Origin from 1960
From the 1960s onward, Pentecostal and evangelical Protestant Christianity grew explosively across Latin America, a region Catholicism had held as the near-uncontested majority faith for four centuries since Iberian colonisation. The sociologist David Martin's foundational study traced the movement's appeal chiefly among the urban poor, arguing its single greatest social consequence was a domestication of machismo and a gentler model of masculinity within converting households. Brazil holds the largest Pentecostal population anywhere in Latin America and is the anchor for this event, though the movement Martin studied runs across the whole region, Guatemala and Chile prominent among the other cases.
Facts
Dates
Start Year1960 is used as a representative starting point for the explosive Pentecostal and evangelical growth David Martin's foundational 1990 study documents as beginning in that decade; the growth is ongoing and this atlas gives no forced precise end year for it. Learn More
How Pentecostalism Grew Across Latin America
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
From the 1960s onward, Pentecostal and evangelical Protestant Christianity grew explosively across Latin America, a region Roman Catholicism had held as the near uncontested majority faith for four centuries since Iberian colonisation. Brazil holds the largest Pentecostal population of any country in the region and anchors this event, though the growth reached across the whole of Latin America, with Guatemala and Chile among the other prominent cases.
The sociologist David Martin's foundational study of the movement traced its appeal chiefly among the urban poor, the communities least served by an often distant institutional Catholic Church. Martin argued the single greatest social consequence of conversion was not doctrinal but domestic, a taming of machismo and the emergence of a gentler model of masculinity within households that turned Pentecostal, as husbands and fathers took up a strict personal morality that reordered their relationships at home.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was the end of Catholicism's four century near monopoly on Latin American religious life. A movement that began among some of the region's poorest urban communities grew, within a few decades, into a demographic force reshaping both the religious map of an entire continent and the texture of family life inside its converting households.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Americas directly: "From the 1960s onward, Pentecostal and evangelical Protestant Christianity grew explosively across Latin America, a region Catholicism had held as the near-uncontested majority faith for four..."
This source names Chile directly: "across the whole region, Guatemala and Chile prominent among the other cases."
Occurred In
Anchored to Brazil, the largest single Pentecostal population in Latin America, though the growth Martin documents runs across the whole region, an approximation named here rather than rounded silently.
Spread Event Of
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