Latin American evangelical politics can be seen, in Laclauian terms, as a construction of the people. More precisely, as the construction of the evangelical people, a minority with demands and a voice of its own in a “Catholic” continent of secular states. It is an evangelical construction of a country’s people in contexts in which evangelicals are considered a sociopolitical force with hegemonic aspirations. However, this double narrative has become complicated in recent years in the rough seas of the so-called conservative wave. A prominent alliance between the political far-right, neoliberalism and the parliamentary and pastoral evangelical elite reverberates from Brazil, which creates serious issues for the expectations of a pluralist impact of the public evangelical presence.

The consolidation of conservative projects supported by political and religious actors in Latin America is not a novelty: the continent has seen advances and crises of popular governments, bloody dictatorships, violent speeches and rights expansion processes that are carried out with different intensity and decoupled temporalities in different countries. The ways of naming this trend are the subject of discussion in this section, since the naming itself is a problem: they are expressions made up of diverse sectors socially and even politically, claiming transformations of varying thickness as the context allows them. Based on these ideas, we organized our discussion around three questions, which the authors answered based on the experience of each country.