Christianity In Central And South America Research Paper

1. Religion Before The Conquest

As is generally the case in the preindustrial world, in which ideological claims are advanced in mythological terms and reinforced through ritual means, in the area now known as Latin America the social order was religiously legitimized. A proper discussion of the various ways in which this religious legitimization took place would require considering the range of societies found in Meso and South America, from kinship-based groups, found for instance in the Amazonian area, to chiefdoms, to states. Since such an examination cannot be undertaken here, it may suffice to say that societies organized as chiefdoms tend to be theocratic, their political life being heavily ritualized; this also applies to early states, such as the Inca and the Aztec, in which the rulers were sacralized and were considered as the pivot of their society. Thus, in the Andean world the Inca dynasty, originally based in the area of Cuzco in southeastern Peru, claimed descent from Inti, the Sun.

More generally, religious legitimation meant that social distinctions, obligation to work, and access to resources were regarded as being regulated by an order that encompassed the social and the physical world. In order to maintain this order it was necessary to structure time and space, as well as the relations between age groups and the sexes. The organization of time was accomplished at several levels: at the individual level, this involved rites of passage; at the macrosocial levels, on the other hand, the structuring required the use of liturgical calendars which were related to the seasons and, above all, to agricultural work. Similarly, space was structured by establishing mythologically based distinctions among neighborhoods and, at a more extended level, by dividing a territory by means of shrines along imaginary lines, an example of which is the ceque system centered in Cuzco, the Inca capital.

2. Conquest, Resistance, Accommodation

The fact that the political, religious, and economic spheres were less differentiated in the Aztec and Inca states than in sixteenth-century Western Europe may have contributed to the speed of the victory of the Spanish and Portuguese adventurers. The ‘modernity’ of the conquerors should not be exaggerated, however, for the Iberian discovery and conquest of America took place immediately after the defeat of the Muslim kingdom of Granada, and the expulsion of the Jews who had refused to convert to Christianity. It can be said, therefore, that the conquest itself took place as a kind of crusade at a time of politico-religious triumphalism. Moreover, attention should be paid to the fact that Columbus seems to have endowed his enterprise with a millenarian aura, hoping that a portion of the wealth found in the Indies would be used in the conquest of Jerusalem. This millenarian component can also be found at work in the self-understanding of some of the members of the religious orders involved in the process of conversion of the vanquished.

In any event, while the crusading spirit validated the conquest, the transcendentalization of religion and the concomitant separation between the roles of priests and those of soldiers and administrators allowed some clerics to denounce the abuses of conquerors, without, however, condemning the conquest itself. During the colonization of Latin America, therefore, Christianity fulfilled the double role traditionally accomplished by religion: that of validating a social order, beginning with the justification of the conquest itself, while also providing the justification for judging that same order. Religions’ double function can also be seen at work among the indigenous population, for whom Christianity served as a vehicle of accommodation as well as of protest. The first aspect involved what is generally known as syncretism, that is, the amalgamation of Christianity and indigenous religions. Thus, the Christian god incorporated elements of Andean divinities such as Wirakocha and Pachacamac, while the Virgin Mary, as the Virgin of Guadalupe, subsumed the Aztec goddess Tonantzin, ‘Our Mother’; Quetzalcoatl, on the other hand, was assimilated to the apostle Thomas. The fact that the physical appearance of some of the inhabitants of the Christian pantheon was said to resemble that of the Indian population, rather than that of the conquerors, indicates on the one hand the extent to which the subjugated population had assimilated the new religion, and on the other, the intimate connection between religion and ethnic identification.

In some cases, conquered elites sought the protection of some of the most bellicose inhabitants of the Christian pantheon, expecting to profit from the power these supernatural beings had shown on the Spanish side; thus, the apostle Santiago, patron of Spain, became syncretized with the Andean Illapa (Lightning), and already in the sixteenth century the Virgin of Copacabana was enlisted in intradynastic struggles. Christianity also played a role in the indigenous rebellions against Spanish domination. This can be seen already on the sixteenth-century Taki Onqoy, and more clearly in the late eighteenth-century Tupac Amaru rebellion, in which the rebels regarded themselves as better Christians than the Spaniards.

