The roots of the current religious revival among Dominican Americans in Washington Heights/Inwood go back to the examples of larger-than-life pastors in Dominican history.
Religious revival in the Dominican Republic was very dangerous to do from 1930 until the dictator Rafael Trujillo was assassinated in 1961. Trujillo really clamped down, using his recognition of Catholicism as the official religion in 1954 as a tool of state control. After his death, the gates were open to religious explorations. First, Dominicans left the traditionalistic rural areas.
Dominicans rushed to the cities to breathe freely and earn an easier life. There, they could also test the new spirit of evangelical/Pentecostal Protestantism and charismatic Catholicism. This led to the establishment of Protestantism as one of the main religions with Pentecostalism being the most significant element. The return to religious searching was long overdue, delayed by years of stasis.
The origins of Christianity in Latin America and the Caribbean had its official beginning on the northern coast of Santo Domingo in the city of La Isabela. Here, the very first Catholic mass in the New World was held on January 6, 1494.
The first priest was the legendary Bartholeme de las Casas, who was a great admirer of Martin Luther. De las Casas had his hands full in battling for full rights for the native Indios, the Taino people.
He was a remarkable defender of the non-European right to full access to Christian faith and church recognition. He documented the mistreatment of the Indians, as they were called, following the teaching of the Apostle Paul that in Christ, all humans were equally dignified and had access to God.
There were philosophical ideas associated with Aristotle that underlay a cruel historical narrative that the Indians and Africans were either primitive human beings incapable of full spiritual understanding or even further down the evolutionary ladder as pre-humans who were only capable of being beasts of burden.
De las Casas won a great international debate but lost the battle. The local businessmen, who profited off the misuse of the native peoples, had the priest recalled to Spain, though he did not give up the fight. For years, the populace lived under oppression. Still, the ideas of freedom, dignity, and faith lived within the Dominican Republic traditions. In the center of the Dominican flag, the Bible is open, it is commonly believed, to the Gospel of John, chapter 8, verse 32, which reads “Y la verdad os hará libres” (And the truth shall make you free).
So, when Dominicans got a chance, they reclaimed their spiritual history. The movement into the Dominican cities was the fastest in Latin American history. This uprooting from the rural cake of custom gave an opportunity to the migrants to have a moment of freedom to look around to see what worldview into which they could root their lives. Practically, this meant that city life had an evangelical/Pentecostal sound.
Besides the legendary history of de las Casas, there were more recent precursors to this outbreak of religious experimentation. Saloman Feliciano Quinones was the first Pentecostal in the Dominican Republic. In 1913, he became imbued with the Holy Spirit after working in the plantations of Hawaii and returned to the Dominican Republic in 1916 with the new Pentecostal teaching. His friend in Hawaii, Juan I. Lugo, founded the Pentecostal Church of God in Puerto Rico. (In 1956, this church declared its independence of the American-based Assembly of God over the issue of Puerto Rican independence.)
The “Dominican Jonah,” Francisco “Pancho” Hernandez Gonzalez heard a call from God to leave Puerto Rico to preach to the Dominicans in the 1930s. Like the Biblical prophet Jonah, Hernandez was afraid of the persecution being meted out by the Dominican government and perhaps didn’t feel that much kinship with Dominican people. So after a few weeks, the Pentecostal pastor fled the country. Hernandez was then struck by tuberculosis. The evangelist took this to be a re-figuration of the example of Jonah being punished for his temerity by a whale swallowing him.
Hernandez returned to the Dominican Republic to preach a message of hope and the second coming of Christ to rescue Dominicans from the suppression of the gospel by Trujillo. He also preached about receiving physical healing from God and social peace for the nation, wrote the journalist Beinvenido Alvarez-Vega.
Soon after Trujillo died in 1961, the number of Protestant denominations proliferated in the Dominican Republic. The first, Convencion Bautista Dominicana, started within a couple of months. For over twenty years, 1-4 denominations were started almost every year.
The Catholic church’s interests were also diverging from the conservative establishment. In 1961, the Catholic Relief Services started with the goal to improve the conditions of poor Dominicans. Charismatic Catholicism also grew. Large crowds of charismatic Catholics gathered to receive the work of the Holy Spirit.
Interestingly, five of the new Protestant denominations have their roots in New York City:
Iglesia Pentecostal Misionera Circulo de Oracion (1969);
Iglesia Pentecostal de Jesucristo Internacional (1970);
Concillo de Iglesias Carismaticas Espiritu de Hermandad (1980);
Concilio Latinoamericana de Nueva York (1980); and
Iglesia Evangelica Pentecostal Cristo en las Anatillas (1982).
The Dominicans have enriched the tradition of New York City as an international center for religious innovation.
