Abstract
The chapter argues that secularism has a strong, often overlooked, spatial dimension that involves the control and/or invisibilization of certain religious practices in socially significant places where they should not be present. The study of the expansion of Pentecostal churches in the city of Buenos Aires, during the 1980s, shows how their visibilization was accompanied by newspaper articles that found this new presence odd and a symptom of urban decay, belying the prevalent ideal image of the city as “European”, “White” and “Catholic”. The article contends that religious regulation, a necessary feature of secularism, has social as well as governmental dimensions and that public space is an important social arena where it must be enforced.
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Notes
- 1.
They had to fight against stigmatization promoted by media, they rallied against the growing bureaucratic control over their temples by the National Register of Religious Organizations (Registro Nacional de Cultos) and mobilized against proposals of religious laws presented in Parliament by senators and government officials, which they saw as restrictive and designed to control the activities of religious minorities. In all these endeavors, evangelicals were much more able to display more or less effective collective action than Umbandistas (see Frigerio 2003; Wynarczyk 2010).
- 2.
Nations are “imagined communities”, cultural artifacts that must be constructed through narratives (Anderson 1983; Bhabha 1990). Dominant narratives provide an essentialized national identity, focusing on the nation’s external boundaries and internal composition, proposing the correct and orderly placement of its (ethnic, religious and gender) constituent elements, containing the present as they construct a legitimating past (Frigerio 2002, 294). Neither univocal nor uncontested, dominant narratives are confronted with counter-narratives or subjected to oppositional readings (Hall 1993) with different degrees of success or social acceptance in particular historical moments.
- 3.
There might be a tension here between the idea of “Modern” and “Catholic” that is mostly eased by the strong secularization that the (local) Catholic Church has undergone, recognizing the different domain competencies between doctors, psychologists and priests—an idea that counters that prevalent in Folk Catholicism, in most evangelical churches and in temples of Afro-Brazilian religions, where (physical, mental and spiritual) healing plays a vital role in religious practices. Societal reaction against the (enchanted) practices of these religions, when they become visible in unwarranted places, expresses how they offend both “Modern” secularized sensibilities and expectations, as well as (secularized) Catholic ones.
- 4.
Comparing the dissimilar dominant narratives of the nation in Argentina and Brazil, anthropologist Gustavo Lins Ribeiro has argued that “if tropicalism is a (cultural) matrix that defines the mode of representing belonging to the Brazilian nation-state, Eeuropeanism characterizes the Argentinian case” and that “idyllically Europeanized Buenos Aires is, for the common sense, the synecdoche of Argentina” (Ribeiro 2002, 242).
- 5.
Gordillo (2016, 242) has likewise recently argued that “Argentina’s self-positioning as a white and racially homogenous nation” and the “specific configuration of whiteness” in the country have strong “spatial dimensions” that have been overlooked. He conceives “White Argentina, first and foremost, as a geographical project and an affective disposition defined by the not always conscious desire to create, define, and feel through the bodily navigation of space that the national geography is largely European” (2016, 243). My argument is similar, albeit in this case more limited to the city of Buenos Aires and adding the religious dimension that is left out of Gordillo’s analysis.
- 6.
The quotes in this paragraph are from the introduction to this volume by Mapril, Blanes, Giumbelli and Wilson.
- 7.
“Evangelists” is the word used in Argentine media as a cover term for evangelicals or Pentecostals. Journalists have no idea of the emic connotation of the word.
- 8.
My translated phrase “The enterprise of faith” probably does not carry (when read abroad) the very derogatory meanings of the original expression “el negocio de la fe”, an often-used term to refer, demeaningly, to the commodification of religion by evangelicals and other “sects”.
- 9.
Appropriations that were often read by prejudiced journalists and other social actors not as “religious” but as “sectarian”—“sect” and “sectarian” being, in Argentina, derogatory terms in the same way that “cult” and “cultic” are in English-speaking contexts.
- 10.
To the economic crisis must be added the novel but increasingly widespread use of cable TV and VCRs, which gained weight as an evening entertainment program in contrast to the previously popular habit of going to the movies or the theater.
- 11.
At the time, the city was the Federal Capital of the country. Now it has changed its status to Ciudad Autónoma, autonomous city with its own head of government.
- 12.
“Choripan” is a local sandwich made with barbecued sausage (chorizo), favored by the working classes in political rallies or football stadiums—and also by the middle classes, but mostly privately in their own barbecues and only more publicly when they want to show affinity with the less privileged sectors of society.
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Frigerio, A. (2017). Religion Out of Place: Social Regulation of Evangelical Expansion in Buenos Aires. In: Mapril, J., Blanes, R., Giumbelli, E., Wilson, E. (eds) Secularisms in a Postsecular Age?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43726-2_13
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