A Standoffish Priest and Sticky Catholics:
Questioning the Religious Marketplace in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico
Journal
of Latin American Anthropology 10(1). 2005
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Abstract
The
loss of the Roman Catholic Church’s monopoly on spirituality in Latin
America has led to an increasingly pluralistic religious landscape. To
describe how believers select a church, some scholars have adopted the
model of a religious marketplace in which ecclesiastical organizations
compete for choosy customers by marketing their spiritual “products.”
However, the tendency of members of the Roman Catholic Church to voice
criticism of the clergy without changing affiliations casts doubt on
the usefulness of economic metaphors for explaining religious
conversion. Anthropologists lack a theoretical model to explain choices
of religious affiliation that seemingly run counter to self-interest.
Ethnographic evidence from Tzintzuntzan, Mexico illustrates how the
content of religious messages matters less than personal and communal
connections to a faith. This “stickiness” of Roman Catholicism
exemplifies how not all religious identities are equally plausible to
those who grow up Catholic. [religious economies, conversion, Roman
Catholic Church, Protestantism, Mexico]
In the 1960s, scholars began to recognize that the Roman Catholic
Church could no longer claim a spiritual monopoly in Latin America .
Faced with accelerating rates of urbanization and an ossified
ecclesiastical bureaucracy, the Roman Catholic Church was unprepared to
compete with nimbler, more emotionally charged Protestant
congregations. Even reforms initiated during the Second Vatican Council
from 1962 to 1965 to make the Roman Catholic liturgy more accessible to
its parishioners failed to stave off competition from fast-growing,
charismatic forms of worship like Pentecostalism. Anthropologists have
searched for new theoretical models to explain the increasingly
pluralistic religious landscape of Latin America. One of the most
enduring of those models has been the idea of a religious marketplace,
in which churches tout the benefits of their spiritual “products” in
hopes of attracting fickle customers.
By many accounts, the success of Pentecostal churches in Latin America
has been a function of their effective “branding” and consistent
ability to deliver solutions to needy believers. The emphasis on a
consumer-driven faith shifts the focus from a top-down religion where
officials of the church hierarchy mold belief to a more ground-level
approach where individuals act strategically to advance their own
interests. With the envisioned competition for spiritual allegiance,
business vocabulary explains the relative attractiveness of each
church, and the Roman Catholic Church seems to be losing market share.
In this article, I offer an alternative to the model of a religious
marketplace, arguing for the continued centrality of the Roman Catholic
Church in establishing religious identities in Latin America.
Ethnographic evidence from Tzintzuntzan, a rural community in western
Mexico, illustrates the deep attachment many believers felt toward
their natal church, an allegiance so strong that even the allure of a
more participatory faith did not undermine their devotion to
Catholicism. Through an analysis of parishioners’ antipathy toward
their assigned priest, I show that religious practitioners do not
always demonstrate predictable market-driven behavior. Despite
widespread dislike for the priest and the increasing availability of
alternate religious opportunities, Roman Catholics in Tzintzuntzan did
not abandon their traditional faith in significant numbers. The
“invisible hand” theory of religious economy predicts that dissatisfied
believers would seek a more gratifying spiritual setting, yet Roman
Catholics separated their negative feelings for the particular priest
from their larger commitment to the Catholic faith.
The example of Catholic stalwarts in Tzintzuntzan casts doubt on the
applicability of economic language for theorizing reasons for religious
affiliation in Latin America. To compare competition among churches to
rival brands of consumer items reduces decisions about faith to strict
fulfillment of immediate, individual needs. In practical terms, both
Crest and Colgate achieve the same goal of dental hygiene, and the
social costs of switching from one brand of toothpaste to another are
minimal. By contrast, religions are neither so easily interchangeable
nor so focused on resolving a single problem. Rooted in childhood
socialization and community participation, religious affiliation in
Tzintzuntzan is “sticky.” Decisions to leave the Roman Catholic Church
do not result from a careful cost-benefit analysis, but as part of a
larger reevaluation of a believer’s life. While it is clear that
religion in Latin America can no longer be viewed through the lens of a
single ecclesiastical organization, demonopolization has not been
accompanied by a spiritual free market in which all churches compete
equally on the objective merits of their spiritual products.
Accounting for Protestantism in
Tzintzuntzan
Tzintzuntzan is one of about two dozen predominantly mestizo
communities on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro in the heartland state of
Michoacán. Although it is now eclipsed in size by other settlements,
Tzintzuntzan has long been a center of Catholic devotion in the region,
dating from its role as the first seat of the bishopric in the
sixteenth century. Even during the period of religious persecution in
the 1920s when the government prohibited the celebration of Mass,
Tzintzuntzan successfully harbored a priest who delivered the
sacraments in private homes. When George Foster, the first ethnographer
to document religious life in Tzintzuntzan, arrived in the 1940s, his
census recorded no church affiliations other than Roman Catholic
(Foster 2000). He himself had to weather accusations of being
Protestant before establishing rapport with the initially suspicious
community.
In the second half of the twentieth century, changing economic
conditions eroded the structures that reinforced group identity and
transformed the way Tzintzuntzeños and others around Lake Pátzcuaro
practiced their faith (Carrasco 1952). Pottery making and subsistence
agriculture, which had been the primary means of making a living, gave
way to wage labor and migration to urban centers in Mexico and the
United States. Improvements in access to transportation and schooling
meant that children could pursue professions outside the community
while tourism brought more visitors to the artisanry stalls that
appeared along the highway. Indigenous dress and the Purépecha language
became scarce in Tzintzuntzan, relegated to the small fishing
communities abutting the lake. DeWalt (1975) has argued that with an
increasing connection to outside forces came a weakening of the
traditional cargo system in many parts of Mesoamerica. In Tzintzuntzan,
this pattern was evident in the replacement of a civil-religious
hierarchy that conferred prestige on a few individuals with
cost-sharing mechanisms that spread the burden of fiesta sponsorship
over the whole community (Foster 1967).
