How Christian Reconstructionism influences US politics: scholar

A Christian chruch service on July 8, 2024 (Paul Shuang/Shutterstock.com)

Art Jipson
The Conversation

January 12, 2026 

Christian Reconstructionism is a theological and political movement within conservative Protestantism that argues society should be governed by biblical principles, including the application of biblical law to both personal and public life.

Taking shape in the late 1950s, Christian Reconstructionism developed into a more organized movement during the 1960s and 1970s.

It was born from the ideas of theologian R. J. Rushdoony, an influential Armenian-American Calvinist philosopher, theologian and author. In his 1973 book, “The Institutes of Biblical Law,” Rushdoony argued that Old Testament laws should still apply to modern society. He supported the death penalty not only for murder but also for offenses listed in the text such as adultery, blasphemy, homosexuality, witchcraft and idolatry.

As a scholar of political and religious extremism, I am familiar with this movement. Its following has been typically very small – never more than a few thousand committed adherents at its peak. But since the 1980s, its ideas have spread far beyond its limited numbers through books, churches and broader conservative Christian networks.

The movement helped knit together a network of theologians, activists and political thinkers who shared a belief that Christians are called to “take dominion” over society and exercise authority over civil society, law and culture.

These ideas continue to resonate across many areas of American religious and political life.
Origins of Christian Reconstructionism

Rushdoony’s ideas were born from a radical interpretation of Reformed Christianity – a branch of Protestant Christianity that follows the teachings of John Calvin and other reformers. It emphasizes God’s authority, the Bible as the ultimate guide and salvation through God’s grace rather than human effort.

Rushdoony’s ideas led him to found The Chalcedon Foundation in 1965, a think tank and publishing house promoting Christian Reconstructionism. It served as the movement’s main hub, producing books, position papers, articles and educational materials on applying biblical law to modern society.

It helped train Greg Bahnsen, an Orthodox Presbyterian theologian, and Gary North, a Christian reconstructionist writer and historian, both of whom went on to take key leadership roles in the movement.

At the heart of reconstructionism lies the conviction that politics, economics, education and culture are all arenas where divine authority should reign. Secular democracy, they argued, was inherently unstable, a system built on human opinion rather than divine truth.

These ideas were, and remain, deeply controversial. Many theologians, including conservatives within the Reformed tradition, rejected Rushdoony’s argument that ancient Israel’s civil laws should apply in modern states.
Christian dominionism and different networks

Nonetheless, reconstructionist ideas grew as people who more broadly believed in dominionism began to align with it. Dominionism is a broader ideology advocating Christian influence over culture and politics without requiring literal enforcement of biblical law.

Dominionism did not begin as a single, unified movement. Rather, it emerged in overlapping strands during the same period that Christian Reconstructionism was developing.

Between the 1960s and 1980s, Christian Reconstructionism helped turn dominionist beliefs into an explicit political project by grounding them in theology and outlining how biblical law should govern society. Religion historian Michael J. McVicar explains that Rushdoony’s work advocated applied biblical law as both a theological and political alternative to secular governance. This helped in influencing the trajectory of the Christian right.

At the same time, parallel streams – especially within charismatic and Pentecostal circles – advanced similar claims about Christian authority over society using different theological language.

The broad network of those who believe in Christian dominionism includes several approaches: Rushdoony’s reconstructionism, which provides the theological foundation, and charismatic kingdom theology.

Charismatic kingdom theology, which emerged in Pentecostal and charismatic circles, teaches that believers – empowered by the Holy Spirit – should shape politics, culture and society before Christ’s return.

Unlike reconstructionism, it emphasizes prophecy and spiritual authority rather than formal biblical law; it seeks influence over institutions such as government, education and culture.

What unites them is the idea that Christian faith should be the basis of the nation’s moral and political order.

Taken together, I argue that these strands have reinforced one another, creating a larger movement of thinkers and activists than any single approach could achieve alone.
From reconstructionism to the New Apostolic Reformation

Christian reconstructionist and dominionist ideas gained wider popularity through C. Peter Wagner, a leading charismatic theologian who helped shape the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, by adapting elements of Christian Reconstructionism. NAR is a charismatic movement that builds on dominionist ideas by emphasizing the use of spiritual gifts and apostolic leadership to shape society.

Wagner emphasized spiritual warfare, prophecy and modern apostles taking control of seven key areas – family, church, government, education, media, business and the arts – to reshape society under biblical authority. This is known as the “Seven Mountains Mandate.”

Both revisionist and dominionist movements share the belief that Christians should lead cultural institutions.

Wagner’s dominion theology, however, adapts Christian Reconstructionism to a charismatic context, transforming the goal of a Christian society into a spiritually driven movement aimed at influencing culture and governments worldwide.
Doug Wilson and homeschooling

Another key bridge between reconstructionism and contemporary dominionist thought is Doug Wilson, a pastor and author in Moscow, Idaho.

Though Wilson distances himself from some of reconstructionism’s harsher edges, he draws heavily from Rushdoony’s intellectual framework. Wilson’s influence can be seen in publications such as “Reforming Marriage,” where he argues for applying biblical principles to law, education and family life.

