Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2: 117-142
Religious Transformations and the Language of Rights in Latin America
Daniel H. Levine
Abstract
Three elements combine to shape the relation of religion and politics in Latin America now and in the future: the facts of religious plurality and pluralism; the emergence of real social and political pluralism in a context of democracy; and the creation and diffusion of a practical vocabulary of rights that includes the defense of human rights, but goes further to promote the creation of autonomous subjects able to claim voice and participation in public life. The creation of a vocabulary of rights, with roots in social, religious, and political norms and practices, provides a theoretical and empirical bridge between religion and politics.
To understand the relation of religion and politics in the Latin America of the twenty-first century, it is essential that we recognize the profound changes that the continent has experienced in both “religion” and “politics” and in how the relation between them is understood, created, and sustained: that is to say, the new actors, organizational vehicles, and arenas in which the relation of faith to social and political action is worked out. This is a dialectical relationship: as both religion and politics change, they also exchange basic ideas and concepts, learning from and adapting to one another. Religion is neither the passive reflection of the social order (as Durkheim might have had it) nor is it a template, or worse, a cookbook, for political action, as much contemporary commentary on fundamentalism suggests. The path is two-way, and the influence is mutual. Three dimensions of change combine to give form and content to the relations of religion and politics in Latin America: (1) religious pluralism, (2) socio-political pluralism and democratic politics, and (3) the creation and diffusion of a language of rights, which includes the defense of human rights, but goes beyond this to promote the creation of autonomous subjects
Daniel H. Levine is James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.
December 2006 | 117 who themselves are capable of claiming voice and participation in social life. The emergence of a practical vocabulary of rights provides an empirical and theoretical bridge between religion and politics. The public face of religion in Latin America, the overall presence of churches, religious groups, and images in the public sphere, and the social and political life of the continent have changed beyond recognition over the last half century. In the not so distant past, thinking about the public face of religion evoked images and symbols of civic religious fusion at all levels. The repertoire included Te Deums, with the presence of political and ecclesiastical “authorities” at the highest level, along with the infallible presence of politicians, clergy, and military officers at the inauguration of public works, the opening of stores or factories, and a wide range of public events or programs. Together on a public stage, this joint presence perfectly reflected and reinforced the identification of “the church” (only one was recognized) with political and economic power and social hierarchy. Thinking about the public face of religion in this new century brings very different images to mind. Street preachers fill the scene, men (they are mostly men) carrying a Bible, a loudspeaker, and sometimes a portable platform, preaching and often singing with some small group in a public square, on a street corner, or near a bus or train station. In any city of the continent and in the smallest and most remote towns as well, it is now just about impossible to linger in a public square or get on or off a bus, metro, or train without running into one or more preachers. They no longer represent “the church”; they speak in the name of many. 1 The contrast with the traditional face of religion is strong and reflects a net of related changes. Where there was monopoly, there is now pluralism; where a limited number of spaces were once officially reserved for religious practice (with a limited number of authorized practitioners), there is now a rich profusion of churches, chapels, and mass media programming, not to mention campaigns and crusades that carry the message to hitherto “profane” spaces such as streets and squares to beaches, sports stadiums, jails, bars, and nightclubs. Instead of a limited number of voices “authorized” to speak in the name of religion, there is now a plurality of voices, not only between distinct denominations but within churches as well. The Argenine folklorist and singer, Atahualpa Yupanqui, has a song called Preguntitas Sobre Dios (Some Small Questions about God) that has much to say about the traditional image and public presence of religion in Latin America. The singer asks members of his family where God can be found. The family is poor—peasants, miners, and woodcutters—and no one knows. No one has seen God, no one responds. Of his brother, the singer says, “And nobody should ask him if he knows where God is / Such an important
1 Uruguay is the notable exception to the older pattern, while Cuba is a clear exception to the new.
118 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2 person has never been to his house.” 2 Yupanqui concludes:
There is business here on earth More important than God. [It's that] no one should spit blood So that others can live better.
Does God watch over the poor? Maybe yes, maybe no. But one thing is sure He eats at the boss’ table.3
The God that Atahualpa Yupanqui sings of is remote: familiar friend of the rich, but invisible and at best indifferent to the poor. This God is no friend to those who fight for change. Anyway, the singer tells us that fighting for justice on earth is more urgent than searching for a God who is too important to care about (much less be present among) the poor. This image of God extends to religion, specifically to the Catholic Church, and has long echoes in the liberal and radical tradition of Spain and Latin America. From the civil wars of the nineteenth century to the Mexican and Cuban revolutions, over a wide range of issues and circumstances, progressives of all kinds consistently identified religion with superstition and churches with reactionary forces. Looking backward from the present, these images have a dated, almost antiquarian quality about them. Over the course of the last fifty years, new groups, insurgent voices, and social forces with religious inspiration and support have reshaped religion’s image and social connections in Latin America and profoundly altered the terms of its engagement in politics. Allies of the past (especially military and economic elites) no longer found religion trustworthy; progressive movements looked to religion for moral and material support. To summarize, in less than half a century, a securely established routine of mutual support and, indeed, mutual blessing among church, state, and power has been transformed in dramatic fashion. New and often confrontational voices emerged, ranging from Christian democratic reformism and liberation theology to Christian Marxist alliances. Protestantism, once a collection of small groups with a public stress on personal salvation, obedience to authority, and a ferocious anticommunism, has grown to the point that it constitutes a significant presence on the public stage. At the same time, Protestantism has diversified, and now incorporates a wide and growing
2 In Spanish, Y que nadie le pregunta si sabe donde está Dios /por su casa no ha pasado tan importante señor. 3 In Spanish, Hay un asunto en la tierra mas importante que Dios/y es que nadie escupa sangre, pa'que otro viva mejor/ Que Dios vela por los pobres, tal vez sí, tal vez no/ pero es seguro que almuerza, en la mesa del patrón.
December 2006 | 119 range of views and positions. This is much change in very little time, change that repeatedly has caught scholars and observers by surprise. How can we grasp the dynamic of change in a way and look to the future with reasonable confidence of accuracy?
