Latin American Catholicism and fundamentalism
1. INTRODUCTION
It was among Christians that the concept of fundamentalism was born. But the milieu in question was Protestant, not Catholic, and it could well be argued that the notion of a Catholic fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms. Even if it were not, one might reasonably hesitate to apply the term to Liberation Theology. And yet its central value is to an extent reminiscent of fundamentalism, and on the formal side it has a significant if indirect historical link to it. This is not enough to justify calling Liberation Theology fundamentalist, but it does make it worth including in the framework of our comparison.
2. FORM
Christianity as such is a religion whose form invites fundamentalization. There is the Bible and there is the rest; all one has to do is to set aside the rest and go back to the Bible. Catholics can make this choice as much as any other Christians. The problem they face, however, is that they thereby cease to be Catholics. A Catholic by definition recognizes the binding character of the continuing authority of the church; a fundamentalist by definition does not. This is one reason for the schismatic outcome of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. In the twentieth century it meant that Liberationists, whatever else they might be, could hardly be both Catholics and fundamentalists.
For a Liberationist, remaining a Catholic carries a certain cost. The Catholic church is a large and powerful organization, shaped around the continuing organizational and doctrinal sovereignty of an ecclesiastical hierarchy headed by the pope.1 This makes it a seriously constricting environment for many of its inmates, and by breaking with it they can look to achieve greater freedom of thought and action. But with that step they also forego the manifold advantages of belonging to such an organization—its support, its resources, its networks, its wide acceptance among ordinary people, not to say its brand image (assuming it weathers the child-abuse scandals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries). We do not need to attempt to weigh up these costs and benefits; what matters is that the Liberationists themselves made clear their preference for being dissidents within the church rather than schismatics outside it. As one activist put it, “The hierarchy has meaning to the people. Attacking the hierarchy means losing contact with the people.”2 A well-known Brazilian Liberationist theologian took a similar view, even in the face of an investigation of his orthodoxy mounted by the Vatican: “I prefer to walk with the Church than go it alone with my theology.”3 Or as a dissident priest said of his membership of the Catholic church, “History put me here.”4 This meant that a thoroughgoing fundamentalism would not have been an option for the Liberationists even had they been attracted by the idea.
Our comparative experience, however, is that thoroughgoing fundamentalism is rare. What we should look for is rather a shift in emphasis, and this we can readily identify among the Liberationists of Latin America. Let us take as an example the classic expositions of Liberation Theology published by the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez in 1970–1971 and examine the authorities he cites.
Sure enough, the Bible is by far the most prominent. Moreover, Gutiérrez quotes it without reference to the Catholic exegetical tradition down the ages. More generally, he cites few Catholic authorities from the period between the New Testament and modern times; even such giants as Aquinas (d. 1274) are rarely mentioned.5 However, the fact that he cites figures from this epoch at all makes it clear that we are not dealing with a doctrinaire fundamentalism, and there is a reference to “the great ecclesial tradition within which every sound theology is located.”6
This allegiance to the church is considerably more in evidence when we turn to the modern period. Here Gutiérrez often cites recent church documents—papal encyclicals, proceedings of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), and decisions of the council of Latin American bishops held at Medellín in 1968.7 He does not treat these documents with the same deference as the Bible; he feels comfortable praising their strong points and occasionally lamenting their weak points8—the latter something he does not do with Biblical texts. He particularly likes what John XXIII (in office 1958–1963) said about the church being “especially the church of the poor.”9 Overall, it is clear that for Gutiérrez these documents are basically authoritative.
But another noteworthy feature of the way he goes about things is the number of modern authorities he cites who are not Catholic at all—Hegel, Marx, Freud, Sartre, Che Guevara, even Luther.10 One senses that Gutiérrez regards any major figure in modern intellectual history as fair game, though there are some conspicuous omissions—Adam Smith, for example. All in all, it is evident that in formal terms his fundamentalizing tendency is a soft one.
That leaves the question of the source of this tendency. As we have seen, a major development contemporary with the rise of Liberation Theology in Latin America was the spread of Protestantism.11 This challenge naturally foregrounded the Bible. As early as 1941 Hurtado was recommending the creation of small groups focused on the Bible to counter the Protestant threat in Chile.12 Later the lay Catholic religious groups associated with the Liberationists—the new “ecclesial base communities”—felt the need to do the same. In other words, the Catholic church was under pressure to emulate Protestant fundamentalism at a popular level. This turn toward the Bible was not an effortless one for Catholics: people had to be disabused of the idea that the Bible had been written by Protestants and that it was therefore heretical to read it.13 But the Protestant factor does much to account for the prominence of the Bible in Liberation Theology.
