New Faces of God in Latin America: Emerging Forms of Vernacular Christianity

Abstract

Virginia Garrard is a specialist in twentieth-century political and religious history who has written extensively on Guatemala. In New Faces of God in Latin America she has set out to write an overarching history of the present for Latin America that situates the region in the academic literature on world Christianity. This is an ambitious task, and Garrard states clearly from the outset that this study will not be in any way exhaustive. It privileges the analysis of Protestantism over Catholicism, particularly Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches and movements. This focus leads her to Guatemala (chapter 2), Mexico (chapter 3), Haiti (chapter 4), and Brazil and Colombia (chapter 5), but she moves nimbly between a nation-centric view of what she terms vernacular religion and a dynamic transnational understanding of the cases. This comparative lens also leads her frequently to the United States but also to Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Korea, to name some pertinent and recurring points of reference. This is not simply due to missionary work, although it is often noted; but immigration is important, as is what Garrard refers to as the “transfluvial” and “polylocative” realities of ideas, methods, theology, and communications (p. 27). Set against this grand array of possibilities, Garrard wants to tease out the local uses, rituals, traditions, and histories that provide the context for religious faith, sometimes in great tension but other times in fascinating synergy with spiritual power. This insistence on what she refers to as “glocal” religion—the ongoing dialectic between global phenomena and local practice (p. 28)—allows Garrard to focus carefully on certain cases, whether Almolonga, Guatemala; the Mexico City barrio of Tepito; the nearly apocalyptic destruction of the Haitian capital; or São Paulo's Temple of Solomon, the heart and headquarters of one of the world's greatest megachurches.It stands to reason that such a grand intellectual project will present serious challenges in terms of sources and method. Garrard relied on a diverse set of sources, some conventional for a historian and others decidedly more comfortable among cultural studies specialists. They include archival research, interviews, and documentation including religious pamphlets, theological debates, tracts, sermons, and prayer cards. Less conventional sources among historians included films, religious websites, YouTube videos, blogs, and social media. The contemporary nature of the project led her to apply interdisciplinary methodology, moving between historical context, ethnographic description, and sociological interpretation.At the heart of Garrard's quest is an argument about the role of faith—in fact, proudly ecstatic, everyday religion, a lived faith requiring constant commitment—deployed against the modernity of a neoliberal capitalist and postmodern world. What does it mean to be Christian in the Maya highlands or Haitian slums in such a context? Garrard takes her cue for how to handle this question from an unlikely source. Following a skillful and intellectually robust introduction, chapter 1 is entirely dedicated to a nominally Catholic theological phenomenon of the Vatican II era called inculturation, a concept that purports to seek out the “seeds of the Word,” particularly in pre-Christian Indigenous religions (p. 35). The idea here is that one may catch glimpses of God and the possibility of holiness in other faiths, such as those of America's Indigenous peoples. Garrard follows inculturation theology through the Mexican bishop Samuel Ruiz and other Catholic and Protestant thinkers, including Antonio Otzoy, a Kaqchikel Maya Presbyterian minister; Tomás García, a K'iche’ Maya Catholic priest; and two African theologians, John Mbiti of Kenya and Kwame Bediako of Ghana. The work of these men and others is consciously postcolonial, an attempt to uncouple Christian theology from its overdetermined Western cultural references and reposition it in what Garrard describes as an Indigenous telos.Garrard is most clearly in her element when writing about Guatemala but offers strong description and analysis of the Haitian and Brazilian cases as well. The Mexico chapter is uneven, stronger in its presentation of the Santo Toribio Romo and Santa Muerte cultos but weaker in its treatment of Juan Soldado and Jesús Malverde, for example. However, it is of little use to focus too closely on one case or another; in many ways this is a book about the forest of Pentecostalism. Garrard does a valiant job of pulling together many separate and disparate threads to weave a compelling tapestry that represents world Christianity across Latin America—indeed, across the American continent. That is the major contribution of this book, and at the level of her many case studies, one is simultaneously pulled into the stories of local—or glocal—religion and constantly challenged to formulate questions about further research. This book will be popular with specialists and students of disciplines across the social sciences and with readers interested in faith, religion, Christianity, and postcolonial perspectives.