The Transformation of Religion: Plurality and Pluralism
Before getting into the particulars of analysis, a brief note is in order on how the concepts of plurality and pluralism are employed and how they are distinguished from one another. Above all, plurality is quantitative, and is used here to denote the growing number of groups, activists, spokespersons, churches, chapels, and the like. The concept of pluralism is social, and is used in this essay to denote the construction of rules of the game that incorporate multiple actors as legitimate parts of the process. For pluralism to gain acceptance in society and politics, plurality is clearly a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Together, the new facts of religious plurality and pluralism are reshaping the public face of religion in Latin America, as they intersect with the equally new facts of pluralism in politics and civil society. A plurality of churches, social movements identified with religion, and “voices” claim the moral authority to speak in the name of religion; a pluralism is increasingly evident in civil society and access to public spaces. Barriers to organization drop as the “rules of the game” for a plural religious arena are gradually worked out and put into practice. This is a two-way street —a dialectical relationship to be more precise. Just as religious plurality and pluralism transform social and political life, putting more actors, voices, and options into play, so too the consolidation and expansion of democratic politics, the reduction of barriers to organization and access, and the gradual elaboration of practical rules of the game for a plural civil society have dramatic impacts of their own on religious institutions. The emergence of pluralism and plurality as part of the public presence of religion in Latin America can be situated with some confidence in time and space. Although precursors can be found in every instance, most observers agree that, for Catholicism, the overall process got underway in the post World War II period, with the emergence of reformist currents within the churches, including a loose network of pastoral centers, journals, and locally based initiatives that, in different ways, represented a search for means to create a more effective presence of the Church throughout the region. Related and spin-off organizations soon crystallized into Christian Democratic parties, breaking long-standing ties between Catholic institutions and conservative politics. These and other similar initiatives were energized and reinforced by well-known developments in global Catholicism that punctuated the 1960s and 1970s, including, of course, the Second Vatican Council, the regional conferences of Catholic Bishops held at Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979), and the emergence of liberation theology. The social and political impact
120 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2 of these developments was amplified and extended by the region’s political experience of the 1970s and 1980s, which drove activists into the churches (often the only space remaining open) where they met with welcome and shelter. This is a well-known story and I will not go into detail here. For present purposes, it suffices to underscore the point that all these movements of change created and legitimized new voices, new agents, and new venues for religious action, whose social and political meaning was magnified beyond the original intent of many by political circumstances.4 For Catholicism, the changes sketched out here present a profound challenge to its traditional role as the church—officially acknowledged wielder of moral and social authority within the boundaries of a defined national territory. The effort to hang on to this unique status and to the privileges that come with it runs counter to the logic of an open and more varied society. Casanova argues that, only when religions abandon the status of “church,” can they be fully compatible with a modern society. “The conception of modern public religion that is consistent with liberal freedoms and modern structural and cultural differentiations,” he writes, “is one that builds on notions of civil society.”5 The Protestant story begins to consolidate into a visible and public presence of pluralism about twenty years later. Starting in the late 1980s, and building on a long process of church “planting” and growth, Protestant groups and spokespersons began to find their way in growing numbers onto public platforms and into politics. With the end of the Cold War and the passing of early “heroic figures” such as Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt, Protestant groups began to consolidate a substantial, varied public presence—building churches, creating schools, acquiring a media presence, and so forth. This gave the Protestant community—itself increasingly diverse and plural internally —an indispensable platform for entering the political arena, at the same time that the end of the Cold War made it possible for that entry to advance a broad range of interests and positions.6 Pluralism and the new presence of a plurality of options change the dynamics of religious growth and competition and work in subtle ways to reconfigure the relations between religion (ideas, practices, and institutions) and the ordinary structures of power and identity in society. This happens
4 For details, see, among others, Daniel H. Levine, Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); id., “Assessing the Impacts of Liberation Theology in Latin America,” Review of Politics 50 (1988); 241-263; and Christian Smith, The Origins of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 5 José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 217. 6 For valuable insights into the global transformations of Protestant and particularly evangelical and Pentecostal presence in society and politics, see Paul C. Freston, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On Latin America specifically, see the papers collected in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Paul C. Freston (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
December 2006 | 121 as new groups are created and drawn into active involvement with new voices taking a place in the public arena. The whole process presents both challenge and opportunity for churches as institutions and for their members and activists, who are slowly learning to live in a world that no longer can be defined by one church in mutual alliance with one state. Reality is now far richer, more complicated, and messier. Pluralism presents religion with both challenge and opportunity. The challenge of adaptation to new rules of the game comes with the opportunity to enter the public arena in new ways, benefiting from and supporting openness and a consolidation of democratic institutions, practices, and norms. The challenge and opportunity of adapting to, or perhaps better, of creating, new rules of the game includes elements that range from the new need to compete for members or resources in an open market7 to the difficulties of coexisting with hitherto demonized groups, or, in the specific case of Catholicism, of accepting the legitimacy of others as equal partners on the public stage. Among the most notable of the opportunities that pluralism puts on the table are the chances to acquire new followers, to reach and energize them in new ways, and to exploit new media. There is also the opportunity to develop ways of acting in politics and relating to potential political allies and partners that preserve independence and a moral center to actions, while still making it possible for the church and its leaders to pursue goals. This task is complicated by the new fact of a more open, less regulated civil society, and by the more open kind of politics that has accompanied transitions to democracy. At the very least, more open politics means the possibility of greater choice, more options for competing for the allegiance and membership of the potential audience, and less regulation of the effort. Protestants in many countries have devoted substantial work to leveling the playing field, above all by sharing in public subsidies hitherto limited to Catholic institutions and by removing or fighting barriers to the ordinary life of their communities, such as laws regulating “noisy churches.” 8 The impetus behind this effort is partly competitive. Steigenga also points to a broad “pentecostalization” of religious belief and practice as elements once limited to Protestant (and specifically Pentecostal) experience, including stress on the direct experience of charismatic power, speaking in tongues (glossalalia), certain kinds of music, and patterns of group organization and leadership, with emphasis on equal access to all, men and women, to the gifts of the spirit, characteristics which have been widely diffused in the Christian community.9 The competitive drive is further reinforced by the reality of
7 On the nature of competition, see R. Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 8 Brian H. Smith, Religious Politics in Latin America: Pentecostal vs. Catholic (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998). 9 Timothy Steigenga, The Politics of the Spirit: The Political Implications of Pentecostalized Religion in Costa Rica and Guatemala (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001).
