Every Western intellectual knows, or used to know, what to think about the Latin American base communities. But as soon as the peak of their influence in the seventies in confronting the "national security state" was over, a cloud of unknowing settled over them. Though clearly important as a channel for democratization, once that was partially achieved other popular movements emerged. Base community influence on these was slight, and members who had taken prudent shelter under religious aegis departed for more congenial venues. Naturally, where the Church still provided the principal means of protest, for example, in rural Brazil, base communities retained their role, as Madeleine Adriance's Promised Land (1995) convincingly demonstrates.

One problem has always been rhetorical inflation. Liberation theologians writing for a Western public found it anxious to believe in the miracle of a Roman Catholic conversion to the Left. As a result, when one harbinger of deflation, the Canadian William Hewitt, produced quite modest empirical findings, he did so almost sotto voce, as if not quite wanting to be heard. In his Base Christian Communities and Social Change in Brazil (1991), Hewitt reported on research into base communities undertaken from 1984 to 1988 in the progressive diocese of Sao Paulo. He showed that they had indeed encouraged a sense of empowerment, for women as well as for men, and had many achievements to their credit, at least in local politics with respect to issues such as education and sewerage. But he also stressed how many kinds of community there were along a spectrum from the devotional to the political and noted their dependence on pastoral agents and sympathetic bishops. Clearly they were vulnerable as the alliance of progressives and moderates weakened and the Church was no longer engaged with a clearly defined political antagonist. Moreover, the women who made up the majority of the 4 million or so members did not always find their special interests welcome. This is not at all to say that Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism (the title of Daniel Levine's important 1992 study) were not being raised and heard. They were, but expectations needed adjustment.

The impact of John Burdick's study Looking for God in Brazil (1993) was maybe more direct. Burdick analyzed small groups in a working-class community in a neighborhood of Rio, comparing the relative impact of base communities, spiritists, and Pentecostals. Though he was clearly sympathetic to the base communities, his comparisons were in many ways favorable to the Pentecostals. Whether one looked at the barely literate, the impoverished, women in difficulty, or colored people experiencing discrimination, Pentecostals could be more effective. Just because base communities were continuous with Brazilian culture, they worked with more established sectors of the poor and found it less easy to create a space for transformation through conversion and group discipline. By contrast, Pentecostals built on a dualism between the household of faith and the corrupt world and so were better able to tame machismo and to secure the integrity of the family, as well as to internalize conscientious self-discipline with respect to work, domestic violence, drugs, and drink. The problems of women were more effectively dealt with by pastors than by a celibate priesthood, and the guilts of both women and men could be discharged and remitted elsewhere. These were radical changes. David Lehmann in his Struggle for the Spirit (1996) characterized it as a new indifference to whether or not the Brazilian intelligentsia pronounced their way of life "authentic" popular culture.

So as expectations about base communities were modified, estimates of Pentecostalism became less disapproving. In the early years of massive expansion from the sixties to the eighties, Pentecostal activities had been impugned by a mixed Catholic-nationalist commentary defining "Latin" America as inherently Catholic. This had chimed in well with a view propagated in the Western media, which saw Pentecostalism, and evangelicalism more broadly, as the religious arm of the North American supermarket promoted by American money with implicit support from the CIA.

In fact, as both studies discussed here show, the vast majority of evangelical groupings had rapidly become indigenous, or had grown up autonomously. Neither finance nor personnel came in the main from elsewhere. By piquant contrast, basismo was an international discourse, and the base communities were often led by priests from abroad as well as quite frequently financed from Europe and the United States. Anthony Gill claims for good measure that the invention of the base communities and of their pedagogical methods owed a great deal to earlier evangelical models. The opprobrium I endured for speaking as I found as late as 1990, when Tongues of Fire was published, has largely disappeared.

Though the "conspiracy theory" of a malign North American influence is washed up as a serious explanation of why one in ten of Latin Americans is now a Protestant, this is not to deny the symbolic attraction exercised by the United States for "the poor" or for non-Hispanic native South Americans who look beyond their immediate environment. Nor does it exclude a role at the margin for televangelism, both North American and local. Evangelicals are notoriously adept at spreading the message by modern technology, not only in Latin America, but in Africa and Asia. The net result is that, so far as Latin America is concerned, a continent once uniformly Catholic—with only minor exceptions in Brazil and Chile—has become a plural society where rival faiths compete on an open market. And, again, as both books reviewed here illustrate, evangelical expansion is accorded a positive evaluation. To gauge that, one has only to read other major contributions with an overall sympathetic tone, such as Rowan Ireland's Kingdoms Come (1992), Kurt Bowen's Evangelism and Apostasy (1996)—concentrating on leakage after conversion (in Mexico)—Andrew Chesnut's study of the importance of healing, Born Again in Brazil (1997), and the varied contributions of Edward Cleary, OP.

Anthony Gill's lively and innovative Rendering unto Caesar is a cross-national study of the distribution of Catholic political radicalism based on "rational choice" theory. By "rational choice" is meant the idea that aggregate behavior in large-scale organizations can be analyzed in terms of marketing strategies directed toward survival. Social actors, in this case Church and state, behave so as to maximize their advantages, according to the information at their disposal, and they seek increased power and legitimacy, which in the case of the Church, includes expanded (or retained) market share. When the Church operated as a monopoly, it strove to preserve a position of privilege, enabling it to concentrate on an alliance with the well-off and powerful. However, once confronted by competition, either from revolutionary political parties or alternative faiths, it has to look after its market share among the masses. Apathy had to give way to activity. Ideally, this activity should use resources with maximum economy given the low starting costs of new firms on the religious market.

Gill's theoretical standpoint therefore predicts a positive relationship between the emergence of competition among the masses, whether religious or political, and the adoption of a "preferential option for the poor." Naturally he has to exclude alternative hypotheses based on the variable incidence of poverty and/or repression, though it is clear enough that if these were the main motivators the preferential option would be adopted in many countries where it remains conspicuously absent. By taking a sample of 12 countries and rating them according to the rival explanatory factors, Gill finds that the best predictor of the option for the poor is indeed the emergence of competition, with only two exceptions, Guatemala and Ecuador.

Inevitably one has to say the basic notion is not new, even though the economic brutalism of the language may shock humane sensibilities. In Madeleine Adriance's Promised Land there are references to Catholic strategies for the pre-emption of rival movements and the way these may be slowed down as they in turn threaten loss of episcopal control. As a clear and decent sympathizer with base communities, Adriance states frankly that their genesis partly lay in response to atheistic communism and also as a means to revitalize a Church hamstrung by a shortage of priests in its competition with the Pentecostals. What Gill's book does is to lend a widespread supposition empirical substance. (I can only wish the editors at the University of Chicago Press had explained to him the difference between episcopacy and episcopate.)

Of course, for many observers the emergence of the preferential option derived from Vatican II and earlier Latin American anticipations, but for Gill this is to enter the sequence of change at the wrong point. Conversely, observers attribute the partial reversal of policy, notably moves against the politicization of the Church, to a restorationist project in the Vatican. Again, for Gill this would be to ignore the sheer rationality of cooperating with the state once some elements of democracy had been restored and repression eased (more particularly, one might add, against middle-class activists). Provided the Church is not facing unacceptable costs in terms of credibility and market share, it always makes sense to seek such privileges as the state may deliver (as in Mexico in 1992) and devote resources to educating the elite. Radicalism is never adopted for long, and it is certainly naive to expect the Church to weaken its own magisterium.

Clearly Gill's approach has an explanatory payoff, but there are problems with it that I think are particularly obvious in his treatment of the exceptions. For example, in explaining why the Guatemalan episcopate did not pursue the preferential option in spite of evangelical competition, he refers to an entrenchment of attitudes derived from a century of war with liberals, and the influence of Cardinal Casariego. The claim is that some histories ensure bishops take a long time to grasp their rational choice. In actual fact the Church was divided, both within the episcopate and in terms of complex relations between Guatemalan priests and radical foreigners.

Similar issues arise in relation to Gill's key comparison between Chile and Argentina. Picking up on a point I made about the curious contrast between the two sides of the Andes as to the penetration of Pentecostalism, he reapplies it to the equally curious contrast regarding the political stance of the Catholic Church. In Argentina, he links the Church's persistent cozying up to the elite to lack of evangelical competition, but this ignores a historic entrenchment of attitudes rooted in the war with liberalism precisely parallel to what he notes in Guatemala.

The anti-Anglo, anti-Protestant alliance of the Church and the military, forged in a crucible of intense nationalism, might very well perform most of the explanatory work reinforced by the specific privileges accorded the episcopate. (See, for example, Loris Zanatta's Dallo Stato liberale alla Nazione Cattolica, 1996.) As for Chile, Gill is surely right to stress episcopal concern at the growth of indigenous evangelicalism from the 1930s on, and the social measures taken to counteract it, but the shift to Christian Democracy and reformism, and then to peaceful coexistence with the "Popular Unity" government, was tied up in the very complex political dynamic of the decade prior to the Pinochet coup of 1973. After a cautious welcome for the coup, it is, of course, true that within a couple of years, and especially after attacks on Christian Democrat personnel, the episcopate took a courageous stand against repression supported by international human-rights organizations. That does not mean it was other than ambivalent about base communities, which drew their support in particular from local leaders, as well as from nuns and from foreign priests.

In short, Gill's treatment of the episcopate as a "social actor" raises queries about ambiguous and internally disputed situations. These same queries arise with respect to his analysis of Nicaragua. Indeed, there are further issues as to the causal direction of the relationship of religious competition to Catholic radicalism, for example, in Ecuador where Catholic-sponsored agrarian reforms, undertaken under conditions of poor pastoral oversight, helped bring about social dislocations that proved favorable to evangelical expansion.

Manuel Vasquez's book, The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity, is light years away from Gill's and weighed down by a portentous vocabulary. It too is about the rise and decline of the "popular church" and likewise about the impact and meaning of Pentecostalism. Vasquez's objection is programmatic as well as analytic in that he wants to mediate between "basist" and "vanguardist" visions of the popular church to arrive at a viable restatement of the relevance of utopia in this world, while respecting "the need for other-worldly transcendence and for the existential aspects of religion." In this context, basism refers to the auton-omous powers of popular culture while vanguardism involves intellectual intervention to replace popular naivete by the critical consciousness needed for social transformation. If these are indeed the terms of the debate, it only illustrates the contention of David Stoll (in his pioneering Is Latin America Turning Protestant?, 1990) and of myself, that this is not exactly the discourse of the poor themselves. Though Vasquez castigates us for saying so, he himself makes no bones about the rhetorical inflation that has damaged liberation theology and what he calls its "Promethean claims."

What Vasquez has to say offers a good guide to a rethinking of liberation theology. His object is to set local data collected over a few months in 1990-91 in the neighborhood of Rio against a crisis of modernity and postmodernity associated with the fluid forms of contemporary global capitalism. In his view, the difficulties of the popular church arose because it was based on a typically modernist formulation, uniting secular with religious utopias through a dialogue between Catholic doctrine, humanist Marxism, and existentialism.

Unfortunately, Vasquez argues, this project ran into the worsening conditions of the poor in the late eighties coincident with the return of democ-racy and the new forms of neoliberal capitalism. The activists, most of them women, were pushed back to defensive deployment of what he refers to as short-term, individualist, clientelist, and patrimonial strategies for survival. Faced by corruption and the exhaustion and fragmentation of life, "in-tra-historical transcendence" looked implausible. Furthermore, any modernist project of structural change based on a "unified collective emancipatory subject such as 'the poor' " came to the end of its viability. In Vasquez's view, Pentecostalism now showed itself much more capable of dealing with the situation, because its participatory practice was rooted in a workable moral reformation of the immediate environment. Having retained a separation between the enclave of faith and the corrupt "world," it was better able to bear the nonappearance of the political kingdom.

Though I have said precisely this, I thought it a hard saying not likely to be received. A dualism once counted as disabling is reassessed as positive, as indeed it has been through the whole period of Pentecostal growth. More than that, it means that in Third World conditions characterized by a strange mix of pre- and postmodernity, a faith feeding raw off the Bible is rated as better equipped to survive than a group being fed sophisticated ideology and social science.

Whether Vasquez's rather grand speculations about postmodernity and contemporary capitalism explain much about the decline of the popular church, I do not know. No doubt he is right to emphasize the problems caused by the sheer pressure of survival in the eighties, but the posited impact of postmodernity on a modernist type of project strikes me as multiplying explanations beyond necessity. Vasquez should apply William of Ockham's famous razor.

More convincing is Vasquez's discussion of the loss of episcopal support, and at least one major reason for decline appears from his own local study. There he gives an account of the withdrawal of the French priests with their money, and the arrival of Irish replacements without it, but well endowed with "liturgical orthopraxis." This I find all too easy to imagine, but the process was, after all, quite widespread. At one point, Vasquez mentions the deleterious effect of the collapse of socialist societies in Eastern Europe, which, if true, is a melancholy indication of a misplaced center of ideological gravity. (After all, it was the raising of the Berlin Wall that should have signaled the game was up, not its collapse.)

Charity and space prevent prolonged comment on Vasquez's treatment of some other laborers in this vineyard. Burdick is admonished for referring to the paradoxical consequences of vanguard elitism and his subtle anthropological approach astonishingly attributed to a "post-modern sensibility" so averse to "totalizing visions" as to ignore the wider social dynamics. Vasquez even claims that Burdick's entirely obvious notion that religious options are in competition is a creation of his own "analytic soap bubble," while Cecilia Mariz is marked down for referring to the equally obvious gap between Pentecostal values and practices. Perhaps Vasquez should read Paul Freston on how even incorruptible Pentecostals can be seduced by political corruption. I am arraigned for a kind of functionalism I remember passing into deserved eclipse over a generation ago. If Vasquez really believes I "fail to take Pentecostalism seriously as a world view," I am forced to wonder whether his eyes have strayed beyond the few pages of summary section to which he makes reference. As for the suggestion that I see Pentecostalism as "a perfect vehicle" for a vibrant autonomous civil society, this crudifies my analysis to the point of travesty.

Yet if we set aside these animadversions as mere youthful enthusiasms for creating his own space, there is something very interesting going on here, which is the dissolution of dogma into attitude. Gustavo Benavides has recently provided an incisive analysis of the way liberation theology has recoiled from its original position, even in so distinguished a practitioner as Guitierrez, and in Vasques we find an ideological restatement scaled down in response to postmodernism. Why he takes postmodern theory so seriously I do not know, but almost every doctrine of the Left is jettisoned, utilizing the legitimacy and trust he says the Catholic Church still partly retains. There is no progressive telos to history, totalization is out, the distinctions of base and superstructure, alienated and unalienated, are long gone, the "poor" as such (and the proletariat) are not some potential political actor for liberation but rather heterogeneous groupings with very varied proclivities.

Moreover, viable perspectives will have to be "decentered and multidetermined," based on a "critical non-reductive materialism." We should not any longer "ontologize the poor" or "cosmicize" human self-realization. In other words, a religiose translation of Marxism is out. What Vasquez opts for is "a deontologized notion of transcendence as surplus" with "a strategic use of post-modern categories" in alliance with a basist approach. "Surplus," no doubt, is an intellectual user-friendly way of not quite mentioning God. Let us hope the masses have ears to hear. I am reminded just a little sadly of Matthew Arnold's characterization of his kind of Christianity without dogma as "Morality touched by emotion." We have been here some time before.

David Martin is emeritus professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and honorary professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster University. He is the author of many books, including most recently Does Christianity Cause War? (Clarendon Press/Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).

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