He has promoted Christian schools, traditional family roles and living out a “Christian worldview” in everyday life, bringing reconstructionist ideas into new areas of society.

Through his writings, teaching and leadership within the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches – the CREC – network, Wilson encourages a vision of society shaped by Christian values, connecting reconstructionist thought to contemporary cultural engagement.

Wilson’s publishing house, Canon Press, and his classical school movement have brought these ideas into thousands of Christian homes and classrooms across the U.S. His local congregation – the Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho – numbers around 1,300.

The Christian homeschooling movement offers parents a curriculum steeped in reformed theology and resistance to secular education.
Enduring influence

Some critics warn that the fusion of dominionist and reconstructionist theology with political action can weaken pluralism and democratic norms by pressuring laws and policies to reflect a single religious worldview. They argue that even moderated forms of these visions challenge the separation of church and state. They risk undermining the rights of religious minorities, nonreligious citizens and others who do not share the movement’s beliefs.

Supporters frame their mission as the renewal of a moral society, one in which divine authority provides the foundation for human flourishing.

Today, Christian Reconstructionism operates through small but influential networks of churches, Christian homeschool associations and media outlets. Its reach extends far beyond its original movement.

Even among those unfamiliar with Rushdoony, the political and theological patterns he helped shape remain visible in modern evangelical activism and the ongoing debates over religion’s place in American public life.

Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

MAGA claims of 'massive religious revival' meticulously debunked

CEO of Turning Point USA Erika Kirk reacts as she speaks during AmericaFest, the first Turning Point USA summit since the death of Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. December 18, 2025. REUTERS/Cheney Orr

Alex Henderson

January 07, 2026

ALTERNET


Christian nationalist themes were alive and well at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest 2025 gathering at the Phoenix Convention Center, which found Vice President JD Vance declaring that the United States "always will be a Christian nation." But that claim was debunked by MS NOW's Steve Benen, who noted what the Founding Fathers had to say on the subject — for example, John Adams, in 1797, writing that "The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion," and Thomas Jefferson saying, in 1802, that the U.S. Constitution created "a wall of separation between church and state."

Another prominent Christian nationalist theme at AmericaFest 2025 is that the U.S. is seeing a widespread evangelical renaissance, which is also what the Moral Majority's Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. claimed during the 1980s. But Salon's Amanda Marcotte, in an article published on January 7, counters that the U.S. is moving in a more "secular" direction — not converting to evangelical Christian fundamentalism in huge numbers.

"For decades now," Marcotte explains, "the Christian Right has been the most powerful and influential force in the GOP, and yet even by their standards, this marked a dramatic shift toward the theocratic impulse. From a purely rational perspective, this is bad politics. Only 23 percent of Americans identify as evangelicals. Trump was able to win in 2024 only by convincing large numbers of people outside of evangelical Christianity that he has a secular worldview. This was aided by the fact that he quite clearly doesn't believe all the Christian language, both coded and overt, his aides coax him to say."

The Salon journalist continues, "But none of that seems to register with MAGA leadership right now. They've convinced themselves — or at least are trying to persuade their donors and followers — that the U.S. is undergoing a massive religious revival. Right-wing media has been pushing the view that huge numbers of Americans, especially young Americans, are converting to fundamentalist Christianity."

Right-wing media, Marcotte observes, are claiming that the murder of Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk in September is fueling a "tidal wave of Americans, especially young Americans, discovering or returning to Christianity." But that "imaginary religious awakening," she stresses, isn't materializing.

"There is no evidence-based reason to believe there's a religious revival among the young that is about to create massive election windfalls for Republicans," Marcotte writes. "On the contrary, a December report from Pew Research found that, 'on average, young adults remain much less religious than older Americans. Today's young adults also are less religious than young people were a decade ago.'"

Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.

Why do some people stay in their faith and others leave? A Pew report offers clues.

(RNS) — Americans who had a good experience as children were likely to keep their faith. Those with bad experiences left, according to a new study from Pew Research Center.

Religious pluralism means more than living around people of different faiths. (Thai Noipho/iStock via Getty Images Plus)

Bob Smietana
December 15, 2025

RNS


(RNS) — Americans who had a positive religious experience as kids are most likely to keep the same faith as adults. Those who had negative experiences are most likely to change faiths or give up on religion. And while a majority (56%) of Americans still identify with their childhood faith, a third (35%) have switched — including 20% who now say they have no religion.

Those are among the findings of a new report from Pew Research Center, based on data from Pew’s 2023-24 U.S. Religious Landscape Study and a survey of 8,937 American adults conducted between May 5 and May 11.

Researchers asked Americans what religion they’d been raised in as well as their current religion, then asked those who switched or left their childhood faith about why things changed. They also asked Americans who are religious why they remain part of that faith.

Nine percent indicated they weren’t raised in a religion and don’t have one today either.

For this study, released Monday (Dec. 15), changing from one brand of Protestantism to another did not count as switching faiths.

The study found that 86% of Americans were raised in a religion, but those who stayed tended to have a different experience from those who left.