122 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2 another kind of pluralism within Catholicism. Opinion surveys regularly show considerable variation in degrees of commitment to the church which undermine traditional expectations of obedience to the hierarchy.10 To be sure, the existence of a gap between leadership expectations and projections and what followers will commit to in itself is nothing new. However, in the context of growing competition from other churches, the matter seems more urgent to Catholic leaders because of the implications for control as well as, of course, the challenge it raises to the status of the Catholic Church as the church. This explains, in part, the stress on reinforcing internal unity and hierarchical control, which gained strength throughout the papacy of John Paul II and continues with Benedict XVI. As we shall see, these developments have led the institutional churches in many cases to withdraw from support of social movements and political activism.11 The heterogeneity of the Protestant community, which has grown more pronounced in recent years, has impeded efforts to create a single authorized voice, for example, through a single regional or even national coordinating body. Pluralism remains the norm. The presence of plurality and plural options within each religious community means that analysts should be particularly careful about drawing inferences from such pluralism in beliefs and memberships with regard to specific political consequences. There are too many churches, too many spokespersons, and too many venues and media for voice for simple references to church and state to suffice. Further, although multiple options and resulting choices can be a starting point for democratic politics, this does not mean that any particular group is necessarily democratic within. As Harris reminds us in his excellent study of religion and African American political activism, participatory ideals can find it hard going within theocratic structures. At the same time, the very variety of options and the volatility of identities and connections12 make it unlikely that any unified and sustained political movement will emerge out of the blooming garden of Protestant growth. The continuing erosion of Catholicism's monopoly status bears on issues ranging from traditional concerns about education, censorship, or public
10 For details, see Fortunato Mallimaci, “Diversidad católica en una sociedad globalizada y excluyente: Una mirada al fin de milenio desde la Argentina,” in Sociedad y Religion, nos. 14/15 (November 1996), or more recently, Cristián Parker, “América Latina ya no es católica? Pluralismo cultural y religioso creciente,” America Latina Hoy 41 (2004): 35-56. 11 A well-known instance was the closing of Chile’s Vicaria de la Solidaridad in 1992. On this case and its impact on social movements and activists, see Hannah Stewart-Gambino, “Las Pobladoras y la Iglesia Despolitizada en Chile,” America Latina Hoy 41 (2005): 121-138. For a general view, see Carol Ann Drogus and Hannah Stewart-Gambino, Activist Faith: Popular Women Activists and Their Movements in Democratic Brazil and Chile (State College, PA: Penn State Press, 2005), and for work specifically on human rights, Kathryn A. Sikkink, “Nongovernmental Organizations, Democracy, and Human Rights in Latin America,” in Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Democracy in the Americas, ed. Tom Farer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 150-168. 12 Fred Harris, Something within Religion in African American Political Activism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
December 2006 | 123 morality, to the allocation of official subsidies and competition for places on government commissions, committees, and public platforms. Set in the general political context, pluralism also suggests that building and sustaining a new role will require groups to play the old politics more skillfully and more consistently than in the past. This means working to maintain the public presence of groups and to hold onto members, sustaining grass- roots democracy, while working on allies and connections and assuming a realistic bargaining stance to politics. Groups need to bargain for better terms with everyone and enter into alliances only with great care and caution. Allies, connections, resources, and the shield they provide remain of critical importance. Allies, resources, and connections are required precisely because what ordinary people need in politics and what defines a system as legitimate in their eyes is predictability, accountability, and a sense, however minimal, of being a legitimate part of something larger. Many of the grass-roots groups that began to operate and consolidate in Latin America in the crucible of the 1970s and 1980s shared a concept of politics, according to which “the people” (defined in terms of social class) constituted a natural majority. In this view of the world, the people would ultimately construct a new counter hegemony, whose eventual victory would obviate the need for ordinary politics. Once a counter-hegemonic understanding could be forged and spread in the population, this people would join together and create a new and different kind of political order. This is an old utopian dream, mostly left behind at least for now. This self-concept had its counterpart in the changing experience of many newly confident Protestant groups as they entered the political arena in the 1990s. As “children of light” bringing a new ethic and political style, they would presumably moralize politics and the political world. But here, as in the case of the earlier generation of Catholic progressives, the old politics proved tenacious—not merely resisting the new but also effectively incorporating, dividing, and demobilizing. In some cases, this demobilization has been accelerated by decisions of the Catholic hierarchy to back out of the center stage of politics, reducing the material support and ideological cover on which groups long relied.13 This process gained strength. For the Protestant communities, in leading cases such as Guatemala, Brazil, or Peru, initial enthusiasm about the prospects for building a new Jerusalem and a new kind of politics yielded to disillusionment and discredit (as in Guatemala or Peru) or to an evangelical pluralism in which utterly new churches (such as Brazil’s Universal Church of the Reign of God) have emerged as self-confident players of the “old politics.” 14
13 Stewart-Gambino, “Las Pobladoras y la Iglesia Despolitizada en Chile.” 14 Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998); Darío López, La Seducción del Poder: Evangélicos y Política en el Perú de los Noventa (Lima: Ediciones Puma, 2004); and Drogus and Stewart- Gambino, Activist Faith: Popular Women Activists and Their Movements in Democratic Brazil and Chile.
124 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2 I want to underscore the issue of choice, how pluralism or what rational choice scholars might call the “supply side” can appear to potential audiences. Very often, analysis of pluralism and plurality takes off primarily from the point of view of groups and leaders: from what those working in a rational choice vein would term the “supply side.” Although this is important, it is incomplete insofar as the motivation of the audience is ignored. Ignoring the audience for change is a little like discussions of governability that center attention exclusively on control and order without addressing issues such as voice, representation, or access. In religion as in politics or social life as a whole, we need to ask how such plurality appears to those on the receiving end. From the point of view of the target audience or audiences, the presence of a plurality of options opens possibilities. To be sure, many new churches are exclusive in membership and make extensive demands on new believers. However, the choice to assume these demands and obligations is made freely. On the ground level, what we know is that those who belong to new churches are, in fact, rarely exclusive in group membership. They belong to groups of all kinds at rates pretty much comparable to other religious groups. This opens possibilities for creating and maintaining ties and relationships across groups, keeping the flow of information open and undergirding the possibilities of common action.
