Spiritual Memory, Spatial Affects and Churchstateness in a Popular Uprising in Afro Colombia’s Pacific Littoral

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the leadership of the local Catholic Church in a forceful social movement of resistance against long-dated marginalization, inequality, and multi-faceted forms of violence in the main city-port in Colombia’s pacific littoral: Buenaventura’s Civic Strike process. Based on interviews conducted with religious and lay participants, it explores how spiritual memory, social space, and collective affects act as the enabling condition for this leadership, a condition that the interviewees characterize as a relation of trust between people and Church. The paper argues that this affect of trust implies complex intersections between social protest, Church and State that require, in turn, a different conceptualization of the social space. One that challenges secularism as an epistemology of the social by overcoming its distinctive clear-cut divisions between Church and State, and between State and civil society. The notion of “churchstateness,” proposed in recent literature, is hence tested as an alternative analytic.

KEYWORDS:

• affects
• Religion
• popular Catholicism
• Latin America
• Church and state
• peacebuilding
• Buenaventura’s civic strike

Introduction

The academic and policy-oriented project self-named as “strategic” or “post-liberal” peace-building¹ had a significant influence in the conception and design of the peace process carried out between the government and the “Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia” (FARC), the largest and most enduring Marxist inspired guerrilla in the Americas. The peace dialogues undertaken among the warring parties between 2012-2016 in Cuba culminated with the signature of a “Comprehensive Peace Accord” that appeared to bring more than 50 years of civil war to an end, opening in Colombia a time of promise. For many Colombians, there was a sense that, finally, a real chance emerged for structural transformations that could move the country toward more egalitarian and just collective forms of government and life. The promise that life among us could be otherwise; but also, that the agents of this long overdue social change could be other ones too, not just that peace as imagined by status quo elites and their thoroughly internalized technocratic forms of government. The hope was that social movements, indigenous, peasants, afro-descendants, students, and labor unions, could gain a space and visibility in public debates thanks to the social and cultural collective self-critique mobilized by the peace process. They would thus have a say they had never had before in shaping the country’s destiny through transformed, more plural and collaborative forms of governance. Between 2016 and 2020, however, more than 800 social and community leaders -many of them from ethnic communities-, and more than 240 ex-combatants who had turned in their arms, were assassinated throughout the country.² In 2020, then, at a juncture in which that promise of peace and social justice thus seemed severely shattered, it was important to reflect on the political affects of trust and hope, the temporalities and spaces in which they are intensified or weakened; the relations between people and institutions that enable or disable them; the way in which these questions traverse the complex articulations between peace-building, statecraft and democracy today.³ And, since one of the characteristic marks of the “post-liberal” conception of peace-building is its deliberate effort to integrate religion into these articulations, this was also a juncture to examine carefully the politics of religion in Colombia’s peace process, and post-accord era.⁴

I wrote this paper in this juncture. In it I attend closely to one of the social movements that has enacted notable forms of organized struggle to reclaim and promote peace, social justice, and dignity for the most disadvantaged in Colombia’s post-accord era: Buenaventura’s Civic Strike process. This movement emerged by around 2012 as a platform for the convergence of different local grassroots organizations in this city-port in the country’s southern pacific region. Ethnic communities and labor unions, rural and urban, came together to promote strategies of community organizing and collective action to confront the drastic forms of socioeconomic, racial and environmental injustice suffered daily by its inhabitants. Among them the lack of supply of clean water for large portions of the population, and the exposure to cruel forms of warlike, gang-related violence generated around the rents of illicit economies. The local Catholic Church’s Dioceses in the head of its by then Bishop, Msgr. Hector Epalza, played a key role in facilitating this interethnic platform, from where massive street demonstrations in 2014 and 2017 were coordinated to demand attention and action from the national government in the midst of a desperate situation of precarity and insecurity. In 2017 these demonstrations took place in the context of an impressive, three weeks long general strike that boycotted the activities of Colombia’s main maritime port, located in Buenaventura, and became a decisive landmark of the city’s history. Through an ethnographic approach to this social movement, I explore the affect of trust between people and Church that my interviewees insistently underscored as the main factor that enabled this leadership of the local Church. I trace how this affect is mobilized by forms of collective memory and desire, and how recent contributions in the field of political theology allow us to probe how political affects such as this one, in their material and collective character, challenge the pervasive grammar of political liberalism (which is currently in Colombia a sort of lingua franca that narrows down our political imagination). I am interested in how the type of religiosity cultivated in this affect of trust between people and Church, and its political importance during the Civic Strike, provides resources for a renewed imagination of the social and the political.

