The Rise of Pentecostalism in Modern El Salvador: From the Blood of the Martyrs to the Baptism of the Spirit

By Timothy H. Wadkins

El Salvador has experienced a dramatic religious transformation over the past half-century. In what was once an almost exclusively Catholic nation, more than 35 percent of the people are now evangelical Protestants, mostly identified as charismatic or Pentecostal.
 
While having some roots in Protestant missions from North America and Europe, the religious renaissance overtaking El Salvador is both homegrown and closely related to the nation’s social, cultural, and economic upheavals. Since the end of the Salvadoran Civil War, the traditional social order—which was established in colonial times, ruled by elites, enforced by the military, and supported by the Church—has been overturned. Once a world of haciendas, plantations, and old merchant firms, El Salvador is now home to new factories, shopping malls, fast food restaurants, and call centers. Modernization has brought new ideas too—about asserting individual rights and making choices, forming communities, voting in elections, consuming material goods, employing technology, and engaging with global culture.

The Rise of Pentecostalism in Modern El Salvador explores how this vast social transformation has opened the gates to runaway religious creativity and competition. In weaving together the lively and complex story, author Timothy Wadkins employs the scholarly tools of historical reconstruction, theological analysis, and ethnographic interviews, as well as the results of a pioneering national religious survey. The outcome is a comprehensive and detailed picture of El Salvador’s religious renaissance against the backdrop of El Salvador’s fitful path toward modernization and democratization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781481307147

Book preview

The Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity

Calvin College

Joel A. Carpenter

Series Editor

Other books in the series

Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic

Andrew E. Barnes

The Making of Korean Christianity

Sung-Deuk Oak

Converts to Civil Society

Lida V. Nedilsky

Evangelical Christian Baptists of Georgia

Malkhaz Songulashvili

China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture

YANG Huilin

The Evangelical Movement in Ethiopia

Tibebe Eshete

The Rise of Pentecostalism in Modern El Salvador

From the Blood of the Martyrs to the Baptism of the Spirit

Timothy H. Wadkins

Baylor University Press

© 2017 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Jacket Design by Natalya Balnova

Jacket Image: One of twelve services held each week at Misíon Elim Internacional, El Salvador. Photo courtesy of Misíon Elim Internacional.

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Series Foreword

It used to be that those of us from the global North who study world Christianity had to work hard to make the case for its relevance. Why should thoughtful people learn more about Christianity in places far away from Europe and North America? The Christian religion, many have heard by now, has more than 60 percent of its adherents living outside of Europe and North America. It has become a hugely multicultural faith, expressed in more languages than any other religion. Even so, the implications of this major new reality have not sunk in. Studies of world Christianity might seem to be just another obscure specialty niche for which the academy is infamous, rather like an ethnic foods corner in an American grocery store.

Yet the entire social marketplace, both in North America and in Europe, is rapidly changing. The world is undergoing the greatest transregional migration in its history, as people from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific region become the neighbors down the street, across Europe and North America. The majority of these new immigrants are Christians. Within the United States, one now can find virtually every form of Christianity from around the world. Here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I live and work, we have Sudanese Anglicans, Adventists from the Dominican Republic, Vietnamese Catholics, Burmese Baptists, Mexican Pentecostals, and Lebanese Orthodox Christians—to name a few of the Christian traditions and movements now present.

Christian leaders and institutions struggle to catch up with these new realities. The selection of a Latin American pope in 2013 was in some respects the culmination of decades of readjustment in the Roman Catholic Church. Here in Grand Rapids, the receptionist for the Catholic bishop answers the telephone first in Spanish. The worldwide Anglican communion is being fractured over controversies concerning sexual morality and biblical authority. Other churches in worldwide fellowships and alliances are treading more carefully as new leaders come forward and challenge northern assumptions, both liberal and conservative.

Until very recently, however, the academic and intellectual world has paid little heed to this seismic shift in Christianity’s location, vitality, and expression. Too often, as scholars try to catch up to these changes, says the renowned historian Andrew Walls, they are still operating with pre-Columbian maps of these realities.

This series is designed to respond to that problem by making available some of the coordinates needed for a new intellectual cartography. Broad-scope narratives about world Christianity are being published, and they help to revise the more massive misconceptions. Yet much of the most exciting work in this field is going on closer to the action. Dozens of dissertations and journal articles are appearing every year, but their stories are too good and their implications are too important to be reserved for specialists only. So we offer this series to make some of the most interesting and seminal studies more accessible, both to academics and to the thoughtful general reader. World Christianity is fascinating for its own sake, but it also helps to deepen our understanding of how faith and life interact in more familiar settings.