According to Pew research, Americans who were raised in a religion and had a positive experience are more likely to have stayed. Chart courtesy Pew Research Center

“Our data shows that the nature of their religious experiences as children — that is, whether they were mostly positive or negative — plays a significant role in whether they stay in their childhood religion as adults,” the study’s authors wrote.

Eighty-four percent of those who had a positive experience as children stayed in the same faith when they became adults, while 69% of those who had a negative experience now have no religion, according to the report

Americans who grew up in what Pew called “highly religious” homes were more likely to keep their childhood faith (82%) than those raised in homes with “low levels of religiosity” (47%). Those most likely to keep their childhood faith were Hindus (82%), followed by Muslims (77%), Jews (76%), those with no religion (73%), Protestants (70%), Catholics (57%), Latter-day Saints (54%) and Buddhists (45%).

Most switching between faiths comes before people turn 30 years old, according to the report. Of those who switched religion, 85% percent did so before age 30, including 46% who switched as teenagers or children.

About half of Americans (53%) who no longer claim a religion, known as nones, after growing up religious did so by age 18. Of those who switched religions, about 3 in 10 did so as teenagers.

Americans who stick with their childhood faith do so because it works for them, according to the report.

Many cited their faith’s beliefs (64%) as the top reason they retained their faith, along with having their spiritual needs met (61%) or finding meaning in life (51%) through faith. Only about a third (32%) said the faith’s social or political teachings are important reasons to keep their faith.

Protestants (70%) and Catholics (53%) were more likely to indicate their faith’s teachings were an important reason to stay compared to Jews (45%). Protestants (65%) and Catholics (54%) were also most likely to say their faith fulfills their spiritual needs. Jews were more likely to cite a sense of community (57%) or their faith’s traditions (60%) as why they stay with their religion.

Few Americans say they stay in their childhood faith out of a sense of religious obligation, including 33% of Jews, 30% of Catholics and 24% of Protestants.

Many of those who left their childhood faith and now have no religion say they don’t need religion and don’t believe, the survey suggests. Among the most important factors were that they stopped believing their faith’s teachings (51%), that religion was no longer important to them (44%) and that they gradually drifted away (42%). Scandals involving religious leaders (34%), unhappiness about social and political teachings (38%) or the way that the religion treats women (29%) were also factors.

According to Pew research, 56% of U.S. adults identify with their childhood religion. Chart courtesy Pew Research Center

Researchers also asked those who have no religion about why they are not affiliated with a faith. Among the most important reasons were that they feel they can be moral without a religion (78%), that they question religious teaching (64%) and that they don’t need religion to be spiritual (54%). About half said they don’t trust religious organizations (50%) or religious leaders (49%).

About 30% of Americans say they have no religion — a figure that has remained constant since 2020.

The report found that about 3% of Americans who were raised without any religion now identify with a faith — largely for the same reasons as religious Americans. They embrace their new faith’s beliefs (61%), say the faith meets their spiritual needs (60%) and say the faith gives their life meaning (55%), they indicated.

As part of the study, researchers also looked at the religious practices of children in the U.S. from the viewpoint of their parents. Just under half of parents with kids under 18 said their children say prayers at night (46%), say grace at meals (43%), read religious stories (43%) or attend services at least monthly (43%).

Protestant parents (61%) were most likely to say their children attend services monthly. They are also most likely (35%) to say their children are being raised in a highly religious household. Nones are least likely to say their children attend services monthly (7%) or are being raised in a highly religious household (1%).

Mothers (39%) are about twice as likely as fathers (17%) to say they play the primary role in teaching their kids about religion, according to the study.

C.R.T.

Sorry, White Nationalists, Europeans were Black until the Rise of Rome, and Rome was Multiracial

By Juan Cole

November 30, 2025

Source: Informed Comment

Image of Ötzi the Iceman by bastiaan from Pixabay

We live in a time when a once level-headed anti-populist politician such as J. D. Vance has increasingly adopted the language of white nationalism, signing on to the Great Replacement theory that nefarious forces, often coded as Jewish, are bringing in immigrants to replace “white” Americans, attacking “multiculturalism” and aligning himself with Christian theocratic nationalism. That his wife Usha is from India is inconvenient to this shift, of course. The shameful Great Replacement theory now embraced by Vance was invented by a French Nazi who considered all Americans “Negroes.”

Whiteness is a term with a checkered history. As a historian, I would argue that it is an objectively meaningless construct. It is only meaningful, like any political identity, in a carefully crafted context and through various sleights of hand. I have pointed out that Ben Franklin only considered the English white, dismissing Swedes as “tawny” and Germans as “swarthy.” In the twentieth century, working-class Italians, Greeks and Irish were gradually admitted to “whiteness,” which had in the nineteenth century been associated with Protestantism, middle and upper class status, and northern European origins. That is, whiteness in America was always mostly about class and religion and unfree antecedents rather than about skin color. Some African-Americans have a lighter complexion than some Mediterranean populations. Arabs were admitted to whiteness in the early 20th century by the courts, though after September 11 their whiteness was often revoked.

