ABSTRACT
Populism, religion and colonialism provide contemporary links that can be explored through three related cases: the emergence of Pentecostalism as a popular and public religion; ecumenical transnational networks of socio-political activism; and the travails of democratisation in the context of a new religion/capitalism assemblage in the South akin to what William Connolly called the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine”. Given the salience of recent epistemic debates on the situatedness and critical edge of knowledge, which search for an authoritative voice from the Latin American context, I will begin with some theoretical notes on the debate on postcoloniality in relation to social and political activism of minorities and religion. I will then explore the two forms of self-inscription mentioned above and move on to examine their connections to the clear configuration of a fierce religious right-wing discourse at odds with older forms of Protestant public engagement in the region that could be called ecumenical.
