Taylor C. Boas observes “the culture wars are coming to Latin America” (1) in his excellent examination of evangelical descriptive representation across the region. Noting this representation varies significantly across time and space, he asks “why Latin America's evangelicals have become political power brokers in some countries” while being “relegated to the sidelines in others” (3). It is a question with important implications for policymaking on LGBTQ and reproductive rights now and in the future.

Working from a comparative historical framework, Boas argues two critical junctures explain variation in evangelical descriptive representation. The first involves secular challenges to Catholic authority around the turn of the twentieth century. Where the secular state sought to strip the Catholic Church of its traditional influence, but the Catholic Church mobilized and sought to take its privileges back, evangelicals were threatened by the Church's efforts and mobilized themselves to protect their own religious equality. Evangelicals were subsequently better-positioned later, in the case of Brazil, to mobilize against worldview threats caused by the expansion of LGBTQ and reproductive rights. At the same time, if a broader societal cleavage is also a fault line within the evangelical community itself, its ability to m