The overwhelming majority achieved through palace intrigues in the Supreme Court of the United States by the most intransigent sector of society and politics, is culminating through the judicial process what they would never have achieved in the pure democratic contest at the polls.
To analyze the reason for the strength that the most extreme right-wing Protestant sects and churches exhibit today throughout the world and what was the origin of this hegemony, we must go back to the beginning of the 1980s, when three “ absolutist reigns” of deep depth that really changed the world. I am referring to the simultaneous mandates of Ronald Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and the papacy of Karol Wojtyla. All three were convinced that the weakness of the Soviet Union offered a historic opportunity to also end, by extension, the hegemony of the left and liberalism (in its most American sense) in the field of ideas. further weaken the Soviet Union.
John Paul II had always lived, until he was elected Pope in 1978, under the yoke of Polish communism, in a church that was simply tolerated. He had learned to survive in that environment, but his greatest desire was to put an end to communism, first and foremost in the European countries directly dependent on the Soviet Union, but also in polluted Latin America, where Liberation Theology applied some theories that he himself and the then Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, considered pure heresy.
For Margaret Thatcher, the problem of leftism was primarily an internal UK issue. The unions had sunk the economy and were making it impossible to govern their country. With his ultraliberal theories and the hoax of “popular capitalism” he was going to change Great Britain from top to bottom and, incidentally, would also contribute to changing the majority perception regarding the virtues of neoliberal capitalism and the evils of social democracy in the rest of the world.
Reagan’s case was more complex. On the one hand, he was very clear that the economy had to be liberalized to the maximum, deregulate everything that could be deregulated and, in short, make good the most radical and crazy theories, in the style of Milton Friedman, about the best way to end the Poverty was to make those who already were richer. But Reagan was also hugely interventionist in Latin America. He supported extreme right-wing governments that did not respect human rights, turned a blind eye when they committed atrocities against the civilian population with the excuse of ending armed guerrillas, and offered direct assistance from the School of the Americas in military and anti-guerrilla training of the armies of “friendly” countries.
The alliance of the three leaders, and some others who served as their extras, worked perfectly with regard to the resounding collapse of the Soviet regime and the implantation of regimes more or less equivalent to democracies in the countries that had belonged to the curtain steel. But Wojtyla and the future Pope Ratzinger were dead wrong in their Latin American strategy.
They chose their ally very poorly and failed to trust that their interests were the same in Latin America as well. At that time, Latin America was the main breadbasket for the faithful of the Catholic Church, with a clear upward trend. Liberation Theology and other expressions of the popular church that did not necessarily have to be on the left, although they were renewing the corseted forms of religiosity that came from Rome and old Europe, they were mobilizing millions of faithful. Suddenly, a strange coalition of interests even opposed to each other caused the withdrawal of Catholicism and, above all, in a very significant way, an exponential growth in the presence of missionaries and ultra-conservative evangelical sects and churches that seeded much of Latin America with billions of dollars.
It happened especially in Central America. an exponential growth in the presence of missionaries and ultra-conservative evangelical sects and churches that seeded a large part of Latin America with billions of dollars. It happened especially in Central America. an exponential growth in the presence of missionaries and ultra-conservative evangelical sects and churches that seeded a large part of Latin America with billions of dollars. It happened especially in Central America.
Today this protestant mobilization is already hegemonic in the countries of Central America. Even in the Nicaragua of dictator Daniel Ortega, beyond the alliance with the worst of official Catholicism, what is truly astonishing is to see to what extent the ultra-conservative sects have spread to all corners of the country, even the most remote and abandoned by the Government, and are conquering the will of the vulnerable population thanks to solidarity actions and offering them a little hope in the midst of misery. And the same has happened in Honduras or Guatemala.
The obsessive ultra-conservative crusade of Wojtyla and Ratzinger in America and their alliance with the Reagan Administration managed in practice to deactivate progressive theologians and dismantle the then powerful popular Catholic organizations, but the price was that this church was largely supplanted by organizations and non-Catholic churches at the service of the most conservative policies. It has never seemed to me that this would have been a great deal for official Catholicism or that behind the Vatican strategy of those years there would have been a very intelligent move.
In the political field, the most surprising consequence today is the turn to the extreme right of the Hispanic communities in the United States, which had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. Also the imposition of theses and laws that violate human rights or even, sometimes, against the most elementary common sense in a democratic, plural and non-denominational State (anti-abortion laws, prayer in public schools, comparison of creationism with scientific theories , etc.). The neighbor’s beard should encourage us not to lower our guard in this regard in our country either.
