The Triumph of Christianity (45 page)

An immense amount has been written about how this came about, with about equal stress placed on the immense number of Protestant missionaries stationed there and on the remarkable proliferation of thousands of African-born Protestant denominations. But these explanations have ignored the fact that at least 150 million of these African Christians are Roman Catholics. Thus, while there are more Protestants than Catholics in Sub-Saharan Africa, as shown in table 22.4, in many nations Catholics substantially outnumber Protestants.

Table 22.4: Catholics and Protestants in Sub-Saharan Africa

To write about the Christianization of Africa only in Protestant terms omits a major part of the story. Indeed, Catholic periodicals abound in reports of rapid growth in Africa, of substantial upward trends in the number of African priests and seminarians. In the twenty-year period 1989–2009, according to official statistics the number of priests in these Sub-Saharan nations rose from 16,580 to 30,339, and the number of seminarians surged from 10,305 to 25,162. This is a stunning achievement.

But there is a profound mystery here. The official Catholic statistics as to the numbers of priests and seminarians are extremely accurate since they are produced by counting individuals fully documented in church records. But there are no master lists of individual members, and it is up to every parish to calculate and report its membership. These reports may be inaccurate and in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, the official church statistics claim
far fewer
members than the Gallup interviewers have found!
The Statistical Yearbook of the Church
reported that in 2006 there were 158 million Catholics in the whole of Africa. The Gallup World Polls (2007–2008) found 194 million Catholics in Sub-Saharan Africa. The official statistic is at least 22 percent too low. This underestimate is the result of the fact that in 21 of the 34 nations, the official statistic is too low, often very much too low. How could this happen? What could cause the bishops in Mozambique, for example, to report that only 23 percent of the population is Catholic, when Catholics actually are a majority (53 percent)? Obviously, the bishops simply had no idea how large their flock had become. But why?

After failing to find any statistical evidence as to why this undercounting has occurred, and having taken up the matter with African experts in the Vatican, the only plausible explanation I can offer is that much of the rapid growth has been poorly documented because it is taking place in outlying areas where local priests are too overworked by rapid growth to keep their membership statistics up-to-date. Needless to say, church officials found this to be a quite gratifying error.

Latin American Pluralism

L
ATIN
A
MERICA WAS LONG
regarded as the Roman Catholic continent, fully Christianized by missionary monks and Spanish swords by the end of the seventeenth century. Throughout the twentieth century, official church statistics reported that well over 90 percent of Latin Americans were Roman Catholics. But it wasn’t so.

Although for several centuries the Roman Catholic Church was the only legal religion in Latin America, its popular support was neither wide nor deep. Many huge rural areas were without churches or priests, a vacuum in which indigenous faiths persisted.
⁹
Even in the large cities with their splendid cathedrals, mass attendance was very low: as recently as the 1950s perhaps only 10 to 20 percent of Latin Americans were active participants in the faith.
¹⁰
Reflective of the superficiality of Latin Catholicism, so few men entered the priesthood that all across the continent most of the priests have always been imported from abroad.
¹¹

Meanwhile, the recent eruption of Protestantism (mostly of the Pentecostal variety) all across Latin America has enrolled millions of dedicated converts.
¹²
This challenge has so upset the Catholic hierarchy that even Pope John Paul II, often a voice for religious tolerance, bitterly attacked the “evangelical sects” as “voracious wolves.”
¹³
But has the conversion of millions of Latin Americans to Protestantism really damaged the Catholic Church? The effects of competition could, of course, overwhelm a lazy monopoly faith. But it also could stimulate an energetic response, transforming the erstwhile monopoly into an effective and far stronger religious institution—which is what has happened in Latin America.

Protestants in Latin America

The first Protestants permitted to live in Latin America were small enclaves of foreign merchants, most of them British and Americans who settled in the nineteenth century, but no Protestant churches or missionaries were permitted. Until well into the twentieth century there even were legal bans on the sale of Bibles in most nations of Latin America, which led to the widespread belief that only Protestants accepted the Bible.
¹⁴

The Catholic legal hegemony began to break down late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth as “liberal” revolutions strained the relations between the governments and the Catholic Church—the toleration of Protestantism being a form of political payback for the Church having supported the conservative regimes.

Initially, nothing much happened. Indeed, many prominent American denominations that were involved in substantial overseas mission efforts rejected Latin American ventures on grounds that these already were Christian nations. But the evangelical denominations rejected this “gentlemen’s agreement” on grounds that “the Catholic Church had failed to connect with the majority of the population.”
¹⁵
The result was a permanent split in American mission efforts, although little trace of the split now exists since the denominations that thought it improper to send missionaries to Latin America have pretty much abandoned all their missionary activities everywhere.
¹⁶
So it was that Latin America was missionized intensively, but only by conservative groups—with Pentecostal bodies soon surging ahead.

