How can religion in developing countries be understood in the context of modernity-in-transition? Available works argue that religious innovations, appropriated primarily by groups of disenfranchised religious actors, serve as mechanisms for coping with the condition of modernity in non-Western contexts. In contrast, this commentary views religious innovations as strategic assertions of waning institutional influence. The argument draws from the experiences of Charismatic Christianity within Catholicism and Protestantism in the Philippines and Latin America.