For 500 years Catholicism has been the dominant religious force throughout Latin America. Its hegemony was based on a complex relationship with popular culture; the colorful and the macabre, the syncretic and the purist, the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, the popular and the erudite have combined to form a uniquely creative and reflexive cultural complex.
But in the second half of the twentieth century, just as the Church sought to reform itself by proclaiming its "preferential option for the poor", some of the most charismatic forms of Protestantism, carried along by an open and aggressive hostility to the traditions of popular culture, began to establish themselves at the heart of the popular sectors themselves - in the large urban slums, among Indian groups and, increasingly, throughout other strata of Latin American societies. Today around a fifth of the population of countries like Brazil and Chile Protestant, mostly Pentecostal. Is this a new Reformation? A cultural revolution? Or merely another confirmation of the illusion of liberation?
Drawing on detailed research in Brazil and extensive knowledge of Latin America as a whole, Lehmann explores the predicament of the Catholic Church in the face of the apparently irresistible rise of Pentecostalism, examines the structure and practices of the religious organizations and assesses the broader political implications of these developments. This well informed and carefully researched study sheds new light on one of the most remarkable cultural transformations of our time.
"Sophisticated study of religion and political culture compares rhetoric of 'the people' in the practices of Catholic Christian Base Communities and Pentecostal or Neo-Pentecostal congregations. Concludes that basista communities build small but powerful dissident elites among the poor, understandable in traditional terms of the relation between elite and popular culture, while crente congregations lead masses of the poor to break radically with what is rhetorically 'popular' and thus with familiar Brazilian political bargains"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
Abbreviations.
Glossary.
Preface.
Introduction.
Part I: Basistas:.
1. Basista Catholicism: Its Context and Character.
2. Movements of Conservation and Renewal in Modern Catholicism.
3. Vatican II, Medellin and Liberation Theology.
4. Concepts and Usages in the Texts and Speech of the 'Basista' Church.
5. Discourse.
6. Conclusion.
Part II: Pentecostals:.
7. The Organizational Dimension of Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism.
8. The Religious Dimension.
9. The Experience of Pentecostals: Exaltation, Loyalty, and Liminality.
Appendix: Pentecostalism's Social Base.
Conclusion.
Bibliography.
Index.
Overview
For 500 years Catholicism has been the dominant religious force throughout Latin America. Its hegemony was based on a complex relationship with popular culture; the colorful and the macabre, the syncretic and the purist, the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, the popular and the erudite have combined to form a uniquely creative and reflexive cultural complex.
But in the second half of the twentieth century, just as the Church sought to reform itself by proclaiming its ...