By 1900 there were 610 American Protestant missionaries deployed in continental Latin America, and by 1923 the total had risen to 1,627.
¹⁷
In 1996 there were nearly twelve thousand.
¹⁸
To put that total in perspective, in 1996 there were substantially more full-time American missionaries in many Latin American nations than there were Roman Catholic diocesan priests! In Honduras there were five missionaries per priest, and missionaries outnumbered priests two to one in Panama and Guatemala. Even so, these statistics did not include thousands of American missionaries on shorter tours. But even more important, the number of American missionaries in Latin America has
fallen
dramatically in the past decade. In 2004 there were only 5,116.
¹⁹
Why? Because they have been replaced by Latin Americans! In many Latin American nations today, native-born evangelical Protestant clergy far outnumber both foreign missionaries and local Catholic priests.
²⁰

The rapid increase in native-born Protestant clergy spurred the rapid growth of Protestant denominations in Latin America. But although it is well known that this is taking place, statistics on actual Protestant membership have been scarce, scattered, and of suspect validity. That is no longer the case. The Gallup Organization’s World Polls provide the first accurate data on the number of self-identified Protestants and Catholics in Latin American nations. No surveys were conducted in Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. Four tiny nations included in the Gallup World Polls were omitted on grounds that they are not an historic part of “Latin” America. Three of them are former British colonies: Guyana, Belize, and Trinidad and Tobago. Haiti is a French-speaking, cultural outlier. That leaves eighteen nations that are culturally and historically identified with Latin America.

Combining the surveys conducted in 2007 and 2008 maximizes the accuracy of the statistics. Every survey asked respondents their religious affiliation. The results are shown in table 22.5.

Table 22.5: Percent Protestant and Catholic, 2007–2008 (Gallup World Polls)

These statistics reveal that Protestantism has become a major religious presence in most of Latin America. Protestants make up 20 percent or more of the population in eight of these eighteen nations, and more than a third in four of them. Only in Venezuela (5 percent) has Protestant growth been minimized. The “Other” category includes indigenous Indian and African faiths. The “Secular” category consists of those who said they had no religion. The high total for the secular category in Uruguay (18 percent) probably reflects the fact that more than 80 percent of Uruguayans are of direct European descent.
²¹

Unfortunately, it is not possible to separate the “Protestants” into their constituent denominations. The major American evangelical groups such as the Assemblies of God, United Brethren, Churches of Christ, and various Baptist bodies are well represented. But there are many purely local Protestant groups as well, most of them having Pentecostal roots. For example, in Brazil, an autonomous Pentecostal body known as
Brasil Para o Christo
(Brazil for Christ) has attracted more than a million members.
²²
In addition to large Latin-born Protestant groups, there are hundreds of small independent groups. Hence the growth of Protestantism in Latin America has been the growth of meaningful pluralism.

The Catholic Response

Faced with serious competition, the Latin church has responded very energetically. This has been ignored in nearly every published study of Protestant growth in Latin America. Thus Harvey Cox enthusiastically repeated David Stoll’s prediction, made in 1990, that five or six Latin nations would have Protestant majorities by 2010 and that Protestants would be on the verge of becoming majorities in several more nations.
²³
But it didn’t happen. Only in four Latin countries do Protestants constitute even a third of the population. Of course, had the bishops continued to embrace their illusions and done nothing to compete with their Protestant challengers, Stoll’s predictions may well have come to pass. And if observers failed initially to see that the church would vigorously respond to the challenge, probably it was because the initial tactic endorsed by the bishops was primarily political rather than religious, and proved to be utterly ineffective.

Known as Liberation Theology, this response to Protestant inroads mixed Marxism and Catholicism and aimed at “mobilizing the poor to struggle for their own liberation,”
²⁴
thereby planning to enlist the masses in support of the Christian Socialism. The term
Liberation Theology
was coined by the Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez in 1968 and popularized by his book
A Theology of Liberation
(1971). In it he redefined salvation, discarding the emphasis on the individual and arguing instead that salvation is collective, taking the form of freeing the masses from bondage. Although they made no mention of Gutiérrez’s claims about salvation, the notion that the church must liberate the masses was officially sanctioned at a conference of the Latin American Catholic bishops at Medellín, Columbia, in 1968.

The primary tactical means proposed to achieve liberation was the “Base Community” (
communidades de base
), wherein a liberationist leader would gather a small group to live and work together in a socialist commune where their political and moral awareness would be raised, meanwhile providing a model of self-improvement for others living in surrounding areas. The long-range plan was to rebuild societies from below, from a new “base.” Appropriately, Base Communities were explicitly linked to the long tradition of experimental utopian communities.
²⁵
And although it was intended that the Base Communities be formed by gathering the poor, it turned out that, as with so many other utopian communities, they mainly attracted the relatively privileged.
²⁶
In any event, even many highly committed liberationists admit that their moment has passed.
²⁷