Schisms and revivals: postdenominationalism and the evangelical-pentecostal landscape in Mexico

Abstract

This paper describes how Mexican Religious Studies could benefit with the usage of the postdenominational category to better understand the country’s changing religious landscape, especially how 2020’s National Census demonstrated a never-before seen increase in the number of people who claimed to have no religion and given how the country is undergoing a major religious shift (ENCREER, 2016). Overall, most studies in Mexico use a given set of categories to understand the religious phenomenon, but there has been a tendency to use pentecostalism, neopentecostalism and evangelicalism as umbrella terms to refer to any christian denomination that differs from catholicism, mainline protestantism or non-trinitarian groups such as the Jehova’s Witnesses or the Seventh-Day Adventists. Using field-data, we argue that the postdenominational category (Miller, 1998), widely used in english
speaking countries, is a necessary addition to our analysis of emerging religious groups in Mexico, because it will allow for a more precise understanding of the religious diversity and evolution of the religious phenomenon not just in the aforementioned country, but also in other countries in Latin America.