That ICE has not gone after the thousands of undocumented Irish in the Boston area or other “white” undocumented immigrants, but only after those coded “brown” or “black,” demonstrates that Stephen Miller’s project is a racialist one, not purely about immigration or undocumented immigration.

One of the symbols of whiteness for Americans constructing a white identity is Europeanness, especially northern Europeanness. It should be remembered that Adolf Hitler initially rebuffed Benito Mussolini’s offer of an alliance because he did not consider Italians white, and kept hoping that instead he could conclude an alliance with Britain.

The bad news for white nationalism is that Europe’s genetic history has revealed that Europeans were mostly dark-skinned until the first millennium BC, and even then whiteness advanced slowly. This belatedness of light complexions has been demonstrated by a scientific paper just this year:

S. Perretti et al., “Inference of human pigmentation from ancient DNA by genotype likelihoods,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (29) e2502158122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2502158122 (2025).

Joseph Shavit summarizes the paper of Professor Perretti and colleagues: “Researchers at the University of Ferrara in Italy studied the genomes of 348 people who lived between 45,000 and 1,700 years ago across Europe and western Asia. Their findings show that about 63% of ancient Europeans had dark skin. Only about 8% had pale skin. The rest had tones in between.”

In fact, Ötzi the iceman, from circa 3000 BC, is both one of Europe’s oldest preserved mummies and one of the darkest Europeans known. Reconstructions of him have made him look white, which is just ideology, not science.

Modern Europeans are immigrants, since much of Europe was not inhabited during the last Ice Age, the glacial maximum of which lasted from roughly 29,000 to 11,700 years ago. After that Africans and people from what we now term the Middle East came in to repopulate the continent.

They were black? They were black. They came from places closer to the equator where UV rays were strong and dark pigmentation blocked them, reducing the danger of genetic damage to embryos.

The major natural selection mechanism for light skin is that in northern climes UV rays are weak and dark pigmentation blocks absorption of them. UV rays provoke humans to produce vitamin D. Lack of vitamin D is associated with a range of poor health outcomes, including increased risk osteoporosis and “of common cancers, autoimmune diseases, hypertension, and infectious diseases.” It is also associated with multiple sclerosis and dementia.

Most important here is that lack of vitamin D damages fetal and maternal health.

So in subsaharan Africa, if two women were pregnant, and one was slightly darker than the other, her embryo would have a very slightly better chance of being protected from harsh UV rays and of being healthy and would be selected for.

Take the same two women to Sweden, and the shoe is on the other foot. The slightly lighter woman’s embryo would have a better chance of getting sufficient vitamin D by being exposed to the weak UV rays up there, and her child would be selected for. Thousands of years later, her descendants would be white as snow.

So modern Europeans are just Africans and Middle Easterners (and some Eurasians) who, under the impact of weak ultraviolet rays, lightened up over time under the impact of natural selection.

It wasn’t until the era of the foundation of Rome, however, than any significant number of Europeans began being lighter complected.

As Dario Radley concludes in Archeology News, dark skin was replaced much more slowly in Europe than had been earlier thought. Why? It turns out that diet is also important. European hunters and gatherers ate foods like meat, fish and wild plants, which were relatively high in vitamin D, and so they could survive even at northern latitudes with weak UV rays while retaining dark complexions.

The Neolithic agricultural revolution where people from what is now Turkiye gradually expanded into Europe and brought grain agriculture introduced a new diet relatively poor in vitamin D, as Shavit points out. So European farmers were exposed to the natural selection process favoring lighter skin. Some of the farmers who came in from the Middle East were from families that had already lightened up because of this diet change.

So, white Europeans in the sense of light-complected ones, are a recent historical phenomenon. And of course in southern Europe people are generally darker. But the point is that all human beings are descended from people we would now code as Black.

I don’t know what glory there is in being light-skinned descendants of Black people because of resettling in northern climes with weak UV rays. At the least, exulting in whiteness in this sense would mean demeaning your own ancestors and family line. All those Americans who think of Rome several times a day should be aware that Romulus and Remus, the mythical figures whose story is wrought up with the founding of Rome, couldn’t have gotten served in a restaurant in the American South in the 1950s.

That is not to mention that the Roman Empire was both among the greatest empires in history and the most multicultural. At its height, it ruled from Morocco to the Caucasus and from Spain to what is now Turkiye. It included Arabophone peoples, Aramaic speakers, Grecophone populations, Anatolian speakers of Iranian languages, Basques, Goths, Celts, and Etruscans along with Romans. When the Romans conquered Syria, they admitted its elites to their aristocracy and had as emperors Philip the Arab (r. 244-249 AD, born in Aurantis, Syria), as well as Elagabalus and Severus Alexander, both from the Emesene dynasty from Homs in Syria, as well as Caracalla, whose mother was from the Syrian Arab family of the Severans,

Elagabalus (r. 218-222) in Arabic is ilah al-jabal, the god of the mountain. Ilah is the Arabic for “a god,” with the definite being al-Ilah or in Jordan and the Hejaz, Allah. So Westerners who don’t like hearing the term Allah can’t even reckon with their own Roman legacy. As for Vance’s diss on multiculturalism, it doesn’t make it easy to understand the greatness of the great multicultural empires, not least Rome itself.

