Religious Patterns of Neoconservatism in Latin America

Abstract

During the last four decades, Latin America has witnessed the political strengthening of collective actors with conflicting agendas: feminist and LGBTQ+ movements on one side, and Catholic and Pentecostal Evangelical sectors on the other. While the first two movements focus on gender equality and the extension of sexual and reproductive rights, the Pentecostal and Catholic sectors have also adopted a political identity, but with an agenda prioritizing the defense of religious freedom and Christian sexual morality. Far from being a holdover from the past, the political strategies employed by these religious sectors continue to affect public debate across much of Latin America today.

Can Conservatism Make Women More Vulnerable to Violence?

“…10. As Vaggione and Machado (2020) and Machado et al (2018) show, evangelicals in Latin American are particularly more likely (than Catholics, for example) to emphasize moral issues in the political and policy arenas. 11.…”

Introduction The Grassroots Right in Latin America: Patterns, Causes, and Consequences

“…Yet this definition is less apt for describing rightist versus leftist stances on issues such as gay rights and abortion, for which contemporary rightists may actually advocate government policy to enforce inequality or to prevent access to services that could be provided via markets, such as abortion or prostitution. Given the centrality of sexuality politics for Latin America's "neoconservatives" or "New Right," we need a definition that adequately incorporates such stances (Côrrea et al 2008;Cowan 2014;Lacerda 2019;Vaggione and Machado 2020).…”

“…In practice, what does Latin America's grassroots right look like? Perhaps the single set of issues distinguishing the right today from that in previous periods is the centrality of sexuality politics; for instance, opposition to abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and school-based sexual education (Biroli and Caminotti 2020;Pérez Betancur and Rocha-Carpiuc 2020;Vaggione and Machado 2020;Zaremberg 2020). In this section, for instance, Corredor and Reuterswärd describe movements opposing "gender equality" in Colombia and abortion access in Mexico, respectively.…”

Diversity as a gift: LGBTQI+ Roman Catholic organizations in twenty-first-century Brazil

“…In parts of Europe and across Latin America, “gender ideology” has become a crucial weapon in public debate, serving as “symbolic glue” to consolidate alliances that bring together different interests and groups around agendas against human rights and democratic logic (Serrano 2017 ). As such, the fight against “gender ideology” has been one of the defining characteristics of a phenomenon referred to by a growing number of authors as “new conservatism” or “neoconservatism” (Brown 2006 ; Vaggione 2020 ; Vaggione and Machado 2020 ), which relates to the rise of extreme right-wing populism in both continents.…”

“…Along the last decade, countries in Latin America and elsewhere have witnessed the increasing political use of Christian elements to buttress both the prevailing sexual and gender order and the social hierarchies built upon them. This has ultimately helped undermine the human rights discourse and even the democratic order itself, with its underlying pluralist logic (Corrêa 2020 ; Vaggione and Machado 2020 ; Brown 2006 ). Considering such context, this paper aims at examining the pluralization of Brazilian Catholicism with regard to the presence of sexual and gender diversity in Roman Catholic environments.…”