One of the insider critics of the “strategic” or “post-liberal” peace-building agenda has noted how despite its self-assigned label, this project’s outlook remains being too liberal or too “secularist”.⁵ This is, too caught up in the coordinates of intelligibility of the human, religion, and the social as they are conceptualized within the normative ideal of liberal democracy. This calls for the exploration of other angles from which to think religious sensibilities and political engagements in peace-building practices from the ground up. The Civic Strike movement in Buenaventura, as I will show, deployed forms of politically engaged religiosity that defy the frames of intelligibility of social and political life implied in the normative ideal of liberal democracy; and more specifically, in the conceptions of the social space, and of the place and role of institutions such as Church, State, or social movements in this space, that this normative ideal tacitly assumes.

In order to reflect on this challenge and its critical force, I reconstruct the political spiritualities lived on the ground during this notable political uprising following the testimonies of people who participated in it. Between 2018 and 2021 I conducted around 50 hours of in-depth interviews with near 20 people who participated in Buenaventura’s Civic Strike in 2017, among them several priests but also lay men and women.⁶ I have talked to renowned leaders who have been visible spokespersons of the social movement in its different stages, but also with other members of the community who participated intensely in the 2017 strike but have had, since then, different levels of involvement with the movement. In selecting the people to interview, I first prioritized talking to priests who had a visible role of leadership in the movement, or who had the experience of accompanying people closely as Church representatives during the strike’s massive demonstrations, since I was interested in how their faith shaped their political engagements. But I also approached lay men and women, some closer to the movement’s leadership and others more distant from it, in order to listen to a variety of forms of participation in the social movement and the uprising. Thus, I tried to maintain a balance between interviewing elders and young people, men and women. Since around 90% of the population in Buenaventura is afro-descendant, most interviewees are afrocolombian, two are from indigenous descent (among them Father John Reina, who plays a prominent role throughout this article), and some are mestizos. Apart from conducting these interviews, during this period I have also visited Buenaventura on several occasions weaving collaborations with initiatives of community based organizing in the city. I have thus gained familiarity with the complex and heterogeneous processes of social work and political participation that people are constantly promoting and navigating through, and the relations of these processes to ecclesial, governmental and non-governmental institutions. And I have also come to have a keener sense of the widespread popular religiosity of the city’s inhabitants and the way in which it is interspersed with their everyday life, as well as with their varied forms of political activism and engagement.

Reflecting from this research, in this paper I explore how these lived political spiritualities rooted in the history of a people’s struggle for dignity and justice, defy liberal secularism’s tacit diagram of the social space. When it comes to conceiving a normative regulation for the place and role of religion in politics, secularism (or “laicismo”⁷) presupposes a diagram of the social space delineated along two borders which are spatial, institutional, and epistemic: the border drawn between the State and civil society (in an up–down vertical axis), and the border drawn between State and Church (in an inside-outside horizontal axis). This same diagram of the social space persists in political liberalism’s “post-secular” turn, and its more religion-friendly and inclusive version of a redefined secularism.⁸ The political spiritualities deployed in Buenaventura’s Civic Strike process, challenge this topography of the social. They do so in the way in which a collective spiritual memory is mobilized through affective traces inscribed in the materiality of the social space, traces in virtue of which these spatialized collective memories bear the affect of trust between people and Church (Section III). And they challenge it, as well, in the way in which in a place like Buenaventura due to its distinctive history, the social movement, the Church and the State as institutional sites where social relations, practices, affects and relations of power are configured and disputed, are thoroughly interwoven in an entangled continuum (Section IV), rather than separated or opposed in a “zero sum game”.⁹ I thus elaborate the notion of “spiritual memory” as a spatial, material and collective phenomenon, to characterize how the affects linked to a widespread popular religiosity with specific historical conditions of possibility leave traces and inscribe themselves in the sensorial density of a shared common life. And for similar reasons I also take recourse to the notion of “churchstateness” recently proposed in the trio work Ekklesia.¹⁰ This notion is attuned with the conception of religious experience as a material, corporeal, affective and collective social phenomenon, that I adopt throughout this paper. I employ it in order to envision another conception of the social space and give an alternative account of the articulations and entanglements between the religious and the political.