Another visible change in the religious landscape around Lake Pátzcuaro
has been the growing presence of evangelical churches. While Protestant
churches have operated in Mexico since the nineteenth century (Bastian
1990; Bowen 1996), they began attracting large numbers of adherents
only since the 1960s. The earliest convert I located in Tzintzuntzan
was an elderly man separated from his wife, who attended his first
Bible study with the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1981. He described the
decision as a straightforward one. He was raised a Catholic and had
always been interested in the Bible. When a young woman from Pátzcuaro
came to his door to talk to him about the Bible, he invited her in. At
the end of the conversation, he purchased a Bible from her and agreed
to attend a meeting with the congregation at the kingdom hall. In the
intervening years, he joined the congregation in Quiroga, a town closer
to Tzintzuntzan, and donated a room in his house for a leader from that
group to conduct weekly Bible study sessions with his family and
another family in Tzintzuntzan.
Between Quiroga and Pátzcuaro, the stretch of the lake most frequently
traveled by Tzintzuntzeños, twelve non-Catholic Christian churches
operated during the time of my fieldwork. They ranged in size from four
members to 300. The oldest group, the Baptists, claimed a founding date
of 1935, but most of the remaining congregations were established in
the 1990s. Of the mainline denominations, just the Baptists and
Presbyterians had a presence in the area, with the remaining churches
following either the Pentecostal tradition or the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Much of the Pentecostal diversity derived from the frequent fissuring
of groups, to accommodate either growth in congregation size or
disaffected members. All the churches counted on the services of a
local pastor, though only one was full-time, and two groups were part
of a ministry headed by a North American missionary. Two of the
congregations met in private homes in satellite communities within
walking distance from Tzintzuntzan, while the others required a taxi or
bus ride to reach.
When I began my fieldwork in 1999, twelve families in and around
Tzintzuntzan had left the Roman Catholic Church to join evangelical
churches. There was little that the converts had in common with each
other beyond their past as Catholics; they included the elderly and
young couples, professionals and manual laborers, social outcasts and
respected men, migrants to the United States and lifelong
Tzintzuntzeños. Many theories about Protestant conversion in Latin
America rest on the assumption that religious actors make decisions
based on self-interest. Most pervasive has been the explanation that
evangelical churches offer an attractive alternative to the dominant
but anachronistic Roman Catholic Church. Membership in the emerging
churches, some argue, better equip Latin Americans buffeted by
socio-economic change to adapt to new conditions favoring mutual
support in unforgiving cities (Deiros 1991; L. Gill 1990; Margolies
1980; Roberts 1968; Vázquez Palacios 1991), cessation of destructive
and antiquated behaviors (Annis 1987; Belaunde 2000; Clawson 1984; Dow
2001; Kearney 1970; Swanson 1994), or refuge from poverty (Chesnut
1997; Garcia Méndez 1997; Green 1993; Mariz 1994).
In some cases, religious conversion has provoked intracommunity
conflict and even violent confrontation. The most conspicuous incidents
of such tensions have taken place in the southern Mexican states of
Oaxaca and Chiapas, where the proportion of Protestants is among the
highest in the country. The high number of religious converts threatens
entrenched power structures in indigenous communities where authority
is based on sponsorship of Catholic festivals and control of
concessions for alcohol sales (Gossen 1989; Rus 1994). Often, religious
animosity masks secular struggles over land and other finite resources
(Bastian 1996; Collier 1997; Gross 2001). Tzintzuntzan, by contrast,
has managed to avoid any overt conflict relating to religious
diversity. Part of this peaceful response has been due to the absence
of an elaborate cargo system, so converts did not automatically remove
themselves from community obligations by opting out of Catholic
fiestas. Many Protestants remained mindful of maintaining good
relations with their neighbors and continued to contribute to
collective funds for fiestas even when they believed their observance
to be against their religion (Cahn 2003). Protestants could also be
relied upon to participate in and even lead secular campaigns such as
improving school facilities and promoting fishing rights. As Falla
(2001) concluded from his fieldwork in Guatemala, the weakening of
traditional structures of local authority allowed some community
members to challenge the dominant religion without provoking a violent
reaction.
The relatively small number of converts in Tzintzuntzan may also have
mitigated any potential conflict. The dozen families who had left the
Roman Catholic Church did not threaten to undermine the robust cycle of
community celebrations that not only instilled group pride but also
provided economic boosts to local artisans and businesspeople. Still,
the relatively peaceful coexistence of faiths did not preclude the
marginalization of Protestant families, who tended to socialize with
fellow congregants rather than with neighbors and relatives. Because of
this rupture with existing social networks, converts admitted to me
that the decision to leave their natal church had been a challenging
one. So strong was the pull of Roman Catholicism that some even
continued to worship saint figures after converting to Protestantism.
Although Protestants frequently voiced criticisms of the majority
Catholics and remembered their own Catholic pasts as a time of
self-delusion, this view developed long after conversion had taken
place. Joining a Protestant church usually followed an invitation from
a family member or friend during the stress of familial crises from
alcoholic husbands to chronic illness, not a calculated search for a
more congenial place to worship.
There seemed to be little correlation in Tzintzuntzan between
dissatisfaction with the Roman Catholic Church and rates of conversion.
