In recent decades, the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in Latin America, the public visibility of the religion, and the political ventures of some of its protagonists have emerged as conspicuous sociopolitical realities. In a continent that is often considered a bastion of the Catholic Church, evangelical diffusion following the arrival of European immigrants in the nineteenth century has only accelerated, claiming tens of millions of followers and, in some countries, nearly half the population. According to Latinobarómetro, almost 22 percent of the population now identifies as evangelical.Footnote ¹ These statistics are unevenly distributed throughout the continent. Protestant diffusion has been slower in Mexico and Paraguay, while in El Salvador and Guatemala evangelical growth currently threatens the majority status of Catholicism. In places such as Costa Rica and Brazil, evangelicals mirror the continent’s average and comprise around one-fourth of the population. They are still a religious minority, but a sizeable one with an active and distinctive electorate.Footnote ² It has become virtually impossible to go about the downtowns of the booming cities of the continent and ignore the multitude of congregations, symbols, music, fashion, and other elements of evangelical religion.

The situation of contemporary Brazil is illustrative of the shifting religious demographics of the continent: In 2010 the country contained simultaneously the largest Catholic population in the world (127 million people), well ahead of Mexico and the Philippines, and the largest Pentecostal population (25 million), far outnumbering the United States and Nigeria.Footnote ³ This thriving religious universe has become a global phenomenon. There are now Brazilian churches spread in different parts of the world, notably in sub-Saharan Africa, and the number of Brazilian evangelical missionaries at work around the world is increasing steadily. Freed from the “postcolonial guilt” of Western missionaries and backed by Brazilian cultural products such as music, football, and soap operas, religious movements and organizations emerging in Latin America find fertile ground in broader transnational communities united by language.Footnote ⁴ Reflecting on the dramatic bottom-up diffusion of evangelical religion, the challenges it posed to the religious establishment, and the sociopolitical transformations it has brought about, some of the region’s leading social scientists began asking “whatever happened to what used to be the most Catholic of continents at the turn of the millennium?”Footnote ⁵ Evangelical communities have made significant inroads into all aspects of social, cultural, and more recently, political life in the region. In addition to the spectacular growth of Pentecostalism, the mainline “historical” Protestant churches also boast a vast institutional apparatus centered in congregations, seminaries, schools, universities, hospitals, and publishing houses that have a remarkable capacity to project their homegrown leaders into civil society as public actors. The megachurches of Guatemala and Mexico City, the historic seminaries of Costa Rica and Argentina, and the store-front temples in the favelas of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil attest to the sheer diversity of this growing religious universe led by charismatic pastors, canny administrators, pious praying women, fearless street preachers, austere theologians, noisy televangelists, and skillful singers.

Evangelical Christianity has long exercised a tremendous hold on the imagination of Latin American observers. They have marveled at its rapid growth and been lured by its “imported” and expressive worldview. Others are equally concerned about its growing political influence, especially its alignment with the authoritarian regimes of the Cold War and populist leaders in recent years. Yet, despite the shock that this transformation of the region’s religious landscape has provoked and the sense of novelty that surrounds it, Latin American evangelicalism is more than two centuries old. The establishment of the earliest Protestant congregations in the Southern Cone dates from the Atlantic Age of Revolutions and the independence of Latin American nation-states from the Iberian metropoles in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The historical imagination of Latin American Protestants, however, goes even further in time. Mexican Protestant writers in the early twentieth century linked their religious heritage to sixteenth-century Spanish mystics and Bible translators, while Brazilian Presbyterians proudly remember that the very first Protestant Eucharist celebrated in the Americas took place in mid-sixteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, not in the United States.Footnote ⁶ The foreign missionaries and local converts who engineered the earliest Protestant and Pentecostal congregations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries channeled existing social and cultural energies for renewal and change into the new religious communities. The contemporary shifts in the religious landscape of the continent are but a recent development of longer historical trajectories of religious revival and fervor.

The very term “evangelical” expressed a desire for religious renewal that looked for inspiration in the deep Christian past. For Latin American Protestant writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the practices and beliefs of the Catholic Church were the result of a long process of “degeneration” of Christianity. Their form of government was despotic, the devotion of saints was unspiritual, and the rites were mechanically reproduced in religious celebrations. The solution they offered was a return ad fontes, a “reversion to primitive Christianity” in the words of Brazilian Presbyterian minister and educator Erasmo Braga in the 1920s.Footnote ⁷ A similar sentiment gathered steam among Chilean Methodists in the early 1900s as they expressed a desire to spark a religious revival in their community by meditating on the book of the Acts of the Apostles and “become like the early church.”Footnote ⁸ The earliest generations of Brazilian Protestants and Pentecostals were driven by an impulse to recover the spiritual energy and religious fervor of the apostolic church through a return to los evangelios/os evangelhos (the gospel). In this sense, evangelical is a native or emic category deployed by the very protagonists of this religious movement. In another sense, the term “evangelical” refers to a religious movement within Protestantism that emphasizes the importance of personal salvation, proselytizing and missionary efforts, and a firm attachment to the Bible. However, unlike the common Anglophone usage of “evangelical,” which is sometimes used as shorthand for revivalist Protestants and is charged with political connotations, this book uses the term in the way that evangélico is used in Spanish and Portuguese to include a wide variety of non-Catholic Christian denominations, from mainline Protestants to Pentecostals and Seventh-day Adventists.

As will become obvious throughout the chapters in the book, the composition of the “evangelical” category is nuanced and under constant revision. The first Latin American evangelicals were mainline Protestant immigrants from northern Europe who established expatriate communities in countries across the region. Missionaries arrived in the latter half of the nineteenth century, initiating efforts to convert local residents with limited success. Pentecostalism, a form of Christianity that emphasizes phenomenological gifts of the Holy Spirit such as speaking in tongues and faith healing, reached Latin America in the early 1900s and spread rapidly throughout the continent in the second half of the century. Today, a majority of Latin American evangélicos identify as Pentecostal. Throughout all these shifts, evangélico is still the most common term to refer to Protestant traditions and their many offshoots.

