Posted on 05/19/2009 8:05:41 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
When Americans discuss the great crisis facing the Roman Catholic Church, they usually are thinking of the notorious sex abuse scandals. Vatican authorities, though, worry more about another crisis, one with potentially far graver implications for the church—the explosive growth of Protestant and Pentecostal numbers in what has always been the solidly Catholic stronghold of Latin America.
Since the 1970s evangélicos have made enormous gains in populous Latin countries. They probably make up 15 percent of Brazil's people today, 30 percent of Chile's, at least a third of Guatemala's. Worse, from the Catholic point of view, these numbers are continuing to grow, to the point that Brazil by mid-century could conceivably have a Protestant majority.
A religious revolution of this scale could not occur without conflicts that spill over into the political realm. Usually Protestants and Catholics fight with words, contending in the mass media and in elections and parliamentary debates. In some countries, though, the fights have reached the point of armed struggle, night-riding and ethnic cleansing. And the motives driving the combatants look very familiar to anyone who knows the story of France or Germany during the Reformation era.
People in the U.S. might feel strongly about intellectual debates over salvation by works as opposed to by faith alone, but they are not likely to pursue those grievances through armed violence. But in some societies, religion is thoroughly institutionalized in the life of the community. Religious practice defines the cycle of the year, the boundaries of the community, the shape of popular loyalties. Often it becomes very localized, centered on devotion to this particular saint or that church or shrine or even this particular version of the Virgin Mary. The authority of faith is rooted in community and tradition, ritual and place.
Imagine then the impact of a radical new concept of the faith, one that grounds authority in the written word and spurns those local traditions as pagan excrescences. People who might not understand church doctrines too clearly become very sensitive indeed to attempts to take away their shrine or their Virgin. When passions rise high enough, they try to stamp out the blasphemers who seek to destroy the world they know. In extreme cases, local riots and purges can merge into wider movements. That was the story of grassroots religious violence in 16th-century Europe. Some thing very like it is in progress today in rural areas of Latin America.
In different parts of that region, Protestantism appeals to various constituencies. The evangélicos have made their greatest advances in the megacities. But the new faith has also had a special impact on traditionally marginalized Indian communities in Mayan regions of Central America and in Andean countries like Peru and Bolivia. For centuries, these communities accepted Catholicism as the official religion, but it contained a strong dose of native tradition. Membership in the community depended on participating in communal rituals focused on the church.
But then the Protestants came, proclaiming their membership in a new universal community, the New Jerusalem. They denounced the old beliefs as superstition, particularly the Indian customs that survived easily within the Catholic framework. Moreover, they condemned the alcohol use that usually marks popular fiestas. In effect, they refused to pay the Catholic cultural tax.
In Guatemala, some extreme evangelicals have tried to enforce popular morality through vigilante campaigns. Catholic village authorities strike back against those who tear the community apart by their refusal to join in processions and devotions. They pressure evangelicals by cutting off water and utilities and by driving their children from the schools. Some battles follow a cycle very familiar from Reformation Europe: Protestants mock a procession in which faithful Catholics carry a figure of the Virgin; Catholics retaliate by burning a Protestant chapel; and the violence continues with night-time raids and expulsions.
Although such unrest has surfaced in several countries, it has been most marked in Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, where interfaith tensions since 1994 have left hundreds dead and thousands more expelled from their homes. Although Western leftists have glorified the Zapatista guerrillas as anticolonialist champions, the Chiapas affair can't be understood without consideration of social tensions between Protestants and Catholics. Some insurgents are driven by Catholic liberation theology, but much of the violence is a reaction not so much to political and economic exploitation as to the acceptance of rival forms of Christianity by other Indian communities. At the heart of the war is the struggle within the faith between traditional and textual sources of authority.
Worsening global economic conditions will likely aggravate ethnic and religious tensions in poorer countries, and Protestant-Catholic conflicts will sharpen. However modern the economic environment, the underlying issues would have been quite comprehensible to John Knox or John Calvin.
Imagine then the impact of a radical new concept of the faith, one that grounds authority in the written word and spurns those local traditions as pagan excrescences. People who might not understand church doctrines too clearly become very sensitive indeed to attempts to take away their shrine or their Virgin. When passions rise high enough, they try to stamp out the blasphemers who seek to destroy the world they know. In extreme cases, local riots and purges can merge into wider movements. That was the story of grassroots religious violence in 16th-century Europe. Some thing very like it is in progress today in rural areas of Latin America.
