Evangelism Meets Liberation Theology
SHAPIRO, Arthur M.
Evangelism Meets Liberation Theology Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth By David Stoll University of California. 445 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Arthur M....
...Unexpected results" is, in fact, a consistent theme running through this book, and one that applies across the board...
...Stoll candidly narrates his own conversion to the conspiracy theory: "It is not the picture I wanted to draw when I started this book...
...foreign policy but of covert and immoral 'dirty wars.'" Of course, there are elements of truth in both the social-utility and the conspiracy theories, as Stoll makes plain...
...Rather, he thought it was the seeming social utility of Protestantism that accounted for its growing appeal...
...What happened...
...Fuentes is a knowledgeable and eloquent man, but my own encounters with Holy Rollers in dusty towns in northwest Argentina tell me Stoll may be on to something...
...Now, however, in the concluding chapter of Is Latin America Turning Protestant...
...Stoll next focuses on three case histories: the saga of the world's first evangelical dictator, Guatemala's Efrain Rios Montt (with the curious revelation that his church is a spinoff from a movement founded by aging hippies on the north coast of California...
...From every valley, from every mountain slope, from every plateau, it rises from beneath thegreat, overshadowing clouds, and says: 'Come!'" So wrote one J.M...
...Evangelism continues to be used as an instrument not just of U.S...
...What do our missionary societies mean...
...The General also opened the airwaves to American televangelism...
...I remember my astonishment when, on a November day in 1982 in Valdivia, I switched on the TV and found a sweaty Jimmy Swaggart describing the Catholic Church as the whore of Babylon...
...Are these vast fields—where there is no Sabbath, no Gospel, no moral sentiment—to be neglected...
...and the story of how the relief organization World Vision tried to buy the allegiance of Indian peasants in the Ecuadorian highlands, with unexpected results...
...it is the folk mythology I wanted to refute, not affirm...
...He designated their Jotabeche Church in Santiago as the site of the nation's annual thanksgiving service and invited its pastor, Javier Vazquez, to serve as Minister of Religion (he declined...
...As for the future of Protestantism in Latin America, the author thinks the economic crisis that threatens to become permanent there has already deflated the evangelicals' claims to material success through prayer and hard work...
...Stoll finds, for instance, that Catholic liberation theology is better at creating martyrs than at catalyzing lasting change...
...they encompass motivation and the degree to which the various denominations are willing or even eager to play dirty political games...
...Because of your self-appointed advisers, your sons of Belial, who claim to be ministers of light commissioned to preach the Gospel of good news, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to heal the sick, to bind up the broken-hearted—have neglected them, spurned them, robbed them, treated them as inferior animals, and never have put forth one exertion to ameliorate their condition of distress and ignorance...
...In every street, in every village, in every parish, in every district and province are to be seen the workings of thy power, the blasted blight of death where thy hand swept over...
...Through the Vicariate of Solidarity, they systematically documented abuses of human rights and cooperated with anti-Pinochet groups abroad...
...Those differences, heshows, go beyond doctrinal minutiae...
...Spangler in Civilization in Chili, Past and Present, published as a Protestant missionary-recruitment tool in 1885...
...Truly, the call is very great...
...Yet by 1990 some authorities claimed Chile was more than one-quarter Protestant, mostly Pentecostal...
...Shall we let 30 million souls perish in ignorance, vice and superstition, without an effort to better their condition...
...A year ago, during a chance meeting, I mentioned this to David Stoll, then a graduate student in anthropology at Stanford...
...the peculiar role of Protestants in revolutionary Nicaragua (and how two Texas "Good Old Boys" got Jimmy Swaggart to go there, possibly triggering his downfall...
...The missionaries carne, but not in great numbers, and their harvest was small and spotty indeed...
...He expects evangelical Protestantism to become ever more intertwined with the ideals of social justice underlying liberation theology—a synthesis that could radically and irreversibly transform Latin American societies in ways never dreamt of by either George Bush or Pat Robertson...
...Before the September 1973 coup that ousted Marxist President Salvador Allende, Protestants were a negligible force in Chilean society...
...See the thousands of noblesonsof toil, disgraced, compelled to live in filth and rags, in such wretchedness and woe that pen fails to depict the misery—and for what...
...There are fearful evidences against you in this land...
...His detailed and insightful introduction to the bizarre and labyrinthine byways of world evangelism starts with a careful explanation of the differences among Evangelicals, Fundamentalists and various other categories of Protestants that tend to be overlooked by the public and press alike...
...For in contrast to the situation in neighboring Argentina, the Chilean bishops broadly closed ranks against the dictatorship's policy of terror...
...In retaliation, Pinochet became a patron of the Pentecostal Methodists...
...He did not take such conspiracy theories seriously, Stoll said...
...Yet Oliver North and his evangelists [preachers he actually recruited] have done this great disservice to their brethren: they have shown that it is true...
...He joked about Jimmy Swaggart, and answered rather poetically that Catholicism was so fundamental an element in the Latin American psyche that he had no doubt it would prevail...
...What happened was that Major General Augusto Pinochet, who succeeded Allende within 10 months, took a strong dislike to the Catholic Church and liberation theology...
...Reviewed by Arthur M. Shapiro Professor of zoology, University of California, Davis "Orome...
...There is a perception in progressive Catholic and intellectual circles throughout Latin America that the region's phenomenal increase in Protestant evangelism in recent years represents a carefully orchestrated, CIA-sponsored strategy to subvert indigenous liberation struggles, redirect the energies of the masses away from the here and now toward a preoccupation with the hereafter, and transfer substantial social control to North American interests or their surrogates...
...A few months ago I had the opportunity to ask Carlos Fuentes what he thought of this...
Vol. 73 • September 1990 • No. 12
