Abstract

The author develops three specific observations on the religious practices introduced by Pentecostalism in the global balance of inequalities in Latin America with the attempt to point out the complexity and ambiguity of their social performances according to dimensions and contexts of analysis. These are: the ups and downs of Catholicism in the region; the growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America; and the characteristics of the implantation of Pentecostalism in the popular sectors and the discussion of its value regarding the reproduction of all kinds of inequalities in contemporary Latin American societies.

Keywords: Latin America, inequalities, pentecostalism, religion, popular sectors

Pentecostalism and Social Inequality in Latin America

he author develops three key observations about religious practices Pentecostalism has added to the overall inequality balance in Latin America by pointing out the complexity and ambiguity of its social endeavors in line with analytical dimensions and contexts. He specifically takes up Catholicism's regional avatars; Pentecostalism's growth in Latin America; that religion's implantation characteristics among the working classes; and a discussion of its value in relation to reproducing a wide variety of inequalities in today's Latin American societies.

Keywords: Religion, Pentecostalism, Latin America, inequality, the working classes.

In general, it must be accepted that one of the undeniable realities of Latin America since at least the 80s of the last century is that of the almost constant multiplication of material and symbolic inequalities, that of the loss of homogeneity and power on the part of the sectors popular. From north to south, from east to west and including periods that could be conceived, in some dimensions, as the recovery of income; and it is that these were offset by the volatility of this recovery and by the fact that in other dimensions (those of public goods such as transport, education, health and habitat and the dimension of the labor market in its evolution quanti and qualitative) the evolution was not so favorable and, many times, it was disappointing. All this to synthetically affirm that we share and above all accept the general framework of analysis proposed by Pérez Sáinz. And we do not do it as they say in my country as a simple “salute to the flag”, as the mechanical repetition of a creed of which the meaning has already been lost, but in the deepest conviction that the history that has made of Latin America, the most unequal region on the planet, tends to repeat, increasingly in worse versions, that brutal fate.

In this context, I would like to make three specific observations on the religious dimension and, more specifically, on the effects of the religious practices introduced by Pentecostalism on the global balance of inequalities in Latin America, with the attempt to point out the complexity and ambiguity of their social performances according to dimensions and contexts of analysis.

I) The focus of my observations is on Pentecostalism, but since its development depends largely on what happens with Catholicism, and as what happens with Catholicism it is also relevant, in an unusual sense, for the On the question of inequalities, it is necessary to make a very general first observation about the vicissitudes of Catholicism in the region.

