Foreign Protestantism

Waldo Cesar observes (Pentecostalism and the Future of the Christian Churches, 91-92) that Protestantism has often felt like a foreign import to Latin America. There was a discontinuity between Protestant missions and the local population, and Protestantism tended to rely on the outside world. All this impressed Latin Americans as a form of neocolonialism.

Cesar isolates two factors that led Protestant missions in this direction. First, “It has been true that historically the Protestant churches always had difficulties coexisting with the popular. This is due not only to what they inherited theologically and ideologically from the missionaries, but also to the social and cultural complexity of popular culture. . . . The evangelization carried on by foreign missionaries transmitted a type of faith and culture that avoided—and even rejected—indigenous values. It took the converts out of their world and transformed them into beings disconnected from their origins” (91).

Second, citing Jose Migues Bonino, Cesar points to “the neocolonial character of the conditions that favored Protestantism’s entry into the continent.” Protestants made a “pact” with “modernizing elites” and favored them over “traditional” ones. This led Protestantism, “to favor the initiative and the objects of the its countries of origin instead of seeking its own dynamism” (92).

Some Evangelical heroes have gone native, but overall Catholicism and Pentecostalism have fared better. Both are more open to indigenous culture. Pentecostalism especially has bypassed the elites entirely, allying neither with the traditionalists nor the modernizers. It has ministered among, and raised, the lowest of the low. The only “pact” was with the outcasts who received the Spirit.