A large body of literature analyzes trends of religious decline across Western Europe and North America. Often rooted in secularization theory—the idea that modernization reduces religious beliefs and practice—this research lacks attention to global, comparative contexts. In this study, the author addresses that gap by examining religious trends spanning two decades across 17 Latin American countries to analyze changes in religious affiliation, church attendance, and religious importance. The author demonstrates that institutional religiosity, measured by affiliation and church attendance, is declining, whereas personal religiosity, measured by religious importance, remains resilient and is even increasing. This fragmented secularization is distinct from patterns observed in Western Europe and the United States. Further analyses highlight additional differences, showing that religious dimensions in Latin America are less tightly correlated and that the religiously unaffiliated maintain stronger religious beliefs and practices than their counterparts in the West. To account for this divergence, the author integrates insights from the neosecularization paradigm with Latin American theories of popular religiosity and lived religion. This synthesis provides a more precise framework for understanding secularization in Latin America and offers a model for applying secularization theory to non-Western contexts, in which modernization unfolds in diverse ways.
Matthew Blanton (Fri,) studied this question.