The surge of Protestant missionaries and charismatic revivals across South America didn’t happen in a vacuum; it unfolded within a Cold War landscape where the United States actively sought religious movements that could blunt the rise of Catholic liberation theology.
If you look closely at the historical record, declassified CIA cables, State Department memos, USAID contracts, congressional hearings, and the work of historians like Greg Grandin, Stephen Rabe, David Stoll, Martin-Baró, and Linda Rabben, the answer is no longer a dramatic conspiracy theory. It’s simply what happened. Not in the sense that every missionary was a covert agent. But because U.S. intelligence and diplomatic officials, from the 1950s through the 1980s, intentionally used Protestant missions as one tool in a broad counterinsurgency strategy designed to weaken liberation theology and preserve U.S.-aligned capitalist order in Latin America.
Before I expound I should let the reader know that I am no stranger to the world of Christian missions. I grew up the son of a Pentecostal pastor and went to school to get two degrees in church history. During college and seminary, I led and participated in mission trips to Fiji, the Philippines, and El Salvador. I worked at Oral Roberts University coordinating student missions trips across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. My intentions were completely sincere. Everyone around me believed we were spreading the gospel. What I didn’t understand at the time, what most missionaries never understand, is that the infrastructure we were plugged into had been shaped for decades by the Cold War, and that evangelical missions, especially the charismatic and Pentecostal branches, had been intentionally cultivated and supported by U.S. political and intelligence structures as an ideological counterweight to the very Christian movements the poor in Latin America were building for themselves.
To see why, you have to understand liberation theology. In the 1960s and 70s, Catholic priests, nuns, and laypeople across Latin America began reading the Bible with the poor in small base communities, and their work was shaped by theologians who helped give this movement its intellectual clarity. Gustavo Gutierrez in Peru, whose book A Theology of Liberation named the movement, argued that faith without a commitment to justice was empty. Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff in Brazil taught that the Gospel required solidarity with the poor and resistance to the structures that kept them poor. In El Salvador, thinkers like Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuria described the oppressed as the “crucified people,” showing that Christian faith was tested in the concrete suffering of those pushed to the margins.
These theologians did not invent liberation theology from above. They put into words what Christian base communities were discovering for themselves as they studied scripture in the shadow of military dictatorships, land monopolies, and U.S. backed elites. These communities did not just pray together. They examined the conditions of their lives. They asked why their societies were structured to benefit a small ruling class and what it meant that Jesus identified with the poor. Liberation theology took those questions seriously and treated them as a call to collective action, offering ordinary people new tools to interpret their own oppression and to organize for land reform, workers’ rights, literacy, and democracy.
Washington saw this as a threat because it encouraged people the empire needed to stay quiet to start asking political questions. The U.S. had already watched Cuba fall out of its orbit, and it was not interested in watching the rest of Latin America follow. So in the late 1960s, U.S. intelligence reports start describing liberation theology as a “subversive movement.” State Department briefings warned that Catholic priests sympathetic to the poor were helping create “pre-revolutionary conditions” in rural areas. The CIA produced internal assessments describing certain bishops as “radicalizing forces.” When the Brazilian bishops issued statements against torture under the military dictatorship, the U.S. embassy cabled Washington expressing concern that the Church was becoming politicized “in dangerous ways.”
So how do you stop a religious movement you can’t outlaw, that is spread through small communities, and whose leaders are clergy protected by the Vatican? The U.S. didn’t try to crush liberation theology directly. It tried to dilute it. Replace it. Counterprogram it. And evangelical missions became one of the most effective instruments for doing that.
This was not merely accidental alignment. It was intentional policy. The U.S. did this in several ways.
The first was through direct coordination with evangelical missionary organizations. One of the clearest examples is the Summer Institute of Linguistics, or SIL, the academic wing of Wycliffe Bible Translators. SIL specialized in going into remote Indigenous regions, studying unwritten languages, creating alphabets, and translating the Bible. These were trained linguists, many with graduate degrees. Their work, on the surface, was scholarly and humanitarian. But during the Cold War, SIL received contracts and grants from USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was a core part of U.S. soft-power strategy abroad. In several countries, including Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, and Ecuador, USAID partnered with SIL to carry out literacy programs among Indigenous groups. These literacy materials often included explicitly anti-communist lessons woven into biblical stories. In Guatemala, SIL teams operated in areas where leftist guerrillas were active, and the military government, backed by the U.S., gave SIL extraordinary freedoms and protection because they saw the missionaries as tools to pacify Indigenous resistance.
Anthropologists who worked in those regions documented how the presence of SIL often coincided with government resettlement programs designed to pull Indigenous people out of autonomous territories and bring them under state control. This was not because SIL itself was designing counterinsurgency tactics, but because SIL created the infrastructure, the literacy programs, the airstrips, the missionary aviation networks, that the state could use. Their aviation service, JAARS (Jungle Aviation and Radio Service), transported missionaries, medical supplies, literacy materials, and occasionally state officials in regions where guerrilla movements operated. JAARS pilots were not CIA assets, but they were operating in regions largely inaccessible to government forces without them, and the cooperation was mutually beneficial.
