Religious pluralism

This thesis explores how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has used media technology as part of its missionary communication strategy. Particular attention is paid to the Internet as a space for religious practice and how the LDS Church has sought to extend its media practices and missionary efforts online. By utilizing new media technology to find individuals interested in hearing its message, the LDS Church faces new challenges to its traditional face-to-face missionary program, its centralized hierarchy of control and its ongoing struggle for identity within American Christian culture. Throughout its history, the LDS Church's missionary communication strategy has used several different methods for finding people to teach but has consistently focused on ensuring that such methods ultimately lead to face-to-face lessons with missionaries, viewed as the most transformative communication exchange for both the missionary and the potential convert.

Since the 1960s Latin America has experienced a religious transformation, with several countries developing significant Protestant populations. These religious changes have influenced the political processes of several Latin American nations, playing a prominent role in elections and the formation of political platforms. Several theories attempt to account for the recent growth in religious pluralism, particularly social anomie theory and religious market models. These theories ignore or downplay the role of conflict between the state and civil society, especially violent confrontations between the government and the Roman Catholic Church. This study focuses on four case studies with varying amounts of church-state conflict and differing religious pluralistic growth rates: Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, and Southern Mexico. This study finds that church-state conflict serves as a catalyst, and in some cases a useful predictor, of growth in religious pluralism.