The Transformation of Politics: Civil Society and Democracy
The religious transformations outlined in the previous section have had many and varied impacts on politics. The loosening of long-established ties binding the Catholic Church with established power created a space and opportunity for new movements and alternative positions. In the 1950s, Christian Democracy emerged to challenge integrist, fascist-inspired, and conservative parties, and twenty years later, liberation theology and associated movements appeared to challenge both politics and the church in the name of a thoroughgoing transformation of politics and culture. It is no exaggeration to state that movements otherwise as different from one another as the landless movement in Brazil, the unemployed and piqueteros (strikers, barricade builders) of Argentina, survival organizations in Peru, and human rights and neighborhood movements everywhere owe much of their initial impulse to the efforts and resources invested by churches and religious activists and to the institutional protection that churches have provided to individuals and groups. The particular form in which the process played out, and the specific career and fate of particular groups varied from country-to-country as the political context and opportunity structure created or closed off possibilities. Despite these differences, the basic fact of pluralization and plurality, and the common task of learning to navigate a plural political world, create important shared elements and underscore the continuous interchange and mutual influence of religious pluralism on politics and the impact of renewed or
December 2006 | 125 restored political pluralism on religion. Plurality and pluralism in religion challenge a pattern of public life accustomed for many years to seeing an official or semi-official church (Roman Catholic), which customarily had a recognizably authorized spokesperson. For new actors, growing pluralism leads to efforts to achieve a legitimate role in public life and a place (alongside the Catholic Church) on public and ceremonial platforms. This has its symbolic side, legitimating new churches as appropriate representatives of religion and morality. It also has a very concrete side, in terms of equal access to official subsidies. As noted, Casanova locates this process as part of the shift of the church from its status as church, that is, a religious institution with an official or semi-official monopoly in a given territory, to one of actor among many in an open civil society. He also suggests that in a public sphere open to all, it is in the interests of all to keep it open. In the long run, this can reinforce the commitment of any group to maintaining an open political life. Political changes have had important and often unexpected impacts on religion. With the restoration of democratic politics across the continent, churches and religious leaders have lost (and sometimes abandoned) their openly political roles. To the extent to which political parties and a “normal political life” have regained strength and presence, new social movements, and, in general, the range of groups in civil society with some link to the churches, have lost resources, members, and effectiveness. It has been common to see activists either withdraw or move into specifically political groups or government positions, and for groups to divide on partisan political grounds. Specifically, religious political parties or voting blocs have had limited success: Christian Democrats remain strong only in Chile, and efforts to create explicitly Protestant parties have not prospered. The very idea of a confessional state, which resonates strongly in some fundamentalist circles around the world, finds little echo in Latin American Protestantism. New leadership groups and utterly new leadership styles have emerged in the churches. Media skills are notable and careers in religious or other broadcasting are increasingly common stepping stones to political candidacies. In some Protestant groups in Brazil, there is the beginning edge of what looks like dynasties, with sons of church leaders or founders assuming a directing and leading role in the next phase of church expansion.15 The end of the Cold War had a powerful effect on all the churches. Along with the electoral defeat of the Sandinista Party in Nicaragua, the global problems of socialism and communism left progressives and liberationists facing a totally new political panorama. Earlier confidence in the power of “the people” to recreate society and politics gave way, slowly, to realization of the need for greater pragmatism. It is ironic that this new awareness should emerge more or less simultaneously with the explosive growth of
15 Freston, Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
126 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2 Protestantism, which has captured a growing share of loyalties among the poor, the preferential base for liberation theology. As one friend commented to me, “While the Catholic Church was opting for the poor, the poor themselves were opting for the Protestants.” Note that option was not for Protestantism in the abstract, but rather for specific forms of Protestantism that stressed an intense spiritual and community life rather than a program for long-term political transformation. As for the Protestants themselves, the end of the Cold War liberated them not only from the obsessive anticommunism of the past, but also from close dependence on foreign (mostly North American) leadership and resources, now directed in growing measure to capture souls in the former socialist bloc. The new opening to politics along with growing pluralism within the Protestant community has brought several important elements to the scene. There is a notable revaluation of politics itself: once seen as the realm of corruption and evil, it is now presented as a possible, legitimate, and even necessary field of action for believers. Where once the children of light were enjoined to concentrate above all on personal salvation and building a community of the elect, they now visualize politics, despite the dangers it holds, as a central part of their identity and responsibility. Explicitly evangelical political parties have had little success as such. They have not been able to mobilize or guarantee a bloc vote of the faithful, nor have they attracted masses of voters of any kind. One finds, instead, a growing plurality of political positions, undergirded in part by the fact that the explosive growth of the churches, not surprisingly, has drawn in new members with a wide variety of experiences, careers, and orientations. The experience of Brazil is notable, with self-identified evangelicals (many of them adult converts) present in parties and movements across the ideological spectrum, from the governing Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), or Workers’ Party, on the left, to the parties of the far right.16 As they engage the political world, groups and actors of religious inspiration have not been exempt from the temptations of the old politics, including corruption and the abuse of power. Evangelical leaders (like Christian Democrats a generation earlier) may have expected their presence to carry with it a cleansing and moralization of politics, but this has not been the case. The experience of the evangelical politicians who rose to power in Peru with Alberto Fujimori is instructive, as is the fall of Guatemala’s evangelical President Elías Serrrano. Darío López documents the sad experience of Peru’s evangelicals who swept into office with Fujimori in 1990 and remained bound to the regime until its ignominious collapse a decade later. López distinguishes between the small group of evangelical politicians, totally compromised by the corruption of the Fujimori-Montesinos regime, and the rich experience of activists and ordinary people in civil society, above all in urban survival
16 Ibid.
December 2006 | 127 movements, human rights organizations, and in the Rondas Campesinas. He argues forcefully that the new civic capacities and social capital created at the base have a greater chance of nurturing and sustaining democracy in the long run.
Those evangelicals who supported the regime contributed neither to the articulation of alternative spaces for participation in formal politics nor to the creation of a distinct political ethos.... The presence of evangelical believers in social movements presents a very different image. As part of these citizen movements, sharing in the dynamic of civil society, and working collectively with the poor in the settlements that encircle our great cities as well as with peasant communities suffering directly from the violence of those years, evangelicals crafted new forms of “doing politics” which in the long run helped keep democracy from collapsing completely.17
The effort to create an effective and effectively democratic political presence has been a continuing thread in the recent public presence of religion in Latin America. The process has a different meaning for elites and the institutions they direct than for grass-roots activists and group members. Elites and institutions face the challenge of maintaining a critical presence in a very different political arena. In the 1970s and 1980s, religion was pushed and pulled onto center stage by a powerful combination of new ideas, effective leaders, and populations eager to make sense of their situation and find moral sanction and allies in their search for solutions. As circumstances changed, religion in that form moved off center stage. This is no surprise, but we should be clear that moving off center stage does not mean moving out of the public sphere. Why expect religion to be depoliticized in Latin America, when religious issues and groups flourish in politics all around the world, not least in the United States? At issue is not depoliticization or abandonment of the public sphere, but rather a shift in who speaks, where voices are heard, and what they say. Religious spokespersons no longer command immediate attention; religious discourse no longer occupies center stage. Even if it did, there is no longer a single voice. For their part, activists and especially grass- roots members face a more elemental challenge: how to hold members and keep organizations alive in the teeth of hard times and a state that is at best indifferent. Everywhere in Latin America, transitions to democracy have been accompanied by demobilization and marginalization of popular movements.