While the majority of Catholics openly expressed disagreement with the
behavior of particular clergy and some of the tenets of the church,
only a tiny fraction of Tzintzuntzeños became Protestants. Unlike in
parts of southern Mexico where the decision to convert might lead to
increased insecurity, no such danger constrained disgruntled Roman
Catholics in Michoacán. Transportation options made visiting Protestant
churches in surrounding communities relatively easy. Moreover, some
Catholics had attended worship services with Pentecostal preachers and
pronounced the experience entertaining and uplifting in comparison with
the staid and rote Mass delivered by the priest. Yet, despite having
the motivation as well as the means to convert, most Catholics found a
way to retain their membership in the Church while making adjustments
for the aspects that displeased them.
Previous studies have helped develop frameworks for understanding
religious conversion, but there are few theories that explain the
absence of conversion where conditions might favor it. Instead of
reducing religious affiliation to a rational choice based on
self-interest, I propose, along with Dillon (1999), that individual
believers feel a “debt” to their Roman Catholic upbringing that makes
other religious alternatives less plausible. Personal histories bind
people to particular religions; ties that can be so enduring that
members will reinterpret objectionable institutional teachings rather
than abandon their religious home.
Bypassing Mass
When I first visited Tzintzuntzan in 1998, Father Mateo was at the end
of his third year of what became a seven-year stint. In the archdiocese
of Morelia, the archbishop determined the placement of parish priests.
The standard term of service was six years in one location, which could
be extended to a maximum of ten years or until a priest’s mandatory
retirement at seventy-five. The rationale was both to provide
possibility of relocation to those priests assigned to isolated
parishes and to prevent certain priests from claiming a hold on the
more desirable parishes. In practice, however, some priests who enjoyed
the approval of the community stayed in the same parish for up to
twenty years.
In the first ethnographic study of Tzintzuntzan, based on research from
1945, Foster (2000:277) reported that Father Tovar was beloved by the
people for his desire to learn and to continue the established customs
of the people. He gave simple sermons about the value of honesty,
family integrity, and sobriety. As evidence of his popularity as a
preacher, parishioners filled the sanctuary for Sunday Mass to
overflowing, making it difficult to find room to kneel in prayer.
Adults in Tzintzuntzan still remembered Father Tovar over fifty years
later and spoke warmly about him and a cadre of other priests who had
made a lasting impression. From their reminiscing, I understood that
the most appreciated quality in a priest was a populist style. Since
all the parish priests in Tzintzuntzan have originated from other parts
of the region or country and have received more schooling than most of
the laity, Catholics were especially fond of those clerics who made an
effort to follow local traditions and display humility. One priest from
the 1960s used to lend money to families of the deceased to purchase a
coffin. He also would buy drunkards a bottle of beer and send them away
when they became rowdy. When he dined in people’s homes, he requested
the same food that his hosts would normally eat and gleefully played
with the children. Father Mateo, though a learned and dedicated priest,
lacked the human qualities that would endear him to the people of
Tzintzuntzan.
Since arriving in Tzintzuntzan, Father Mateo had aimed to instill
theological rigor in Catholic worship. In this he was supported by the
Church’s larger “new evangelization” effort that “enjoins the laity to
cooperate obediently with the hierarchy and to follow the Holy See in
matters of faith and doctrine” (Peterson and Vásquez 1998). In addition
to requiring confession before marriage, Father Mateo also asked the
parents and godparents of a child taking first communion to confess and
attend Church-sponsored talks. He sanctioned lay leaders to conduct a
series of Bible-study sessions called the Workshop of Prayer and Life
and introduced weekend retreats for married couples to improve
relationship skills. Instead of recognizing the innovations as a way to
deepen their faith, Catholics in Tzintzuntzan perceived them as an
unwelcome imposition. Specifically, parishioners interpreted the
changes as a power grab meant to stamp out traditional forms of
devotion. In retaliation, Roman Catholics did not leave the Church, but
rather devised ways to profess their faith while bypassing the priest.
The most conspicuous reform Father Mateo instituted was to lengthen the
duration of Mass from thirty minutes to one hour. He also refused to
schedule the lengthened services to avoid conflicting with important
soccer matches or rodeos, as previous priests had. Catholics reserved
particular criticism for his long-winded sermons, which attempted to
connect the Gospel reading of the day to contemporary life, but often
in a strained and repetitive fashion. A teacher who grew up in a very
observant household complained to me with hyperbolic flourishes, “I
hardly ever go to Mass now. This priest goes on and on for three hours.
He treats us as if we were imbeciles and can’t understand the examples
the first time. It should take no more than fifteen minutes to get the
point across. He abuses our time.” I experienced his long-winded
sermons in my first days of research when an elderly and well-respected
woman in the community died. At the funeral Mass, Father Mateo
neglected to make a single reference to the deceased, preferring to use
the occasion to remind the audience at length that the only way to
guarantee security in the afterlife was to have a strong relationship
with Jesus Christ.
Discontented Catholics continued to value attendance at Mass, but found
a way to avoid the long services in Tzintzuntzan. A mother of three
teenagers revealed to me her solution to the soporific sermons: “The
priest likes to talk. I get fed up. Did you go to the Easter Sunday
service? I fell asleep. Now when I want to go to Mass, I go to Quiroga.
I’m there and back before they’re out of Mass here.” Taxis to Quiroga
passed through Tzintzuntzan frequently, taking about ten minutes and
five pesos (fifty cents) to reach the church there. I heard from many
people who preferred to attend Mass in Quiroga or another city,
combining the trip with shopping and visiting relatives.
