For the last three or four decades there has been a steady global upsurge in conservative Protestant Christianity parallel to the upsurge in conservative Islam. Indeed, these have been the two main shifts in world religion during the second half of the twentieth century. The advance of conservative evangelicalism has been most evident in what used to be called the Third World, especially Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, but it is also notable in the Philippines, the Pacific rim (above all Korea), and China. Sizable conversions have occurred in parts of Eastern Europe, notably Romania. And evangelical religion can clearly claim to be the liveliest sector in the developed “Western” world, whether we speak of Britain, Holland, the United States, or Australia.
Just what the overall numbers are is difficult to say, partly be cause numbers are propaganda, but also because there are varying criteria for what constitutes affiliation and because there is a penumbra of fringe movements. Most estimates of evangelicals in Latin America hover between 40 and 50 million, which is about one person in ten. The total in Africa must also be in the tens of millions, and optimistic estimates are similar for China. Maybe in the world as a whole we are talking about 200 million people.
The main upsurge is not in the older, more staid evangelicalism but in Pentecostalism. That means we are dealing with movements offering what are called the “gifts of the Spirit” (such as healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues), rather than with what some people label “fundamentalism.” At the same time, there are plenty of versions of the older mainstream churches “in renewal,” representing a spillover of the Pentecostal spirit. Alongside them are myriad small churches, many of them quite local, as well as charismatic fellowships. And there are also thriving megachurches, often with a neo-Pentecostal emphasis on health and wealth. Indeed, health-and-wealth churches seem to resonate very easily with the em phases of traditional African religion. There are, finally, syncretistic movements at the margin of evangelical Christianity, such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, in Brazil, and The Light of the World, in Mexico, each with about two million followers.
Initially there was a tendency to pigeonhole evangelical expansion as a form of American cultural imperialism, supported by American money and spearheaded by American missionary personnel, including the televangelists. However, most recent research recognizes that, whatever the origins of some of these movements in the North Atlantic Protestant world, they are now independent and indigenous in both personnel and finance. In the contemporary world of mass communications and geographical mobility, the missionary is no longer necessary. Missionaries still exist, of course, but even if they did not the evangelical expansion would be much the same, given the capacity of religious messages to pass along lines of personal and familial contact. People and ideas are on the move at increasing speeds.
Certain characteristics of evangelical and especially of Pentecostal religion bear upon the likely character of any substantial political presence. Crucially, evangelicals and Pentecostals have carried forward traditions of the separation of church and state. Also, they are so fragmented that they cannot hope to operate in concert to establish some kind of ideological monopoly. In that respect they are quite unlike “fundamentalist” Muslims, who in many countries seek ideological hegemony and the regulation of all citizens ac cording to Islamic law. Evangelical Christians are, with one or two exceptions, ambitious at most to constitute an effective pressure group, pressing corporate institutional interests and broad moral principles, and generally acquiring a voice in the public forum.
Another characteristic likely to affect the form that evangelicals’ intervention and influence takes is their considerable suspicion of “the world,” expressed through a concentration on building up the body of the faithful as a separated enclave of righteousness. Thus the initial impact of evangelical conversion occurs not through overt political action but as a major mutation of culture: restoration of the family, the rejection of machismo, the adoption of economic and work disciplines and new priorities. Occasionally this phase of cultural accumulation and the establishment of autonomous space may is sue in more direct political action, as it did in the black civil-rights movement in the United States and, for an earlier example, in the association of British Nonconformists with the Liberal Party 1870-1920.
But these rather dramatic excursions are exceptional. The more usual mode of political intervention has to do with establishing a voice that ex presses both the institutional interests of what has become a substantial sector of the world of voluntary association and a concern for broad moral principles. This voice may make itself heard through negotiations with local authorities, or through candidacies within established parties. Beyond that, the evangelical presence is felt through the large number able to vote for the candidates or parties most sympathetic to the evangelical point of view.
The evangelical understanding of the political realm, when not suffused with suspicion, tends to be at once individualistic and pragmatic and thus to correspond to historical features of political life in Anglo-Saxon democracies. Its individualistic approach supposes that political improvement depends on the multiplication of persons of moral integrity; the preferred discourse is through personalized images rather than structural arrangements and forces. And its pragmatism ensures that evangelicals are resistant to political doctrine and the language of “project” that pervades Latin European and Latin American political discussion. At the most there is a strain towards neoliberal positions and a rejection of kinds of socialism that express the antireligious traditions of the Enlightenment. In Latin America, the evangelical and Pentecostal experience of the comprehensive world-views of Marxism and Catholicism (or the two combined) has not been positive, and that is expressed in voting behavior.