It is necessary to remember that the transformations that originated in the Vatican Council ii they had the fundamental meaning of promoting a deeper dialogue between Catholicism and the social and political circumstances of modernity. Liberation theology is the clearest example of a tendency on the part of Catholic elites to attend to demands posed by democratization, social commitment and the transformation of the institutional conditions of religious membership: from the old parochial order to societies of masses transformed by the mass media, the expansion of the educational system, capitalism and the verification of exclusionary tendencies that soon after would become more acute. We will summarize, perhaps unfairly, those expressions to the fact that they tried to modernize religion with an image that condenses that step: the transformation of Jesus into a historical subject. Personally, I will say that it is an image that I like, but analytically I must say that this operation that tried to promote a sense of the Christian experience as an experience of solidarity and political commitment not only had evangelizing successes but also negative counterpoints. It is that this modulation of Catholicism, which was based on an overcoming, if not a repudiation, analytical and theological repudiation, of the “naiveties” of faith in providence and in miracle, precisely for that reason it set aside the religious imagination of the popular sectors that to some extent became, if not the enemy, the adversary of the new Catholicism. Aldo Buntig (1969) social scientist and priest, argued, for example, that the emphasis on promises, processions and miracles denoted a stagnation in the oral phase of development, taking at face value a then common combination between Marxism and psychoanalysis. Thus, faith and miracles should be read as metaphors for the attitudes and historical events of the people of God in the emancipatory process and not as "real" events with an additional meaning that should be contextualized and pedagogical by an "expanded clergy" of priests to local elites, through a myriad of promotion and co-optation mechanisms that ranged from lay ordination to the presence of a strong development of ngo (Lehman 1992). This not only culturally distanced Catholicism from at least a part of the “poor people”, a term that Lowie (1989) takes from some Christian trade unionists to designate the excluded, which was precisely what in theory was considered as the subject of a history in the one that fused emancipation and salvation, but rather enhanced the role of the clergy, reinforcing a division that had always been a barrier between the popular sectors and Catholicism. Thus, from the 1960s on, Catholicism played at least two roles in shaping the popular sectors. In the first place, it recycles its mode of social influence, contributing to the politicization of a part, often small but active, of the popular sectors in various ways, depending on the countries of the region. The empowerment effects arising from this path are uneven: if on the one hand it is undeniable that through liberation theology there were processes of formation of organizations capable of having an impact on the defense of the rights of different subordinate subjects, It is also true that, in many cases, this influence reached a limit and that, based on cultural and political assumptions of improbable generalization in the popular sectors, it ended up weakening the capacity for collective organization of the social strata most affected by the trends. structurally exclusive that have worsened since the mid-1970s. Secondly, in this same context, the reinforcement of the clerical aspect of Catholicism, despite its extensions, will determine a "void" that will be precisely the one that will occupy or build the growing Pentecostalism at their expense: the divide between mobilized and non-mobilized Catholics by liberation theology ion or by the central guidelines of Catholicism influenced by the Second Vatican Council also has characteristics of a process of differentiation and social confrontation rooted and concretized at the religious level. These two consequences of the transformations of Catholicism interact with the characteristics of Pentecostalism, which I will describe hereinafter, and lead to a fact: Pentecostalism is the option of the poor in front of Catholicism that embodied the option for the poor.1

II) The growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America is a specific variant of a movement that has shown in the last hundred years an unprecedented capacity for globalization. Pentecostalism produces conversions and masses of the faithful in China, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, and in various countries on the African continent. In all these cases, as in Latin America, a constant is verified: Pentecostalism has a great capacity to link its message with the spiritualities of each of the cultural landscapes of the region, as well as to encourage forms of organization, theology and flexible, varied and easily appropriated liturgy with which it is disseminated among the most varied segments of the population from different national contexts.

The first way of spreading Pentecostalism was the migration of believers who moved with their faith and the pioneering missions organized from various countries, especially.2 Then, from the 1940s and 1950s, the missions continued, but Pentecostalism also developed from local leaders who adapted it to the endogenous social and cultural situation. An autonomous Pentecostalism, which privileged earthly salvation and was based on "divine cure", was superimposed on original Pentecostalism which emphasized sanctification and the repudiation of sin. The expanding Pentecostalism dialogued with popular needs and beliefs in a way that no religious denomination ever did, hence its differential success. For Pentecostals, miracles were not tricks or metaphors of necessity, as they were for actors as different as the educational apparatus, classical Protestantisms or even Catholicism, which in many of its aspects, as we have already said, the disavowed. By the 1950s, Pentecostals already made up an important contingent in various Latin American countries. Towards the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s, capitalizing on all these antecedents, a third stage began, in which two paths of Pentecostal growth became general: that of the so-called “neo-Pentecostalism” and that of the autonomous churches. What some researchers and religious agents call "neo-Pentecostalism" exacerbates features of classical Pentecostalism, while producing theological, liturgical, and organizational innovations. The expressions related to the presence of the Holy Spirit were pluralized and gained strength (the commitment to miracles was increased and systematized) and the figure of shepherds as privileged subjects capable of making this blessing viable. In this context, two key theological articulations emerged: the "theology of prosperity" and the "doctrine of spiritual warfare." For our argument, it is convenient to consider in some detail the first: the prosperity theology, which polemicized and antagonized liberation theology on a practical level; He held that if God can heal and heal the soul, there is no reason to think that He cannot bestow prosperity. The horror of analysts molded by secular culture or observers close to Catholicism, which sanctifies poverty in the face of the “mixture” of the spiritual with the economic, prevented us from perceiving that this aspect of the Pentecostal theological offer has many airs of family with the sacrificial dimension that in peasant towns leads to offering animals and crops to the gods in exchange for prosperity. Only, as corresponds to the time of capitalism, it cannot be materialized in any other way than through the general equivalent of all commodities: money. Neo-Pentecostal churches used all available communication innovations and also applied “church-growth” techniques that had been successfully developed in South Korea. However, neo-Pentecostalism designates, more and more, a new phase in the development of Pentecostalism and, less and less, a type of church. All Pentecostal churches adopted emphasis and motives “typical of neo-Pentecostalism” (Oro and Semán, 1999).