So we are eager for you to read, ponder, and enjoy these Baylor Studies in World Christianity. There are many new things to learn, and many old things to see in a new light.

Joel A. Carpenter

Series Editor

To Beulah M. Jenesen

1903–1976

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Eruption of the Spirit in the Land of the Savior

Chapter 1. La Nueva Familia de Fe

Chapter 2. The Preferential Option for the Spirit

Chapter 3. The New World Order

Chapter 4. Spirit-Filled Ascendency in the New World Order

Chapter 5. Surviving the World

Chapter 6. Consuming the World

Chapter 7. Engaging the World

Chapter 8. Managing the Spirit

Conclusion: Spirit-Filled Christianity and Modernization in El Salvador

Appendix 1: Interview Data

Appendix 2: Data for 2011 Survey in Nine Salvadoran Spirit-Filled Churches

Bibliography

Notes

Subject Index

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book examines the origins and cultural implications of a wide-ranging religious resurgence that has taken place over the past half century in El Salvador, the smallest, most violent, and most densely populated country in Latin America. While this new religiosity has roots in the Protestant Evangelical and Pentecostal traditions that were imported into this country by North American and European missionaries beginning in the late nineteenth century, this movement today is neither missionary generated nor a temporary flare-up of sectarian religious enthusiasm in an otherwise traditional and static Catholic society. In fact, it is an indigenous-led eruption of popular religiosity that is creating a tear in the Catholic sacred canopy, contributing to a precipitous decline in Catholic allegiance, and complementing recent social and cultural processes of modernization.

The Christians and Christian communities that make up this religious awakening are exceedingly diverse, with complicated structures of belief and spiritual practice. For this reason, it will be beneficial at the outset to define a few important terms employed throughout the book. Almost all of the participants who make up this this movement are Protestant and Evangelical. This can be confusing because in Latin America, Protestants are commonly referred to as Evangélicos. This usage dates back to the late nineteenth century when Protestant missionaries from Europe and America began to enter Latin America preaching the Protestant gospel. At the time, all Protestants were called Evangélicos to distinguish them from Catholics. Today, however, Evangelicalism has become a distinguishable subset of Protestant diversity across the world. Thus, in this book the term Evangelical will be used to delineate those Protestants who rally around four general theological themes: the belief in the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible; the conviction that every individual can have a personal relationship with Christ, who died on the cross for their sins; a trust that Christ will return again to judge the world and save Christians from eternal perdition; and a commitment to preach the gospel message everywhere.

A majority of Salvadoran Evangelicals are also Pentecostals. Unlike traditional Evangelicals, Pentecostals are distinguished by the emphasis they place on the Holy Spirit. They believe that the miraculous events originally associated with the day of Pentecost and documented in the biblical book of Acts ought to be experienced by modern believers. Modern Pentecostalism, which is now the fastest-growing spiritual movement across the globe, has its roots in a series of revivals that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in various locations across the globe, and especially the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, which began in 1906. Since then varieties of Pentecostal Christianity have spread rapidly throughout the world. Across the Latin American subcontinent, nearly three-quarters of all Evangelicals now identify as Pentecostal to one extent or another.

Although this movement has become diverse in doctrine and practice, the largest Pentecostal denominations in the country, the Assemblies of God and the Church of God, teach the so-called classic notion that, following conversion, every Christian could and should have an emotional breakthrough experience with the Holy Spirit. Classical Pentecostals refer to this experience as the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and, just as on the original day of Pentecost, they believe that the evidence for Spirit baptism is speaking in tongues.

Tongues speaking, however, has proven to be quite controversial in how Pentecostalism is defined, and this is especially the case within Salvadoran Evangelicalism. The controversial aspect of speaking in tongues brings up a third group, often referred to as Charismatics. These Evangelicals, while very much Pentecostal-like in their worship, typically belong to non-Pentecostal churches and do not teach that speaking in tongues is a necessary condition for baptism in the Spirit. The irony is that Charismatics often place even more emphasis on wild emotionality in worship and on various manifestations of the Spirit than do traditional Pentecostals. Adding to the confusion is the fact that not all Charismatics are Protestant. The Pentecostal Spirit has leaped over its traditional boundaries within Protestant Evangelicalism and is now embedded in the Catholic Charismatic movement, known in Latin America as the Católica Carismática Renovación.