The second major example involves the Assemblies of God and Pentecostal missions more broadly. In Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Guatemala, especially during their military dictatorships, the U.S. government openly preferred evangelical churches to the Catholic Church. During the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, U.S. officials praised Pentecostal churches for “keeping the masses calm” and for reducing support for the left. In Brazil’s Amazon region, the military dictatorship encouraged American Pentecostal missions to expand because they provided a religious alternative to the radical priests who were helping Indigenous communities organize against land seizures. U.S. diplomatic cables from the 1970s note with approval that Pentecostal movements “lack the politicizing tendencies of certain Catholic clergy.”
Then there’s Campus Crusade for Christ, better known today as Cru. The founder, Bill Bright, made anti-communism a central part of his ministry from the 1950s onward. Campus Crusade programs were supported by U.S. embassies in various countries, especially during the authoritarian rule of Brazil’s military junta. In 1974, Bright launched the “Here’s Life” campaign in Brazil with the blessing of the U.S.-backed government. Internal documents show coordination between Campus Crusade and U.S. consular officials, who saw the campaign as a way to promote a depoliticized Christianity that discouraged support for leftist organizing. This was part of a broader U.S. strategy: if liberation theology created politically conscious Christians, evangelical revivalism created inward-focused ones.
The third major mechanism involved what the CIA called “psychological operations.” U.S. information agencies like USIA produced materials portraying liberation theologians as Marxist infiltrators who wanted to destroy the Church. These were circulated to conservative Catholic bishops, Protestant leaders, and local elites. The CIA also supported radio networks like Trans World Radio and HCJB (based in Ecuador), which broadcast sermons across the continent preaching submission to authority, anti-communism, and personal salvation rather than social transformation. Historians have shown that these broadcasts increased sharply in regions where liberation theology was strongest.
And then there is Guatemala under Efraín Ríos Montt. If there is a single moment when evangelical Christianity and U.S. counterinsurgency fully merged, it is this period. Ríos Montt was a general who took power in a 1982 military coup. He was a born-again Pentecostal and a member of an American-affiliated charismatic church. His weekly national TV addresses sounded like sermons, mixing Bible verses with calls for total obedience to the state. His government carried out one of the worst genocides in Latin American history against the Maya. Ríos Montt was not just supported by the U.S., Ronald Reagan personally praised him as “a man of great integrity.” American evangelical leaders visited him, prayed with him, and publicly defended him. Meanwhile, Catholic priests who supported Indigenous rights were being assassinated or disappeared.
Ríos Montt’s rule was not an outlier. It was the logical end of a decades-long project: replace politically engaged Catholicism with a politically harmless Protestantism, so that the structures of inequality remained untouched.
Even in countries without open dictatorships, the same pattern emerges. In Brazil, as Catholic base communities organized unions and landless workers, the Assemblies of God exploded in membership. In Chile, Pentecostal revivals surged under Pinochet. In Peru, evangelical missions expanded rapidly in the 1980s as Catholic priests began speaking against the military’s human rights abuses. In every case, U.S. officials described Protestant growth as a stabilizing force.
What makes all of this chilling is that it worked. By the 1990s, liberation theology had been sharply weakened. The Vatican, under pressure from conservative factions and geopolitical concerns, disciplined liberation theologians. Meanwhile, Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity had become the fastest-growing religious movement in Latin America. Today, Pentecostals form one of the strongest voting blocs for right-wing and authoritarian politicians across the continent.
Most missionaries who participated in this never knew. Their intentions were honest. Mine were honest. But the structure, the funding, the partnerships, the diplomatic support, the propaganda, the development projects, had been engineered long before any of us arrived. The U.S. didn’t need missionaries to be CIA agents. It just needed them to preach a version of Christianity that left the economic order untouched.
And that is exactly what happened.
Further Reading and Sources
For readers who want to investigate this history in more depth, the following books and primary source collections offer the most reliable and well documented accounts of the relationship between U.S. foreign policy, Protestant missions, and the suppression of liberation theology.
Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre. A detailed study of Guatemala and the Cold War with extensive analysis of how the U.S. opposed liberation theology and supported evangelical alternatives.
David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth. A careful examination of why evangelical missions expanded during military regimes and how that growth intersected with U.S. strategic priorities.
Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology and The Religious Roots of Rebellion. Clear introductions to liberation theology and its political context.
Stephen Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. Focuses on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America with discussion of religious dynamics under military regimes.
Linda Rabben, Unnatural Selection. Documents missionary involvement in Indigenous regions and the political implications of their presence.
Manuel Vasquez and Anna Peterson, Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas. A broader contextual look at how Christianity and politics interact in Latin America.
National Security Archive, Cold War in Latin America Collections. Declassified U.S. embassy cables, CIA reports, and military documents.
CIA CREST Database. Digitized declassified files related to psychological operations, USAID partnerships, and religious influence programs.
These sources provide the clearest window into how religious movements became instruments within larger geopolitical strategies across the Western Hemisphere.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate