Religion and Political Conflict in Latin America

Daniel H. Levine, Daniel H. Levine

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781469615899
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

The authors examine popular religion as a vital source of new values and experiences as well as a source of pressure for change in the church, political life, and the social order as a whole and deal with the issues of poverty and the role of the poor within the church and political structures. Exploring areas from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, and Chile, the authors analyze the transformation in popular religion and reevaluate the growth of grassroots organizations.

1: Religion, the Poor, and Politics in Latin America Today

Daniel H. Levine

The relation between religion and politics in Latin America today claims our attention and calls us to serious study and reflection. Much has been written in and on this process in recent years, with attention going in more or less equal measure to changes in religion, changes in politics, and the new links between them being created across the region. As a result, we now have many good studies of theology and ideology, the creation of new programs and strategies by the institutional churches, and generally on the dynamic relation of religion (ideas, symbols, groups, and practices) to politics in all its many forms and levels: conservative accommodations, neighborhood movements, military authoritarianism, revolutionary organization, and liberal democracy.¹ These lines of inquiry are now being extended to explore the sources of change at the grass roots and the ways in which transformations in the daily practice of religion and politics are linked to larger structures of power and meaning.

Change has been remarkably rapid and widespread, and the task of understanding its sources and development has absorbed much scholarly attention. But although change has clearly been both deep and far-reaching, change is not irreversible. Moreover, change is not all there is to the process. Significant continuity is visible in the ideas, institutions, and day-to-day routines of both religion and politics. Not surprisingly, the conjunction of intense change with strong pressures for continuity has generated escalating debate and a series of sharp, often bitter and violent conflicts throughout the region.²

This book explores this process through a series of case studies that come together around a small set of interrelated issues: changing explanations of poverty (especially its sociological sources and theological significance) and the definition of new roles for the poor within the structures religion and politics provide. These issues take concrete form in struggles to control the beliefs, practices, and organizational expression of what is conventionally known as “popular religion.” As we shall see, debates over “the popular” (lo popular in Spanish) and struggles to define and control its proper expression have become a central thread of conflict at all levels in cases otherwise as distinct as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, or Colombia. The resolution of the issues differs from case to case, in accord with context and circumstances. But the unifying theme in all cases is the same: how to explain poverty and how to provide a role for the poor.

Why this focus on the poor? First, the poor are obviously the majority of the population, and naturally the churches want to reach and orient them in changing and often difficult circumstances. Moreover, the poor have always held a privileged place in Christian thought, and hence attempts to explain poverty in new ways touch contexts of religious significance, which easily become central points of conflict. Further, in situations of economic and political crisis, any attempt to reach, orient, and organize the poor is viewed with fear and suspicion by civil and military authorities. Here, the ability to shape and direct the organizations of the poor and to train and orient those who link the institutional churches to the poor in daily practice (priests, sisters, catechists, and lay leaders—“pastoral agents” of all kinds) is politically explosive and has lately emerged as a central arena of ideological and bureaucratic conflict. As we shall see, in all these cases, change in theology and in sociology are closely intertwined, as new images of the church and its religious mission converge with transformed understandings of the world in which the churches live.

I have stressed conflict so much to reinforce the point that just about every aspect of this field is subject to debate and controversy. This is in no sense a “settled” field, and as we shall see, the issues at stake are highly charged with emotion, meaning, and commitment. The rest of this introduction lays out a broad context and background for the chapters that follow.³ I do not attempt an exhaustive summary of the field but instead focus on change and continuity around the central themes of poverty and the role of the poor. I begin with a brief analysis of the meanings of poverty and “the popular” in contemporary Latin American debates. I then discuss a few key events in the recent history of these issues, especially the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the general meetings of Latin American Catholic bishops held at Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979). Particular attention is given to the emergence and significance of grass-roots Christian communities, commonly known as base communities or CEBs (for comunidades eclesiales de base), which have often become the focal point of debate and action. Because the contributors to this volume share a few key assumptions about how best to study these issues, I close this introductory chapter with brief comments on theory and method.

One way to put these developments in perspective is to look for a moment through the eyes of those who live the process day to day. In recent work among base communities, I asked about the meaning of the church’s “preferential option for the poor,” a phrase that will be considered in some detail below. Here is the statement of one Venezuelan peasant, extremely poor, direct, and with a perspective solidly rooted in the Bible he has recently learned to read:

I believe that here we are nothing, not “church,” nothing, if we cannot feel for our brother. How can we feel for other things? Look, the church tells us that if you love the God you cannot see, and you do not love the brother you do see, then you are a faker. So I believe that if we cannot feel for our brother, who is right here beside us, and we cannot give him a helping hand, then we can’t do anything. We lose everything. To me, this is how to cooperate as a church. Because you are church and I am church. Doing your work you are making the church. This is the church we make as we work. You go about working not only for yourself but for the community. What is the use of this information? To learn about what is happening in the world. To get it moving. You are sent because someone sends you; there is one who moves you. If not, you can’t see where you are. He is here with us both, guiding us, and who knows where? So this is God’s house, and this is the church. For me, this is what it is.⁴