It especially angered parishioners that while the priest expected their
attention when he demanded it, he rationed his own time carefully. Part
of his responsibilities included weekly visits to smaller surrounding
communities without a resident priest, but when he was in Tzintzuntzan,
he rarely left the church compound, which housed both his office and
his residence. He reserved Mondays as a day of rest, refusing to
schedule Mass or other celebrations. Every October, a group of adult
males undertook a two-week long pilgrimage on foot from Tzintzuntzan to
the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Customarily,
the priest saw them off with a Mass at 3 a.m. According to some
participants, Father Mateo demanded the unusually large sum of one
thousand pesos (roughly one hundred dollars) for his services at such
an early hour. Rather than pay the amount, the men left without the
usual blessing.
Catholics interpreted his aloof manner as haughtiness and his
pronouncements as needlessly arbitrary, but they still recognized the
importance of seeking Church sanction for their life cycle events.
However, even this did not guarantee obedience to the priest’s wishes.
One man, a prosperous potter, never had time for weekly Mass, but he
did schedule one for his daughter’s baptism. As a quiet protest, he
asked a communist friend of his to serve as the child’s godparent.
To confront Father Mateo directly would be disrespectful, so Catholics
in Tzintzuntzan quietly sought counsel and approval from priests in
other communities. When one couple, who had been legally married for
five years and was raising a daughter, approached Father Mateo for a
church wedding, he insisted that the bride return to live with her
parents for a month and that no godparent at the ceremony be unmarried.
Incensed at this inconvenient request, the couple simply asked a priest
in another city to marry them without the restrictions.
The substitution strategy also worked for one father of a groom, who
recalled bitterly, “He won’t marry a couple if the parents haven’t
confessed. We didn’t have time to confess before our son’s wedding, and
when we went the night before to confess, the priest wasn’t there. But
we took communion anyway. We committed a sin. The wedding was all paid
for, what could I do?” To assuage his feelings of guilt, he consulted
another priest and was relieved to find out that he had only
transgressed a rule set by Father Mateo, not the Church. This
understanding reinforced his impression of Father Mateo as capricious
and exacting, but did not temper his devotion to the Roman Catholic
faith itself.
Bypassing the collection basket
The most serious charge Catholics levied against Father Mateo was that
he sought personal enrichment over spiritual fulfillment. Tithing for
Roman Catholics in Tzintzuntzan traditionally meant donating the first
fruits of the harvest to the priest. Elderly women told me it was once
common to see eggs in the collection basket. With the decline of
agriculture in the region, priests began to ask parishioners to tithe
in cash. In a sermon during the largest fiesta of the year, Father
Mateo defined the tithe as giving the equivalent of one day’s earnings
once a year. Even this practical change raised suspicion of avarice.
As members of one Catholic family were describing to me how Protestant
churches woo converts through monetary bribes, the conversation turned
to their own church. They mentioned critically the switch from crops to
cash in tithing and joked sarcastically that next the priest will ask
for donations in U.S. dollars. The father of the family continued,
“Priests have large property holdings. They get a salary from the
bishop but they also charge for every Mass. It costs one hundred pesos
to have your name mentioned at a Mass, and he’ll say up to ten names.
And the priest here tells you the day and hour of the Mass. If I’m
paying, I should get to decide.” He also accused the parish priest of
selectively writing receipts for services so he did not have to report
his entire income to the bishop and could pocket the proceeds from some
baptisms and weddings. Even the priest’s request for parishioners not
to bring candles to the church to prevent smoke damage to the artwork
seemed to many a cynical ploy to enrich his coffers through new
coin-operated electric candles.
My fifty-year-old landlady recalled that in her childhood, the first
corn, figs, and squash were all donated to the priest. By the time she
was married, a new priest had requested monetary donations instead.
Indignant, her peasant husband stated, “I don’t harvest money. I
harvest maize.” For several years, her husband delivered the first crop
of the harvest to a priest previously stationed in Tzintzuntzan, who
still accepted the edible alms. Since she became widowed, she let her
fields lie fallow and turned to petty commerce. Because she could not
afford to stray far from her corner store, she attended Mass every
Sunday with Father Mateo. During the offering, she always put three
pesos (about thirty cents)—to represent the Holy Trinity, she said—in
the alms bowl. Her overall financial contribution to religious
activities was much larger, but she directed the majority of her
donations to laity who served as organizers for specific festival
celebrations. She was not certain if the priest received a fixed salary
or not, but she did know that a third of the alms he collected went to
the diocese, a third for church maintenance, and the remaining third
was for the priest. By limiting her donations at Mass to a token
amount, she intentionally docked the priest’s pay.
Other Catholics shared this strategy of diverting their monetary
contributions from the priest to other parish activities. An elderly
woman who volunteered to clean the parish church one day a month told
me that she usually observed donations of a peso (ten cents) or less
when people came to pray. It made little sense, Tzintzuntzeños felt,
for them to give charity to a priest who lived in relative affluence
compared to the majority of his parishioners. Yet, they were eager to
provide services that benefited the maintenance of the church building.
Thirty women had signed on as unpaid caretakers for the church, one
responsible for each day of the month (the head woman also served on
the thirty-first). So popular was this task that a waiting list of
volunteers had formed to take over responsibility for a day when a
caretaker retired or died.