Since Liberation Theology is not about identity, we are concerned here only with values. In assessing what a fundamentalizing emphasis does for the Liberationists, let us follow the usual order. As in the previous section I will give some incidental attention to Protestant fundamentalism, though here more by way of comparison than historical explanation.
On the social front going back to the Bible does something dramatic for Liberation Theology. Its view of the poor is founded directly on scripture, especially the New Testament—and as usual, with no significant recourse to later Catholic exegesis.14 As we have seen, what made this view of the poor and its scriptural foundations so seductive for the Liberationists was the prestige of Marxism15 and not the challenge of Protestantism. But the significant point here is that Christian scripture was ready to provide them with the wherewithal to construct their leftist syncretism.
The equivalent foundational texts of Islam and Hinduism would have been much less helpful. In the Islamic case the poor may be at the head of the queue to enter Paradise, but in the meantime they are given no promise that theirs is the kingdom of God.16 This helps to explain why figures like Mawdūdī and Quṭb displayed no interest in elaborating a theology of liberation with such a focus.17 Likewise, the strong endorsement of social hierarchy in the Hindu case makes the mainstream tradition, even in its Vedic form, an inhospitable setting for a preference for the poor. And sure enough, movements championing those at the bottom of Hindu society have taken one of two forms: either they are religious movements that have broken with mainstream Hinduism or they are secular movements that do not relate to it.18 One might perhaps argue that Gandhi’s crusade against untouchability was an exception. Indeed, as a member of the elite who identified with the poor and downtrodden, he did have a real spiritual affinity with the Liberationists; in a religious idiom unavailable to them, he averred that if he had to be reborn, it should be as an Untouchable “so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings, and the affronts leveled at them.”19 But his idiosyncratic religiosity was far from mainstream—and in no way fundamentalist. He relativized Hinduism through his belief that “there is one true and perfect religion, but it becomes many as it passes through the human medium.”20 He ascribed a higher authority to his moral convictions than to the Hindu scriptures, which he considered like all scriptures to be man-made.21 And while he held that untouchability had no support in the Hindu scriptures,22 he also affirmed that were he to be persuaded otherwise, he would discard his religion “as I should throw overboard a rotten apple.”23 The Hindu value he did espouse in his political life was nonviolence (ahiṃsā),24 but his deployment of this value in politics was no part of the Hindu tradition.
We come now to what fundamentalism would mean for attitudes to warfare. In a Latin American context in which nonviolence cut no ice and insurrection was the order of the day, a focus on Jesus did not have much to offer the Liberationists. It might have been different if, like the Christian Reconstructionists, they had been prepared to take their inspiration from the Old Testament25 or if, like the Cristero rebels of western Mexico in the 1920s, they had been comfortable with the later record of Catholic belligerency.26 But the Jesus of the New Testament gave no support to insurrection. This helps to explain the ambivalence displayed by the Liberationists in this regard, caught as they were between the violence of the Marxists and the pacifism of the Gospels. No such problem confronted violent Islamists.
Our next topic, divine jealousy, need hardly detain us. More than either Islam or Hinduism, it has been the historical lot of Christianity to accommodate itself to legal, intellectual, and political traditions that took shape independently of it—the process so eloquently acknowledged by Augustine.27 A return to the values of the founder does little to destabilize these accommodations since it was he who advised his followers to render “unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” (Matt. 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25). As far as the Liberationists are concerned, divine jealousy is a nonissue.
Finally, we come to the polity. As we have noted, in their political thought the Liberationists lacked a conception of the Christian state—a gap in their thinking that reflects a gap in the foundations of Christianity.28 We do not need to elaborate on this here, but it may be worth a digression to see how the same lacuna affects the Protestant fundamentalists of North America. Most Christian fundamentalists in the United States have no conception of what it would mean to set about establishing an intrinsically Christian state. If a Christian fundamentalist is nevertheless determined to construct such a notion, there are only two ways to go: forward into the eschatological future, or back to the pre-Christian Israelite polity of the Old Testament. I will not take up the eschatological option here, but it is worth spending a moment on the Israelite alternative.
