In the opening lines of this book, we find Daniel Levine sitting in a movie theater in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1967, watching a newsreel of a ribbon-cutting ceremony presided over by a triumvirate of a priest, a military officer, and an elected official. A few pages later, we come across a picture that Levine snapped of an indigenous evangelical street preacher in a small Guatemalan market town in 1968. These two scenes set the stage for the narrative unfolding over the next 300 or so pages, in two ways. First, they neatly demarcate conditions in the region near the beginning of the tumultuous half century that is the subject of the book: a monopolistic Catholic Church allied with the forces of economic and political order, the first signs that waves of Protestant evangelization would soon dramatically transform the religious landscape. Second, these two scenes prefigure something about the project’s methods, style, and epistemological basis.
Politics, Religion, and Society in Latin America is an expansive and masterful book. It is expansive in that it aims to cover a very large territory—50 years of changes in politics and religion across a diverse region—and largely succeeds in doing so. It is masterful in that its pace is driven by the depth and length of Levine’s personal and academic experience. The narrative jumps back and forth from broad historical overviews to in-depth case studies to theoretical discussions; detailed historical descriptions give way unexpectedly to interesting critiques of major recent studies and theoretical approaches. Insights often appear to be based on intuition resulting from decades of reading, observation, and thought, rather than on the particular evidence described in the book itself. Its comprehensiveness and apparently effortless synthesis of history and theory make this a very good overview of the field, one suitable both for researchers and for the classroom.
The author asks big questions: How have religion and politics coevolved in Latin America over the past 50 years, and how is this coevolution best explained? The first and second chapters lay out theoretical premises. First, Levine objects to standard narratives depicting either religion’s secular decline or religious resurgence in politics; rather, he says that “the boundaries between ‘politics and religion’ [are] porous border zones where mutual influence and interchange are normal and continuous” (p. xi). The mixing of politics and religion is constant across time and space; what varies is the ways religious groups interact with politics.
Second, Levine argues strongly for the primacy of ideas in explaining change. Scholars have often taken the perspective that religious groups’ political ideologies are actually driven by other interests. In Marxist analysis, those interests are determined by class; more recent work focuses on the Catholic Church’s institutional interests and the threat posed by Protestant groups. Objecting to such reductionism, the author instead advocates a “phenomenological” approach investigating religious actors’ own perceptions, beliefs, and interpretations of their actions. Such an approach necessitates taking actors’ expressed motivations seriously, and paying attention to diversity between and within countries and religious groups. “If we are to understand the relation between religion and politics,” he says, “we must be willing to engage religion on its own terms. … Taking religion seriously means paying attention to religious ideas as motivators and legitimators” (p. 4). Levine implies that such an endeavor requires qualitative methods. This last point is a bit misleading, since a growing and rich literature in comparative and American politics uses public opinion surveys and experimental methods precisely to study what religious actors themselves think. Still, it is certainly true that qualitative listening to religious actors express their perspectives in their own words greatly enriches such quantitative analysis.
Third, Levine points out that ideas by themselves are not enough to explain religious groups’ political actions. Humans are incessantly creative, constantly producing new religious ideas. But “ideas are not some disembodied mental stuff. They appear to real people in real social contexts” (p. 12). Social movements and institutions, as well as power, persuasion, and opportunity structures, all affect the adoption and diffusion of some ideas over others. Periods of intense social change—such as, for instance, the past half century in Latin America—are likely to create cultural space for new ideas. This theoretical focus on the intersection of ideas and contexts is very appealing. At the same time, explaining actions based on beliefs risks tautology. If religious elites are indeed sophisticated idea generators, they will be able to articulate theological justifications, sincere or motivated, for any political action. To give traction to a theory based on ideas, we need to explain how and why theology changes in certain ways in certain conditions. The book succeeds in doing so at some points—for instance, arguing that threat leads religious identity groups to adopt ideologies legitimizing violence—yet does not fully theorize how religious ideas change.
Chapter 3, then, provides an excellent overview of the major changes in religion in Latin America in the past half century, integrating a discussion of demographics, institutions, and theology. The general lines will be familiar to many readers: dramatic growth in Protestantism, and especially Pentecostalism, since the 1970s; a Catholic Church that is gradually losing ground and that, after a period of highly progressive politics in the 1960s to 1970s, has taken a decidedly conservative turn. The in-depth analysis of the Catholic Church’s “installed capacity” (pp. 69–75) across time and space is particularly interesting. Also useful is Levine’s analysis of the documents produced by the Latin American Bishops Conference in Aparecida, Brazil, in 2007, which depict a Church hierarchy that perceives Catholicism as gravely threatened by globalization, secularization, and religious competition.
The “meat” of the book is found in Chapters 4 through 7, which attempt to explain the coevolution of religion and politics in four domains: democracy and pluralism; social movements and civil society; violence; and human rights and reconciliation. Levine is interested in explaining the sets of ideas and actors that promoted democracy or authoritarianism, violence or peace, in different circumstances, not in broad generalizations about religion’s overall effects. Substantively, the chapters give greater attention to Catholic than Protestant actors. While scholars interested in these issues will find much of the historical material to be familiar, specialists will find Levine’s ability to jump from 60,000-foot overviews of the lay of the land to detailed description of particular cases and to theoretical insight both helpful and engaging.
The first of two concluding chapters situates Latin America in a broader comparative context, examining how trends in the book’s four key domains across the world relate to what is found in Latin America. Finally, in the last chapter Levine speculates on the future, suggesting that in the medium-term religious groups in the region will focus on conventional participation, promoting socially conservative objectives in a pluralistic political sphere.
This is a substantively rich and theoretically engaging book that will appeal to non-specialists and specialists alike. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students will find this a clearly written, accessible, and engaging entry point to the field. Scholars of Latin America and of comparative religion and politics will find not only new and interesting case studies but also an insightful synthesis of familiar topics.
