Theology Today - Vol 48, No.1 - April 1991 - BOOK REVIEW - Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America

102 - Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America

Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America

By David Martin

Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990. 352 Pp. $39.95.

Among the cultured despisers of Pentecostal religion, it is understood that Pentecostalism uproots individuals from the old social contexts and leaves them alone to face a massive and highly repressive social order. Does not Pentecostalism perform cultural lobotomies, whereby the old pieties and the spirits of the dead are consumed in holy fires that leave, at best, only the ashes of the former faith? Still more criticism may be directed at the alleged tendency of Pentecostalism to take the individual out of politics; at best, Pentecostalism seems apolitical and, at the worst, reactionary. For some observers, Pentecostalism in Latin America may seem to be merely an export of the shabbier forms of North American evangelism.

In this book, David Martin lays these suspicions to rest. Pentecostalism builds community rather than ravaging it with unredemptive individualism; the Pentecostals transform rather than destroy the old pieties and spirits of the community. Finally, Pentecostalism engages in a communal rather than solitary form of witness that is profoundly political in its implications and, over the long haul, in its consequences. Far from being a sociological despiser of religion, David Martin is a cultural admirer, at least, of dissenting religion on the peripheries of Europe and North America, where the individual is emboldened and enfranchised in a movement that releases the solitary and responsible aspects of local community into the mainstream of the nation's social life. It is, in the opinion of this reviewer, the best sociological study of Latin American Protestantism to date.

For David Martin, the rise of Protestantism in Latin America follows certain very familiar patterns. Where the center of a nation is clearly secular, as in Venezuela, for instance, Protestant opposition on the periphery tends to be weak. Christ exists, as it were, alongside culture rather than in a dynamic relation to the nation's politics and culture. Where the culture of a nation is religious, however, as in Chile, Protestant opposition is more active and takes on a Pentecostal tone. It is as if Protestantism, in its most dissenting forms, can only flourish where the center and the periphery are engaging in what Rene Girard once called "the hostile symmetry of opposites."

Take the case of Colombia, for instance, where the Catholic church is clearly reform-minded while remaining entrenched in the nation's political and cultural center. The Catholics, Martin reminds us, are concerned with self-discipline, sobriety, frugality, and education of children, and the strengthening of a civic spirit. Thus, there is a certain symmetry between the Catholic Church at the center and the Pentecostals on the periphery, who, looking into the mirror of Catholicism, see

102 - Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America

the Catholic Counter-Reformation's reflection of themselves. No wonder that in Colombia the Pentecostals are hostile to the Catholic church's clergy and their claims to mediate the Spirit.

The Pentecostal movement is strongest where there is a certain weakness or a gap in the social structure. Where, as in Argentina, the Catholics and the Protestants alike are still contained in their ethnic enclaves, the Pentecostal spirit is not free to move, and Pentecostalism attracts relatively few adherents. Where, as in Northern Chile, depression, migration, and the vagaries of foreign investment have devastated the communities of that region, the Pentecostal spirit has few openings and channels, only a social wasteland. In Southern Chile, on the other hand, enough of the social order remains to nourish the spirit but not enough to contain it within the old forms. For instance, reservations and small farms provide the basic social forms and nourish familiar social sentiments, but being fragile these containers cannot prevent the Spirit from finding new outlets and creating new solidarities, opportunities, and chances for advancement.

It is not enough, then, that there be a center for the dissenting spirit to attack; there must also be forms of community that can stimulate the appetite for kinship without satisfying it in the usual familiar forms, communities that can provide a stimulus to neighborliness without limiting that spirit to those who happen to be next door or nearby. What Martin calls elsewhere continuity and consanguinity must be opened up to new forms of relationship, so that the Spirit can provide new brothers and sisters, new neighbors, for those who are driven by poverty or pulled by opportunity to venture along unfamiliar paths into new social contexts.

Pentecostalism primarily threatens particular groups who get their power from their ability to represent the periphery to the center and to pass on the center's demands to the periphery. The old English clerisy is but one example of such a group; in Mexico, for instance, mestizos provided the same "services" to the local population. These were small landholders and office-holders, largely Catholic and in collaboration with the priesthood, who gained legitimacy from both tradition and custom, from the fiestas and from a theology that emphasized the laity's need for mediation in their approach to the center. To some extent main-line Protestant churches shared this function of mediation, especially through schools and libraries, newspapers and journals, and an educated clergy who could pass on the verbal means of participation in the life of the center to congregations on the periphery.

That form of mediation through the word was broken by the spiritual dissent of a more radical and charismatic Protestantism, Martin writes, that surfaced in the 1960s in Mexico and that shifted the dramatic center of Protestantism from the more Americanized north of Mexico to the southeast. The new dissent took several forms, notably a strong increase in tribal organization. The periphery was

106 - Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America

mobilized among the tribes for what Martin calls "political and cultural self-defence. In other words, pristine isolation from religious or cultural change was not really an option."

Martin is at some pains, therefore, to note that Protestant missionary activity has not turned the cultural peripheries of Central and Latin America into a spiritual wasteland, that is, markets for the capitalist economy, audiences for evangelical or state-sponsored television, and a labor force for plantations. On the contrary, he notes, some of the integrity of traditional communities is preserved in Protestant forms, especially where a belief in the spirits reinforces peasant or tribal reverences for the dead or local demonologies. Furthermore, local groups have formed co-operatives of consumers and producers under Protestant auspices, and the missionaries' schools and hospitals have provided the necessary repairs to a people under the stress of such rapid social change. Political self-determination and community self-consciousness are fostered rather than undermined by this form of Protestant expansion. Dissent can do for the Latin American periphery what it did for Wales and Scotland, by bringing the periphery into contact with the center on terms that allow for local cultures and communities to survive.

Although Martin does not directly confront the question of whether there is something magical in the beliefs of Pentecostal Christians or in the more established forms of Protestantism, it is clear that the question is entirely relevant to his proceedings. It seems that Pentecostal religion does provide a form of sympathetic magic, and this in several ways. When the peasant or tribal person leaves the constraining but protective surroundings of the traditional community, the new but fragile self needs support and defense against new trials and temptations. To dispense with the direction of the patron requires the protection of a new leader; to avoid the ecstasies of the fiesta one must have a new way of raising one's spirits. To get distance from the ancestors requires infusions of a new and holier spirit; and so on. It is in providing this newly emergent self with cultural and social support that Pentecostalism fosters a responsible individualism, a self-assertion of the spirit that requires an affirmative social context and builds the prototype of new communities in receiving such support.

If Martin is right, Protestants will succeed in accumulating capital, achieving higher levels of education, opening new businesses, and dominating local politics. In a Catholic country, where, nonetheless, Protestants come to hold an edge over Catholics in "the good things in life," wear better clothes, and hold themselves upright in public in expectation of social honor from their slightly less successful Catholic fellow-citizens, the seeds for social violence may ripen with a vengeance on the order of St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. If Martin does not emphasize this possibility, it may be because he is expecting the British North American experience to prevail over the European, and he could be right.

108 - Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America

Martin may also be reflecting what Philip Rieff, once called the cultural elite's "admiration for the 'vitality' of the lower (cultural classes), that vitality being a mirror of their own earlier dynamism." I hope the day will never come when a more stagnant Catholic populace will resent the success of the Protestant population, envy their clothing and cars, and make common cause with state power to put the Protestants back in their places.

RICHARD K. FENN

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey