VIOLENCE AND RELIGIONS IN LATIN AMERICA

The recent history of Latin America has been marked by extensive violence, violence of many kinds: the institutionalized violence of poverty, disease, and injustice; massive violence of repression and torture, revolutionary violence, and a growing violence of daily life linked with migration, drugs, gangs and domestic abuse. In contrast to the past, there are now also many religions: the monopoly of the Catholic church has been replaced by religious pluralism with new churches growing rapidly. The combination of intense and widespread violence with religious innovation and a multiplication of new churches has had important effects on the evolution of religions, their discourse and appeal, and their presence in public life. Among the most notable of these impacts are the turn of many churches to promotion of human rights and protection of victims, and opposition to repressive governments, the alliance of others with that repression in the name of a kind of Christian nationalism, and the appeal of many new churches as a way of opting out of the violence of daily life through rebirth in a new religious community.