THE CROSS AND THE FLAG
Collett, Merrill
THE CROSS AND THE FLAG Right-wing evangelicals invade Latin America BY MERRILL COLLETT Chileans got a chance last January to see in the flesh an American who appears on government-controlled...
...Alban calls it "Daddy Christmas...
...Our work with refugees has opened our eyes," Noemi de Espinoza, the group's president, told a reporter...
...Proano was briefly jailed in 1976 and despite constant harassment by Ecuador's elite, he spent thirty years fighting for the dignity of the Indians and moving the church out of its gilded cathedrals and into remote villages...
...An ecumenical conference held in the Ecuadoran town of Cuenca last year focused on the growth of the evangelical sects...
...are the great challenges for the continent's Christians," the final document read...
...Raising his voice to God in prayer, Swaggart implored: "Father, pour out a revival on Chile, because despite what the U.S...
...Spread out under the snow-covered volcano for which the province is named, peaceful Chimborazo hardly looks like a battleground...
...Evangelist Lowell Lundstrom scheduled a "gospel invasion" of Jamaica for last July...
...Nunez told me the newspaper ads were paid for by a wealthy donor who is not an evangelical but who shares Marin's political beliefs...
...You can go there for a new and fresh message of hope or just to get away from the noise at home...
...While some Catholics struggle to create and maintain community organizations that draw villagers together, the evangelicals are intent on separating villagers into warring sects, splitting food co-ops, trade unions, neighborhoods, and even families...
...Latin America used to be the safe province of the Roman Catholic Church...
...Everybody was there to see a musical review called 'The Lamanita Generation.' I thought it had something to do with North American Indians because I saw a group of tall, red-skinned youths and the minister said that all the money collected that Faith-healing, Bible-thumping, devil-exorcising preachers fill soccer stadiums from Santiago to San Salvador...
...says Ecuadoran journalist Maria Alban, who has co-authored a book on evangelical sects in Ecuador which now tops the best-seller list in Quito...
...His work is now under siege by the evangelicals...
...Dozens of sects scramble for converts, but Corral says the U.S.-based World Vision appears to be outspending all the others...
...Seaga's "pro-Christian and pro-U.S...
...It goes about Chimborazo sponsoring self-help projects for those it favors, creating envy among the Indians and shredding the fragile social fabric woven together by Proano's organizing efforts...
...People have lots of questions, and the evangelicals have lots of answers...
...They divide us...
...World Vision is a sort of evangelical development agency...
...Alban got the last laugh, however...
...Protestants now claim 20 per cent of the population in Guatemala, 15 per cent in Chile, and 10 per cent in Brazil...
...They build crude temples and set up support networks for poor people cut off from their rural roots and scorned by the authorities...
...The seventy Protestant pastors and Catholic bishops who attended condemned the manipulative techniques of the sects and their complicity with ruling classes, but the conference concluded that oppression was the enemy...
...Injustice, exploitation, immense human misery, hunger, sickness, illiteracy, violence, death...
...Nunez is trying to help along the process by managing the campaign of born-again presidential candidate Godofredo Marin...
...By the time of his retirement in 1985, Proano was nominated for a Nobel Prize for having built dozens of Indian base communities that could provide for themselves materially and spiritually...
...That Swaggart and Pinochet favor the same brand of "freedom" is not news to those familiar with the politics of America's religious Right...
...Man looks more to himself in the city," says Luis Magin Alvarez, executive secretary of the Venezuelan Evangelical Council...
...During General Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup, the stadium was used as a torture center and a concentration camp, but that didn't trouble Swaggart...
...Some 400 Catholics convert every hour...
...God is doing great work in Venezuela," he says...
...The leading Mormon in Ecuador lives in a mansion as big as the U.S...
...The Mormon church is one of the fastest growing religious groups in Ecuador...
...Next the red-skinned warriors did some fantastic dancing that everybody loved...
