The Politics of Religion in Revolutionary Nicaragua

Abstract

The Popular Insurrection in Nicaragua is examined against the backdrop of the grass-roots mobilization and protest that built up between 1968 and 1978. Particular attention is given to the linkages between grass-roots religious change and political mobilization. It is argued that the democratization of religious experience in the decade following the 1968 meeting of the Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín greatly facilitated the participation of the poor in the Nicaraguan Revolution, but that it also sowed the seeds of intrachurch conflict after the Triumph of the Revolution. Post-Triumph conflict between church and state and between the church hierarchy and the so-called popular church are then examined, with a view to showing that the major religious issue in revolutionary Nicaragua is not Marxism versus the church, but democratization in the church and in the political order.