Entangled: Evangelicals and Gangs in El Salvador

Abstract

Abstractow are the two most ubiquitous community-based organizations in poor Salvadoran neighborhoods—gangs and evangelical churches—connected? Most studies concur with the Brenneman/Wolseth thesis, which states that evangelical churches uniquely provide people with a pathway out of gangs. This article argues that such dynamics are a relatively small subset of a broad range of interactions between evangelicals and gangs. Data from the Religion, Global Poverty, and International Development study, collected in a mid-sized Salvadoran city from 2014 to 2018, show that: (1) family networks link evangelicals and gangs; (2) evangelicals and gangs share community governance; (3) gangs infiltrate congregations; and (4) evangelical ideas and networks penetrate gang life. These findings indicate that the widely accepted “haven” perspective of evangelicals in Latin America is insufficient to explain current empirical complexities. An “entanglement” framework is thus introduced, which may be relevant to evangelicals’ relationships to contemporary Latin American society more broadly.