In 380 CE the Roman emperor Theodosius declared Christianity to be the official religion of the empire. This was some fourteen centuries before Christianity came to Latin America, but the decree established an alliance between throne and altar, or perhaps better, cross and sword, that determined the impact of this religion on the New World.
In the fifteenth century CE, Christopher Columbus, for all his skill as a navigator, had fantasies that his first landfall, in Haiti, was one of the islands from which Solomon had brought riches to Jerusalem (1 Kings 10). Riches, of course, were the other element in the voyages of exploration that began around this time; one of the early reports we have of Columbus is that in 1478 he was buying sugar in Madeira. Religion, however, cannot be kept out of the story: part of the impetus for the voyages was the defeat of the Muslims in Spain, the Reconquista, and there were dreams of establishing a Christian kingdom in the Holy Land.
Religion was prominent in Columbus’ 1493 voyage, and a group of Franciscans sailed with him. In Mexico, Hernán Cortés took advantage of the resentment of the peoples against Aztec domination, and after entering Tenochtitlán (modern Mexico City) in 1519, seized the emperor Montezuma and used conversion as part of his technique of domination. ‘Conversion’ is not perhaps the best word for the process, as Catholic missionaries tended to baptise local people in something like a production line, without dwelling too much on the content of the new faith. When local people did attempt to interpret Christianity in terms of their own world view, as in the case of the Aztec Juan Diego, whose original name was Cuauhtlatoatzin (‘the Talking Eagle’) who had a vision of the Virgin Mary, it took enormous efforts for the religious authorities to accept this as authentic faith.
The suffering inflicted on the indigenous inhabitants, and later on the Africans transported from their homeland, especially to Brazil, where the local people were said to be too weak to work the sugar plantations, was generally taken for granted by the white population. There were exceptions, such as Antonio de Montesinos and the better known Bartolomé de Las Casas. In December 1511 Montesinos told the whites of Santo Domingo:
You are all in mortal sin. You will live and die in it because of the cruelties and tyrannies you inflict on these innocent people. Tell me: by what right and on the basis of what justice do you keep the Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude?
Montesinos and Las Casas agreed that the root of the problem was European greed. Las Casas wrote:
The reason why the Christians have killed and destroyed such an infinite number of souls is that they have been moved by their wish for gold and their desire to enrich themselves in a very short time.
But the Christians treated such criticism as a nuisance, and ignored it. The eventual movement for the abolition of slavery was not a specifically Christian one, but based on liberal, Enlightenment values. As the Latin American colonies gradually acquired their independence, Church and state were separated, giving way to secular republics.
The growing diversity of Christianity in Europe after the Reformation took time to be reflected in Latin America. One minor example is in fact political. During the time the Dutch seized control of Recife in northeast Brazil from the Portuguese, the Jewish community from the Netherlands built a synagogue in the city, but they were expelled when the Portuguese took back control.
Protestant missionaries did not begin to arrive in Latin America until the early 19th century, when the so-called ‘historic’ Protestant churches were established, Anglican, Presbyterian and Baptist. From the middle of the 20th century there has been a massive growth of Pentecostal churches, which range from huge organisations such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God to tiny local communities; this very flexibility may account for their success, when compared with the cumbersome and male-dominated structure of the Catholic Church.
The renewal in the Catholic Church promoted by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was taken up with enthusiasm by the leadership of the Catholic Church in Latin America, which established a regional body, CELAM, and held a series of continental conferences over the next 40 years. The first of these, in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968 proclaimed the ‘preferential option for the poor’, and in 1971 the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez published his Theology of Liberation, which gave its name to a school of theology that argued that Christians should be active in combating poverty and ‘structures of injustice’. Although this was rare, the ELN guerrillas had a number of priests in its ranks and the Colombian priest Camilo Torres died fighting with the ELN.
More widespread were the ‘Christian base communities’, which were an attempt to root the Church in localities and enable local communities to work out the practical implications of Christianity for their own lives. This movement was important in giving support to the strikes in São Paulo in the 1970s from which Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s current president, first emerged as a national leader. These liberationist ventures in the Latin American church, especially Brazil, were viewed with suspicion by the anti-communist Polish Pope John Paul II, and he used his appointment of bishops to restrain it.
