The Prophet Motive
Huntington, Deborah
It is the small, dusty town of Ocotal, Nicaragua, near the Honduran border, in May 1983. Nicaragua is under attack from invading exiles and the atmosphere is electric. In front of...
...By 1910 CAM had 28 missionaries tending 70 churches with 1100 members in Central America, mainly in El Salvador and Guatemala...
...Scofield's mission was a forerunner of many which expanded into Central America during the twentieth century, emphasizing different religious symbols and Biblical stories than nineteenth century U.S...
...91-93...
...Costa Rica, 1980), draft documents (SanJos6, Costa Rica: Proyecto Centroamericano de Estudios Socio-religiososPROCADES, 1980-81, xerox...
...Protestant missions are a multinational, multimillion dollar enterprise...
...The number of U.S...
...But singly or in twos and threes, they come forward slowly...
...sion work in the late 1940s...
...3 Nearly a quarter of Guatemala's population, 15% of Nicaragua's and 12% of Panama's Street-corner in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, 1983...
...This promise of social mobility in turn increased the appeal of evangelicalism...
...Many of the evangelical missionaries who had been in China relocated in Central America...
...They came from theologically conservative backgrounds, believing in a fundamentalist, or literal, interpretation of the Bible, maintaining that Catholic is not Christian, and that only the bornagain are God's chosen people...
...CAM was more aggressive than preceding missions, perhaps because Scofield felt that GodNACLA Report was going to hold North American Christians directly responsible for every Central American who perished "so unaccountably neglected...
...2. Bill Bright, Revolucidn Inmediata (Barcelona: Cruzada Estudiantil y Profesional para Cristo, 1973), p. 8 and passim...
...in Robert Craig, "El Papel del Protestantismo en Costa Rica," in Protestantismo y Liberalismo en Amirica Latina (San Josi, Costa Rica: Departamento Ecumdnico de Investigaciones, 1983), p. 61...
...The film Jesus has been showing for free for several nights each week...
...The Appeal of Salvation This is not to suggest a facile correlation between the growth of capitalism and Protestantism...
...2 8 They became good workers...
...If you are patient, God's glory will make you rich in the next world...
...Economic transformations, forcing peasants off their land, sending some to the cities as migrants and turning others into wage laborers on cash crop plantations, contributed to a breakdown of the traditional outlook, slowly leading to turning points in national social consciousness...
...The kind of evangelical Protestantism which is sweeping Central America removes its adherents from social struggle and reform, places the onus on God rather than humans to act, and results in submissive resignation while waiting for Jesus' return to bring about change...
...Marsden, Fundamentalism, pp...
...Within a decade it arrived in Central America...
...Presbyterians is "the value of time" and what a sin "the passing of time" is...
...THE PROPHET MOTIVE 1. For this interpretation, see Gerstner, "The Theological Boundaries of Evangelical Faith," in Wes and Woodbridge, The Evangelicals: What They Believe, Who They Are, Where They Are Changing (New York: Abingdon Press, 1975), pp...
...It focuses on the conservative evangelicals, who represent the majority although not the totality of Protestants in the region, to determine what worldview they have offered during these turbulent times, and why they have had such widespread appeal...
...Anti-communism pervaded the writings of missionaries, the religious literature used for training local pastors and the mission board publications issued in the United States...
...2 3 The country was particularly slow to industrialize, and in the 1950s, 85% of the population still lived in the countryside...
...But Scofield's doctrine now explained the woeful state of the world as the necessary and predestined result of humankind's alienation from God...
...signs of the Great Tribulation were found in peasant rebellion...
...the Quaker Oats Company heir financed Chicago's Moody Bible Institute...
...Who among you here wants to spend the rest of your days with JESUS...
...Ibid., p. 9. 16...
...A utopian vision, it foresaw world progress "guided by His influence...
...In the 1930s there was already a large landless population, the product of late nineteenth century land grabs by the coffee oligarchy...
...1, p. 22...
...Though still small, it would open a new period of growth as new missions entered the region in droves...
...even as MacNaught wrote, the Salvadorean government was shooting all male Protestants in Nahuizalco, burning Bibles and closing churches.4" The joint mission of saving souls for Christ and nations from Satan was locked into missionary thinking following the "closing" of China to mis* In this year, the Liberal dictatorJose Santos Zelaya was overthrown after a Conservative revolt backed by U.S...
...2 2 Nowhere in Central America did the commercialization of agriculture occur as late as it did in Honduras...
