As conversion to Protestantism exploded across Latin America beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, it was likely inevitable that some of the new converts would end up in elective office. Evangelicals now constitute large minorities in several countries and could surpass Catholics as a percentage of the populations of Guatemala and Brazil by the 2030s—yet in no country in the region have evangelicals in elected office risen to their percentage of the general population. (In this review, as in Boas’s book and across Latin America, the term “evangelical” refers to all Protestants.) Nonetheless, Latin American evangelicals’ electoral engagement has drawn outsized political commentary and analysis in the past decade or so. This may be due partly to the novelty of evangelical politics and to social stigmas affecting converts, who historically tended to be from the lower and working classes across the region. However, scholarly attention has been driven primarily by the distinctive style of evangelical politics: its organization as a voting bloc at both the mass and elite level and its strong commitment to evangelical churches’ priorities, including both their material interests and conservative stances on sexuality politics, ranging from abortion to LGBTQ+ issues.
In this context, a new wave of scholarship on religion and politics in Latin America has developed. Whereas an older body of work up through the 1990s primarily used qualitative methods, including ethnography and historical analysis, recent scholarship on religion and politics in the developing world typically uses both behavioralist empirical methods and rigorous tracing of causal processes. Perhaps the most important new Latin Americanist book in this renaissance is Taylor Boas’s 2023 monograph, Evangelicals and Electoral Politics in Latin America: A Kingdom of This World.
Drawing on a decade of data collection and research, Boas asks a big question for which there are no obvious answers: Why have evangelicals been so much more successful in entering electoral politics in some countries than in others? He develops his answer primarily through rich case studies of Brazil, Peru, and Chile, three countries in which evangelicals have similar issue priorities and constitute similarly sized minorities—30% in Brazil, 21% in Chile, and 13% in Peru—but have had wildly different experiences in the electoral arena. This religious group has been most politicized and capable of drawing votes in Brazil and least in Chile, whereas Peru serves as an intermediate case.
Boas begins by considering two sets of questions posed by activists and scholars. First, are differences across the three countries due to lower demand for evangelical substantive representation in Peru and Chile than in Brazil? Marshaling both conjoint survey experiments and ecological analysis, Boas shows that, in the abstract, evangelicals in all three countries exhibit similarly strong in-group preferences for evangelical candidates and that localities with more evangelical voters give greater support to whatever evangelical candidates are on offer. The problem in Chile, therefore, is not evangelical voters’ indifference to a candidate’s religion.
Second, are cross-country differences rooted in institutions? Scholarship on minority political representation commonly assumes that minorities will vote for in-group members and that electoral institutions affect whether votes turn into seats. Moreover, a prominent explanation for the political success of Brazilian evangelicals points to both the porosity of Brazil’s party system and the permissiveness of open-list proportional representation with high district size in elections for the lower chamber of the National Congress. However, Boas’s empirical analysis casts doubt on institutional explanations. Although cross-national and, to some extent, over-time data are consistent with the institutional hypothesis, he finds that subnational variation in district magnitude is not associated with variation in electoral representation. Boas concludes that institutional explanations are at best a partial explanation for why evangelical politicians do better in some times and places than in others.
The next four chapters then turn to Boas’s preferred explanation, which he argues is causally prior to electoral behavior and institutions: politicization of and perceived threats to evangelical identity. Evangelical identity first became politicized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he argues, as the region’s tiny evangelical community and the Roman Catholic Church responded to the disestablishment of the church across most of the region. The constitutional divorce between Latin American states and the Roman Catholic Church was more amicable in some places than in others. In Brazil, the church actively fought to recoup former privileges, most prominently in the 1988 constitutional convention, leading the Assemblies of God to successfully mobilize a slate of candidates to the convention. In Chile, by contrast, the church largely accepted the terms of its divorce.
In the second half of the twentieth century, evangelical communities across the three countries also responded differently to the Cold War, the Catholic Church’s strong leftward movement, and military dictatorships. Whereas Brazil’s evangelicals and Pentecostals tended to develop clientelistic alliances with the conservative military regime, those in Chile became ideologically polarized under Pinochet, further fracturing subsequent potential evangelical coalitions. Peruvian evangelicals remained unified and largely tolerant of the country’s relatively moderate and inclusive military government but subsequently fractured during the 10-year authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori.
Then, around the turn of the twenty-first century, sexuality politics entered the stage. There was little variation in evangelicals’ reactions; globally, evangelicalism and Pentecostalism are associated with strong opposition to issues such as LGBTQ+ rights and abortion (see, e.g., Joel Robbins, “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33, 2004). Boas argues that evangelicals’ prior levels of mobilization and fragmentation affected their ability to mobilize to fight these new perceived threats. In Brazil, an already mobilized evangelical community effectively derailed some liberalization efforts, whereas evangelicals, often in alliance with conservative Catholic politicians, were relatively ineffective in doing so in Peru and Chile. These efforts had further consequences for electoral politics, as Brazilian evangelical politicians became some of the standard-bearers for a renewed cultural Right.
Boas’s explanation is powerful and intellectually satisfying, although I have a few quibbles with the analysis. Most importantly, I believe he dismisses the institutionalist explanation too quickly, particularly in the Brazilian case, and subjects it to more strenuous tests than he does his own alternative explanation. In my own study of Brazil, I am persuaded that evangelicals are more successful in races for the lower chamber of Congress than the national Senate or executive office largely due to differences in electoral rules. He also could have made more of the point that evangelicals remain substantially underrepresented, even in Brazil. Nonetheless, the book represents the best that the new wave of comparativist religion and politics scholarship has to offer: the intersection of rigorous empirical analysis with deep case knowledge and careful thinking about how causal processes play out cross-nationally. In this sense, it belongs on a bookshelf with Latin Americanist books such as Luis Felipe Mantilla’s How Political Parties Mobilize Religion: Lessons from Mexico and Turkey (2021) and Amy Erica Smith’s Religion and Brazilian Democracy: Mobilizing the People of God (2019), as well as new Africanist books such as Gwyneth H. McClendon and Rachel Beatty Riedl’s From Pews to Politics: Religious Sermons and Political Participation in Africa (2019) and John F. McCauley’s The Logic of Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Africa (2017).
Going forward, big questions remain in the study of conservative Christianity in the developing world. Scholars of political behavior and psychology should continue to investigate when, where, and how conservative Christians mobilize to support democratic processes and causes such as environmental protection. Moreover, the extent to which evangelicals and conservative Catholics can ultimately form a single rightist political coalition remains unclear. Finally, the next decade will likely bring a religious earthquake: Roman Catholicism will become a minority religious identification in many countries of Latin America, and evangelical identification will likely subsequently overtake it in a few countries. How the two religious groups and their institutions respond will undoubtedly be a question of great scholarly interest.