The Roman Catholic Church, even in Italy, accepts the fact that it cannot dominate a society and therefore sees itself as a potent commentator in a pluralistic framework.
Obviously there are contrasts here with both Islamic and Catholic interventions. In contrast with Islam, there is no body of legal norms to promote as the basis for an evangelical society. While some minor currents of evangelical opinion advocate a reorganization of society along Levitical lines, these currents are not influential and are highly unlikely to acquire serious influence in Latin America. In contrast with Catholicism, there are no historic norms worked out over centuries of power and politics to draw upon. As evangelicals experience the intricate dynamics of the political sphere, they have no traditions to use as guides. What they have instead, at least in Latin America, are the established practices of corporatism and clientage, and it is all too easy to adjust to these practices. As a result, the traditional evangelical fears of the corruption that can follow from dealings with the “principalities and powers” have occasionally proved well founded.
In the absence of sophisticated norms deployed by high-status ecclesiastics and religious intellectuals, evangelicals are exposed to the vagaries of circumstance equipped with little more than native good sense and the limited inferences they can draw from the Bible. They lack markers to stabilize their responses. At the same time thy are not misled, as some Catholics seem to be, into supposing that the existence of such markers means that popular piety is aware of them and can be mobilized behind them. Whether one is thinking of the analyses proposed by liberation theologians such as Leonardo Boff and Gustavo Gutierrez or the reflection of Pope John Paul II, these are not the major influence upon the Catholic population, whose everyday practice of piety is governed by personal and local concerns. Once this is taken into account, the contrast between evangelicals and Catholics is really not so great.
Perhaps this is the point that will draw this broad introduction together. What we have initially as a consequence of the evangelical upsurge is the creation of an autonomous social space within which people may participate in the creation of a different kind of subsociety. In this subsociety, those who count for little or nothing in the wider world find themselves addressed as persons able to display initiative and to be of consequence. Divine validation loosens their tongues, and they engage in a free communication with one another within the constraints of vigorous pastoral authority. Moreover, as these enclaves multiply, religious monopoly breaks down and pluralism develops, mediation gives way to direct access, and a competitive religious economy is established.
Taken in themselves, these features of participation, pluralism, direct access, and competition might seem to imply both democracy and the market economy. However, it is not that simple. In societies like those of Brazil and Nigeria where corruption, corporatism, and clientage are endemic, established culture exercises a centripetal pull on every kind of subsociety or resistant enclave. But in none of today’s established democracies was democracy built in a day. A whole series of cooperating circumstances has to be assembled, and even then the democracy that results is always in danger of corrosion or corruption. The large-scale growth of voluntary religious associations based on participation and competition is only one rung on the ladder to the eventual establishment of a viable democracy and civil society. Nonetheless, the emergence of more and more significant social actors whose interests have to be taken into account can only help the prospects for democracy.
Two further aspects of evangelical/ Pentecostal mores enhance the democratic potential: the exercise of authority, and peaceableness. Despite its historical antecedents, authority in Pentecostalism is concentrated in a male pastorate; in that respect the movement resembles Christianity as a whole in that it consists largely of women and is run largely by men. At the same time, many different roles and responsibilities are available, and this enables all members, male and female, to participate. It is also arguable that a movement based on spontaneous expression of “gifts of the Spirit” can survive only if there is a stable and unquestioned frame of authoritative governance. Spontaneity depends on boundaries.
As for peaceableness, we have already noted the undermining of machismo. The male ceases to be predatory and irresponsible and becomes domesticized. In the reconstituted evangelical family, the respect traditionally given to the male has to be earned. Moreover, males are withdrawn from the romanticism of violence. Not only are they no longer expected to respond to mayhem with mayhem, but they are emphatically not natural candidates for a Kalashnikov culture, either as guerrillas or as agents of the national security state. There is a civilian quality about the evangelical man. Naturally this also means he may abstain from militant engagement in situations of social in justice, for example on the shop floor. But on the whole, the adoption of a peaceable temper should help diminish the cycles of violence characteristic of Latin American society and the societies of sub-Saharan Africa.
