Religion in Chile: Catholic Decline and the Pentecostal Surge

Chile is a majority Christian country, but Catholicism no longer dominates it the way it did a generation ago. Somewhere between four and five in ten Chileans now identify as Catholic, close to a fifth belong to Pentecostal or other evangelical churches, and a fast-growing share -- concentrated among the young and in Santiago -- claim no religion at all.

The Fastest Emptying Pews in South America

For most of the twentieth century Chile looked like a textbook Catholic country. The 1992 national census counted more than three-quarters of Chileans as Catholic, and the Church held informal authority over schools, hospitals, charity and family law. That consensus came apart unusually fast. The 2002 census put Catholics at roughly seven in ten, and the regional Latinobarometro survey series has tracked the figure sliding into the forties over the past decade.

Two things happened at once. Evangelical churches, almost all of them Pentecostal, held and modestly grew their share. Meanwhile the religiously unaffiliated expanded from a small urban minority into one of the largest blocs in the country, leaving Chile at the secular end of Latin America alongside Uruguay -- a striking position for a nation whose armed forces still march behind a Marian patroness.

• Catholic: a plurality, roughly four to five in ten adults, down from over 70 percent in the early 1990s
• Evangelical and Pentecostal: in the region of 15 to 20 percent, concentrated in working-class neighborhoods and the southern regions
• No religion, agnostic or atheist: the fastest-growing category, roughly a quarter to a third in recent polling
• Other: small Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Baha'i and Latter-day Saint communities, plus Mapuche practice that survey categories capture poorly

A Revival in Valparaiso and the Church on Jotabeche

Chilean Pentecostalism was not imported by a foreign mission board. It began inside a Methodist congregation in Valparaiso in 1909, where the American-born pastor Willis Hoover encouraged prayer meetings that produced ecstatic worship, healing claims and speaking in tongues. The Methodist hierarchy rejected the phenomenon, Hoover and his followers walked out, and by 1910 they had organized what became the Iglesia Metodista Pentecostal. That makes Chile home to one of the oldest independent Pentecostal movements anywhere.

Its most visible monument is the Catedral Evangelica de Chile on Jotabeche Avenue in Santiago, an auditorium-style temple seating many thousands of worshippers and serving as the movement's national center. Every September, around the Fiestas Patrias, it hosts an evangelical Te Deum attended by the president -- a deliberate counterpart to the Catholic Te Deum at Santiago's Metropolitan Cathedral, and a measure of how far Pentecostals have come from the social margins.

The style stayed distinct from North American megachurch culture: brass bands, street preaching in plazas and bus terminals, strong pastoral hierarchy, lay preachers who hold ordinary jobs. Growth has been strongest where the Catholic parish network was thinnest -- new peripheral settlements, mining towns and the rural south.

The Karadima Case and the Collapse of Institutional Trust

Chile's Catholic decline is not only a story about secularization. It is also a story about scandal. In 2011 the Vatican found Fernando Karadima, an influential Santiago priest whose parish in El Bosque had formed a generation of clergy, guilty of sexually abusing minors; Pope Francis laicized him in 2018. The damage widened through Juan Barros, a bishop accused by survivors of witnessing and concealing that abuse, whose 2015 appointment to the diocese of Osorno was protested by parishioners inside the cathedral itself.

Francis defended Barros during his January 2018 visit to Chile, then sent investigators and reversed course. In May 2018 every active Chilean bishop traveled to Rome and offered his resignation collectively, an event with no real modern precedent; several were accepted in the months that followed. Chilean polling since has repeatedly placed confidence in the Church among the lowest of any national institution, and during the protests of late 2019 a number of churches were burned or vandalized -- anticlerical anger unthinkable in the 1980s, when the Vicaria de la Solidaridad made the Church the country's most respected defender of human rights under the dictatorship.

Mapuche Religion: Ngen, Machi and the Guillatun

Close to a tenth of Chileans identified as Mapuche in the 2017 census, mostly in Araucania, Los Rios, Los Lagos, Biobio and the southern cities. Mapuche religion is a living tradition, not a museum survival, though many families practice it alongside Catholic or evangelical membership. At its center is a relational view of the world: places, rivers, forests and weather have ngen, spirit-owners owed respect, and conduct is governed by admapu, the inherited body of custom. Ngenechen is invoked as the ordering power over people and land.

The machi and the rewe

The machi is the community's healer and ritual specialist, most often a woman, called through dreams and illness and trained for years under an established machi. She works with lawen, Mapuche herbal medicine, and with the kultrun, a shallow drum painted with a quartered design of the cosmos. Her ritual post is the rewe, a carved wooden pole with steps cut into it, planted facing east. Public health services in the south now run intercultural programs that formally recognize machi practice.

What a guillatun is for

The guillatun, or ngillatun, is the major collective ceremony: a multi-day gathering on a dedicated field, oriented east toward the sunrise, in which a community prays for rain, harvests, health and balance. Riders circle the field, families raise temporary shelters, animals and food are offered, and muday, a fermented grain drink, is shared. It is a religious act rather than a performance, and many communities restrict photography and outside attendance.

Land is inseparable from this. Forestry plantations, dams and road building have repeatedly cut across sites understood as the homes of ngen, which is why Mapuche territorial claims are argued in religious as well as legal language.

Desert Devotions: La Tirana and the Andean North

The single largest religious gathering in Chile happens in a village of about a thousand people in the Tarapaca desert. Each July, La Tirana fills with well over a hundred thousand pilgrims for the feast of the Virgen del Carmen on the sixteenth. What makes it distinctive is the bailes religiosos: sworn dance societies, some more than a century old, whose members promise years of service. Diabladas in horned masks, descended from the Andean tradition shared with Oruro in Bolivia, dance in shifts before the sanctuary from dawn into the night, then formally take their leave of the image before going home.

This is Andean syncretism rather than a Spanish import. Northern Chile's Aymara communities keep offerings to the Pachamama, mountain shrines and agricultural rites inside a calendar of saints' days, and the Atacameno villages around San Pedro keep patronal feasts with their own confraternities. The Virgen del Carmen herself is patroness of Chile and of its armed forces, a link dating to the independence wars.

Secular Law, Persistent Faith

Chile separated church and state in the 1925 constitution, but the legal culture stayed conservative long after: divorce was only legalized in 2004, making Chile one of the last countries in the world to permit it. Abortion on three specific grounds followed in 2017 and same-sex marriage in 2021, both over episcopal objection. A 1999 religious equality law gave non-Catholic churches legal parity, and since 2008 the national calendar has included a Day of the Evangelical and Protestant Churches on 31 October alongside Good Friday and the Immaculate Conception.

None of that means Chileans stopped believing. The country gained its first two modern saints in living memory -- Teresa de los Andes in 1993 and the Jesuit Alberto Hurtado in 2005 -- and Hurtado's Hogar de Cristo is still the largest charity in the country. What has weakened is the authority of institutions, not the appetite for the sacred, and that is exactly the gap Pentecostal congregations, Mapuche revival and unaffiliated personal spirituality have moved into.