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Introduction
Guatemala currently enjoys the largest percentage of
Protestant citizens of any Latin American country. In the past
thirty years, the Protestant population has increased from
approximately one percent of the population to over a third
(some estimates place the Protestant population at as much as
40% of the population). The conversions have been remarkably
egalitarian; indigenous Mayans, urban ladinos (nonindigenous
Guatemalans) and even many of Guatemala’s elite have been
caught up in this trend toward evangelical Christianity. Three of
Guatemala’s leaders in the past two decades have been members
of Protestant churches: the military dictator Efrain Ríos Montt
and elected presidents Jorge Serrano Elías and Alfonso Portillo
Cabrera.
According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census’ International
Data Base, Mayan Indians make up approximately 44% of
Guatemala’s population. While Spanish is the language of
bureaucrats, governments and ladinos, over twenty distinct Mayan
languages are spoken throughout the provinces, in many cases as
the first, primary or only language. While urbanization has been
increasing dramatically in Guatemala as throughout Latin
America, much of the population remains rural and isolated, both
by mountainous and jungle terrain, lack of education, and
differences in language. All of these factors make the egalitarian
character of the Protestant conversions especially interesting.
Many have assumed that this religious conversion is
causing a shift towards more “Western” economic and ethical
values (those associated with the United States and northern
Europe, the strongholds of Protestant religion) among its Mayan
adherents. Some have even proposed that Protestantism’s sole
reason for existence is as a vehicle, plugged by U.S. special
interests, for ‘modernizing’ indigenous communities. Researcher
Susan Rose and Steve Brouwer, for instance, warn of the
“increasing cultural expression of U.S. imperialist values, what we
might call Fundamentalist Americanism, which is being exported
from the United States through the direct agency of conservative
North American Christians” (43). But while Protestantism and
its attendant virtues (especially the renowned ‘Protestant work
ethic’) are associated with U.S. and European success, it is also an
adaptive religious expression of pre-existing cultural norms. In
order for Protestant religions to be accepted by Guatemala’s
indigenous Mayan majority, they must be made to look appealing
by adapting their message to suit their audience. Protestantism,
therefore, seems likely to have little social or political impact on
indigenous Mayan societies. Indeed, Mayanism seems set to leave
its mark on Protestantism as surely as Protestantism affects
traditional Mayan culture.
Indigenous populations in Guatemala and elsewhere have
proven to be politically unwieldy entities, ignored throughout
many dictatorships or thought of primarily in terms of human
rights violations by the Left and as a cheap labor source by the
Right. Recent trends towards democratization of government
have brought indigenous communities to the political forefront as
potential voters. By exploring the nature and values of a religious
trend, I hope not only to help understand the popularity of
evangelical presidents, but also to gain some insight into the
process by which various political, social and cultural ideas may
be assimilated by Guatemala’s indigenous people.
This paper will explore possible causes of and cultural
changes resulting from Protestant conversions among rural
Mayans. Beginning with a history of Protestant missionary
efforts and political entanglements in Guatemala, I will make
clear the adaptive effort required to appeal to an indigenous
population, the parallels between many Mayan practices and
beliefs and current Protestant rhetoric, and attempt to identify
some of the factors that make certain branches of Protestantism
so appealing to rural Mayan communities.
Protestant Beliefs
In order to understand Protestantism in relation to
Guatemalan Mayan communities, it may be helpful to briefly
review Protestantism itself. The Protestant Reformation was
initiated by Martin Luther, a sixteenth-century German monk
who objected to the excessively hierarchical nature of the
Catholic Church and the corruption (especially the selling of
plenary indulgences) associated with a religion that separated (as
he saw it) man from the word of God. When Luther himself
attempted to turn to the Bible to find answers to religious
questions, his superiors cautioned, “Brother Martin, let the Bible
alone; read the old teachers; they give you the whole marrow of
the Bible. Reading the Bible simply breeds unrest” (Jones 55).
His response was to institute a religion based upon personal
exploration and acceptance of the Bible, where intermediary
structures between God and the common man would be kept to
a minimum: “we are all priests and kings in Christ, as many as
believe on Christ… Therefore a priest in Christendom is nothing
else than an office-holder. While he is in office, he has
precedence; when deposed, he is a peasant or a townsman like
the rest” (qtd. in Jones 57).
