The arrival of the Europeans in Latin America brought their social organization, their religious beliefs and institutions. Since then, Catholicism has been installed as the religious system that dominated and permeated societies. Assembled to the Spanish and Portuguese crowns during the colonial era, the Catholic Church grew in structure, in specialists –priests and nuns–, and became the quasi-monopolistic option in the public space, spreading Catholic symbology over a mestizo society in the traces of the beliefs and rituals of the ways of life of pre-Hispanic societies still persisted, to which the beliefs of the deported and enslaved Africans first, of the migrants later, were incorporated. America is born into modernity as a society traversed by miscegenation and syncretism, visible in the cracks and interstices of the hegemonic cult. The independence processes (19th century) maintained the privileged relationship between the states and the Catholic Church, forming a relationship model that entered into crisis between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century with the advance of liberalism and the legislation that gradually removed the prerogatives of the Church. in the control of the population (registration and civil marriage, secularization of cemeteries, divorce) and come in some countries to separate the Church from the State (Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico).
And if the identification between the nation and Catholicism defined a political horizon in many Latin American countries during the first half of the 20th century, the associations between the Church and the states at the legal and political level never came to correspond to a homogeneous population from the point of view of religious view, not even with a uniform Catholic membership. The institutional gaze leaves in the shadows the vast multiplicity of diverse beliefs and practices of Latin Americans, which are not regulated by an ecclesial structure that, especially in the countries of the Southern Cone, historically suffers from a chronic shortage of personnel.
The concept of secularization is complex. One of the most widespread interpretations associates it with the decline of religious beliefs and practices from the processes of modernization. It is not a unilinear or irreversible process, and it impacts people's beliefs and practices as well as cultural structures and social and political institutions. Thinking about secularization then requires an open look at the processes of social transformation. Approached from the perspective of beliefs, Latin American societies are spaces in movement, in which diversity is manifested in the presence of plural religious groups and in diverse attitudes and practices within religious groups. During the 20th century, nine out of every ten inhabitants of Latin America were Catholic, and even today around 40% of the world's Catholics live on the continent. This vast majority remained until around the 1960s, when various processes gradually appeared that transformed the landscape of Catholic hegemony.
Considering the religious distribution of its population, the Pew Research Forum1 divides the countries in Latin America into four groups:
1. Predominantly Catholic, with more than 70% of its population Catholic (Paraguay, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela and Panama)
2.Majority Catholic (Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico).
3.Half Catholics (El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua).
4.With less than half of its Catholic population (Honduras, Uruguay, Cuba).
Among the countries with the lowest percentage of Catholics we can observe different situations: while in Honduras the proportion of both Catholics and Evangelicals is close to 40%, in Uruguay and Cuba the percentage of people with no religious affiliation exceeds 35%. In the countries of Central America, Pentecostal evangelicals have grown steadily and reach more than a third of the population, while in the countries of the Southern Cone of Latin America (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay) and in El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, people without religious affiliation have increased steadily since the 1990s.
The processes that mark the religious opening of Latin American societies are multiple and diverse depending on the country: among these currents we can evoke the growth of the Pentecostal evangelicals, the reinventions of identity linked to indigenous and Africanisms, the spread of religiosities of Eastern origin , like Buddhism and Hinduism, the flourishing of the spiritualities of the new age, and also the possibility of thinking outside any religious framework. For Latin Americans, changing their religion, adopting practices far from orthodoxy, believing without belonging to any religious tradition have become concrete possibilities and little penalized socially and communally. In a world marked by capitalism and globalization, the circulation of people, goods and merchandise characterizes social relations, and with them attitudes towards religion and beliefs. The religious landscape shows large majorities whose relationship with the institution is marked by autonomy, and minorities who choose to practice religion and spirituality intensely and throughout their lives: which leaves an increasingly reduced space for religious institutions as organizers of social life.
The increase in people who do not adhere to any religion is one of the phenomena that characterizes socio-religious change in Latin America. Since the beginning of the 21st century, and with the exception of Uruguay and Cuba, where the "without religious affiliation" constitute an older phenomenon, the growth of this current has become evident. At first it was about people of Catholic origin, who moved away from their religion of origin; then this group grew until it reached 8% of the population of Latin America (Pew Research Forum, 2014). It is a process that is growing and permeates all societies: the countries with the highest percentage of “no religious affiliation” are Cuba, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Honduras.