17 López, La Seducción del Poder. Evangélicos y Política en el Perú de los Noventa, 124, 125.
128 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2 By now, it is clear that early hopes for a new politics will not be fulfilled. With only scattered exceptions, the social power and new identities put together in the struggles of preceding decades proved unreliable bases for organization and action in the new politics of the 1990s. By the early 1990s, many groups had burned out: the struggle had been exhausting, organizations divided on partisan political grounds, members lost interest, drifted away, or moved into government or politics, leaders were not replaced, and severe economic decline meant that, for numbers of grass-roots followers, the struggle to survive took precedence over the political struggle.18 The impacts of political change on religion clearly come from sources that go well beyond the bounds of formal politics. Great hopes were placed in civil society as the seedbed of a new and more democratic political life. But the new ground of democratic politics proved all too often stony and difficult, when not wholly sterile. In the recent experience of Latin America, as in many other historical and contemporary cases, churches and religiously linked or inspired movements have been among the most important venues in which civic capital has been created and nurtured. Together with a broad spectrum of groups (commonly referred to as civil society), they have played a particularly prominent role in recent years. They open public life to hitherto excluded groups and silent voices, and together represent the creation of a series of spaces for public life which, in many instances, simply did not exist before. These are the neighborhood associations, human rights organizations, women’s groups, survival organizations such as the communal kitchens of Peru, cooperatives, cultural groups, new unions, micro businesses, piqueteros, and so on. That many of these groups ultimately fail should not surprise us, nor does it mean that they leave no trace in the personal life of activists or in society at large.19 The key question may not be the group itself but rather the possibility of creating capacities in one arena and transferring them to other fields of action. Indeed, from one point of view, the most densely structured
18 Recent scholarship has underscored the importance of gender in this process. Throughout the region, women have been a significant part (commonly a majority) of the members and activists of grass-roots groups of religious inspiration. Such activism is costly and difficult, and often runs afoul of felt obligations to family, not to mention open pressure from male relatives. Women also encounter a glass ceiling in many churches, with positions of influence and authority effectively closed to them. The situation is marginally better in some Pentecostal groups, which believe that gifts of the spirit are open to men and women alike, but here, as in the Catholic Church, Max Weber’s general point holds: as religions institutionalize and consolidate, patriarchal views and male domination become more pronounced. For insightful theory and valuable data, see Drogus and Stewart-Gambino, Activist Faith: Popular Women Activists and Their Movements in Democratic Brazil and Chile. 19 On this point, see Drogus and Stewart-Gambino, Activist Faith: Popular Women Activists and Their Movements in Democratic Brazil and Chile; Daniel H. Levine and Catalina Romero, “Movimientos Urbanos y Desempoderamiento en Peru y Venezuela,” América Latina Hoy 36 (2004): 47-77; and Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
December 2006 | 129 and provisioned groups may well be less apt venues for the creation of civic capacities and social capital than those with less exclusive and exhaustive internal ties. Granovetter’s classic work on the “strength of weak ties”20 is relevant here. He stresses that, when the ties within a group are wholly exclusive and demanding and the group, in effect, is shut off from others, there are significant problems of survival. In contrast, weaker internal ties facilitate alliances between groups and the group keeps itself open to the flow of information.
The Language of Rights: Vocabularies, Organizations, Impacts
Consideration of religious transformations and the language of rights in Latin America includes but is not limited to issues of human rights in the classic sense of civil liberties and the protection of the person, but it extends to more general matters of equality, voice, participation, and access. Throughout Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge expansion in the number of human rights organizations, in their national and local presence, and in the scale and effectiveness of their international connections. This phenomenon is related to (although analytically distinct from) the more general expansion of social movements and popular organizations described earlier. Support from the churches, both within nations and localities and, importantly, at a transnational level, was critical in the initiation, financing, and sustaining of these groups. In the 1990s, these same institutions and groups played an important role in negotiating the end to civil wars, in the preparation, staffing, and activities of truth and reconciliation commissions, and in negotiations leading to truces and stand-downs from armed conflict. 21 Why did churches take up rights as a cause in this way and in this time, not only human rights in the classic sense but also a more expanded and agent-defined sense of rights? Why now and in this way and not before? Over the past four decades, political violence in Latin America—targeted assassinations, death squads, torture, disappearances, and internal conflicts and open civil wars—claimed many victims. Religious figures—bishops, priests, nuns, lay activists and educators, and ordinary men and women associated in some way with them—have a prominent place on this long and painful list. But reference to violence, even violence on this scale, is insufficient to account for the new commitment to rights that made so many into targets and
20 Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360-1380. 21 Sikkink, “Nongovernmental Organizations, Democracy, and Human Rights in Latin America”; Lawrence Wechsler, A Miracle: A Universe Settling Accounts with Torturers (New York: Penguin Books, 1990); and Susan Burgerman, Moral Victories: How Activists Provoke Multilateral Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). For a comparative view, see Tristan Borer, Churches and Political Action in South Africa (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1998).
130 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2 martyrs.22 It is also essential to acknowledge the impact—within religious institutions and among religiously inspired activists—of changes in theology and in the understanding of what faith means and requires. The views that evolved could not be subsumed under the rubric of conventional models of charity and amelioration, because a key component was to empower the victims, identify with them, and act alongside them. Central to this development is insistence on the image of an autonomous subject, with capabilities, rights, and legitimate claims as a result of being human. This means that, as a practical matter, the creation and use of a language of rights is difficult to disentangle from the development of associations and networks. Words focus attention, channel energies, and inspire those who use them to see and evaluate reality in specific ways, and to seek allies, connections, and means with which to work on the world as they see and judge it. This is the case with the transformation of rights in religious discourse in Latin America. These changes are most notable and have been most commented upon in the case of liberation theology, which had the effect in many cases of leading key figures in the hierarchy, clergy, and lay population to identify with victims of poverty and repression and to reread their religious mission as requiring action to change the circumstances that created abuse. Central to this development is insistence on the figure of an autonomous subject, with capabilities, rights (including a right to legitimate voice and participation in the public sphere), and legitimate claims as a result of being human. The ideas crystallized in liberation theology did much to shape the positions taken by the region’s Catholic bishops at Medellín and Puebla and served as a generative base for the actions of many individuals, groups, and church-sponsored or -linked networks in defense of rights and democracy throughout the region. Three concepts lie at the heart of liberation theology and together provide a foundation for thinking about rights in a new way : (1) emphasis on God as the God of Life; (2) insistence on the unity of sacred and human history; and (3) stress on seeing poverty as a social and historical condition, one that is deeply contrary to God’s desires. These three elements are knit together by a concern with poverty that is also a commitment to the poor to side with— to take a “preferential option” for—the poor (to use the phrase made famous at the 1979 meeting of the region’s Catholic Bishops in Puebla. God gives abundant life and values the life of all beings. This life involves more than simply survival over a determined number of years: the life envisioned by the
22 A classic early statement is Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People, The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America: The Catholic Church in Conflict with U.S. Policy (New York: Penguin Books, 1982). See also, Phillip Berryman, Stubborn Hope Religion, Politics, and Revolution in Central America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994); Donna Brett and Edward Brett, Murdered in Central America: The Stories of Eleven U.S. Missionaries (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988); and Anna Peterson, Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War (Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press, 1997).
December 2006 | 131 God of Life requires adequate health, fulfilling education, family, nutrition, and so forth. Throughout his work, the theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez refers to poverty as “early death”—a condition that creates limited, truncated, and often painful lives. To insist that there is only one history—that human and sacred history are joined—means, in a concrete sense, that one does not wait for salvation or begin building the kingdom of God after death. The kingdom of God begins here and now, and being true to God’s plan also must begin in this life. (Luke 17:20-21—“The Kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, ‘Lo, here it is…. For behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.’”) Gutiérrez makes an explicit connection between commitment to the God of Life, and hence, commitment to the poor and concern for human rights.
