Explaining How Uruguay Became a “Religious Ghetto”

Abstract

Given Latin America's historical and robust religiosity, how do sociologists explain that Uruguay became an extremely secular society since the turn of the twentieth century? Earliest attempts to interpret and explain Uruguayan secular society came in the 1960s from Uruguayan scholars. Typically, these studies were produced by religious practitioners, or at least researchers sympathetic to religion, who attributed weak religiosity, at least weak Catholicism, to two factors: the lack of a colonial heritage and European immigration. Counterfactuals to the "weak institution" and the "social base" claims are based on new research, especially as it pertains to immigration and settlement patterns among Italian and Spanish immigrants. The counter-arguments presented here, while not entirely invalidating the "social base" and "weak institutional church" claims, make it more difficult to assume that urban demographics and ecclesiastical history in Uruguay are significantly correlated to the secularization of Uruguayan society. This study is important because it creates theoretical space that should stimulate researchers to consider alternative causes for Uruguayan secular society that provide greater explanatory power by integrating historically contingent evidence in the context of theoretical explanation.