Religion Out of Place: Social Regulation of Evangelical Expansion in Buenos Aires

Abstract

The chapter argues that secularism has a strong, often overlooked, spatial dimension that involves the control and/or invisibilization of certain religious practices in socially significant places where they should not be present. The study of the expansion of Pentecostal churches in the city of Buenos Aires, during the 1980s, shows how their visibilization was accompanied by newspaper articles that found this new presence odd and a symptom of urban decay, belying the prevalent ideal image of the city as “European”, “White” and “Catholic”. The article contends that religious regulation, a necessary feature of secularism, has social as well as governmental dimensions and that public space is an important social arena where it must be enforced.