Abstract

FRIGERIO, Alejandro. Why we cannot see religious diversity: Questioning the Catholic-centered paradigm in the study of religion in Latin America. Cultura representaciones soc [online]. 2018, vol.12, n.24, pp.51-95. ISSN 2007-8110.  https://doi.org/10.28965/2018-024-03.

The paper argues that the study of religion in Latin America has been hindered by the persistence of excessively Catholic-centered visions that prevent us from adequately understanding the extent and relevance of religious diversity, relegating it to a mere recent and residual epiphenomenon of our social reality. The true role of Catholicism in the continent would be better ascertained -in its different dimensions- if we stopped uncritically accepting a series of basic assumptions that guide our analyses and that I will try to rethink in this work. For this purpose, I will identify the minimum features of what I consider a dominant analytical paradigm in the social scientific study of religion and provide an alternative view, based on different theoretical assumptions. I argue that the overdependence on the assumptions of some canonical authors, the excessive equation of “identities” with “beliefs” and the favoring of overinstitutionalized visions of religion, as well as the scant attention paid to the different modes of religious regulation, provide an exaggerated view of a “Catholic Latin America”.

Keywords : Religion; catholicism; religious diversity; theory; spirituality.