Did war change Guatemala's faith?
Did war change Guatemala's faith?
PRI's The World
June 30, 2016 · 8:30 AM EDT
By Amy Bracken
A wide variety of churches now dot the misty landscape of Guatemala's Western Highlands.
Credit:
Amy Bracken
. . .
The 36-year conflict is generally seen as a military versus guerrilla struggle for power and land, and also a front in the Cold War. But many of the estimated 200,000 people killed were civilians, and massacres of mostly indigenous people led to widespread charges of genocide.
Miguel de León Ceto was born in Nebaj, a town in the hard-hit Maya Ixil highlands, but his family fled to Mexico when he was a baby. When he finally came back, he was a teenager, and there was something that particularly puzzled him. “When I returned to Guatemala, and specifically Nebaj, one thing that surprised me a lot was how many evangelical churches there were,” he tells me. “There were so many. For me it was something strange, something new.”
. . .
De León Ceto became fascinated with the role of religion in his homeland. He wrote a master’s thesis on the topic. Now he’s writing his dissertation on it. He says the war had a lot to do with the rise of evangelicalism. For one, the government created a vacuum when it targeted the Catholic Church because it was seen as siding with insurgents.
“The military wanted to neutralize, depoliticize the population,” de León Ceto says, “and many priests were assassinated. ... So the evangelical church grew exponentially during the war. It was an extraordinary growth. And also many people turned to evangelicalism to save their lives. I mean, if you join the evangelical church, the military won’t bother you.”
More:
http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-30/did-war-change-guatemalas-faith
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