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When Daniel H. Levine arrived in Venezuela in 1967, the study of religion in Latin America-never mind its scholarship in political science-hardly existed.

Despite the Catholic Church's 500-year institutional presence in Latin America and the rising tide of change among the clergy and the faithful after Vatican II, few scholars had bothered to study religion in the region.

Levine came to Caracas to conduct research for his dissertation, later published as Conflict and Political Change in Venezuela (Princeton University Press, 1973). He concedes that up to this point he had been largely unconcerned with religion in Latin America, or elsewhere for that matter, but he had a natural interest in questions of conflict and ideology. As part of his dissertation, he conducted a case study on state subsidy of religious education, and he quickly began to see that the church and its relationship to the faithful were changing rapidly.

"Going to Venezuela in 1967 was serendipitous happenstance," reflects Levine, the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

Nearly 40 years later, he is considered to be a pioneer in systematic research on religion and civil society in Latin America. His work in Churches and Politics in Latin America (Sage, 1980), Religion and Politics in Latin America: The Catholic Church in Venezuela and Colombia (Princeton university press, 1981), Religion and Political Conflict in Latin America (University of North Carolina press, 1986), Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism (Princeton University press, 1992), and Constructing Culture and Power in Latin America (University of Michigan Press, 1993), are essential reading for any scholar in the field. (See Indexing Levine for his top articles.)

In hindsight, Levine arrived in Latin America-Venezuela and Colombia specifically-at a fascinating moment in the region's history. In the late 1960s, Venezuela was one of a handful of democracies in Latin America considered exceptional for its stability and relative prosperity, while neighboring Colombia provided an example of a deeply conservative church which was experiencing strong internal conflict. The fact that the 1968 CELAM conference was held in Colombia's second city, Medellin, heightened interest in the issues throughout the country.

"He is one of the most important scholars of Latin American politics and society of the last 30 years," said Faculty Fellow FRANCES HAGOPIAN, the Michael grace ii Associate professor of Latin American Studies. "I learned more from Dan's writing on religion than anyone else's. He is a student of democracy, and more specifically, of Venezuelan politics. He is also a student of civil society, which unites his work on religion and democracy."

"He has taught us that we can't understand religion without understanding civil society; we can't understand democracy without studying civil society."

A gifted student, Levine graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College and did graduate study at the London School of Economics and Yale University (where he received a PhD in political science in 1970).

His entire professional career has been spent at the University of Michigan, where he has served as chair of one of the top-ranked political science departments in the country and as director of the program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

During his career, he has been a prolific author, producing seven books along with over 70 articles and chapters and more than 40 book reviews.

"My long-standing interest has been the search for generalization, not simply to observed regularities, but rather to observed patterns in the elective affinity of ideas and audience, consciousness and context," wrote Levine recently.

"To paraphrase Max Weber, my goal is not merely to identify a unit of behavior or the empirical regularity, but to get at what ‘following a rule' means to those who organize their lives to follow such rules."

What sparked your interest in religion in Latin America?

When I did my book on Venezuela (Conflict and Political Change in Venezuela), it became clear to me that the church had changed its views on politics: it was much more open to democracy and organizing. Then I got interested in religion by virtue of reading a book called Catholicism, Social Control, and Modernization in Latin America by Ivan Vallier (prentice-hall, 1970). He argued that in order for the church to have an influence on the changing society of Latin America, it had to get out of politics in order to have a broad social influence. I didn't agree with much of what he wrote, and ironically, what happened in Latin America was the precise opposite of what Vallier expected: Christians for Socialism emerged in Chile and liberation theology began to emerge at this very time and religion and politics became a field of intense, often violent conflict. But although I disagreed with Vallier, he did spark my interest in exploring the field more deeply.

I concluded (in Religion and Politics in Latin America: The Catholic Church in Venezuela and Colombia) that Catholicism was changing, and if it was going to change society, it first had to change itself. Some of those changes were visible in terms of how the church engaged issues and the career patterns of its leaders. At the same time, I became very interested in popular religion and popular groups.

