Evangelicals and Electoral Politics in Latin America – A Kingdom of This World
By C. Boas
Cambridge University Press, £75

LATIN AMERICA, since the Spanish conquest, has been a stronghold of the Catholic church which has dominated life and politics. As elsewhere, the Catholic church has been a strong conservative force and bulwark of dictatorships. 

With the eruption of liberation theology in the 1960s, following the Second Vatical Council, a number of Latin American theologians took the side of the poor and challenged the conservatism of the Catholic hierarchy. 

It was also in the 1960s and ‘70s that Evangelism became a significant factor in US politics.  

I recall making a documentary about this phenomenon, examining the role of leading preachers like Billy Graham, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell, all oleaginous rabblerousers with mass following on TV.  

Falwell founded the Moral Majority and was credited with delivering two-thirds of the white evangelical vote to Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. This movement was powerful and scary, and also sat on enormous amounts of money. 

Some of that hoard was used to set up evangelical groups in Latin America, almost certainly with tacit backing from US the conservative establishment. 

That background gets no mention in this book. 

The author looks solely at the role of evangelicals within the geographical confines of Latin America, although he does mention the CIA-engineered coup of 1954 in Guatemala against the progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz with the full co-operation of the Catholic church. At that time, the small Evangelical churches were marginal and were playing a more progressive role. 

In the ‘80s, however, there was a resurgence of their political muscle but in a different, conservative guise.

In the face of the spread of guerilla struggles and liberation theology there was an urgent need for the US to secure its “backyard.” The corrupt local oligarchies could easily be harnessed to that aim as seen more recently in Brazil with its last president, Jair Bolsonaro, who operated with a foot in both Catholic and Evangelical camps to good effect.  
 
It is certainly true that the Catholic church in Latin America had, by the mid-20th century, become too comfortable in its dominant and unchallenged role. There was increasing disillusion and the Left was gaining ground politically. The conservative evangelicals chose an opportune time to intervene, offering a vociferous opposition to modernist ideas on things like abortion and same-sex marriage which were inflammatory topics for a people steeped in conservative values. 

Boas delves deeply into the data in terms of voting patterns, the political expression and representation of evangelical groups in various countries and provides a detailed overview of patterns and trends but he fails to examine the deeper causes and political significance of the Evangelical movement.
 
Rather, Boas argues, that the question of Evangelical participation in Latin American politics needs to be viewed through a long-term lens. He recognises that the role of the Evangelical churches in the first half of the 20th century was a largely progressive one, very different from the latter half. Since then they have increasingly aligned themselves with the right-wing of the Catholic church. 

While in the first half of the 20th century the Evangelicals won the battle for religious equality (with the Catholic church), they appear to be losing the culture wars during the 21st.