**Protestant-Catholic conflicts will sharpen**
No, I think we are going to see a new era of Protestants and Catholics standing against the religion that has swept through Europe and is now threatening the U. S.
Interesting they mention Guatamala: the largest (and essentially the only) orphanage in Guatemala is run by neither protestants nor by the Latin church. It is run by Orthodox nuns. Similarly a major orphanage in Mexico is run by the Orthodox Church.
Is that a BAD thing?..
Spreading the Gospel of the Salvation of Jesus Christ, should be the aim, not the denomination as there are no Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, etc. in heaven -- only Christians.
“It is run by Orthodox nuns. Similarly a major orphanage in Mexico is run by the Orthodox Church.”
Several of the younger members of our parish have served in both for up to 9 months. By all reports its a wonderful operation.
First, let me point out that Phil Jenkins is a secular researcher at Penn State University, and by casting this as Protestant v. Catholic, he’s probably tying to stir up trouble.
But...
(I speak of Brazil because I learned much when the pope was going to visit)
If this were the Lutheran or Anglican/Nigerian church growing so much in Brazil, I could see it as a good situation. Much of Brazil was never Catholic, but simply a mix of unevangelized African and indegenous religions simply labeled Catholic because the nation was officially Catholic. There usually was at least some blending with Catholic / Christian beliefs.
The problem is that most of the new Protestant groups are very dissimilar to the Protestant missionaries who partly evangelized them. Several combine the 7th-Day Adventists’ paranoia against the powers of this world (which in Brazil means the USA), the Pentacostalists’ gnosis and fake prophecying, and the African religions’ fixation on Satan, and a Mormon-like restorationism (that isn’t directly related to LDS) into a horrific concoction that isn’t remotely Christian, but bitterly, even insanely anti-Catholic.
Fortunately, much of this happened in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout John Paul’s reign, Brazil has strengthened the authenticity and native character of its priesthood (so it isn’t do-gooder liberal religious orders), squashed the Liberation Theology movement, gotten more media savvy, and confronted the radical quasi-Christian movements, so that the number of “Catholics” in Brazil is about the same as it was in 1990, and those who are Catholic are better catechized. That said, there is of course, the same problem with the media promoting sinfulness that we have up here.
Good for the Orthodox. Funny I mentioned the trad Anglicans and Lutherans in my previous post. They are “defective” (as Benedict would say before his aghast handlers spin his words) in their faith, but I figure Anglican or Lutheran is far better than pagan. But there’s nothing at all defective about the Orthodox sacraments, and I would be quite thrilled to learn that the Orthodox are making massive inroads in Brazil’s pagan north or libertine cities.
... in fact, I could yearn for the day when the big religious conflict in any nation was between Orthodox and Catholic! :^D
I don't know if you're aware of how these things are connected, but they are - specifically, by New York's Hudson River valley and the "burned over districts" of the 19th century.
Throughout the 1800s, numerous revivals swept through the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York. Charles Finney, perhaps the most famous of the "Second Great Awakening" evangelists who repeatedly worked that area, coined the term "burned over district" because the residents had grown increasingly calloused and resistant to his methodical revival methods. He likened them to the charcoal remains left behind by multiple forest fires (the fires being his revivals).
Here's where your connection comes in. Numerous religious movements were spawned in the Hudson River Valley, following those revivals. Adventism, Unitarianism, Mormonism, Restorationism, and scores of other movements Christian and not sprang up or hit the area within the span of a few decades. A common theme among them was that the Catholic Church was to blame for a "great apostasy" in Christianity, and that [fill in the new group's name] was "restoring" the gospel and the "true church" to the world. A lesser theme for many was supernaturalism and prophetism.
Thanks... I’ve never tied those ends together that way, but for each factual point I know anything about, I know you’re right. Excellent analysis. (Or, more correctly, synthesis.)
Now what do upstate New York and Brazil have in common? In Brazil, the anti-Catholicism seems to me to be a marketing angle combined with a scapegoat: if you attack only the paganism, you’ll get good Catholics, so if you want people to join your corpor — I mean church — you have to attack the Catholic church with equal vehemence and tie the two together. It’s like Mac has to do more than convince people how wonderful it is to buy a new, more powerful operating system; they also have to say what’s wrong with Vista. Of is there something more?