This book offers a glimpse into the history of evangelicalism in Latin America through the writings and narratives of the movement’s first adherents and leaders. An integral element of this text is the dialogical use of both primary and secondary materials. Primary sources are firsthand accounts of events or experiences written by those who participated or witnessed them and are at the heart of this volume.Footnote ⁹ Examples in the following chapters include newspaper articles, letters, and autobiographies. Using these accounts, one of our primary goals is to provide access to the people themselves and the events they lived through to enable readers to investigate and interpret those experiences through the participants’ own voices. These accounts are prefaced by scholarly introductions to provide readers with well-informed analysis by some of Latin America’s leading scholars of the region’s rich and ever-evolving evangelical landscape. The primary sources reprinted here, as well as the scholarly introductions that accompany them, chart diverse theoretical and methodological approaches as they engage with a wide range of perspectives on Latin American evangelical history. Such a broad approach demonstrates that there is neither a singular path in the movement’s expansion nor in scholarly discussions. Both have moved along multiple but interrelated axes of faith, cultural and social change, and sometimes even conflict.

The entries in this book, both the scholarly introductions and primary sources, highlight this diversity including questions of theological doctrine and the interpretation of written scriptures. These interpretations changed over time and varied across different sects or denominations and cultural contexts. As the adoption of the term evangélico suggests, the historical development of evangelicalism in Latin America was layered and uncertain, lending itself to multiple explanations. In this introductory chapter, we direct the reader’s attention to several themes that emerge throughout the history of evangelicalism in Latin America, as well as some of the important theoretical issues that are currently shaping the field. Out of necessity, we also provide a brief overview of the historical context in which evangelicalism emerged to launch the more detailed discussions of evangelical life and experience contained in the chapters that follow.

I.1 Christianity Worldwide and the Politics of Evangelicalism

The religious communities and practices created by Latin American evangelicals attracted widespread scholarly and public attention beginning in the 1960s. Social scientists were initially struck by the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in Chile and Brazil and its impact on individual attitudes to democracy, literacy, and social mobility. Two decades later, the attention turned toward Central America, especially Guatemala and El Salvador, where evangelical religion expanded exponentially and made controversial inroads into politics and public life. In the 1990s, surveys carried out in the cities of Lima, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro showed that evangelical Christianity was popular and fast expanding. Devoid of the hierarchical bureaucracy of the Catholic Church and spreading through the initiative of socially marginalized converts, the movement encountered fertile ground in impoverished communities. But there were crucial contextual differences. In Peru, evangelical Christianity was less Pentecostalized than in the other settings. On the other hand, Brazilian sociologist Rubem César Fernandes estimated that a new evangelical church was registered every day in Rio de Janeiro between 1990 and 1992, and 91 percent of these were Pentecostal.Footnote ¹⁰

Contemporary attention to this phenomenon emerged at the confluence of at least two developments in academia and civil society: the study of Christianity as a world religion and evangelical involvement in Latin American politics. The field of World Christianity began to take shape as a scholarly paradigm from the late 1990s onwards, when scholars and commentators drew attention to the new global demographics of Christian religion. Influenced by the sociological turn to globalization and historical studies on transnationalism, and attentive to the spread of evangelical Christianity in the Global South, theologians, social scientists, and mission historians began to examine the social, cultural, and political impact of the new global demographics of Christianity. This shift in the academic agenda solved some challenging intellectual conundrums. On the one hand, it brought together an array of scholars in the North Atlantic, Africa, and Latin America, such as Andrew Walls, Brian Stanley, Dana Robert, Mark Hutchinson, Edith Blumhofer, Mark Noll, Ogbu Kalu, and Paul Freston into a shared framework of research. From the outset, scholarship in World Christianity crossed the specialty of area studies and academic disciplines and fulfilled pressing demands for interdisciplinarity. On the other, it furnished mission theologians and historians a promising way out of the postcolonial critique of mission practice as complicit with imperialism.Footnote ¹¹ More recently, anthropologists such as Joel Robbins, Matthew Engelke, Birgit Meyer, and Naomi Haynes turned to the worldwide diffusion of charismatic evangelicalism with renewed interest, seeking to integrate ethnographic studies of the local embodiments of Christian religion into a comparative framework of analysis and probing the frontiers between anthropology, theology, and philosophy.Footnote ¹² Globalization was one of the key concepts in social scientists’ debates on evangelicalism, most notably its Pentecostal variant. They examined its entanglements in complex transnational networks that enabled religious practices and ideas to travel in multiple directions and conceptualized the “world-breaking” consequences of conversionist religions heavily invested in the language of rupture and the “world-making” propension to establish religious communities that are responsive to local cultural concerns.Footnote ¹³

In another form, historical studies in the early 2000s called attention to the dramatic growth of Christianity in the Global South. For influential scholars such as Philip Jenkins and Dana Robert, over the course of the twentieth century the demographic contours of Christian religion experienced a major shift southward that altered the center of gravity of Christianity. As secularization made headways, the old epicenters of ecclesiastical power and missionary initiative in Europe and the United States were now giving way to thriving religious communities in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America. Christian churches and communities in the Global South emerged in this scholarship as the new Christian metropoles. This was a movement with significant implications. First, to a good number of the protagonists of such movements of religious renewal in the Global South, the liberal attitudes and theologies of the Western Christians sound as conformed to the corrupt patterns of this temporal world and in need of purification. In the opposite direction, the puritanical zeal, conservative morality, and pneumatic practices of majority world churches, especially of the fast-growing Pentecostals and charismatic Catholics, seem unsavory to Western elites.Footnote ¹⁴ These imbalances result in mutual misunderstanding and depreciation, even as they have spurred a new influx of majority-world evangelists and missionaries to the secular West. Second, as historian Dana Robert stressed, these processes of religious diffusion in the Global South have, for the most part, been led by local Christians: evangelists, Bible women, catechists, prophets, and religious mystics have been “the most effective interpreters of Christianity” in multiple contexts, engaging with local cultural idioms and indigenizing religion.Footnote ¹⁵ As the following chapters in this book demonstrate, grassroots religious diffusion has been integral to the expansion of evangelical religion in Latin America since the beginning, involving a plethora of local agents who appropriated the message and methods of foreign missionaries for their own spiritual and social purposes.