Whiteness and Westernness are such fragile ideas that they break down rapidly when subjected to the historian’s gaze. They are a fragile reed on which to base the politics of 350 million diverse Americans, all of them ultimately descended from Black people.Email

Juan Cole

Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three and a half decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context, and he has written widely about Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and South Asia. His books include Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires; The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East; Engaging the Muslim World; and Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East.

Was the Pentecostal Boom in Latin America a CIA Psyop?

Capitalism, Protestant Missions, and the War on Liberation Theology

By Colten Barnaby

November 30, 2025

Source: Kensington Koan

The surge of Protestant missionaries and charismatic revivals across South America didn’t happen in a vacuum; it unfolded within a Cold War landscape where the United States actively sought religious movements that could blunt the rise of Catholic liberation theology.

If you look closely at the historical record, declassified CIA cables, State Department memos, USAID contracts, congressional hearings, and the work of historians like Greg Grandin, Stephen Rabe, David Stoll, Martin-Baró, and Linda Rabben, the answer is no longer a dramatic conspiracy theory. It’s simply what happened. Not in the sense that every missionary was a covert agent. But because U.S. intelligence and diplomatic officials, from the 1950s through the 1980s, intentionally used Protestant missions as one tool in a broad counterinsurgency strategy designed to weaken liberation theology and preserve U.S.-aligned capitalist order in Latin America.

Before I expound I should let the reader know that I am no stranger to the world of Christian missions. I grew up the son of a Pentecostal pastor and went to school to get two degrees in church history. During college and seminary, I led and participated in mission trips to Fiji, the Philippines, and El Salvador. I worked at Oral Roberts University coordinating student missions trips across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. My intentions were completely sincere. Everyone around me believed we were spreading the gospel. What I didn’t understand at the time, what most missionaries never understand, is that the infrastructure we were plugged into had been shaped for decades by the Cold War, and that evangelical missions, especially the charismatic and Pentecostal branches, had been intentionally cultivated and supported by U.S. political and intelligence structures as an ideological counterweight to the very Christian movements the poor in Latin America were building for themselves.

To see why, you have to understand liberation theology. In the 1960s and 70s, Catholic priests, nuns, and laypeople across Latin America began reading the Bible with the poor in small base communities, and their work was shaped by theologians who helped give this movement its intellectual clarity. Gustavo Gutierrez in Peru, whose book A Theology of Liberation named the movement, argued that faith without a commitment to justice was empty. Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff in Brazil taught that the Gospel required solidarity with the poor and resistance to the structures that kept them poor. In El Salvador, thinkers like Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuria described the oppressed as the “crucified people,” showing that Christian faith was tested in the concrete suffering of those pushed to the margins.

These theologians did not invent liberation theology from above. They put into words what Christian base communities were discovering for themselves as they studied scripture in the shadow of military dictatorships, land monopolies, and U.S. backed elites. These communities did not just pray together. They examined the conditions of their lives. They asked why their societies were structured to benefit a small ruling class and what it meant that Jesus identified with the poor. Liberation theology took those questions seriously and treated them as a call to collective action, offering ordinary people new tools to interpret their own oppression and to organize for land reform, workers’ rights, literacy, and democracy.

Washington saw this as a threat because it encouraged people the empire needed to stay quiet to start asking political questions. The U.S. had already watched Cuba fall out of its orbit, and it was not interested in watching the rest of Latin America follow. So in the late 1960s, U.S. intelligence reports start describing liberation theology as a “subversive movement.” State Department briefings warned that Catholic priests sympathetic to the poor were helping create “pre-revolutionary conditions” in rural areas. The CIA produced internal assessments describing certain bishops as “radicalizing forces.” When the Brazilian bishops issued statements against torture under the military dictatorship, the U.S. embassy cabled Washington expressing concern that the Church was becoming politicized “in dangerous ways.”

So how do you stop a religious movement you can’t outlaw, that is spread through small communities, and whose leaders are clergy protected by the Vatican? The U.S. didn’t try to crush liberation theology directly. It tried to dilute it. Replace it. Counterprogram it. And evangelical missions became one of the most effective instruments for doing that.

This was not merely accidental alignment. It was intentional policy. The U.S. did this in several ways.

The first was through direct coordination with evangelical missionary organizations. One of the clearest examples is the Summer Institute of Linguistics, or SIL, the academic wing of Wycliffe Bible Translators. SIL specialized in going into remote Indigenous regions, studying unwritten languages, creating alphabets, and translating the Bible. These were trained linguists, many with graduate degrees. Their work, on the surface, was scholarly and humanitarian. But during the Cold War, SIL received contracts and grants from USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was a core part of U.S. soft-power strategy abroad. In several countries, including Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, and Ecuador, USAID partnered with SIL to carry out literacy programs among Indigenous groups. These literacy materials often included explicitly anti-communist lessons woven into biblical stories. In Guatemala, SIL teams operated in areas where leftist guerrillas were active, and the military government, backed by the U.S., gave SIL extraordinary freedoms and protection because they saw the missionaries as tools to pacify Indigenous resistance.

