Is Protestant Growth Inevitable? Assessing religious change in twenty-first century Mexico
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent decades have seen a rapid increase in membership of Protestant churches in most Latin American countries, including Mexico. The growth has been considered sustainable and linked to modernisation processes. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in southern Mexico since the late 1990s, most recently in 2008, this article seeks to challenge claims that Protestant growth in rural Latin America is inevitable, continuous and universal. Mapping and analysing changes in the religious composition of one particular Zapotec community in Oaxaca over the ten-year period, the article demonstrates that local level religious dynamics are multidirectional and considerably less predictable than aggregate statistics and general trends would suggest. Rather than presenting evidence of irrefutable Protestant growth, religious diversity in many Oaxacan communities has recently stabilised or actually decreased. Reasons for this can be sought in the internal dynamics of Protestant congregations, the high level of apostasy, national legislation, as well as in changes and revitalisation of Catholic practices. Keywords: Mexico, Oaxaca, religious change, Protestantism, Catholic Church, indigenous communities
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".