In Latin America, the Catholic flock is shrinking
Despite having the first Latin American pontiff, the region is becoming more evangelical as well as secular. That could polarise politics.
Alejandra Lemonnier joined the convent of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus when she was 20. She came from a religious family, attended a Catholic school and lived in a conservative neighbourhood in Buenos Aires. Her four younger siblings were all, to varying degrees, Catholic–at least officially. Today Sister Lemonnier, who is 31, is the only devout member of her family. Her oldest brother became a New Age spiritualist. The sister that follows came out as a lesbian and formally renounced her faith in 2018. Another sister is “indifferent” and for the youngest brother, who is 18, religion is “just not part of his universe.”
The diversity of beliefs in Sister Lemonnier’s family reflects a growing trend. Latin America holds more than a third of the world’s Catholics, but their numbers are shrinking. In 1995, 80% of people in the region identified as Catholic. Today only 56% do. Many have switched to evangelical alternatives. Since 1995 the share of evangelicals has risen from 3.5% to 19%, according to Latinobarómetro, a pollster.
Yet a lesser-documented trend is the rise of those who do not profess adherence to any religion, known as the “nones”. Their share has quadrupled to 16%, and is particularly high among young people. The waning of the Catholic church’s monopoly provides more choice to believers and may have contributed to social advances like liberal abortion laws and same-sex marriage in some countries. But it could also increase polarisation where religious identities become politicised.
The data on religious identification can be patchy. In Latinobarómetro’s survey, only 5% of Mexicans identified as evangelicals, while 11% did so in the 2020 census. Another factor is that the regional average disguises wide variations. Uruguay, where between 10-21% of people declare themselves atheist or agnostic–a far larger share than in the United States–probably drives up the average of the “nones” category, while in some countries like Guatemala and Honduras there are now as many evangelicals as Catholics. Mexico, Paraguay and Bolivia appear more immune to Catholic competition. Yet even here, change is afoot. The share of Mexican “nones” reached 11% in 2020, up from 4.7% in the 2010 census.
The trend towards greater religious pluralism is undeniable. Yet the drivers of change are varied. Evangelicalism does particularly well among lower-income people and certain marginalised groups such as prisoners. This is partly because of strategy: in Argentina, the evangelical movement negotiated with prison authorities in the 1990s and early 2000s to craft separate wards, says Verónica Giménez Béliveau, a researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. Such wards tend to be less violent and cleaner, attracting ever-more adherents. An entirely evangelical-run jail was founded in the province of Buenos Aires in 2002.
This has been replicated elsewhere. “In the past, the pastoral work in prisons was carried out by the Catholic church. Now, the evangelicals prepare prisoners to become pastors within jail,” says Father Alfredo Infante, a priest in Caracas. Dr Giménez Béliveau says that the evangelical focus on conversion makes prisons particularly attractive. “The process of conversion is about a before filled with darkness, and an after filled with light following an encounter with God. The ideal place to demonstrate this change is in prisons.”
But not everywhere is the link between evangelicalism and marginalisation so clear. In Brazil a 2020 poll by Datafolha suggested that the poor are just as likely to be evangelicals as Catholics. Elsewhere, evangelicalism has reached the elite. In 2015 Guatemala became the first country in the region to elect an evangelical president.
The data for the unaffiliated is more clear-cut: having a university education reduces religiosity. Nowhere is this more evident than in Chile, which has experienced one of the greatest declines in religiosity. Access to higher education has quintupled since 1990, and GDP per capita grew sixfold between 1990 and 2018. At the same time, the share of “nones” tripled between 1998 and 2018, encompassing around a third of the population today.
Education and material progress can lower religious identification in several ways. Pippa Norris of Harvard University and Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan posit that as “existential insecurity” decreases and people’s basic needs are met, the importance of religion as a coping mechanism declines.
