Catholicism in Context: Religious Practice in Latin America

Abstract

A critical problem to study Catholicism in the context of Latin American modernity, is that the conceptual tools we use to study religion were designed to understand the transformations that modernity provoked in European religiosity. Studies on the religion of Latin Americans have largely explored the religiosity of the population through surveys that measure attendance, adherence and affiliation. While some anthropologists have explored religious practices among particular groups, we do not know how ordinary, urban Latin Americans practice religion. To fill this gap, a group of researchers from Boston College, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Catholic University of Córdoba, and Catholic University of Uruguay, funded by the John Templeton Foundation conducted between 2015 and 2018 a study of religion as practiced by Latin Americans in their daily lives. We saw that the transformations brought about by modernity at the social and personal level have affected religious traditions and organizations as well as the ways in which people live their religiosity. Religious sources have been pluralized, and religious practices are diverse and occur everywhere. There are no “exclusive” secular or religious spaces, objects or times; religious practices are not circumscribed to “the religious.” This way of living religion among respondents, poses future questions for sociology and religious institutions.