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Many scholars have documented how migration from Latin America to
the United States shapes the interconnected spheres of religious
participation, political engagement, and civic formation in host
countries. What has largely gone unexplored is how the experiences
of migration and adaptation to the host country also shape the
ecclesiological arrangements, theological imagination, and communal
strategies of immigrant religious networks. These communities
maintain close ties with their home countries while simultaneously
developing a religious life that distinguishes them both from their
home countries and from faith communities of the dominant culture
in their host countries. Joao Chaves offers an account of the
dynamics that shape the role of immigrant churches in the United
States. Migrational Religion acts as a case study of a network
formed by communities of Brazilian immigrants who, although
affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, formed a
distinctive ethnic association. Their churches began to appear in
the United States in the 1980s due to Brazilian Baptist missionary
activity. As Brazilian migration increased in the last decades of
the twentieth century, hundreds of Brazilian evangelical churches
were founded to cater to first-generation immigrants. Initially
their leaders conceived of these churches as extensions of their
denomination in Brazil. However, these church communities were
under constant pressure to adapt to their rapidly changing context,
and the challenges of immigrant living pushed them in exciting new
directions. Brazilian churches in the United States faced a number
of issues peculiar to their nature as diasporic communities:
undocumented parishioners, membership fluctuation caused by
national and international migration patterns, anti-immigrant
prejudice, and more. Based on six years of ethnographic work in
eleven congregations across the United States, dozens of interviews
with Brazilian pastors, and extensive archival history in English
and Portuguese, Migrational Religion documents how such churches
adapted to unique challenges, and reveals how the diasporic
experience fosters incipient theologies in churches of the Latinx
diaspora.
Joao B. Chaves analyzes the first hundred years of Southern Baptist
missionary activity in Brazil to reveal how the racialized
practices of Southern Baptist Convention missionaries in the
largest Latin America country shaped aspects of Latin American
evangelicalism in general and the Brazilian Baptist Convention in
particular. Partially because the Brazilian Baptist Convention sent
missionaries to many Latin American countries, established
educational institutions that trained ministers from a number of
denominations, and impacted the life of Brazilian evangelicalism in
general, the influences of Southern evangelicalism manifested in
the Brazilian Baptist Convention were established into Latin
American evangelicalism broadly. Although Latin American
evangelicalism is a diverse movement both in its Pentecostal and
non-Pentecostal manifestations, historians have tended to overlook
the power of US evangelicalism in the establishment and maintenance
of the evangelicalism in the region, preferring to offer sharp
distinctions between the US-based ""evangelical"" movement and
Latin American ""evangelicos."" This book recognizes that such
distinctions may explain cases in which differences between US and
Latin American evangelicalisms exist, but it argues that a
hemispheric evangelicalism overdetermined by the commitments of US
Southern evangelicals has broader explanatory power.
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