My second single-authored book on religion, Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism, was concerned with the possible contribution of Catholicism to democracy: both political and the democratization of culture and civil society. Lately, I've been writing a little more on that and what we can expect in terms of the growth of Protestantism and changes within the church itself.

What does the future hold for the Catholic Church?

Latin America is not so much "turning Pentecostal" or even "turning protestant" as it is "turning pluralist" for the first time in modern history. The research points to continued intense competition among religions in an ever-broadening range of arenas and media, continued diffusion of spirit-filled intense forms of religious practice, growing independence of Latin American protestant churches, and growing projection out of Latin America by these same churches.

It also seems clear there will be no successful reconstruction of catholic monopoly, and no major new confessional political parties of any affiliation. The trends suggest a pullback from confrontational politics and a renewed public stress on conventional moral issues including education, censorship, family, and sexuality and reproduction, along with competition for state subsidies and privileges.

The statistics regarding Protestantism are very unreliable, so we do not have a really precise idea of how many people have actually defected from the Catholic Church, but the trend is clearly to the growth of effective religious pluralism in Latin America. Some of the most interesting changes have come with the rapid growth of locally led Pentecostal churches, and their changing involvement with politics. Pentecostals used to be dismissed as people who either had no interest in politics (which was a realm of contamination, and anyway of little interest in the light of Christ's imminent return) or as secure allies of the Right. These generalizations no longer hold. Pentecostal churches and believers have gotten involved in politics (in Latin America as here in the united States) and as they do so, have assumed a much broader range of positions and alliances than past experience might have led one to expect. Through its creation of multiple centers of organization and community, the Pentecostal movement has important indirect effects on politics as it makes civil society more dense and creates new citizens.

What explains the rise of Pentecostalism?

This notion that Pentecostalism is no more than a stalking horse for the religious Right doesn't hold water. Similarly the notion that people were radicalized through participation in base communities doesn't hold up. I think they [Pentecostal churches] draw on people who have a deep need for religious experience. They provide a very intense spiritual community that's very appealing.

They also work a lot in the cities-places where the Catholic Church doesn't do very well. They promote issues that the Catholic Church doesn't put up front very much: how to deal with alcoholism, domestic abuse, physical health and healing. When you ask people in Latin America what they consider a big problem, they often mention alcoholism. When I first got this answer, I thought to myself, don't they understand the political system or economic structures? But the truth is that if you have ever seen a home destroyed by alcoholism you understand how big an issue it is for many people. It is not necessary to reform the social or economic structure to deal first with something really concrete.

The protestant and Pentecostal approach has been that to reform society, you have to begin by reforming persons, and they work at it in concrete, community-centered ways.

As one of the first scholars to really study Church base communities, how did the reality match with the perception of them as radicals?

There was actually quite a bit written about them-mostly from theologians-but I don't think anyone had actually spent much time with them and asked what they did every day. What do they do? It turns out they prayed a lot, worked together in their community, and were not wide-eyed revolutionaries. Another issue concerned the numbers-80,000 base communities was an often-reported statistic-yet no one seemed to know where that number came from. In Popular Voices, I tried to look at base communities in a systematic way in a range of communities across two countries. I spent a lot of time at meetings of base communities/rural cooperatives, just listening and seeing how people presented themselves in public, interacted with one another, and with larger social and political institutions.

Whether they are seedbeds of an entirely new culture, I don't know: there are elements of both continuity and change here. In some places like Brazil and Central America, they had a clear relationship with the Left; in others, like Colombia, they were more closely tied to and controlled by the institutional church. My main finding was that if they were left alone, the more likely they were to be democratic. The real question was under what circumstances do they engage in social, political, or civil society building actions. You can't tell a bunch of poor people that it is time to build civil society: it is like asking someone who builds a slingshot to kill birds to construct an atomic bomb. Civil society is an indirect outgrowth of other processes, and takes time to develop authentic and durable roots. In a sense, there was an idealization of the base communities-as if they were the authentic popular will-but it was the coalition of grassroots groups with pastoral agents and others from outside the community that was really interesting to me.

