There are three great stories in the demographics of the Christian world over the last two generations. One was widely heralded and remains much discussed, the other two are much less so.
One, is of course, the secularisation of the West. The second, a big part of my academic work, is the explosion in Christian numbers in Africa: from around 60 million at independence to something like 700 million today. The third is the move of millions of Latin Americans from Catholicism to Protestantism, usually Charismatic and Pentecostal forms of Protestantism, since around 1970.[1] Evidence is starting to build that, starting in the 2010s, there has been a change in direction. Catholicism has continued to lose both nominal and active adherents, but those leaving were less inclined to move toward Evangelicalism than out of organised religion altogether.
David Martin’s Tongues of Fire (1990) was the one of the first serious academic works on the subject in the UK, and has a place of pride on my bookshelf; in the USA, David Stoll’s Is Latin America Turning Protestant? of the same year possibly had more impact.[2]
Brazilian Pentecostals being baptised in the River Jordan. © Gerry Lynch, 16 November 2022.
The gathering turn to Protestantism emerged during a tumultuous period in Latin American Catholic life, with the rise of Liberation Theology among what had been a reactionary clerisy in the 1960s and then its shattering from above under the pontificate of John Paul II. While Liberation Theology claimed to speak for the poor, it was during its ascendancy that the continent’s impoverished legions, long underserved by priests, started looking elsewhere for spiritual sustenance. “The Catholics opted for the poor and the poor opted for Pentecostalism” runs the old canard.
But departures to Pentecostalism accelerated further in the decades since Latin American Catholicism’s renewed tack to the Right: and it was a modest tack – the shift should not be overstated; there was no return to the reaction of the first part of the 20th Century.
How great is the scale of the departure from Catholicism in Latin America? Catholic identification dropped from approximately 90% in the 1960s to 70% in 2010, and further to 57% by 2020.
These trends were confirmed in a landmark study produced by the Council of Catholic Bishops for Latin America in 2023; this found that the number of Catholic baptisms per head of population had fallen by two-thirds between 1970 to 2020 (albeit, like the rest of the world, aged dramatically in these decades, so there are fewer infants needing to be baptised in a continent where infant baptism remains normative). This is in a continent where the number of priests had more than doubled in the same period, making some headway in the continent’s historic shortage of clergy.[3]
According to Latinobarómetro surveys since 1995, the decline in Catholic numbers has been particularly steep in a number of countries: in Uruguay, where they started from a low base in this culturally European, secular, country; and in the very different societies of Central America’s impoverished quartet of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, where the Latin American Bishops’ report reckons that Evangelical numbers are roughly equal to Catholicism’s.[4]
In 2014, Pew reckoned that while 84% of people in the region had been raised Catholic, only 69% still were. In contrast, while only 9% of Latin Americans had been raised Protestant, 19% were currently; among the religiously unaffiliated, the corresponding figures were 4% and 8%. 81% of those who had left the Catholic Church by 2014 cited a personal connection with God as a reason for their shift, while 69% enjoyed the new style of worship at their new place of worship.[5]
There is some evidence that the pattern has changed in the decade or so since. A subsequent Pew research report was released last month, based on surveys with residents of six of the region’s most populous countries in 2024: it found Protestant numbers had increased in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru, but at a much slower pace than in previous decades, and Protestant numbers remained flat in Mexico, one of the region’s least Protestant countries anyway. The same survey found that between 18% and 26% of those raised Catholic in each of those countries had left the Church, but it was the numbers refusing any particular religious affiliation after doing so that had risen most dramatically in recent times.[6]
Pew noted that true atheism remains rare in Latin America: a majority of the religiously unaffiliated in the region still believe in God—the religiously unaffiliated in Latin America are about as likely to believe in God and pray daily as those identifying as Christians in Europe! Of particular note, and likely distinctive to the region, is that those identifying as Protestant in Latin America are much more religiously committed than Catholics, let alone the religiously unaffiliated: perhaps because it takes a high degree of religious commitment to abandon an ancestrally dominant Church affiliation to begin with. And, never forget, Latin America remains the world’s most Catholic continent, the only one with an outright Catholic majority, and home to around two in every five Catholics worldwide.
It should be appreciated that the 2024 survey did not cover any of the smaller and poorer countries where Evangelical growth had been particularly robust – as identified by, among others, the region’s Catholic bishops. So it still may be premature to confirm the hypothesis that while Catholicism continues to decline in Latin America, it is now religious detachment rather than Evangelicalism that is benefiting. But that can at least be a working hypothesis: in a continent with the most dramatic post-2010 birth crunch in the world, it is clear that social and cultural change remains particularly rapid and its drivers poorly understood.
Recommended Reading
Elle Hardy, ‘Prosperity versus liberation: How Pentecostalism’s prosperity gospel replaced Catholic liberation theology in Latin American life’, Aeon Magazine, 23 January 2025.
Pew Research Centre, ‘Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region’, 13 November 2014.
Pew Research Centre, ‘Catholicism Has Declined in Latin America over the Past Decade’, 21 January 2026.
Paul Constance, ‘Latin America’s Fertility Decline is Accelerating. No One’s Certain Why’, Americas Quarterly, 4 January 2024
[1] Others would argue for listing the growth in Christianity in China and South East Asia’s Chinese diasporas; or the emergence of a substantial underground church in Iran; as being of as much significance. They may well prove to be so in the long term, but so far they aren’t even close to the scale of the demographic movements in the Atlantic world.
[2] Protestantism is clearly a different phenomenon from Pentecostalism which is in turn not quite the same as Evangelicalism; the people who collected the data used for this piece used different terms in different surveys, so I gotta roll with what I gotta roll with.
[3] Ana Lourdes Suárez, Martín López Fidanza, and Martín Olszanowski, La Misión de la Iglesia En Los Países De América Latina: Colección de Investigaciones CELAM (Bogota: Centro De Gestión Del Conocimiento CELAM, 2023), 54ff.
[4] Ibid, 277.
[5] Pew Research Report: ‘Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region’ 13 November 2014. (Link)
[6] Similar shifts are present among Hispanics in the United States.