At the same time, in the same period there was a multiplication of the small Pentecostal churches. This phenomenon has been less observed but it is no less important: most of the converts to Pentecostalism end up grouping in small autonomous churches in their neighborhoods after a passage through larger or more institutionalized churches. Many of the neighborhood pastors obtain in these large churches the know how to build new temples in their areas of residence, to which each group of believers imprints the stamp of the particularity of their experience. In a dynamic that is similar to that of the proliferation of musical bands, the small churches are the silent majority in which the Pentecostal sensibility is preferred. In these small churches, any observer will be able to find almost everything that is claimed to be typical of “neo-Pentecostalism”, but offered from autonomous and endogenous projects to the populations of all the peripheries of Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico.

Pentecostal growth feeds on the organizational and discursive advantages of evangelicals in relation to the situations that we have already pointed out in Catholicism: where Catholicism stops calling miracles, Pentecostalism renews them; where Catholicism recreates the distances between the priest and the people of God, with a bureaucratic, disenchanted and even “progressive” logic, the universal priesthood claimed by that Protestantism gives birth to a church in each block and, what is more important, a shepherd who was born, lived and suffered on that block. This happens in an area where demographic transformations favor Pentecostal growth: in those spaces in which Catholicism, with its slow logistics, does not manage to account for the metropolitanization process that characterizes the region, in each new neighborhood where the Church Catholic plans to arrive through slow, regulated processes that go through the parish, the diocese and the Vatican itself back and forth, there are already one or more evangelical churches. This process also occurs from the countryside to the city, and from the periphery to the center. And it is for this reason that journalistic observations almost always confuse the effects with the causes: the great Pentecostal churches, which are the most visible, not only do not necessarily congregate the majority of the faithful, but they are not the triggers of the phenomenon either, but they assume that role before “metropolitancentric” observers.

This set of phenomena that in very synthetic lines describe the process of Pentecostal growth has a double meaning to understand the relationships between popular sectors, religion and social inequality. In the first place, and although the ideology of Pentecostalism is objected, it functions as a social process of redistribution of the power to produce religion of which Pentecostalism is the way and the cause. In this sense, despite the fact that other asymmetries grow, there is one that is reversed: in terms of symbolic production, the popular sectors gain power and autonomy, as Brandão (1980) observed very early. On the other hand, secondly, and taking into account the causes for which Pentecostalism grows, another effect of empowerment of subordinate subjects should not be ruled out. Pentecostalism, as we have already said, conquers believers by promoting miracles. What miracles ?: the pacification of family relationships, the solution of problematic drug and alcohol consumption, youth “detours” in violent organizations, a series of social and personal suffering whose reversal can also be computed as an advance of the subjects of the popular world in situations in which it is always more possible to get worse than better. It is no longer only the intangible area of the production of symbolic goods, but also the heavy and concrete facts of the daily life of groups that find in this religious expression a possibility of improvement.

