Religious Engagement,Civic Skills,and Political Participation in Latin America

To what extent has the growth of Evangelicalism in Latin America contributed to political participation across the region? A number of scholars of religion and politics in the United States have suggested that Evangelicalism promotes the development of civic skills necessary for political engagement, while the Catholic Church, due to its hierarchical structure, provides fewer opportunities for skill acquisition. In this paper, we apply this debate to Latin America to test whether civic skills developed in Catholic and Protestant church activities lead to differential participation rates in 18 countries. We utilize the 2014 Pew Religion in Latin America survey to test these effects, and find that Protestant churches do indeed promote skill-developing activities at higher rates, but that Catholics, when involved, are more likely to translate this religious participation into political action. We conclude that political scientists must better understand the organizational role of religion in promoting political engagement worldwide.     

The Strategic Practice of “Fiesta” in a Latino Protestant Church: Religious Racialization and the Performance of Ethnic Identity

Founded and led by a U.S.-born white pastor, Amor Poderoso is a nondenominational, evangelical megachurch in El Paso, Texas, almost entirely composed of Mexican-Americans, recent Mexican immigrants, and current Mexican citizens. Ethnographic fieldwork from 2014 to 2017, supplemented with interviews with pastors, worship leaders, and attendees, reveal that much of congregational life orients around intentionally showcasing “Mexican” culture through sounds, images, and artifacts that appropriate an array of idealized ethnic references (e.g., food, dress, mannerisms, clichés) from Northern Mexico. Ongoing ethnic displays do not originate spontaneously or impromptu from membership but rather serve as a form of tactical authenticity derived from U.S. racial schemas mobilized by congregational leaders as a distinctive religious resource. Weekly worship services featuring dialect-inflected Spanish preaching and singing project ethnic signals that elicit connections to both a common ancestral heritage and a common religious identity. In short, church leaders at this southern border Latino church deliberately deploy sounds, images, and artifacts to assert racialized performances of being “Mexican” for distinctly religious purposes, especially evangelization. In the process, the distinctive practices of religious racialization effectively structure church members’ ethnic and religious identities around racial tropes to buttress a cogent corporate identity for enacting institutionalized evangelical narratives and legitimating charismatic authority.     

Catholicism,Protestantism, and Mexicanness on the US–Mexico border: discourses,narrative identities,habits, and affect

ABSTRACT

In Mexico, Catholicism and national identity are deeply intertwined through what we call a process of articulation. Thus, not surprisingly, despite the recent impressive growth of Protestantism in the nation, most people still believe that being Mexican and being Catholic are almost synonymous. Additionally, because the two identifications do not ‘cross each other’ (as the metaphor of intersectionality posits) but, instead, enter a very complex process of articulation in which each modifies the other, there is a particular way in which many Mexicans experience and perform their Catholicism, in the same vein that there is a particular way in which Catholics experience and perform their Mexicanness. Simultaneously, because neither nationality nor religion is narrated and/or performed in isolation to other forms of identification (e.g. race, ethnicity, region, gender) other possible identifications are also articulated or co-inform (in different ways) nationality and religion in the identitarian encounters that occur on the border. In the way people build their identifications around religion, narratives, practices, habits, affect, and emotions are continuously interrelated. We show that having an altar outside one’s house or making the sign of the cross on one’s body is both (depending on the unfolding of the social interactions and their patterns of relations) a non-linguistic discourse and a habit. We also show that their mere presence (in the case of altars) or performance (in the case of the sign of the cross) affect the people around the site or the performance, triggering complex emotions. That altar and sign of the cross can potentially be all these things simultaneously highlights their importance as ‘affective conductors’—stressing their significance as central objects in the intensification of relations that give new capacities to the entities involved in the patterns of relationship at play in the identitarian encounter at stake.     

Contributors

The ‘imagined community’ (famously defined by Benedict Anderson) could not be created out of nothing. It built upon previously existing identities. And though nineteenth-century nationalism is often seen as essentially secular, the most powerful of these identities were frequently religious. Indeed the clergy often played a major role in promoting a national consciousness. While a ‘national church’ readily saw itself as the embodiment of the nation’s past history, present identity and future aspirations, religious minorities usually had a more ambivalent relationship with a nationalism that was always in some degree exclusive. And even in the case of a ‘national church’, the interests of politicians and ecclesiastics were not always the same. Moreover some nineteenth-century nationalisms were defined in ways to which religion was largely irrelevant, or were in explicit opposition to the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, in ways that varied in kind and degree from country to country, nationalism and Christianity came to be intertwined in nineteenth-century Europe. National identities were to an important degree defined by reference to specific Christian traditions, their history, their forms of worship, and their heroic figures. At the same time nationalism often came to be seen as an integral part of Christianity. Readiness to die for the motherland was presented as a Christian duty and, in particular, Christian preachers of this era were strongly influenced by the concept of a God-given national mission, which justified nationalist claims and might sometimes justify war.     

