Latinos Flock to New Religious Marketplace

A pope-authorized computer-generated replica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the primary symbol of Mexican Catholicism and national identity, is currently touring Southern California. Her sojourn is scheduled to culminate with a mass celebrated at the Sports Arena on Dec. 12, the 468th anniversary of her apparition to a humble Aztec Indian, Juan Diego. Her first apparition is said to have brought the Christian faith in Indian vernacular, Nahuatl, to the collective MesoAmerican soul and signaled God’s special election of Christianity’s newest colonial charge: Mexico. Catholicism transformed Mexico, but Mexico also transformed Catholicism: the synthesis of the Indian mother goddess, Tonantzin, and the Christian princess, Mary, into Guadalupe is just one manifestation of the religious change. The Virgin of Guadalupe now comes to Los Angeles not to enlist the Indians in Spanish Christian colonialism, as in 1531, but as a shepherd in search of her lost Mexican American flock.

In East L.A., she will find many churches and shrines built in honor of her. But Latinos’ religion and its place in the United States are becoming only shadow mutations of their former selves. At the center of institutional change is what Andrew M. Greeley called the “defection” of Latinos from the Catholic church. Greeley claims that 60,000 Latinos leave Roman Catholicism every year, and that nearly 1 million have abandoned the Catholic memory of their fathers and of their homelands for Protestantism, especially its evangelical strain, since 1973. Another study suggests that 66% of Latinos are at least “cultural Catholics”--the culture that nurtured the dark mestiza goddess Guadalupe--and 25% are Protestant. This is a seismic shift, considering that during the 1920s, only about 5% of Latinos in Los Angeles were Protestant and the rest were Catholic.

Public reflection on the decline of Latino Catholic parishes either has taken the form of a Catholic apologetic or a triumphant Protestant discourse celebrating the new “Latino Protestant Reformation.” But no one has discussed the changes as a social reconfiguration closely paralleling developments in the larger U.S. religious culture.

Religious-studies scholars once confidently proclaimed a United States whose civil religion had a liberal Protestant core. Yet, the cultural revolutions of the ‘60s, generally, and new immigration laws, specifically, have changed this. Liberal Protestantism has given way to secularization and the growth of religious extremes. Today, about 40% of Americans attend a religious institution weekly. Somewhat paradoxically, upward of 95% profess a belief in God, a spiritual practice and/or a higher supernatural power. Where, then, are Americans getting their ideas about God, and where are they learning their moral values?

Culture, especially its more popular forms, and a capitalist sensibility are reshaping the nation’s religious ethos and practice. In the current American religious market, “successful” Christian churches reflect an entrepreneurial spirit in which Martin Luther’s “priesthood of the believer” is primary. Americans are rejecting mediation of the sacred as meted out by religious specialists and defined by formal institutions in favor of direct and immediate access to and experience of the divine. Sensual and physical gratification, together with mystical experiences, are most in demand. Concomitantly, postmodern Americans, lost in a world of moral relativism, abjure elaborate theologies, opting instead for the simple moral absolutes of an American brand of biblical literalism: the good will be rewarded; the bad will suffer eternally.

For unchurched believers, popular cultural icons have filled the void left by the rarefied artifacts of religious institutions. The church of Jerry Springer currently offers America’s favorite ceremony; his glib and preachy “[final] thoughts” have the ring of prophetic declarations. In this way, therapeutic, individualistic/narcissistic and confessional aspects of self and society captivate the American soul.

Latino communities are not immune to these U.S. cultural trends. In fact, Latinos are participating in and contributing to the emergent American religious arrangement. The “big three” religions in Latino L.A.--Catholicism, evangelicalism/Pentecostalism and organized faith-healing practices known as curanderismo and espiritualismo--are undergoing radical changes, a shift reflected in the architecture of public space. Storefront churches and healing centers--botanicas--provide immediate and direct access for believers. The proliferation of religious sites in East L.A., and especially the evangelical “challenge,” epitomize a capitalist ideology that holds that competition increases quality: Religious specialists are now answerable to Latino religious consumers and must strive to meet the demands of a community that, sadly, remains largely under siege. Latinos are demanding that religion be removed from its exclusive and privileged places of production and placed within the daily struggles of real people.

Religion in East L.A. and Latino communities overall is becoming radically democratized. Hence, the Virgin of Guadalupe, for the first time in her history, leaves the grand halls of her shrine in Mexico City and comes to East L.A.: a triumph of will and hyper-reality. Additionally, storefront religion is blurring the boundaries between clergy and laity, between private and public, between sacred and profane, between gift (blessing) and commodity. Some curanderas and Pentecostals are exploiting the moment by providing spiritual therapy and immediate and fantastic solutions for everyday problems--for a modest fee. Meanwhile, Catholic churches struggle to adopt to the changing Latino consumer tastes.

Working among East Angelenos for a decade now, my expectations were formed by own romantic memories of my father’s church in the 1970s and early 1980s. My father’s congregation struggled for years to buy a beautiful, tall, imposing church built as a place of worship and cooperative fellowship, not as a marketplace. Located on a street corner in what was then the heart of the East Oakland Latino neighborhood, his church demarcated the boundaries of community. My father’s Pentecostalism was not of the quick-fix variety. It was about compassion, love, responsibility, ethical behavior, sacrifice, hard work and limitless possibility--and it was about politics. A registered and voting Democrat and union man, my father preached an ethics of civic engagement. But, mostly, it was about compassion.

The future of U.S. Latino religions, like the nation itself, depends upon forcefully rearticulating the myths and symbols that Americans hold sacred--a new civil religion that decimates borders between “us” and “other,” in which all distinctions between “insider” and “outsider” are no longer necessary because all are on the inside. Recently, I asked a woman who was attending a mass for Guadalupe what the Virgin could provide to Los Angeles. “They say that Guadalupe is very miraculous,” she responded, “and we need a lot of miracles here; I believe they can happen.”