Abstract

JAIMES MARTINEZ, Ramiro. Secularization and Revolutionary Protestantism. The Representation of Religious Dissent as a Historiographical Project in Jean-Pierre Bastian. Estud. hist. mod. contemp. Mex [online]. 2025, n.69, pp.249-278.  Epub Apr 29, 2025. ISSN 0185-2620.  https://doi.org/10.22201/iih.24485004e.2025.69.77955.

From the perspective of social history, this essay aims to analyze the representation of Protestantism as a historical subject in the historiography of the 1980s and 1990s, taking the case of Jean-Pierre Bastian. The leading argument is that Bastian built a homogeneous representation of a liberal, middle-class, and democratic Protestantism, based on three referents. First, the work of Deborah Baldwin, from which Bastian adapted the thesis of religious dissent as a foundation for political dissent. Secondly, by promoting a similar interpretation of the work of the English historian Eric Hobsbawm. Finally, I assert that the theory of secularization based on the tradition-modernity dichotomy throughout was the model for this historiographical project, that combines the anti-Pentecostal stigma of American and Mexican denominational Protestantism with contributions of social scientists such as David Martin and David Stoll, thus reinforcing the portrayal of a liberal, democratic, and modernizing Protestantism. Another alternative is to consider it as an expression of breakdown throughout Christendom regime, which had prompted a distinction between clericalized tendencies throughout the Church, and predominantly secular ones, subject to new proposals for social struggle.

Keywords : social history; history of religion; religious change; secularization; Protestantism.

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