The fluid nature of these designations makes the analysis of this movement a bit like keeping a live octopus in a box. Just when you think you have it contained by a set of descriptive terms, tentacles of difference wiggle out everywhere. Despite its many variations and mutations, however, like the body of the octopus, this movement has a core that animates all of its different expressions. That core is a reflexive unity between the supernatural worldview of the Bible and the individualistic experience of the pneumatic. For this reason, while terms like Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Charismatic will be used to delineate subgroups within the movement, most often the term Spirit-filled will be employed to capture the essential nature of this religious renaissance.

Origins of this Study

This book represents a continuation of research that began with my training as a cultural and theological historian interested in the intersections between religion and modernization. This project began in the context of teaching several summer immersion seminars entitled Christianity and Culture in El Salvador (2005–2009), through the auspices of the Institute for the Global Study of Religion at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, which I founded and continue to direct. These seminars were designed to focus on the Salvadoran Civil War, the development of Liberation Theology, its manifestations in the Communidades Ecclesiales de Base (Christian Base Communities, CBC), and the famous Civil War martyrs such as Archbishop Oscar Romero as well as the six Jesuits from the University of Central America who in 1989 were slaughtered by a U.S.–trained death squad acting on behalf of the Salvadoran government.

In the course of these seminars, however, my students and I kept encountering Evangelicals and Pentecostals—on television, at public rallies, in small rural churches, and in some of the largest churches in the world. These encounters prompted me to explore the extent to which this historically Catholic country was still dominated by Catholic faith, the scope of the Evangelical and Pentecostal movement, and the ways in which this movement was affecting the spiritual and social landscape of El Salvador.

Slowly at first, I began what would blossom into a comprehensive research project. From 2006 to 2009, together with a team of other social scientists, I mapped out the essential contours of this movement by visiting churches, scouring archival material in El Salvador and the United States, and interviewing numerous leaders. In 2009 my research team partnered with the University Institute of Public Opinion (IUDOP) at the University of Central America in San Salvador and helped them create and administer a national poll that statistically confirmed the size and makeup of the resurgence we were witnessing.¹ In 2010, I received funding from the Center for the Study of Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, which was part of the large Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative funded by the John Templeton Foundation.² This funding allowed me to choose a representative sample of eight different religious communities where I became a participant observer in worship, in Bible studies, and frequently in casual conversations with leaders and members. During a sabbatical leave in 2010–2011, I was able to conduct more than 150 individual and group videotaped interviews in many different churches and organizations and, with the assistance of the Institute of Public Opinion at Francisco Gavidia University in San Salvador, administered a comprehensive survey within the eight representative communities (see appendix 2). During the research process, sometimes in collaboration with members of my research team, I also published several articles and book chapters on various aspects of the project.

Acknowledgments

I have not completed this project alone. The entire editorial staff at Baylor University Press has been superb. I wish to thank Baylor University Press director Carey Newman, who offered wise and often humorous advice about turning an academic project into a readable book. Joel Carpenter, director of the Nagel Institute at Calvin College, is the editor of Baylor’s series on World Christianity. Joel read the entire manuscript, and I have greatly benefited from his insights, advice, and warm support. Canisius College was very accommodating as I prepared this book. I have benefited from two summer research fellowships, a group of skilled librarians, especially Mr. Matthew Kochan, and the early support for my work from Dr. Scott Chadwick, who was then the academic vice president at Canisius and is now the provost at Xavier University. I am also grateful to the Assemblies of God staff at both the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center and the World Missions archives, Springfield, Missouri, who facilitated access to valuable archival resources about Assemblies of God missionaries in El Salvador and Guatemala, and to the staff at the Instituto de Opinión Pública of the Francisco Gavidia University in San Salvador, for their work in preparing and administering two different surveys within Evangelical and Pentecostal churches.

I owe a great debt to the team of individuals both in San Salvador and in Buffalo who have assisted at every point. In San Salvador, Evelyn De Guély, a lawyer, gifted translator, and personal secretary to Mario Vega, the pastor general at Misión Cristiana Elim, functioned as my assistant throughout this project. Evelyn arranged my schedule, accompanied me to interviews, and made the fast-paced and slang-ridden Salvadoran Spanish comprehensible for a vernacularly deficient gringo scholar. Simply put, without her this project would have been impossible, and I am very grateful. Mr. Eliberto Juarez, the former director of Semillas de Nueva Creación, was also an asset to this project. Eliberto probably knows the Evangelical-Pentecostal world better than any other Salvadoran, and my long conversations with him were very helpful for my own understanding of the contours of this movement. Eliberto opened up doors to churches and organizations for my research team and allowed us the free use of the Semillas’ office to conduct interviews and hold forums. I remain particularly grateful to the hundreds of Salvadorans from many walks of life and many faith perspectives who were willing to tell me their stories and allowed me to retell them in this book.

