Sacrifice and Regeneration

Seventh-day Adventism and Religious Transformation in the Andes

Yael Mabat

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781496216700
• eBook ISBN: 9781496233936
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

At the dawn of the twentieth century, while Lima's aristocrats hotly debated the future of a nation filled with "Indians, " thousands of Aymara and Quechua Indians left the pews of the Catholic Church and were baptized into Seventh-day Adventism. One of the most staggering Christian phenomena of our time, the mass conversion from Catholicism to various forms of Protestantism in Latin America was so successful that Catholic contemporaries became extremely anxious on noticing that parts of the Indigenous population in the Andean plateau had joined a Protestant church. In Sacrifice and Regeneration Yael Mabat focuses on the extraordinary success of Seventh-day Adventism in the Andean highlands at the beginning of the twentieth century and sheds light on the historical trajectories of Protestantism in Latin America. By approaching the religious conversion among Indigenous populations in the Andes as a multifaceted and dynamic interaction between converts, missionaries, and their social settings and networks, Mabat demonstrates how the religious and spiritual needs of converts also brought salvation to the missionaries. Conversion had important ramifications on the way social, political, and economic institutions on the local and national level functioned. At the same time, socioeconomic currents had both short-term and long-term impacts on idiosyncratic religious practices and beliefs that both accelerated and impeded religious change. Mabat's innovative historical perspective on religious transformation allows us to better comprehend the complex and often contradictory way in which Protestantism took shape in Latin America.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1
• 1. Wars, Indians, and the Peruvian Nation
• 2. Army Veterans Return to the Highlands
• 3. Religious Conversion and Racial Regeneration in an Indian Community
• 4. Religious Conversion and Communal Cohesion
• Part 2
• 5. Seventh-day Adventism and the Foreign Missionary Enterprise, 1850–1920
• 6. Seventh-day Adventists and the Challenge of Modern Times
• 7. Everyday Sacrifices and Missionaries’ Experiences in the Andean Highlands
• Part 3
• 8. Building an “Indian” Mission on the Top of the Andes
• 9. From the Lake Titicaca “Indian Mission” to “the Lake Titicaca Mission”
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Yael Mabat