| Summary: | Abstract This book is about religion and modernity, how religion interacts with modern culture, and how modernity influences religion. “Modernity” signifies not only technological developments, but also the dynamics of capitalism, the differentiation of social functions, specialization of spheres of knowledge, and expansion of human rights. By religion is meant the cultural practices people use to connect with a suprahuman power that they experience as influencing their lives. The thesis presented is that in Latin America there is an interaction between modernity and religion, but the result has not been religion’s diminishment (secularization), but its transformation. Exploring religion as ordinary Latin Americans practice it, the research presented in this book discovered that there is more religion than secularists expect, but of a different kind than religious leaders would wish. The difficulty in assessing religiosity as it exists in Latin America is due in part to the continuing use of categories that were not designed for religious cultures outside the North Atlantic world. Those categories point us toward a different kind of dynamics, which in fact obscure Latin American religious dynamics. If we look at religion from the perspective of Latin America and of the people who practice it there, we will find a different definition and different conceptual tools for understanding the religious experience of Latin American people, and these new tools help us to look at religion in a different way.
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