3. Religion In The New Republics

The accommodation between indigenous religions and Christianity should not obscure the fact that from the beginning of the conquest, in order to forestall challenges from within, Spanish authorities sought to destroy the indigenous religions, undertaking ‘extirpation of idolatries’ campaigns; similarly, in order to protect Catholic orthodoxy from external threats, Spanish authorities tried to isolate the colonies from Protestantism, Judaism, and liberalism: Christianity— the Baroque Christianity of the Counter Reformation—served as one of the bastions of Spanish power during the three centuries of colonial rule. The role played by religion in the wars of independence of the early nineteenth century was ambiguous. Whereas the lower clergy tended to side with those who wanted to achieve independence from Spain, the prelates, many of whom had been born in the Iberian peninsula, were generally in favor of maintaining the colonial regime. Once independence was achieved in the nineteenth century, the Creole elites kept in place the church’s prerogatives, while at the same time seeking to control it, just as the kings of Spain had done. After the governments of the new republics and the Vatican signed concordats regulating the status of the church, Roman Catholicism generally enjoyed a privileged position, one that was enshrined in the republics’ constitutions.

The situation, however, was not always as favorable as clerical groups would have wanted. As in Spain itself, the very hegemony of the church contributed to an atmosphere of anticlericalism which led to attempts to curtail that institution’s privileges; this anticlerical attitude was intensified by the influence of liberal and positivist currents. The most radical measures against Roman Catholicism were taken in Mexico, a country that re-established relations with the Vatican only in 1992. In general, however, Latin American governments have regarded the church as an ideological ally, one which played a crucial role in the legitimization of the social order.

4. Religion And Everyday Life

Encompassing domestic devotions and public anticlericalism, individual rites of passage and official liturgies, Catholicism has been an omnipresent reality in the life of Latin Americans. But, as one would expect, Catholicism has been lived differently by men and by women, by members of upper and lower classes, in urban and rural milieus. As in southern Europe, in Latin America everyday religion in its private and public forms has been the domain of women; thus, except for special occasions such as Lent and Christmas, women have constituted the majority of the faithful in Sunday services. Similarly, it is the mothers who traditionally have been in charge of introducing children to the rituals and the moral injunctions of Catholicism. It is in the process of religious socialization that social class plays an important role, as children of the middle and upper classes are generally subject to religious indoctrination in schools directed by members of religious orders, whereas those who attend state schools are subject to minimal religious education.

One of the consequences of this religious indoctrination is that Catholic revival movements such as Catholic Action, or political parties linked to Catholicism, such as Christian Democracy, involve mainly middle and upper class persons. In large cities, public religious activity is usually restricted to Sunday masses and to occasional processions, in some of which participate government dignitaries. The legitimizing role of Catholicism as the state religion can be seen at work in the solemn liturgies with which church and state commemorate independence day, and even more so in the consecration of entire countries to Jesus or the Virgin Mary.

4.1 Popular Religion

The counterpart of official Catholicism is represented by what is known as ‘popular religion’—that is, those symbolic practices that seem to want to escape, and even to oppose, the control of religious elites. Ambivalence is at the core of popular religion, since in order to express opposition it is necessary to make use, against the grain, of the symbolic resources of the institutions which one opposes. Popular religion is part and parcel of a complex system of assimilation and rejection, through which subordinate groups sometimes negotiate and others struggle over access to cultural and in the last instance material goods. Latin American popular religion comprises the syncretic processes referred to above, in which elements of the symbolic world of the Spanish conquerors were incorporated into that of the Andean, Mesoamerican, and other conquered groups, as well as contemporary ritual practices in urban and rural milieus, such as processions and pilgrimages, which represent the counterparts of the liturgical functions choreographed by the official Church.

Despite the current academic infatuation with symbolic resistance, however, it must be said that the parodic, carnivalesque, rituals of popular religion generally have not constituted serious threats to the hegemony of Catholicism or of the state. In fact, the expenditures required by the ritual calendar of indigenous communities instead of leveling economic disparities may increase them.

4.2 Millenarian Movements

In general, in order for popular religious practices to turn into insurrections it has been necessary that the state attempt to suppress in a violent manner groups that have sought to isolate themselves from a changing society in order to live according to the teachings of the Gospel under the guidance of a charismatic leader. This happened, among other places, in northeastern Brazil from 1893 to 1897, in the millenarian movement of Canudos; it happened again in southern Brazil from 1912 to 1916 in the Contestado rebellion. Both the Canudos and Contestado movements constituted reactions against the secular, positivistic values of the Brazilian republic—and in the case of the Contestado rebellion it is clear that it was triggered by the dislocations brought about by capitalism. Like millenarian and messianic movements in general, those that have taken place in Latin America have involved marginal regions in transitional periods, and have been led by marginal, literate individuals, such as Antonio Conselheiro, leader of Canudos, and Miguel Lucena Boaventura, known as Jose Maria, leader of Contestado.

