I am not sure how many people read prefaces, but if you have made it this far I urge you to continue. In the course of the next few short paragraphs, I hope to provide you with a little insight into why this book was written and how to read it.

This work is an extension of my earlier research that began while I was in graduate school and which resulted in a dissertation and a previously published book, Rendering Unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America. The primary conclusion of that book was that religious competition, primarily from evangelical Protestants, prompted the Latin American Catholic Church to pay attention to the needs of its parishioners more closely. In countries where the number of Protestants was expanding rapidly, the Catholic Church tended to take a more preferential option for the poor and denounce governmental institutions deleterious to the nation's citizenry. In the final analysis, I concluded that this is a good thing. However, the one question that I never got around to answering was why Protestants happened to be more numerous in some countries than in others. In a subsequent article published in Rationality and Society, I discovered that religious liberty accounted for the varying growth rates of Protestants throughout Latin American countries. This finding would seem rather mundane; of course minority religions would expand where there were fewer laws preventing them from expanding.