Anthropologists who worked in those regions documented how the presence of SIL often coincided with government resettlement programs designed to pull Indigenous people out of autonomous territories and bring them under state control. This was not because SIL itself was designing counterinsurgency tactics, but because SIL created the infrastructure, the literacy programs, the airstrips, the missionary aviation networks, that the state could use. Their aviation service, JAARS (Jungle Aviation and Radio Service), transported missionaries, medical supplies, literacy materials, and occasionally state officials in regions where guerrilla movements operated. JAARS pilots were not CIA assets, but they were operating in regions largely inaccessible to government forces without them, and the cooperation was mutually beneficial.

The second major example involves the Assemblies of God and Pentecostal missions more broadly. In Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Guatemala, especially during their military dictatorships, the U.S. government openly preferred evangelical churches to the Catholic Church. During the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, U.S. officials praised Pentecostal churches for “keeping the masses calm” and for reducing support for the left. In Brazil’s Amazon region, the military dictatorship encouraged American Pentecostal missions to expand because they provided a religious alternative to the radical priests who were helping Indigenous communities organize against land seizures. U.S. diplomatic cables from the 1970s note with approval that Pentecostal movements “lack the politicizing tendencies of certain Catholic clergy.”

Then there’s Campus Crusade for Christ, better known today as Cru. The founder, Bill Bright, made anti-communism a central part of his ministry from the 1950s onward. Campus Crusade programs were supported by U.S. embassies in various countries, especially during the authoritarian rule of Brazil’s military junta. In 1974, Bright launched the “Here’s Life” campaign in Brazil with the blessing of the U.S.-backed government. Internal documents show coordination between Campus Crusade and U.S. consular officials, who saw the campaign as a way to promote a depoliticized Christianity that discouraged support for leftist organizing. This was part of a broader U.S. strategy: if liberation theology created politically conscious Christians, evangelical revivalism created inward-focused ones.

The third major mechanism involved what the CIA called “psychological operations.” U.S. information agencies like USIA produced materials portraying liberation theologians as Marxist infiltrators who wanted to destroy the Church. These were circulated to conservative Catholic bishops, Protestant leaders, and local elites. The CIA also supported radio networks like Trans World Radio and HCJB (based in Ecuador), which broadcast sermons across the continent preaching submission to authority, anti-communism, and personal salvation rather than social transformation. Historians have shown that these broadcasts increased sharply in regions where liberation theology was strongest.

And then there is Guatemala under Efraín Ríos Montt. If there is a single moment when evangelical Christianity and U.S. counterinsurgency fully merged, it is this period. Ríos Montt was a general who took power in a 1982 military coup. He was a born-again Pentecostal and a member of an American-affiliated charismatic church. His weekly national TV addresses sounded like sermons, mixing Bible verses with calls for total obedience to the state. His government carried out one of the worst genocides in Latin American history against the Maya. Ríos Montt was not just supported by the U.S., Ronald Reagan personally praised him as “a man of great integrity.” American evangelical leaders visited him, prayed with him, and publicly defended him. Meanwhile, Catholic priests who supported Indigenous rights were being assassinated or disappeared.

Ríos Montt’s rule was not an outlier. It was the logical end of a decades-long project: replace politically engaged Catholicism with a politically harmless Protestantism, so that the structures of inequality remained untouched.

Even in countries without open dictatorships, the same pattern emerges. In Brazil, as Catholic base communities organized unions and landless workers, the Assemblies of God exploded in membership. In Chile, Pentecostal revivals surged under Pinochet. In Peru, evangelical missions expanded rapidly in the 1980s as Catholic priests began speaking against the military’s human rights abuses. In every case, U.S. officials described Protestant growth as a stabilizing force.

What makes all of this chilling is that it worked. By the 1990s, liberation theology had been sharply weakened. The Vatican, under pressure from conservative factions and geopolitical concerns, disciplined liberation theologians. Meanwhile, Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity had become the fastest-growing religious movement in Latin America. Today, Pentecostals form one of the strongest voting blocs for right-wing and authoritarian politicians across the continent.

Most missionaries who participated in this never knew. Their intentions were honest. Mine were honest. But the structure, the funding, the partnerships, the diplomatic support, the propaganda, the development projects, had been engineered long before any of us arrived. The U.S. didn’t need missionaries to be CIA agents. It just needed them to preach a version of Christianity that left the economic order untouched.

And that is exactly what happened.

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Further Reading and Sources

For readers who want to investigate this history in more depth, the following books and primary source collections offer the most reliable and well documented accounts of the relationship between U.S. foreign policy, Protestant missions, and the suppression of liberation theology.

Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre. A detailed study of Guatemala and the Cold War with extensive analysis of how the U.S. opposed liberation theology and supported evangelical alternatives.

David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth. A careful examination of why evangelical missions expanded during military regimes and how that growth intersected with U.S. strategic priorities.

Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology and The Religious Roots of Rebellion. Clear introductions to liberation theology and its political context.

Stephen Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. Focuses on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America with discussion of religious dynamics under military regimes.