It is at this point where the characteristics of the implantation of Pentecostalism in the popular sectors and the discussion of its value with respect to the reproduction of all kinds of inequalities in contemporary Latin American societies must be discerned. From what I have briefly exposed and from what Pérez Sáinz tells us, it is impossible not to ask ourselves the solutions that it offers to personal suffering that derives from the characteristics of social organization, such as the one that is also offered to economic suffering through of the aforementioned prosperity theology, do not imply a reinforcement of individualism and consumerism that makes believers converge with the spirit of neoliberalism that is, in turn, responsible for a great wave of inequalities and exclusion that affects the popular sectors? We cannot give a definitive answer here, but we would like to give arguments that allow us to qualify a positive and absolute answer to this question. Indeed, the solutions promoted by Pentecostalism through rituals, prayers, doctrines and moral orientations are individualizing in a very specific sense: they often involve an awareness, a critical review of the responsibilities of the subject that inevitably implies individualization (Mariz , 1994 a, b). But this term, individualization, must be taken with enormous caution if we take into account that acute critics of sociology and anthropology have taught us that what, as the "notion of person", as the space of constitution of the agent of which the individualism of individualism is a specific case, it must overcome the gross opposition between individualism and holism, as can be found formulated in Marcel Mauss or Durkheim to admit the singularity (the multivariate character, let's say) of the notions of person and, specifically, of individualisms.3

On a more concrete level, this implies that it cannot be said simply that the individualization promoted by Pentecostalism necessarily implies the adoption of a pattern of selfish behavior, opposed to any type of collective action, an abandonment of the community and of the ties of belonging and social origin. Partly because of a corollary of the above that forces us to distinguish individualisms in the singular. But also because, from the analytical point of view, a confusion sometimes prevails between what the analyst hears in the televised pastors' discourse and what can be discerned in the appropriations of the faithful in daily life and from a series of incredible speeches. mediators who make what we see on television is not exactly what the faithful hear, receive and practice on a daily basis in the small neighborhood churches where the largest congregate apart from the believers from the popular sectors. Empirical research reveals that a discourse such as that of prosperity, which seems to involve the greatest individualizing and mercantilist powers, is not translated or appropriated as a stimulus to enrichment, distinction and for himself who can: rather it is taken as an incitement to the action trusting in the retribution of providence and for the benefit of the family and the subject in plans that have to do with work and obtaining daily sustenance in situations in which it operates as an antidote against fatalism and the descent of the self esteem. The young woman who every morning must find the strength to go out and sell in the streets, the bricklayer who starts his day looking for work, the taxi driver who rents his car for a daily price, neither looking for nor dreaming of millions, nor of trips to Miami, nor with any of the situations with which the churches that buy spaces on television try to attract faithful, but with small triumphs to which those words of encouragement and self-encouragement give a very little boost.

This does not necessarily imply the adoption of a selfish, possessive, competitive pattern of action, but neither can it be denied that these appropriations can intrinsically favor the adoption of collective action courses to face the evils that are faced from prayer, pastoral advice, rituals of liberation of negative spirits, etc. Now, not all believers define all the problems they face in their trajectories at levels of aggregation that can be family, neighborhood or national as exclusively individual questions of solution, procedure or value. This is verified in fact on another plane that is the subject of innumerable discussions: when it is seen that the Pentecostals, contrary to what was expected of them in the pioneering analyzes that expected this individualization in a pre-established way as a very Protestant "withdrawal from the world" Instead of taking refuge in religion, they organize to transform the world and participate in politics. It is usually stated a priori that this political participation is naturally "favorable to the right", and with this two issues are avoided. In the first place, that if that were their political orientation, it can no longer be said that they reject collective action. But secondly, this statement leaves aside the fact that they assume this participation with pragmatism and singularities that do not allow to affirm that their commitments are or have to be “naturally neoliberal” all the time: if in Brazil, for example, they do so. in favor of a liberal and conservative candidate in 2018, it should not be forgotten that before, between 2002 and 2015, they did so actively for one of a democratic and popular nature. And more generally, it should not be overlooked that on average, in Latin America they configure a sensitivity divided between social concerns that are more accentuated than in Catholicism as a whole and an agenda that today is more conservative in terms of gender and sexual diversity than that of Catholicism. of Catholics, although in other decades this has not been so clear (Machado, 1994).4

