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C h A P t e r t w e lV e Christianity and Politics in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy Catholics, Evangelicals, and Political Polarization David Smilde and Coraly Pagan Somewhat unexpectedly, religion has become one of the primary media of conflict in Venezuela during the tumultuous decade of Hugo Chávez’s presidency. Given the crisis of Venezuela’s traditional political parties the Catholic Church has been one of the few institutions with enough credibility to counter the Chávez administration and has done so virtually from the first days of the government . At almost every turn—from the National Constitutional Assembly to the April 2002 coup, from the 1998 elections to the 2004 recall referendum— the Catholic Church has been intimately involved or actively vocal. The Chávez administration, in turn, has aggressively sought, from 1999, to confront the monopoly of the Catholic Church in order to increase social and political space for other social actors more conducive to the government’s agenda. One of the main media of this effort has been support for evangelical Protestant churches. The Chávez government has repeatedly attempted to form an alliance with evangelical Protestants as a way of channeling new social and political actors into its participatory democracy. The reaction of evangelicals has been mixed, with most churches remaining officially apolitical but with several becoming open and outspoken allies of President Chávez (Smilde 2004a, 2004b). This entry of religious institutions and practice into the political fray is surprising given their traditionally cautious approach to politics in Venezuela. First, despite being instrumental in overthrowing the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the Catholic Church did not have a strong public political role during the forty-year Punto Fijo democracy. Traditionally weak, and heavily dependent on state subsidies, it has historically been cautious, focusing its energies on education (Daniel Levine 1981). The evangelical movement is not 316 SMIlde And PAGAn particularly strong either, by regional standards. While Venezuela was home to one of the most successful attempts at an evangelical political party—the Organización de Renovación Auténtica (orA; see Smilde 2004a)—this party never enjoyed widespread support among evangelicals, and politics was not an important focus among evangelical leaders and congregants. Increased political participation has not been without cost as it has brought to public light clear divisions within both the Catholic Church and the evangelical movement. While the Catholic hierarchy has vigorously opposed the Chávez government, several bishops and priests, as well as grassroots Catholic communities, have publicly expressed their sympathies to the government’s revolutionary project and openly rejected the hierarchy’s oppositional stance. And while some neoPentecostal evangelical groups have openly supported the government and taken part in government initiatives, others have expressed a principled apoliticism while occasionally criticizing the government. The stances of Catholic and evangelical leaders do not seem to conform to any sort of straightforward analysis of institutional interests. For example, while it makes sense for the Catholic Church to oppose the Chávez administration given that the base of Catholic devotion and the focus of the church’s attention has long been the upper-middle class, the church receives massive subsidies from the executive branch of the Venezuelan government (Smilde 2000). The hierarchy’s fervent opposition, then, is not clearly in its self-interests, as it puts these subsidies in danger. Similarly, while one might think that there is a natural affinity between evangelicals and the Chávez movement based on class, the most strongly pro-Chávez evangelicals are not actually the poorest, but those “neo-Pentecostal” churches that derive their membership from the middle classes. In other words, looking closely at Catholic and evangelical political positions seems to point toward an irreducible impact of ideological commitments.The Catholic Church is seemingly motivated to some degree by a commitment to liberal democracy, economic globalization, and human rights. Pro-Chávez evangelicals, on the other hand, appear to be motivated by a brand of theocratic thought that easily grafts onto nationalism (Smilde 2004b). There is precedent for such differing political engagements of Catholics and evangelicals —Sandinista Nicaragua being the clearest. There the Catholic Church became divided between the hierarchy’s critical stance toward the Sandinistas and the “popular” church’s open support and participation in the Sandinista government (see Dodson 1986; Crahan 1989; P. Williams 1989). And the evangelical movement became divided between criticism of the Sandinistas articulated by the U.S. Christian Right and collaboration with the Sandinista...

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