...Now the evangelicals go around with loudspeakers trying to destroy our credibility and our community work...
...The party proposed to reorganize Venezuelan democracy on biblical principles, which Marin says are "free enterprise and free elections...
...The show began with a song sung by a trio of Otavalan Indians who kept calling themselves "brothers of the Lamanita generation...
...They founded a people whose skin was made dark by God as a punishment for their sin...
...Evangelicals use the quote to bolster the notion that rebellion is sin...
...Ecuador's most Indian province, Chimborazo is now 40 per cent evangelical...
...I was there to listen to Indian flute music and drink chicha at the grand harvest ball known as the Festival of Yamur...
...They distributed a pamphlet with a cover drawing of a blond Jesus in white robes being adored by some lightly tanned, Hollywood-looking Indians...
...Ours could be the last major Christian offensive in Jamaica" if approaching elections throw out the conservative government of Edward Seaga, Lundstrom warned in a fundraising letter...
...Faith-healing, Bible-thumping, devil-exorcising preachers fill soccer stadiums from Santiago to San Salvador...
...They were called "Las Lamanitas," the dark-skinned ones...
...If we observe this preacher's visit in the light of the parable of the Good Samaritan," Almazan wrote, "we could say he represents the priest or the Levite...
...The powerful landowners are gone, but the goal is the same: to disunite the people...
...Everywhere their percentage is growing...
...evangelical missionaries have been active in Latin America and the Caribbean for decades, Christian crusaders are now taking the region by storm...
...Anticommunism is fundamental to these evangelicals...
...Inside was the history of man's arrival in the Americas as revealed to Joseph Smith...
...In Colombia, the army has accused some evangelicals of sharing their tithe with the guerrillas...
...Not any longer...
...It claims 50,000 members, 50 churches, and 360 missionaries...
...It is here, in these villas miserias, where evangelicals flourish...
...I met my first Mormon missionaries in the Ecuadoran Indian town of Otavalo...
...He said the show was marvelous...
...The Reverend Gabriel Almazan, who leads a group of progressive Chilean evangelicals, sent a letter to the conservative Council of Pastors protesting Swaggart's indifference to the people...
...What is surprising is the success these fundamentalists are having in spreading their religion—and their political ideas—south of the border...
...If Liberation Theology has moved some Catholics away from defending the power structure, these fundamentalists stand ready to step into the breach...
...The civic amphitheater in Otavalo was completely filled," Alban recalls...
...At the end of the conference, the health minister invited her to attend a performance of folklore in Otavalo...
...Latin America is more urbanized, more industrialized, more populated, better educated, and far more socially complex than it was twenty years ago...
...Though small numbers of U.S...
...The first humans arrived on a boat from Jerusalem in 600 B.C., the pamphlet stated...
...Monsignor Proano's greatest success was making the church credible to the Indians," says Bishop Corral...
...The Reverend German Nunez was born to a Catholic peasant family and was converted by American missionaries as a youth...
...A chemical engineer, Marin is running on the platform of the evangelicals' newly formed ORA party, an acronym that means "pray" in Spanish...
...By the end of the four-hour performance, sweat had washed away the tanning cream of the red-skinned youths and exposed them for what they were: white Mormon missionaries...
...Lundstrom's invaders never hit the beach at Montego Bay...
...In the shantytowns of the Peruvian city of Chiclayo, socially conscious evangelicals have branched off from their conservative churches to lead a community-organizing effort...
...Extended families, large landholders, military caudillos, and the traditional Roman Catholic hierarchy no longer define what is right and wrong...
...Can you imagine...
...Soon after he took over the diocese in 1954, Proano gave 950 acres of church property to Indian families for an agricultural cooperative...
...A few years ago, Alban was attending a ministry of health conference in rural Ecuador on the benefits of mothers' milk...
...press has said about this country, here there is a freedom of worship...
...Such liberal spin-offs from the evangelical movement are becoming more common...