A university student who had returned to Tzintzuntzan during a school
vacation expressed her hesitancy to support the priest when she called
herself a “Catholic in quotes.” When I asked why she was not a
full-fledged Catholic, she replied that she was uncomfortable with the
seeming hypocrisy of the Church: “If the Lord was so poor, giving away
food to the needy, why is the Catholic Church so rich? The priests take
the alms for themselves and live comfortably. It seems that the Church
interprets the Bible as it wants to.” Many Catholics shared her
skepticism about the altruistic intentions of the priest. A man, who
had once studied in the seminary but left before his ordination,
compared the Catholic Church unfavorably to the Protestant
denominations. While Protestant churches took up collections to help a
member who was sick, all the alms in the Catholic Church were destined
for the priest. The only act of consistent and public charity that
Father Mateo performed was a monthly Mass and luncheon for the sick and
infirm.
Father Mateo further inflamed resentment when he attempted to assert
control over the temple of La Soledad. Adjacent to the parish church,
La Soledad traditionally had been managed by an elected group of twelve
cargueros, office holders responsible for paying the priest to walk
across the churchyard to celebrate Mass in the temple once a month.
Performing the duties of a carguero could be burdensome, particularly
in recent years when a renovation project increased the costs
associated with maintaining the temple. On the other hand, office
holders benefited from the generous donations visitors left in honor of
the Santo Entierro, or the Sacred Sepulcher, a waxy Christ figure lying
in a glass coffin. Since word spread that the sculpture had
miraculously outgrown its case, requiring an additional compartment for
his feet, the Santo Entierro had attracted a large number of local
followers and pilgrims eager to ask for his intercession. One community
leader estimated that alms at La Soledad generated between three
hundred and six hundred dollars a month. Rumors were already
circulating that cargueros had pocketed large sums of donated money, so
the priest’s actions only inflamed suspicions that he coveted the
financial resources of the temple. When he was rebuffed, Father Mateo
refused to celebrate Mass in La Soledad.
Father Mateo did not see his program of reform as radical. Speaking to
me during one community festival, he reflected, “The people here are
very rooted in their traditions. Their exterior manifestations of faith
come from their ancestors. It’s okay to have these fireworks and
musical bands. They may have to be purified a bit, but they are
offerings.” Unfortunately for him, small acts of “purification”
unleashed large waves of resentment. Significantly, no one confronted
Father Mateo directly, preferring to grumble privately then disregard
his pronouncements.
Complaints about the priest’s role in fiesta celebrations did not
originate with Father Mateo. In Brandes’s study of the fiesta cycle in
Tzintzuntzan as a form of social control, he concludes that the
relationship between priest and pueblo is inherently tense. “Everybody
acknowledges the priest’s power, if not his legitimate authority, in
the orchestration of fiestas….At virtually every juncture, he is the
key to fiesta success. Consequently, he incurs resentment, as much for
giving support as for withholding it” (Brandes 1988:182). Brandes
documents how responsibility for fiesta sponsorship in Tzintzuntzan
shifted from individual cargo holders to priest-appointed
commissioners. This power to name organizers for each of the many
religious celebrations throughout the year contributed to the friction
between priest and community since accepting the post meant almost
certain financial sacrifice. During Brandes’s research, social pressure
was so strong that only rarely did a person nominated to be a
commissioner refuse to serve. By the time of Father Mateo’s tenure, it
became more common to reject the commission.
Father Mateo did have his defenders, mostly older women and widows who
devoted their free time to the Church and made up his small circle of
confidantes. When someone commented snidely that the priest drove an
expensive car, some women countered that many of his responsibilities
took him to the far-flung settlements accessible only by dirt roads.
Others contended that the priest did not receive a fixed salary, but
lived on the fees charged for weddings, baptisms, and Masses. From that
sum, he had to pay his secretary, the sacristan, and the utility bills
of the church. Most commonly, though, his supporters defended members
of the priesthood in general for their extra schooling and
self-sacrifice, then stated with resignation that at least Father
Mateo’s term was nearly over.
Buying and selling in the religious
marketplace
For all the criticism of Father Marcos and threats to “run him out of
town,” Roman Catholic Tzintzuntzeños separated their dislike for the
priest from their respect for the Church. Instead of skipping Mass when
they found his services tedious and condescending, Catholics attended
Mass in nearby communities. Rather than withhold donations to the
Church when they suspected the priest of financial mismanagement,
Catholics contributed generously of time and money to lay
organizations. In each of these cases, Tzintzuntzeños expressed their
dissent by bypassing priestly authority and establishing novel channels
that allowed them to continue being traditional Catholics. This
insistence on retaining a Catholic affiliation despite an unpopular
priest and the availability of alternative worship sites calls into
question the relevance of models of a free market in religious choice
for Latin America.
Descriptions of the religious marketplace consciously borrow from the
language of modern commerce. Berger popularized the business approach
to religion in his discussion of the loss of a single “sacred canopy”
that covers the majority of people in a society. “The religious
tradition, which previously could be authoritatively imposed, now has
to be marketed. It must be ‘sold’ to a clientele that is no longer
constrained to ‘buy.’ The pluralistic situation is, above all, a market
situation. In it, the religious institutions become marketing agencies
and the religious traditions become consumer commodities” (1967:138).
What follows from this increased competition is that individual
churches come under pressure to produce tangible results, which can in
turn attract more followers. Although Berger’s secularization thesis
has been challenged in the face of religion’s compatibility with
modernity and the rise of fundamentalism , the idea of religion as a
commodity has persisted (see Iannaccone 1995).
