Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama by Kenneth L. Woodward

Author:Kenneth L. Woodward [Woodward, Kenneth L.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781101907399
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

This was liturgy as ideology, but the indoctrination did not end with the mass. The Diego Rivera–like murals Molina had commissioned to cover the church walls were a visual celebration of the Sandinista revolution. Though the murals were not yet finished, one could already see in panoramic sequence the history of Nicaragua told as a narrative that begins in oppression—first by Spanish colonizers, then by the Yankee imperialists—leading to the Somoza dictatorship and climaxing in the revolution. Augusto César Sandino, Carlos Fonseca, Ajax Delgado—all the fallen heroes of the revolutionary movement were on display as figures in a modern martyrology. So, too, were Camilo Torres and Archbishop Romero as witnesses to Liberation Theology’s wider communion of saints. The panels were arranged, Molina explained, as a contemporary Stations of the Cross celebrating the death and resurrection of the Nicaraguan people.

As he spoke I thought of how the Puritan settlers had read themselves into the Bible by identifying their journey to America as a new exodus of God’s people out of bondage and to the New Israel. Here, though, was an even nervier exercise in the appropriation of sacred story: the embedding of a political insurrection in the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. If this was the popular church, redeemed and at prayer, I wondered what would happen to it and its liturgy over the long haul if, like most revolutions, this one failed to make good on its promises.

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