Liberal Arts Services

Prof. Virginia Garrard-Burnett publishes two new books on Protestantism in Guatemala

Garrard-Burnett, Associate Professor in History and Religious Studies, has garnered critical acclaim from the Guatemalan press for her work

Posted: October 8, 2009

In the last 40 years, Guatemala has seen an unprecedented wave of conversions to Protestantism--more so than in any other country in Latin America. Prof. Virginia Garrard-Burnett's 1998 book, Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem, offered the first comprehensive history of Protestatism in this Central American nation. More than a decade after its publication, a Spanish-language translation, El protestantismo en Guatemala: Viviendo en la Nueva Jerusalén (2009), has arrived to much acclaim in the Guatemalen press. The newspaper La Hora hailed Prof. Garrard-Burnett as a "world authority" on the topic, calling her work a "classic" and a "key to understanding one of the most important aspects of the socio-political life of our country." Television reports and a major event at Guatemala's International Book Fair also marked its release.

One of the key findings of the book is that the growth of Protestantism in Guatemala has been a response to increasing state militarization, public violence, and globalization since the 1960's that undermined traditional social ties of custom and kinship. Dr. Garrard-Burnett further explores this tense relationship between Protestantism and violence in a new monograph, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efrain Rios Montt, 1982-1983 (forthcoming in December, 2009, from Oxford University Press). In the early 1980s, General Efrain Rios Montt, who became president in a coup, conducted a scortched-earth campaign of terror against rural Mayan communities, an event which has since been termed "the Mayan holocaust." Yet, despite the tens of thousands who perished in these atrocities, Rios Montt was an outspoken Pentecostal Christian. Garrard-Burnett uses these events to explore more deeply the several decades of political and social violence that gripped Guatemala. She finds that many Guatemalans converted to Pentecostalism because its strong apocalyptic worldview corresponded to the reality of violence in their communities.

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