The second development took place at the intersection of religion and politics. At least since the 1980s, Latin American countries such as Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil have experienced a Protestant eruption in the realm of electoral politics. Once suspicious of the worldly workings of the corridors of power, evangelicals in different parts of the continent replaced the motto “believers don’t mess with politics” with the slogan “brother votes for brother” and have since demonstrated a remarkable capacity to mobilize local constituencies in favor of homegrown candidates. In specific cases, such as in Brazil and Colombia, they have been able to organize religiously inspired political parties to populate the national congress.Footnote ¹⁶ In other contexts, such as in Peru, evangelicals pursued their political ambitions within the limits of the existing secular parties and failed to elect their own candidates but drew increasing support and recognition from elected representatives for their moral agendas.Footnote ¹⁷ Whereas evangelical politicians in the region initially approached formal politics pragmatically, supporting the ruling coalitions in exchange for public benefits such as radio and television concessions, in recent decades they have upheld a programmatic moral strategy. Nowadays, prominent evangelical politicians proudly claim to serve as moral bulwarks against “cultural degeneration,” opposing agendas such as egalitarian marriages, decriminalization of abortion, and in the recent case of the impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff in 2016, taking part in right-wing mobilizations against the social reformism of the “pink tide.”Footnote ¹⁸

These two scholarly developments shed light on important developments in Latin America. There is now a sophisticated literature in Spanish, Portuguese, and English that examines the multiple mechanisms that project religious energies into the public sphere and civil society, explores how evangelical communities embody the new faith, and probes the complex manners through which they weave their religious identities into their social and cultural worlds. There are, however, a number of conceptual and interpretive limitations. Latin America still occupies only a discrete place in the literature on world Christianity. There are some reasons for that. The first relates to linguistic barriers. The expression “World Christianity” does not translate easily and meaningfully into Spanish and Portuguese. As one of the architects of the field of World Christianity, historian Brian Stanley has argued, although the global evangelical culture that emerged after World War II crossed territorial boundaries beyond Britain and the United States into Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, it was nevertheless a movement that “operated within an English-speaking world.”Footnote ¹⁹ It circulated more easily within the limits of a collapsing British Empire and American zones of influence. Second, Latin American Christian theologians and missiologists have long been wary of the concept of globalization. Part of the analyses of liberation theologians and philosophers such as Gustavo Gutiérrez and Enrique Dussel of the mechanisms of socioeconomic oppression were grounded in a powerful critique of the global political economy. Gutiérrez, for instance, borrowed from the work of dependency theory scholars such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Guillermo O’Donnell to formulate his evaluation of global capitalism and the increasing economic dependence of global peripheries.Footnote ²⁰ Dussel’s proposal likewise called for a liberative ethics that encompassed a critical analysis of the “casualties” of the capitalist world-system.Footnote ²¹ In evangelical circles, these critiques acquired different meanings, targeting the paternalism and cultural insensibility of American missionaries. Theologians and missiologists associated with the Latin American Theological Fellowship (FTL), working in the context of the Cold War, developed a strong rebuttal of North American missiology and what the late Ecuadorian René Padilla called “American culture Christianity,” which viewed evangelical identities and American cultural products as intrinsically connected.Footnote ²² In such evaluations, the concept of globalization served as a shorthand for homogenization under the long shadow of Western influence.

Such focused attention on evangelical politics, we believe, risks obliterating the complex dynamics involved in the expansion and consolidation of new religious communities throughout Latin America. Excessive interrogation into electoral politics has the potential to sideline what was central for believers: their faith, religious commitments, rituals, belief, evangelism, and congregations. In other words, it overlooks the ways in which believers “give life to their faith” and engineer new religious communities from the ground up. Additionally, singular emphasis on evangelical politics risks collapsing religious and political identities; it situates the complex and unexpected entanglements between religious worldviews and social action on the “right” or the “left” of political and ideological spectrums. This interpretative holdover from the Cold War that still informs academic interpretations of evangelical religion in Latin America frequently creates a false dichotomy between the political choices of evangelicals and intellectual elites. For progressive scholars, the apparent overlay of public and private moral concerns in contemporary evangelical discourse looks distasteful, and their insertion into state affairs seems out of touch with the secular foundations of modern democracies. In media outlets and academic literature, evangelicals are frequently dismissed as “the repugnant Other” of modern liberal discourse or as “disappointing subalterns,” whose ethical choices sound culturally inauthentic and politically alienated.Footnote ²³

The chapters that follow address some of these issues through a close study of the longer historical trajectories of evangelical faith, diffusion, and politics in Latin America. In the first place, they reconstruct the early historical experiences that shaped evangelical Christianity in Latin America and identify multiple successions of movements of religious revival in the continent. In other words, this volume situates the contemporary evangelical movement into older lineages of religious revival, expansion, and action. As historians Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene have argued, the politicization and globalization of religious identities and their projections into the public sphere and civil society have roots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and were contingent upon the social, political, cultural, and technological transformations of the modern era.Footnote ²⁴ Taken together, the entries in this book reveal multiple historical patterns of evangelical renewal in Latin America that created a rich and variegated religious tapestry. Second, the primary sources and scholarly introductions reproduced here trace with accuracy the transnational circulation of people, print, ideas, and institutions that shaped experiences of evangelical and Pentecostal revival in the Caribbean and the Southern Cone. Instead of taking religious globalization as a given or assuming that Christianity “moves from everywhere to everywhere,” the following chapters look at the specific expressions of evangelical religion that crossed boundaries and created local roots. In the third place, this volume examines the relationship between evangelical Christianity and power not only at the level of state politics but also at the reconfiguration of social hierarchies and the entanglements between religion and political ideologies. Contributors from Peru, Brazil, and Argentina show how local converts and foreign missionaries entered sociopolitical debates about national identity and patriotic behavior and construed Protestantism as a religion that propagated civic virtues and fulfilled the modernizing aspirations of political reformers. They also demonstrate how religious differences between Catholics and Protestants merged into local political struggles and informed both judicial action against religious minorities and electoral politics since the very beginning of the twentieth century. Finally, conversion narratives and autobiographies illuminate the personal dramas and cultural reconfigurations involved in processes of religious change. They demonstrate how the earliest generations of Latin American Protestants channeled widespread aspirations for personal and social transformation into the new religious movement. In this sense, evangelical religion served as a catalyst for cultural and social transformations that were already underway in the region. In Section I.2, we offer an overview of the history of Protestantism and Pentecostalism in Latin America, showing how missionaries and converts created a diverse repertoire of notions of religious change.

