ABSTRACT
To talk about religious beliefs in Inter-American relations today means to refer to a wide variety of actors as different as isolated indigenous groups in the Amazon, traditional Catholicism, powerful upper-middle-class Neopentecostals, and urban tribe churches. It also involves Latin American Pentecostal mission endeavors in the USA and transnational elites of faith business, and finally the reception and transformation of US religious discourses and practices. The colonial period is of interest for Inter-American studies on religion inasmuch as during this time of almost complete separation of Anglo-Saxon and Spanish colonies, quite distinct religious habitus were formed. The Anglo and Latin American worlds remained completely separate. While the evangelical mission societies–American Bible Society, Christian and Missionary Alliance and Latin American Mission–prompted the first wave of mass evangelism in Latin America, the enduring change of the Latin American landscape came with the Pentecostal and, later, the Neopentecostal movements.
