Social and Political Effects of Religiosity and Religious Identities in Latin America
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Date
2009
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Abstract
This paper provides an empirical examination of the effects of religiosity and of religious identities on a broad range of attitudes in seven Latin American countries. It is based on ECosociAl, a new national survey of large urban areas. The topics covered in the paper include the extent to which these religious variables affect levels of civic participation, the propensity to vote in elections, self-placement on the left-to-right ideological scale, levels of happiness, confidence in institutions and in other people, and the degrees of tolerance or acceptance of people of different beliefs, personal attributes, or social condition. The main finding here is that the effects of Latin American religiosity on individual attitudes and reported practices are much the same as they are in the United States, even though such religiosity is attached predominantly to a Catholic religious tradition. American “exceptionality,” linked as it is to its unique Protestant founding moments, turns out to be, therefore, much less exceptional than what is usually thought. Similarly, the findings here contradict the often repeated claim that the advance of Protestantism in Latin America should contribute to foster democratic consolidation in the region by infusing it with the cultural and civic virtues long associated in the literature with this religious tradition. Our empirical results fail to detect any substantial differences in the attitudes of Latin Americans of different religious identities. The paper concludes by speculating that the US and Latin America share similarly much lower levels of secularization, and that this is what makes the new world—and not only the US— ”exceptional” in comparison to Europe.