Among North American fundamentalists, those who think seriously about the establishment of a Christian state as a political project are the Christian Reconstructionists.29 They represent a small minority among Christian fundamentalists, “a movement within a movement,”30 “a tiny fringe.”31 In a manner reminiscent of Sayyid Quṭb, they see “the rejection of God’s government for man’s government” as a form of apostasy.32 As God tells Samuel when the Israelite elders express their desire to have a king “like all the nations,” “they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.”33 Yet even in this fringe milieu there is some hesitation about making a clean break with the existing American polity, and it surfaces in divergent attitudes to the American Constitution. Two of the leading Reconstructionist thinkers are Rousas John Rushdoony (d. 2001) and his estranged son-in-law Gary North.34 One aspect of Rushdoony’s thought that North mercilessly attacks is what he calls Rushdoony’s thirty-year defense of the American Constitution as “an implicitly Christian document.”35 By contrast, North himself denounces the Constitution as “anti-Christian,”36 “an apostate covenant,”37 a “demonic plan” devised by James Madison;38 the problem with the document “was and is polytheism,”39 and its adoration is a popular form of “idol worship.”40 When the nation ratified the Constitution, it broke with its Christian past “by covenanting with a new god, the sovereign People.”41 In the premises of his thinking about a properly Christian political order, North thus stands out as a figure inviting comparison with numerous Islamists; he sounds just like Ẓawāhirī denouncing democracy.42 By the same token, Christian fundamentalists at large fall well short of this standard. But the substance of what North is proposing would not have much appeal to Islamists. One of its characteristic features is a commitment to reducing the role of the state to a minimum, even in a fully Christian society, whereas for obvious reasons Muslim fundamentalists want their Islamic state to be strong.43 Thus North speaks of “self-government under God,”44 just as he looks forward to the eventual emergence of a republic that will be “decentralized, international, theocratic.”45 In other words, the Reconstructionist paradigm is the premonarchic, not to say anarchic, phase of the Israelite polity. As we have seen, there is good scriptural authority for this choice, but it is also aligned with the prominence of libertarian thinking in the United States and no doubt strongly influenced by it.46 This is not a style of political thought with much appeal outside North America, either for Islamists or for Liberationists. There is, nevertheless, one significant overlap between the two visions: both Christian Reconstructionists and Islamists focus on a past in which dynastic succession, and the patrimonialism that inevitably goes with it, were conspicuously absent.47
What emerges from this discussion is that Liberation Theology, insofar as it can be described as fundamentalist at all, is characterized by a one-track fundamentalism that does not go beyond the preference for the poor.48
4. FUNDAMENTALISM, CONSERVATISM, AND MODERNISM
The relationship of Liberation Theology to modernism need hardly detain us: the Liberationists are modernists. Insofar as one aspect of their thought can be seen as a return to the foundations, it served the thoroughly modernist purpose of importing into Catholicism what many progressive Latin Americans saw as the leading secular ideology of the day.
The interaction between Liberationists and Catholic conservatives was more conflict prone. Most obviously, they were at different ends of the political spectrum. They also represented very different religious styles. It is true that basic elements of Catholic religious life—such as churches and masses—remained constant, much as in the Muslim, though not the Hindu case. But, as we have seen, the Liberationists had little sympathy for popular religion and no idea how to build on it:49 so where the Hindu nationalists knew just what to do with the traditional religious processions of India, those of Latin America were wasted on the Liberationists. They had no kinship with the Cristeros of an earlier epoch, whose insurrection against the irreligion of the Mexican state was a desperate attempt to preserve the kind of traditional Catholicism that the Liberationists despised. Nor did any rapport develop between Liberation Theology and the diffuse but widespread religious conservatism that continues to exist among pious Latin American Catholics.50
5. CONCLUSION
Though Christianity and fundamentalism go well together, Catholicism and fundamentalism are arguably mutually exclusive. What we see in the case of Liberation Theology is in fact no more than the presence of an isolated fundamentalist motif, the privileged role ascribed to the poor. Formally the Liberationists owed it to the Protestants, whose presence explains their focus on the Bible; substantively they derived the idea from the Marxists, with the poor substituting for the proletariat as the agent of revolutionary transformation. But their scripture did not offer the Liberationists any equivalent of the armed violence of the Marxists or their conception of a postrevolutionary political order, nor did it have anything relevant to tell them about identity. That one fundamentalist motif apart, the Liberationists can best be described as modernists—devotees of a modern rather than a jealous god and in sharp conflict with conservatives. Overall, religious fundamentalism has played no more part in politics in Latin America than it has among the Hindus.
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1 As Keddie points out, Catholicism is “the only major religion with a single doctrinal leader” (“New Religious Politics,” 704).
2 D. H. Levine, Popular voices, 84–85.
3 Sigmund, Liberation theology, 159.
4 Nagle, Claiming the Virgin, 67.
5 For occasional references to Aquinas, see, for example, Gutiérrez, “Notes,” 200; Gutiér rez, Theology of liberation, 4–5.
6 Gutiérrez, Theology of liberation, xxxv.
7 Gutiérrez, “Notes,” 201; Theology of liberation, 22–23.
8 See, for example, Gutiérrez, Theology of liberation, 23, 99.
9 Ibid., xxvi, xli, 162 (but cf. 164–65).
10 For such references, see, for example, Gutiérrez, Theology of liberation, 8, 18–21, 30, 32, 52, 56, 93, 101, 112, 125, 138.