...Many missionaries also represent the newer Pentecostal movement, which draws strongly on fundamentalism but also offers the bonus of an emotional and *These figures do not include 30,300 Mormon and 100 Jehovah's Witnesses missionaries...
...penniless, we own the world" (II Corinthians 6:10...
...CAM's Bible institutes sprang up everywhere...
...Wilson, Mission Handbook, p. 66...
...There, by means of the codification of language and evangelization through Bible translation, they have had a profound impact on the pace of integration-and often exploitation-of indigenous peoples...
...As in El Salvador, communal land was expropriated early on, peasants were made landless, the coffee market crisis hit hard and revolutionary movements were in evidence by the 1930s...
...Soren Hvalkof and Peter Aaby, "Introducing God in the Devil's Paradise," in Hvalkof and Aaby, eds., Is God an American?, p. 17...
...Author's free translation...
...several other Englishspeaking churches soon followed...
...Ibid., pp...
...Stoll, Fishers of Men, pp...
...Dominated by foreign banana companies, the country's rural capitalist sector was slow to emerge...
...It was a time of regional economic depression and violent political upheaval...
...Many of the Antillean and Jamaican workers who built Costa Rica's national railroad were Baptists...
...And so the national church grew up...
...The planters did not reclaim their lands until the 1940s when the coffee market improved...
...Sociologist Emilio Willems found related trends in Brazil and Chile...
...3 9 Raw anti-communism picked up where sanctions against partisanship left off...
...The new evangelicals-fundamentalists, premillenialists and Pentecostals-institutionalized their claim on evangelical culture through the establishment of Bible schools such as the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago...
...But there appear to be several marked differences in the behavior of the Nicaraguan coffee oligarchy during the period of the Depression...
...2 9 Protestantism offered all things to all people...
...By 1935, CAM had 63 churches operating with 13,700 members...
...From Guatemala in the 1890s he wrote, "Christians acquainted with Romanism only in the United States have no conception of how utterly debased and idolatrous it is in Spanish America...
...There was a shortage of priests and clerics who could administer the sacraments...
...4 1 A history of CAM in Guatemala, written in 1954 after the CIA-sponsored overthrow of the freely elected Arbenz government, closed on an optimistic note: "For many months Communistic domination has been present in the Guatemalan government, evidently introduced and controlled by Red Russians...
...Personal testimony was used as a "text for proclamation...
...A British trader, William le Lacheur, is credited with linking Costa Rica's new coffee growersJan/Feb 1984 0 z Catholic church in main square, Nebaj Ouiche, Guatemala, 1983...
...As we write, the Communistic government has been overthrown and a new regime is in the making...
...2 6 Both trends suggest that peasant displacement in the 1930s was less severe in Nicaragua than in El Salvador...
...32-38...
...They took over the elementary schools but kept the missionary teachers for want of money...
...What legacy did these zealous evangelicals who "felt a weighty burden" to preach to Central America's "tormented souls" leave behind them...
...By the early 1970s, when the Salvadorean popular organizations were beginning to take shape, the annual rate of Protestant conversion was 11.3% Nicaragua, on the other hand, presents a curious trend...
...At this eleventh hour, Christians must work to save every last possible soul by convincing them of the urgent need to repent their sins and accept Christ as their personal saviour...
...On a personal level, people felt their self-worth affirmed through successful efforts at battling such problems as alcoholism...
...Latin American Mission team, Evangelism in Depth: Experimenting with a New Type of Evangelism (Chicago: Moody Bible Institute, 1961), pp...
...Protestantism...
...Numerous Christian groups agree that they are "building the Kingdom of God-the God of the poor," but a growing number of Protestant sects insist that "only Christ saves" and "only the saved are the Church...
...1 7 A Growing Faith What Central America needs, wrote evangelical social historian Kenneth Grubb in the 1930s, is a greater sense of her own sin.' 8 So convinced of this need were U.S...
...Only Christ's return could alleviate matters...
...conservative evangelicalism was an ex6Jan/Feb 1984 pression of several trends...
...evangelicals had championed such causes as female suffrage and the abolition of slavery during the 1840s and 1850s...
...In a period of abrupt social change and mass migration, the sundering of emotional bonds with community, extended family and tradition brought about a crisis in social reference...
...The Liberal reform period reached its zenith with the ascent to power in 1871 ofJusto Rufino Barrios in Guatemala...
...3 5 Townsend, like many missionaries, was giving a narrow interpretation here to a verse from Paul's Letters to the Romans (13.1), which refers to "legitimate" authority, not "all" authority...
