In the Name of the God Who Will Be: The Mobilization of Radical Christians in the Sandinista Revolution

Radiating from the altar of the church are the vivid colors of the mural depicting the birth of the new humanity: there is a Nicaraguan baby Jesus ascending into sunlight surrounded by a gathering of humbly dressed campesinos bringing offerings of tortillas, gallo pinto, and watermelon. On the far sides of the altar are the soldiers fighting the civil war, men in different uniforms on each wing, handing in their weapons to gain admission to the celebration. These are not unexpected elements in a church mural, but there are four other guests depicted at this banquet: anarchosyndicalist Augusto Sandino, avowed atheist and revolutionary Carlos Fonseca, famous guerrilla fighter Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, and the former archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero. While Romero is not too startling an inclusion, the presence of these other three men in the mural demands an explanation. They are, of course, the three primary heroes in the mythology of the FSLN, but that does not clarify their attendance at the festival imagined on the wall of the Cultural Center of Batahola Norte.¹ The celebration of Sandino, Fonseca, and Che in church imagery embodies the puzzle of the massive and active support given by the radical Christians of Nicaragua to the FSLN during the power struggle against the Somoza dictatorship in the 1970s.

Two questions arise from the Batahola mural. Why were the Christian masses mobilized at all, after centuries of suffering governance as corrupt, hateful, and murderous as that of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the third installment of the family dictatorship, with relative diffidence? Why did Christian mobilization take the specific form of alliance with the Sandinista Front? The Nicaraguan Catholic community was radicalized during the 1960s and early 1970s by the philosophical currents of liberation theology. This process of radicalization (Gustavo Gutiérrez and Paulo Freire use the term “conscientization”)² overcame the hegemony imposed by the collusion of the church and state that had dictated the terms of the lives of the Nicaraguan people for hundreds of years. They no longer envisioned their problems as having personal causes, but rather began attributing blame to structural deficiencies in the Nicaraguan system. Hegemony should be understood here as the shackling of the social imaginary, as the limiting of notions of the possible in the minds of the members of a society that is carried out through various cultural mechanisms of the state, religious bodies, and daily life. The radical Christians came to understand their faith as requiring their participation in the casting off of the Somoza dictatorship; in their search for a mechanism through which to join the struggle, they selected the FSLN. They chose the Sandinista Front because it was able, through rigorous application of its ideology, to create a space for action that allowed the radical Christians to practice their faith. The FSLN provided an avenue for them to forge their own notion of ‘the possible’ and to act out the necessary action component of the newfound beliefs in a morally responsible way. The Sandinistas did this by creating situations where collective action was less costly or more likely to succeed. Once the radical Christians had participated under the umbrella of the FSLN, they discovered ideological commonalities and joined the Front.

The literature on the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 is both sizeable and of a high quality, but it does not offer an answer to the question posed by Che, Sandino, and Fonseca’s presence in the church mural: why did the radical Christians fight with the Sandinistas? Why join a leftist, nominally Marxist, very violent, revolutionary organization? There is a more significant problem with the historiography, beyond its failure to answer this question. Each of the works approaches the revolution from above, looking either at social structures, institutions, or the major thinkers and actors. None of the previous historical works present a history from below that looks at the motivations of the majority of the people of Nicaragua. This strips agency away from them; instead, explaining historical causation by citing the actions of the few. What is...