106 Roger Finke and Rodney Stark
in Massachusetts who would declare such a system to be his first choice” (Blau 1950:
188). When the Supreme Court ruled against school sponsored prayers in 1962 (Engel
v. Vitale), the outcry was immediate, as the ruling represented one more step in the
desacralizing of American institutions (Reichley 1985: 145).
Following the deregulation of the American religious economy in the late eigh-
teenth century, the level of involvement increased steadily until reaching a plateau
in approximately 1926. Religious pluralism continued to increase with all areas of the
nation now having a wide range of religious options, and the process of desacraliza-
tion has gradually differentiated religious and social institutions. For each of these
areas, however, the changes began immediately following religious deregulation, but
required several generations before the full impact could be seen. The next section turns
to Latin American nations, where the deregulation, or separation of church and state,
has occurred more recently and less completely.
Supply-Side Changes in Latin America
For over four centuries, the Roman Catholic Church was the established church of Latin
America. The Church received generous financial and legislative support from the state
and exerted extensive influence over other social institutions, including education,
family, and politics. But the newly independent republics of the early nineteenth cen-
tury began questioning this relationship, and by the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century the governments sought formal disestablishment. Although new religions still
faced strong resistance and stiff regulations, with Catholicism remaining the dominant
cultural force and holding close ties with the political and social elites, the eroding au-
thority of Catholicism opened the door for foreign missions. By the 1930s, a growing
wave of evangelical Protestant missionaries began to arrive. Initially, the progress was
extremely slow, requiring time for social networks and trust to develop between the
missionaries and the locals. Following World War II, however, the primary mission-
ary work was progressively taken over by local converts and a rapid growth ensued.
Not only were the locals more effective in missionizing, they were more difficult for
the Catholic church to regulate (Gill 1998, 1999). Whereas foreign missionaries can be
evicted or denied entry, local citizens are more difficult to control.
The consequences of this gradual reduction in religious regulation were similar to
those in the United States. First, the reduced regulations lowered the entry costs for
new religions and resulted in a flowering of new sects. This new supply of religions
included numerous Protestant sects, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, multiple indige-
nous religions, and movements combining religious traditions. Second, as the oper-
ating costs of the new religions were reduced, the rapid growth of the upstart sects
resembled that of the early-nineteenth-century American upstarts (see Martin 1990:
36–42). As early as 1973, the Brazilian newspaperEstado de Sao Pauloargued that Brazil
had more “real” Protestants than “real” Catholics, noting that there were now more
ordained Protestant pastors than ordained Catholic priests (Stoll 1990: 6). David Martin
(1990: 50) reports that, in the late 1960s, evangelical Protestants held fifteen million
adherents and two decades later the number was “at least forty million.” If current rates
of Protestant growth hold for another twenty years, Protestants will be the majority in
many Latin nations – they already make up the majority of those actually in church
each Sunday. Third, the aggressive marketing of the new religions has forced the once