In an influential study of religious affiliation in the United States,
Finke and Stark (1992) extend Berger’s metaphor of competing religious
brands, but advance the thesis that increased denominational pluralism
leads to greater overall religious participation, not to
secularization. As church options expanded from the colonial period to
the late twentieth century, the proportion of respondents in the United
States census professing adherence to a religion soared. This growth,
however, was not spread evenly across all denominations. To explain why
Baptists, Methodists, and Roman Catholics recorded the highest
memberships by the nineteenth century, the authors look to the
similarities in their doctrine. The churches most successful in
attracting adherents, they argue, are those that “impose significant
costs in terms of sacrifice and even stigma upon their members” (Finke
and Stark 1992:238). This counterintuitive conclusion rests on the
assumption that religious decision-making follows a strict cost-benefit
analysis. Without stringent requirements for achieving spiritual
rewards, a church makes it easier for less committed “free riders” to
benefit from collective religious participation, thus encouraging
attrition.
Though suggested by public records of fluctuating church membership,
Finke and Stark’s microeconomic model of religion lacked qualitative
evidence to support its claims. Bellah et al. (1985) first recognized
through interviews with white, middle-class adults in the United States
how religious pluralism has meant increased privatization and
individualization of religious expression. Roof’s telephone surveys
document how intensely personal religion has become in the United
States’s “spiritual marketplace.” The boundaries of Protestantism,
Catholicism, and Judaism no longer mark the religious terrain, which
has instead given way to a more fluid, unpredictable landscape. Baby
Boomers, who once identified with a single ecclesiastical institution,
have undergone a “qualitative shift from unquestioned belief to a more
open, questing mood” (Roof 1999:9). In a 1955 Gallup poll, only four
percent of adults had converted from the church of their childhood.
Thirty years later, one-third of poll respondents had switched churches
(Wuthnow 1988:88). To meet the curiosity of what Roof calls “spiritual
tourists” and “spiritual entrepreneurs,” new religious providers have
emerged offering more user-friendly products.
Scholars of religion have begun to apply the consumer model of faith
developed in the United States to countries in Latin America,
emphasizing how in times of crisis, women and men seek the brand of
faith most conducive to mitigating their suffering. The resulting
decline in Roman Catholicism’s popularity has been confirmed in census
reports from around Latin America (Giménez 1988; Gutiérrez and Smith
1996). The trend has been especially pronounced in impoverished urban
areas and indigenous regions, the same populations that have shown the
greatest participation in evangelical Protestant churches. Many
explanations for the shift to Protestant worship focus on the
shortcomings of the Roman Catholic Church. According to the model of
religious economy, the Church is continuing to act like “a lazy
monopoly” and not an aggressive competitor in a crowded marketplace
(Stark and Finke 2000:243).
There have been attempts to remake the Roman Catholic Church in a more
activist mode that responds to the felt needs of the laity, but these
have been either poorly implemented or sabotaged by more conservative
clerics. Anthony Gill (1998) likens the position of the Roman Catholic
Church in Latin America to a monopolistic company facing a surge of
competition. A natural response is for the corporate leaders to lobby
government officials to mitigate the brewing threat by erecting
barriers to the market and subsidizing activities of the monopoly. With
that option exhausted, the Church has begun to pursue a longer-term and
more costly approach to restructuring.
While his analysis follows the model of churches as producers in a
religious economy, its focus on institutional decision-making overlooks
the content of religious messages disseminated by different groups.
Some anthropologists have shifted their focus to the consumers of
religious products in the hypothesized marketplace. Greenfield
notes how non-Catholic religions in Brazil have come to duplicate the
patron-client bond that characterizes the relationship between a
Catholic saint and a devotee. With so many potential sources for
spiritual aid, Brazilians continuously “shop” for the most effective
medium, making several promises in return for succor, then repaying the
saint, orixá, or Holy Ghost that delivered it. Should the favored
patron fail to participate in future reciprocal exchanges, the client
is free to sever that relationship and find a more forthcoming
spiritual partner. Implied is that the preferred faiths in Latin
America are those which cater to the immediate, intimate needs of
followers.
Given the prohibitive cost and limited accessibility of medical care in
many parts of Latin America, health problems tend to be the most
pressing concern of many poor people. It is no coincidence, then,
writes Chesnut (2003:4) that the three most “profitable religious
producers” in Latin America put faith healing at the center of their
worship. Pentecostalism, Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and Candomblé
all share a “pneumacentric” emphasis that values direct communication
with the spirit world to alleviate crises in the empirical one. In the
newly competitive field, ecstatic faiths leverage the advantage of
“sales representatives” who resemble the population they serve, a
“marketing strategy” that embraces mass media, and a “product” that
promises to transport believers beyond their everyday worries. Chesnut
points to the escapist appeal of pneumacentric faiths for women for
whom unremitting poverty thwarts any attempt to advance the interests
of their families (2003:129-130).
If a strict cost-benefit calculation applied, it would be advantageous
for disaffected Catholics to join one of the competing churches that so
openly court new members. Though much longer, worship services in
Pentecostal churches rarely induce boredom. Becoming a Protestant does
require strict tithing, but many pastors serve only part-time and are
from the same socio-economic class as the congregation. Under the logic
of the economic model, it is irrational for Roman Catholics to expend
the additional effort to create alternative mechanisms for fulfilling
the sacraments and to risk provoking the anger of the parish priest by
defying his wishes. Models that begin from the assumption that
conversion will take place suggest that religious actors assess the
content of each church’s message then choose the most beneficial one.
By this measure, the number of Protestant converts during Father
Mateo’s tenure should have grown. However, Tzintzuntzeños did not treat
all religious options as equally plausible. Even without a
state-granted monopoly, the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed an advantage
that compelled its members to tolerate dissatisfaction by working
around their objections rather than leaving the fold.