The primary focus of Protestant religions, then, is
personal communities of the faithful. Rather than offering a
recipe by which to get into God’s good graces, Protestantism
places an emphasis on teaching inherently sinful human beings to
accept God’s salvation. Only God, Protestants reason, decides
who may be saved and who may not; he is too powerful to be
manipulated by prayers and good deeds. From this background,
then, Protestantism developed with an emphasis on the
importance of literacy, so that one may access the word of God
directly, on personal salvation, and on small communities of the
faithful rather than extended national and international
infrastructures. Furthermore, it does not discriminate based
upon past actions, but rather claims that once one is “saved” by
God, one is naturally inclined to do good; [the faithful] do good
because it pleases God, not because they are trying to buy their
way into heaven. Material wealth and fortune, furthermore, are
evidence of God’s grace and their status as “saved” individuals.
History of Protestantism in Guatemala
In Guatemala, as in the rest of Latin America,
Catholicism was the version of Christianity first introduced. The
Catholic Church was heavily involved in colonizing Guatemala,
and as long as the country was a part of the Spanish Empire, the
Church played a powerful role in politics, and was a major
landholder and an enormous influence upon society. Upon
declaration of independence from Spain in 1821 … the initial
government of Central America, based in Guatemala, instituted a
number of liberal reforms that severely curtailed the power of
the Catholic Church, which was seen as a competitor for control
of the land and people and a hindrance to modernization. Under
the Army officer Rafael Carrera, faithful highland Indians
revolted against this attack on their beloved Church and instituted
a number of reforms to return power to the Church, but, as
historian Virginia Garrard-Burnett notes, “Carrera’s rhetorical
support for the Church was tempered by a wary pragmatism” (6).
Unwilling to share power, he was careful to limit the Church’s
political and economic influence. “Thus,” explains Garrard-
Burnett, “despite the Carrera administration’s public support of
the Catholic Church, the Church’s political and particularly its
economic power continued to erode slowly as the century
progressed” (6).
In 1871, Carrera’s relatively pro-Catholic successor was
overthrown and General Justo Ruffino Barrios came into power.
A so-called “Liberal dictator” bent on developing Guatemala into
a “real” nation, complete with national identity, Barrios believed
(along with many others) that the Indian majority of the
population needed to be assimilated into the developing country;
Garrard-Burnett explains that “Protestantism could break the
bonds of community and atavistic faith that hindered the
development of the nation-state, and in doing so it might
introduce and nurture the very characteristics that could mold
even the most backward members of the state into productive
citizens” (13). With an eye, then, on using Protestant religion to
“reform” and “modernize” his indigenous population, Barrios
instituted a number of reforms emphasizing freedom of worship,
in an effort to attract foreign missionaries and European
immigrants. When this proved less helpful than he had
anticipated, Barrios began soliciting various missionary agencies
to send people to Guatemala, eventually, in 1882, traveling
personally to New York to persuade “the Presbyterian Board of
Foreign Missions to reroute John Clark Hill, a pastor designated
to work in China, to return with him to Guatemala” (Garrard-
Burnett 14).
Subsequent Liberal dictators continued to encourage
various Protestant missionaries to proselytize in Guatemala, but
with little success for nearly a century. Missionaries did not find
Guatemala an appealing destination for a long time; reforming
Catholic South Americans held less romance than working with
“heathen” Asians or Africans. When they did come, they
restricted their work, on the various governments’ advice, to
Spanish-language preaching and Bibles in an attempt to
encourage Indian communities to modernize. Nonetheless, they
were popular with governments for their extensive efforts to
encourage literacy by establishing and running evangelical schools
(a key tenet of their faith, as noted above, being the ability to read
for oneself the word of God as expressed in the Bible).
Successful Protestant Conversions
Despite fifty years of evangelical effort, by the 1930s
Protestantism was hardly popular with the Guatemalan public. In
his study “Reconsidering Protestant Growth in Guatemala, 1900-
1995,” researcher Henri Gooren estimates that by “1937-1938,
between 1% and 2% of the total Guatemalan population
considered itself Protestant” (181), hardly proof of a massive
popular movement, or a successful adoption by Mayan or other
Guatemalans of Protestant mores and values. A turning point,
however, seemed to be reached when Protestant missionaries
began to attempt to proselytize in native languages. Cameron
Townsend initiated the project in 1929, with the publication of a
Kaqchikel translation of the New Testament (Garrard-Burnett
69). He went on to found the Wycliffe Bible Translators, “a
group whose sole intended purpose was to translate the scriptures
for ‘unreached peoples’” (Garrard-Burnett 69).
