The Politics of the Spirit: The Political Implications of Pentecostalized Religion in Costa Rica and Guatemala. By Timothy J. Steigenga. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001. 220p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper

The Politics of the Spirit is Timothy Steigenga's long-awaited quantitative study of religious affiliation and political behavior in Central America. What he has done in this spare and conscientious study is to take to task the “conventional wisdom” about Protestantism in Central America. This...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe American political science review Vol. 96; no. 3; pp. 673 - 674
Main Author Garrard-Burnett, Virginia
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.09.2002
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Summary:The Politics of the Spirit is Timothy Steigenga's long-awaited quantitative study of religious affiliation and political behavior in Central America. What he has done in this spare and conscientious study is to take to task the “conventional wisdom” about Protestantism in Central America. This is a formidable endeavor, given the flood of scholarly literature that has been produced by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists about Protestantism, and especially Pentecostalism, in Latin America over the past two decades. Because Pentecostalism seemed to emerge in Central America during the region's political crisis of the late twentieth century, much of this literature carried with it a highly deterministic subtext, defined by Max Weber and by models of political behavior borrowed from the United States and European experiences.
ISSN:0003-0554
1537-5943
DOI:10.1017/S0003055402870368