Seventh-day Adventism and Religious Transformation in the Andes (2022)

“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.’’

Description from the publisher’s website.

See below a video of the online book launch of Dr Yael Mabat's Sacrifice and Regeneration: Seventh-day Adventism and Religious Transformation in the Andes. Dr Mabat delivered a lecture on the book with time for questions and discussions afterwards. (19.04.23)

Sacrifice and Regeneration: Seventh-day Adventism & Religious Transformation in the Andes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKJfZgmYmh8

“About the Speaker

Dr Yael Mabat
Lecturer at Ben Gurion University

Dr Yael Mabat is a visiting scholar at the Institute of the Americas, University College London, a post-doctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University, and a lecturer at Ben Gurion University, Israel. Her research focuses on modern Christianity in the Americas with a particular interest in transnational religious encounters and how they shaped local social, economic, and political structures. Her forthcoming book Sacrifice and Regeneration: Seventh-day Adventism and Religious Transformation in the Andes, examines the unique success of the Seventh-day Adventist missionaries in the Andean highlands. More recently she has begun working on the intersection between religion and modern medicine, primarily as manifested through the work of medical missionaries.”
Sacrifice and Regeneration: Seventh-day Adventism & Religious Transformation in the Andes | UCL Institute of the Americas - UCL – University College London