The Re-Politicization of Religion: Chile’s Constitutional Plebiscite

• In Event: Social Movements and Parties, Crisis and Change

Abstract

(With Danissa Contreras and Camila Henzi)

In recent years, there has been an upsurge in evangelicals’ political participation in Latin America, expressed in social movements against “gender ideology” and support for evangelical or evangelical-aligned candidates. Bolsonaro in Brazil, Manuel Antonio López Obrador in Mexico, and runner-up Fabricio Alvarado in Costa Rica are all examples of candidates that had evangelicals as an important part of their constituencies (Goldstein 2020). And mass mobilization such as those that emerged in Peru and Colombia against the introduction of a gender perspective in school curricula show the strength these movements can have. These forms of social and political participation have generally emerged as a response to the advance of feminist movements and sexuality politics (Smith and Boas 2020). Chile has been part of this trend, albeit with more modest results. Protests around civil union, abortion, and gender identity laws were limited in number of participants and impact. And although 2017 saw a record-high number of evangelical legislative candidates, their representation is still limited, compared for example to the Evangelical caucus in Brazil (Dos Santos and Moddelmog 2019). The ongoing constitutional process that formally started with a plebiscite in October 2020 may change this trend. The plebiscite asked citizens whether they agreed a new constitution should be drafted to replace the one dictated by Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1980. An overwhelming majority of 78 percent voted for this option.

This paper analyzes how evangelical organizations and churches organized around the “approve” and “reject” options of the plebiscite. The comparative experience shows that a) plebiscites can be highly polarizing events, and that b) constitutional processes have constituted critical junctures in the political participation of evangelicals in countries such as Brazil and Colombia (Freston 1993, Beltran & Creely 2018). As such, the Chilean constitutional process presents a unique opportunity to observe how evangelicals are constituted into political actors. The results show that, in line with mobilization in the rest of the region, evangelical groups mobilized to oppose a new constitution, centering their campaign on moral issues and had a new constitution might open the door for a new definition of the family and expand abortion rights. This has been the traditional position of evangelicals in politics, including the small “evangelical caucus,” and two newly formed evangelical parties. More surprisingly, progressive evangelical organizations formed to support a new constitution, understanding the constitutional process as an instance to address some of the important social and ethnic inequalities existing in the country. While progressive sectores - usually associated with “historical” evangelical churches such as Methodist and Baptists - have long been a dissident voice within the Christian community, their political salience has been margine. We argue this involvement is partly motivated by attempting to break the dominant association between evangelicals and socially conservative positions, and that during the plebiscite, both positions tended to polarize.

Through the analysis of social media, interviews, survey data, and the press, in this paper we provide an initial characterization of evangelical actors during the plebiscite, investigating their strategies, political alliances, and agendas, shedding light on the underexplored diversity of evangelical’s political engagement.

Author

• Danissa Paz Contreras Guzmán, University of Texas, Austin