As I stated earlier, in the final analysis, poverty means death: the physical death of many as well as cultural death from the disregard in which many others live. A few decades ago, our perception of this situation led to preoccupation with the theme of life as a gift from the God of our faith. The assassination of Christians, victims of their testimony to the Gospel, made this concern all the more urgent. Reflection on this experience of persecution and martyrdom has given strength and breadth to a theology of life that helps us see that the option for the poor is, at root, an option for life.23
A vision of God as the God of Life and insistence that there is only one history acquire practical focus through the analysis and understanding of poverty. Acknowledging the social and historical character of poverty has several consequences. All social orders are created by human beings acting under particular historical circumstances. No divine approval attaches to any social or political order, much less one that creates and sustains massive and dehumanizing poverty. Because poverty is a historical product, constructed and maintained over time by relations of power, poverty can be challenged and changed using the same methods of organization, collective action, and the exercise of power. This outlook on poverty drives the recourse to the social sciences that have been such a central (and misunderstood) component of liberation theology. Social science does not replace theological reflection, but rather complements it. The evolution of social scientific understanding of poverty in Latin America provided liberation theology with both an explanation of reality and an action program. The explanation finds the roots of poverty in exploitation and class division; the action program is popular
23 Gustavo Gutiérrez, ¿Donde Dormirán Los Pobres? (Lima: CEP, 1996), 56.
132 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2 organization. Structural analysis has been foundational for liberation theology, and as Gutiérrez acknowledges,
This has not been without costs, because although it is true that the privileged of this world easily accept hearing about the existence of massive poverty (there is no way to hide it in our times) problems begin when one points to the causes of this poverty. Searching for causes inevitably leads to the topic of social injustice and this is when one finds resistance. Above all if to structural analysis one adds a concrete historical perspective, one that points up personal responsibilities. But the greatest resistance and fear appear when the poor take stock of their own situation and organize.24
Gutiérrez is fully aware of the continuing evolution of the social sciences, and points to the corresponding evolution of analytical tools for theological reflection: early reliance on dependency theory has yielded to a broader, more interdisciplinary, and culturally nuanced set of references. The conceptualization of poverty that undergirds liberation theology is simultaneously material and concrete, spiritual, and a matter of commitment.25 Liberation theology advanced a utopian position to the extent theologians and those inspired by them refuse to accept that what exists defines the boundaries of the possible. They look beyond the parameters of the present to the possibility of something better, something that does now exist.26 The power of this formulation lies in how it combines an understanding of poverty and injustice with a commitment to action, rooting both in a biblical vision of the God of Life. From this perspective, a phrase such as “the right to life,” so central in many recent North American debates, extends well beyond issues of conception, contraception, and abortion on which these debates have centered. They share in a concept often referred to as a “consistent ethic of life,” which folds consideration of reproductive issues and abortion into a broad set of positions on health, poverty, capital punishment, war, and
24 Gustavo Gutiérrez, Gutiérrez,Gustavo, Textos Esenciales Acordarse de los Pobres (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Peru, 2004), 566. 25 Gutiérrez states the matter clearly in a text that explores the new context of poverty in the world economy. “We live in a continent that is both Christian and overwhelmingly poor. The presence of this massive and inhumane poverty drove us to reflect on the biblical meaning of poverty. Towards the middle of the 1960s, three understandings of the term ‘poverty’ were formulated among theologians: a) real (often called “material”) poverty, as a scandalous state, not desired by God; b) spiritual poverty, in the sense of a child like spirituality one of whose expressions is indifference to the goods of this world; and c) poverty as commitment: solidarity with the poor and protest against poverty.” Gutierrez, ¿Donde Dormirán Los Pobres? 7-8. 26 Daniel H. Levine, "Considering Liberation Theology as Utopia,” Review of Politics 52, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 602-619.
December 2006 | 133 care of the terminally ill.27 The kind of action enjoined is also very specific: there is great stress on solidarity and sharing the lives and conditions of the poor (the common Spanish term is accompañamiento) and working with them to empower change. This general position was summed up by the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador in a speech delivered just a month before he was shot down while celebrating mass. Romero called for recognizing the poor—seeing them as they really are—and acknowledging their centrality to a proper understanding of the church’s mission.28 It is the poor, he stated,
...who tell us what the world is, and what the church’s service to the world should be. It is the poor who tell us what the polis is, what the city is and what it means for the church really to live in that world.... Because the church has opted for the truly poor, and not for the fictitiously poor, because it has opted for those who are really oppressed and repressed, the church lives in a political world, and it fulfills itself as church also through politics. It cannot be otherwise if the church, like Jesus, is to turn itself toward the poor. 29
Poverty is the result of the power of what Romero termed “structures of sin” in society and politics.
They are sin because they produce the fruits of sin: the deaths of Salvadorans—the swift death brought by repression or the long, drawn out, but no less real, death from structural oppression…. No matter how tragic it may appear, the church through its entrance into the real socio-political world has learned how to recognize, and how to deepen its understanding of, the essence of sin. The fundamental essence of sin, in our world, is revealed in the death of Salvadorans.30
27 This is a position often associated in the United States with the late Cardinal Archbishop Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, who also used the term “a seamless garment” to denote a broad agenda of life. This position clearly has much in common with that articulated in liberation theology. See Peter Boyer, “A Hard Faith: How the New Pope and His Predecessor Redefined Vatican II,” New Yorker, May 16, 2005, for an account of current Vatican politics and their influence in the United States, which situates this concept within North American Catholicism. 28 The quotations that follow are from “The Political Dimension of the Faith from the Perspective of the Option for the Poor,” an address delivered on the occasion of his being awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the University of Louvain, Belgium, Feburary 2, 1980. Reprinted in Voice of the Voiceless: The Four Pastoral Letters and Other Statements (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985). 29 Ibid., 179, 182-183. 30 Ibid., 183-184.
134 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2 Critics often question his stated preference for the poor. Is it not too exclusive, partial, or excessively politicized? Those working within this perspective insist, to the contrary, that their stance is an essential element of any authentic faith. Gutiérrez puts the matter boldly:
It is a theocentric and prophetic choice rooted in God’s freely given love and demanded by it. In other words, the poor are preferred not because they are morally or religiously better than others, but because God is God, He for whom “the last shall be first.” This assertion clashes with our narrow understanding of justice, but it is precisely this preference for the poor that reminds us that God’s ways are not our own.31
Solidarity with the poor and oppressed requires commitments of a kind that place individuals and groups directly at the center of conflicts. Accompanying the poor and oppressed entails the risk of sharing their fate, and so it has been. Gutiérrez insists that the poor and oppressed are themselves key protagonists of the process.
