One of the chief purposes of scholarly publications is to fill gaps in our knowledge of the world, and Arlene M. Sánchez Walsh’s Latino Pentecostal Identity: Evangelical Faith, Self, and Society does that admirably. Most scholars of religion know next to nothing about Latino Pentecostalism, and this book will serve as an important guide for future study. That said, it should also be pointed out that the book’s title unnecessarily claims too much. This is not a study of Latino Pentecostalism in general, but an analysis of the Mexican American Pentecostal experience in Southern California—and that specificity does not weaken the text. In fact, it strengthens the book by implicitly acknowledging how difficult it is to make intelligent statements about Latino Pentecostalism that apply everywhere and to all Hispanic groups. So this book ultimately fills only a small portion of the gap in our knowledge of Latino Pentecostalism, but the gap it fills is important, and anyone interested in understanding Hispanic Protestantism in the United States ought to read it.
Latino Pentecostal Identity – Evangelical Faith, Self and Society
Columbia University Press
272 pages
$34.00
For those who might be wondering why they should care about Latino Pentecostalism, a few demographic facts should make that case. Latinos are now the largest minority group in the United States, having recently surpassed African Americans. In terms of raw numbers, there are more than 30 million Hispanics living in the United States, 13 percent of the total U.S. population.
The Latino world of North America is a mosaic of cultures rather than a uniform community. Mexican Americans, like those described in Sánchez Walsh’s book, are the largest group, making up roughly 60 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population. Puerto Ricans, the next largest subgroup, constitute about 15 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population, Cuban Americans account for a little over 5 percent, and the remaining 20 percent trace their roots to a variety of other Spanish-speaking countries (especially those of the Caribbean and Central America). In contrast to the caricatures that still predominate in Anglo culture, most Latinos in the United States are fluent in English. More that three quarters are bilingual; about 10 percent speak only Spanish, and a similar number speak only English. Almost three-quarters of Latinos are native-born U.S. citizens.
Religiously, a sizeable majority of U.S. Latinos (70 percent) are Catholics; flipping those categories around, the American Catholic Church itself may soon become a predominantly Hispanic church. Right now Latinos make up one-third of all U.S. Catholics; by mid-century fully half of all American Catholics will be Hispanic. Taken at face value these statistics may, however, overstate the influence of Catholicism within the Latino community. The majority of Hispanics clearly are Catholic in a cultural sense, but estimates of weekly church attendance range as low as 12 percent, and the religiously inactive percentage of the Hispanic Catholic population may be as high as 50 percent.
Finally, about 25 percent of the U.S. Latino population is Protestant in one form or another, and the great majority of these Hispanic Protestants—more than three-quarters of them—are Pentecostal. In fact, it might be more accurate to identify the two main variants of Latino Christianity as either Catholic or Pentecostal rather than as Catholic or Protestant. Besides reflecting the actual numbers, this also acknowledges the many similarities that exist between non-Pentecostal Latino Protestants and their Pentecostal neighbors in terms of worship, conceptions of faith, and concern for the social ills that plague the Latino community in the United States. It is also worth noting that Hispanic Pentecostals, for the most part, are much more religiously active than their Catholic counterparts. On any given Sunday it is thus possible that there might be as many Latino Pentecostals in church as Hispanic Catholics. Hispanic Pentecostalism is a force to be reckoned with, and its influence will grow exponentially in the years ahead.
Until very recently, there has been an almost total scholarly void in terms of the study of Latino Pentecostalism. A turning point came with the 1992 publication of Eldin Villafañe’s The Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Pentecostal Social Ethic. Samuel Solivan’s The Spirit, Pathos and Liberation: Toward an Hispanic Pentecostal Theology (1998) advanced the discussion in a slightly different direction. As helpful as these two books are, neither one focuses, as Sánchez Walsh’s work does, on the empirical realities of Hispanic Pentecostalism. Instead they deal with normative questions of ethics and theology. Sánchez Walsh thus fills a huge gap in the literature by describing the living, and often tension-ridden, terrain of Pentecostal faith as it is actually experienced by Latinos.