For examples of the foregoing broad principles of evangelical impact on politics I will rely on a variety of sources, but in particular on the work of Paul Freston on Latin America.1 I do not intend to discuss the exhaustively analyzed case of American evangelicalism and the “Moral Majority” or “Christian Coalition” except to say that most of their particular political and moral concerns are specific to the North American context and are not extensively reproduced in other parts of the world. In Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere, the clash is not between evangelicals or “fundamentalists” and the secular humanism characteristic of liberals in the East Coast elite; this set of issues barely arises. Furthermore, the role of televangelism is very much muted elsewhere. American evangelicals do of course have in common with other evangelicals concerns about matters having to do with the family and sexuality.
We will look first at three sharply contrasting cases in Latin America: Peru, Guatemala, and Brazil. In Peru the evangelicals compose only some 7 percent of the population and are mostly not Pentecostal. In Guatemala, evangelicals compose some 30 per cent and are overwhelmingly Pentecostals and charismatics, but the politically significant sector involves a unique penetration of the elite by neo-Pentecostals. In Brazil, evangelicals are about 15 percent and the majority of them are Pentecostal, above all in the massive Assemblies of God churches; but there is a extraordinary gamut of kinds of evangelicals, ranging from middle-class charismatics and megachurches like Renascer (“to be reborn” in Portuguese) to the lower-class God is Love church, which has minimal political involvement, and the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which is contentious and politically activist.
The evangelical minority in Peru was mobilized with other out-groups as part of “Cambio 90,” the successful presidential campaign of Alberto Fujimori. The aim of Fujimori’s campaign organizers was to gain access to the indigenous vote and the world of small vendors through the evangelical network. Nineteen Protestants were elected to the congress in that 1990 election, mostly from the historic churches, and a Baptist pastor became second vice-president. After the election, however, Fujimori marginalized his support of evangelicals and opened negotiations with the Catholic Church.
In Guatemala, where a long-standing civil war finally concluded in 1996, evangelicals have become major figures in running social work and education. The two evangelical presidents, Efrain Rios Montt (1982-83) and Jorge Serrano (1991-93), were both members of the political class prior to their conversion to neo-Pentecostal elite metropolitan churches, Verbo and El Shaddai. This situation illustrates the penetration of a particular variant of Pentecostalism into the modern business elite, but it does not seem that Serrano’s election was due in particular to the evangelical vote among the people at large.
Brazil offers the most significant case, since it involves nearly half the southern continent. Historical Protestantism had for some time had a minor political presence, without denominational endorsement. But 1986 brought a marked increase in Protestant representation in the congress as well as a shift toward more denominational endorsement of Pentecostals, especially from the Assemblies of God. Members of this new group of representatives came from lower social origins than their predecessors and were closely associated with the Pentecostal leadership. The number of practicing Pentecostals was not so far behind the number of practicing Catholics, and the evangelical representatives went beyond cultural defense (in issues of family and sexuality) and the promotion of their institutional interests to contest the symbolic role of the Catholic Church in the public forum. Most evangelical representatives were on the center-right or center. As for the evangelical electorate, though far from uniform, in probably worked against the left-wing candidate Lula in 1989 and may even have been crucial in the election of 1994. Some indications of increasing influence are the greater respect and sensitivity shown from the left and the propensity of politicians on the left to use evangelical language, and occasionally even to convert. Paul Freston adds that an evangelical left has emerged in Brazil. He warns against the triumphalist tendencies among some Pentecostals and what he regards as the destabilizing effects of the political interventions of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.2
Fundamentalism is a ragbag category joining together disparate movements: believers in biblical literalism do not necessarily accept the charismatic practice of the “gifts of the spirit.”
Mention of the Universal Church in Brazil permits a side glance at its equally expansive and syncretic parallel in Mexico, The Light of the World. Only by an act of conceptual charity are these two churches categorized as Pentecostal. What is interesting about The Light of the World is that it effectively runs the district of Provincia Hermosa in Guadalajara and has done so on the basis of close relations with the Permanent Revolutionary Party (PRI). The Light of the World has a temple holding some 15,000, with an exotic atmosphere and hints of Zionism. It was founded in the thirties by a former sergeant in the Mexican civil war and shares the anti-Catholic nationalism of the PRI. At the same time, it is flexible and acute enough to have also established good relations with PAN, the Catholic party, to the considerable irritation of church representatives.