In Buffalo, my research team included two social scientists who are colleagues at my institution. Dr. Patricia Christian, professor of sociology, was most helpful in organizing our polling projects and interpreting the data. Patricia also made major contributions to publications that came from the project. Michael Gent, professor emeritus of organizational studies, has been connected to this project since we began coteaching seminars in El Salvador in 2006. Mike has participated with me in conducting interviews, preparing surveys, and authoring joint articles. He has read and critically evaluated every part of this book, and I owe a great deal to his Catholic sensibilities. Most of all I appreciate his encouragement of my work and steadfast friendship over the years.

This project was funded through the Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative (PCRI), sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and administered by the Center for the Study of Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC) at the University of Southern California. I am grateful to Kimon Sargeant, vice president for human services at the Templeton, and especially to Donald Miller, director of the CRCC and project director of the PCRI. Along with his amazing staff at the CRCC, Don managed several different grant projects connected to the PCRI and was responsible for convening all of the grantees together for two week-long symposiums, first in Quito, Ecuador, and then in Nairobi, Kenya. I learned a great deal from Don as well as from the global network of scholars who participated in these gatherings.

Two individuals in El Salvador were especially helpful in this project as consultants and conversation partners: the Reverend Mario Vega, pastor general of Misión Cristiana Elim, and Dean Brackley, S.J., late professor of theology at the University of Central America (UCA). Mario is without doubt the most important leader and intellectual in the Evangelical community in El Salvador, and I am grateful for our many conversations about the movement and his concerns about the pressing social issues confronting this small country. Dean was a source of constant encouragement in my work, and his insights about Salvadoran religion and the rise of the Evangélicos are embedded in this book in many different ways. Unfortunately for the world of scholarship, for the global Jesuit community, for the hundreds of university students from around the world who came to visit him at the UCA, and for his many friends across the world, Dean passed away in October 2011. He is sorely missed.

Last, but in no way least, I owe my wife, the Reverend Tracy S. Daub, immense gratitude. She read and edited the manuscript at every stage of its production. If it is clear and reads well, it is because of her. She was also my primary theological interlocutor in the project, and her careful analysis and insights helped to make my ideas more coherent. Most of all she was patient, encouraging, and loving in ways I often take for granted and could never repay. To my children, Zachary and Abigail, who help make my life complete, this book is the answer to your questions about why I spent so much time away and what I was doing all that time sitting in my upstairs office.

This book is dedicated to my maternal grandmother, who helped to raise me. Although she was totally blind, she was an accomplished pianist, avid gardener, phenomenal cook, and vociferous reader of audio books. My grandmother was also a devout Pentecostal, even though, ironically, she never spoke in tongues and was never healed of her blindness despite numerous trips to faith healers. She was also my first theological and spiritual mentor. My interest in spiritual matters began early in my life in numerous and often fervent conversations with her while sitting at the table in our family kitchen.

Introduction

The Eruption of the Spirit in the Land of the Savior

We spent the morning in search of his final resting place. It turns out that Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, known throughout the world for being a champion of the poor, El Salvador’s most famous martyr and the soon-to-be saint, is entombed in the basement of El Salvador’s National Cathedral.¹ Though a few years ago his memorial was renovated to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of his assassination, it is all but hidden. No signs point to its location. Of course, San Salvador, the capital city of this, the smallest, most earthquake-prone, most densely populated, and most violent country in all of Latin America, is not known for being tourist friendly; it has few signs pointing to anything. Nevertheless, as my students and I stood quietly before the tomb on June 5, 2005, we could not help wondering about current Salvadoran attitudes toward this modern-day prophet, whose assassination while he was celebrating Mass on March 24, 1980, marked the beginning of what was to become one of history’s most violent civil wars.

The transformation of Oscar Romero into a champion of the poor is a conversion story of biblical proportions, but it is also a symbol of the social rupture that was about to begin in El Salvador.² When Romero became archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, he was a bookish churchman and a sturdy defender of the aristocratic and military status quo. When some of his clerical colleagues began to side with the poor and joined them in their increasingly strident demands for economic justice and land rights, Romero chastised them as Marxists. However, early in his tenure he began to change his mind as he encountered reports of widespread governmental atrocities against the poor. His conversion to a more radical perspective came immediately after his good friend, the Jesuit Rutilio Grande, parish pastor at Aguilares, was brutally gunned down by a government death squad on March 12, 1977. Within days Romero began to turn his pastoral attention almost exclusively to the plight of the poor. He condemned government oppression against them, called on soldiers to lay down their weapons in civil disobedience, and openly repudiated the U.S. government for giving aid to the military. By late 1979 Romero knew his life was in jeopardy but continued to speak out. Two weeks before he was murdered, he told a reporter that if they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. . . . [L]et my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality.³

