Tensiones en el campo religioso protestante-evangélico chileno. Jóvenes profesionales y sociabilidades en los procesos de movilidad religiosa

Abstract

The following article presents some results of an investigation that analyzes the Chilean protestant-evangelical religious field in the context of the deinstitutionalization of religion, a phenomenon characterized by a change in individual disposition towards authority and a greater distance from traditional institutional ties. This research proposed the manner in which the processes of individualization and pluralization, associated with the sociocultural transformations of recent years, affect the internal dynamics of this field. Mainly, this scenario leads to an opening to multiple modes of community belief and ascription. For this, the role of faith-based organizations in academia and their influence on young professionals is analyzed. The latter are understood as deregulatory communities of the religious field. They are also seen as spaces of resignification and creative agency that enrich community religiosity and are more effective in reading the sensibilities of the new generations. At the same time, these organizations are posed as disputed territories for religious capital with conventional churches. This has implications for the processes of religious diversification and mobility that structure the protestant-evangelical identity, characterized the presence of greater tensions between institutional expectations and claims to personal fulfillment. Afterwards, I propose a theoretical model of religious mobility seeking to establish the elements that are part of this transit. To this end, the proposal is based on the interweaving of structural factors, existential challenges, and experiences of rupture, that configure its conditions of possibility. Finally, it is concluded that the internal dynamics of intense traffic and movements within the evangelical world constitute phenomena that demand to be approached from new theoretical-analytical approaches that allow their complexity to be accounted for. The methodology consisted of a qualitative strategy, making use of the life stories method, participant observation technique, and semi structured open interviews.