Wearing Religion on Your Sleeves

Recently, in a Q & A post for a very popular expat blog, a soon-to-be expat in Latin America was worried about finding a girlfriend in a very religious country; the soon-to-be expat was atheist.  The blogger reassured the concerned would-be expat that Latin Americans, although with very deep-rooted religious beliefs, don’t usually “wear their religion on their sleeves.”

 

I both agree and disagree.

 

In the normal meaning of this expression, meaning that someone talks about their religion to the extent that it might be uncomfortable for other people, I agree.  Most religious Latin Americans I know (even some that I would call “very religious”) would not usually discuss their faith or try to push it on other people.  They simply don’t seem to find that necessary.  In this way, they’re very discrete and not at all obtrusive in their beliefs (again, generally speaking.)  For this concerned expat, this would probably be enough; any girlfriend he found would probably not be pushy, even in this kind of relationship.

 

Yet, in another sense of the idea, I would disagree.  If we consider the “concrete” (although definitely not usual) meaning of “wearing your religion on your sleeves,” I would say Latin Americans do; i.e. they actually wear their religion on their sleeves – or at least on their arms.  Bracelets similar to the one in the picture are fairly common, in my experience.  Mexicans who wear the Virgin of Guadelupe or Saint bracelets may not talk about them, or even expect or hope that other people will notice; I suspect (although I can’t confirm) that they wear them to remind themselves of something or perhaps to use them for prayer more so than to show other people something.  While they wear their religion on their sleeves in the concrete sense, they don’t “wear their religion on their sleeves” in the sense that they are pushy and obsessed or are going to try to convert you or even talk to you about God.

 

I suspect many North Americans who wear “What Would Jesus Do” bracelets or the coloured bead bracelets would do so for a similar reason – primarily, even if not solely, to remind themselves of something. Yet, in English-speaking North America, we have a stigma that people who use these things will be obsessive about their faith.  Although this is definitely not true all the time, it is true more often here (Canada or the U.S.) than in Latin America.

 

For Latin Americans, the same is true of household altars, icons, statues, rosaries, etc.  You might see all of these things in someone’s home, car or bus (bus drivers take a lot of liberty in personalizing their vehicles,) but they probably won’t seem in any other way preoccupied or focused on the related themes.  In the worst cases, any of them could be “trends” or just the thing to do in your family or community; in the best cases, I suspect that these people use these items to remind themselves of their faith, to pray, etc. but are content to leave it that. They’re instruments of personal devotion, not of outreach or conversion.

 

I suspect that for this concerned would-be expat this would also be OK.