adherents. These two authors based their analysis of change in religious practice on ‘rational choice theory’ (Iannacone et al., 1997). It is important to note that in the 1990s a Brazilian sociologist, Silveira Campos, wrote and published a very puzzling work about this phenomenon, taking as an example the Brazilian neo-Pentecostal mega-church named the Universal Church of God’s Kingdom. In this work, he concludes that the Universal was a ‘clear example of how the market is proposing to religion new logics which give rise to new religious practices’ (Campos, 1997: 471).

We can also compare the evangelical impact in the Meso-American zone with that in the Indochina area. In the former area indigenous communities were able to maintain, in spite of their centuries-old Catholic acculturation, a lot of traditional elements through an analogical fusion of their more important spirits or divinities with the saints of popular Catholicism, giving to the latter a new signification in their own cosmogony. Nonetheless, in that region, as in the mountainous regions of Indochina, it is in the rural milieu (in other words, in indigenous communities) that the neo-evangelical impact has been stronger on a socio-political level, because the introduction of the new Christian credo provoked a lot of attrition, sometimes violent, between members of the same community (Masferrer, 1998). All the new adherents refused to participate in the ‘costumbre,’ an internal hierarchy structured around the Catholic saints’ ceremonies. As a result they were often expelled from their villages, as in the case of the Bou’nong (Scheer, 2011), who refused to sacrifice to the protecting spirits of the village.

To resume the analysis about political elements, I could say that in Latin America, the first studies about these phenomena were developed through analytic dynamics related to the socio-cultural and political situations of the countries concerned. At the beginning of the 1950s the Evangelical movement grew in such a manner that it overtook the categories (sect, denomination, congregation, church) established by the European and North American sociology of religion. This new Protestant penetration concentrated initially on providing a refuge to the forgotten masses. It represented a bulwark against the anomy related to their new conditions of life (Willems, 1967) and also the possibility of reproducing in the town, through small communities, social relations (authoritarianism, dependence, clientelism, and favor) similar to what they had known in their original communities (Lalive d’Epinay, 1968/1975). This can also be applied to most of the situations analyzed by the researchers who work in Southeast Asia and, particularly, to all the villagers who were obliged to uproot themselves because of war and lost all their wealth, as well as the protection bestowed by the spirits of their territory.

Subsequently, and at a time when, in Latin America, the Marxist guerrillas were on the rise in various parts of the sub-continent, analysts focused on a more directly geopolitical aspect concerning the implantation of some neo-evangelical movements, particularly the Pentecostal one, suggesting that the conversion of part of the Latin American population (at that period 5%) to the new forms of evangelicalism corresponded to the will of the United States to financially assist the cultural and political hold of the West over Latin America, through the proselytizing of the many missions that reached even very isolated Amerindian groups (Hvalkoff and Aaby, 1981). On the same subject, the various statements gathered by Ware et al. and by the socio-anthropologists working in Cambodia and Vietnam show that, initially here too, United States organizations wished to penetrate in order to both proselytize and influence politically. Nonetheless, we need further, more specific, research about these topics in Asia because studies in this field are still relatively new (Bautista and Khek Gee Lim, 2009).

Social and cultural concerns

Some years later, in the 1980s, the endogenous transformations of local Latin American neo-evangelism and the explosion of Pentecostal conversions, in both the rural and urban environments, resulted in a reappraisal of such interpretations in terms of imperialistic dynamics to the benefit of academic work oriented towards an understanding of internal cultural factors able to explain these adhesions (Garrard-Burnett and Stoll, 1993). It appears, at this time, that the possibility that anyone might receive the ‘gifts’ of Holy Spirit (without any particular theological or scholarly training) and that men might become clergymen and live a normal family life (in contrast to the Catholic tradition of celibacy) favored the transfer of Catholic poorer fringes to the new credo (Aubrée, 1986/1991). All the groups belonging to that movement in the 1970/80s period preached submission to any authority, a rejection of figurative representation of the divine (iconoclasm), respect for the transgression-based ethos, and complete religious exclusivity, even on a friendship level.

Otherwise, the ‘predestination’-oriented Calvinist-Pentecostal preaching and the subsequent status of ‘God’s chosen ones’ provided a new dignity to the converts at the same time that the ‘divine cure’ was able to alleviate the physical and psychic illnesses of this poor but believing population, in which women represented more than 75% of the adherents (Novaes, 1985). It seems that the situation is quite different in Southeast Asia because the direct testimonies gathered by researchers are, in the main, linked to male discourse. But it is possible that this perception stems from my lack of knowledge about the respective power of men and women in these cultures or the simple fact that all ministers are men. In fact, we know that – even today – the majority of evangelical churches are reluctant to accept the ministry of women.