Linda Rabben, Unnatural Selection. Documents missionary involvement in Indigenous regions and the political implications of their presence.

Manuel Vasquez and Anna Peterson, Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas. A broader contextual look at how Christianity and politics interact in Latin America.

National Security Archive, Cold War in Latin America Collections. Declassified U.S. embassy cables, CIA reports, and military documents.

CIA CREST Database. Digitized declassified files related to psychological operations, USAID partnerships, and religious influence programs.

These sources provide the clearest window into how religious movements became instruments within larger geopolitical strategies across the Western Hemisphere.

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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

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The Angry Tide of the Latin American far right

By Vijay Prashad

November 30, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Protesters invade the National Congress of Brazil

The far right in Latin America is angry. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Argentina’s Javier Milei always look furious, and they always speak loudly and aggressively. Testosterone leaks from their pores, a toxic sweat that has spread across the region. It would be easy to say that this is the impact of Donald Trump’s own brand of neo-fascism, but this is not true. The far right has much deeper pedigrees, linked to the defence of the oligarchical families that have roots in the colonial era across the virreinatos (viceroyalties) from New Spain to Rio de la Plata. Certainly, these far right men and women are inspired by Trump’s aggressiveness and by the entry of Marco Rubio, a furious defender of the far right in Latin America, to the position of US Secretary of State. This inspiration and support are important but not the reason for the return of the far right, an angry tide that has been growing across Latin America.

On the surface, it looks as if the far right has suffered some defeats. Jair Bolsonaro is in prison for a very long time because of his role in the failed coup d’état on January 8, 2023 (inspired by Trump’s own failed coup attempt on January 6, 2021). In the first round of the presidential election in Chile, the candidate of the Communist Party, Jeannette Jara won the most votes and will lead the centre-left bloc into the second round (December 14). Despite every attempt to overthrow the government of Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro remains in charge and has mobilised large sections of the population to defend the Bolivarian Revolution against any threats. And, in late October 2025, most of the world’s countries voted for a UN General Assembly resolution that demands an end to the blockade on Cuba. These indicators —from Bolsonaro’s imprisonment to the vote on Cuba— suggest that the far right has not been able to move its agenda in every place and through every channel.

However, beneath the surface, there are indications that Latin America is not seeing the resurgence of what had been called the Pink Tide (after the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998) but is experiencing the emergence of an angry tide that slowly has begun to sweep the region from Central America down to the Southern Cone.

Elections in South America

The first round of the Chilean presidential election produced a worrying result. While Jara of the Communist Party won 26.85 percent of an 85.26 percent turnout, the far right’s José Antonio Kast came in second with 23.92 percent. Evelyn Matthei of the traditional Right won 12.5 percent, while the extreme right candidate who was once with Kast and now to his right, Johannes Kaiser, won 14 percent. It is likely that Jara will pick up some of the votes of the centre, but not enough to overcome the advantage of the far right which looks to have at least more than 50 percent of the voters on its side. The so-called social liberal, Franco Parisi, who came in third, endorsed Kast in 2021 and will likely endorse him again. That means that in Chile, the presidency will be in the hands of a man of the far right whose ancestry is rooted in German Nazism (his father was a member of the Nazi Party who escaped justice through the intercession of the Vatican) and who believes that the dictatorship in Chile from 1973 to 1990 was on balance a good idea.

North of Chile, in Bolivia, the new president Rodrigo Paz Pereria, son of a former president, beat the far right’s Jorge Tuto Quiroga (a former president) in the second round of the election that had no candidate of the left (this after the Movement for Socialism governed Bolivia continuously from 2006 to 2025). Paz’ own party has a minority position in the legislature and he will therefore have to align himself with the Quiroga’s Libre coalition and he will likely adopt a pro-US foreign policy and a libertarian economic policy. Peru will have its own election in April, where the former mayor of Lima —Rafael López Aliaga— is expected to win. He rejects the label far right but adopts all the generic policies of the far right (ultra-conservative Catholic, advocate for harsh security measures, and favours a libertarian economic agenda). Iván Cepeda of Colombia is the left’s likely candidate in their presidential election in May 2026, since Colombia does not permit second terms (so President Gustavo Petro cannot run again). Cepeda will face strong opposition from Colombia’s oligarchy which will want to return the country to their rule. It is too early to say who Cepeda will face, but it might be journalist Vicky Dávila, whose far right opposition to Petro is finding traction in unexpected parts of Colombian society. It is likely that by the middle of 2026, most of the states along the western edge of South America (from Chile to Colombia) will be governed by the far right.

Even as Bolsonaro is in prison, his party, the PL (or Liberal Party), is the largest bloc in Brazil’s National Congress. It is likely that Lula will be re-elected to the presidency next year due to his immense personal connection with the electorate. The far right’s candidate – who will be either Tarcísio de Freitas, the governor of São Paulo state, or one of the Bolsonaro’s (wife Michelle or son Flavio) – will struggle against him. But the PL will make inroads into the Senate. Their control over the legislature has already tightened the reins on the government (at COP30, Lula’s representative made no proposals to confront the climate catastrophe), and a Senate win will further their control over the country.

