THANKS TO GOD AND THE REVOLUTION: POPULAR RELIGION AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE NEW NICARAGUA

Most accounts of liberation theology, like most accounts of socialist revolution, stress those aspects of belief and practice that are "new." As seen by political or religious elites, either case combines class analysis with a "progressivist" telling of history in a fashion that might be glossed "modernist.";By analyzing the traditional religious beliefs and practices of the urban poor--the saints' cults--one can demonstrate a continuity (rather than rupture) between traditional and revolutionary ideology. On the one hand, rituals of inversion and reversal capture and perpetuate in the popular imagination the image of "a world turned upside down." On the other, traditional levelling practices conserve the social equilibrium in poor communities and provide a real model for the redistributive policies of revolutionary regimes.;What popular traditionalism captures is the image of a world made stable and whole by its inversion: the lower overturning the upper. The image of social good that the popular classes project, then, is ultimately traditional, conservative and timeless--not modernist, liberal, or progressive.;Liberation theology--with its theory of social sin, its political prescriptions for the concomitant human suffering--represents a partial systematization and rationalization of these impulses, using Biblical texts as the springboard for a class consciousness that is both traditional and rationalized, revolutionary and conservative. The new evangelical Protestant movement, counter to its usual interpretations, suggests a similar salvaging of tradition. And in a secular vein, the authority structure of Sandinismo clearly invokes traditional, conservative and religious methods of legitimation within the framework of a modern revolutionary state.;My fieldwork in Managua's barrios populares suggests that revolutionary ideology and liberation theology in the popular classes themselves are anything but unproblematically progressivist worldviews.;The Nicaraguan experience suggests a critique of Marx's texts on religion specifically and the resultant theory of alienation more generally. The narratives whereby popular classes interpret their experience as actors in a revolutionary drama suggests a perspective that runs counter to progressivist models of history--and similarly-based political movements--that pose a false opposition between popular traditionalism and revolutionary class consciousness.