Introduction Toward a Gospel for the Poor "Young people [ask] questions regarding the Christian attitude towards a Marxist regime, while the pastors [discuss] the length of the skirts that girls are wearing in church. A social ethic--we have none." In August 1972, Ecuadorian evangelical René Padilla wrote a personal letter to one of the key architects of postwar evangelicalism in the United States, theologian Carl F. H. Henry. For Padilla, the social retreat of evangelicals was "much more dangerous" than tobacco, alcohol, and dance--traditional taboos of fundamentalist missionaries from the United States and many Latin American evangelical pastors. At the time, many Protestant evangelical pastors in Latin America preached naked moralism and saving individual souls from a damned world while overlooking their pressing sociopolitical context. Latin American Protestant evangelicalism is an unlikely location for social Christianity and has been widely overlooked by observers precisely because it often mirrored fundamentalism in the United States.

Carl Henry likewise decried the social retreat of fundamentalists from the ails of a postwar American culture in his brief but influential study, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947). Henry presented U.S. culture as morally vacuous and beckoned fundamentalists to fill the void with evangelical theological and political materials. Uneasy Conscience became a blueprint for rebranding fundamentalism as "neoevangelicalism" and a rallying cry for postwar evangelical activism in the United States. At the time of Padilla''s letter, however, Henry was planning a forty-day trip to eight Latin American countries under the auspices of the Latin American Theological Fraternity (Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana or FTL). Given Henry''s reputation as a leading evangelical expert in social ethics, one might expect Latin American evangelicals to request Henry''s assistance in developing a new brand of evangelical social Christianity. Instead, in the same letter, Padilla sharply warned Henry to avoid the topic completely precisely because he was an American.

Much had changed in the preceding decades, and leaders from the Global South were rising to take their place at the table of theological and political discourse. In fact, a nascent Evangelical Left in Latin America was already developing a brand of social Christianity, flavored by the political and social ferment of the global Cold War. Pressing conversation regarding the relationship between social action and the Christian faith was neither new nor unexpected. An entire generation of Latin American theologians insisted that the church should center on the poor--in Pope Francis''s words, to build "a Church which is poor and for the poor." Their response was profoundly shaped by their Cold War context. The intense ideological struggle of the global Cold War--the undeclared war between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated international affairs roughly between 1945 and 1991--was an extension of European colonialism and the proving ground of ideologies forged in Moscow and Washington. Both sides attempted to determine the destiny of the Developing World often through means of economic coercion, political assassinations, and propping up repressive military regimes. From within this sociopolitical ferment, a generation of religious elites--both Catholic and Protestant--sought to mold new theologies to fit the Latin American reality.

The Cold War was the seedbed of social Christianity. While Latin America has been widely credited with inspiring Catholic social teaching, especially theologies of liberation, this same context has been widely overlooked in the story of Protestant evangelicalism. Latin American evangelicals shared the sociopolitical context while negotiating a unique path as a religious minority community in an overwhelmingly Catholic continent. They drew from personal biographies filled with anti-Protestant acts of violence, oppression, and discrimination, in addition to pervasive inequality and repressive military governments. This was, according to Padilla, "part and parcel of life for non-Roman Catholic Christians and others in pre-Second Vatican Council days" in Latin America. On this divergent road, an embryonic progressive coalition of evangelicals began to develop a social Christianity that would challenge evangelical political and theological loyalties around the world. These developments in Latin America coincided with a brief political moment for an Evangelical Left in the United States. Newsweek magazine christened 1976 "The Year of the Evangelical" as the American public elected its first "born-again president.

" Yet, this evangelical was not a conservative but a progressive and not a Republican but a southern Baptist Democrat--Jimmy Carter. For American evangelicalism, this was largely political prologue, the first act in a drama dominated by the Republican Party and the so-called Religious Right. Around the globe, however, an increasingly diverse cast of characters began to revise the evangelical script. To put it succinctly: the political and theological moment of the Evangelical Left was neither brief nor driven primarily by American actors. In particular, an emerging Latin American Evangelical Left was busy marketing social Christianity to a younger, emerging generation of global evangelical activists--including many in the United States. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this Latin American negotiation of power, politics, and theologies presented the most formidable challenge to American management of expansive sectors of global Christianity. As Latin Americans shifted, they pulled many globally conscious evangelicals with them. Latin American leadership here was far from accidental; they drew unique inspiration from their story as a religious minority community.

Protestantism in Latin America The identity of Latin American Protestantism was forged at the intersection of Catholic hegemony, systemic violence, and American missionary oversight. Indeed, their story is one marked by migration, missions, and negotiation. Prior to World War I, Protestant communities were mainly the product of early nineteenth-century immigration. As the nineteenth century progressed, two realities converged in the fields of politics and religion: the independence of Latin American nations from the colonial powers of Spain and Portugal and the legacy of the Second Great Awakening in the United States, a Protestant revival movement that flourished from the 1790s to the 1830s. Those factors inspired new missionary initiatives from the North and an influx of Protestant missionaries from the United States into Latin America. After Ecuadorian independence in 1822, for example, the liberal reforms of President José Eloy Alfaro Delgado opened the door to a wider foreign missionary presence. At the end of the nineteenth century and into the first part of the twentieth century, every Protestant missionary in Ecuador was from the United States. During the first Alfaro presidency (1895-1901), the Gospel Mission Union was established in 1896 and the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1897--Protestant denominations from the United States that compose 40 percent of Ecuadorian Protestants today.

In 1906 (during Alfaro''s second presidency), the Ecuadorian government established a new constitution, which, at least on paper, separated church and state and placed wider restrictions on Catholic clerical influence in areas such as education. It is no coincidence that the years 1900-1912 saw the establishment of influential missions such as those described above and also the American Bible Society (la Sociedad Bíblica Americana) and Evangelical Mission Union (Unión Misionera Evangélica). Yet none of these missions could boast an indigenous church membership roll of more than 100 by 1910. At the turn of the twentieth century, wider trends in migration began to reshape the internal structure of Latin American life. In 1960, one political scientist observed the tail end of these migration patterns, saying, "There is no Latin American country in which there has been a trend away from urbanization; everywhere the impressive fact has been the movement toward the city, the swelling of urban populations." In the 1930 Mexican census, for example, Mexico City, the capital, contained nearly 961,000 inhabitants. By the next census a decade later, the city had nearly doubled in population to almost 1.5 million inhabitants.

After World War II, Protestantism began to gain a foothold in Latin America as urbanization provided a new social context for religious life. Protestant churches found acceptance at the margins of this new urban environment, growing in places that traditional Roman Catholic structures largely struggled to reach--due in part to pervasive priest shortages in the region. The growth of Protestant churches also coincided with the increasing involvement of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America during the Cold War era. In some cases, Latin American military dictatorships were friendlier to Protestants than to Catholics, as the Catholic hierarchy held power and influence while increasingly siding with the poor. By implication, many Latin American Protestants were seen as foreigners in their own land, labeled "gringos" and Yankees. Many Roman Catholic priests and authorities also viewed Protestant evangelistic efforts toward so-called nominal Roman Catholics as imposing on their religious turf.

Priests and religious leaders sometimes played into these fears by stoking up mobs for violence against Protestants. Until the 1960s, nearly 90 percent of Latin Americans self-identified as Catholic. Today, nearly 20 percent of Latin Americans self-identify as Protestant. Put another way, only one in ten Latin Americans alive t.