Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gonzalez, Francisco E

Titel

Latin America: Intense Religiosity and Absence of Anti-System Confessional Parties

Ist Teil von

• SAIS review (Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies), 2017, Vol.37 (1), p.S-105-S-121

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

PAIS Index

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The salience of religious political parties might have come across as an anachronistic inquiry to the adherents of modernization a generation ago. But the continuing influence of religion in politics—be it in terms of the religious activism that fundamentalist Christians exert in the U.S. Republican party or in the multiple contemporary conflicts and civil wars with a strong religious undertone—reminds the reader about the dangers of wishing away fundamental sections of highly organized and motivated groups in societies around the world. The supposedly irreversible march of secularism is wishful, naïve thinking from the early decades of the twenty-first century.Latin America is a region of the world that has been relatively homogeneous in terms of religious belief since the Iberian conquest in the sixteenth century. Roman Catholicism, albeit suffused with important Amerindian and African characteristics that have produced a rich syncretism, rules the roost. Different branches of Protestant and Evangelical churches have also made important inroads in some Central American countries, such as Guatemala, Chile, Mexico and, significantly, parts of Brazil. Their presence tends to be more visible in urban slums and cut-off indigenous rural communities.In short, this essay supports the perspective of authors such as Jean Meyer that highlighted that the difficulty of channeling the political action of Catholics (i.e. not defying the fundamental rules that provide the framework of representative democracy) derives from the original ambiguity in the tenets of the Church's social doctrine, Catholic Action and Christian Democracy. Poised against both socialism and liberalism, the Catholic Church's social doctrine—officially born after the publication of Pope Leo XIII's Encyclical Rerum Novarumin 18911—left individuals, groups, and the Church hierarchy significant latitude to apply their own subjective judgments about the social, economic, and political conditions in their countries.2Generally, they found reality to be below the ideal standards set by Catholic principles and in need of structural repair. Such diversity of living conditions is particularly evident in Latin America, a region plagued by socioeconomic and political privilege, abuse and impunity, inequality, poverty, and a weak adherence to the rule of law.