In this article, I aim to contribute to the critical genealogies and ethnographies of secularism that have had a lasting influence in the field of critical research on religion in the last decades, as well as to a keener understanding of the relations between religion and peace-building in Colombia’s post-accord era. My main argument is inspired by the efforts to analyze secularism as a complex set of techniques of government that tend to render visible and empower certain forms of religiosity and of life, while marginalizing or rendering others unintelligible from the perspective of the dominant epistemologies of the human and the social that the techno-politics of the western liberal State sustains.¹¹ This line of analysis has proved fruitful to analyze social conflicts in the context of the Islamic diaspora in Western Europe¹², or with respect to the political agency of Muslim women in Middle Eastern countries.¹³ It has also been generatively adopted to reflect on the persistent forms of structural racism and antiracist struggles in the United States and their historical theologico-political layers.¹⁴ But this type of critique of secularism has been rarely mobilized in the context of Latin America. This article shows not only the viability but the necessity of this critique of secularism (or laicismo) as a biopolitical technique of knowledge-power inherent to the specific trajectories of the liberal State in Latin America’s recent history. Which is in part the history of its increasing insertion in contemporary forms of global governance in which liberal democracy has been an uncontested normative ideal, but also an epistemologically dominant horizon of interpretation of the political. The until now understudied intensification of the liberal governance of religion hand in hand with the peace process in Colombia, which I cannot expose here in detail, implies both the landing of global forms of governance of religion, and the reinforcement of liberalism as a dominant epistemology of the social and the political. I show in this article how the critique of this dominant epistemology is forcefully deployed in how people’s lived religious and political experiences take place at sites of community based resistance.

I follow as a case in point Buenaventura’s Civic Strike social movement. I explore here the gaps and tensions between lived and governed religion¹⁵: between popular forms of religiosity mobilized in a notable popular uprising, on the one hand; and, on the other, religion as the liberal State makes it intelligible by means of secularism (laicismo) as a dense interpretative grid of the social. How one understands “religion” as a social phenomenon in a specific place and time, becomes thus a site of dispute regarding the very epistemology of the social and the political, this is, the ways in which we understand, and thus perform, our life in common. And at the same time, an opportunity to reflect on how the complex vicissitudes of Colombia’s peace process, its hopes and frustrations, its joys and tragedies, are not just a matter of the temporal delay between the signature of the peace Accord, that became law, and its implementation. But rather, also, an occasion to interrogate critically dominant regimes of meaning and intelligibility through which we make sense of our social and political lives.

The pentecost of a people’s uprising

In May of 2017 the most important city-port in Colombia’s mainly black pacific coast, Buenaventura, was the site of an extraordinary political event, which people today refer to as “glorious”: a twenty-two days long popular general strike that involved around 90 grassroots organizations rose against longstanding forms of everyday and structural inequality, violence, marginalization, and State indolence. These organizations, among them port labor unions, consejos comunitarios and cabildos indígenas¹⁶, coalesced around an interethnic platform called the Civic Strike movement. This open platform grew consistently since then in the following years and by 2020 registered 211 official member organizations. The platform was thus the site of a transformation in political collective awareness and engagement, and it was forceful in demanding from the government the necessary structural changes that could lead toward people’s vision of what it means to “live in peace and with dignity in the territory,” which was the Civic Strike’s main motto. It has been a decisive and game changing factor in the city’s recent historical and social landscape. This is the case even if the delays in the materialization in palpable public works of the agreement with which the strike was suspended back in 2017, and the channeling of almost the entire energies and strategy of the movement in “technical” conversations with government officials behind closed doors, have led in the previous two years to an increasing disconnection between the representatives’ committee and its bases.

