Evangelical churches today can be found in almost every neighborhood in Latin America — and they are transforming politics like no other force. They are giving conservative causes [read Catholic causes], and especially political parties, new strength and new constituencies.
In Latin America, Christianity used to be associated with Roman Catholicism. The church held a near monopoly on religion until the 1980s. The only challenge to Catholicism was anticlericalism and atheism. There has never been another religion until now.
Evangelical pastors embrace varied ideologies, but when it comes to gender and sexuality, their values are typically conservative. They expect women to be completely submissive to their evangelical husbands. And in every country in the region, they have taken the strongest stands against gay rights.
Evangelicals, who account for almost 20 percent of the population in Latin America, are fueling a new form of populism. They are supplying conservative parties with nonelite voters and tend to vote conservative on key issues of sexuality, family, etc.
Brazil is a prime example of the rising evangelical power in Latin America. The 90 or so evangelical members of Congress have thwarted L.G.B.T.-oriented legislative actions, played a role in impeaching the leftist president, Dilma Rousseff, and have made their voice heard on other conservative issues. An evangelical pastor has been elected mayor of Rio de Janeiro, one of the world’s most gay-friendly cities. So grand are their successes that evangelical pastors elsewhere say they want to imitate “the Brazilian model.”
And that model is spreading. With the help of Catholics, evangelicals have also organized anti-gay marches in Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Peru and Mexico. In Paraguay and Colombia, they compelled the ministries of education to ban books dealing with some types of sexuality. In Colombia, they even mobilized to defeat a referendum on a peace accord with the FARC, the largest guerrilla group in Latin America, arguing that the accords pushed feminism and L.G.B.T. rights too far.
How have evangelicals become so politically powerful? The answer has to do with their new political tactics. And no tactic has been more transformative than the decision by evangelicals to forge alliances with political parties on the right.
Historically, right-wing parties in Latin America tended to gravitate toward the Catholic Church and disdain Protestantism, while evangelicals stayed out of politics. Not anymore. Conservative parties (mostly Catholic) and evangelicals are joining forces.
Chile’s presidential election in 2017 provided a perfect example of this union of pastors and party. The two center-right candidates, Sebastián Piñera and José Antonio Kast, courted evangelicals. Mr. Piñera, who won, even had four evangelical bishops as campaign advisers.
There is a reason conservative politicians are embracing conservative evangelicalism. Evangelicals are solving the most serious political handicaps that right-wing parties have in Latin America: their lack of ties with nonelites. As the political scientist Ed Gibson noted, parties of the right used to draw their core constituency from the upper strata. This made them electorally weak. But evangelicals are changing that. They are bringing in voters from all walks of life, but mostly the poor. They are turning right-wing parties into people’s parties.
This marriage of pastors and parties is not a Latin American invention. It’s has been happening in the United States since the 1980s, as the Christian right gradually became arguably the most reliable constituency in the Republican Party.
That there is convergence between the United States and Latin American on evangelical politics is no accident. American evangelicals [who have been learning their lessons from Roman Catholics] coach their counterparts in Latin America on how to court parties, become lobbyists and fight gay marriage. Few other civic groups enjoy stronger external ties.
In addition to forming alliances with parties, Latin American Evangelicals have learned to make peace with their historic rival, the Catholic Church. At least on the issue of sexuality, pastors and priests have found new common ground. Perhaps the Latin American Catholic Church realized that they would have to engage evangelicals in common causes if they were going to achieve their own goals of political power. The latest example of cooperation has been in framing the language political actors use to describe their causes for multiple constituencies, and thereby more powerfully influence politics.
In Latin America, both Catholic and Evangelical clergymen have used the “ideology of gender” to frame their political platform. This term is used to oppose efforts to promote the homosexual and transgender agenda. Evangelical and Catholic clergies simply say this is just ideology, not science. Evangelicals stress the word “ideology” because they are trying to protect themselves, and especially their children, from exposure to these ideas.
The political beauty of “ideology of gender” is that it has given clergymen a way to recast their religious stand in secular terms: as parents’ rights. In Latin America, the new Christian slogan is, “Don’t mess with my kids.” It is one of the results of this Evangelical-Catholic collaboration.
Politically, we may be witnessing a historic truce between Protestants and Catholics in the region: Evangelicals agree to embrace the Catholic Church’s strong condemnation of abortion, the Catholic Church embraces evangelicals’ strong condemnation of sexual diversity, and together, they can confront rising secularism.
This truce poses a dilemma for Pope Francis. On the one hand, he reaches out to modern and liberal groups, while on the other, he is dedicated to ecumenical engagement. As a political actor, the pope worries about the church’s waning influence in politics, so an alliance with evangelicals seems like the perfect antidote against papal political decline.
Evangelicalism is transforming parties and possibly the Catholic Church. Conservative [mostly Catholic] parties used to think of themselves as the region’s essential check against populism. That pitch is no longer credible. These parties are realizing that going along with pastors generates voter excitement, even if only among churchgoers, and excitement equals power.
The pattern is the same in the United States. Evangelicals and Catholics work together to achieve common political goals. Rome adjusts its strategy that will best achieve it purposes – particularly political and religious purposes. Latin American Evangelicals (mostly Pentecostal) were once opposed to Catholicism. Now the Catholic Church has adopted them as colleagues in the cultural war. The ecumenical collaboration in the United States is being buttressed by similar collaboration in Latin America. The result will be the same.
“When the churches of our land, uniting upon such points of faith as are held by them in common, shall influence the State to enforce their decrees and sustain their institutions, then will Protestant America have formed an image of the Roman hierarchy.” The Spirit of Prophecy, Vol. 4, page 277.
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