Christianity as feminist utopia? Religious conversion and feminism across three generations of indigenous evangelical women in post-mission Ecuador

• In Event: Feminismos indígenas, violencias y resistencias

Abstract

This presentation examines how indigenous women in Ecuador confront the gendered promises of evangelical Christianity and articulate new forms of religious feminism in the long-term aftermath of conversion. The immediate benefits that conversion accords to women are emphasized in the scholarly literature, leading some scholars to ponder, “have we stumbled onto a feminist utopia?” (Lorentzen and Mira 2005, 69). What I call the “Christianity-as-feminist-utopia” trope is prevalent in local narratives as well. In Ecuador’s Chimborazo Province—the site of a widespread conversion of indigenous peoples from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity in the 1970s—first converts stress how missionary Christianity liberated women from domestic violence and paved the way towards greater social mobility. Yet very little is understood about the intergenerational effects of conversion. This paper draws on fourteen months of ethnographic research I conducted in a Kichwa-speaking evangelical community in Chimborazo. Qualitative interviews with second- and third- generation believers who grew up in Christianized households reveal women’s enduring struggles in their evangelical marriages and churches. Their experiences, which are officially silenced, and the ways in which they push back against evangelical patriarchy through religious (re)commitment challenge scholarly assumptions about feminism and the effects of conversion alike. This paper contributes to scholarship on emerging indigenous feminisms across Latin America through its focus on the often-overlooked dimension of religious identity.

Author

• Kathleen C O'Brien, University of Arizona