The people of Buenaventura that I have talked to in my fieldwork recall with pride and joy the epic, festive, and massive demonstrations that brought more than 100,000 people to the streets, roughly one-fourth of the city’s entire population, in May of 2017 during the strike days.¹⁷ Here were mostly black peoples dressed in white t-shirts, walking, dancing, chanting and, at designed points and times of encounter, praying together. Their testimonies also speak of an affective intensity that sustained the strike’s efforts during moments of extreme duress, including episodes of brutal police repression. Daly is a afrocolombian women lawyer in her forties who, as many of the active members of the Civic Strike movement did, came to the platform moved by the enthusiasm and intensity of those days of street protests. She narrated to me her experience of 9 May of 2017, the day of the largest and most enthusiastic demonstration, in these terms with a broken voice:

There were such key moments and turning points, that I say that everything that has happened in Buenaventura has been the work of God. This is something that goes way beyond the human, because there were very specific things that detonated at timely moments, and made people gather massively in the designed spaces of encounter in the streets¹⁸

Apart from having touched ordinary people’s lives so profoundly, the popular uprising also deployed a notable level of political efficacy and legislative force. By bringing this city’s commercial, administrative, and social activities to a halt, the mobilization was finally successful in pressing the national government to reach an agreement with the Civic Strike’s Committee in which most of their demands were taken into account. State investment and the commitment to concrete actions toward improvements in education, labor conditions, health facilities, cultural and recreational infrastructure, and a functional supply of basic public services like water and electricity, were finally approved and signed off by the two parts after several days of intense and at times very strained negotiations.¹⁹

Days before the beginning of the strike Monseigneur Hector Epalza, by then the Bishop of the local Catholic Dioceses, wrote a public official statement expressing the Church’s unequivocal support to the social protest, inviting people to march in the streets peacefully, but also resolutely and committedly. He was also a very assertive communicator during the most difficult moments of the strike. Through local public media and social networks, he sent denunciatory SOS messages to the government, and reassuring messages to the people during the outbursts of police repression and vandalism. Three years before, in 19 February 2014, Bishop Epalza had a leading role in the organization of a march that the interviewees and the local news media characterize as unprecedented, decisive, and as the “mother” of the 2017 civic strike. There had never been so many people walking together in the streets of Buenaventura protesting around a common cause (the local media said at the time around 30,000 or 40,000). The 2014 march’s motto, “to bury violence and live with dignity in the territory,” was a cry to bring people out of a situation of generalized fear and despair provoked by sky rocketing homicide rates (140 in 2013, and already 30 in the first two months of 2014), and a threatening and unlivable dynamic of invisible frontiers in the neighborhoods. All of the latter were related to the intensification of criminal gang’s territorial disputes.²⁰ These outbursts of criminal armed violence were fueled by a background of structural violence: scandalous unemployment rates (68%) and aggressively extractivist economic activities that conceived of Buenaventura more like a “port” that benefited the economic interests of big companies engaged in international commerce, rather than as a city whose inhabitants struggled in precarious conditions. Buenaventura lacked by then basic public services like a clean water supply, health care, and educational facilities. Bishop Epalza was the main public figure denouncing for several years these circumstances to state authorities and international organizations.

This influence of a militant Church struggling in an outstanding political process of popular awakening, uprising, and organizing is confirmed by many other testimonies. For several other religious leaders, but also for many laypeople who participated in it, the Civic Strike was at once a spiritual and a political experience, as is clear in Daly’s testimony. The interviewees often brought up “trust” as a key factor for understanding the importance of the local Catholic Church’s Dioceses’ outspoken and hands-on leadership during these events. But beyond that, they underline the Church’s key role in the wider history of processes of political articulation and mobilization that brought the strike about, and which continue to be decisive up to this day in the city’s social landscape. In one of our interviews, Father John Reina, the most active and visible leader of the Church in the Civic Strike movement up to this day, and at the time of the three-weeks-long general strike the director of the local Dioceses’ Social Pastorate, said to me:

For the Civic Strike to be possible, there were two prevalent factors: trust, and the struggle for what is common. Why do I say this? It is just a matter of doing an assessment … if one asks people: “If the Church wouldn’t have been involved in the Civic Strike would you have gone out to march?” People wouldn’t have gone out. The Church here represents the common good and represents trust … . (May 18, 2017)

