The CIA Didn't Invent Latin American Evangelicalism. But the Cold War Helped Turn It Into a Political Force

One of the most persistent stories about Latin American religion begins with a provocative claim:

The CIA brought evangelical Christianity to Latin America to fight communism.

The historical reality is more complicated—and, in some ways, more interesting.

The CIA did not invent Protestantism in Latin America.

It did not suddenly import Pentecostal Christianity in the 1970s.

American and European Protestant missionaries had been operating in the region for generations, and Pentecostalism developed its own Latin American movements, leaders and institutions.

But something changed dramatically during the Cold War.

Washington began to worry that the Catholic Church—once viewed largely as a conservative pillar of social order—was becoming an engine of political and social change.

And U.S. intelligence officials were explicitly studying that transformation.

A 1969 Nixon administration document ordered the CIA to produce a country-by-country assessment of the Catholic Church in Latin America, including its political role, foreign clergy and non-Catholic missionaries and groups.

Another memorandum from Henry Kissinger to President Richard Nixon referred explicitly to a CIA study of the Latin American Church and noted the transformation of Catholicism from a defender of the established order into an advocate of social change.

That is the beginning of a much bigger story.

Washington had a Catholic problem

The 1960s and 1970s transformed Christianity in Latin America.

The Second Vatican Council encouraged Catholics to engage more directly with poverty and social injustice.

Then came liberation theology.

Its advocates argued that Christianity could not be separated from the material conditions of poor people.

For millions living under authoritarian governments, extreme inequality and political repression, that could become a radical proposition.

A priest preaching about salvation was one thing.

A priest asking why a landowner owned thousands of hectares while peasants had nothing was something else.

And a priest organising poor communities was something else entirely.

Some Catholic clergy and lay movements became increasingly involved in social and political struggles.

In Central America, figures such as El Salvador's Archbishop Óscar Romero became powerful critics of political violence.

Washington was watching.

The 1969 U.S. National Security Council process explicitly asked the CIA to investigate the changing role of the Catholic Church.

The concern was not imaginary.

The American government genuinely believed that parts of Catholicism were moving toward political positions that could destabilise governments friendly to Washington.

Then another Christianity was growing

At precisely the same time, Pentecostal Christianity was expanding rapidly.

And this is where the popular CIA story contains a grain of truth—but dramatically oversimplifies the history.

Pentecostalism wasn't manufactured in a CIA laboratory.

It had its own theological roots, missionaries, local converts, indigenous leaders and social networks.

Latin Americans didn't simply become evangelical because Washington told them to.

They converted for many reasons.

Personal religious experience.

Healing.

Community.

Social mobility.

Family networks.

Urbanisation.

Migration.

Disillusionment with established churches.

And, for some, a Christianity that appeared more immediate and accessible than the traditional Catholic hierarchy.

Academic research describes the explosion of Pentecostalism during the final decades of the twentieth century as one of the most consequential transformations in Latin American religious history.

But politics became entangled with the religious transformation.

And Central America became the laboratory.

Evangelicalism and anti-communism

During the 1970s and especially the 1980s, conservative U.S. evangelical networks became increasingly influential in Central American politics.

The Oxford Research Encyclopedia notes that U.S.-based Pentecostal groups flooded Central America during the 1970s, while their strong anti-communism and relationships with American policymakers gave them growing influence in U.S.-Central American relations.

Then came Guatemala.

In 1982, General Efraín Ríos Montt seized power in a military coup.

Ríos Montt was a Pentecostal Christian.

He presented himself as a devout Christian fighting communism.

American evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson praised his anti-communist government, while President Ronald Reagan defended him against international criticism.

This is where religion, American foreign policy and Cold War ideology became impossible to separate cleanly.

But there is an important distinction:

That does not prove that the CIA created evangelical Christianity.

It demonstrates something different:

Washington recognised evangelical networks as politically useful and, in some cases, aligned with them against left-wing movements and governments.

That distinction matters.

The strategy wasn't necessarily “make people religious”

The more sophisticated interpretation is about political orientation.

A poor farmer who believes his salvation depends on overthrowing an unjust economic system represents one kind of political possibility.

A poor farmer who joins a church, changes his personal life, builds a local community and focuses primarily on individual salvation represents another.

That does not mean evangelical Christianity inherently produces political passivity.

It doesn't.

Latin American evangelicalism has produced conservative politicians, progressive activists, social-justice movements and everything in between.

But during the Cold War, American conservative Christianity often presented communism as fundamentally incompatible with Christian faith.

That made certain evangelical networks natural ideological partners for Washington.

The contrast with liberation theology was particularly important.

Liberation theology asked:

Why are people poor?

Conservative evangelicalism often asked:

How can this person be transformed?

Those questions can lead to very different political conclusions.

But then something unexpected happened

The United States did not control the movement.

Latin Americans did.

Pentecostalism became localised.

Brazil developed enormous Pentecostal denominations.

Guatemala produced its own evangelical political culture.

Central American churches developed their own leaders.

African, Latin American and Asian forms of Pentecostalism increasingly became independent centres of global Christianity.

The missionary became the convert.

Then the convert became the pastor.

Then the pastor built the church.

Then the church built a television station.

Then the television station became a political platform.

Eventually, the movement became bigger than the people who originally helped spread it.

That is the crucial irony.

You can weaponise a religious network for geopolitical purposes without being able to control what that network eventually becomes.

Brazil shows how far the transformation went

Brazil is perhaps the clearest example.

The country remains overwhelmingly Christian, but its religious landscape has changed dramatically.

In Pew Research Center's 2024 survey, 46% of Brazilian adults identified as Catholic while 29% identified as Protestant. Pentecostals alone accounted for 19% of Brazilian adults.

And Brazilian Pentecostalism isn't simply an American import anymore.

It has developed its own institutions, theology, media empires and political organisations.

Brazilian churches have mastered television.

Radio.

Music.

Publishing.

Political mobilisation.

And increasingly, social media.

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, for example, built an enormous media operation around television and other platforms.

Brazilian evangelical Christianity has become a cultural industry.

It produces music.

Movies.

Television programming.

Podcasts.

Influencers.

Political commentators.

And enormous social-media ecosystems.

The movement has learned something that many traditional religious institutions were slow to understand:

attention is a form of power.

The television preacher became the social-media preacher

The technology changed.

The strategy didn't.

Television once allowed charismatic pastors to enter millions of homes.

Now TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp allow them to enter millions of phones.

A pastor no longer needs a television station.

He needs a camera, an internet connection and an audience.

That has dramatically lowered the cost of religious communication.

And evangelical organisations have become extraordinarily sophisticated at it.

They understand storytelling.

Testimony.

Emotion.

Music.

Short videos.

Personal transformation.

Celebrity.

Community.

And algorithmic distribution.

The modern evangelical preacher can operate simultaneously as pastor, broadcaster, entrepreneur, influencer and political communicator.

That is a very different institution from the parish church of the twentieth century.

But the CIA explanation still misses the biggest factor

If American intelligence really created the evangelical explosion, then the theory has a serious problem:

why did evangelical Christianity become so culturally powerful across countries where Washington's influence cannot adequately explain the outcome?

The answer is that the movement found fertile ground.

Latin America was experiencing massive urbanisation.

Traditional social structures were changing.

Millions of people were moving from rural communities into cities.

Poverty and inequality remained enormous.

People wanted community.

People wanted hope.

People wanted healing.

People wanted economic improvement.

People wanted a personal relationship with God.

Pentecostal churches offered all of these in different combinations.

And they did something else extremely well:

they adapted.

They didn't simply transplant American Christianity.

They Latin-Americanised it.

The numbers tell the story—but not the way viral posts often claim

It is tempting to say that evangelicals have already replaced Catholics across Latin America.

That is not accurate.

Catholicism remains the largest religious affiliation across the region.

Pew's latest research, based on a 2024 survey of six major Latin American countries, found Catholic majorities in Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Argentina, while Catholics and Protestants were both major populations in Brazil and Chile. Protestant shares ranged from 9% in Mexico to 29% in Brazil.

And the broader 2020 global religious landscape also shows Latin America remains overwhelmingly Christian, with Catholicism still the largest tradition across most countries.

So claims that evangelicals are already “the largest religious group in Central America” everywhere, or that more than half the population is evangelical in countries such as Costa Rica and Panama, need to be treated cautiously.

The numbers vary substantially depending on whether surveys count Pentecostals, Protestants, evangelicals and charismatic Christians separately or together.

But the transformation itself is undeniable.

Argentina, Uruguay and Mexico tell another story

The countries where evangelical growth has been less dominant also demonstrate why there is no single explanation.

Argentina has experienced Protestant growth, but Catholicism remains significant and religious disaffiliation is substantial.

Mexico remains predominantly Catholic.

Uruguay is particularly distinctive because religious non-affiliation is unusually high.

Pew's latest research found that in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, the religiously unaffiliated population is larger than the Protestant population.

So the real story isn't:

Catholicism → CIA → evangelicalism.

It is:

Catholic dominance → religious competition → evangelical expansion → religious pluralism → political and cultural transformation.

The Cold War accelerated and politicised parts of this process.

It did not create the entire process.

And this is where the story becomes relevant far beyond Latin America

The Latin American experience offers a fascinating case study in how religion becomes intertwined with geopolitics.

A foreign power can support a religious movement because it serves a political objective.

But religious movements have their own agency.

They develop their own institutions.

Their own money.

Their own leaders.

Their own theology.

Their own media.

And eventually their own political ambitions.

What begins as an alliance can become an independent power centre.

That is precisely what happened in much of Latin America.

The real legacy of the Cold War may therefore be stranger than the conspiracy theory

The simplistic version says:

The CIA sent evangelicals to Latin America to defeat communism.

The historical record doesn't support that formulation.

The more defensible version is much more interesting:

Washington recognised that religion was politically consequential, investigated the growing political activism of the Catholic Church, and developed relationships with anti-communist evangelical networks at a time when Pentecostalism was already expanding through its own missionary and local channels.

The result was not a religious movement controlled by Washington.

It was a religious ecosystem that eventually became powerful enough to influence governments, elections, media and culture on its own.

And that is why the story matters today.

Because the most successful political technologies are often not the ones governments invent.

They are the ones governments temporarily discover how to use.

Then the technology escapes them.

Latin American evangelicalism may be one of the clearest examples.

The CIA did not create the evangelical revolution.

But the Cold War helped turn religion into a geopolitical instrument.

And the people who inherited that instrument eventually learned how to use it for themselves.