...Nearby landowners were thrown into a frenzy, alerting the government to the danger of a "red" bishop inciting the "backward" Indians...
...Las Lamanitas...
...Venezuela is Latin America's least Catholic country, the Church having lost credibility when the clergy sided with Spain against the liberation armies of Simon Bolivar...
...Now seventy-one, he has been a committed evangelical organizer for the past twenty years, helping to triple the number of believers in the country to 1.5 million...
...We can't help but think that the evangelicals are part of a wider strategy...
...The Mormons, four blond, blue-eyed youths fresh from the Utah gene pool, were there to preach the gospel according to the Angel Moroni and pick up a few bargains in Ota-valo's famous textile market...
...I didn't know anything about the Mormons but I did understand that a religious sect was making a joke out of our cultural values," she says...
...American evangelicals have been in the country for three generations, long enough to raise indigenous preachers...
...They responded with Mormon doctrine on the history of the Americas...
...But that's what it turned into when its former bishop, Leonidas Proano, began to empower the Indian poor...
...And in Chile, Jimmy Swaggart's endorsement of Pinochet has divided the faithful...
...beliefs of the Bible Belt into every remote corner of the Latin American landscape...
...Communist states are part of an "evil empire," they say, and communist guerrillas challenge God-ordained authority...
...After months of advance publicity, blow-dried and born-again televangelist Jimmy Swaggart arrived in Santiago to stage a religious revival in the National Stadium...
...The coup was "one of the great events of the century," Swaggart told the crowd, and he called Pinochet "a man who loves his country a great deal...
...But if one battalion of Christian soldiers was sent back to the barracks, many more have taken up positions in the southern half of the hemisphere...
...I give thanks to God for the freedom enjoyed in Chile...
...THE CROSS AND THE FLAG Right-wing evangelicals invade Latin America BY MERRILL COLLETT Chileans got a chance last January to see in the flesh an American who appears on government-controlled television every Sunday...
...Almost every city in Latin America is ringed by shanty towns of rural immigrants...
...She was shocked...
...Faced with humanity's great needs—in this case those of the Chilean people, who find themselves abandoned on the road, wounded, bleeding, and dying—he passed by on the other side, to the National Stadium...
...They create islands...
...They were blown out of the water by the shocked reaction in Jamaica to the stridently partisan tone of his fundraising letter...
...government was losing popularity to the "strongly socialistic" People's National Party led by Michael Manley, Lundstrom wrote, and Manley's party "will not allow the gospel to have the freedom it has today...
...The number of evangelicals in Latin America has doubled in just six years to fifty million...
...The evangelicals are doing the most damage to our efforts right now," Bishop Victor Corral told me during a visit to Ecuador's province of Chimborazo...
...A wave of evangelical fervor is rolling over the region, carrying the conservative Merrill Collett is the Venezuela correspondent for Latinamerica Press, a progressive Catholic weekly published in Peru...
...Latin America's grim social reality is challenging the conservative assumptions of some evangelicals...
...Marin's platform is getting a wide hearing, thanks in part to a series of full-page newspaper ads with Marin's picture and program, including a quote from Romans 13: "There is no authority that doesn't come from God...
...ambassador's...
...It's a notion that finds favor among Latin American ruling elites...
...At the intermission, Alban asked some of the performers about the "La-manitas...
...He wants his own personal religion...
...night would be donated by the North Americans...
...He was very moved...
...Nunez predicts that at the present rate of growth, a majority of Venezuelans will be evangelical Christians by the end of the century...
...The clash between progressive Catholics and conservative evangelicals is felt most strongly in the villages...
...After the government of Honduras replaced a liberal Catholic refugee-relief agency with conservative Protestants, a dissident group of evangelicals formed a separate organization dedicated to reading the Bible in the light of the country's repressive political system...
...The templos are like neighborhood social centers," says Magin...
...Right-wing evangelicals are tapping the anxieties of a region in transition...
Vol. 51 • December 1987 • No. 12