Yet education in particular can have the effect of “desacralizing authority,” says Ricardo González of Adolfo Ibañez University in Santiago. As people become wealthier and more educated, they seek greater autonomy over their lives and begin to distrust institutions in general. In Chile, the collapse of trust in the Catholic church has been mirrored by a drop of trust in the government, the armed forces and the police.
Though Chile is heading in the direction of Uruguay, it has a long way to go. Uruguay is an outlier not only in the region but in the world. The separation of church and state was enshrined in the country’s 1918 constitution. The state took over areas where the Catholic church had a grip, for example by forcing couples to get married by law before they could do so in church. Catholic holidays were renamed. Easter week, known as holy week (“semana santa”) in the rest of the region, is called “tourism week” in Uruguay. Christmas is “family day.” Yet even in secular Uruguay, the share of people who identify as “nones” has grown from 26% in 1995 to more than 40% today, including atheists and agnostics.
Though Latin America is becoming more irreligious, it is doing so in a striking way. Unlike Western Europe, many “nones” continue to have spiritual beliefs. Indeed, in Chile almost 70% of people continue to believe in life after death, including more than half of the religiously unaffiliated. In Colombia, 80% of people believe in miracles, including 14% of agnostics and a whopping 65% of the unaffiliated. There are also new beliefs. In Argentina, where the share of religiously unaffiliated has almost doubled in the past decade, 77% of these say they believe in “energy” and a third believe in astrology.
Though “nones” are becoming more common, very few people identify as atheist, which remains taboo. Data for the region do not exist, but atheist Latinos in the United States are far more likely than those of other ethnicities to report that they have had negative experiences related to being nonreligious within their families. In a study of 34,000 people, 77% of Latinos claimed they had been physically assaulted for their irreligion.
All this reflects the strength of cultural Catholicism, thinks Andrés Casas of Pontifical Xavierian University in Bogotá. He says that even when interviewing members of Colombia’s former communist guerrilla groups, “the young guerrilleros say things like ‘thanks be to God.’ ” Catholicism in public life remains strong. When a Swedish satanist heavy-metal band tried to host a concert in Bogotá in 2018, officials quickly mobilised to shut down the venue. Dr Giménez Béliveau notes that there are crucifixes in police stations and courts in Argentina. “Religion is inscribed culturally” in the region, she says.
As the religious market becomes more dynamic, people have greater choice. Father Infante notes that in Venezuela, “a large part of society is making its own religious menu.” A Brazilian Catholic may attend evangelical mass every now and again because they like the style of worship, and perhaps dabble in candomblé, an Afro-descendant belief system, says Arlene Sánchez-Walsh of Azusa Pacific University in California. Greater competition has also forced the Catholic church to be less complacent. Charismatic Catholicism, which mimics some practices from evangelicalism, has grown.
The political and social implications of Latin America’s religious shifts could be enormous. Evangelicals traditionally shunned politics, but that changed in the 1980s, when the pastor of a Brazilian mega-church called for believers to mobilise candidates for an assembly that was rewriting the country’s constitution. Evangelicals feared that the Catholic church would try to increase its privileges in the new magna carta, and sought to enshrine religious freedom. The church got almost all its candidates elected to the assembly.
Since then, evangelical churches have promoted political candidates, using church money–evangelicals often give 10% of their income in tithes–and church-affiliated radio stations to promote them. Today, the evangelical lobby in Brazil’s Congress includes 195 of 513 federal deputies. Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s far-right president, courted the evangelical vote. Although he is a Catholic, he was re-baptised in the River Jordan shortly before his election by an evangelical pastor who is also the head of a large political party.
Evangelicals have also mobilised to great effect elsewhere. In Colombia they played a crucial role in defeating a peace agreement with communist guerrillas in 2016. In Costa Rica an obscure evangelical singer reached the presidential runoff in 2018 after the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, which is based in the country, ruled that same-sex marriage must be legal. Mexico’s president depended in part on evangelical support to be elected, even though they represent a small part of the population. In Peru an evangelical church that forbids its male members from shaving and encourages women to wear head coverings secured the second-highest number of seats in the country’s 130-member Congress in 2020.