I.2 Protestantism in Latin America

I.3 Latin American Protestantism as an Object of Analysis

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Protestants and Catholics in Latin America engaged in bitter religious controversies from the pulpit and in the press. Through tracts and sermons, evangelical preachers and Catholic priests energized the Latin American public sphere and fueled the religious zeal of the faithful. Religious controversies were conceived and treated as serious scholarship in Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century, and in their books and tracts ministers and priests displayed their erudition and made use of formal scholarly practices, such as footnotes and fieldwork, to examine the disruptive sociopolitical effects of the religion of their rivals.Footnote ⁶⁵ In unexpected ways, religious controversies evolved into serious analyses of the Protestant presence in Latin America. A pioneering work came from the Jesuit priest and theologian Camillo Crivelli, a professor of Protestant history at the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome. In 1933 Crivelli published Directorio Protestante de la América Latina, a monumental overview of over 800 pages detailing the history, doctrine, activities, location, and institutions of Protestants across the continent, a work that won Crivelli recognition as “the Columbus of Protestant propaganda in Latin America.”Footnote ⁶⁶ One of Crivelli’s graduate students in Rome, the influential Brazilian priest, later cardinal Agnelo Rossi, closely followed his mentor’s work and published the Diretório Protestante no Brasil in 1939. In the early 1940s, the influential Chilean Jesuit Father Alberto Hurtado also drew attention to the publications, schools, missionary strategies, and fundraising campaigns of Protestants in the country.Footnote ⁶⁷ The tone of these works was scholarly, sober, and statistical, aimed at amassing reliable data about Protestant growth and examining the impact of Protestant schools, seminaries, hospitals, and charitable institutions in the region. These overviews were thorough and accurate but far from neutral. Crivelli and Rossi intended to provide clerics with a “clear knowledge of the Protestant threat” as well as tools to counter the “dangerous Protestant infiltration.”Footnote ⁶⁸

French historian Émile Léonard produced the earliest academic treatment of the history of Protestantism in Latin America. While a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, Léonard carried out extensive research into local archives between 1948 and 1950. He published a series of articles in 1951 in the Revista de História, the history journal of the University of São Paulo, which formed the basis of his pioneer O Protestantismo Brasileiro: Estudo de Eclesiologia e História Social (Brazilian Protestantism: A Study of Ecclesiology and Social History) of 1961. Léonard had only limited access to foreign missionary sources; instead, he focused on the local dynamics of the evangelical movement, recovering the history of its Brazilian founders, the social locus of the new religion, and the movements of independence from foreign missionary tutelage.Footnote ⁶⁹ The book also captured the complex ways in which Protestantism related to the broader religious landscape of Brazil, incorporating religious and cultural practices from folk Catholicism, indigenous and African cultures, and Spiritism. Léonard situated the origins of Pentecostalism in Brazil in an earlier succession of Protestant “mystics” in the country who endured peripatetic lives and harsh living conditions to fulfil their evangelistic calling or sought direct communication with the divine.Footnote ⁷⁰

After the publication of Léonard’s work, scholars in ecclesiastical circles began to take the history of evangelical religion in Latin America more seriously. But by the 1960s and 1970s, their institutions were caught up in the political turmoil of the Cold War. Part of the academic production of this period came from writers and theologians who grew increasingly disillusioned with the authoritarian politics of their denominations and the paternalism of foreign missionary organizations. Influential scholars such as Brazilians Rubem Alves and João Dias de Araújo were highly critical of the theological dogmatism and ecclesiastical tyranny of their churches, while Ecuadorian René Padilla and Peruvian Samuel Escobar famously expressed their suspicion of North American missionary paternalism in the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne in 1974. Although their analysis of Protestant missionization and history in the region were intellectually stimulating, provocative, and insightful, they also sound like autobiographies in disguise, projecting their authors’ ordeals, disappointment, and struggles into the Protestant past.Footnote ⁷¹

Around the same time social scientists and historians began to take Latin American evangelicalism as a serious object of analysis. Certain approaches adopted by scholars during this period still influence the field today. The first of these trends was structural functionalism. In the 1960s, the pioneer sociological studies of Christian Lalive D’Epinay and Emilio Willems examined the growth of charismatic Protestantism in Chile and Brazil. These studies were ambitious in their scope and revealing in their approach, identifying the uneven geographical spread of evangelical religion and social niches in which it flourished. The two authors considered both the external phenomena that allowed the new religion to spread, such as macro-structural social and economic change in the twentieth century, and the internal characteristics of the congregations, such as doctrine, ecclesiastical government, liturgy, and community-building. D’Epinay and Willems associated Protestant diffusion with processes of anomie in modern Latin America, the decomposition of sociopolitical structures that routinized human relations in agrarian societies. The rapid advent of industrial capitalism and urbanization deregulated these realities, forcing mass dislocations to the booming economic centers and eroding established social and family relations. For these analysts, Protestant congregations offered converts the opportunity to reconstruct social bonds in fractured contexts, while also providing social and personal security.Footnote ⁷² The authors explored the complex dynamic of change and continuity in the making of evangelical religion, especially Pentecostalism. For D’Epinay Pentecostalism recreated the vertical seigniorial form of government of the hacienda through the authority of pastors and leaders, while for Willems the new religion had all the key characteristics of the messianic movements that characterized religious life in Latin America since the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁷³ But for them, evangelical Christianity produced contrasting impulses. While D’Epinay viewed Pentecostalism as an authoritarian form of Christianity, Willems claimed that it furnished practitioners with a set of attitudes and beliefs, such as a work ethic and the cultivation of literacy, appropriate for the modern world.Footnote ⁷⁴

Over the next decades, social scientists and theologians followed the functionalist approach of D’Epinay and Willems and produced detailed and sophisticated case studies of the expansion of Protestantism in Latin America. The studies of Ronald Frase and Antonio Gouvêa Mendonça, for instance, situated the early expansion of evangelical religion in the Brazilian countryside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries firmly into the socioeconomic transformations of the emerging coffee economy, identifying with accuracy the marginalized social sectors who embraced and propagated the new religion.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, in a perceptive study that contemplates the limitations of functionalist explanations for religious change, historian Joseph Florez argued that such explanations see “religious transformation as mere reflections of more quantifiable (…) forms of interest such as class or politics rather than as a creative force for change in its own right.”Footnote ⁷⁶ While such explanations rightly drive attention to the social locus in which religious change takes place, they usually fail to capture the role that ritual, practice, myth, and belief play in the existential reordering of conversion.