The Salvadoran Civil War began almost immediately following Romero’s murder. According to the political spin generated by the Reagan-era governments of El Salvador and the United States, it was a proxy for the global Cold War: a necessary effort to eradicate the influx of Soviet arms and communist ideology that inspired and sustained the fierce guerrilla resistance movement known as the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, commonly referred to as the FMLN). But El Salvador’s poor knew differently. Poor campesinos knew that this armed conflict was a long-overdue response to centuries of aristocratic and military rule that had ruthlessly kept the majority of the population destitute, landless, and marginalized from political participation. What became central in the poor’s interpretation of Salvadoran realities, and a forceful ingredient in their overall ideology of resistance, was a new religious movement that had grown up within the progressive wing of the Latin American Catholic Church, known as Liberation Theology. With antecedents in the Church’s increased concern for the poor, first expressed at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and worked out more systematically in the subsequent Latin American church councils of Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979), Liberation Theology became a serious thorn in the side of a government that was interested in preserving, at all costs, the status quo ante hierarchical social structure. Liberationists also ran afoul of the conservative Catholic hierarchy because of their leadership in the small cellular groups (CBCs), which were proliferating throughout El Salvador’s rural parishes and were helping politicize the poor and spread liberationist ideas.

The liberationist clergy and leaders in the widespread solidarity movement taught that the biblical notion of the kingdom of God had less to do with a future in heaven and more to do with the present liberation of the poor from unjust social structures that kept them impoverished and oppressed. The liberationist vision was for a new society, where the reign of God would result in the democratic participation of equals rather than the traditional power of a few. Through these teachings, Liberation Theology helped to empower a whole generation of poor people to organize and participate in the fight for liberation.⁴ The government, military, and cadre of the landed oligarchy fought back ferociously to preserve the old order. Following Romero’s assassination in 1980 and before the war ended in 1992, several liberationist leaders were brutally murdered, including the famous cases of the four American women church workers and the six Jesuits at UCA and their cook and housekeeper. They were joined by thousands of campesinos who died at the hands of government death squads and American bombs.

Like thousands of other parish and student groups that pour into this tiny laboratory of radical theological innovation and social upheaval, my group of eight college students, two other faculty members, and I had come down to El Salvador because we were enamored of Romero and the revolutionary implications of Liberation Theology. Moreover, we desired to be in solidarity with El Salvador’s poor. We wanted to see how the influence of the Catholic martyrs and the liberationist preferential option for the poor continued to reverberate in the years since the peace accords were signed in 1992. In the course of our visit, we met with several priests, nuns, historians, and economists who explained the horrific effects of the war. We visited churches and social organizations that were addressing difficult postwar social problems such as political corruption, gang violence, migration, mining, and family disintegration. We stood at the Wall of Memory in San Salvador’s Cuscatlán Park, contemplating the painful reality of some twenty-five thousand dead and missing persons whose names are enshrined on the wall. Nevertheless, a painful reality overshadowed our visit. Although the war had ended nearly fifteen years earlier, El Salvador was still beset with overwhelming poverty, vicious gang violence, and the breakdown of family structures, as more and more Salvadorans migrated to the North. We wondered whether Romero’s blood had been the seed for anything.

Our quiet contemplation at the crypt was interrupted when we began to hear sounds of tambourines, loud music, and shouting coming from outside. When we climbed the stairs out of the basement to the street, we were thrust into a massive sea of bodies—later estimated at more than fifty thousand. This crowd paid no attention to the cathedral or to the prominent resident in the crypt. Instead, it was heading to the Parque Libertad for a protest rally on behalf of the Baptist television evangelist and megachurch pastor Edgar López Bertrand. Better known as Brother Toby, Bertrand is the founder and pastor of an Evangelical empire known as Tabernáculo Biblico Bautista Amigos de Israel Central.⁵ He had recently been arrested in Houston for passport fraud after unsuccessfully trying to use a counterfeit birth certificate as proof that twenty-year-old Pamela López was his adopted daughter. When confronted, Toby pleaded guilty, paid a hefty fine, and spent nearly three months in jail. Through it all, however, Bertrand’s flock stood by their pastor. By the day of the rally, his case had become a cause célèbre, and the whole city was inundated with