LATIN AMERICAN countries have long celebrated a plethora of Roman Catholic public holidays, from Corpus Christi to St Peter and St Paul. But this year Chile set a regional precedent, declaring October 31st a public holiday in honour of “the evangelical and Protestant churches”. It marks the date in 1517 when Martin Luther pinned his 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, starting the Protestant Reformation. Only Slovenia and some German states take it as a holiday.
What makes the decision to celebrate the Reformation odder is that Chile is the only country in Latin America that still has a significant (Catholic) Christian Democrat party. Nevertheless, the new holiday was approved by a unanimous vote in Congress. The politicians seem to have spotted an opportunity.
In the latest census in 2002 in a once staunchly Catholic country, 15% of Chileans said they were “evangelicals” (a synonym in Latin America for Protestants). State schools now offer a choice of Catholic and evangelical religious teaching, and the armed forces have chaplains from both denominations.
Chile is not alone. More than 15% of Brazilians and over 20% of Guatemalans are now evangelicals. Most Latin American Protestants are Pentecostals, stressing direct experience of God. Pentecostal churches continue to multiply in poorer areas of Santiago, as they do across the region. A former Catholic bishop and liberation theologian was elected as Paraguay's president this year. But the embrace of Protestantism by Latin America's socially aspirational poor looks like an inexorable trend. Five centuries after the region's forced conversion to Catholicism, Chile's new holiday is a cultural milestone.
It comes at a price. Chile may have a reputation as boringly hard-working, but now has 16 public holidays a year (plus the “bridge” days that Chileans tack on when a holiday falls near a weekend). A workday's production is worth some $735m in lost output. So the government wants quietly to drop two of three holidays dedicated to the Virgin Mary.