...whatever the motive, numerous politicians and businessmen found an ally in the Protestants...
...29-30...
...All annual average growth rates are taken from Clifton Holland, ed., "Status of Christianity Profile" series (Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, 1981...
...4 More than one million Protestants are engaged today in evangelism in a region in which half a century ago the converts numbered less than 30,000...
...69, 105, 123...
...Where one's countrymen exploit [one] must serve," they wrote...
...The rebels had not damaged a single church...
...next to the aggressive evangelicals, Catholicism must have seemed dormant, unresponsive...
...Hints of a "national security faith" began to enter their discourse...
...The historical roots and development of Central American Protestantism are the topic of this article...
...As a twinkling cross fades from the screen at the film's end, a local evangelist leaps on to a makeshift stage: "Step forward those of you who want eternal life...
...Other walls command different messages: "Christ calls on the fighter to repent...
...3 0 At the same time, evangelicalism contributed to a sense of self-worth, within a system which denied it to people by expelling them aggressively from their land, ignoring their urban presence and repressing their attempts at speaking out...
...That is "the only real revolution," writes Campus Crusade's founder and director, Bill Bright...
...In calling for a new mission effort directed at Central America in 1916, the ecumenical denominations may have decried "the sordid standards" exhibited by "representatives of foreign capital" which allowed businessmen to "complacently profit," but they found that salvation cushioned the impact of exploitation...
...Some may have seen their sins, others their self-interest...
...2 It is Nicaragua, but it could as easily be El Salvador or Honduras, where scores of organizations are dedicated to full-time evangelism...
...4. Clifton Holland, ed., World Christianity: Central America and the Caribbean (Monrovia, CA: Missions Advanced Research and Communication Center, 1981), pp...
...updated in interviews with author...
...The shifts in interpretation evoked very different ideas of the relationship between human beings, and between them and God...
...These denominations, while Christian, are not generally considered Protestant.' Jan/Fab 1984 3NACLA Report E The faithful at the Protestant centennial, San Salvador, 1982...
...Their Christianity is different than recent, primarily Catholic, liberation theology, which challenges the believer to "join in the creation process" with God to shape a better world...
...Pittman, RememberAllthe Way (Huntington Beach, CA: Wycliffe Bible Translators, 1975), p. 103, cited in David Stoll, "Words Can Be Used in So Many Ways," in Soren Hvalkof and Peter Aaby, Is God an American...
...Since economic contraction affected the entire region, how is such a disparity to be explained...
...Anglo-Saxon Christians had a "civilizing mission" and "a plain duty to discharge in respect to the moral welfare of Latin America...
...Both Herrera and his successor, Orellana, found that their best workers "were those who had been converted to the Gospel...
...George Black, Triumph of the People: The Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua (London: Zed Press, 1981), p. 11...
...On the face of it, it seems implausible that this Americanmade product should sell well in revolutionary Ocotal...
...U.S...
...Earlier post-millenialism had encouraged Christians to work for social reform, suggesting that they themselves might benefit from such labor...
...the North American workers who engineered the trans-Panama railroad in 1849, and later the canal system, were also Protestant...
...and "They shall not pass...
...7 Feeling "a burden" for these poor people, Scofield, with the backing of several Dallas businessmen, formed the Central American Mission to "preach the gospel to every creature in Central America...
...Who is ready to take the first step forward withJesus,just come up to the altar, take that step...
...Costa Rican evangelicals still sing, "I've got nothing in this world but a mansion in the next...
...until the 1960s, annual ProtestantJan/Feb 1984 growth there measured only 4...
...Ibid., p. 50...
...Spain, And in Samaria, p. 224...
...In the process, he founded the Protestant community in Costa Rica...
...are now counted among "the saved...
...And it is a brand of Protestantism distinct from the "mainline" or ecumenically oriented denominations such as the United Methodists or the Presbyterians who encourage a "social witness" against "unjust systems...
...His medical clinic, opened in the early 1920s, proved a magical draw by providing modern medicine against hookworm...
...If strains of empire-building marked the overture, anti-communism was the theme of the processional...
...182, 289...
...Townsend and R.S...
...XV, No...
...58, 89...
...The average annual growth rate of the Protestant community in Honduras was only 1.6% between 1936 and 1950-the lowest in the region-while in El Salvador it was 9.2% between 1930 and 1945, and 7.1% between 1945 and 1960.21 There were differences in the numbers of churches in each country, but this does not explain people's willingness to enter them...
...The population there had at least heard the message of Christ, however base, distorted and papist it might be...
