Abstract
Some ten years ago, the Peruvian government started a project of collaboration between some churches and the National Penitentiary Institution, with individual churches intended to be responsible for a prison unit. However, by 2016, there only remained one successful unit: Ancón jail, under the care of MMM (Movimiento Misionero Mundial), a fundamentalist church popular in poor areas (MMM 2016a, c). Through interviews with pastors and inmates and by studying living conditions, I investigate the main features of MMM’s methods. Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition and a lived religion approach are taken as conceptual frameworks. The excluded inmate goes through a recognition process which enables him to develop a new identity and become a successful MMM proselyte. In parallel to religious and inner processes, he is reinserted into society.
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Notes
- 1.
In this article, I use the term “evangelical” in the Latin American idiom, to designate Christian non Catholic people.
- 2.
This investigation is part of a project on secularization developed in the Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya financed by the Italian Bishops Conference. We are very grateful to Dr. José Luis Pérez Guadalupe, Dr. Bocanegra and Pilar Diaz for helping us in our investigation, especially in getting authorization to enter the jails. We also wish to thank Claire Maas, Gustavo Martinez and David Romero, as well as those who have kindly accepted to share their experiences with us. For the purpose of the investigation, in 2016, we visited SJL and Ancon II jails as well as two other jails. We have assisted to religious offices inside SJL (MMM office and Catholic mass). We have interviewed INPE authorities (Dr. Pérez Guadalupe, Dr. Bocanegra, Violeta Olortegui, and Pilar Diaz), two INPE social assistants, three MMM pastors in charge of SJL and Ancon II, eight leaders from MMM in charge of visiting jails, six inmates from MMM (among them the leaders inside SJl and Ancon II) as well as six catholic leaders in charge or involved in the pastoral care (among them a priest, two nuns and officers in charge of jail pastoral from the Peruvian Bishop Conference), four catholic inmates involved in the pastoral care and four evangelical leaders or pastors inmates, in addition to several informal conversations with various people, nuns, inmates, leaders.
Religious leaders and religiously involved inmates were happy to help: they were thankful for the interest we had in them; they were also, especially MMM members, proud of their achievement inside the church. In the inmates’ interviews, we have used a pattern similar to that of Ammerman’s interview; however, we were not authorized to record the interviews and therefore have not been able to analyze them in a thoroughly systematic way as Ammerman does.
- 3.
The investigation was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect the view of the John Templeton Foundation.
- 4.
Analyzing religious conversion, mostly in a different context, Pierre-Yves Brandt reaches the following conclusion: “it seems that, from a psychological point of view, conversion corresponds to a kind of identity change which may be felt subjectively as a sudden breakthrough. Nevertheless, such a transformation implies an entire process which articulates an intra-psychological experience with recognition from others” (Brandt 2009, 40). For Hervieu-Léger (1999, 131), “all the process of conversion are told as ways of identity formation.” Some authors (Rambo , 1993, 22; Gooren 2010, 38) have attempted to delineate phases in the process of conversion. Henri Gooren, a specialist of conversion in Latin America, criticizing “the Pauline idea of conversion as a once-in-a-lifetime experience” (2010, 127) conceptualizes a process of conversion in several steps (“conversion careers”) implying more and more involvement in the religious institution: “preaffiliation,” “affiliation,” “conversion,” “confession,” and maybe “desaffiliation” (2010, 50). Those steps roughly match Honneth’s recognition process but Gooren’s theory does not attempt to understand the inner process of change so important in the case of inmates. Honneth’s theory is especially convenient for understanding marginal and excluded populations, for it enables us to interpret each facet mentioned by Brandt, Hervieu-Léger, and Gooren as part of a general transformation process. It must be recalled that Honneth developed his theory after analyzing Foucault’s work and Hegel’s early writings (the philosopher takes as a model for reflection the case of criminals). The criminal world and jail subculture imply an interplay between exclusion and inclusion at the core of Honneth’s theories.
- 5.
Many authors, among them Snow and Machalek (1983) and Lewis Rambo (1993), consider that “crisis and tensions are at the heart of conversion” (Gooren 2010, 41). This approach, which may explain many conversions, does not take into account the subjective dimension, the feeling of shame, which in jail has been revealed in interviews as the main motive for conversion.
- 6.
There is a large literature on the topic. We have gone through some of it previously (Lecaros 2016a). Two authors are worth mentioning in this context: Guillermo Nugent (2010) analyzes Peruvian society in terms of tutelage: Peruvian citizens have been traditionally treated as minors who have to be guided by the military and the Catholic Church; Jenny Pearce has shown how systematically Latin American governments tend to rule in an authoritarian way to impose order. She argues that by using violence to fight violence an unending spiral of violence is created (Pearce 2010).
- 7.
These questions are inspired by the work of Heinz Streib. The author shows how bitterness may be felt upon leaving fundamentalist groups in particular after experiencing disappointment with members of the denomination. On the contrary, someone who has in a way outgrown the limitations of the denomination conceptual system would not feel such a trauma (Keller et al. 2013, 127). Taking into account that disaffiliation is relatively frequent among Evangelicals (Gooren 2010; Lecaros 2015b), the outcome of disaffiliation for an ex-criminal member of MMM could be devastating if he has not built up multiple wellsprings of recognition.
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Lecaros, V. (2020). Conversion as a Safe Way Out of Crime in Peru. In: Sremac, S., Jindra, I. (eds) Lived Religion, Conversion and Recovery . Palgrave Studies in Lived Religion and Societal Challenges. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40682-0_9
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