Jean-Pierre Bastian’s earlier work on Protestantism is well known; this book extends that effort to a larger canvas. Bastian’s goal here is to explain the growth and emerging character of new religions and to understand their relation to established structures of power in politics, society, and of course, in religion, where assumptions of Catholic hegemony are now being called into question. La mutación religiosa de América Latina combines rich demographic and social data (on urban and rural areas, and with special reference to ethnicity) with a wealth of case detail to set the pattern of religious change in a realistic and meaningful context. Much of the book’s value rests on this systematic review of the evidence. The book is intriguing but ultimately frustrating because of the way Bastían sets about explaining these transformations.
Throughout the book, a foundation of Weberian analysis is overlaid with leftovers from Marxist social theory and a characteristically postmodern emphasis on the formation and fragmentation of identities. These do not go together very well. Bastian writes in the tradition of French social theory, and displays a notable predilection for rigid theoretical polarities (modern-traditional, center-periphery, rational-emotional, oral-written, individualism-corporatism, sacred-secular, and so forth). This creates difficulties when it comes to making sense of the evidence. The author appears bound to a model of Latin American society and politics (rooted in ideas about the persistence of corporatism) that leads him to doubt the evidence of change his own work presents so abundantly. Contradictions surface repeatedly: religious change is shown to be a potent source of identity and a field for the creation of social and political movements but the possible impact of these changes is denied in a world dominated by corporatist norms and structures. Democratic movements and new political arenas are dismissed as facades for a world of continued elite domination. Despite Bastian’s own evidence about the connection of new religions to mobility, literacy, and activism of all kinds, Pentecostal and evangelical movements are asserted to be all about emotion: change is ruled out by definition.
A brief introduction and opening chapter provide a historical overview and lay out the argument in general terms. Bastian then uses census data and registers of churches and other religious spaces very effectively to map religious change over time and space (chap. 2). Bastían lays the myth of transnational domination to rest by showing that the roots of new movements and changing patterns are as much local as external. His discussion of change in rural and urban areas (chaps. 4 and 5) is instructive. In each case, new forms of sociability emerge, with ambiguous results. The creation of movements and leadership groups opens hitherto unknown possibilities for manipulation of inexperienced mass publics (p. 127). Bastian underscores the charismatic power of the founders of new religious movements. He rejects the notion that emphasis on texts, and hence on literacy, carries a potential for cultural transformation. This is emotional religion: texts and reading are no more than “un ritual que permite organizar la emoción del pobre en el sentido de la creación de un actor social nuevo cuya autonomía se funda en un acto comunitario basado en un lenguaje, la alabanza” (p. 144).
The political impact of religious change is ambiguous. As Protestants in Latin America (like Pentecostals and fundamentalists in the United States) shift from rejecting the world as a vale of sin to active engagement with it, religiously inspired political vehicles have multiplied. But although new vehicles multiply, the result is not basic social or cultural change, but rather protection under a new set of patrons. Populist preachers and founders of new religions, such as Bishop Macedo of Brazil’s Church of the Universal Reign of God, are the political entrepreneurs of the future. Unlike David Martin, Bastian sees no surge of individualism or cultural transformation, now or in the future, and he is at pains to make it clear that religious change is not the same as religious reform: “Al contrario, el imaginario religioso sigue informado por la misma cultura de la mediación aun cuando sus manifestaciones difieran” (p. 213). Corporatist norms and structures remain hegemonic. Thus, he notes, “por cierto, como emoción del pobre, los pentecostalismos nacen del subdesarrollo económico. Cuando ellos pasan de las demandas religiosas a la acción política, tienen a llenar el desfase entre la realidad del mundo de la exclusión de donde surgen y una modernización política de fachada que sigue negando en los hechos los principios democráticos liberales, fundándose en un simulacro de parlamentarismo que impide toda representatividad que no sea corporatista” (p. 170).
A theoretical logjam at the heart of this book undercuts the analytical value of the evidence the author presents. The logjam is created by the clash of overwhelming evidence of change with concepts that make continuity inevitable and basic change impossible by definition. Surely in the analysis of religion the time has come to give up rigid polarities, to abandon unworkable theories, and in the specific case of Latin America to move beyond immutable notions of corporatism and recognize new movements and arenas as spaces that people can enter, use, and transform. The world may be difficult and the struggle for change is indeed a struggle, but on Bastian’s own account of things, the world is not as frozen as he would have us believe.