Latin American Pentecostalism: The Ideological Battleground

Abstract

[ The new Protestantism began its growth spurt in the 1940s but did not become news in the academic community outside Latin America until around 1990 when two English language studies, David Martin's Tongues of Fire and David Stoll's Is Latin America Turning Protestant? appeared almost simultaneously and heralded the beginnings of a substantial literature on the Latin American Pentecostal movement from the 1990s on in English and other European languages as well as Spanish and Portuguese (Martin 1990; Stoll 1990). In an important essay on the Chilean case, Edward Cleary and Juan Sepulveda, a Catholic and a Pentecostal respectively, argue that the studies of Willems and Lalive D’Epinay have been more influential than their work merits, because for so long there was little else, in particular no local research to challenge it. Keywords:Chilean; Lalive D’Epinay; Latin American; Pentecostal movement; Protestant; Spanish; Tongues of Fire , A little over a century has passed since Pentecostalism began sweeping across the globe. By the late 1950s there was a growing realisation that Pentecostalism was becoming a global force (van Dusen 1958), while Pentecostal scholar Amos Yong traces three waves of Pentecostal scholarship which followed from the 1960s onwards (Yong 2007). By the 1970s interest in Pentecostalism was strong, while the 1980s saw even greater Pentecostal growth across much of Latin America. Within the Latin American milieu, whether region-wide syntheses, local or regional case studies, thematic or comparative approaches, research into Pentecostalism has focused on the scale of Pentecostal growth across that continent. Keywords:Amos Yong; Latin American; Pentecostalism ]