This commitment draws from the experience of the oppressed themselves as they began turning themselves into agents of their own destiny. In effect, in the 1950s and 1960s, we witnessed the first steps in consciousness and organizing by popular sectors in defense of the right to life, in struggle to defend their own dignity, for social justice, and in a commitment to liberation. Here one could see the outlines of a kind of popular protagonist (an actor) which would consolidate in the coming years and which, with advances and retreats, remains a presence in our lives. Many Christians from these sectors have been present in this process…their experience has nurtured theological reflection. It is therefore false to argue that theological reflection (la inteligencia de la fe, the intelligence of faith) arose from middle classes, only later extending to the experience of the poor themselves. The truth is that their own commitments, their efforts to organize and their living experience of the faith have been present from the very beginning. To ignore this is to misunderstand what happened in these times or to misrepresent it explicitly: the facts themselves belie such an interpretation.32
31 Gutiérrez, Textos Esenciales Acordarse de los Pobres, 571. 32 Ibid., 574.
December 2006 | 135 Many have questioned whether the church may be losing its religious identity through such deep involvement in politics. Others, Gutiérrez notes, have gone further. “From positions of power they have openly violated the human rights defended in church documents and struck blows against those Christians who gave voice to their solidarity with the poor and oppressed.” Echoing Archbishop Romero, he responds that “a correct insertion into the world of the poor does not distort the mission of the church. The truth is that this is where the church finds her fullest identity as a sign of the Kingdom of God to which we are all called and in which the poor and insignificant have a privileged place. The church does not lose its identity in solidarity with the poor, it strengthens it.” 33 The conceptualization of poverty in liberation theology provides a ground for an expanding concept of rights, and a moral vocabulary that legitimized organizations and action in defense of these rights. The demand for solidarity with the poor and the oppressed means active efforts to defend them along with a commitment to put institutions at their service. It goes beyond the economics of poverty to address broader issues of inequality and injustice. It goes beyond acting for the poor to accompanying them and placing institutions and resources at their disposal. From this starting point, the transition to support of movements by landless peasants, urban squatter settlement dwellers, political prisoners, the unemployed and similar groups is straightforward. In Peru and other cases, grass-roots ecumenical coalitions worked to defend rights. In key cases such as Brazil and Chile, the Catholic Church, with support from others and access to important transnational networks, placed resources at the service of the defense of human rights and of the victims of repression.34 In these and other cases, the defense of classic human rights was accompanied by promotion of organizing efforts and of the right to participation by those without resources. Through a close examination of the origins of many grass-roots movements (peasant and urban squatter settlements, local health committees or cooperatives), one finds a coalition of religiously inspired activists with communities having specific needs. One case in point is what has become the biggest single social movement in Latin America, Brazil’s organization of landless peasants, the Movimento Sem Terra (MST).35
33 Ibid., 592. 34 On Peru, see López, La Seducción del Poder. Evangélicos y Política en el Perú de los Noventa. On Chile and Brazil, see Drogus and Stewart-Gambino, Activist Faith: Popular Women Activists and Their Movements in Democratic Brazil and Chile, and Wechlser, A Miracle: A Universe Settling Accounts with Torturers. 35 On the MST, see Miguel Carter, “The Origins of Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST): The Natalino Episode in Rio Grande Do Sul (1981-84)—A Case of Ideal Interest Mobilization,” University of Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies, Working Paper Series, Working Paper CBS-43-2003, 2003, and Wendy Woolford, “Sem Reforma Agrária Não Ha Democracia: Deepening Democracy and the Struggle for Agrarian Reform in Brazil,” in Civil Society and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Carlos Waisman, Richard Feinberg, and Leon
136 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2 The transformation of religious language paralleled the evolution of organizations addressing rights. The two developments are closely related.36 Kathryn Sikkink distinguishes three moments in the development of human rights organizations and networks in Latin America: creation (1973-1981), consolidation (1982-1990), and refocusing and retrenchment (1991 onward). In the first period, “human rights” was placed on the agenda of national and transnational institutions for the first time. North American, and particularly European, church groups played a key role in setting up and financing groups in Latin America. Key institutions were created, including specifically for the Americas, America’s Watch, the Inter-American Committee for Human Rights, the Washington Office on Latin America (formed by a coalition of church groups), and in Latin America, the Service for Peace and Justice, SERPAJ, an outgrowth of organizing efforts by the Quaker-based Fellowship for Reconciliation.37 Ron Kraybill’s comment on the role of Catholic actors in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe’s war of independence is apt. Religiously inspired values of peace, transcendence, and service to others inspired them to engage with the victims of violence.
But Catholics did not merely see the issues; their far-flung church system provided an unparalleled information gathering network, making it possible to compile information essential for mobilizing domestic and world opinion. When it came to influencing decision makers, the Catholic efforts depended on an international structure for collecting, analyzing and disseminating information and a ready entrée to political figures and media channels, domestically and abroad. 38
In the first period, most national and transnational groups centered their attention on massive violations of rights by military dictatorships, and so focused on rights of the person, freedom from execution, torture, and arbitrary imprisonment. As groups became more established and transnational networks consolidated, “they now began to address the human rights issues
Zamosc (London: Palgrave Macmillan/St Martin’s Press, 2006), 139-168. That this movement continues to draw church commitment and continues to entail risk was brought home by the recent murder of Sister Dorothy Stang, a North American nun who had worked for thirty years with peasant groups in Brazil’s northeast. See Kirk Johnson, “Memory of Activist Sister is Now Brother’s Mission,” New York Times, March 20, 2005. 36 Sikkink, “Nongovernmental Organizations, Democracy, and Human Rights in Latin America.” 37 Ibid., and Ronald Pagnucco and J. D. McCarthy, “Advocating Non Violent Direct Action in Latin America: The Antecedents and Emergence of SERPAJ,” in Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: Revival of Religious Fundamentalism in East and West, ed. Bronislaw Misztal and Anson Shupe (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 125-150. 38 Ron Kraybill, “Transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe: The Role of Religious Actors.,” in Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, ed. Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 221.