One of the strengths of this book is Sánchez Walsh’s willingness to problematize the boundaries of the Pentecostal movement in ways that most Pentecostals (and most scholars of Pentecostalism) have avoided. Thus she deals with a number of different Pentecostal and/or charismatic groups, ranging from old-style Pentecostal churches like the Assemblies of God to newer organizations like the Vineyard fellowship and Calvary Chapel, which many traditional Pentecostals would not consider Pentecostal at all. The realities described by Sánchez Walsh differ from the idealistic pictures of Pentecostalism painted by theologians and church leaders. Her work makes it clear that within the Hispanic community, Pentecostalism is a relatively fluid phenomenon. One can be more or less Pentecostal, or Pentecostal in different ways. The history of Latino Pentecostalism demonstrates that it is a flexible faith that can be adjusted to meet the changing needs of individuals and their communities.
Sánchez Walsh is also fully aware that Latino Pentecostalism has had a mixed relationship with Anglo evangelicalism. Latino Pentecostals have borrowed a host of ideas and all sorts of material culture (from Christian t-shirts to WWJD bracelets) from Anglo evangelicalism. But Hispanic Pentecostals remain cautious nonetheless. Most Anglo evangelicals don’t understand the realities of Latino life in the United States, and evangelical political positions can sometimes be strongly at odds with the deepest concerns of the Hispanic community. Of course, Anglo evangelicalism itself is a mosaic of many different groups and perspectives, and Sánchez Walsh knows that. Thus rather than use the notion of evangelicalism in a simplistic manner, she accurately describes the movement as an “unwieldy network” of different groups and subgroups. That means, of course, that generalizations are hard to come by, which is precisely why Sánchez Walsh adopts a case-studies approach in Latino Pentecostal Identity.
Sánchez Walsh focuses on four separate historical case studies, and in each instance she raises important questions. She looks first at the experience of Latinos during the earliest years of the Pentecostal movement (1900 to about 1925). While the now standard picture is that Pentecostalism began as an anti-racist, multicultural movement, she says early Pentecostalism was far from being a “racial utopia” for Hispanics. She turns her attention next to the Assemblies of God missionary Alice Luce and the Latin American Bible Institute (LABI) that Luce helped found in 1926. While Luce is often cited as a proponent of Latino autonomy, Sánchez Walsh points out that she was also capable of being thoroughly matriarchal and patronizing when she felt Hispanic Pentecostals were not behaving or believing as they should. Sánchez Walsh follows the story of LABI to the present, using the school as an example of how traditional Pentecostal Christianity has fared in the Latino community.
Sánchez Walsh’s final two case studies focus on Victory Outreach and La Viña. Victory Outreach is a parachurch ministry (now in the process of becoming a denomination) that was begun by Sonny Arguinzoni in 1967. Arguinzoni’s ministry was oriented toward drug users, ex-convicts, and children in need. These people were shunned by the traditional Latino Pentecostal churches, so he began his own organization where they could feel at home. Arguinzoni’s work has been very successful, but the association is currently struggling with issues of leadership succession and how to meet the changing needs of the community. Sánchez Walsh’s contention is that versions of Latino Pentecostalism like Victory Outreach constantly need to reinvent themselves in order to meet the community’s changing needs. La Viña, the Latino wing of the Vineyard movement, presents a different set of challenges to Hispanic Pentecostalism. Here Sánchez Walsh examines two issues: How far the Pentecostalism of Latino Pentecostalism can be stretched, and how “Latino” Latino Pentecostalism can remain. In La Viña more than anywhere else, she sees potential tensions between being Pentecostal and being evangelical and between the loss and maintenance of a separate Latino identity.
What adds one final layer of interest to this book is the way Sánchez Walsh occasionally allows us to see glimpses of her own ambivalent relationship with Pentecostal faith and her struggle to balance academic objectivity with her personal search for identity as a Latino Christian woman. That push-pull, insider-outsider dynamic gives the book an added sense of depth and authenticity.
Douglas Jacobsen is Distinguished Professor of Church History and Theology at Messiah College. He is the author most recently of Thinking in the Spirit: Theologies of the Early Pentecostal Movement (Indiana Univ. Press).
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