The Politics of Latino Faith

Religion, Identity, and Urban Community

Catherine E. Wilson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814794586
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Pundits and commentators are constantly striving to understand the political behavior of Latinos—the largest minority in the United States and a key voting block. As Catherine E. Wilson makes clear in The Politics of Latino Faith, not only are Latinos a religious community, but their religious institutions, in particular faith-based organizations, inform daily life and politics in Latino communities to a considerable degree.

Timely and discerning, The Politics of Latino Faith is a unique scholarly work that addresses this increasingly powerful political force. As Wilson shows, Latino religious institutions, whether congregations or faith-based organizations, have long played a significant role in the often poor and urban communities where Latinos live.

Concentrating on urban areas in the South Bronx, Philadelphia, and Chicago, she provides a systematic look at the spiritual, social, and cultural influence Latino faith-based organizations have provided in American life. Wilson offers keen insight into how pivotal religious identity is in understanding Latino social and political involvement in the United States. She also shows the importance of understanding the theological underpinnings at work in these organizations in order to predict their political influences.

1

The Development of a Religious Identity Politics

[There is a difference between] a scientific knowledge and an experiential knowledge of a community. Faith-based organizations live in the community and serve with passion [because] they recognize . . . that any change comes from the power of God.

—Bishop Roderick Cesar¹

The development of a religious identity politics constitutes a new approach in the field of political science. Religious identity politics is treated here as a broadly defined term and refers to the content and context of religious values, beliefs, and culture that drive social and political action in community life. Such a politics comprises personal, communal, and public levels. On the personal level, the believer engages in activities related to personal devotion—i.e., prayer, fasting, Bible study, and worship. On the communal level, the believer enlarges his or her personal sphere through an institutional attachment to a religious congregation. As for the public level, the believer’s institutional attachment does not stop at his or her place of worship, but also extends to his or her neighborhood, racial and ethnic community, and nation.

Because this study of Latino FBOs is ethnographic in nature, religious identity politics will be treated from the perspective of the Christian believer as opposed to the social-science researcher. In so doing, this chapter seeks to uncover how the “experiential knowledge” of the believer—to which the above quote refers—is at the heart of religious identity politics. Anthropologists have suggested that this kind of knowledge can be viewed in four distinct ways: as “open to critical reflection; mostly contextualized; . . . a repository of timeless realities, or [as] a conditional stage of understanding.”² The religious experiences of the Christian believer, while personal and private, have social and political consequences, as manifested through the pastoral leadership and varied ministries of LPAC, Nueva, and TRP. These experiences, however, do more than simply shape social and political involvement. While the content of religious values, beliefs, and culture help one to “make sense of [religious] experience,”³ the believer’s experiences also serve to bring to life these values, beliefs, and culture.

For many political scientists, religion is a means to something else in American public life, i.e., political mobilization, social capital, and social-service delivery. In Voice and Equality (1995), Sidney Verba et al. contend that religion is a domain highly relevant to American politics, as religious institutions are often the sites for “deliberate attempts to mobilize the ranks to political action.”⁴ Moreover, in Bowling Alone (2000), Robert D. Putnam contends that religious institutions are the “single most important repository of social capital in America.”⁵ Other scholars view religion as being a commodity in the marketplace and argue that sheer competition for members is exhibited among religious denominations.⁶ Lastly, some researchers deem religion a social construction. In his famous study of a black Pentecostal church, Melvin D. Williams characterizes religion as “one available means by which man can create his social reality.”⁷

The development of a religious identity politics resists any categorization of religion as a political, economic, or social variable. In many cases, the Christian believer views religion and politics not separately, but as continuous entities. In The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Clifford Geertz contends that the political and religious contexts may not only appropriate the same symbols, but also commingle political meanings with their religious counterparts.⁸ While religious identity politics is indebted to the intellectual discipline of cultural anthropology for its conceptual development, it also finds its heritage in the subfield of political science known as political culture. The full development of this type of identity politics reaches beyond these fields, incorporating conceptual tools from theology, philosophy, sociology, literature, urban studies, and public policy.

This study contributes to the field of political science in that it considers religion not merely for its instrumental worth (i.e., as a means to political mobilization, social capital, or social-service delivery), but for its intrinsic value. In contrast to viewing religion as another form of social capital, this study explores how religious values and beliefs constitute what anthropologists call “public culture.” Written from the perspective of the believer, this study takes religious values and beliefs seriously and acknowledges that religion in general—and the Christian religion in particular—is subject to different social and political expressions, i.e., “religious identity politics,” due to the way in which Latino FBO leadership interprets the Christian narrative in their respective urban contexts.

There are five main sections contained within this chapter to help illustrate the development of religious identity politics. These sections emphasize the important role urban faith plays in the Latino community. Whereas the first two sections provide a theoretical discussion of the study of religious identity politics, the last three sections offer a practical account of the link among Latino religious culture, urban community development, and social and political involvement. The first section begins with a brief summary of how the subfield of political culture lays important groundwork in the development of a religious identity politics. The second section, on the other hand, discusses the way in which cultural anthropology understands religion as an aspect of public culture, by exhibiting six impacts that religion has on public culture. This section will draw heavily from Clifford Geertz’s research with respect to culture—and religious culture more specifically—due to the indebtedness the field of anthropology has to the Geertzian view of making “the cultural object . . . [the] center stage” in ethnographic accounts.⁹ While the third section illustrates the intimate connection between religious institutions—churches and FBOs alike—and urban community development, the fourth section explicates the content of Latino religious culture and how such culture informs social and political involvement. The fifth section maintains that there are varying expressions of religious identity politics by displaying three versions of Latino Christian ministry, as attributed to LPAC, Nueva, and TRP. Lastly, the chapter concludes with a short summary of the themes treated above.