Overview: Poverty, the Poor, and “the Popular”

Much of the conflict surrounding the meaning of poverty and the proper place of the poor is summed up in contemporary Latin America in debates over “the popular.” The possible meanings of “popular” (as in popular art, religion, music, culture, organizations, and the like) are explored in detail in the studies that follow, and the various dimensions of the popular are brought together in the concluding chapter. Here I simply want to introduce the term with a cautionary note. Caution is needed because the term “popular” has connotations in contemporary Latin America which catch North Americans unawares. Its core meaning rests not on popularity (something favored by many), but rather on a sense of what constitutes the populus—the central defining characteristic of the population. At a minimum, “popular” thus involves some notion of subordination and inequality, pointing to “popular” groups or classes. This is accompanied by an explanation of how they came to be poor. As used in Latin America today, “popular” also implies a sense of collective identity, and lately it carries a claim to group autonomy and self-governance. In all these ways, reference to “the popular” directs attention to the ideas, beliefs, practices, and conditions of poor people, however defined, and by extension to the kinds of ties that bind them to institutions of power, privilege, and meaning.

At this point, consensus ends and debate and struggle begin. Conflict starts over the definition of the poor and the proper explanation of poverty itself: who are the poor, why are they poor, and why does poverty grow? Of course, poverty and a concern for the poor are nothing new. After all, the churches (like other major institutions) have always dealt with the poor in some way. But new understandings of poverty can change the stance institutions take and in this way lay the basis for new sorts of relations with the poor in everyday life. The change is deceptively simple. Once attributed largely to individual failings, poverty is now increasingly seen as the product of structural inequalities. From this point of view, poverty is not a universal, inevitable condition, but rather emerges as the product of certain historically specific structures of power created by human beings and hence changeable. Thus the poor need not be “always” with us, for their condition is contingent on power, and arrangements of power can be challenged and changed.⁵

Note that this is a sociological definition of poverty, which cuts across Catholicism’s traditional stress on “the poor in spirit,” highlighting instead the need for solidarity with the materially poor. Several important implications flow from this shift to sociological categories. First, as poverty is defined in structural terms, stress is placed on class and on the opposition of classes as a social fact which the church has to recognize. This clearly places the church in the midst of conflict and raises troubling questions for its traditional message of reconciliation.⁶ Second, the emphasis on class gains new significance because of the new value given to the experiences and understandings of poor people. Older assumptions about the ignorance of the masses have yielded with remarkably little opposition to a view stressing sharing and solidarity with the poor precisely because their poverty gives them a more authentic and religiously valid perspective.⁷

There are powerful strains of religious populism here, a “going to the people,” which is visible in many of the cases in this book. Identification with the poor, born of a desire to share their cause and conditions, has led many priests and sisters to go to the people, much in the style of nineteenth-century Russian populism. Their actions and the religious justifications they create suggest that the poor are no longer to be taken simply as the uninstructed waiting to be led by their betters. Instead, claims to autonomy, self-governance, and independent action are increasingly advanced as legitimate.

What is really new about this process in Latin America is not so much the critique of injustice, or even the repeated clashes of the institutional churches with authoritarian regimes. Although these are indeed sharp, the opposition of religion to political power has ample precedent. But in Latin America today it is clear that the locus of debate and the capacity for sustained action have moved beyond the formal limits of the ecclesiastical institutions to rest, for the first time, with poor people in groups which they themselves take a major hand in running. Here, religious men and women have reworked the meaning of their faith in a context charged with concern for linking religious values to the issues and conflicts of everyday life. As a result, traditional religious symbols, messages, and celebrations have gradually taken on new meanings, spurring and underscoring a new understanding of social life and new commitments for dealing with it. Urgent and difficult questions arise: Is this the way the world must be? Will religion reinforce the existing order or can it lay the foundations for seeing change as both legitimate and possible? Is revolutionary violence legitimate in the Christian scheme of things? Can Catholic groups democratize internally and thus in the long run provide a basis of experience in democracy for the larger society without falling afoul of church and official elites who fear the loss of authority and control? In sum, can poor people work through their religion to less fatalistic understandings of their own situation and in the process use their religion to create structures and paths of action to promote change?