In Latin American evangelicalism as a whole, the institutional interests of the denominational leaderships are by no means always a guide to the way believers vote. Evangelicals insert themselves where they can acquire a voice. In 1974 in Chile, for example, the majority of denominational leaders, in common with the Catholic leadership, welcomed Pinochet, but voting behavior before and after Pinochet does not display any affinity with his regime. Evangelicals in Chile make up nearly 20 percent of the electorate, but they do not have a single member in the legislature. The situation in Colombia illustrates the search for a voice as well as the promotion of institutional interests. In the election of 1990, evangelicals emerged as an electoral entity seeking adequate civil rights, and since then small parties have also expressed the political concerns of leaders of Bogota’s megachurches.
The two African countries where evangelical influence is most likely are Nigeria and Zimbabwe. In Nigeria the return to democracy is still in the balance, but there are many middle-class charismatic churches that are much more politically conscious than their poorer Pentecostal brethren. These churches often represent a university-educated Christian elite that practices economic discipline, emphasizes the integrity of the family, and seeks to re place corruption by trust in public and business affairs. The problem with such a vision is that it is likely to be blunted by the high politics of patronage.
In Zimbabwe the Assemblies of God denomination by itself accounts for something like 10 percent of the population. Pentecostalism began in the colonial period as an anti-colonial movement, and it has since then tended to express the interests of women and young men against older male power, as well as the unassuaged traumas of the civil war. A very general point about African situations is that with the widespread collapse of state provision, the mainstream churches have operated as NGOs in association with government while Pentecostalism has come to act as a kind of opposition.
A distinctive approach that is associated in particular with Paul Gifford assimilates Pentecostal influence in Africa into the broad category “fundamentalism.”3 In my own view, fundamentalism is a ragbag category joining together disparate movements: believers in biblical literalism do not necessarily accept the charismatic practice of the “gifts of the Spirit.” Be that as it may, Gifford speaks in terms of an explosion of “fundamentalism”—much of it having relationships with the American South—that is eroding the influence of the mainstream Protestant churches as well as bringing about a Pentecostalization of the older bodies. He points out that a completely different dynamic from that of North America prevails in Africa. All churches, whether mainstream or independent or Pentecostal, take the Bible literally. Almost all states are opposed to abortion and are un aware of “gay rights” issues or Western-style feminism. Neither evolution nor humanism figures in discussions.
Gifford focuses on Liberia as a prime instance of a kind of Christian dualism separating church from world but with a component of health-and-wealth doctrine. Liberia is, of course, a special case, with its long-term ties to the United States (it was founded in 1822 through the efforts of an American group to settle freed American slaves in West Africa) and with the role Christianity has had in relation to the power of the Americo-Liberian oligarchy and the dominance of the True Whig party. In the latter years of William Tolbert’s presidency (1971-80) the mainstream churches distanced themselves somewhat from the dominant oligarchy, and at the same time a sizable group of Christians emerged under the banner of the Evangelical Fellowship of Liberia. The Evangelical Fellowship was reacting against the close identification of mainstream Christianity with the establishment, and it adopted an apolitical stance. As in a number of Latin American churches, charismatic Christianity in Liberia carries an overtone of Christian Zionism, one implication of which is opposition to Islam.
The tendency to abjure political involvement exists elsewhere. In Korea, evangelical Christianity coalesces with existing cultural traits already oriented toward achievement with the result that the religious impact is largely restricted to cultural reform. It sponsors self-help and mutual insurance programs and exhibits a piety allied to technological pragmatism. As Grant Wacker put it in another context, Pentecostalism seeks out the Garden of Eden equipped with a satellite dish.4 These traits in association with the economic and family ethos already noted are important in the reform of culture.
The Philippines is another country anchored historically within the U.S. sphere of influence. In 1992 a Protestant, Fidel Ramos, was elected as the country’s president. In a recent volume the argument is made that the spiritual warfare embraced by Philippine charismatic groups overlaps military activity against Communism.5 As in Guatemala, there are charismatics among the elite. Sophisticated use is made of radio, and there are extensive networks in education. There is also a margin of so-called dominion theology (from the Psalmist’s assertion that man was given dominion over God’s creation) such as exists also in Guatemala, but notions of Christian theocracy are no more practical in the Philippines than in Latin America. The evangelicals, in any case, constitute no more than 10 percent of the population.