Getting involved in social action is a difficult, costly calculus for many people, particularly those in difficult economic circumstances. Sometimes, though, injustice infringes upon one's life in a way that precludes the ability to remain on the margins of activism. In these base communities, I was amazed how much time and effort people would put into maintaining their community and learning about their surroundings. There is an incredible desire for education among the uneducated. Much of what transpired at these meetings was learning and a fulfillment of needs for sociability and fellowship, building trust through repeated common effort.

You've written extensively on democracy in Venezuela. Did you predict how antidemocratic the regime would become?

Hardly anyone saw it coming and I confess that I didn't. In truth, I got off the topic of Venezuelan politics (I was working mostly on religion and politics) until I was drawn back in the early 1990s. By the mid-1990s it was evident that Venezuela was falling apart. In 1994, I published an article called "Goodbye to Venezuelan Exceptionalism" (Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 4, 1994) and it was clear that the country and its institutions were changing pretty dramatically. Chavez comes out of nowhere and he's a product of the complete discrediting of what came before. In retrospect, the signs of decay are clear enough. In (Faculty Fellow) MICHAEL COPPEDGE'S book-which is really a book about stalemate and decline in the party system-he argues that decay has deep roots.

How did the system fail in Venezuela? How does Venezuela today compare to your time there early in your career?

When I first began studying Venezuela, almost forty years ago, I concluded that the country's democracy, although new, was strong and well founded. They had a 50-year struggle between political parties and the military for power, and the parties won it for a while, although now it looks the other way. It is fashionable now to conclude that it [Venezuelan democracy] was totally corrupt and tainted from birth. I don't believe that. The country's democratic governments after 1958 had accomplished a lot, and really transformed the country-a country that was rural, illiterate, and disease-ridden-became urban, literate-and media-soaked, and highly socially mobile. Then it begins to decay rapidly in the 80s, but people forget that petroleum prices hit rock bottom and didn't really recover until late in the 90s. Now, they are so high, people assume that is the way it has always been.

I think all political systems are fragile and need a lot of care. It is easy to understand in retrospect how the system failed. By the late 1980s Venezuela suffered from hollow institutions and a succession of incompetent leaders, who in a sense did exactly what Chavez is doing now: they had high petroleum income and they spent it as fast as possible. There was vast and well-publicized corruption, which is not surprising given how much money from petroleum revenues flows through the public treasury. The big puzzle for Venezuela is how do you create a large deficit in a country with a high surplus.

Why do you think your work has been influential?

My undergraduate thesis advisor, Kalman H. Silvert, [founder of the Latin American Studies Association], said that you should always try to generalize insofar as it is possible: respecting the data but reaching beyond the data to link them to broader generalizations. The truth is that no one cares about your particular work in a given region of Latin America; people want to know how what you find is relevant to their own concerns. I think that my theoretical training helped me to look for broader connections. It always amazes me that I survived at the university of Michigan because I was so far from the mainstream there, but I have always done what interested me and so far it has served me well. It may be that the trend lines in political science are running against me, given my own bias in favor of qualitative work, but I will plan to continue to trust my instincts and to pursue what sparks my interest.

What is your current research? What are you working on?

I am currently involved in two quite different efforts. One is to finish a book on religion and politics that was half written when my wife became ill and died (she died at the end of 1997). Although I have written a number of articles and chapters on these issues since that time, it has been hard for me to return to the book itself. But my recent stint as a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg allowed me the time to review what I had written, and to edit, reframe, and begin to rewrite that book in the light of the vast amount of fine scholarship that has been produced in the last ten years.

At the same time, along with my Venezuelan colleague and friend José e. Molina, I am working on a project that strives to come up with new and hopefully better ways to assess the quality of democracy in Latin America. We have organized several panels on this issue at meetings of the Latin American Studies Association, have coedited a recent issue of the Spanish journal, America Latina Hoy, (with our overall paper and four country studies), and we are now working on refining and extending our effort while incorporating more country studies. The ultimate goal is a book that will appear in both Spanish and English.