...3. Samuel Wilson, ed., Mission Handbook: North American Protestant Ministries Overseas (Monrovia, CA: Missions Advanced Research and Communication Center, 1979), pp...
...Dominion over Guatemala's 1.5 million Indians was carved up between five mission agencies in the 1920s, and CAM took charge of nearly half...
...In 1921, Guatemalan President Carlos Herrera urged a CAM missionary to concentrate his evangelizing efforts on the president's own largefincas...
...In the early 1930s, when the bottom fell out of the coffee market, El Salvador's "Fourteen Families" responded by laying off massive numbers of workers...
...The limited data available, however, shows important national variations in the rate of Protestant growth...
...8 Wycliffe/SIL works through securing government contracts, leading them into tacit alliance with local powers...
...Only in the 1960s did migration and unrest become evident, paralleled by a growth in the rate of conversion to Protestantism, to 12.4% between 1965 and 1978.24 El Salvador's population pressure has always been stronger...
...The task of the evangelical (the term refers, in its most general sense, to believers in a doctrine of personal salvation by faith in Christ') is to bring about the glorious return and Kingdom of Jesus...
...An important component of the mentality they inherited was the insistence that the church had no role to play in addressing conditions of suffering and repression...
...Cyrus Scofield, the pioneer missionary and founder of the Central American Mission (CAM), sought to set the record straight...
...The new Bible institutes and faith missions depended on the largesse of oilmen, industrialists and plantation owners, who viewed their contributions as investments against Social Gospel preaching...
...Spain, And in Samaria, pp...
...The only larger mission was the Moravians, with 32 missionaries and 1300 members in Nicaragua, concentrated among the Miskito, Sumo and Rama Indian population of the Atlantic Coast...
...Their work would set in motion a new dynamic of self-propagation...
...8. Ibid., p. 8. 9. Charles Robinson, D.D., History of Christian Missions (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), p. 404...
...pire-building...
...Both fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches multiplied, often breaking away from mainline denominations and then splitting further among themselves over doctrinal disputes...
...With Liberal power consolidated in El Salvador and Honduras too, Barrios seized church properties, abolished ecclesiastical courts, dissolved religious orders, introduced public schools and, in short, generally secularized society...
...The key appears to lie in the intensity and nature of peasant displacement...
...Kenneth Grubb, An Advancing Church in Latin America (London: World Dominion Press, 1936), p. 22...
...6. Wilton Nelson, "A History of Protestantism in Costa Rica," doctoral dissertation (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1957), pp...
...The first was fundamentalism, which had gained ground at the turn of the century as a reaction to what it called the climate of "theological bankruptcy" of that epoch...
...Cameron Townsend, "A great Cakchiquel evangelist," in Central America Bulletin, September 15, 1924, p. 14, cited in Stoll, Fishers of Men, p. 34...
...Lyman Stewart, founder of the Union Oil Company, was the major backer of the Open Door Bible Institute of Los Angeles, and financed the publication, Fundamentals, in which the beliefs of the fundamentalists were hammered out...
...The legal deed of the first Protestant church in 1848 was in the name of the local British coffee financier...
...Other authors emphasize as central the mandate to convert new followers...
...44-45...
...Missionary boards were at first slow to respond to Barrios' invitation...
...for most missionaries the Christian doctrine of love drew the line at the Left...
...International Review of Missions, July 1929, cited in Camilo Crivelli, S.J., Los Protestantesy La Amirica Latina: Conferencias, Acusaciones, Respuestas (Rome: Isola del Liri, Soc...
...6 Independence went far toward undermining Catholic hegemony in Central America, but it was the separation of church and state under the Liberal reforms of the latter half of the nineteenth century which broke the absolute power of the Catholic establishment...
...The vast majority of Protestant missionaries to Central America represented the evangelical branch of American Protestantism, which stresses the task of winning converts to Christ...
...93-94...
...That the appeal of Protestantism should begin to take root in the 1930s is scarcely surprising...
...The Pentecostals formed a distinct current within Christianity for their belief in salvation through "Baptism in the Holy Spirit," evidenced by "speaking with other tongues as the Spirit gives utterance...
...The purse strings were still controlled in the United States...
...Jaime Wheelock, Imperialismo y Dictadura (Mexico City, Siglo XXI, 1974...
...Backed by growing amounts of money, missionaries branched into specialized services, founding radio stations, hospitals, aviation transport companies, Sunday schools, book stores and so forth.NACLA Report cc "The Almost Chosen '--Seventh Day Adventists portray the Second Coming...