11 See 133–34.
12 Gill, Rendering unto Caesar, 134; and cf. 96 on Catholic distribution of Bibles in Argentina and Brazil in the 1930s.
13 Ibid., 89, and cf. 93–94. Compare a remark made by a Colombian Catholic who had taken a cursillo (a short religious course): those who had not taken the course thought that those who had done so “were not Catholics any more, but had joined some [Protestant] sect” (D. H. Levine, Popular voices, 303). Charismatic Catholics making pastoral visits to Catholic homes have likewise been mistaken for Protestants (Chesnut, Competitive spirits, 86).
14 See 199–201, 204–5.
15 See 353–55.
16 See 174–76.
17 See 180–81.
18 See 76–77, for examples of the former, and 86–87 for a case of the latter.
19 Quoted in Jordens, Gandhi’s religion, 104. Again: “Self-realisation I hold to be impossible without service of and identification with the poorest” (242).
20 Ibid., 154, and see 74, 150, 151, 156. From 1930 on he did not even assert that Hinduism was better than other religions (154). Likewise he came to know the Gītā thanks to his contacts with the Theosophists (10, 27) and was a disciple of Tolstoy (14, 31, 34, 62–63).
21 Ibid., 65–66, 76, 128–29, 133, 145. He did try to read the Vedas but without much success (140).
22 Ibid., 92, 104.
23 Ibid., 104, and cf. 103.
24 Ibid., 222–23, 231–32.
25 See 305–6, 436–38.
26 Cf. the Cristero song quoted above, 245.
27 See 297–98.
28 See 351.
29 For a sketch of this school of thought, see English, “Christian Reconstructionism,” especially 167–73. I am indebted to Robert Wuthnow for his helpful response to my queries. For a broader comparison of Christian Reconstructionist thought with Muslim fundamentalism, see Al-Azm, “Islamic fundamentalism reconsidered, Part II,” 90–97.
30 Shupe, “Reconstructionist movement,” 880.
31 Wilcox, Onward Christian soldiers, 127–28. English states that the movement “experienced its greatest flourish in the late 1980s,” but that “as soon as it stepped into the spotlight, its popularity began to plateau and fade” (“Christian Reconstructionism,” 169). By contrast, a secularist commentator writing in an alarmist vein sees Reconstructionism as “a little-known political theology that is steadily gaining adherents” and influence (Pottenger, Reaping the whirlwind, 208).
32 Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical law, 34, 797–99.
33 1 Samuel 8:7, quoted in Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical law, 797.
34 English, “Christian Reconstructionism,” 167–68. Rushdoony and North never spoke to each other after a clash in 1981.
35 North, Political polytheism, 683. He quotes Rushdoony’s claim that to read the Constitution as “the charter for a secular state” is a radical misreading of history and that the Constitution “was designed to perpetuate a Christian order” (701, citing Rushdoony, American system, 2). For more on such views of the Constitution among Reconstructionists, see Pottenger, Reaping the whirlwind, 228–31. For the similar view of the Catholic Jacques Maritain, see his Man and state, 183–84, speaking of “this great political Christian document,” and cf. his Christianisme et démocratie, 37.
36 North, Political polytheism, 681.
37 Ibid., 691.
38 Ibid., 696.
39 Ibid., 701.
40 Ibid., 655, 702.
41 Ibid., 654–55.
42 See 331.
43 If we go in search of Islamic Reconstructionists championing a decentralized, bottom-up political order, perhaps the only context in which a few are to be found is ninth-century Baṣra (see Crone, “Ninth-century Muslim anarchists,” 16–19).
44 North, Political polytheism, 590. Another Reconstructionist writer, Gary DeMar, affirms that Reconstructionists believe in a “minimal state” (North and DeMar, Christian Reconstruction, 92), and advocate “a decentralized social order,” not “a centralized political order” (94–95).
45 North, Political polytheism, 590, and see English, “Christian Reconstructionism,” 172. Likewise, North identifies “the creation of a worldwide theocratic republic” with “the creation of a bottom-up political order” (North, Political polytheism, 650) and speaks of “a decentralized, international theocracy” (659).
46 This is not to say that Christian Reconstructionism is libertarian. Once its vision is realized, the heresy of democracy will have disappeared (cf. English, “Christian Reconstructionism,” 172), Christians will have dominion over the entire world, those who refuse to submit will be denied citizenship, religious liberty will be withheld from “the enemies of God” (173), and—particularly striking in an American context—the Biblical laws of slavery will be upheld (178n30).
47 For this aspect of the Biblical heritage, see Walzer, In God’s shadow, chap. 4, especially 50–51.
48 As the Boffs say about the Biblical themes emphasized by Liberation Theology, they “may not be the most important themes in the Bible” in themselves, but they are “the most relevant” to the poor (Boff and Boff, Introducing liberation theology, 33).
49 See 206.
50 For this conservatism, see, for example, Malkin, “Many states in Mexico.”