The second trend came about in the 1980s through the studies of Brazilian historian David Gueiros Vieira and Swiss sociologist and historian Jean-Pierre Bastian. In several influential monographs, Vieira and Bastian explored the connections between foreign missionaries and local converts with liberal political groups in Brazil and Mexico in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁷⁷ Their studies located the early history of Protestantism in the political and ideological settings of the era, depicting the introduction of the new religion not as a foreign imperialistic intrusion financed by Anglo-American capital, as conservative Catholics and Marxist intellectuals argued, but as an “endogenous” phenomenon. For Bastian, the earliest waves of Protestant expansion related to internal transformations in Mexican society, such as the liberal political reforms of the mid nineteenth century, the influence of a reformist Catholic clergy, and the rise of independent forms of sociability centered on secret societies, such as Masonic lodges and societies of thought.

As the two authors demonstrated, the message and methods of missionaries and evangelists resonated with the modernizing aspirations of radical liberals, emphasizing individual salvation, the propagation of universal literacy and modern education, the need of foreign immigration, and the enfranchisement of religious minorities. Protestant elites were portrayed as liberal modernizers, whose values, message, and institutions offered a clear contrast to the traditionalism of Ultramontane Catholics. In later works, Bastian extended the Mexican experience of Protestant radicalization and involvement in revolutionary mobilization to the rest of Latin America.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the following decades, theologians and historians built upon and elaborated on the arguments of Bastian and Vieira, showing how evangelical churches, institutions, and publications were part of wider processes of religious, cultural, and intellectual dissent in modern Latin America.Footnote ⁷⁹

The third trend emerged in 1990 with the publication of David Martin’s Tongues of Fire and David Stoll’s Is Latin America Turning Protestant? These books called the attention of Anglophone publics to the significant changes in the religious configurations of Latin America and examined the entanglements between religious and cultural change. The focus of these works was also more presentist, seeking to elucidate the extraordinary appeal of contemporary charismatic evangelicalism to marginalized sectors of society. Unlike the previous scholarship, these works were more concerned with case studies and used extensive primary historical and sociological research to offer theoretical generalizations, looking at the complex patterns of cultural, social, and religious change.Footnote ⁸⁰ Stoll’s and Martin’s perceptions of the movement, however, were strikingly different. For Martin, charismatic evangelicalism, especially its Pentecostal variant, was a democratic form of religion in which the “gifts of the spirit” were available to anyone. It provided women and the urban poor with notions of religious and social rupture that facilitated a breakaway from established hierarchies. Martin also established analogies between the history of Methodism in England and Pentecostalism in Latin America, in the sense that both challenged the historical dominance of established churches and created free spaces for socially marginalized people to cultivate their spiritual gifts and leadership. On the other hand, Stoll saw the movement as closely connected to, almost derived from, the United States, especially the Christian Right and its “dominion theology.” The religious universe of Latin American evangelicalism was depicted as diverse and multifaceted, but its agents risked being seduced, almost kidnapped, by American diplomatic and political interest in the region. The surveys of Martin and Stoll sparked renewed interest in the history and politics of evangelical religion in Latin America in the Anglophone world. Subsequent studies by historian Virginia Garrard and sociologist Paul Freston closely examined the origins of Protestantism in Central America and the evangelical eruption into electoral and state politics in Latin America and the Global South, identifying multiple patterns of evangelical growth and politicization.Footnote ⁸¹

A fourth trend emerged over the past couple decades and reconstructed the intellectual history of evangelical religion. Under the influence of Jean-Pierre Bastian, Latin American historians such as Mexican Carlos Mondragón and Brazilian Silas Souza turned to the writings of the earliest Protestant leaders and writers of the region, looking at how they weaved their religious identities into social and political debates and conceptions of national identity of their age.Footnote ⁸² The theological and missiological revival of the 1970s, especially the critique of Anglo-American missionary discourse emanating from figures such as René Padilla and Samuel Escobar, attracted a good deal of scholarly attention. Two recent studies situate the rise of “integral mission” and the Latin American Theological Fellowship in different contexts. Daniel Salinas’s monograph reconstructs the series of theological conferences in the region in the post-World War II context, showing how this generation of theologians broke away from the institutional grip of American missionary organizations to fashion their own missionary ideologies, while David Kirkpatrick shows how the ideas of the “evangelical left” of the Cold War influenced global missionary and aid organizations.Footnote ⁸³

Finally, in recent decades evangelical growth sparked a good deal of ethnographic interest. The grassroots diffusion of this variant of Christian religion, its relation to the wider religious arena, and its embodiments in institutions and forms of behavior began to attract increasing attention from the 1990s onward. Social scientists have uncovered the multiple ways in which contemporary evangelicalism reconfigured gender relations in Colombia and Brazil, how neo-Pentecostals appropriate and repackage religious practices and ecclesiastical forms from the Catholic Church and Afro-Brazilian religion, the complex relationship between religion and urban violence across the region, and how Christian Zionism and philo-Semitic attitudes create new languages of religious renewal.Footnote ⁸⁴ These studies provide crucial insight into the deeper history of evangelicalism in the region by examining the fine-grained dynamics of religious change and the profound social and communitarian re-orientations implicated in conversion experiences and religious socialization.

I.4 The Book

The chapters in this book push these interpretive trends forward in different ways. They provide fresh insight into the lived experiences of the first generations of evangelical converts in Latin America. The primary sources shed light on the ideas, expectations, ordeals, and struggles of the earliest Protestants and Pentecostals, and the ways they weaved the new religion into everyday life and their cultural and sociopolitical settings. The scholarly introductions, written by some of the most knowledgeable interpreters of Latin American religious history, provide important background information about the sources and contextualize them, singling out their significance. Together, the sources and introductions touch upon a wide variety of issues around some unifying threads.