...20-22...
...In 1932, for example, the CAM missionary Reverend Roy MacNaught wrote condoning the repression which met the Pipil Indian uprising in El Salvador: "A man who embraces red doctrines, who rebels against his government, who pillages and burns, is worthy of death...
...In front of the Sandinista Defense Committee headquarters, red and black flags fly at half-mast to honor the sons of the neighborhood who have just died in the border battles...
...evangelicals that they worked at an ever more feverish pitch...
...2 Another was the physical abandonment of plantations by their owners, particularly in the important coffee growing areas where Sandino's rebel army was active until 1933...
...Independence from Spain opened the region to commerce and exchange with the rest of the world...
...or "Thou shalt not kill...
...Many evangelicals confused Christian with American ideals and equated the defense of Christian civilization with the expansion of U.S...
...With remarkable resilience, evangelical Protestants held on to their conservative view of the world, even in the context of the increasing radicalization of Christianity during the 1960s...
...Guatemalan evangelicals today reflect that their foremost cultural heritage from the U.S...
...The Moravian Church, of German-Czech origin, sent missionaries to attend to British colonial administrators in 1728...
...9 Trends in U.S...
...CAM and the new Pentecostal Assemblies of God were each active in four countries...
...They are stepping up for a package of beliefs which, as put forward by Campus Crusade, leaves no room in their earthly lives to work for social gains...
...The Central American Mission, CAM, saw its missionaries as "trail blazers" and sought nationals to carry the torch as "messengers to their own people," because this would allow them to accomplish "a maximum volume of work...
...Each felt the personal impact of an urgent commission from God to fulfill the prophecies of an earlier age...
...Origins of the Species Protestantism followed British colonial expansion into the western Caribbean, spilling into Central America through the Mosquitia region of Nicaragua and Honduras in the early 1700s...
...the country's communal 4jido land holdings remained intact until well into the twentieth century...
...Viewing Protestants as a convenient ally against the Catholic hierarchy and the rural oligarchy, Barrios invited the Presbyterian Church to send proselytizers in 1873...
...Pentecostalism offered an illusory hope of democracy unavailable in society as a whole...
...Slowly a new phase of Protestant expansion began, through conversion rather than immigration, as first the Presbyterians and later the Methodists, Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists arrived...
...H. Beach, Geography of Protestant Missions (London, 1904), p. 91, in Prudencio Damboriena, S.J., ElProtestantismo en Amirica Latina, Two Volumes, (Freiburg, Switzerland: Oficina Internacional de Investigaciones Sociales de FERES, 1963), Vol...
...Honduras, p. 12...
...3 6 Anastasio Somoza Garcia encouraged missionaries into Nicaragua in the late 1930s...
...and Canadian overseas missionaries working with agencies which grossed nearly $1.2 billion in income.* Less than 5,000 of these missionaries come from the ecumenically oriented denominations affiliated with the National Council of Churches of Christ...
...Marsden, Fundamentalism, pp...
...Willems, Followers, pp...
...One missionary wrote from Guatemala, "As a byproduct of salvation comes a train of material blessings...
...167-175), p. 172...
...David Stoll, Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire?: The Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America (London: Zed Press, 1982), p. 26...
...they were joined shortly by Cuban exile pastors in the early 1960s...
...Holland, Status of Christianity (Honduras draft), p. 12...
...El Salvador's ruling oligarchy was entirely unwilling to contemplate even a modicum of land reform...
...Historically, evangelicals have remained predominantly outside of-if not opposed to-these diverse political mobilizations...
...William Menzies, Anointed To Serve: The Story of the Assemblies of God (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 1971), p. 22...
...in 1960, for instance, Wycliffe pledged to support the Guatemalan government of President Miguel Ydfgoras Fuentes against insurgency...
...What cause for thanksgiving, that doors are still open wide for promoting gospel advances, and that even the threat is lifted...
...1 6 The Fuller family of Southern California, for instance, supported 54 missionaries with the profits from their orange groves...
...vivid relationship with God through such experiences as revival meetings and speaking in tongues...
...As they moved into the regions of Central America dominated by the Spanish in the early 1800s, the scattered and lonely pioneers of Protestantism encountered strong harassment, even violence, from the selfindulgent officials of the Catholic Church, comfortable in their privileged, propertied and protected status...
...The vast majority are representatives of the conservative and fundamentalist agencies, which use crusades, door-to-door witnessing, radio programs, even food aid and health care to advance the born-again message...