Common Agenda of the Angry Tide

The Angry Tide politicians who are making waves have many things in common. Most of them are now in their fifties —Kast (born 1966), Paz (born 1967), Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado (born 1967), and Milei (born 1970). They came of age in the post-dictatorship period in Latin America (the last dictatorship to end was in Chile in 1990). The decade of the 1990s continued the economic stagnation that characterised the 1980s —The Lost Decade (La Década Perdida) that convulsed these countries with low growth rates and with poorly developed comparative advantages forced into globalisation. It was in this context that these politicians of the Angry Tide developed their common agenda:

Anti-Communism. The far right in Latin America is shaped by an anti-left agenda that it inherits from the Cold War, which means that its political formations typically endorse the era of US-backed military dictatorships. The ideas of the left, whether from the Cuban Revolution (1959) or from the era of the Pink Tide (after 1998), are anathema to these political forces; these ideas include agrarian reform, state-led finance for industrialisation, state sovereignty, and the importance of trade unions for all workers and peasants. The anti-communism of this Angry Tide is rudimentary, mother’s milk to the politicians and used cleverly to turn sections of society against others.

Libertarian Economic policies. The economic ideas of the Angry Tide are shaped by the Chilean “Chicago Boys” (including Kast’s brother Miguel who was the head of General Augusto Pinochet’s Planning Commission, his Minister of Labour, and his head of the Central Bank). They directly take their tradition from the libertarian Austrian School (Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard as well as Milton Friedman). The ideas were cultivated in well-funded think tanks, such as the Centro de Estudios Macroeconómicos de Argentina (founded in 1978) and the Chilean Centro de Estudios Públicos (founded in 1980). They believe the State should be a force to discipline the workers and citizens, and that the economy must be in the hands of private interests. Milei’s famous antics with a chainsaw illuminate this politics not only of cutting social welfare (the work of neoliberalism) but of destroying the capacity of the State itself.

Culture Wars. Drawing on the wave of anti-gender ideology and anti-migration rhetoric, the Angry Tide has been able to appeal to conservative evangelical Christians and to large sections of the working class that has been disoriented by changes seen to come from above. The far right argues that the violence in working class neighbourhoods created by the drug industry is fostered by ‘liberalism’ and that only tough violence (as demonstrated by El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele) can be the solution; for this reason, they want to strengthen the military and police and set aside constitutional limitations on use of force (on October 28, the government of Bolsonaro ally Cláudio Castro in Rio de Janeiro sent in the police who killed at least 121 people in Operation Containment). It helps the far right that it adopted various conspiracy theories about how the ‘elites’ have spread ‘globalised’ ideas to damage and destroy the ‘culture’ of their nations. This is a ludicrous idea coming from far right and traditional right political forces that champion full-scale entry of US corporations into their society and culture, and that have no respect for the histories of struggle of the working class and peasantry to build their own national and regional cultural worlds. But the Angry Tide has been able to construct the idea that they are cultural warriors out to defend their heritage against the malignancies of ‘globalisation’. Part of this culture war is the promotion of the individual entrepreneur as the subject of history and the denigration of the necessity of social reproduction.

It is these three elements (anti-communism, libertarian economic policies, and the culture wars) that brings together the far right across Latin America. It provides them with a robust ideological framework to galvanise sections of the population to believe that they are the saviours of the hemisphere. This Latin American far right is backed by Trump and the international network of the Spanish far right (the Foro Madrid, created in 2020 by Fundación Disenso, the think tank of the far right Vox party). It is heavily funded by the old elite social classes, who have slowly abandoned the traditional Right for these new, aggressive far right parties.

Crisis of the Left

The Left is yet to develop a proper assessment of the emergence of these parties and has not been able to drive an agenda that sparkles with vitality. A deep ideological crisis grips the Left, which cannot properly decide whether to build a united front with the traditional right and with liberals to contest elections or to build a popular front across the working class and peasantry to build social power as a prelude to a proper electoral push. The example of the former strategy (the electoral alliance) comes from Chile, where first the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concertación) formed in 1988 to keep out the parties of the dictatorship from power and second the Apruebo Dignidad formed in 2021 that brought Gabriel Boric of the centrist Broad Front to the presidency. But outside Chile, there is little evidence that this strategy works. The latter has become harder as unionisation rates have collapsed, and as uberisation individualises the working class to erode working class culture.

It is telling that Bolivia’s former socialist Vice President Álvaro García Linera looked northwards to New York City for inspiration. When Zohran Mamdani won the mayor’s race, García Linera said, “Mamdani’s victory shows that the left must commit to boldness and a new future”. It is hard to disagree with this statement; although, Mamdani’s own proposed agenda is mostly to salvage a worn-out New York infrastructure rather than to advance the city to socialism. García Linera did not mention his own time in Bolivia, when he tried with former president Evo Morales to build a socialist alternative. The left will have to be bold, and it will have to articulate a new future, but it will have to be one that emerges from its own histories of building struggles and building socialism.Email

Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. Tings Chak is the art director and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and lead author of the study “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.” She is also a member of Dongsheng, an international collective of researchers interested in Chinese politics and society.