The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity.

Levine, Daniel H.

The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity. By Manuel A Vasquez. Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion 11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xvi + 300. $64.95 cloth.

This book presents itself on several levels; the author asks to be read in several ways. In empirical terms, Vasquez offers a study of the crisis of the popular church through a close account of the experience of one base community in Brazil. Like many who have taken up this topic lately, Vasquez was drawn to the issues by commitment to the liberationist project and disappointment at its apparent failure. The failure is both political and religious: allies have deserted, organizations have foundered, goals have been abandoned, members have left, and other religious groups have entered the field to define and satisfy needs.

The author likes complicated terminology, and his language often gets in the way of his argument. Nonetheless, the reader who is willing to slog through critical theory, postmodern categories, and globalization and world systems theory will find much of great value in this book. Vasquez makes a consistent effort to link macroanalysis (globalization, world capitalism) to microanalysis, the stuff of every day life. This is easy to call for, but difficult to accomplish, and here Vasquez's insistence on the particulars of contextualizing local history in global contexts (akin to what C. Wright Mills called the intersection of biography with history) pays off. He shows how changing economic configurations make collective action increasingly difficult for poor people and undermine the credibility of liberationist strategies that called for changing the world through such common action.

The liberationist project overestimated the capacity for common action that ordinary people possess, and compounded the error by misreading popular identity. Liberationist views of the poor rely heavily on idealized categories of class, but as a practical matter popular identity is multiple and fragmented. Authors like Drogus, Nagle, or Burdick have underscored the power of elements such as gender, race, or age. Vasquez generalizes the issue, stating that the popular church cannot afford to continue "ontologizing the poor as if they were a unified homogenous force" and trying to reach "it" through a popular elite with its own particular perceptions, interests, and needs. Given the fragmentation of and stratification within the working class "the pastoral strategy of small conscientized" groups threatens to widen the gap between the popular church and the variety of experiences that make up the world of the poor (197). This is an important argument, and does much to clarify the problems that liberationist groups have encountered in recent years.

Vasquez is theoretically ambitious, and goes on to argue that "understanding the crisis of the popular church, particularly in one of its most mature embodiments in Brazil, might shed light on modernity's plight" (3). Its fate offers a window into the plight of modernity because the particular way in which it fails (misreading its base, losing allies and members, projecting unrealizable goals that soon become unpalatable to the audience) underscores the end of belief in self-managed collective action that is central to the logic of modern politics. This is a bleak vision, one in which the gradual constriction of alternatives limits visions of the possibility of change. The author finds here much of his explanation for the contrary appeal of Pentecostal Protestantism, which has "apparently commodified salvation, turning the whole religious field into a vast market where the poor purchase temporary relief for their afflictions" (112). This judgment seems excessively harsh, and runs the risk of reducing religion's appeals to solutions to life problems, ignoring the expressive and aesthetic aspects of involvement.

The general account of the origins and evolution of the liberationist project in Brazil is well done. Although this is well-worked ground, Vasquez brings fresh insight, particularly in his account of how and why liberationist groups and ideas produced the opposite of what they wished and intended. They called for common action to change the world, to transcend the barriers of how things were. What they. got was weariness and loss of credibility. "The poor's experience of increasing loss of control over their lives," he writes," stands in stark contrast to CEBs' teleological view of history in which human actions point to the realization of the reign of God on earth" (112). After a thorough review of alternative explanations for the crisis (internal church politics, competition from Protestants, the impact of changes in global capitalism), Vasquez affirms that the root of the problem lies in the gap between the theory and practice of liberationist Christianity and the realities poor people face every day. The project is so unrealistic and the goals so implausible that people just withdraw (207-208).

Concluding chapters reinterpret the crisis and advance a series of suggestions in the line of "basist realism," points that can help popular groups survive, despite everything. Prominent here are the need to recognize the diversity of popular identity., and figure out ways to deal with it; to pay close attention to gender issues, since women are the bulk of members, actual and potential; to work on immediate, realizable, local projects--small victories, in other words. As a colleague of mine once remarked, for the average peasant, empowerment means getting a tractor or a power saw, not joining a movement!

Throughout the book, Vasquez underscores the need for scholars to tread a careful line between micro and macro, rejecting both as insufficient by themselves, and always striving for more effective ways to join the two. This is a useful and important project, and the author's consistent attention to it helps him to identify the ways in which local social action can satisfy needs, and resituate individuals in the context in which they live.

Daniel H. Levine University of Michigan