...5. Wilson, Mission Handbook, pp...
...They may have been equal within the church, but they felt their special relationships with God placed them apart from the community, and-they believed-rightly so...
...247-260...
...with Great Britain's lucrative coffee market...
...Despite differing emphases and motives, by the second decade of the twentieth century both conservative and ecumenical denominations projected a Protestant consensus as partners in emCyrus Ingerson Scofield, founder of the Central American Mission...
...Buildings are daubed with slogans of "Death to Somocismo...
...3 2 They had sole responsibility for the Cakchiquel (the second largest ethnic grouping) and "shared" the Quiche and Marm (first and third largest) with other agencies...
...Wycliffe founder Townsend wrote a novel in 1936, called Tolo the Volcano's Son, dealing with a fictional Mayan revolt which is led by a Russian Bolshevik and foiled by a Mayan Bible translator...
...Even while tremendous disparity exists, rich and poor, illiterate and sophisticated, "all alike are humbled before the blazing fire of God's glory...
...One trend was a partial return to pre-capitalist relations of production, whereby plantation owners compensated for wage cutbacks with access to land-a revival of subsistence agriculture through payment-inkind...
...Nationals took over the bookstores organized by the missionaries but continued to import the complete Spanish language line of publications from editorial houses in Texas, Missouri and California...
...By the mid-1930s the Seventh Day Adventists were present in every Central American country...
...One result in Central America has been the reformulation of religious reference points...
...Its North American missionaries have worked in 26 language projects in Guatemala, five in Panama and three in Honduras...
...George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 152...
...In 1909, when "revolution was declared" in Nicaragua,* the medical efforts of CAM's missionaries made government officials lavish in their appreciation and praise...
...as many as 30,000 died in a matter of weeks...
...Nonetheless, missionaries historically-and inevitably-found themselves in partisan positions, partly because of their respect for authority, partly for their sense of the greater good...
...preoccupation with this world would mean serving two masters...
...The California-based Campus Crusade for Christ has brought the Gospel of Luke here on the silver screen as part of its Central America-wide evangelization campaign...
...Earlier interpretations had suggested that after the world had succeeded in living in peace for 1000 years, Christ would return to judge it...
...3 4 By 1923 there was sufficient impetus to start the Robinson Bible Institute for training indigenous church workers, and eight years later Townsend published the Cakchiquel New Testament, the first book ever published in that language...
...The local landed and commercial elite expanded to absorb Protestant coffee traders from Britain and Germany...
...publication decrying the recent U.S...
...Protestant beliefs were attractive for their "survival value...
...the second is the value of education...
...As the missionaries settled in, they would write the rules of Christian conduct, defining what was legitimate in Christian thought...
...In Guatemala, Protestant growth was extraordinary...
...NACLA interview with Miguel Angel Casco, Managua, Nicaragua, April 19, 1983...
...The film'sJesus is a gentle, white miracle worker, who speaks serpentine parables in an authoritaIn December 1982, believers celebrated 100 years of Protestantism in El Salvador...
...they offered people a means of coping with emergent capitalism...
...They were composed at this time of the mainline denominations, which held that missionary activity in Catholic countries was a low priority...
...They joined committees to administer church bank accounts, but the surplus generated by each country's tiny middle class could not-with the possible exception of Guatemala-finance rapid church expansion, much less maintain the Bible institutes, hospitals and radio stations...
...153-155...
...Protestantism Scofield was an early proponent of the interpretation ofJesus Christ's return known as "premillenialism...
...The North American missionaries, havPresbyterian missionaries translating the Bible into Quiche...
...2 S4 89lb eF/naJ tive tone, with a deep Spanish voice-over on the soundtrack...
...They have been growing at a tremendous rate...
...The pace of economic changes which had begun in the 1890s, such as cash crop expansion by the rural oligarchy, peasant displacement and urban migration, quickened during the economic contraction of the 1930s...
...As missionary zeal grew in the United States and Canada, groups rallied increasing amounts of money for spreading the Gospel worldwide...
...a second, related phenomenon has been the willingness on a mass scale to defy political and social structures...
...A decade later, Emilio Roman L6pez, formerly a notable Cakchiquel Protestant, was killed at the head of a Cakchiquel contingent of the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR...
...CAM entered Guatemala in 1894, El Salvador and Honduras in 1896, and Nicaragua in 1900...
...4 In Guatemala, while CAM publications cited "Red Russia" as the source of unrest in the 1950s, Mayan Protestants were leading land takeovers and being imprisoned...