5. Liberation Theology

At the elite level, the privileged status of Catholicism in Latin America has not gone unchallenged either. In the nineteenth century, anticlerical groups, influenced by positivism, had already decried the church’s influence; similarly, in the twentieth century politically progressive groups opposed the alliance between oligarchic governments and conservative church. It was, however, during the early 1960s, prompted first by the triumph of the Cuban revolution and then by the Second Vatican Council, that the traditional equation between church and conservative politics was broken. The Cuban revolution, combined with the Council’s attempts to re-examine the relation between the church and the world, forced some members of the Latin American clergy to question the role the church had played in the maintenance of an unjust social order. That questioning led to the emergence of a ‘prophetic’ understanding of Christianity known as the Theology of Liberation. Influenced by the social sciences as much as by traditional methods of theological exegesis, the liberation theologians removed concepts such as sin and salvation from the mere personal and spiritual realms to one that took into account the structures of the societies within which sins were committed and salvation was sought. This theological approach was attacked by conservative Catholics, clerical and lay alike, who accused its proponents of forsaking Christianity and falling prey to Marxism. It cannot be emphasized enough, however, that despite its apparent threat to Catholicism, the theology of liberation constituted an attempt to save Latin America’s dominant religion by enlisting it in the task of reforming society. That ultimately, attacked by the local churches and neutralized by Rome, the theology of liberation gave up its distinctive use of sociological categories and retreated into traditional spirituality, was to be expected, given that the liberation theologians were, after all, theologians.

6. Alternatives To Catholicism

But Rome’s victory was a hollow one, for the presuppositions shared by both conservative and revolutionary clerics—that Latin America is and will remain Roman Catholic—proved to be illusory. As the conflicts between Rome and the radical theologians were taking place, a far more important development was unfolding, namely the spread of Protestantism—or, to be more correct, of Evangelical forms of Christianity. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the triumph of Protestantism may have demonstrated the ultimate irrelevance of the confrontation between Rome and the theology of liberation, there is a strong affinity between this theology, which could be considered as a Protestant Catholicism, and the evangelical churches. In both cases we find a puritan faith centered upon the Word, suspicious of the rituals of official Catholicism as well as of those that constitute popular religion. It is as if both movements away from a sacramental, hierarchical, agrarian-based vision of the world had developed as a response to the weakening of the agrarian economy with its rituals and mythologies in order to come to terms with a predominantly urban world ruled by the market.

But, instead of the ‘disenchantment’ of the world, to use Weber’s term, we find two religiously ambiguous, half-enchanted formations, the Evangelical and the Catholic, whose task it is to mediate between the two worlds. In both versions of Christianity there is still the attempt to preserve, if only though the Word, the presence of the transcendent, while at the same time deritualizing everyday activities. The causes and consequences of this deritualization have been explained in terms of a rationalization of economic activities, involving, for instance, the avoidance of the burden represented by wasteful ritual expenditures, and in more general terms turning away from the pressure exercised by community and tradition. The result is a world of ever widening economic disparities which must be confronted in an instrumental manner by the individual as individual, rather than as a member of a community. But, rather than repressing emotion, individualism and instrumental reason seem to exacerbate it. Thus, as in the tense coexistence of Pietism and Enlightenment found in eighteenth-century northern Europe, we find that the strongest forms of Latin American non-Catholic Christianity are Pentecostal; this has led to the emergence of charismatic forms of Catholicism—one more example of the proliferation of religious offerings in the religious market that emerged after the break up of monopolistic Catholicism.

In this context reference should be made to the growth of New Age religions among the middle and upper classes, as well as of religions of African origin among groups which are not of African descent, and in countries, such as Argentina, which do not have a significant black population.

While the early spread of Protestantism was caused by the activities of North American missionaries, the subsequent growth of evangelical churches is now largely fueled by local ferment. In some countries, such as Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, and Brazil, evangelicals constitute a significant proportion of the population, whereas in others, such as Venezuela and Colombia, that presence is much smaller. Considering, however, the continuous growth of non-Catholic forms of Christianity, it can be said without reservation that the equation between Latin American religion and Catholicism, presupposed, among others, by the advocates of liberation theology, is a thing of the past. It is true that the Catholic church can still exercise pressure upon governments and legislatures on matters related to the control of female sexuality, but even in these cases, despite the fact that abortion is still illegal in Latin America, birth control campaigns are not uncommon, as the birth rate has decreased in the last several decades, a fact which shows that the influence of the church on the everyday life of ordinary people has diminished substantially.

6.1 Conservative Trends In Catholicism

A development that will likely contribute to the further loss of popularity of the Catholic church among the lower classes, while perhaps increasing it among high-income groups, is the growing importance of conservative Catholic groups such as the Opus Dei, a secretive organization supported by the Vatican. But even in the case of the Opus Dei, one can see its promotion as an attempt on the part of the church to accommodate itself to a changing world. In effect, despite its traditionalism and authoritarianism, the values promoted by this organization are consonant with the demands of a capitalist order, and in more general terms with the demands of modernity.

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