The New Yorker:

A new book looks at a clandestine movement to proselytize in Muslim countries.

By Graciela Mochkofsky

The Brazilian journalist Adriana Carranca was on a reporting trip to Afghanistan in 2008, seven years after the U.S. invasion, when she heard about a married couple from her home country who were running a pizza-delivery business in Kabul. They had to be mercenaries, or drug dealers, Carranca thought, and she wondered about the plausibility of anyone believing that the pair, who at the time had two young children, would cross the world just to sell pizza. Indeed, the business was a front for a clandestine operation, and it took Carranca two years to uncover how extraordinary their true mission was: to convert Afghans to Christianity in a nation where such a conversion can be deadly.

Carranca chronicles the couple’s secret life in “Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims,” her first book in English. (The publisher is Columbia Global Reports, an imprint directed by Nicholas Lemann, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker.) Their story may sound like an extreme case of religious fervor, but it’s part of a striking phenomenon: the expansion of the evangelical movement in the Global South, and the growing role that Latin Americans play in it—a development that has received ample attention from academia but not enough from journalism. Carranca’s book arrives to fill that void.

To understand why the couple undertook such a dangerous mission, it’s necessary first to understand the radical religious transformation of Latin America. By the late twentieth century, after four hundred years of Catholic hegemony, the region had begun shifting toward Protestantism, with Pentecostalism—a charismatic evangelical faith that began appearing in various countries by the late nineteenth century—driving most of the growth. According to some counts, by the nineteen-eighties, half of Latin American Protestants were Pentecostals. By 2014, a Pew Research Center survey found that about one in five Latin Americans identified as Protestants, though just one in ten said that they had been born into a Protestant family. “Much of the movement away from Catholicism and toward Protestantism in Latin America has occurred in the span of a single lifetime,” Pew reported.

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