...Wycliffe was started by Cam Townsend, who arrived in 1919 "with a burning zeal and vision for the downtrodden Indians of Guatemala...
...It projected that the modern age would shortly end in woe and sorrow, in what Scofield called "the Great Tribulation," when Christ would return to lift up his "saved" to Heaven and begin a 1000-year rule of divine justice...
...soil...
...As their mission became intertwined with American political imperatives, the Antichrist-destined to appear shortly before Jesus' coming-was now seen in bolshevism...
...Copenhagen, Denmark: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs and Cultural Survival, 1981), p. 32...
...Nearly $110 million went into the overseas effort during 1925-1927.19 By 1930 there were more than 50 Protestant sects or denominations (that is, groups sharing a statement of unity in faith) and inter-denominational faith missions active in Central America...
...Their sights were set instead on the millions of benighted souls in Asia and Africa who had never even heard the name of Jesus Christ...
...Fundamentalists responded that "God's Kingdom" could not be achieved on earth...
...Stoll, Fishers of Men, p. 24...
...agencies sending missionaries to Central America would grow from 52 in 1930 to 116 in 1960 and 267 in 1979...
...Emilio Willems, Followers of the New Faith (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), p. 248...
...See Steven Volk, "Honduras: On the Border of War," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...Stoll, Fishers of Men, pp...
...In 1921 they began a training school among the Cakchiquel, which by 1953 had expanded to graduate 99 indigenous pastors from seven different language groups...
...19-22 and 29-30...
...invasion of Nicaragua and noting that "missionaries everywhere were practically unanimous in their condemnation" of Secretary Kellogg's Nicaragua policies...
...75-76...
...turn of the century occupations of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico were intended to "show the world that education and pure Christianity are able to prepare men to govern themselves...
...No organization has done more to give evangelicalism an indigenous face than the Wycliffe Bible Translators, more commonly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics...
...personal salvation was the only route by which some would experience it later...
...Evangelical organizations met the challenge by fine tuning their marketing strategies and multiplying mission budgets...
...empire...
...The most striking characteristic of Central American Protestantism is that it is the product of foreign-primarily North American-evangelical mission activity...
...Committee on Cooperation in Latin America (CCLA), Christian Work in Latin America: Survey and Occupation, Message and Method, Education (New York: Missionary Education Movement, 1917), pp...
...Foreign Policy--A Case Study from the 1920's," EvangelicalMissions Quarterly, July 1979 (pp...
...In 1979 there were more than 53,500 U.S...
...Likewise, no activity in the name of Jesus could be construed as political, even when it impacted realms of ownership, control of power and resources or social welfare...
...3 The outside world might scoff at such "equality," but the adherents believed in it fervently...
...Spain, And in Samaria, 1954 edition, p. 210...
...it was not until the 1950s that Honduran investors moved into coffee, cattle, timber and cotton...
...The definition of the term "evangelical" is hotly disputed...
...each member shared with others how God had acted in his or her life...
...Stoll, Fishers of Men, p. 4 6. 18...
...To the dominant sectors it offered minimal reproach for their own rapaciousness...
...Approximately 1,500 North American missionaires were working in Central America by the end of the 1970s...
...Though they had no part in building the roads, they now took over the reins of the horse, so to speak...
...1011 The missionaries insisted on a dualism of religion and politics...
...They opened their first in 1920 among the ladinos in Guatemala...
...Its theology was conceived, financed and packaged in Texas, Missouri, California and the Bible Belt, then translated directly into Spanish...
...John Stam, "Missions and U.S...
...Obey the government, for God is the one who has put it there," wrote Townsend from Guatemala...
...Miguel Angel Casco, an Assemblies of God pastor born in Matagalpa, reminisces today that after the death of Sandino in 1934, there was a large influx of foreign missionaries into the Matagalpa region, where Sandino's army had been active.37 In 1961, Somoza's son, Luis, would lend an air force plane and pilot to spread the word about a national evangelical campaign...
...7. Mildred Spain, And in Samaria: A Story of More than Sixty Years' Missionary Witness in Central America, 18901954, Revised and Extended Edition (Dallas, TX: Central American Mission, 1954), pp...
...Scofield's mission and others leaned heavily on Biblical prophecy, which led them to interpret the world around them in terms ofBiblical symbols...
...Poor ourselves, we bring wealth to many...
...troops...
...5 Following the Spirit's first "outpouring" in 1901, Pentecostalism rolled through the Southern Bible Belt into California, then back to the newly industrialized Midwest...