The traits referred to in the preceding paragraphs about Latin America, which differ considerably from the historical-cultural background, contribute largely to the construction of new individual and collective identities. These, in various cases, were completely opposed to the indigenous religious experiences, built on ingenious combinations of ancient customs and Catholic devotion, as ‘costumbre’ in the Andean region and Meso-America (Pédron-Colombani, 1998) or Afro-Catholic indigenous hybridizations on the littorals and islands (Hurbon, 2000).

On the Asian side, various works dealing with this topic enhance the fact that, in the 1970s and 1980s, indigenous traditions were completely overwhelmed by war and the subsequent massive population transfers. All these circumstances favored the abandonment of sacrificial rituals to spirit ancestors and a subsequent conversion to the Christian God, who is considered as ‘stronger’ and his cult ‘less expansive.’ Nonetheless, the more recent case of the Jorai introduces a new element owing to the fact that, in this ethnic group, the Pentecostal conversion seems, through the analysis made by Jammes, related to the search for autonomy and tends to affirm both an ethno-nationalism and a political resistance. The Hmong case (Ngo, 2011) seems still more representative of a transnational movement linked to the international migrations whose objective is to maintain, through the migration network, a ‘living’ ethnic identity. This strong affirmation of particular identity by means of a new religious identity has not yet appeared, to my knowledge, in the works published on Latin America. I can just mention that when I was working (2000/2005) in the Costa Chica of Oaxaca (Mexican Pacific Coast) I noted that there were migration networks related to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and to the Witnesses of Jehovah. However, they were anything but an ethnic network and better described, I think, as a regional or family network, able to promote preachers’ migration from Mexico to the U.S.A. Still, a similar ethnic identity affirmation network can be found in Africa, where the Akan of Ghana gave to their autonomous Church of Pentecost the same objective of the resignation of identity. Today, this Church established in other African countries and in the United States, is supporting extremely effective ethno-national links (Fancello, 2006).

In Mexico we can find another kind of resignation of identity through religious means in the Tzotzil population of San Juan Chamula in Chiapas. This people had been rejecting Christian missions in order to ‘re-invent’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992) their religious traditions in a blending of ancestral symbolism with foreign and modern elements of ‘material culture’ (Bastide, 1970) such as Coca-cola. Owing to its brown color, important in the Maya cosmogony, this drink is used as substitute for saka – a ceremonial beverage made from corn.

I want now to make some observations that seem to me to be important for the socio-cultural dimension of these comparative works between Latin America and Asia. The first is related to ‘baptism,’ which appears in various papers as a very important symbol of integration for the whole community of Christians, or People of God. When I was working in the field in Brazil, the Pentecostal believers made a clear distinction between ‘baptism in water,’ a sign of the individual’s integration into the community of believers, and ‘baptism by fire,’ a Holy Spirit effusion linked to the first gift of the entity, referred to as ‘glossolalia’ by scientists and ‘angels’ tongue’ by believers. This second baptism was considered as the supernatural sign of acceptance of the person by the divinity and, subsequently, as the definitive proof of his status as one of ‘God’s elect.’ This element, which accompanied the predestination doctrine, has nearly disappeared now, as has the practice of glossolalia, which has been replaced by less verbal and more corporeal forms of trance (Aubrée, 1985/1996), particularly in neo-Pentecostal groups. It would be very interesting to investigate whether that kind of ritual and doctrinal shift has also accompanied the development of Asian Pentecostalism.

On the other hand, in their paper, Ware et al. analyze how the motivations linked to the notion of ‘mission’ have been slowly transformed, slipping from a strong evangelical and proselytizing orientation to an investment in socio-economic community development that fits better with ideas of social justice. Moreover, the authors emphasize the fact that this movement has been appreciated in different ways by its interlocutors. This analysis of the motivations of those who support the general orientations of mission give us the possibility to perceive the new conscientization of some evangelical groups concerning the social living conditions of their potential adherents and the subsequent implementation of humanitarian programs.

In the Brazilian field, as far as ‘classic’ Pentecostalism is concerned (Freston, 2001), I did not register such a modification towards an evangelical orientation. This may be due to the older establishment of Pentecostalism in Latin America (beginning of 20th century), which signifies that evangelical missionaries have for a long time now been nationals and not foreigners; moreover, these nationals have the same social origins as their congregation. Consequently, the discourse about improving believers’ social conditions is based much more on the existence of ‘mechanical solidarity’ (Durkheim, 1930) inside the congregation and on the ethic responsibility of the attendees coupled with the force of their faith in God, whose divine power and blessings they are able to implement positively in everyday life. The Brazilian neo-Pentecostal mega-churches, such as the Universal Church of God’s Kingdom or Mundial of God’s Blessing, as well as having their specific ‘prosperity theology,’ have over the past twenty years developed some humanitarian commitments in their African and European congregations, particularly directed at their poorer members.

