Summary
This conclusion will attempt, firstly, to delineate the main characteristics of evangelical politics across the three continents; secondly, to look at the implications of Third World evangelical politics for democracy, pluralism, nationalism and globalisation; thirdly, to raise questions regarding the challenge of politics for evangelicalism; and lastly, to ponder the future of evangelical politics in the Third World in the next decades.
EVANGELICAL POLITICS IN THE THIRD WORLD: TOWARDS A CHARACTERISATION
We have examined evangelical politics in twenty-seven countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. We have used diverse sources: for a few countries, personal fieldwork in loco; for many more, interviews and documentary research; and for all cases, extensive bibliographical research. This has resulted, as in most broad-ranging comparative studies, in an unevenness of information from country to country, whether through gaps in research or actual gaps in empirical knowledge. Nevertheless, certain methodological principles which seem appropriate to the object of study have been followed throughout.
One is that too much discussion of evangelical politics in the Third World has been underdetermined by empirical data. One of the raisons d'être of this book is that we need to know more about what is actually happening before we jump to conclusions about what it all means. Before anything else, we need to become immersed in the specificities of the religious and political fields, and of the interaction between them, in each national context.
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- Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America , pp. 281 - 321Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001