Introduction: Laicidad and Religious Diversity: Themes in the Debates on the Regulation of Religion in Latin America

Abstract

The transformations in the Latin American religious field are numerous and present diverse analytic challenges for academia, including those linked to the regulation of religions in contemporary societies. This work presents two principal challenges that are considered by the contributors to this publication in different ways. On one hand, the strong public presence of the Catholic Church, in addition to its translation into a marked identity in the Latin American population, has also imparted a strong presence of Catholicism in the political sphere. Faced with this phenomenon, societies have sought diverse ways to regulate this religious interference in politics and in the state, and academic agendas have not stayed away from this search. Whether based on empirical or normative approaches, multiple investigations have delved into the ways in which states, principally through law and formal institutions, regulate (or not) the public presence of Catholicism as well as other religions (particularly the evangelical churches) that began to acquire strength in the region. On the other hand, the diversification and pluralization of the religious field, thanks to the emergence and growth of alternative ways of believing and practicing that challenge the Catholic hegemony, suggest negotiation of the boundaries between religion and politics in renewed manners. Thinking about regulation, in this sense, implies thinking about how religions themselves compete with each other, generating mechanisms for challenging or maintaining the old hegemonies, which create forms of regulation among belief systems. Both the normative reflections and the empirical developments in laicism and the processes of laicization, as well as the debates raised by the diversification of religion, mark in one way or another a large part of the Latin American academic agenda around the intersection of religion and politics.