This session examines how powerful systems, colonialism, Cold War geopolitics, neoliberalism, and capitalist ideology capture and discipline religion in Latino/a contexts, and what accountability demands in response. Papers explore how Afro-diasporic cosmologies have been subordinated within colonial frameworks that police religious legitimacy; how Cold War interventions weaponized Protestantism in Latin America while erasing the agency of the poor; how neoliberal ideology infiltrated Latino Evangelical life through the Prosperity Gospel; and how capitalism functions as a religious formation that forecloses liberatory futures through debt and carceral control. Together, these contributions insist that serious engagement with mañana requires naming how religion has been conscripted in service of domination—by external forces and through intra-communal reproduction of harm. Drawing on decolonial feminism, liberation theology, and critical historiography, the session pursues honest reckoning and the liberatory possibilities that emerge when communities refuse to foreclose the future.
What futures emerge when “syncretism” is no longer treated as religious impurity but as a decolonial practice of survival and accountability? This paper destabilizes syncretism as a colonial category that presumes purity and Christian normativity, arguing instead that Afro-diasporic traditions such as Santería and Vodou represent insurgent forms of sacred world-building under conditions of enslavement and anti-Black violence. Drawing on Charles Stewart and Michael Pye, and engaging Jacqui Alexander’s concept of “divine self-invention” in Pedagogies of Crossing, I interpret syncretic practice as Sacred labor through which Black and Indigenous women cultivate communal memory and embodied resistance.
Turning inward, the paper confronts anti-Blackness within Latine communities, where Afro-diasporic religions are often marginalized or folklorized. I argue that rethinking syncretism becomes an ethical demand: a call to accountability, restorative memory, and pluriversal futures that refuse to reproduce racial and religious hierarchy.
In Latin America, Pentecostal communities once relegated to the social periphery now exercise pervasive political influence, with Pentecostal leaders eager to fill the ranks of the political class. Reflecting a penchant for ostentatious displays of political theater, Pentecostals have attracted scrutiny from critics. Narratives attributing Pentecostalism's Latin American rise primarily to US government intervention and backroom conspiracies have gained a recent resurgent popularity across social media platforms, painting a distorted picture. A fuller assessment of Pentecostalism’s move from the social margins to the political mainstream reveals complex dynamics — at times instructive, at times cautionary. This paper reviews key points of disjuncture between existing research and popular narratives, revisits Cold War era sources, and theorizes about the popularity of these conspiracy theories. We employ a preferential optic that centers the religion/s of the poor and interrogates North American religious interventions.
This paper answers the puzzling question political observers have been asking over the last years: Why did so many Latino Christians vote for Donald Trump? My argument pushes back against simple racial explanations. Rather, I contend that Latino Evangelicals, and Evangelical Christianity in general. primed believers to accept neoliberalist ideals as tenets of their faith. It was the hegemony of neoliberalism that led so many to support this modern form of American authoritarianism.
This paper explores the theological critique of capitalism developed within Latin American liberation theology by engaging Walter Benjamin’s insight that capitalism functions as a form of religion structured by guilt and unpayable debt. Benjamin’s claim that capitalist religiosity binds subjects to a despairing future provides a framework for examining how debt operates not only as an economic mechanism but also as a spiritual and ideological force. Drawing on the work of Franz Hinkelammert, the paper argues that the religiosity of capitalism is most visible in its eschatological imagination: its capacity to discipline the future by presenting the continuation of the present order as inevitable. Within this framework, the carceral state and the militarization of immigration enforcement in the United States can be understood as expressions of the same capitalist logic of surveillance, debt, and control. In response, the paper proposes Christian hope, as articulated in liberation theology, as a communal praxis that contests the foreclosure of the future.