Protestant Church in Latin America and the Caribbean

By: John Burdick

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Protestant Church in Latin America and the Caribbean

Examines the reasons for Protestantism's appeal among blacks in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Since the nineteenth century, but especially since World War II (1939–1945), Protestant churches in Latin America and the Caribbean have been magnets for people of African descent. The reasons are complex. First, in contrast to the Catholic Church, these churches do not carry the stigma of many centuries' complicity with slavery; they offer structures of authority and leadership that are relatively open to people of color; and their doctrine of democratic access to the Holy Spirit is undoubtedly attractive to the socially disempowered.

Historical Protestantism

The first Protestant churches to arrive in the region were noncharismatic Baptists (from the United States) and Methodists (from Great Britain). These churches' earliest missionaries strove to attract a mass black audience, but ultimately succeeded only in reaching a small, literate black contingent. In Jamaica, the Baptist mission was led by George Lisle, a manumitted slave from the American South who arrived in 1783. Although the number of Jamaican slaves converted to Baptism grew to nearly 10,000 on the eve of abolition in the 1830s, and may even have contributed to the slave rebellions of the period, interest in the church declined in the years after emancipation, as it came to be replaced by the indigenous Jamaican religious movements of Native Baptism and Revival Zion. The historical Baptist Church, however, retained the better-educated, urban black elite who did not wish to be mistaken for their proletarian counterparts. Similarly, in Brazil, the missionaries of the North American Baptist Church never developed a mass black following. From the start they were associated with the urbanized and educated classes, including better-off mulattos (of African and European descent); this remains the Brazilian Baptists' social base to this day.

The story of the Methodists is similar. Upon arriving in Jamaica from England in the 1780s, they sought to form a cadre of slave ministers. Numerous blacks flocked to the church as a result, but their percentage dwindled in the century following abolition, as nonelite ex-slaves turned to Pentecostal and Rastafarian groups. In Brazil, the Methodists arrived early, in 1836, but directed their attention from the start to the literate mulatto elite, who were happy to find a religion that, unlike the Catholic Church, would not snub them.

The elite people of color who were attracted to the historical Protestant churches found a degree of respect and opportunities for advancement that did not exist for them in the Catholic Church. In Brazil, in addition, the Methodists were innovators in addressing the racial issue. Home to many upwardly mobile mulattos, the Methodist Church became an important location from which to identify and criticize obstacles in the socioeconomic path of people of African descent. As early as the 1950s, the Methodist José da Silva Oliveira preached against white prejudice and sought to promote among blacks an ideology of hard work, literacy, and social uplift. Later, in the 1980s, the Methodists were leaders in founding the national Ministry to Combat Racism. This ministry now has regular meetings at which members examine the teachings of the Bible on racism. The ministry promotes the inclusion in the Protestant liturgy of black music, such as Hip-Hop, Reggae, Rap, and Samba. Despite these efforts, the church, with its emphasis on literacy, cool rationality, and education, continues to appeal primarily to the black elite, not the masses.

Nonorthodox Evangelicalism

No discussion of the participation of the African diaspora in Protestantism would be complete without touching on the powerful nonorthodox Protestant traditions in the Caribbean. In the wake of nineteenth-century revivalist awakenings, religious leaders emerged who articulated powerful Bible-centered visions syncretized with elements of non-Christian and traditional African belief. These include the Spiritual Baptists and Shouters of Trinidad, the Shakers of Saint Vincent, and the Revival Zionists and Rastafarians of Jamaica.

Until the mid-eighteenth century, Protestantism in Jamaica was limited to the Anglicanism of the planter class. In 1783 George Lisle founded the Baptist Church, which eventually led to the emergence of Native Baptists. This group mingled Protestant theology, a strong preoccupation with dreams and visions, and the slave healing cult known as Myal. By the 1860s, more than half the blacks of Kingston were Native Baptists. The 1890s saw the emergence of a major revivalist movement, led by Alexander Bedward, whose preaching united biblical theology with the practice of healing using water from sacred springs. His followers, in turn, divided between the two biblical sects of Pocomania and Revival Zion.

Revival Zion is now, in Jamaica, one of the more popular religious groups among the descendants of slaves. Although staunchly committed to the Bible as its source of inspiration, the religion resembles the non-Christian groups of the hemisphere in its acceptance of possession by entities other than the Holy Spirit. Like the Pentecostals, Revival Zionists seek after the experience of the Holy Ghost; unlike them, they also seek possession by the great prophets and evangelists of the Bible, from Moses, Joshua, and Ezekiel, to the apostles and archangels, to the spirits of the religion's deceased leaders. All these spirits visit the believer, taking him or her through spiritual, shamanlike journeys, and endowing him or her with the ability to heal. This power is also transmitted through drinking water drawn from a sacred spring, thereby bringing the spirits into the bodies of the believers.

