Is Protestant Growth Inevitable? Assessing religious change in twenty-first century Mexico

Authors

• Toomas Gross https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1244-6945

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.116519

Abstract

Recent decades have seen a rapid increase in membership of Protestant churches in most Latin American countries, including Mexico. The growth has been considered sustainable and linked to modernisation processes. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in southern Mexico since the late 1990s, most recently in 2008, this article seeks to challenge claims that Protestant growth in rural Latin America is inevitable, continuous and universal. Mapping and analysing changes in the religious composition of one particular Zapotec community in Oaxaca over the ten-year period, the article demonstrates that local level  religious dynamics are multidirectional and considerably less predictable than aggregate statistics and general trends would suggest. Rather than presenting  evidence of irrefutable Protestant growth, religious diversity in many Oaxacan communities has recently stabilised or actually decreased. Reasons for this can be sought in the internal dynamics of Protestant congregations, the high level of apostasy, national legislation, as well as in changes and revitalisation of Catholic practices.

Keywords: Mexico, Oaxaca, religious change, Protestantism, Catholic Church, indigenous communities