These reflections suggest that much has changed since the days when religion was taken as an unquestioned ally of the established order throughout Latin America. But though change is surely striking, it is important that our concern for change be tempered in two ways. First, we must realize that changes of this magnitude never occur overnight. They have a history, and this history strongly conditions the scope and character of any change undertaken. Second, as noted at the outset, although change is indeed prominent, change is not all there is to the process. Moreover, change is not unidirectional. Change can be reversed, and in any case, important elements of continuity remain to shape and limit the impact of any innovation. The next section traces the history of these changes in detail, through a close look at three landmarks in the process: the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), Medellín, and Puebla.

Vatican II, Medellín, Puebla, and Beyond

The meetings held at Vatican II, Medellín, and Puebla together constitute a pattern of change, experimentation, accommodation to new perspectives, and, more recently, attempts to restrain change that provide the context of our inquiry. In this section, I will outline briefly the central themes of each meeting, with particular concern for their impact on current struggles over religion, politics, and the popular.

To begin with, the three meetings are linked in many ways. Much of the motive force for recent changes in Latin American Catholicism (as in the church generally) stems from attempts to work out the implications of Vatican II. Indeed, the Medellín conference was convened precisely with the goal of applying Vatican II to Latin America and thus clarifying the church’s proper role in the region’s continuing transformations.⁸ In the same way, Latin American bishops gathered at Puebla eleven years later to weigh the lessons of Medellín, to evaluate past and present experience, and to chart a course for the future. Nor did the process end with Puebla. Subsequent years have been marked by intense debate and conflict, and at the time of writing (early 1985) the Vatican has begun preparations for a major synod to evaluate and clarify the significance of the Second Vatican Council itself and the changes that followed from it.⁹

Vatican II is best seen less as the beginning of change than as the acceptance of new ideas and drives for change hitherto rejected. The council saw far-reaching and as yet not fully absorbed attempts to rethink the nature of the church, the world, and the proper relation between the two. Long predominant models of the church as a perfect, unchanging, and hierarchically ordered institution were complemented by the revival of older models of the church as a “Pilgrim People of God”—a living, changing community of the faithful making its way through history. Viewing the church in these terms opened Catholic thought and action to the legitimation of historical change, both as a simple fact to be accepted and as a source of new, valid values.¹⁰

The acceptance of change as normal and even desirable freed the church (at least in principle) from identification with existing structures and social arrangements. If all change as a matter of course, none can be identified with God’s will. Any social arrangement is historically conditioned and thus can be made over by human action—not simply endured in hopes of a better life to come. Attention to historical change also leads to concern for understanding how societies developed as they did. At Vatican II, this process began with a general interest in sociological analysis, especially with theories of modernization and development. This concern was soon expanded in Latin America to include extensive and controversial borrowing from Marxist ideas, particularly those concerning class, conflict, and violence.

Rethinking the church as a Pilgrim People of God also had a major impact on norms of authority and obedience. The implications were especially notable in three related areas: for relations within the organizations of the church (such as bishop-priest-sister-laity); for the church’s stance as an institution toward other institutions; and finally, for the experiences learned in the daily life of church organizations and presumably carried over to other spheres of life. Let me explain.

Within the church, the stress on the historical experience of change moved practice away from a concern with role, rank, and status to a stress on testimony, solidarity, and shared experience as sources of action.¹¹ The call to identify with the poor as a prerequisite of legitimate leadership is only a small step away. The church’s stance toward other institutions is affected by the stress on accepting and even promoting change. Finally, the more general learning about authority from daily practice and experience within church organizations¹² begins to shift in two key ways. First, the expectation of relatively automatic obedience begins to be called into question by clergy, sisters, and laity, who in growing numbers see action (not rank alone) as a central basis of legitimacy. Second, the weight placed on sharing and solidarity has meant the development of greater collegiality and power-sharing among church elites, along with calls for more egalitarian structures of participation in general. As we shall see, the second is considerably more difficult to achieve than the first.

In all these ways, Vatican II combined an open stance to the study and promotion of social change with a commitment to seeing God’s role as an active presence in the world. This commitment rests above all on a renewed interest in biblical images, especially those drawn from the Old Testament prophets, who consistently stress God’s concern for action and justice over outward conformity and ritual.

Both the opening to s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1: Religion, the Poor, and Politics in Latin America Today
• 2: Ambivalence and Assumption in the Concept of Popular Religion
• 3: Latin America's Religious Populists
• 4: El Salvador: From Evangelization to Insurrection
• 5: Nicaragua: The Struggle for the Church
• 6: Brazil: The Catholic Church and Basic Christian Communities
• 7: Brazil: The Catholic Church and the Popular Movement in Nova Iguaçu, 1974-1985
• 8: Chile: Deepening the Allegiance of Working-Class Sectors to the Church in the 1970s
• 9: Colombia: The Institutional Church and the Popular
• 10: Bolivia: Continuity and Conflict in Religious Discourse
• 11: Conflict and Renewal
• Select Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index