Revival Zion has strong Ethiopianist and back-to-Africa dimensions. African ancestors sometimes possess the faithful; the colors of the Ethiopian flag are often present in the ritual center; Ethiopia is regarded as the promised land to which the descendants of slaves would eventually return; and the color of gold, used in the adornment of the central spiritual pole of the cult center, is said to symbolize the lost riches of Africa. The music played during rituals, in contrast to mainstream Protestantism, is self-consciously “African,” as it uses traditional drums and percussive rhythms. The ritual itself is strongly reminiscent of the various African-derived cults and is based on the movement of mediums in a counterclockwise direction around a sacred center.

All these elements contributed in the 1930s to the hiving off from Revival Zion of Rastafarianism. Marcus Garvey was very influential among Revival Zionists because of his Ethiopianist views. When Garvey prophesied in 1929 that the Messiah would appear in the form of the Ethiopian emperor, he tapped into the messianism embedded in the Zionist reading of the Bible. Thus when Haile Selassie I was crowned emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, many Revival Zionists took this to be the fulfillment of Garvey's prophecy. Those who accepted the divinity of Selassie and of his power to bring about the long-awaited return of the diaspora to the Zion of Ethiopia began to call themselves by Selassie's pre-imperial name, Ras Tafari. The sect grew quickly in the 1930s, as Ethiopia's Babylonian captivity by the Italian Fascists seemed to many to be the realization of biblical prophecy. The religion fused the notions of sacred nature, healing, and Ethiopianism in the crucible of seething resentment against colonialism and white domination. Between the 1940s and 1960s, the religion thrived in Kingston among the black underclass. In the 1970s the influence of reggae transformed the religion into a worldwide movement. Its roots in Garveyism's Ethiopianism meant that Rasta would become the spiritual and aesthetic heart of the Pan-Africanist movement, from the 1970s to the present. Yet Rastafarianism continues to be a strongly biblical movement, deriving its ideological strength from its reading of the Old Testament.

Pentecostalism

Pentecostalism encompasses the numerous Protestant churches that emphasize the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as prophecy and speaking in tongues. Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing, most popular form of religiosity in Latin America and the Caribbean today, accounting for up to 85 percent of all Protestants. The religion arrived in Brazil and Jamaica in the second decade of the twentieth century, has grown at breakneck speed since the 1950s, and now boasts more than twenty million faithful in Brazil, as well as half a million in Jamaica. Many of these people are black. While no more than 7 percent of Brazilians identify themselves to census takers as “black,” fully 15 percent of Pentecostals do so. And in Jamaica, the majority of Pentecostals are black (rather than mulatto).

The reasons for this growth among blacks are not difficult to determine. In contrast to historical Protestantism, where secular hierarchies are transferred to the church, Pentecostalism makes available the explosive experience of the Holy Spirit, which razes social distinctions. Further, in societies where dark skin tones and nappy hair have low social prestige, people with these features are attracted by Pentecostalism's unequivocal language valuing natural over artificial, and inner over external beauty. Equally important, the building of strong self-esteem offers poor black youth in both societies a powerful alternative to the world of drugs and gangs. And, as is the case for all Pentecostals, irrespective of race, the abandonment of drinking, smoking, adultery, and gambling transforms household relationships, creating greater gender equality and offering couples hope of economic and emotional stability.

Neopentecostalism

Traditional Pentecostal denominations, such as the Assemblies of God, have been slow to tap into the new, emerging groups of young people with hopes for upward mobility. In particular, these churches have been reluctant to incorporate young people's commercial music, dance, and the acceptance of “vanity” (stylish clothing and makeup) into their liturgical forms. Into this gap have moved a number of churches that hived off in the 1970s from the mainstream Pentecostal churches, and now are growing at a rapid clip through television, radio, and spectacular showlike revival meetings. These churches, such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and the Church of Rebirth, embrace popular music, including traditionally black music, as well as styles of dance and dress that are rejected as too worldly by the older Pentecostals. The churches have a huge youth following, including young people of African descent. Yet because these are young people who can, in general, afford nicer clothes, and who look to religion primarily as a source of sociability rather than survival, they tend to belong to a relatively better-off class segment. The vast majority of poorer blacks continue to participate in the traditional Pentecostal churches. For them, the impact of the Neopentecostals may be felt indirectly, as the older denominations feel obliged to re-think their doctrinal stances on music, dress, and dance. By the end of the twenty-first century, most denominations had internalized the influence of Neopentecostalism.

It has become common in Latin America and the Caribbean for intellectuals who espouse some form of Pan-Africanism or Afrocentrism to criticize both Catholic and Protestant Christianity as Eurocentric ideologies imposed on Africans from the outside and having a deracinating influence on them. Without engaging this debate, the foregoing remarks on the Protestant traditions in the region have suggested that these traditions are not inevitably at odds with the development of a strong black racial identity, and that they have even been known at times to contribute to that identity.

See also Afrocentricity; Back to Africa Movement; Catholic Church in Latin America and the Caribbean; Dance in Latin America and the Caribbean; Music, Afro-Caribbean Religious; Pan-Africanism; Rastafarians; Role of Slaves in Abolition and Emancipation in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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