Christianity in Border Region: Transits, Tensions and Religious Reconfigurations

Abstract

The region known as the Triple Frontier, in South America, draws attention for its qualitative religious diversity. Alongside the expressions of believing and feeling related to the Catholics and Evangelicals, still majority, there are diversified religious practices. So that the neighborhoods and streets of the cities of Ciudad del Este (PY), Puerto Iguaçu (AR) and Foz do Iguaçu (BRA), make this border region a space of conflict and privileged religious transit to think the religious dynamics in America Particularly in the South of the American continent. The strong socio-cultural interrelations feedback from the intense flow of material and symbolic goods, enabling a complexification of Christian religious matrices in the region. In this sense, this article seeks to: discuss how Christianity - notably Catholic and evangelical - has organized and maintained itself in this dynamic and multiform religious scene; characterizing the specificities of the different manifestations of belief / devotion / practices in the region insofar as it seeks to configure the socio-historical context of the emergence of these religious groups, their frontier flows and the relationship established with current social practices; the transnationalization of the sacred discourse of these communities and their role in understanding the relationship between cultural diversity and religious indoctrination. To provide an ethnographic and analytical picture of Christianity in the frontier region.

Keywords: Border. Religion. Social dinamics.