First, a good number of primary sources are taken from the periodicals, magazines, and newspapers that missionary organizations and churches published in Spanish and Portuguese. In parts of the Southern Cone, foreign missionaries and local converts encountered almost unrestrained legal autonomy to produce and circulate religious literature, despite strong opposition of the Catholic Church and some political bosses. These printed sources played a central role in the simultaneous diffusion and politicization of evangelical religion in the continent. In far-off congregations devoid of established ministers and pastors, lay leaders read aloud sermons, biblical passages, religious poetry, and hymns printed on the pages of evangelical periodicals. These strategies circumvented the high rates of illiteracy in the region and enabled the new religion to propagate far beyond the grasp of foreign missionaries.Footnote ⁸⁵ Evangelical print culture also assisted the “transformation of communities of believers into communities of opinion” in Latin America.Footnote ⁸⁶ Through the pages of newspapers and magazines, the new religious experts in the continent commented on the social and political issues of the day, launched bitter religious controversies with Catholic writers, followed international events from the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) to World War II, and became active participants in the continent’s public sphere. The printed publications reproduced here capture the voices of members of a new religious minority trying to carve out a social space for themselves during the religious and political agitations of the age.Footnote ⁸⁷

Second, the chapters and sources shed light on the individual and collective reconfigurations arising in the wake of evangelical diffusion. Conversion stories and first-hand accounts of religious transformations reveal the personal anxieties and psychological pressures of individuals in search of holiness, spiritual fulfillment, consolation, and security. The following contributions nuance functionalist interpretations of the spread of evangelicalism, portraying conversion as a means of coming to terms with the demands of modern capitalist rationality. Instead, they reveal the deep “existential passions” for wholeness, consolation, and providence that animated the earliest generations of believers.Footnote ⁸⁸ But for external observers, the creation of new Protestant congregations and the pneumatic experiences of glossolalia, divine healing, and trances of the Pentecostals were understood in reference to existing religious practices. The first Pentecostals in the region had to reassure the broader public that they were not spiritualists or practitioners of African Caribbean or African Brazilian religions and that possession by the Holy Spirit was not a mere trance. Like the participants of millenarian movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Pentecostals were pathologized and depicted as religious fanatics.Footnote ⁸⁹

Finally, this book demonstrates the agency of local believers in the making of Latin American evangelicalism. In varying degrees, all the chapters show how new converts and religious specialists took up evangelistic responsibilities in their own hands and engineered new religious sensibilities and communities from the ground up. “Middle figures” such as schoolteachers, itinerant Bible sellers, Bible women, and local evangelists played a crucial role in the dissemination and standardization of religious creeds and practices. They mediated creatively between the religious universe of foreign missionaries and their own, bridging cultural and conceptual differences. Evangelical converts, ministers, and writers merged the new message of individual salvation and the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice into local cultural practices, religious traditions, natural landscapes, and intellectual debates, thereby enabling evangelical religion to create local roots.

Chapters 1–11 are divided in three sections. The first explores conversion accounts written by early Protestants and Pentecostals. Both the scholarly introductions and primary sources that accompany them reconstruct the ways evangelical leaders and believers embraced the new religion and negotiated the construction of their new evangelical personhood amid sociocultural surroundings. For some of the protagonists in these chapters, an anticlerical critique of Catholic faith, politics, and moral renewal anticipated conversion to evangelical Christianity. The chapters in this section shed light on how processes of religious change funneled pre-existing aspirations for spiritual and ecclesiastical reform into the new evangelical communities. They also demonstrate how such rupture with the established religion set the beginning of “conversion journeys” in which believers changed confessional affiliation multiple times.

In Chapter 1, historian Carlos Martínez García recovers the conversion and ministry of Mexican Dominican priest turned Protestant preacher Manuel Aguas. At least since the 1860s, when Protestants began to set a foothold in Mexico City, Aguas came into contact with evangelical literature, which he initially abhorred. Christian print, however, was crucial for the priest’s rupture with his religious order and the Catholic Church, as he read compulsively heterodox religious tracts, Protestant books, and Bibles that circulated in the city. Aguas began to attend an evangelical congregation in the capital and in 1871 published in a local periodical an account of his conversion. Mexico’s vibrant culture of print and oral communication gave a wide resonance to the conversion account and drew attention from various social sectors. Manuel Aguas’s conversion narrative also touched on a long historical tradition in colonial New Spain, where chronicles, pamphlets, sermons, and paintings representing Martin Luther as the embodiment of evil familiarized Catholic publics with Protestantism and the Reformation. In the primary source provided, Aguas modelled his conversion on Luther’s own history, portraying himself as an heir of the Reformer’s religious legacy in modern Mexico.

Paula Seiguer takes us to the early twentieth century and recovers the life stories and ordeals of two little-known Argentine converts: Matías Fernández Quinquela and Carlota Lusbin. They never served as ordained ministers or full-time evangelists but took on the missionary task in their own hands. Fernández Quinquela led a small congregation in a suburb of Buenos Aires and organized an evangelical school, and Carlota, his wife, was arrested while doing street evangelism in front of a Catholic parish in the city. They came to evangelical religion through Anglican missionaries, though Fernández Quinquela’s suburban Iglesia Evangélica Argentina was an independent congregation. His autobiographical account captures the catalytic role evangelical communities played in processes of cultural renewal in Latin America. Fernández Quinquela claimed he felt “sickening disgust” and “great repugnance” toward Catholic dogmas and practices long before his evangelical conversion. He wanted nothing short of an “Argentine Reformation,” which would fulfill his country’s desire for progress through the pursuit of a “pure Christianity.” The reports of Carlota Lusbin’s arrest also demonstrate the grandiose aspirations of converts. The periodical that investigated the case and addressed Spanish-speaking evangelical communities in Latin America, irrespective of nationality, claimed that the whole affair around Lusbin’s arrest would promote the “emancipation of Argentine women” from the grasp of the Catholic clergy.

Pablo Moreno Palacios concentrates on the turbulent life of Pedro Aguirre Molina, a rural worker and convert under the Unión Misionera Evangélica de Colombia whose life and career evolved amidst violent political struggles. Aguirre’s autobiographical conversion account flows without restraint or concern for grammatical rules, weaving biblical verses into his own tribulations in breathtaking paragraphs with little punctuation. His style is a revealing snapshot of the encounter of first-generation converts with the world of literacy and the opportunities it offered for them to narrate personal transformations and self-making. This intimate account highlights the intensity of the political transformations of the first half of the twentieth century, when violent conflicts between the liberal and conservative parties of Colombia trickled down to the lives of citizens. Aguirre Molina’s autobiography situated his own life events into a providential history, in which he encountered divine deliverance and provision at every stage. To some extent, the narrative illustrates what sociologist David Martin has called the “peaceable cultural transformation” of evangelical conversion.Footnote ⁹⁰ Throughout his story, Aguirre Molina’s irascible behavior gives way to a new domesticated persona, whose conciliatory attitude contrasted sharply with his violent surroundings.

