I’ll always remember a Spanish-speaking woman I interviewed years ago when I was doing an article for the Houston Chronicle on why Catholic immigrants from Latin America switched over to Protestantism soon after they immigrated to the United States.
The answer, this woman told me, was the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart and his radio broadcasts into Central and South America. “Before, we didn’t know we had a choice on who to believe,” is approximately what this woman told me. “But once we heard Jimmy Swaggart on the radio, we knew there was something else out there other than the Catholic Church.”
In the past 40 years, much of the population of Latin America has likewise realized they have faith options and a recent Wall Street Journal piece claims that this trend of mass conversions to Protestantism — and specifically Pentecostalism — has reached a tipping point.
This is news all of a sudden?
RIO DE JANEIRO—Tatiana Aparecida de Jesus used to walk the city’s streets as a sex worker, high on crack cocaine. Last year, the mother of five joined a small Pentecostal congregation in downtown Rio called Sanctification in the Lord and left her old life behind.
“The pastor hugged me without asking anything,” said Ms. de Jesus, 41, who was raised a Catholic and is one of more than a million Brazilians who have joined an evangelical or Pentecostal church since the beginning of the pandemic, according to researchers. “When you are poor, it makes so much of a difference when someone just says ‘good morning’ to you, ‘good afternoon,’ or shakes your hand,” she said.
This has been a huge advantage that the Protestants have pressed home.
These emerging Protestant flocks don’t have a shortage of priests as does the Catholic Church does –- where parishioner-to-clergy ratio mean there’s one priest per several thousand parishioners. Let’s keep reading:
For centuries, to be Latin American was to be Catholic; the religion faced virtually no competition. Today, Catholicism has lost adherents to other faiths in the region, especially Pentecostalism, and more recently to the ranks of the unchurched. The shift has continued under the first Latin American pope.