Contesting Faith,Truth, and Religious Language at the Creation Museum: A Historical-Theological Reflection

Abstract

The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, attempts to demonstrate the flaws in contemporary science and to offer an alternative explanation of human origins and biological complexity rooted in a specific reading of the biblical narrative. This effort, however, is paradoxically rooted in the worldview of modern science and the Enlightenment. This article will examine the Creation Museum's definitions of faith, truth, and religious language and will compare these definitions to those of mainline Protestant Christianity to uncover the historical and theological presuppositions of Creationist and mainline Protestant engagements with contemporary science.     

The Rhetoric of Homosexual Practice

Many Protestant denominations have or recently had policies that prohibit “self‐avowed practicing homosexuals” from being ordained. By only prohibiting “practicing” homosexuals, proponents of these policies claim that they do not discriminate against homosexuals as a group since, technically, a homosexual can still be ordained as long as she is “non‐practicing.” In other words, a condemnation of homosexual practice is not the same as a condemnation of homosexual persons. I argue that this is not the case; the rhetoric of homosexual practice does, in fact, amount to a condemnation of gays and lesbians. It does so by conflating the two things it claims to keep separate—homosexual conduct and homosexual identity. I demonstrate this conflation by analyzing the history of this rhetoric and how it has been adjudicated in church court decisions from the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA).     

Protestant and Catholic Distinctions in Secularization

Differences between Protestants and Catholics in religious beliefs and behavior are revisited in the light of growing theoretical and empirical evidence for stages of secularization and a remaining religious core in Western societies. To what extent are remaining Protestants more religious than before and compared with remaining Catholics? Analyzing repeated cross-sectional survey data from 1985 to 2012 in the US, Canada, and Great Britain, we find that, in most cases, Protestant affiliation has declined more significantly than Catholic affiliation. Yet, individuals who declare themselves as belonging to a Protestant denomination have higher rates of regular service attendance, prayer, and Christian beliefs than those previously. They have also surpassed these same rates among Catholics in both the US and Canada and are on track to do so in Britain in the coming years.     

Women of African Descent and Protestantism

This article aims to highlight critical elements of the Brazilian history and context as a basis for understanding the participation and action of women of African descent within Brazilian Protestantism. It begins by reviewing the establishment of Protestant denominations in Brazil against the background of slavery, which was abolished only in 1888, before turning to how a national identity was developed in Brazil that strove to be White, ignoring inequalities due to slavery, and the existence of racism in Brazil, thereby feeding what came to be known as the “myth of the Brazilian racial democracy.” The article goes on to discuss the historical and continuing conditions of women of African descent, and to offer elements for a clearer understanding of the lives of women of African descent in Protestant churches in Brazil.     

John Milton's Magisterial Reformation

In the English prose he published over a period of two decades, John Milton frequently uses the term ‘reformation’ to identify the age in which he was living and the causes for which he was fighting. In so doing, he reveals his support for the magisterial Reformation and his rejection of the radical Reformation. He expresses his desire not for religious diversity but for union with the Scottish and Continental Reformed Churches. He constructs a complex discourse that is self-serving, misleading in some ways, prophetic, and calculated to win a range of polemical contests. In supporting the magisterial Reformation, he also displays his support for theologians who participate in government, and magistrates who participate in determining religious belief and conduct. Milton thus repudiates many aspects of modernity and is, as he insists, a man who lived during, and promoted what he called, ‘times of reformation’.     

Hitler's theology: A cautionary tale for today's peril

In this article the author updates and renews his thesis from 2013 about the Weimarization of American political culture. He argues that fascism is an endemic modern possibility that has a theological dimension that becomes visible when the left‐right ideological binary descending from the French Revolution is set aside. Reviewing the evidence from Hitler's Table Talks, he shows how Hitler both understood himself as a progressive change agent and envisioned writing a new theology for triumphant Nazism in retirement. The article concludes by drawing upon Giorgio Agamben's analysis of Nazi biopolitics in Homo Sacer to point towards a messianic alternative.