Maricelis Nogueras Colón traces the journeys and religious transformations of Juan León Lugo, one of the founding figures of Puerto Rican Pentecostalism. His story is set in the context of the Spanish-American War (1898) and the collapse of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean. León Lugo’s impoverished parents moved to Hawaii as labor migrants, and it was in this archipelago that he first encountered the Pentecostal revival through Californian missionaries en route to East Asia in 1912. Soon he started to experience the religious fervor and to become enmeshed in the transnational circuits of the movement: in Hawaii, León Lugo was “baptized in the Holy Spirit,” and in California, where he found employment as a rural worker, he experienced divine healing. In 1916 León Lugo was ordained by the Assemblies of God in the United States and headed to Puerto Rico as a missionary. For early observers, the pneumatic signs and wonders of Pentecostals resembled the manifestations of African-Caribbean religions like santería. Depicting Pentecostalism as a “subaltern religion” whose practices and practitioners were pathologized and racialized in the US and the Caribbean, Nogueras Colón recovers the spiritual intensity of the movement and the sociopolitical complexity in which it emerged.

Part II examines changing patterns of religious behavior, sensibility, and practice among evangelical communities in the Southern Cone. Argentine historian Norman Rubén Amestoy reconstructs the bitter religious controversies in the River Plate region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter looks closely at the role of Methodist periodicals in Protestant-Catholic controversies. These papers had offices in Montevideo and Buenos Aires and addressed a broader transnational religious audience in the River Plate. The sources highlight the confrontational style of the Protestant propaganda of the era. These periodicals promoted an ambiguous form of secularization in the Southern Cone. Instead of promoting religious decline or “privatizing” religion, Protestants in the River Plate sought to establish voluntary religious communities that took part in public debates in the region. Their critique of the established religion, however, had secularizing implications. First, Protestants claimed that allegiance to the Catholic Church was not a precondition for active citizenship and decoupled religious belonging and political participation. Second, their iconoclasm reconfigured religious sensibilities. For Amestoy, Protestants promoted a “book-centered piety” and disenchantment by attacking the theatricality and materiality of Catholic practice and devotion. Third, they also advanced a specific form of what sociologist Max Weber called “inner-worldly asceticism.” For Protestants, Catholicism and patriotism were incompatible, since the Church demanded loyalty to supranational authorities based in Rome. Evangelicals advocated a sense of civic obedience and notions of patriotic behavior as part of their divine calling.

Juan Sepúlveda explores the trajectories and ruptures involved in the Pentecostal revival in Chile. The story starts with the American Methodist missionary William Taylor, who sought inspiration in the missionary model of the Apostle Paul to promote self-supporting congregations in the country. The leadership of the Methodist mission passed on to Willis Hoover, who settled in Valparaíso in 1890. There he encountered a well-organized and vibrant congregation desirous of recovering the spiritual energy of the early church. The Chilean revival initially attracted the participation of urban workers. Two elements are of crucial importance for the story. First, as the primary sources demonstrate, the revival was unequivocally Methodist and viewed itself as in line with the Wesleyan–Holiness tradition, emphasizing moral cleansing and the pursuit of Christian perfection. When conflicts between the revivalists and the American missionaries began to escalate, the movement’s earliest leaders reasserted their commitment to the Methodist tradition, desirous to bring it to completion through the revival. Also of great importance are the complex niches and transnational nodes of the early Pentecostal movement. Sepúlveda reconstructs with accuracy the networks that brought the revival into being. Hoover and Taylor were well connected to the worldwide Methodist missionaries, and part of the movement’s inspiration came from the Mukti revival in India.

Brazilian historian Karina Kosicki Bellotti examines the ideologies of Seventh-day Adventists in Brazil through an analysis of the magazine Life and Health (f. 1939). The magazine envisioned man as “the masterpiece of creation” and promoted vegetarianism and a healthy lifestyle in the country. Editorials and other publications advertised the so-called eight natural remedies (nutrition, exercise, sunlight, temperance, pure air, rest, water, and trust in the divine power) as a healthy recipe that prepared body and mind to serve God’s purpose. This was in line not only with Seventh-day Adventism worldwide but also with the eugenic policies of the Getúlio Vargas regime (1930–1945). In its pages, Life and Health praised the new policies for the “eugenic improvement of the race,” including the implementation of physical education, the provision of balanced meals in public schools, and sanitation campaigns. Bellotti calls attention to some important details. First, the magazine had a remarkably secular tone. It promoted the dietary agenda of Seventh-day Adventism, publishing articles by physicians and other health specialists, but touched lightly and occasionally on religious matters, seeking to address a broader public regardless of religious affiliation. Second, the emphasis and ideologies of the magazine shifted over time, moving from the eugenic policies of the 1930s and 1940s to a broader concern with personal hygiene in the 1950s and 1960s and then catering to the needs of hyper-individualized readers in the neoliberal era.

The final section, titled “Negotiating Social, Political, and Everyday Life,” examines how religious change reconfigured socio-political commitments, loyalty, and daily life in Latin America. Juan Fonseca’s chapter explores the expansion of evangelical communities in Peru since the late nineteenth century, tracing the history of Protestantism in one of Latin America’s Catholic strongholds. The chapter focuses on the periodical Renacimiento, an interdenominational publication founded in 1921 by Scottish missionary John “Juan” Ritchie and sponsored by the Evangelical Union of South America. As Fonseca notes, the periodical served as a platform for the politicization of religious identities. The primary source shows how Protestants discussed broader issues including workers’ rights and public health, and took part in the indigenista movement. In the context of the celebration of the centenary of the independence of Peru, the periodical’s editors highlighted the place of religion in the history of the nation. They depicted the Catholic Church as a foreign institution, governed by an authority based in Rome and led by foreigners in the country. For the magazine editor, the Church betrayed the principles of Latin America’s libertadores, replacing Iberian colonialism with a form of spiritual despotism. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Protestant writers claimed that the religious energy of Christianity had the potential to meet the demands of the nation by purifying and propagating civic virtues.

