The Metamorphosis of Latin American Protestant Groups: A Sociohistorical Perspective

Abstract

Study of religious phenomena in Latin America and the Caribbean covered by the generic term Protestantism has opened up a fertile field of research for sociologists, anthropologists, and historians in the last thirty years. The exponential growth in new non-Roman Catholic religious movements since the 1950s and the breadth of their organized networks have stimulated research based more often on sensationalism than on a scientific perspective. The complex and pluralistic manifestations of this heterodox religious phenomenon have generally been reduced to a notion of Protestantism rarely found in scholarly usage. The multiplicity of non-Roman Catholic religious movements cannot be reduced to some catchall category of Protestantism. Moreover, one must also analyze the connection between usage of the term Protestant and a culture marked by the Spanish Inquisition, which shaped the Ibero-American collective unconscious for more than three centuries, in order to understand why a fair number of Latin American researchers look at religious dissidence rather superficially, reducing it immediately to Protestantism.