The common theme IMO is illiteracy. Consider then the quote I gave in post #1, from the article:
....in some societies, religion is thoroughly institutionalized in the life of the community. Religious practice defines the cycle of the year, the boundaries of the community, the shape of popular loyalties. Often it becomes very localized, centered on devotion to this particular saint or that church or shrine or even this particular version of the Virgin Mary. The authority of faith is rooted in community and tradition, ritual and place.The Catholic believers have practices, but they don't know the doctrines that lie behind them. Their faith is in the community, in the community knowing better than them. Had they known what they believe and why they do, in theory they'd be resistant to believe what the evangélicos are telling them about their faith. Had the evangélicos known (and believed) more about church history and doctrine, they'd probably give up and switch to being Catholic or Reformed.Imagine then the impact of a radical new concept of the faith, one that grounds authority in the written word and spurns those local traditions as pagan excrescences. People who might not understand church doctrines too clearly become very sensitive indeed to attempts to take away their shrine or their Virgin. When passions rise high enough, they try to stamp out the blasphemers who seek to destroy the world they know.
To the restornationist mindset, history is meaningless. History is where the apostasy happened. History is when the corrupt creeds were written. History is full of false churches and false doctrines. "What we're doing here is a new thing that wipes away those old, false things." And anyone who claims they're ignorant of history is probably one of those book-learned people who refuse the Holy Spirit and substitute books in His place.
So ignorance is IMO the fuel of this fire. The cure is literacy and education. The evangélicos may profess to advocate that, but their pedigree discounts knowledge post-1st-century and pre-19th century (or pre-Radical Reformation for the anabaptists) in origin.
Once again, I believe you’ve done an excellent job of synthesizing the information! The pagan-ish Brazilians certainly do have low literacy, and an abysmally poor understanding of Catholicism, in particular, and moreso of Christianity, in general. The Catholicism which had been retained from the very rare appearance of a priest had been only that which they could reconcile with their pagan beliefs. In this case, however, I wasn’t aware that literacy and basic Christian tenets was particularly bad in upstate New York. Maybe I misread the “burned out” information, but hadn’t there been any spiritual or educational formation with the previous generations of preachers, or had they merely whipped everyone up into a furor and moved on before they had imparted any real knowledge?
Given some of the set-to’s in the border lands in times past (think Serbs and Croats) I’m not sure that’s something to long for.
Mostly the latter denying the legitimacy of the former. Reformed/Protestant ministers were well-educated and stoic in their temperament. A Puritan-like stoicism was valued in their congregations, as evidence of self-control over their passions. Theological universities like Princeton were evidence that higher education was valued by the ecclesiastical community, too.
Now consider that the Revivalist and "circuit" preachers of the anabaptist and restorationist bents tended to have no formal education, especially in theology or doctrine. Consider also that revivals were conducted in areas reachable (if not served) by the existing Protestant ministers, as if these areas were "unchurched". The 19th century revivals usually devolved into spectacles of wild emotionalism (which were followed, nine months later, by a rash of illegitimate births). The expected response to a call for repentance was not just contrition, but an emotional outpouring of tears and wailing. Not only was this counter to the Protestants' theological beliefs, but it ran counter to the Protestants' culture of stoicism. In other words, the revivals were by nature counter-Protestant.
When a revival preacher was successful at manipulating the attendees' control over their own emotions, he used that as "evidence" to persuade them that their old doctrinal understanding had misled them. But a couple of days later the revivalist leaves town, telling the community that since real revival has occurred among them, the Holy Spirit will guide them into all truth (or some similar argument). The community is then left to themselves to repair the theological (and emotional) damage done by his coming, without the revivalist to guide them in the reconstruction of their lives. A couple of years later, another revivalist rides into town, and sets the whole thing in motion again. Later, rinse, repeat, until the town is sick of anything that smacks of religion (the burned over districts) or someone gets it in his head that religion itself needs fixing (the cults).
This may be an over-simplistic and over-generalised explanation of things, but it gets the point across.
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I’m not going to blame religious differences for the Serb-Croat hostilities. The Croats wanted liberation from the Marxist Yugoslavian government. The Yugos responded by destroying what was supposedly the most beautiful coastal city in Europe, Dubrovnik. When the focus shifted to Bosnia, the Croats let loose rage against the Serbs, who represented the Yugos to them, and the Al-Qaeda types moved in to represent the Islamic Albanians.
Frankly, I don’t think the Serbs gave a crap about whether the Croats included the Filioque, or that the Croats gave a crap about whether the Serbs considered John Paul II to have any authority.
Go back to the WW II era and look at Ustashe propaganda: “Kill a third, drive a third into exile, convert a third,” was their program for the Serbs.
The emnity is a lot older than the Wars of the Yugoslav Dissolution.
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