David Nogueira’s chapter looks closely at the entanglements between religion and local politics in the backlands of the Brazilian northeast. In the city of Corrente in the state of Piauí, where American missionaries claimed to have established the “remotest mission station (…) in the world,” members of the prominent Nogueira family converted to evangelical Christianity through interaction with Baptist missionaries.Footnote ⁹¹ Twin brothers Benjamin and Joaquim Nogueira, an army colonel and a senator of the Republic, are the protagonists of this story. The Nogueiras rivaled another prominent clan in the region, the Cavalcantes, but religious change widened the gap between them. Benjamin Nogueira took part in religious controversies with local priests that were widely publicized in the region. In this tense setting, religious controversy was highly politicized. As Nogueira points out, Protestants and Catholics collapsed the boundaries between religious affiliation and political loyalty. For Protestants, only their religion fit the sovereignty of the Brazilian Republic, and they claimed that the Catholic unease with the Republican Constitution of 1891 expressed their anti-republicanism. The sources in this chapter show how historical periodicals capture the voices of obscure believers who left little historical record elsewhere.

Turning to Central America, Ligia Madrigal Mendieta situates the expansion of Protestantism in Nicaragua into the political history of the country. For the author, Nicaraguan politicians in the nineteenth century were driven by a desire to modernize the country and reform the state. The political reforms of the era slowly but continuously moved away from the political and religious arrangements of the colonial era, ensuring free space for open religious dissidence. Special attention is given to legal issues. Mendieta reconstructs the politico-religious negotiations and conflict around constitutional clauses on religious freedom in Nicaragua. It began with commercial treaties signed with the British crown in the 1860s ensuring liberty of worship and conscience for British subjects in Central America and evolved into a recognition of full liberty of worship in the liberal constitution of 1893, whose articles are reproduced in the chapter. In Mendieta’s narrative, despite the pushback of Catholic priests and writers against the anarchy and instability of Protestantism, the Nicaraguan public had become increasingly familiarized with religious dissidence by the 1910s.

Susana Andrade’s chapter looks at the encounter between the Waorani of Ecuador and missionaries of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a group that sparked a good deal of anthropological controversy in the twentieth century. The story starts with the traumatic massacre of five missionaries at the hands of the Waorani in 1956 on the banks of the Cuyabeno River in the Amazon. The Waorani’s aggressive response to the missionaries mirrored their troubled relationship with multinational oil corporations that seized indigenous lands in the Amazon and provoked a wave of confrontations and conflict in the region. Relatives of the deceased missionaries turned again to the Waorani in a renewed attempt to Christianize the tribe. For Andrade, their relationship was characterized by “cultural incomprehension.” The encounter was profoundly asymmetrical: whereas the indigenous people by and by embraced the new religion, with its theological binaries and technical apparatus, the missionaries continued to bemoan and despise the indigenous culture. However, the apparently successful Christianization of an indigenous group that had initially resisted Western penetration was alluring to American audiences. They funded trips of indigenous converts and evangelists to the United States and welcomed the converted Waorani as superstars, firing the religious zeal and conversionist ethics of American evangelical constituencies.

I.5 A Note on the Selection of Text and Style

Given the diversity of evangelicalism in Latin America, it is impossible to fully capture the rich tapestry of experience and identity in a single volume. Our aim has always been to provide readers with a broad introduction to the movement across the region in its earliest years while acknowledging the distinct socio-cultural landscapes in which it developed. This means that not every document or story could be included. But this also meant looking beyond “important” or “classic” texts to highlight the voices of early believers and shed light on their perspectives, many of which rarely appear in the historiographical record or were previously unavailable or inaccessible across linguistic barriers. In selecting each primary source text, we relied heavily on the expertise of our contributing authors – each with a deep understanding of the complex interplay of religion, culture, society, and politics in their respective geographic specialties. From Mexico to Argentina, the primary sources encompass a range of perspectives, providing a more holistic portrayal of the complexities of evangelical experience.

Our efforts to include as broad a range of sources as possible highlighted a separate but connected goal to increase conversation among scholars working in the evolving field of World Christianity and Latin American evangelical history. As we noted earlier, scholars are increasingly more aware of the contributions of local believers to the processes of religious diffusion throughout the Global South and Christianity worldwide. However, while the center of gravity of Christian mission and praxis has shifted southward, the inclusion of scholarship from researchers and observers of the non-Anglophone world has not followed suit. Even though the old epicenters of ecclesiastical power and missionary impetus in Europe and the United States are now giving way to communities in the Global South, much of the historical scholarship remains rooted and dominated by perspectives emanating from those same centers. Partly, this can be explained by issues arising out of linguistic differences and the difficulty of locating and accessing little-known evangelical accounts, which were seldom deemed noteworthy or influential. More pervasive, and perhaps less acknowledged, is the tendency to marginalize studies written in languages other than English. The ever-expanding nature of the field of World Christianity means that it is important to engage with the growing body of critical texts on evangelicalism in Latin America and facilitate more meaningful dialogue with, and amplify the crucial work being done by, scholars across the region. One of the principal accomplishments of this volume, we believe, is to increase awareness of the scholarship on evangelicalism originating in Latin America.

The translations for this volume attempt, as much as possible, to remain true to both the intent and meaning of the original text. Though translation is an imperfect science, we have tried to stay as close as possible to the Spanish or Portuguese meaning while also ensuring accuracy and cultural sensitivity. This meant leaving the texts unaltered, including grammar and spelling choices made by the original authors. In instances where it seemed essential to provide some further explanation, we have done so in a brief footnote. To ensure linguistic consistency, all Spanish-language documents, constituting most of the book, were translated by a professional consultant. This meticulous approach safeguards the fidelity of the original texts while making them accessible to a broader audience.

In curating this collection of primary source texts, many were substantially abridged for the sake of space constraints. For this, we beg the pardon of the original authors. Still, we believe the chosen documents shed light on the movement’s historical trajectories, doctrinal shifts, and societal impacts and we invite readers to engage with these voices from the past, appreciating the richness and diversity of evangelical experiences across Latin America. We hope this volume serves as a steppingstone into a field that continues to unfold, offering valuable insights into the complex interplay between religion, culture, and society in the region.