ROME – In pondering evangelical fortunes, there’s perhaps no greater contemporary case study than the religious transformation of Latin America over the last half-century. As recently as the 1960s, Latin America was virtually a homogeneously Catholic continent; today it’s more than 20 percent Protestant, and in some countries the share is substantially higher.
In Honduras, for example, a Gallup poll in 2020 found that 48 percent of the population of almost ten million now identifies as Evangelical Protestant, with only 34 percent as Roman Catholic. In Guatemala, a 2023 survey found that 44 percent of the total national population describes itself as Evangelical, while 42 percent is Catholic.
In Brazil, long regarded as the largest Catholic country on earth, a 2023 Ipsos survey concluded that just 38 percent of the total population of 216 million still defines itself as Catholic, while 29 percent say they’re Protestant. At the current rate of change, some experts believe a plurality of Brazilians will be Protestant by 2030.
(While newly minted Protestants across Latin America generally refer to themselves as evangélicos, a vast share, often as much as 70 percent or more, are actually Pentecostals, either in terms of membership in a formally Pentecostal denomination or in terms of spiritual style.)
In a hyperpolitical age, it’s no surprise that one of the most popular attempts to explain the transition has been ideological.
In sum, the realignment of Latin America has been the most dramatic storyline in global religious demography in the last century. Such rapid and massive change requires explanation, and over the last few decades there’s been no shortage of punditry on the subject.
In a hyperpolitical age, it’s no surprise that one of the most popular attempts to explain the transition has been ideological.
In brief, Catholic conservatives often blame the liberation theology movement for allegedly making Catholicism in Latin America excessively political, this-worldly, and divisive, thereby driving people away; this hypothesis is often summed up in the soundbite “while Catholicism chose the poor, the poor chose the Pentecostals.”
Liberals, meanwhile, often argue that the Catholic Church lost its credibility with the faithful in many Latin American nations by aligning itself with right-wing dictatorships and police states throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, preparing the ground for substantial shares of the population to defect. On this reading, it wasn’t the rise of liberation theology that caused the losses, but rather the failure to embrace it wholeheartedly.
In fact, a moment’s reflection is enough to reveal the superficiality of both interpretations.
If the conservative reading were correct, then Catholicism’s losses in Latin America should have begun to ebb in 1978 with the election of St. John Paul II to the papacy.
On John Paul’s watch, prominent theologians associated with the liberation movement were investigated and sanctioned, such as Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff, who eventually left the priesthood. Bishops who backed the liberationists were either ushered out of office, such as Bishop Hélder Câmara in Recife, Brazil, in 1985, or their power base was undercut, such as Câmara’s fellow Brazilian Cardinal Paulo Arns, whose Archdiocese of São Paulo was split into five different dioceses in 1989.
Yet despite the obviously more conservative stance of the Church during the almost thirty-five years of the John Paul II/Benedict XVI era, Catholics who had joined Evangelical and Pentecostal groups across Latin America did not come streaming back—in fact, in many places the losses only accelerated.
Pari passu, the liberal reading is just as facile, for an equal-and-opposite reason. If all that’s necessary to reverse Catholic fortunes were to embrace liberation theology, then one logically would have expected the trend lines to have turned around with the election of Pope Francis in 2013.
From the moment he took office, history’s first Latin American pope made rehabilitating key figures involved in the liberation theology movement—many of whom had once been under a Vatican cloud—a priority.
He lifted canonical sanctions imposed by John Paul II on Sandinista priests in Nicaragua; he celebrated Mass in Rome with Peruvian Dominican Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, whose 1971 book A Theology of Liberation gave the movement its name; in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis insisted we hear “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,” citing the title of a 1995 book by Boff; and, most famously, he beatified Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador in 2015 and canonized this “martyr of the poor” in 2018.
Logically, based on the liberal hypothesis, one would have expected all those ex-Catholics in Latin America to have come home as Francis wrapped liberation theology in a loving embrace, but nothing of the sort has happened.
When we look around in our own backyards, what generally makes the difference between a thriving parish and a moribund one?
So where does the explanation actually lie?
It’s revealing to look at data from the Pew Research Center on the reasons Latin Americans gave for leaving the Catholic Church in favor of an Evangelical or Pentecostal alternative. By far the most popular reply, at 81 percent, was “seeking personal relationship with God,” followed at 69 percent by “enjoy style of worship at new church.”
In other words, it was individual and community spirituality that loomed largest, not questions of political affiliation.
Further, personal contact also seems to be critical. Overall, almost 60 percent of Latin Americans who left Catholicism for some form of Protestantism reported that their new church had reached out to them.
In addition, the Pew data show that Latin American Protestants are much more likely to engage in person-to-person evangelism; in Peru, for instance, 38 percent of Protestants said they share their faith with others at least once a week, compared to just 7 percent of Catholics. In Brazil the spread was 43 to 14 percent, and a similar gap appears virtually wherever in the region you care to look.
To borrow a political analogy, what the data seems to show is that the explanation for what’s happened in Latin America isn’t the platform, but the ground game—not ideological orientation, but street-level evangelical hustle.
If we think about it for a moment, that’s hardly true only of Latin America.
When we look around in our own backyards, what generally makes the difference between a thriving parish and a moribund one? More often than not, the difference boils down to three things: the quality of the preaching, the quality of the music, and how welcoming the community is. If those three points are in place, a parish generally will grow no matter its politics—from the most ostentatiously traditionalist enclave to the most hippy-dippy peace-and-love ethos.
The good news for Catholics from the Latin American experience, therefore, is that no matter what’s happening in Rome or in the bishops’ conference, for the most part it has relatively little impact on the highly personal decisions people make about religious affiliation. Catholic evangelists don’t have to be held hostage, in other words, to decision-making on high.
On the other hand, the data also suggests that the top of the ecclesiastical pyramid—i.e., the hierarchy—isn’t simply going to flip a switch and solve all our problems either. Instead, evangelists must roll up their sleeves and get to work, recalling that even the broadest trends are always made up of highly specific, individual movements in one direction or another.
The moral of the story is that if evangelists focus on those individual movements, in general the broad trends will take care of themselves—just ask the typical Latin American Pentecostal.