December 2006 | 137 in transitional regimes, increasingly stressing the role of democracy, political rights, and justice for victims of past human rights abuses. The groups began to stress the “quality” and “content” of democracy rather than the mere existence of elections; this allowed them to incorporate many of their basic human rights concerns within the debate about democracy.39 Sikkink dates reorientation and retrenchment from 1991 onward, a point in time that coincides more or less with transitions to democracy in major countries and the end of civil conflict and internal war in such notable cases as Guatemala, El Salvador, and Peru. These developments drew many militants into “ordinary politics,” and coincided with accumulating changes in the Catholic Church under the papacy of the late John Paul II that led to a withdrawal from activism and the closing of such well-known institutions as Chile’s Vicaría de la Solidaridad.40 Human rights groups, of course, remain active, but their own agenda has also changed, moving beyond torture to impunity, rights violations, electoral rights, and rights of vulnerable groups such as women, children, homosexuals, and indigenous peoples. Some groups founded in earlier periods, such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who began in 1977 with strong support from SERPAJ, continue to the present day with a broader agenda. In Latin America, as in cases such as South Africa or the Philippines, groups of religious inspiration (occasionally but not always joined by leaders of the institutional churches) played a key role brokering an end to dictatorship and negotiating an end to civil war, and in the preparation and legitimization of truth and reconciliation commissions. Those opposed to such a role often argue that such efforts simply stir up the past, and some—like the Argentine Catholic bishops’ call for a “balanced” history—legitimize the role of military and police institutions in combating subversion.41 However, on the whole, religious language and organizations have been deployed in support of these efforts. In a commentary on the Report of the Peruvian Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, Gutiérrez notes that ignoring the past means refusing to face a present that has deep roots in that very past, thus making a repetition all the more likely. He rejects the notion that such a report is simply nosing around the past and that it is time to move on. Those who hold this view, he writes, “lack respect for the dead. They forget that for those who directly suffered harm and loss from the violence, for those who do not know if their loved ones are dead or where their bodies may be, all that happened is not
39 Sikkink, “Nongovernmental Organizations, Democracy, and Human Rights in Latin America,” 155. 40 For details on Chile, see Stewart-Gambino, “Las Pobladoras y la Iglesia Despolitizada en Chile.” Similar issues have arisen in Peru, along with controversies concerning the role of Opus Dei, and the human rights positions taken by Cardenal Cipriani. On this case, see Larry Rohter, “Peru’s Catholics Brace for Fissures in Their Church,” New York Times, May 8, 2005. 41 Fortunato Mallimaci, “Catolicismo y política en el gobierno de Kichner,” America Latina Hoy 41 (2005): 57-76.
138 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2 another time for them, it is a lacerating present. 42 Gutiérrez insists that pardon (a totally free act taken from a perspective of faith) be distinguished clearly from a just sanction for crimes committed. Citing the biblical injunction, “Blessed are those who weep, those who feel compassion, those who feel as their own the sufferings of others” (Matthew), he continues,
There is a gesture that the prophet Isaiah presents us with in beautiful and moving terms: “The Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces and remove the condemnation of the people from the earth. Blessed, happy are those who act in this way. In the words of Luke, we can say, ‘Woe to them who present themselves before the God of justice and mercy with dry eyes. Because they did not know how to share their time, their concern and their feelings with those whose dignity as human beings, as daughters and sons of God was trampled upon, those who have suffered forgotten and in silence....’ Bible calls this “consolation.” But let us be precise. This consolation has the sense not only of welcoming and listening, but also, and above all, of liberating from all that creates an inhuman situation…. Will we let this opportunity pass? The opportunity for reconciliation. We cannot allow truth to remain hidden under ground, in one of these unmarked graves that hold so many dead. 43
It is fair to ask what impact words, in this case the transformation of a language of rights, can have in the long run. Do not actions count more than words? The preceding discussion underscores how closely related words are to actions. The transformations in religion in Latin America outlined here, and the creation of a new moral vocabulary of rights have had tangible consequences and long-lasting impact in the region. Human rights is now firmly on the agenda of all major institutions. Networks of local groups of all kinds (including those dedicated to human rights) now exist, often with extensive transnational connections. This is not to say that abuses no longer exist. But there is now an organized and vocal constituency that monitors and denounces such abuse. The link of religious change to expanded understandings of rights that is expressed in language is manifest in collective social action through a broad network of social movements—a civil society —that in most cases simply did not exist twenty years ago. Despite the many difficulties such movements have encountered, and the exaggerated
42 Gutiérrez, Textos Esenciales Acordarse de los Pobres, 461. 43 Ibid., 464-465.
December 2006 | 139 expectations and hopes placed in them, their presence does change the social and political landscape, providing new venues for action and sources of new leadership that are only now beginning to make themselves felt.
Conclusions: Pluralism and the Future of Rights
The dynamic and conflict-charged character of the transformations that constitute our story make it difficult to draw a balance. The reality sketched out here is constantly changing. The pluralism that is so visible now was predicted by very few: the continued energy and creativity of those on the ground will surely produce as yet unanticipated patterns. Drawing a balance is further complicated by contextual variation. The common thread of pluralism and plurality shapes the actors at play and the resources and orientations at their disposal, but what they do with these varies greatly depending on the structure of opportunity in any specific time and place. A review of the recent history of religion and politics, and of the relation between them shows much change in little time. Contrary to what classic theories of secularization and modernization lead many to anticipate, the space where religion, society, and politics come together has remained a dynamic source of innovation and continuing transformation. The resulting changes in the structure of groups and in the sources and nature of leadership, in the character of public discourse, and in the claims made on public space have consequences that reach far beyond the confines of any particular institutional sphere. So it is not just governments or churches that are affected: new issues are put on the public agenda, and new groups brought into play. With roots in these continuing transformations, the new language of rights reaches out to shape the agenda of institutions, as it gives voice and a legitimate place in public life to hitherto silent, marginal, and ignored groups. Among the most urgent tasks any agenda for the future must take up will be finding ways to make sense of the multiple consequences of religious pluralism as much for religion as for politics, democratic politics above all. The erosion of Catholicism’s religious and cultural monopoly in Latin America and the coming of real pluralism impact the public image of religion and have a clear feedback effect on the internal life of all communities of faith. Whatever their particular beliefs or their social and political interests or commitments, all now face a plural and more open world. One way to get at possible futures is to think about how institutional churches and religiously inspired groups and activists reposition themselves to cope with the new realities of plurality and pluralism in religion and politics. The active involvement of church people and networks in the promotion and defense of human rights is testimony to the introduction of a vocabulary of rights into religious discourse which has had important legitimating effects on the discourse of rights and equality in social and political life more broadly. For the Protestant community in particular, as we have seen, repositioning
140 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2 means revaluing politics as a proper and legitimate arena for action, while leaving behind the ferocious and obsessive antileftism that constrained political options in the past. The transformations described here mean that, as we look into the future, we must pay attention not to one but to multiple agendas. Any effort to construct agendas has to acknowledge the legitimate presence of multiple actors not only in politics and society, but also within religion itself. Building up civil society presents the long-dominant Catholic Church and other churches competing with it for members, resources, and a public presence, with a range of groups and voices that escape control and must be recognized as autonomous if they are to be real, rather than paper organizations.
December 2006 | 141 142 | Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No. 2