A symbol of John Paul’s attitude was his finger-wagging rebuke of Nicaraguan priest Ernesto Cardenal, one of several priests who were ministers in the Sandinista government. Famously also, Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, and an opponent of the military regime in El Salvador, was shot dead in 1980 while celebrating mass, and six Jesuits from El Salvador’s Central American University were also murdered by soldiers in 1989.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentine cardinal elected in 2013 as Pope Francis, is not a follower of liberation theology, but he has called for ‘a poor Church for the poor’, and linked this with a concern for the environment, notably in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, with its explanatory subtitle ‘On Care for the Common Home’.
A sequel to this document was the synod on the Amazon region, held in October 2019. This looked at the situation of the region and its peoples, and included representatives of 16 Amazon peoples. As well as looking at ways in which the destruction of the rainforest could be halted, the meeting took a more respectful view of the cultures of indigenous peoples and their relation to Christianity, provoking allegations that the synod was promoting ‘pantheism’. Also controversial for many Catholics were the proposal to ordain married men and to admit women to the diaconate, both measures that would enable the Church to function fully in such remote regions.
If the implications of the Amazon synod will take many years to come to fruition, a concentrated example of the interplay of religion and politics came in the Brazilian presidential election of 2022, which in the second round on 30 October saw Jair Bolsonaro, the president in office, facing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, himself a two-term president from 2003 to 2010. Neither man is known for strong religious convictions, but both were raised as Catholics. But Bolsonaro found in the Pentecostal churches a constituency that shared his conservative views on homosexuality, gay marriage and abortion, issues on which Pentecostals are much more conservative than Catholics in Brazil.
During the 2000s Bolsonaro formed an alliance with Silas Malafaia, the leader of the Assembly of God Victory in Christ, a successful tele-evangelist, and took up these issues in Congress. Another important influence was his Congressional assistant, Michelle Reinato, a fervent Pentecostal, who became his third wife in 2013, in a ceremony conducted by Silas Malafaia. The alliance with the pastors seemed to be paying off: in the 2014 legislative elections Bolsonaro’s votes increased sevenfold. He completed this rebranding with a baptismal ceremony in the river Jordan conducted by a pastor and fellow Congress member. In the election Bolsonaro won in 2018, Pentecostal supporters distributed his election material outside churches.
The 2022 election was a greater challenge for Bolsonaro, with the polls a month before the election giving Lula a lead of 14 points. Bolsonaro once again showed himself to be a religious chameleon: two months before the first round of voting he attended a Catholic mass and received communion.
Bolsonaro did not lack support among Catholics. Despite the widely publicised differences between Catholic and Protestant voters, the creation of the religious Bolsonaro was partly the work of ultra-conservative Catholics. Ignacio Arsuaga, founder of the Spanish far-right group HazteOir (‘Make Your Voice Heard’), which has now expanded into an international English-language movement, CitizenGO, came to Brazil in late 2013 to work with right-wing Catholics. Other elements of the Catholic far right include the Heralds of the Gospel, an offshoot of the older, traditionalist Catholic, anti-communist Tradition, Family, Property movement.
What unites these groups is a rejection of the Second Vatican Council and a loathing of Pope Francis. They have links with the long-time ally of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon. Bannon asserted that ‘Bolsonaro will win unless it’s stolen by, guess what, the machines.’ (Brazilians use voting machines at elections, and Bolsonaro has claimed, without any evidence, that they can be rigged.) Bannon has also described Lula as ‘the most dangerous leftist in the world, a criminal, a communist’. These ultra-conservative groups represent a minority of Brazilian Catholics, but their skilful use of social media gives them a disproportionate influence. One of the few Catholic voices speaking out publicly against Bolsonaro is the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, who called this election ‘a choice between civilisation and barbarism’.
In one of his few comments about religion in the campaign, Lula said that Bolsonaro’s ‘greatest lie is to keep invoking the name of Jesus … he uses the name of Jesus in vain in an attempt to abuse the good faith of the Christian women and men of this country.’ On 2 September the normally reticent Catholic bishops’ conference expressed their concern at ‘religious manipulation and the spreading of fake news, which has the power to destroy harmony among individuals, peoples and cultures, and threatens democracy. Religious manipulation, led by politicians and religious figures, distorts the values of the Gospel and distracts attention from the real problems that need to be debated and addressed.’
Lula of course won, though extremely narrowly, with a margin of less than 1%. There is evidence that the attack on the presidential palace, Congress and the Supreme Court on 8 January this year was in part organised by pastor politicians. If you talk to people in Brazil a month after Lula took office, you find that the poison of fake news – and perhaps fake religion – still runs through the veins of Latin America’s largest democracy.
Francis McDonagh is the former Andes Programme Manager for CAFOD. He is a translator and writes about Latin America for the Tablet.