Contradiction and Conflict: The Popular Church in Nicaragua (review)

Contradiction and Conflict: The Popular Church in Nicaragua. By Debra Sabia. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. x, 239 pp. Cloth, $34.95.

Political interpretations of the Sandinista Revolution have varied to the point of extreme polarization, both inside and outside Nicaragua. This ambiguity has attracted the attention of scholars for two decades. One of the many aspects of the Sandinista Revolution that continues to interest researchers is the role religion has played in shaping or inhibiting social and political change in Nicaragua. During the 1980s, as part of its ideological war with the Sandinistas, the Reagan administration insisted that the revolution was hostile to religious institutions and that the regime persecuted the clergy. But scholars have demonstrated that a much more complex and nuanced relationship existed between church and state (and within the Roman Catholic Church) during those highly conflictual years.

One of the most interesting stories of the Sandinista years is the struggle of Christians within the Catholic Church to reconcile religious beliefs and values with the revolution. This struggle proved to be as divisive in the religious arena as the broader partisan disagreements were in the political arena. While this story had already been told with considerable insight (see chapters by Crahan and Williams in The Progressive Church in Latin America, ed. Scott Mainwaring and Alexander Wilde [Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1989]), Debra Sabia's new book complements earlier research and brings the story forward into the post-Sandinista period.

Sabia's book focuses on the popular church in Nicaragua. She intends to refute those who have regarded the popular church as a breakaway-church or an attempt to create a "parallel magisterium." She does this by analyzing the spiritual motives of several members of the popular church. Her study is narrowly focused in that it draws its empirical data from three Christian Base Communities (CEBs) which began functioning in Managua before the popular insurrection that overthrew Somoza, and were still active, albeit in a diminished way, in the post-Sandinista period. Indeed, the central (and most original) focal point of her analysis rests on a relatively small number of in-depth interviews with popular church activists. The results of those interviews are interpreted through the use of Weberian ideal types.

Sabia contends that over the course of the Sandinista revolution, the popular church fragmented into four distinct currents. These ranged from the marxist type at one extreme (former Catholics who embraced marxist ideology but participated in CEBs) to the alienated Christian type (Christians disillusioned by what they see as political manipulation of the popular church who have turned to a more spiritual, other-worldly orientation). Revolutionary and reformist Christian types were somewhere in between. The real strength of Sabia's book is the way she allows the popular church members of these various types to tell their stories in their own words. From their free-flowing answers to her questions we learn a great deal about the way selected members of the popular church have been affected by revolution, war and intra-church conflict.

Sabia's interviews provide a penetrating look at the variety of perspectives that can be found even within the superficially homogeneous world of the Nicaraguan popular church. Her nuanced differentiation of the revolutionary Christian type from the reformist Christian type is helpful. However, it does seem odd to present Cardinal Obando y Bravo as an example of the reformist type and to cite him at length in demonstrating that the Catholic Church did not take sides in the Sandinista-Contra conflict (see pp. 154-55). In a similar vein, if the book is about current or former participants in the popular church, the sample used to illustrate the alienated Christian type seems oddly drawn. It includes at least one interviewee (quoted extensively) who seems never to have had any connection with the popular church.

Two broader concerns deserve attention. First, Sabia...