Economic impact

This last part of this article concerns the economic impact of conversion on the believers’ life. It can be observed on various levels. First, for those who are parts of the hierarchy of the great denominations (pastors, vicars, and preachers). Second, these churches have created for their flock a special network of housework staff to whom they grant a label of moral caution and honesty (Aubrée, 1987/1995). In Pentecostalism in particular, the faithful have the possibility of receiving from the Holy Spirit an ‘evangelization gift,’ which enables them to create their own congregation. These congregations are a source of income and they therefore played, and continue to play, a not insignificant economic role as much in great metropolises (Aubrée, 1986/1991) as in the Amazonian forest (Boyer, 2008). For that we can observe along the years, in the denominations whose ministers and preachers are wage-earners, cases of obvious social development generated by the security of employment into a capitalistic society where the ‘informal work’ segment can represent between 20% and 40% of the wage bill (Marques Pereira and Lautier, 2004).

Over the past thirty years in Latin America, the neo-Pentecostal developments and the subsequent introduction of ‘prosperity theology’ have boosted the paradoxical spread of both the spirit of enterprise and an unlimited belief in miracles prompted by the expression of faith and its supposed economic counterpart (Corten, 1996; Aubrée, 2000). In view of the various analyses concerning Asia, it can be observed that, on the one hand, the great Indonesian churches are autonomous on a financial level, and on the other, that many of their members have a good economic status. In mainland Southeast Asia, the present situation is quite different; in this region, we notice a sprinkling of economic resources aimed at the consolidation of small confessional establishments, particularly in the highland area between Cambodia and Vietnam. On the other hand, the example of the Four Square Gospel missionary activities shows that beyond the search by the Montagnard for a divinity able to better protect them in the socio-political conditions in which they live, this denomination has an obvious economic interest in providing wages to ethnic leaders (Jammes).

At the semantic content level of ‘prosperity theology’ we note an actual difference between Mexico and Brazil. In the former, this expression responds to strong North American investment in the creation of evangelical churches that will recruit amongst the wealthy population. In these churches God is blessed for the fortune already obtained and prayed to in order to maintain the family’s good health and prosperity. In contrast, in Brazil, the Universal Church of God’s Kingdom, which is paradigmatic of national and international mega-churches, recruits principally amongst the poorest social classes (Mariano, 1999), to whom its discourse brings the continually renewed hope of reaching a state of wealth ‘by the mercy of the good Lord’ and by the expression of an unlimited faith in God’s blessings through mystic attitudes and cash offerings.

However, it seems very important to note this difference in believers’ social conditions to appreciate the diversity of the new discursive marketing techniques that mega-churches are using to recruit adherents. This allows us to see to what extent the sermon content in evangelical churches aimed at enticing recruits or creating loyalty has changed from the predication of an ascetic attitude in daily life (Weber, 1964) to the promotion of the consumption of all material and spiritual goods as new forms of salvation (Yip and Ainsworth; Maddox, 2012, 2013). In these texts we note that the mega-churches are using marketing discourse in order to obtain results in the sense of what they are aiming at for their congregations. In Singapore, the two churches organize their ritual meetings like cultural entertainments to ‘occupy a special position in the market place.’ To do this they ‘stage’ their ceremonies in various buildings that are decorated in such a way as to make them resemble as little as possible traditional religious places. By doing this, they transform not only their identity as churches but also the identity of the individual believer. In Sydney (Australia), Maddox focuses her research into the Hillsong international mega-church on the particular discourse concerning women attitudes. In this ‘theology of woman’ the author observes that consumption is a duty because the woman who takes care of her body and style becomes a ‘walking evangelistic billboard.’ This very new form of proselytizing is directly related to an economic system where the middle-class individual is valued and exhibits financial success as proof of having been granted divine blessings.

Conclusion

To conclude, these renewed forms of ethics will probably not be long in coming to the people of emergent countries, where the Pentecostal churches remain the choice of the poorest. In fact, the Holy Spirit – the ethereal and luminous figure of the Christian tradition – has been crystallizing the wills and aspirations of believers for a long time and, through this, is now acting to stimulate for all the modern construction of individualism. This non-anthropomorphic figure has the plasticity and capacity to adapt to various cultures that are driving its present success in a great number of countries that were very far from Christian traditions. Accordingly, it can adapt to cultural systems where the notion of ‘force’ sustains the whole cosmogony and the magical-religious practices linked to it. Thus, for uprooted and underprivileged people this ‘illuminating force’ is apparently becoming the unifying melting pot where elements of ancestral traditions and the wishes generated by individualizing and globalizing modernity are defined in a new ‘imaginative constellation,’ in the sense given to that expression by the French philosophers Henry Corbin (1958) and Gilbert Durand (1964).