The Religious Market in Nicaragua: the Paradoxes of Catholicism and Protestantism

“En Dios Confiamos”: Politics, Populism, and Protestantism in Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua

“…We examine all of these in both bivariate and multivariate logistic regression equations (where being Protestant or something else is the dependent variable). 6 Following a convention established in the research of Gooren (2003), our analyses focus on Mainline Protestants and Pentecostals, excluding Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. 7 Among other sources, one can consult Marcano (2013), Gooren (2005), Zub (2008), Smith and Haas (1997), Steigenga and Coleman (1995), and Aguilar et al (1993).…”

Ambassadors for the Kingdom of God or for America? Christian Nationalism, the Christian Right, and the Contra War

“…3 Much of the existing literature on religion and the Contra war focuses either on denominational change and political involvement in Nicaragua itself, or on the Catholic and Protestant left's activism against Reagan's foreign policy. For the former, see Gooren [19], Smith and Haas [20]; for the latter, see Strauss [21], Smith [22], Nepstad [23], Peace [24], and Keeley [25]. Unlike these works, this article takes a different tack by examining the relationship between Christian nationalist rhetoric, public diplomacy, and policy among evangelical Protestants and Catholics across the political spectrum in both the United States and Nicaragua.…”

“…The national constitution guaranteed religious freedom, yet for decades the Catholic Church had enjoyed special state privileges due to its close relationship with the Somoza regime. As the Catholic clergy and laity grew increasingly critical of the dictator's corruption and penchant for brutality during the 1960s and 1970s, the Church leadership tempered and then withdrew its support from Somoza [19,27,28]. By the time of the revolution, the vast majority of Catholics and Protestants in Nicaragua welcomed his ouster.…”

“…A delegation of U.S. evangelicals who visited Nicaragua in 1982 noted that while "large numbers of clergy and laity (the so-called 'popular' or 'people's church') are enthusiastic about the revolution," the church hierarchy had split: "four of the eight bishops are supportive and four are not" ( [32], frame 294). When a number of revolutionary Catholic priests received appointments to important posts in the Sandinista government, including the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education, the archbishop of Managua Miguel Obando y Bravo and other conservative members of the Catholic hierarchy attempted to discipline them for their involvement in the government ( [19], p. 344; [32], frame 292). In his study of religious change in Nicaragua during the 1980s, anthropologist Henri Gooren noted that "the conflict was essentially a political power struggle over the control of the Roman Catholic believers," with the official church hierarchy retaining strong support from "rural and urban elites" while alienating the poorer sectors of Nicaraguan society, which tended to support the Sandinistas and the popular church ( [19], p. 344).…”

“…As Henri Gooren notes in his anthropological study of the post-Sandinista religious marketplace in Nicaragua, in the early 1990s "the Roman Catholic Church remain[ed] divided between a conservative hierarchy and a sizeable minority, made up of the so-called 'popular church'" ( [19], p. 354). Evangelical church members also seemed to vary in their political views; many worshippers who belonged to indigenous churches (a significant proportion of the evangelical population) continued to support the FSLN, while those belonging to churches with stronger ties to U.S. denominations tended to have more negative views of the Sandinistas ( [19], p. 353). That said, some revolutionary evangelical organizations, such as the Comisión Evangélica de Promoción de La Responsabilidad Social, worked to strengthen their relations with liberal Protestant churches in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s [83].…”