These translations into indigenous languages turned out
to be a highly effective way of reaching out to Mayans. In her
essay “Making One Our Word: Protestant Q’eqchi’ Mayas in
Highland Guatemala,” author Abigail E. Adams describes the
impact of a Nazarene mission’s publication of the New
Testament in the local language:
In 1958 the Q’eqchi’ New Testament was published. It
was dedicated in 1961 to the San Juan Chamelco
church… The Nazarene missionaries realized that
Q’eqchi’ speakers were responding more than the Ladino
Spanish speakers. In 1957 [prior to the publication of the
New Testament] the ratio of Q’eqchi’ to Spanishspeaking
membership was approximately one to three.
By 1967 the ratio was closer to one to one, and by 1977
three out of every four Nazarenes were Q’eqchi’ Maya
speakers. (216)
By working in the local population’s native language, the
Nazarenes were able to convert far more people than through all
the previous efforts to advertise the modern, foreign aspects of
their religion. Notes Adams, “In the missionaries’ accounts to
me, they attributed the denomination’s growth to the power of
the Sedat Bible translation. They described the Q’eqchi’
Nazarenes as taking that Bible and making mission work their own
work” (emphasis added, 217). Once the Q’eqchi’ adopted the
faith as their own, they began to operate independently of the
local Nazarene mission; “A long-term U.S. missionary described
traveling in Alta Verapaz in the 1970s and encountering groups
of men on their way to Nazarene services in places that the
missionaries were unaware of ” (217). This Bible translation was
so successful that the local Catholic church adopted it: “One
priest remarked, ‘The Nazarenes helped us to open our eyes to
do everything in the indigenous language. We slept as they
translated. The language is the people’…. The Catholics
adopted the Sedat Bible translation” (217).
Overall, it appears that it was not until the Mayans
themselves got control of the interpretation of the Bible in
general and Protestant faith in particular that they began to
accept the new religion en masse. Garrard-Burnett describes the
massive growth in native churches, coupled with the
diminishment of missionary projects, which occurred when
churches began to include indigenous members in their structure:
“Beginning in 1945, the Presbyterian mission board had begun to
train local pastors and to reduce American aid to native churches
by 10 percent each year to encourage self-sufficiency. The effort
came not a moment too soon, for in 1946, a nationalistic group
broke off from the Central Presbyterian Church to form a
separate native Presbyterian church” (114). Discussing the
decline in the Latin American Mission’s (LAM) evangelical
program, she asserts,
The most important reason… for the LAM’s decline in
the late 1960s and the early 1970s was the growth of
native churches” (113). By taking the interpretation of
Protestantism into their own hands, native Guatemalans
could develop their own brand of Protestantism: as [the
native churches] matured, these missions began to reject
certain aspects of the American missionaries’
evangelization package. In particular, the new nativechurch
movement objected to the
way that the LAM and other American fundamentalist
groups promoted American values, lifestyles and politics
along with the gospel (113).
Probably not coincidentally, it was after the churches began to
reject these ‘foreign’ values that Protestantism took off among
Guatemalans in general and indigenous people in particular.
Especially, native churches and potential converts found
Pentecostal beliefs and practices to be appealing. Notes Garrard-
Burnett: “although many of the new [native] sects splintered off
from non-Pentecostal churches, virtually all of the new
denominations became Pentecostal churches within a few years
of their establishment. All the major indigenous churches that
emerged after 1954 were either founded as or eventually became
Pentecostal churches” (117). Gooren confirms this, noting that
during the boom years of Protestant expansion (late 70s through
mid 80s), most traditional Protestant churches experienced slow
growth, stagnation or even loss of members while Pentecostal
native groups experienced membership growth by as much as
125% per year (185). Clearly, Pentecostal religion tapped into
Mayan cultures in a way that traditional Protestant missionaries,
with their “modern” and “Western” values, had been unable to
achieve.
Why Pentecostal Protestantism?
As discussed above, Protestant faith centers on small
communities of the saved, not institutional efforts to achieve
salvation. While some of the larger Protestant institutions have
developed bureaucracies to support their efforts, the splinter
groups that make up so much of Guatemalan Protestant activity
may consist of little more than a collection of members of a few
local extended families. David Scotchmer has documented the
prevalence of authoritarian, independent groups consisting of 30
members or less; these, he claims, account for at least 33% of
Protestant activity in rural Mayan areas. Interestingly, Garrard-
Burnett points out that this model, which initially looks quite
different from Catholicism, may in fact reflect quite closely the
ostensibly Catholic communities Protestant churches have
supposedly replaced. “By 1910, Liberal anticlerical reforms had
exacerbated [the chronic shortage of Catholic clergy] to the
extent that indigenous communities in the western highlands and
Alta and Baha Verapaz were, in Edward Cleary’s words, ‘mostly
free of direct Catholic control’” (57). “The power vacuum left by
the institutional Church” as successive Liberal dictators curtailed
its control over communities “left a new space for the expansion
of localized popular expression, specifically, for the expansion of
what Louis Luzbetak has called ‘Christopaganism’” (57). Gooren
also notes that many so-called Roman Catholics may be so in
name only rather than behavior. Instead, many authorities feel
that both “real” Catholicism and Protestant denominations are
competing for people who identify more with folk Catholicism,
or local worship of saints, then any established and overarching
institution.