Putting a thumb on the scale
This is the same paradox that Dillon (1999) addresses in her study of
“pro-change” Catholics in the United States who disagree with Church
orthodoxy yet remain firmly in its flock. Supply-side explanations of
religious affiliation, she argues, look only at the content of
religious messages and not at their reception. By introducing the
concept of “interpretive autonomy,” Dillon highlights the ability of
Roman Catholic laity who favor ordination for women, equal rights for
gays and lesbians, and the legality of abortion to construct their own
understandings of religious doctrine that may contradict official
church teaching. The reason some marginalized Catholics reinterpret
exclusionary doctrine rather than seek a religious community more
consonant with their views is the rewarding sense of community that
they feel in the Roman Catholic Church. This “debt,” she says, “lessens
the plausibility for them of alternative, ad hoc identities” (Dillon
1999:244). These are not the uprooted spiritual seekers that Roof and
Wuthnow identify, but people who feel a connection to the indelible
effects of “growing-up Catholic” (Dillon 1996:75).
Catholics in Tzintzuntzan also counted as significant the lasting ties
of their Catholic upbringing which connected them both to other members
of the community and to their ancestors. In fact, many Catholics
readily acknowledged the limitations of their faith yet called the
attachment to their family’s teachings too strong to break. A Catholic
man reflected on a vow he made to the Virgin of Guadalupe: “Good or
bad, it’s our belief. My brother [a Jehovah’s Witness] says we’re
idolatrous. But they are not idols to us. I know they’re made by men,
but they represent something divine to us. I know that Guadalupe is
paper, but when the priest blesses her, it’s very important. I don’t
know God, but I know a supreme being exists. We call him Jesus Christ.
From a child they inculcated it in me.” I heard the term inculcate
(inculcar in Spanish) frequently in my conversations with Roman
Catholics as a justification for their firm commitment to the Catholic
faith. In a small, marginal community where most livelihoods relied on
the uncertainty of tourist traffic or the successful crossing of the
U.S. border without documents, maintaining close relations with others
through Catholic rituals and worship ensured Tzintzuntzeños a wide
network of support.
When this Catholic man’s daughter reached her fifteenth birthday, he
was tempted to invest his money in adding a second story to his house
rather than the traditional quinceañera celebration. In the end, he
marshaled the profits from his small general store and his teacher’s
pension to spend 50,000 pesos (about $5,550) for a lavish party. He and
his wife commissioned a Mass from the priest, hired a band from another
community, slaughtered a cow yielding 180 kilograms of meat, and
recruited 21 friends to serve as godparents. Their daughter, now in
medical school in the state capital, admitted to me that she enjoyed
her celebration but since then rarely has attended Mass and had not
confessed to a priest in over a year and a half. Her parents jokingly
called her an Aleluya, a slang term for a Protestant, but did not
pressure her to honor the Catholic sentiments. Deepening her faith in
the Catholic Church was only a secondary reason for the fiesta; more
important were repaying debts of mutual aid and strengthening ties with
neighbors through the system of fictive kinship.
For many, the Catholic faith remained a tangible legacy of their
parents, something not to be judged as positive or negative, but to be
honored as an inheritance. An elderly woman recalled that when she was
a child, the bells of the Soledad Temple would ring nine times every
Saturday in the pre-dawn hours. Her father made her and her siblings
wake up and say a credo with each peal of the bell before allowing them
to go back to sleep. Though that tradition is no longer practiced, she
recited the rosary every night before bed in the manner her father
taught her and later served for seventeen years as a caretaker of the
Sacred Sepulcher. As another Catholic woman told me about her
imperviousness to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who come to her door
proselytizing, “I am already defined. Be it good or bad—this is what my
parents left me.” Taught to them by parents and reinforced by their
peers, devotion to the Catholic faith could not be dislodged easily by
an ill-tempered priest or an evangelizing neighbor.
As the metaphor of a spiritual marketplace to account for the challenge
to the Roman Catholic Church’s dominance in Latin America gains
currency, some scholars have begun to question its appropriateness.
Vásquez (1999) concedes that economic thinking is a seductive way to
theorize religious choice. However, it is also a static formulation
that overlooks both efforts by the Catholic Church to invigorate its
pastoral mission and the internal divisiveness of Protestant
denominations. For many of the same reasons, Burdick (1993) prefers to
theorize religious pluralism through the medical anthropological model
of overlapping healing options. Seeing religious affiliation as mere
market choice reduces faith to practical considerations, conceiving
“trajectories through the religious arena [as] purely opportunistic
efforts to solve concrete problems” (1993:8). Such a facile approach
assumes that individuals choose freely between available sources of
aid, unconstrained by existing social networks and beliefs. Burdick
prefers the complexity of the framework from medical anthropology,
which views the search for religious solutions as a fluid process of
identity building.
Chesnut’s focus on the content of religious messages implies that
believers weigh different options before choosing the most suitable one
for healing their afflictions. The image of Latin American laity is
then one of individuals unmoored from any loyalties, freely shifting
from church to church as new problems arise. Chesnut anticipates this
criticism by stating that, “In no way does the existence of a free
market in faith imply that religious consumers engage in comparison
shopping with all brands of faith” (2003:150). Comparison between
religions, he contends, takes place within an existing framework of
preferences. Yet, a model of religious choice based on self-interest
however constrained offers no clues for understanding why many
believers in Latin America persist in a church whose personnel or
policies they criticize harshly. Nor does his description of the most
successful churches provide an explanation for why a person would
choose one healing-centered faith over another. Even if not all faiths
compete equally, under the religious economy model laity are restricted
to choosing between pre-existing spiritual identities without
accounting for how believers may fashion their own religious profiles
in contradiction to institutional wishes.
