Religion and the State

Once Europeans discovered the Western Hemisphere and church leaders determined that its residents were indeed human beings, both Spanish and Portuguese monarchs justified their claims to colonies and commercial monopolies in terms of bringing Christianity to the heathens. The monarchs codified this rationalization in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas that divided the non-European world between them for commerce, colonization, and religious conversion. Pope Alexander VI confirmed the treaty. For roughly the next three centuries, evangelization dominated church activities and church-state relations. The monarchs provided financial and political assistance. Conversion, often no more than baptism and mandatory weekly masses, was largely the work of Franciscan, Dominican, and later the Company of Jesus (the Jesuits) missionaries. During colonization of the Caribbean, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474?–1566), one-time conquistador turned missionary, became the blistering critic of Spanish practices. In his political tract A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, he described the conquest as the sadistic brutality, torture, enslavement, or murder of indigenous peoples. He called on the king to restrain the conquest, reverse Indian slavery, and regulate Spanish-Indian relations. Spain's colonial rivals (e.g., England) and rebellious dominions (e.g., the Dutch) widely reprinted the book, often with Albrecht Dürer's (1471–1528) fanciful and terrifying engravings to mobilize popular opinion against the Spaniards. As Protestant northern Europe gained ascendancy over the Catholic south in global geopolitics, the influence of this text continued to grow, and its negative portrait of Spaniards and the church still colors popular perceptions in the twenty-first century.

Religious leaders undertook efforts to restrain the conquistadors and colonists and to impose religious orthodoxy by instituting the Inquisition in Spain's possessions. Because they were felt to have an incomplete understanding of religious doctrine, Indians, except in cases of bigamy and cannibalism, were not subject to the Inquisition. In its efforts to evangelize the Indians, and the arriving African slaves, the church utilized its most powerful symbols, frequently announcing new martyrs, saintly behavior, and miracles. The most famous of these, the 1531 apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, created an indigenously Mexican mythology in which an Indian, Juan Diego, was chosen by the Virgin to carry her message to a Spanish bishop. Doubters saw in this tale a ploy by church leaders to assist the evangelization process. Albeit initially violent and only intermittently successful, these conversion strategies aimed at African and Indian populations, and the partially successful campaign for orthodoxy among the settlers did result in a continent that was, for the most part, fervently Catholic—although Catholicism itself was transformed in the process, as it integrated symbols, rituals, and imagery from pre-Colombian and African sources, and from New World ecologies.

Church-state relations in Latin America changed fundamentally under Spanish King Charles V (1516–1556), an enlightened monarchy who intended to establish a secular, efficient empire. The best-organized and funded challenge to his authority was led by members of the Jesuit order. In response, the king acted decisively to expel all Jesuits from Spain and its possessions in 1767. This provided a preview of the often-bitter anticlerical policies of government leaders influenced by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution over the next century. The Latin American colonies for the most part had achieved independence by 1824, and nearly all new regimes, whether republics or monarchies, attempted to restrict church influence in secular life by deamortizing church properties, limiting religious holidays, and abolishing clerical control of the civil registry, cemeteries, and separate courts. Until the last decade of the century, Popes especially Leo IX (1049–1054) urged Catholics to reject these secular campaigns as threats to the church. In each of the Latin American nations, efforts to separate church and state resulted in civil strife, and often civil war. In Mexico, it provoked the War of the Reform (1858–1861) won by Benito Juárez and the Liberals, but the clerics made a final effort by helping inspire the French intervention and the empire of Maximilian and Carlota. Warfare continued from 1862 to 1867, when Juarez's armies defeated the French, executed the emperor, and separated the church and state. Similar if less violent struggles took place throughout the region.

The Papal Degree Rerum Novarum in 1892 represents a reversal of the Roman Catholic Church position on the struggle with national governments and modern society. Pope Leo XIII decreed that the church should protect the local nature of religion, and support individuals against the social homogenization and economic exploitation of modern life that destroyed faith. This decree inspired a re-evangelization campaign, and initiated the organization of Catholic unions and political parties, many of which, such as the Christian Democrats in Chile, remain powerful in the twenty-first century. Priests and members of religious orders now tried to control the programs of civil government rather than trying to dominate government. At times, the social activism resulted in bitter struggles, for example the Cristero Rebellion in Mexico (1926–1929) over the role of religion in a revolutionary society. Rerum Novarum also inspired what became splits within the church itself. The Pope encouraged social activism, but by the 1920s and 1930s the militancy among some priests had become a revolutionary fervor. Colombian Father Camilo Torres, for example, went into the highlands in the 1960s to join revolutionaries and was later killed by counterinsurgents.

Pope John XXIII called the bishops to meet in 1962 in Vatican II. Beset by challenges of the world's economic inequities, the rise of communism, and the increase of revolution, the church fathers initiated changes. One result was the rise of liberation lheology, with local parish programs for social welfare called Christian Base Communities (CBCs). These community action programs confronted needs unmet or ignored by civil authorities. The CBCs constituted an indirect challenge to government officials, and often provoked direct confrontation with governments to obtain basic necessities for the poor. These CBCs became especially important in Brazil during the years of the military dictatorship and served as a form of grassroots organizing. In other countries, Guatemala, for example, the failure of both government and church leaders to assist the indigenous population provided an opening for Protestant and Morman missionaries. Conversion to these faiths provided a new support network for rural Guatemalans. The church-state experience, of course, varies by country, from leadership in challenges to dictatorship in El Salvador, to organization of indigenous peoples in Chiapas, to struggle to survive in antireligious Cuba. The rise in conversion to Evangelical Protestantism is another complicating factor, with some governments reacting with hostility and suspicion to a movement led by foreigners, while in other cases—notable Guatemala—conservative Protestants have become heads of state. In the twenty-first century, the relationship between church and state remains in flux.