João B. Chaves, "The Global Mission of the Jim Crow South: Southern Baptist Missionaries and the Shaping of Latin American Evangelicalism" (Mercer UP, 2022)

New Books in Latin American Studies

João B. Chaves analyzes the first hundred years of Southern Baptist missionary activity in Brazil to reveal how the racialized practices of Southern Baptist Convention missionaries in the largest Latin America country shaped aspects of Latin American evangelicalism in general and the Brazilian Baptist Convention in particular. Partially because the Brazilian Baptist Convention sent missionaries to many Latin American countries, established educational institutions that trained ministers from a number of denominations, and impacted the life of Brazilian evangelicalism in general, the influences of Southern evangelicalism manifested in the Brazilian Baptist Convention were established into Latin American evangelicalism broadly. Although Latin American evangelicalism is a diverse movement both in its Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal manifestations, historians have tended to overlook the power of US evangelicalism in the establishment and maintenance of the evangelicalism in the region, preferring to offer sharp distinctions between the US-based "evangelical" movement and Latin American "evangélicos." The Global Mission of the Jim Crow South: Southern Baptist Missionaries and the Shaping of Latin American Evangelicalism (Mercer UP, 2022) recognizes that such distinctions may explain cases in which differences between US and Latin American evangelicalisms exist, but it argues that a hemispheric evangelicalism overdetermined by the commitments of US Southern evangelicals has broader explanatory power.

Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. Student from South Korea in the Department of History & Ecumenics, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary.

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