In short: in terms of their participation in the social game, Pentecostals are not necessarily individualistic or neoliberal, and can often support patterns of behavior and political action contrary to those prefigured by those labels. Pentecostalism, with all its determinations and all its ambiguities, is still a disputed process. And the dispute over exclusionary projects should not only count them as part of the forces that produce exclusion.

Bibliography

Brandão, Carlos Rodrigues (1980). Os deuses do povo: um estudo sobre a religião popular. São Paulo: Brasiliense.

Buntig, Aldo (1969). El catolicismo popular en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Bonum (Cuaderno i, sociológico).

Burdick, John (1993). Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Arena. Berkeley: Univesity of California Press.

Bellah, Robert N. et al. (1996). Habits of the Heart. Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Londres: University of California Press.

Estrada Saavedra, Marco (2011). “Teocracia para la liberación: la disputa por la hegemonía estatal desde la fe. La experiencia de la diócesis
de San Cristóbal de las Casas
y el pueblo creyente en la selva lacandona”, en Sanchiz Agudo y A. Estrada Saavedra (ed.). (Trans)formaciones del Estado en los márgenes de Latinoamérica: imaginarios alternativos, aparatos, inacabados y espacios transnacionales. México: El Colegio de México/Universidad Iberoamericana.

Goldman, Marcio (1999). “Uma Categoria do Pensamento Antropológico: A Noção de Pessoa”, en Marcio Goldman (comp.), Alguma Antropología. Rio de Janeiro: Relume-Dumará.

Lehman, David (1992). “Prolegómeno a las revoluciones religiosas en América Latina”, pp. 35-41, Punto de Vista, núm. 43, Buenos Aires.

Lowie, Michel (1989). “O catolicismo latino-americano radicalizado”, en Estudos Avançados, vol. 3, núm. 5. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0103-40141989000100005

Machado, María das Dores (1994). Carismáticos e Pentecostais: adesão religiosa e seus efeitos na esfera privada. Tesis doctoral. Río de Janeiro: iuperj.

Mariz, Cecilia (1994a). Coping with poverty: Pentecostals and Christian Base Communities in Brazil. Filadelfia: Temple University Press.

Mariz, Cecilia (1994b). “Libertação e Ética. Uma análise do discurso de pentecostais que se recuperaram do alcoolismo”, en Alberto Antoniazzi (coord.), Nem Anjos nem Demônios. Petrópolis: Vozes.

Oro, Ari y P. Semán (1997). “Os pentecostalismos no Cone-Sul: Panorama e Estudos”, en Religião e Sociedade, vol.18, núm. 2, pp. 127-155.

Oro, Ari y P. Semán (1999). Neo-Pentecostalismo e conflitos éticos. Religião e Sociedade, Río de Janeiro, vol. 20, núm.1, pp.39-54,

Pérez Guadalupe, José Luis y S. Grundberger (ed.) (2018). Evangélicos y poder en América Latina. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Social Cristianos/Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.

Pew Research Center (2014, 13 de noviembre). “Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region”. Recuperado de: https://www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latin-america/, consultado el 09 de julio de 2019.

Sanchis, Pierre (1994). “O Repto Pentecostal da Cultura Católica Brasileira”, en Alberto Antoniazzi (coord.), Nem Anjos nem Demônios. Petrópolis: Vozes.

Semán, Pablo (2000). “El pentecostalismo y la religiosidad de los sectores populares”, en M. Svampa (comp.), Desde abajo: la transformación de las identidades sociales. Buenos Aires: Biblos.