Latin American protestantism. From the neglected continent to the continent of opportunity: an assessment of the justification for Protestant expansion in Latin America, 1894-1960

Abstract

The official commemorations of Quincentenary and the arrival of Spanish civilization (1492-1992), or the celebration by Indians of 500 years of suffering and resistance, has fostered a great deal of interest in the study of Christianity in Latin America. The Indian communities interpreted the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in these celebrations as not only showing a lack of sympathy for the suffering of their forbears, but also as an implicit acceptance of the Spanish Conquest as something good. Their complaint is clear: they had nothing to celebrate in what they see as the genocide of their cultures and martyrdom of their forbears. They demanded that Christian Churches should mark this anniversary by acts of repentance and forgiveness for the blessing they had given to the Spanish Conquest.Although this resentment was focused on the Roman Catholic Church, the contribution of Protestant churches in Latin America was also brought into question. Protestant criticism of the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in the conquest and oppression of the Indians cannot overlook the fact that Protestants later repeated essentially the same vices that the Roman Catholic Church had during the colonial period. This is why the acts of repentance that Indian communities are demanding also apply to Protestant Churches.Studies on the arrival of Protestantism in Latin America in the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century provide evidence that old criticisms by Protestant missionaries of the behaviour of Spanish colonialists did not prevent Protestants from participating in the neocolonial project in Latin America, which was as cruel, and perhaps more cruel, than that of Spain. Such studies reveal that the "pilgrims" in Latin America were not essentially different from the priests that accompanied the conquistadors. The road towards modernisation which independence opened in 1821 and the coming to power of the liberal governments added to the legacy of suffering that the Spanish Conquest had brought to the region.This present research should be seen as a contribution to the history of Protestantism in Latin America in the framework of the questions raised by the celebrations of the 500th anniversary. It is an indictment of old Protestant missionary societies which thought to fill the vacuum that, according to them, the failure of Roman Catholic Church had brought about in Latin America. We say indictment of "old" because we are aware that present leaders of most of the churches to which we refer have also become critics of their predecessors' attitudes. This is certainly the case of Methodists, Presbyterians, Northern Baptists, and some others, including the South American Missionary Society in Great Britain.However there are still many organisations, especially independent missions or "faith missions", who have not come to terms with their past. It is interesting how some of these "faith missions" that were part of the movement towards Latin American evangelisation in the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, with origins both in Great Britain and the United States, have given their records a strange character of secrecy, to which only their own members have access. Latin Americans are not able to read how these Protestant missions understood their cultures. The danger of the possibility of "misuse" that is argued to keep the secrecy of the records, is often nothing more than the fear of other histories than their own "official history" of their activities in Latin America. "Misuse" of the records often means supporting non- Western points of view regarding the contributions of these. This explains why most of the historic works on these missions are written by non-Latin Americans, and more especially by people whom the mission leaders could trust that their approach would not contradict the ideas of their founders. These mission leaders too often will not allow that the people of the mission field should have the right to pass judgement on their activities, as missionaries does with these people's cultures. "Official" histories of the Protestant missions in Latin America have omitted the fact that the development of Christianity in the third world, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, had a dynamic closely related to social events. They lose sight of the fact that the expansion of Christianity in Latin America succeeded largely through the assistance of political and military force. These histories say little about the influence that social events had on their activities, or the influence that the expansion of Christianity had on social conditions in Latin American communities. These works are interested mainly in featuring the success of missions in terms of conversions and the development of congregations.This thesis describes the ethos of a Protestantism that was challenged by the emergence of the Liberation Theology and especially by the emergence of a strong and dynamic Pentecostal movement after the 1960s. We pay special attention to the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America(CCLA) as the main force that convinced North American Protestant missionary societies to consider Latin America as a mission field, on the same footing as Asia and Africa. Although we consider Protestant work in Latin America early in the nineteenth century, it is not until the emergence of the CCLA,(1914), and especially after the Panama Congress(1916), that North Americans decided to support openly Protestant expansion in Latin America. In the first two chapters we analyze what led to this change of attitude of North American protestant missions towards Latin America.