Comparing Renewalists’ Political Orientations in Latin America and Africa

• In Event: Christianity and Politics in Latin America and Africa: Cross-Regional Dialogue

Abstract

By the early 2000s, the religious landscapes of both Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa were transformed by the rise of Renewalist Christianity – an umbrella term for Pentecostals and Charismatics. Demographers have found that these born again, spirit-focused movements are the fastest growing religious groups in both Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa (Pew 2009; 2014). Accordingly, Africanists and Latin Americanists have begun to document the complex political implications of these religious transformations, though their research has been segregated by region. This paper unites and advances this research by offering the first systematic cross-regional analysis of how individuals’ Renewalist (or other) Christian affiliations may correlate with certain political attitudes and behaviors. To what extent, we ask, do regional, country and/or local-level factors – such as regime type, state capacity, economic inequality, and religious competition – correspond to particularly pro-democratic attitudes or high levels of political participation? Specifically, we run multilevel models on a cross-regional database that we compiled from data collected by the Pew Forum (2009; 2014). Our sample includes 44,832 people across 14 sub-Saharan African and 18 Latin American states. Findings indicate that, even when controlling for a host of individual and higher-level variables, Renewalists’ political profiles do, in fact, differ significantly from other Christians. This is particularly true with respect to views about the appropriate relationship between church and state. Yet, we also find important distinctions between Pentecostals and Charismatic Catholics (who embrace strikingly similar doctrine and worship style) in some contexts and regional variations in some of these relationships. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for scholarship on religion and politics and avenues for future research, which we argue should use experimental, qualitative and survey methods to further advance knowledge about the political correlates of Renewalist movements and the contextual factors that influence them.

Authors

• Elizabeth S. Sperber, University of Denver

• Erin Accampo Hern, Syracuse University