Like in the United States, today’s culture wars have provided fertile ground for evangelicals. Everywhere in Latin America are they more socially conservative than Catholics, even when accounting for religious observance. Protestants who participate in religious services at least once a week are far more likely to oppose homosexuality and sex outside of marriage than are Catholics who attend mass at least weekly. In a recent survey, 35% of Peruvian Catholics said abortion should be illegal in all cases, compared to 51% of evangelicals. (Pew Research Centre has great data on the gap in evangelical and Catholic social conservatism, albeit from 2014).
In some countries, evangelicals have aligned with conservative Catholics to fight against sexual and reproductive rights. A movement founded by the son of a Pentecostal pastor in Peru, called “Con mis hijos no te metas” (Don’t mess with my kids), which riles against progressive sexual education in schools, successfully agitated for the dismissal of an education minister in Peru. In Colombia an alliance of religious groups caused an openly gay education minister to resign after her ministry tried to reduce discrimination against LGBT youths in schools.
Such dynamics could contribute to increased polarisation. Though the trend is not uniform, evangelicals tend to vote more right-wing, while nonbelievers lean left. (A recent Datafolha poll shows that Brazilian evangelicals’ voting intentions are split between Mr Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the left-wing front-runner in the country’s upcoming presidential election). In Chile, the hard-right presidential candidate José Antonio Kast, a Catholic with nine children, courted religious voters. The leftist Gabriel Boric, who won the election, was supported by university-educated youths.
The role of the Catholic church in public and private life may continue to diminish. Sister Lemonnier says that the exclusion of women in the institution could be its weakest link in a context of growing feminism. “Women are the backbone of most congregations, yet when it comes to the Church hierarchy and positions of power, it’s all masculine.” She notes that nuns and laywomen are technically allowed to perform baptisms in some circumstances. “But in practice they don’t do it because everything is still concentrated in the figure of the priest.” She thinks the Church could find common ground with feminist and LGBT+ demands by, for example, leading campaigns to end violence against women or allowing priests to bless same-sex marriages.
Matías Bargsted of the Catholic University in Chile believes the survival of the Church will also depend on how it manages reputational scandals linked to paedophilia. In Chile, the church’s efforts to cover-up abuses battered its popularity.
Yet such scandals may also offer an opportunity for renewal, thinks Father Fábian Báez, an Argentine priest who is close to Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff. “If people don’t believe in us as an institution because of the abuse, the cover-ups, the lack of coherence with the message of Christ, the institution’s close links to economic and political power, that leads the Church to lose credibility. But it also invites the Church to start again, as a poor Church based on a love for God and service and charity for others.” Like Father Infante, the Venezuelan priest, he believes that since the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, the Church has focused less on the poor and more on issues of sexual morality.
A final problem facing the Catholic church is institutional rigidity. Evangelicalism has grown in part because pastors need few qualifications; Catholic priests must spend years in a seminary. Nuns and monks also have more restrictions. They must take vows of poverty and chastity. In a consumerist world, this life is less attractive, says Dr Giménez-Béliveau. In Argentina, the number of nuns and monks has fallen by a quarter since 1960. Evangelical pastors can marry and get rich. Prosperity gospel, a Pentecostal discourse that sees wealth as a direct gift from god, allows some pastors to live luxuriously. The founder of Brazil’s biggest evangelical church is a billionaire.
In Buenos Aires, Father Báez hopes that the church can win back adherents by rediscovering its humble origins. “The Pope uses this phrase: pastor with a scent of sheep. Meaning the priest and the church need to be where the people are, in social media, in the villages, in the barrios.” But whether the flock will come back is doubtful.
*all data cited here without an attached link was downloaded from Latinobarómetro’s website: https://www.latinobarometro.org/latOnline.jsp
