Evangelicals and Catholics in El Salvador: Evolving Religious Responses to Social Change

Abstract

Recent scholarship on religion and politics in Latin America has highlighted grassroots participation as an important means of under standing the ways in which people respond to the concrete challenges of everyday life. While recognizing that institutional factors remain im portant, many scholars have moved away from an exclusive emphasis on church and state as all there is to religion and politics. Some au thors have added another level of analysis by pointing to the impor tance of mediating actors, especially pastoral workers and semi-official religious groups.1 Others have highlighted the ways that the historical developments and institutional structures of different religions shape the boundaries within which grassroots dynamics occur. According to this perspective, different religions provide different sets of resources for responding to political and social conditions.2 While religious tradi tions and institutions are often highly diverse and fluid, in this view the resources and central values, symbols, and narratives of each tradition shape the responses of individual believers, grassroots communities, pastoral agents, and church officials.