Argentina, 1954

The censuses of 1947 and 1960 put evangelicals at two or three percent of the country, and Daniel Míguez writes that they were usually refused permits for public acts. Rocky Grams's In Awe In Argentina gives a census of 174 adherents in the Assemblies of God in the early 1950s.

Pentecostals had been there since before the First World War. Louie Stokes dates Louis Francescon's arrival in Buenos Aires to 9 October 1909, on the Italian line out of Chicago.

In 1953 Perón courted the Evangelical Confederation, and its leaders refused him. At the end of that year, Stokes writes, a commission formed for a stadium campaign under T. L. Osborn, who could not come, and Hicks visited and it was agreed for April.

Hicks came on the invitation of the Union of the Assemblies of God, Míguez writes, and reached Argentina on 9 March. He met Perón a week later, on 16 March by Zielicke or 17 March by Hilario Wynarczyk, who gives the interview forty-five minutes.

The campaign opened at the Atlanta stadium on 14 April, and Stokes gave about 8,000 for the first crowd, Hicks about 6,000, Wynarczyk about 1,000, and an assistant of Hicks, interviewed by Zielicke, 500. Stokes reported almost 100,000 on 13 May and over 100,000 on the next night, “according to estimates.” The meetings moved to Huracán on Saturday 22 May and closed on 12 or 13 June.

Stokes counts fifty-two days without rain days and holidays, and Wynarczyk counts fifty-eight, in an event planned for fifteen. Paul Sorensen interpreted, Zielicke writes, and Stokes reported some thirty-five co-operating churches at the time.

The Los Angeles Times asked why no doctors confirmed the healings, and no medical check is known. Argentine medical associations called the meetings curandería, folk healing. The Catholic daily El Pueblo attacked the campaign.

Other Pentecostals held the stadiums to be sinful ground, Baptists disliked the style, and leading pastors objected that healing put the forgiveness of sins second. Stokes himself admits the campaign was not supported by all the churches.

Perón turned on part of the Catholic clergy on 10 November 1954, and a law of 20 May 1955 opened the way to reform the constitution's article on religion. Perón fell that September, and the new government dissolved the evangelical union he had sponsored.

Hicks returned early in 1955. The Foursquare minutes of 3 February say he was being held in a hotel, and Zielicke writes that he was released on 4 February and forbidden further meetings. Stokes has him opening a temple in Buenos Aires with a campaign from 6 to 13 March. Míguez calls the return a resounding failure. Hicks died on 6 January 1973.

Stokes counts fifty-three congregations in the Union in 1957 and one hundred and fifty about 1964. Wynarczyk writes that Hicks and the healings did not contribute directly to the growth of the churches, since the churches lacked the structure and the crowds came for miracles.

A table by Wynarczyk and his colleagues counts six Pentecostal temples in the capital in 1950, sixteen in 1970, thirty-six in 1980 and one hundred and twenty in 1992. The count grows slowly at first and fastest after 1980.

Míguez calls the campaign a passing success whose legacy lay in how Pentecostal leaders came to see themselves. He traces from it the local mass ministries of the 1970s and early 1980s. Wynarczyk and his colleagues trace the “fourth Protestantism” of the 1980s to the same movement.

Hicks gave God's favour and a guard who was healed. Miller printed a story that Perón was healed. Míguez holds that Perón allowed it as a further challenge to Catholic power in his conflict with the Church. Wynarczyk studies Perón's own agency among the churches, with the union he sponsored that year as his evidence.

Zielicke also calls the permit likely a political move, and he finds Hicks's timing closer to chance than plan. The open war with the Church came seven months after the campaign opened. La Nación reports that the Church was angered by the permits for football grounds.

José Norberto Saracco held in 1992 that the masses needed a Hicks because Perón's charisma was in crisis that April. Wynarczyk answers that this explains only a part. Míguez points to freedom after restriction and to the people's old resort to healers. Hicks and Stokes said God did it.

Hicks's own account of how he came shifts. He told Lindsay that God spoke to him in prayer and sent him to South America, and Stokes has a commission already at work. He puts Chile before the permit in August and after it in November.