November 1, 2004

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico - "It is necessary to overcome the historical vision that Protestantism in Latin America began with the arrival of foreign missionaries in the XIX Century," said Mexican theologian and investigator Carlos Mondragsn, during the II Symposium on Evangelical Protestantism in Latin America.

Mondragsn made this statement during the event organized by the Latin American Theological Fraternity (FTL) based in Mexico, the Study Center on Mexican Protestantism, the Community of Christian Students and researchers from the National University of Mexico in San Cristsbal de las Casas, Chiapas in southern Mexico.

During his conference, Mondragsn made a distinction between Protestant institutions, whose representatives reached Latin America after the wars of independence, to found the first Churches and the literature, the ideas and the European Protestant colonizers who reached these islands and coastlines at different times during three centuries of Spanish domination.

According to the UNAM investigator and FTL member we must continue to study the endogenous conditions of Latin American religious history as well as the active role that Latin Americans themselves played in disseminating and consolidating Protestantism in these lands.

He said there are cases in countries south of Rio Bravo, or regions where groups of believers broke with the Catholic Church and met together to read and study the Bible before representatives from historic Protestant denominations arrived. They arrived to give a denominational name to these groups, he said.

Mondragsn gave the example of the so-called "constitutionalist fathers" in Mexico who tried to create a Mexican Catholic Church, independent of Rome, in the second half of the XIX Century. When this project failed, the former priests approached North American Protestant denominations, giving rise to the subsequent formation of some of the first Mexican Protestant Churches.

"We must recognize the presence and work of the former priests in the foundation of several of the first Protestant Churches in Latin America," he emphasized.

This is not the only historical example. There were cases in which missionaries gave the denominational name to already existing Churches or groups of believers, yet in the reports and missionary historical accounts these appear as the fruit of foreign missionary work. The role that Latin Americans themselves played in disseminating the Bible and in Evangelical preaching was lost, he said.

Returning to the concept of "polygenesis" that was mentioned by a previous speaker, Mondragsn emphasizes the importance of being aware of historical reality, such as the emergence of Protestantism in Latin America, which was plural and diverse and has the active participation of national subjects, without whom the work of foreign missionaries would not have borne the fruit it did.

In his conclusions, Mondragsn affirmed that the "history of Mexican and Cuban Protestants shows that the historic dynamic that is presented in the dissemination of ideas and Protestant doctrines responds to multiple factors that cannot be reduced to a single explanatory model."

Latin American Caribbean Communication Agency (ALC)