People without religious affiliation are not uniform in their attitudes, practices and beliefs, nor in terms of their ideological or political preferences. If we consider the attitude towards religion and beliefs, it is possible to identify atheists, those who do not believe in the existence of God, agnostics, and a larger group that is related to spirituality and beliefs beyond the institutions or belonging to a religion. For those who define themselves as atheists, religion is not an issue in their daily lives. These people live, are educated, go through difficult circumstances such as illness or loss of loved ones, eventually form families, without religious beliefs or practices intervening: religiously inspired family rites are not performed, sons and daughters are not baptized and funerals are secular. The search for meaning of these people bypasses religion.
But although the practices and beliefs of those far from religion drop significantly in relation to those who identify with a religion, not all people without religious affiliation necessarily stop believing. In Argentina, for example, three out of ten people with no religious affiliation believe in God.2 These are subjects who identify themselves as spiritual, who seek contact techniques with the transcendent such as meditation, prayers, yoga or reiki practice, and who they reject any institutional belonging. They tend to maintain attenuated beliefs and practices, related to certain family sociabilities and a personal relationship with the sacred, unrelated to churches or temples. The interpretation of the divine as energy, the enchantment of the cosmos and holistic worldviews are part of this universe. From the socio-demographic point of view, the "without religious affiliation" are more numerous among young people and among the inhabitants of large metropolises.
The increase in people with no religious affiliation is not, however, the only thread that we can follow to try to understand secularization in Latin America: if we look at the population of people who identify with any religion, and especially Catholics , we will notice that there is a large population there that is sociodemographically similar to those without religious affiliation (among them there are younger people, more inhabitants of large cities), and that they have similar behaviors: low levels of practice, decreased religious beliefs compared to other people religious, little attachment to churches. This population, which still identifies with some creed, establishes a relationship marked by autonomy with its religion. These are believers who build their own religious trajectories of belonging and practices, are indifferent or critical of directives and even institutional values, and for whom religious institutions are a reserve of symbols that can be used or not, depending on the situation. needs or individualized routes.
The religiosity lived on the margins of institutions is definitely an air of the times: even with the persistence in most Latin American countries of a Catholic habitus, inscribed in urban structures, in the presence of Catholic images in government institutions in some countries, combined with a growing visible evangelical presence in public demonstrations and in the number of temples, Latin American societies are plagued by a low-intensity religiosity, where beliefs and practices are reduced to their minimum expression, and are marked by autonomy and personal choice. This religiosity needs little from the churches: people turn to institutions in search of symbols, rituals, blessed objects in personal journeys devised in interaction with the media and social networks rather than in direct relationship with a community, with priests, nuns, pastors or other spiritual leaders.
How to think in the social and political scene of Latin American societies the increase in the population without religious affiliation and of believers far from institutions? Two converging phenomena appear linked. On the one hand, the departure from the ideas marked by religious dogmas shows a progressive opening of social relations, which has been projected in legislation that includes the various ways of relating to the other and to the body. Thus, same-sex marriage has become law in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay and some states of Mexico; abortion is legal in Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Cuba and some states of Mexico; and gender identity laws enable people to recognize themselves with their self-perceived gender in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay and Ecuador, while in Peru, Brazil and Colombia it is allowed through the judicial system or by presidential decree. These opening processes were pushed by new social movements, such as feminism, which massively took to the streets and occupied the public space with their demands, some of which condemn the intervention of the Church in public affairs.
On the other hand, the lower intensity of religious affiliations can be associated with the loosening of the social bond: the 21st century has seen the emergence of ever larger sectors that do not have religious or political sociabilities, that do not participate in parishes or temples, but neither in unions, neighborhood associations or school cooperatives.3 It is a young population, disengaged from the spaces that used to structure social life, with little appreciation by institutions of all kinds and with strong criticism of the democratic system. Among this population, whose expectations of economic and social improvement have been disappointed, with their lives marked by labor informality, in which the State does not arrive or arrives late, the ideas of conspiracy and anti-system groups circulate more easily, and they are groups susceptible to being tempted by the non-partisan extreme right. Churches and religious institutions are thought of as obsolete and bear restrictions on individual freedoms. The "Neither State nor God nor Church" seems to have been taken over by young people from the right pole of the political arc.
The remoteness of institutions is not a phenomenon typical of religious institutions: it happens with political, educational, and social ones. Mistrust grows: citizens distance themselves from churches, schools, unions and political parties. Where the social bond becomes weak and diluted, suspicion, anger and rage grow. Secularization in Latin America is present, coexists with religious and spiritual beliefs, and also with processes of estrangement and mistrust of not only religious but also social and political institutions. Perhaps this is the greatest challenge for democratic coexistence in Latin American societies.
Verónica Giménez Béliveau is a principal investigator at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) of Argentina, coordinator of the Society, Culture and Religion program at the Center for Labor Studies and Research (CEIL) and professor of Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). ).