...intervention in the Caribbean and Central America was a vehicle for Christian expansion...
...The Assemblies of God, which began their work in El Salvador through an independent missionary who arrived in 1912, had opened 21 churches by 1935.20 Estimates place the total Protestant population at 41,000 in the mid- 1930s...
...At the same time, the evangelicals were quick to take advantage of the opportunity offered by history, developing an ever more sophisticated marketing strategy...
...Science, in the form of Darwinism and other theories, was challenging God's creation role, and "Social Gospel" thinking among the largest denominations "reduced Christianity to social ethics...
...21-28...
...The Devil's Playground Raised under missionary tutelage, the new leadership tended to mirror the outlook of its mentors...
...While a steady growth in Protestantism is evident over the last 50 years, particular spurts appear during the 1930s in El Salvador and in the 1950s in Guatemala, then region-wide in the 1970s...
...Shortly thereafter, one of the foremost evangelists on their regionwide campaign was arrested on charges of bolshevism at a revival meeting where 9,000 handbills had been circulated bearing militant titles such as "Nicaragua to the Fight...
...While Pentecostalism provided people with a sense of community and a sense of personal affirmation for each individual, it also separated believers from the body of society...
...A spree of infrastructural development in the 1840s, which spurred the way for cash crop investment, brought immigrant labor to Costa Rica and Panama...
...This period was followed by additional displacement as the oligarchy expanded into cotton production for the new textile industry...
...Caesar must not compete with the Heavenly Father...
...6 (Nov-Dec 1981), pp...
...between 1975 and 1979 alone, their personnel grew by 90%, and their mission income doubled to over $1 billion...
...The resulting peasant rebellion of 1932 in the western Pipil and Nahuatl Indian areas was crushed with great brutality...
...Disputes and shifts in scriptural interpretation had major repercussions in Central America, but they were provoked and resolved on U.S...
...Ibid., p. 183...
...These are separate spheres, they taught, and evangelicals have no place operating in the latter, whether in building a land reform movement or advocating partisan electoral positions...
...It is a relationship they have often overstepped...
...Traditional Catholicism was unable to fill that void...
...thrift, sobriety and other expressions of discipline were promoted, and explained how at least some adherents were able to climb out of poverty...
...By the 1940s and 1950s, a first generation of nationals began to participate in local church leadership...
...Iglesia Evangdlica Nacional Presbiteriana de Guatemala, Apuntes para la historic (Guatemala City: Iglesia Evangdlica Nacional Presbiteriana de Guatemala, 1982), p. 126...
...Missionaries from these institutes soon fanned out through the world to distribute Bible tracts, form new churches and staff them, and establish replica Bible institutes...
...4 2 Progressive minority voices occasionally rose to the surface...
...among their workers it promoted passive acceptance of authority and the status quo...
...Ethel Wallis and Mary Bennett, Two Thousand Tongues to Go (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1966), p. 25, cited in Stoll, Fishers of Men, p. 41...
...the Presbyterians had 22 churches and nearly 11,000 members...
...The "basic anchor in orthodox Christianity"-the notion of the inspired Scripture-was being challenged, and modernism was creeping into religious thinking...
...The implications for evangelical involvement in social issues was immense...
...ing already defined the destination, continued to design the routes...
...As the Sandinistas seek unity as the best defense, and call the population to arms as the means of saving the revolutionary experiment, Nicaraguan Christians are divided...
...Menzies, Anointed to Serve, p. 59...
...A year after opening an institute in San Salvador, CAM started the Central American Bible Institute in Guatemala City in 1929 and by the 1950s had graduated nearly 300 pastors...
...3 3 He had to learn Cakchiquel to teach the Indians not to burn candles to their Spanish edition of the Bible or to get drunk in its honor...
...U.S...
...Harry and Susan Strachan, founders of the Latin American Mission-which by 1934 had conducted evangelization campaigns in 14 Latin American nations-wrote an article in 1927 for their U.S...
...A. Macioce y Pisani, 1931), p. 23...
...Protestantism effectively mediated between the individual and a society in flux.27 The Protestant ethic forged an attitude necessary to the furtherance of entrepreneurial and working-class activity...
...Messengers to Their Own People Central to the evangelicals' growth was the formation of local pastors and church leaders working in their own tongue, above all among 9NACLAReport the indigenous population...
...Their religion imbued them with a heady sense of their own importance...
...El Salvador, p. 9. 22...
...4 5 Nevertheless, these cases were few and far between...
Vol. 18 • January 1984 • No. 1