Other practices of Pentecostalism, including glossolalia,
or speaking in tongues, and the trance states associated with
reception of the Holy Spirit, may have strong appeal to animist
or folk-religion-based communities. Garrard-Burnett, for
instance, observes that
The form of worship in the Pentecostal churches—with
an emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit and highly
emotional and spontaneous worship services and the
ecstatic practice of speaking in tongues—appealed to
Guatemalans on an innate level. The practice held a
special resonance for Indians, in that speaking in lengua—
that is, in native languages rather than the Latin or
Spanish of Catholic worship—had traditionally played an
integral role in the traditional religious practices of the
Maya, with glossolalia substituting for the indigenous
utterances that signaled contact with the divine. (118)
Adams also points up the Mayan focus on language, noting “The
force and power of language is one of five ideological ‘clusters’
that Gary Gossen found reoccurring throughout Mesoamerica
“(206), and she explains that, for the Maya, “Language is not
merely an expression of successful social solidarity. Language has
power in and of itself to articulate and disarticulate beings”
(213). Little wonder then, that Mayans would be drawn not only
to Protestantism, which places primacy on the Word of God, but
more particularly on the ability to “speak in tongues” when
possessed by the Holy Spirit.
Conclusion
Guatemalan – and particularly Mayan – interest in Protestantism,
then, appears to be primarily a tool seized on by indigenous
peoples as a means of expressing and perpetuating their cultural,
social and spiritual beliefs. Indeed, Adams relays that “Cahuac
del Valle found a stronger literacy in Q’eqchi’ than in Spanish,
due largely to the literacy work of the foreign missionaries. Some
57% of the men could read and/or write in Q’eqchi’ as
compared to 40% of men who could read and/or write in
Spanish; 32% of Q’eqchi’ women could read and/or write in
Q’eqchi’, compared with 22% of women who were literate in
Spanish” (224). In light of this information, it seems foolish to
ascribe the popularity of Protestantism to a spreading of
“Fundamentalist Americanism” and ideology. Rather, it looks to
be a case of assimilation of a foreign practice into an indigenous
culture that selectively modifies the new religion to suit the old
society, rather than the other way around. Whether this new
expression of Mayan culture, then, will impact Guatemalan
politics remains to be seen, but it seems clear at the very least that
Protestantism as manifested in Guatemala has little to do with the
infliction of Western ideals upon a local population.
Works Cited
Adams, Abigail E. “Making One Our Word: Protestant Q’eqchi’
Mayas in Highland Guatemala.” Holy Saints and Fiery
Preachers: The Anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and
Central America. Eds. James W. Dow and Alan R.
Sandstrom. Westport: Praeger, 2001. 205-234.
Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the
New Jerusalem. Austin: U. Texas, 1998.
Gooren, Henri. “Reconsidering Protestant Growth in
Guatemala, 1900-1995.” Holy Saints and Fiery Preachers:
The Anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and Central
America. Eds. James W. Dow and Alan R. Sandstrom.
Westport: Praeger, 2001. 169-204.
Jones, W.T. “Reformation.” Hobbes to Hume: A History of Western
Philosophy. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, 1969.
Rose, Susan D, and Steve Brouwer. “The Export of
Fundamentalist Americanism: U.S. Evangelical Education
in Guatemala.” Latin American Perspectives 17.4 Guatemala,
Debt, and Drugs (Autumn 1990): 42-56.
Scotchmer, David. “Pastors, Preachers, or Prophets? Cultural
Conflict and Continuity in Maya Protestant Leadership.”
Holy Saints and Fiery Preachers: The Anthropology of
Protestantism in Mexico and Central America. Eds. James W.
Dow and Alan R. Sandstrom. Westport: Praeger, 2001.
235-262.
“U.S. Bureau of the Census’ International Data Base.” U.S.
Census Bureau. <http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/
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