Revolution, Revival, And Religious Conflict In Sandinista Nicaragua

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 30 (2008) 147-191

Calvin L. Smith, Revolution, Revival, and Religious Conﬂict in Sandinista Nicaragua , Religion in the Americas Series 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 312 pp., $99.00, paper.

Any academic treatment of religion and politics during the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua will necessarily be forced to sift through the highly-charged political propa- ganda of the 1980s and is thus destined to raise the hackles of both Sandinista critics and apologists. Calvin L. Smith’s study of the relationship between Protestants and the Sandinistas in revolutionary Nicaragua is no exception. Smith’s focus on the under-explored role of Pentecostals in Nicaragua is noteworthy, and his use of ﬁrst-hand interviews with Protestant leaders who lived through the revolution adds new evidence to old debates about Protestant-Sandinista relations and Sandinista religious persecution. His attempt to bring an even-handed approach to this polarizing subject is, however, undermined by his inattention to international context, uncritical acceptance of dubious secondary sources, and a conclusion that makes precisely the kind of broad political generalizations about evangelicals that he initially warns his readers against.

Smith begins the book with a review and critique of the relatively sparse academic litera- ture on Protestants and politics in Nicaragua, noting the highly polarized nature of the 1980s and 1990s publications. Two of the book’s major faults are evident at this early junc- ture. First, Smith dives into the discussion of various interpretations of Protestant-Sandinista relations without providing the necessary historical or international context. Readers who are unfamiliar with the history of U.S. policy toward Nicaragua, the role of the Reagan administration in Central America in the 1980s, or the Iran-Contra scandal and its after- math will be left without the slightest ability to contextualize the arguments and claims made by the various authors Smith reviews.

Second, as a result of the lack of historical context, Smith places the carefully researched work of well-established academics (such as Michael Dodson) on an equal plane with jour- nalistic pieces and overt propaganda (such the work cited by Humberto Belli and Edmund Robb). While Smith brieﬂy mentions the association of Edmund Robb and Humberto Belli with the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) and the Puebla Institute (36), he does not bother to inform his readers about the far-right (and openly interventionist) proﬁle of the IRD or the fact that credible sources have repeatedly linked Belli to the CIA and illegal Contra-aid funding. Once again, anyone who is not intimately familiar with the massive propaganda war waged by the Reagan administration over Central America during the 1980s, the extra-legal means through which funding was channeled to the Contras and their supporters, or the massive scale of the repression committed by the neighboring U.S. — backed governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras during the same time period will be left with a distinctly distorted view of the processes and the events Smith seeks to document in Nicaragua.

The strongest sections of the book document the history of Protestantism in Nicaragua, relations between Protestants and the Somoza government(s), and repression against evan- gelicals that took place under the Sandinista regime. Smith gives far too much validity, however, to any scrap of evidence that CEPAD (the evangelical NGO founded by Baptist Dr. Gustavo Parajón) was somehow illegitimately pro-Sandinista and unrepresentative of evangelicals. T ere is also an eerie similarity between the sort of accusations Smith enter-

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 30 (2008) 147-191

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tains about CEPAD (that it was a pawn of the leftist Sandinistas because it carried out development and aid work under that government) and similar allegations brought against evangelical organizations under the right-wing governments elsewhere in the region. In each case, evangelical organizations are tarred by association and innuendo, with far too much credit given to the accusations of representatives of competing religious organizations with their own particular agendas.

Smith’s central thesis is that the majority of evangelicals in Nicaragua were more politi- cally conservative than has been previously reported and were therefore perceived as a threat by the Sandinistas and repressed. Even discounting the dubious evidence provided by sources such as the U.S. State Department and the IRD, there is no question that the sec- ond half of this thesis holds true. But the ﬁrst half of Smith’s argument ignores inconven- ient evidence from the most detailed and deﬁnitive study of evangelical politics in the 1990 Nicaraguan elections. According to a study that utilized 1990 Gallup survey results, evan- gelicals were not much diﬀerent from Catholics in terms of their politics and, in some cases, were more pro-Sandinista than Catholics (see Christian Smith and Liesl Ann Haas, “Revo- lutionary Evangelicals in Nicaragua: Political Opportunity, Class Interests, and Religious Identity,” Journal for the Scientiﬁc Study of Religion 36, no. 3 [1997]: 440-54). T is ﬁnding ﬂies in the face of Smith’s argument that evangelicals may have played a key role in the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinistas (273). Given that a vote against the Sandinistas was the only obvious route to ending ten years of a devastating U.S. — backed Contra war in 1990, the greater surprise is that the Sandinistas garnered any signiﬁcant support among evan- gelicals (or any other sector of the Nicaraguan population, for that matter).

The fundamental ﬂaw with Smith’s book is that it never seems to leave behind the politi- cally polarized era of the 1980s to enter into a dialogue with more recent academic litera- ture on evangelicals and politics in Latin America. For Smith, evangelicals (and classic Pentecostals in particular) are primarily posited in direct opposition to the Sandinista polit- ical authorities and serve as rivals on multiple levels (class, ideology, education, gender). The reality, as multiple studies of religion and politics in Latin America have recently dem- onstrated, is that Pentecostalism thrives in various political contexts and that its adherents may be found across the political spectrum. It should come as no surprise that this trend held true in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas as well.

Reviewed by Timothy J. Steigenga

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