A rather different pattern emerges in south India. Here there is no contiguous imperial presence to be blamed for cultural incursions. Nevertheless, the parallels with Latin America are striking. A considerable proportion of Christians is now associated with charismatic churches that emphasize the Bible and the gifts of the Spirit, including exorcism, healing, and prophecy. These churches are led by lay people rather than established hierarchies, and they seek out the supernatural in everyday life. As in Latin America, they offer opportunities for female participation. Parallel changes are taking place in the mainstream bodies, including the Roman Catholic Church. However, the main stream bodies tend to look relativistic and compromising when faced with the militancy of Hindus and the power of non-Christian deities. What the new movements represent is the defense of the Christian stake in the social order, together with a specifically Indian reclamation of supernatural presences and powers.
Perhaps the most surprising contexts for these changes are in Western and Eastern Europe. In Portugal, for example, the rapid expansion of the Universal Church has made it second only to the Roman Catholic Church. The Universal Church appears to have an appeal for the educated young and has created a “People’s Party.” In Hungary (which is perhaps more strictly Central than Eastern Europe) the Faith Church has be come the fourth largest religious body in the country, after the Catholics, the Reformed, and the Lutherans. Its “prosperity gospel” has an extensive appeal among the Budapest middle class, and it has personnel links with the neo-liberal element in the current government.
Peter Berger has observed that the vitality of conservative religious groups in all three major monotheistic faiths is cognate with the relative decline of liberal groups that have attempted to conform to “modernity as defined by progressive intellectuals.”6 At the same time, the major attempts in this century to institute what T. S. Eliot called “the idea of a Christian society” have all gone into decline. The neo-Calvinist movement to constitute a specifically Christian culture was never very effective, whatever its intellectual underpinnings. Liberation theology was more effective in the proposals of its intellectual protagonists than in everyday reality, and it has declined since the arrival of Pope John Paul II and the passing of the Latin American political crises of the 1960s and 1970s. Christian Democracy always had a strong admixture of secularizing dynamism and is now, with the evanescence of dogmatic Communism, chronically lacking a plausible antagonist.
This means that within societies with a Christian tradition, even in such strongly religious countries as the Irish Republic and Poland, the old inclusive frame allied to ecclesiastical monopoly is no longer viable. The Roman Catholic Church, even in Italy, accepts the fact that it cannot hope to dominate a society through a party such as “Democrazia Christiana,” and therefore sees itself as a potent commentator within a pluralistic framework, possessed at the same time of concrete institutional interests.
That role, the role of influential commentator within a pluralistic society, still exists, and it is probably the one that will eventually be taken up by the expanding evangelical movements of the contemporary world. True, sometimes those movements are drawn by the cultural pull of the societies in which they operate to adopt corporatist models of intervention; sometimes they even entertain notions of replacing the Catholic Church in its old domination of public space. But that remains a dream. The likelihood is that evangelicals will work within parties as commentators on the moral condition of society. In that respect, evangelical movements will exhibit a powerful contrast with those Islamic movements that seek the regulation of a whole society according to religious norms.
The evangelicals’ most potent contribution will be the creation of voluntary associations and the multiplication of social and political actors in the public arena. Other things being equal (which of course they rarely are), the cultural characteristics of evangelicals—participation, pragmatism, competition, personal discipline—ought in the long run to foster democracy.
David Martin is emeritus professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, a visiting professor at Lancaster University, and an international associate of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture, Boston University. Among his many books are Tongues of Fire: Conservative Protestantism in Latin America (Blackwell) and Does Christianity Cause War? (Oxford Univ. Press). This essay is excerpted from The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, edited by Peter L. Berger (Eerdmans/Ethics and Public Policy Center). Used with permission.
1. Paul Freston, “Popular Protestants in Brazilian Politics,” Social Compass, Vol. 41, No. 4 (1994), pp. 537-70.
2. Ibid.
3. Paul Gifford, Christianity and Politics in Doe’s Liberia (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993). See also Paul Gifford, “Prosperity: A New and Foreign Element in African Christianity,” Religion, Vol. 20 (1990), pp. 373-88.
4. Grant Wacker, “Searching for Eden with a Satellite Dish: Primitivism, Pragmatism, and the Pentecostal Character,” in Richard Hughes, ed., The Primitive Church in the Modern World (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 139-66.
5. Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan Rose, eds., Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (Routledge, 1996).
6. Peter L. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in Peter L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Eerdmans/Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999), pp. 1-18.
Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
