Abstract

Motivations, interests and concerns of the Pentecostals with the poor are analyzed, following the changes in the social, political, charitable and mitigation strategies for overcoming poverty in Chile. There are four characterized moments: the “Pentecostalism as self-organization of the poor”, the “Pentecostal socialism”, the “Pentecostalism charity”; and “coping strategies to fight poverty”; which are studied from a critical reading of primary sources of Pentecostal origin, published in the early twentieth century. An overview of Pentecostalism is offered by the identification of problems thereof with a mere space of comfort and confinement, or with an engine of social mobility.