Can the story of evangelicalism in Latin America be summed up in a single volume? Certainly not, and even the editor of The Gospel in Latin America admits as much. In the Foreword, David Bebbington suggests a more modest goal of helping to “place the Evangelicals of Latin America in the historical setting” (viii). Discerning readers cannot help but wonder if even that objective might be overly ambitious given the vast social, economic, political, and ethnic diversity existing across societies as distinctly different—in both political and religious terms—as, say, Honduras and Uruguay. Latin America is not now, nor ever has been, “one place” in any useful sense. And yet, perhaps there is value in sketching religious tendencies and variation across a diverse geographic region such as Latin America.
If there are any commonalities across the region, surely a key trait is the shared legacy of the institutional predominance of the Roman Catholic church for the better part of 500 years. Evangelical Protestants throughout Central and South America and in most of the Caribbean learned to define themselves as over against their mostly Catholic neighbors, relatives, teachers, and leaders. And yet the trajectories of Evangelical Protestants have varied enormously, both across nations as well as within them. This fact becomes clearest when reading back-to-back chapters by J. Daniel Salinas and Virginia Garrard. In the first, Salinas explores the important legacy created by Latin America's evangelical Left. At least as early as the participation of Renee Padilla and Samuel Escobar at the Lausanne 1974 conference, these leaders called evangelical leaders across the globe to embrace a misión integral—a holistic mission—that emphasized both the spiritual and social needs of all persons. Their call did not go unheeded and resulted in the formation of the Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana, which continues to provide important space for Latin American theologians even today.
As true and as important as the story of the evangelical Left may be, it could hardly contrast more sharply with the story told in the chapter that follows Salinas's piece. There Virginia Garrard charts the rise of “Dominion Theology” and “Christian Restoration” in Bolivia and Brazil, where former President Jair Bolsonaro received the enthusiastic support of Neo-Pentecostal leaders such as Edir Macedo. Resembling a kind of make-Christian-nationalism-great-again approach to political involvement, the movement represents “an ideology and practice for a specific type of conservative Christian political engagement” (64). Garrard's aptly chosen chapter title “Buried Giant” betrays her deep concern for the future of evangelical contributions to the political sphere and reminds us that the theologically astute intellectual leaders of Latin America's late twentieth-century evangelicals may have had a greater impact on global theological education than on the political and ecclesial realities at home.
A strong current of attending to political context runs through this volume, in keeping with academic engagement with Latin American religion in general. In fact, many of the chapters lean rather heavily on the work of social scientists such as David Stoll, David Martin, and Paul Freston. By the end of Part I, David Kirkpatrick cannot help but acknowledge this intellectual debt to the social sciences, going so far as to concede the “historical lacunae” in narrating the history of Latin American evangelicalisms. And although Part I of the book does make a contribution, it is in the second part of the book, titled “Particular Lands,” that we see strides being made toward seriously addressing those lacunae.
Of particular interest to scholars of religious history is the chapter by Pedro Feitoza “Evangelical Conceptions of History, Racial Difference, and Social Change, 1900–1940.” Feitoza provides a fascinating account of attempts by early twentieth-century Brazilian evangelicals to fashion a usable past for themselves by drawing on accounts of Huguenot refugees arriving in Rio de Janeiro in 1555, several decades before the English separatists landed at Plymouth Rock. This story, coupled with the accounts of persecution faced by Huguenot settlers at the hands of Portuguese Catholics, who thought the Huguenots were too friendly with their indigenous neighbors, provided the raw materials out of which early twentieth-century evangelical leaders could fashion a founding narrative of faith-inspired martyrdom in Brazil that reached back centuries. Just as intriguing is the argument, in the second part of Feitoza's chapter, that several of Brazil's early twentieth-century evangelical leaders worked hard to push back against scientific racism, an ideology that was particularly attractive to white elites who employed it to explain economic, social, and political troubles in Latin America. At mission conferences such as the Panama Congress of 1916, these Brazilian ministers openly questioned scientific racism's biological determinism. For example, Eduardo Carlos Pereira, who was among the few speakers not from North America at the conference, wove together a Biblical understanding of a single origin of all races with an appreciation for Darwin's evolutionary theory and in so doing “brought together the traditional evangelical emphasis on the authority of the Bible with the scientific confidence characteristic of his era to challenge prevailing racial theories” (135).
While there are several chapters in Part II that merit attention—Matheus Reis's chapter on Brazilian immigrant churches in Florida is particularly noteworthy—Feitoza's chapter stands out as refreshing and unique due to its contribution to the “history of historiography.” He reports on Latin American evangelicals “doing history” in a way that was clearly motivated by pastoral, political, and social needs in a given time and place. By reaching back a century into the past to explore the role of history-making within the Brazilian evangelical church, Feitoza reminds us of the key role historians can play in simply “telling the stories” of evangelical growth, change, and adaptation to the sociopolitical challenges of their day. Feitoza and the other contributors have done us a service in telling such stories, and even anthropologists and sociologists would do well to read them.
