Why Churches Change: Evidence from Latin America
There is strong evidence that money and attendance can genuinely affect a church's policies. Here's why that matters.
My recent "Political Economy of Development" class has gotten me thinking a lot about church power: how do churches build power to change governments and people? How do people and ideas build power within their churches? What are the key determinants of church decisionmaking?
Besides my inane need to know everything, these questions are genuinely personal to me: there are very real evils in the American Evangelical church, and I desperately want them to stop. But how? Where did they come from? Are there things I can do about them? Does attending an Evangelical church make me complicit in the actions of the broader church?
One of the best books I read for class was Anthony Gill's Rendering Unto Caesar, an economic exploration of the rise of liberation theology in Latin America. Liberation theology is what happens when you take Jesus' teaching about poverty seriously, striving as a church to genuinely center the poor (and later other marginalized groups) and take their needs as seriously as if they were your own.
In its earliest forms, this was often tied to Marxism, and resulted in Catholic participation in leftist, anti-dictatorial revolutions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, and numerous other places in the late 20th century. Liberation theology still exists today and there's so much to learn from it, but Gill is more interested in a secondary question: how did liberation theology gain a foothold in a deeply traditionalist, traditionally conservative Catholic Church?
Gill's answer, surprisingly, lies in the rise of Pentecostalism. Gill sees churches as primarily interested in two things: getting people to attend, and obtaining money to fund church activities. By the mid-20th century, he argues, the Latin American church had created a sort of equilibrium for itself: virtually all Christian churches in the area were Catholic at the time, so there was very little competition for attendance. As a monopoly, the church was free to ally itself with the rich and powerful, no matter how unjust, who were willing to pay the church (and suppress its enemies) to keep up a public image as "good Christians". This unholy alliance served both parties well for a long time, at the expense of the poor and powerless who had no way to influence either church or state.
As time went on, however, Pentecostal churches began to spread like wildfire in Latin America, largely because they were incredibly good at appealing to people in poverty. They taught that poverty could be escaped by faith and hard work (and donations to the church), and people flocked to them to learn how they, too, could become rich! (Nuance here is important -- Pentecostal churches were not all the same, and while some almost certainly were just scams, others were running genuine job-training programs and self-help groups that people really wanted.)
Because of this, Gill argues, the poorest members of society started leaving the Catholic church to attend small Pentecostal churches instead. This changed the incentives facing the Catholic church, which now found that it needed to appeal to the poor and the marginalized or to risk losing the vast majority of its attendees. Liberation theologians, who'd been criticizing their own church on this axis for much longer, suddenly found themselves a part of a church that (at least in places) was finally willing to listen, and they became tremendously influential.
Image: the probability that the Catholic Church in a country mobilized for democracy between 1972 and 2000 as a function of the fraction of Pentecostals in that country in 1970. The dots show countries whose churches did/didn't mobilize, while the curves estimate the probability that a country with a given fraction of Pentecostals would have mobilized. Notice the steep cliff around 3% Pentecostal for Latin America, which seems to force the Catholic Church to give up its pro-dictator stance and support a revolution as marginalized people become more and more willing to leave.
So what do we learn from this? What is the takeaway for Christians who want their churches to change? I think there are two things we need to keep in tension.
First, churches really do respond to economic incentives and this really can lead to change (for better or for worse.) Gill theorizes that churches are influenced by money/tithes and by the attendance of people in the pews (or lack thereof.) We shouldn't think of this model as ``pastors are purely self-interested agents" -- there are lots of ways this mechanism plays out in real life:
Pastors believe in their church's programs, which require money and volunteers, and may end up having to weigh their personal beliefs about a given topic against the impact it might have on their church.
Even if no single pastor changes their beliefs, churches with more money and members will grow more powerful and have extra influence, while other churches may be sidelined or even end up closing. Thus, the overall impact of "the church" might change to reflect either its members or its funders.
Large church organizations may try to understand these variables more systematically -- for example, the Southern Baptist Convention semi-recently named a "task force" to figure out whether one of it's members' "liberal activities" (namely, speaking out against racism and sexual abuse in the church) was causing a decline in financial donations.
I don't think I personally have much to offer in the financial realm -- my salary is a small fraction of a church budget, and I don't think my local church even noticed when I stopped giving to it. I find it unlikely that the leverage my small donation gives me over an already overfunded church would make it a more Godly use of money than malaria nets or climate activism.
But the second thing to keep in mind is that while membership seems to carry a lot of power (enough to shift the Catholic church towards liberation theology!), using this power in an intentional manner seems quite hard.
Churches tend to be a very familial, "everyone is friends" setting, where making threats like "I will leave unless X happens" would create real tension. (I think workers at companies with this type of work culture have similar trouble effectively unionizing.)
I'm not sure under what circumstances this is the right thing to do.
It could also backfire if the pastor interprets it as a "the world is against the Christian church" call for them to dig into what was being done.
Is there a way to say "we are leaving if things don't change" that doesn't come off as a threat?
1 person "threatening" to leave is unlikely to do much. I think it would be much more effective to find 10-15ish similarly-minded people (especially people who "do things" for the church) who could threaten to leave at the same time (or actually leave and join a different church.)
My biggest worry is that if everyone who cares about social justice does leave the Evangelical church, there's a real risk that the church might move even further in the racism/sexism/nationalism/greed/etc direction.
I want to read more about white churches around the time of the Civil War -- was it better for the anti-slavery church to split off (leaving an explicitly pro-slavery church) than it would have been to have a single church that kept hedging on the issue? I'm genuinely unsure how to think about this.
To conclude, here is the short version of the point I wanted to make: individuals do have some level of power over churches via their membership, although this has to be coordinated to produce any sort of result. The questions of how and to what end this power can be wielded is something I want to think more about.