As the most quantitative of the social sciences, economics holds appeal
for scholars who wish to present rigorous, nomothetic theories of human
behavior. However, extending models of rational choice from economics
to explain religious affiliation risks reducing decision-making to
individual maximizing without consideration of community interests.
Anthropologists have long observed behavior that furthers no individual
advantage, but rather community well-being. Graeber (2001) faults the
injection of economics into anthropological theory for making “society”
disappear by stripping behavior to physiological needs. Without a
notion of cultural difference, these attempts invariably fail to
explain why some outcomes are more desirable than others for different
people. The universalizing tendency of rational choice theory has also
been critiqued in the field of political science. For Green and Shapiro
(1994), economic accounts of political behavior suffer from
methodological vagueness that fails to advance an understanding of how
politics work empirically. Scholars in religious studies have issued a
call to focus on religion as lived experience apart from externally
imposed divisions between sacred and profane (Orsi 1997).
So popular has the logic of the market become that the Center for
Studies on New Religions titled its 2001 conference “The Spiritual
Supermarket: Religious Pluralism in the Twenty-first Century.” This
metaphor may describe the spiritual seeking of Baby Boomers in the
United States, but it does not map neatly onto the Latin American
religious landscape. If the religious arena is a supermarket, then
religious practitioners become solely consumers of pre-packaged church
doctrine, not producers of spirituality in their own right with the
ability to reinterpret doctrine that displeases them. The “stickiness”
of Catholicism suggests that any purely economic model of religious
affiliation will fail to capture the not so easily quantifiable costs
of conversion. By devising alternative ways to fulfill their duties as
Catholics instead of joining a Protestant church, Tzintzuntzeños are
flouting the underlying assumptions of the marketplace, but they are
not behaving irrationally. Theirs is a rationality that defies economic
modeling since it relies on the autonomy to interpret received doctrine
in a way informed by their commitment to the communal tradition of
Catholicism (Dillon 1999:254).
While it is clear that the Roman Catholic Church no longer enjoys a
monopoly on the spiritual affiliations of Latin Americans, it is less
apparent that Catholicism has been reduced to one of many competing
brands. Religious practitioners do not fit the role of fickle
consumers, balancing the risks and rewards of every “brand” of faith to
choose the one that best advances their individual interests. Nor do
the perceived failings of the Roman Catholic Church in Tzintzuntzan
encourage conversion to other faiths. As the unswerving commitment to
Catholicism illustrates, competition between churches does not hinge on
religious message alone. Mexico’s constitution guarantees the freedom
of religion, and a growing number of proselytizing Protestant churches
have emerged around the country, yet the large majority of Mexicans
remain part of the Roman Catholic Church. The crucial role of Catholic
belief and ritual in the socialization of Tzintzuntzeños and their
continued centrality in community life demonstrate that any weighing of
religious options occurs with a thumb on the scale in favor of Roman
Catholicism.
Notes
1. Jehovah’s Witnesses, like Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists, are
not technically Protestant denominations, but they do fit the
descriptive label of “evangelical.” Galindo (1994) calls these groups
“Para-Christian.” However, in Tzintzuntzan, Catholics and converts
alike did not make such fine theological distinctions. Following the
common parlance in Mexico, I will be using “Protestants” to include all
converts to non-Catholic churches.
2. Norget (1997) describes
how the “New Evangelization” campaign achieved limited success in
Oaxaca. In a previous era, Roman Catholics in Spain interpreted the
Vatican II reforms not as a Rome-directed initiative, but as the
pernicious plot of an imperious parish priest (Brandes 1976).
3. Ethnographic and
historical studies of Mexican communities confirm that tension between
priest and parishioner is commonplace (de la Peña 1981:226, Rugeley
2001:236, van Zantwijk 1967:142). In his sweeping survey of
priest-parishioner relations in eighteenth-century Mexico, Taylor
(1996) describes the mutual accommodation between clergy and followers
that presages Tzintzuntzeños’ ability to reject the priest while
maintaining their Catholic identity. Priests before the Bourbon reforms
tolerated unorthodox beliefs and superstitious practices among their
flock as long as they detected a firm commitment to monotheism (51).
Outside of the basic rites of passage that mark the life cycle,
priestly involvement in local practices was minimal (62).
4. This same wary respect for
the parish priest reappears in a study in the central Mexican community
of Mexquitic. Frye (1996:116) observes that Catholics perform religious
ceremonies without him, “treating the priest more as a ritual prop than
a spiritual leader.” The priest’s presence gave official sanction to
religious activity, but was not essential for the expression of
Catholicism.
5. Part of the Church’s
multi-pronged strategy in Latin America has been the development of a
progressive theology embodied in Christian base communities (known by
their Portuguese initials as CEBs). The explicit Marxist bent of the
groups may have contributed to class consciousness (Lancaster 1988) and
the politicization of women (Drogus 1997), but it also displeased the
conservative Pope John Paul II. Subsequent episcopal appointments in
Latin America replaced progressive Church leaders with more traditional
ones. Both local bishops and Vatican leaders have supported the growth
of Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) while dismantling the network of
CEBs in Brazil and throughout Latin America (Beozzo and Susin 2002;
Juárez Cerdi 1997). Catholic Charismatics resemble Pentecostals in
their use of ecstatic prayer and music in worship.
6. Similarly, Schmidt (1997)
finds that the supply and demand model of religious choice in the
United States oversimplifies a diverse denominational field into a
simple tally of winners and losers. Rather than importing theoretical
frameworks from medical anthropology, Schmidt suggests that viewing
religion through Mauss’s work on gift and exchange restores the nuanced
reciprocity that characterizes individual decision-making in a
pluralistic religious arena.
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