The Value of Political Culture

The central purpose of including a brief summary of the legacy of political culture is to show how such a subfield in political science shapes the language of religious identity politics. As previously stated, religious identity politics is defined above as the content and context of religious values, beliefs, and culture that drive social and political action in community life. Much of this definition is indebted to the concept of political culture, which is conceived of as “political orientations” by co-authors and political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba in their seminal work The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (1963). Generally speaking, political culture is described as “attitudes towards the political system and its various parts and attitudes toward the role of self in the system.” Beyond these general terms, Almond and Verba note that different “types” of political culture exist based on the level of one’s personal orientation to the political system.¹⁰

A study of the varying expressions of Latino Christian ministry—picked up at the end of this chapter—functions in a similar manner as an analysis of diverse types of political culture. Such expressions embody a distinct approach to religious identity politics, or better yet, a particular theological orientation to the larger social and political order. These ministerial expressions slightly extend the argument presented in Civic Culture that political culture amounts to personal “knowledge of system . . . feelings towards it, and . . . judgment of it.”¹¹ Religious identity politics revolves not only around personal orientations (or in theological terms, acts of personal devotion), but also around communal and public orientations, exhibited in the institutional attachment the believer has to congregational life and the larger community.

The subfield of political culture emerged in the mid-1950s but did not rise to full stature until the publication of Civic Culture in the early 1960s. In this publication, Almond and Verba carried out extensive field-work and survey research in five so-called “democratic republics”—the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, West Germany, and Italy—to measure levels of interpersonal trust and “commitment to democratic institutions.” The co-authors regarded trust and commitment as essential ingredients to “effective political participation” and “for the functioning of the democratic rules of the game.”¹² Although this cross-national study was considered cutting edge for its use of methodological techniques drawn from behavioral psychology, public opinion research, and cultural anthropology,¹³ many scholars critiqued its treatment of culture as “an instrumental device for allying citizens and system.”¹⁴

Shortly after the publication of Civic Culture, Verba and Lucian Pye, another representative of the political culture school, co-edited a work entitled Political Culture and Political Development (1965). In this work, Verba broadened the concept of political culture, characterizing the term as “the system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values” that describes the context of political action.¹⁵ The development of religious identity politics is even more indebted to Verba for this later understanding of political culture. As an early proponent of political culture, Verba relied on anthropology to generate increased knowledge concerning the “beliefs,” “symbols,” and “values” that constitute the notion of culture. Even with such reliance, Verba understood culture not for its own intrinsic value, but merely for its instrumental worth, or “as an attribute of a political system.”¹⁶

As the study of political culture experienced its peaks and valleys during the 1970s, that study reemerged with a new face in Almond and Verba’s edited volume, The Civic Culture Revisited (1980). In addition to having a range of authors comment on current trends in political culture in the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Germany, and Italy, Almond and Verba included various critiques of their original concept of political culture, as presented in Civic Culture. Carole Pateman’s essay, contained in the edited volume, maintains that Almond and Verba’s earlier work on political culture generated numerous assumptions. For example, she notes that in speaking of the type of political culture of a particular nation, Almond and Verba implied not only that “a model of the civic culture” existed, but that such a model “was relevant across the whole community.”¹⁷ Indeed, Verba himself criticized that model as “bold,” “incautious,” and even “foolhardy.” He argued that the scope of the work was far too broad, and that the work lacked a “rich contextual knowledge” of the nations under study.¹⁸ Almond contended that while the concept of political culture presented in the earlier work stressed the “value orientations toward political objects and processes,” missing was an emphasis placed on “attitudes towards public policy.”¹⁹ Even with these critiques, Verba commended the original Civic Culture for “add[ing] to progress and to culmination in the study of comparative politics.”²⁰

Current literature on political culture—as seen in the works of Robert Putnam and Samuel P. Huntington—builds on the legacy of Civic Culture by viewing personal orientations as highly instrumental to the functioning of a stable democratic culture.²¹ In Working with Culture (2002), Anne M. Khademian focuses on how culture acts as a “commitment” in the field of public management. Defining the “common understandings held by people working together in an organization or program” as the “commitments” of a culture, she argues that commitments provide a “context” for how “people approach their work” and a “guide for action and reaction.”²² Other recent studies have extended Almond and Verba’s treatment of political culture by researching two new areas: (1) the “process” by which political culture is “institutionalized” and (2) how such culture is “produced” and “consumed.” In these recent studies, political culture “encompasses a wider range of spheres of social life and of states of mind.”²³ Additionally, nontraditional renderings of political culture have employed a “more flexible cultural approach,” one attentive to identity politics and symbolic analysis.²⁴

These renderings have carved out “general principles of a cultural approach to politics”²⁵ that pays close attention to the theoretical devices found in the field of anthropology. The development of a religious identity politics amounts to a cultural approach to politics. Such an approach acknowledges culture, and more specifically, religious culture, for its own sake, both in content and context. Like Khademian, understanding culture as a “commitment” helps one to view religious commitments as a “reference point, sometimes consciously applied, sometimes unconsciously.”²⁶ The next section discusses the meaning that leading anthropological scholars assign to the words “culture” and “public culture.” Culture is more than a characteristic of the political system or an attribute of the social order. Religion, as a specific kind of culture, must be described on its own terms, as it constitutes a distinct worldview with its own set of theological commitments and outcomes. As a form of culture, religion “does not unilaterally determine organizational outcomes, but it does provide powerful structuring tendencies shaping those outcomes.”²⁷

Religion and Public Culture

As the primary subject matter of anthropology, culture is understood as public because it...