Social and Political Context

Summary

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Latin America experienced critical and sometimes contrasting changes in terms of political and social orientations. On the one hand, progressive governments’ successive takeovers of power in the first decade of the century marked Latin America's ‘left-wing turn’. With their own nuances, several governments opposed neoliberal principles by stressing the role of the state in implementing regulatory, redistributive and social policies, especially those oriented towards minorities and protected groups. On the other hand, in the second decade, most of these so-called progressive governments were replaced by right-wing ones. In this ‘right-wing turn’ in the region, the reaction of the new governments was characterised not only by promoting free-market policies but also by pushing back their predecessors’ progressive reforms. It is in this context of political and social transitions that Latin American Christianity also repositioned itself as a salient actor in the public sphere.

Whereas in the twentieth century, the Catholic Church was the hegemonic religious actor in the region and the main counterpart in state– church relationships, in the twenty-first, there is a multitude of Christian actors with diverse features and agendas populating the landscape of social and political groups engaged in public debates. In their attempts to affect public decisions, twenty-first-century Latin American Christians act around three distinct but complementary facets: as a social-religious countermovement, as pressure groups and as political parties. In this essay, then, I describe each of these facets of Christianity in the Latin American public sphere. I argue that three main factors explain such public engagement by Christians: the defence of their moral principles; their complaints around social, economic and political injustices; and the dynamics of competition among different Christian streams.

From Left-wing to Right-wing

In Latin America, the twentieth century ended with processes both of consolidation of democracy and of deepening neoliberal policies that reduced the role of the state. However, growing mobilisations at the beginning of the twenty-first century questioned the privatisation policy, unemployment, poverty and inequality in the region. For example, the so-called cacerolazos in Argentina, the Indigenous uprising that ended with Jamil Mahuad's mandate in Ecuador, and the ‘water war’ in Bolivia exposed the damage done by the implementation of neoliberal policies.