Despite interviewees’ different standpoints in a rugged and complex political scene, the theme of “trust” as a key to understand what had happened was recurrent. Olga López, an elderly woman who works at Father John Reina’s parish, recalled the feeling of community, togetherness, and solidarity at the designed points of encounter during the Civic Strike days. Some people cooked, some people played with the children, others played music, and some were in charge of the demonstration’s logistics: routes, security issues, and the efforts at coordination with other points of encounter in the city. She said with nostalgia that this feeling reminded her of bygone times when she was growing up, and neighbors respected each other and shared what they cooked: “if someone made pudding she offered it to the neighbor, and the neighbor never gave the pot back empty” (May 18, 2018). A similar evocation came from Daly’s testimony:

There were cultural manifestations throughout the city’s main avenue. It felt like a party, like if it was again that Buenaventura of the uramba, when people gathered to spend time together and to eat out of what each and everyone could share. It was a bit like remembering childhood. The whole strike thing made me remember my childhood a lot. How one spent all the time in the streets, how we all were neighbors, a family. This is what violence has done to our society, it has broken that structure that we had, because more than just people coexisting we were a big family (December 17, 2019)

The affect of trust thus evoked in these testimonies, destabilizes drastically spatial and social partitions between the intimate and the political, the household and the street, the private and the public. How does one trace the trajectories and stakes of this affect and its political import? The emphatically theologico-political figure that came up in an interview with Father John Reina, will give us a cue. A very vivid figure of religious significance came out when, with a broken voice and heightened emotion, he conveyed the meaning that 19 May of 2017 had for him, when the people in Buenaventura massively walked in the streets to support the Civic Strike committee (the group of spokespersons of the movement that have been assigned to have a seat in the negotiation table with the government), in the most uncertain and tense juncture of the strike. That day, a curfew had been declared after violent outbursts of vandalism had erupted in reaction to brutal police repression against the peaceful demonstrations. This expression of the people coming out to take the streets in defiance of the curfew and in support of the popular uprising (while the movement’s leaders felt defeated and had asked them to stay at home) was lived by him as a “new Pentecost”:

Look, we are not the ones doing this, there is a divine force that accompanies us. This is why I say that it is a new Pentecost, it is God’s support to what we are doing because it is just, it is not unjust, not unjust. (… .) This is something that fills me with joy, it reaffirms my commitment with this process, but above all with this God and with the Church I am serving. (May 18, 2018)

This theologico-political “Pentecost,” in the sphere of influence of pastoral practices associated to an emancipatory, popular, black Catholicism²¹, opens an angle from which to conceptualize the political reach and valence of the affect of “trust” repeatedly evoked. This is the angle of specific philosophical questions concerning the relationship between institutions and affects. How do affects get inscribed into institutional settings? What happens in these trajectories, how can one give an account of them, and their ethical, political and social repercussions? And then, how do these affective inscriptions in institutional formations require us to think otherwise the relations between church and state in terms, for instance, of forms of “churchstateness”²²?

I approach these questions by tracing an epistemic force in the effect of dissonance and strangeness provoked by these testimonies, by the experience they narrate, and the inhabited world of thought and praxis they mobilize and bear. To adopt the attitude of a reductionist translation that assumes that these testimonies speak in an ecclesial or theological language ciphered as a “metaphor” for social phenomena that could be explained more “objectively” or in an analytically clearer fashion in the secular episteme of the social sciences, is a way of neutralizing this excess, and the dissonance generated by it.²³ I hence listen to these testimonies in their literality, not in the sense of presuming in them a direct referential relation between speech and world (between what they say and “what is the case”), but in the sense of reflecting seriously on their performative force in the configuration of bodies, practices, relations, affects, spaces, and institutions; and on this force’s ethical and political import in the formation of unusual practices of citizenship and political agency.

Spatial trust: interlaced histories of violence, trust, and citizenship

In this section I will argue that the affect of “trust” between people and Church here evoked, which is simultaneously religious and political, should be thought as spatial, not just historical; that is, it should be thought of as impersonal, supra-subjective, and inscribed in the materiality of places and things. I elaborate on three scenes from the archival and ethnographic material of the Civic Strike process to show how they convey the spatial character of the “trust” that the testimonies speak of: a televised political negotiation; a post-card with the picture of two bishops sold as a souvenir; and the spectral saturation of spaces in the memories of bygone times.

The last two days of the strained talks between representatives of the Civic Strike movement and the national government’s officials were televised by the local channel Telemar, and followed closely by people in the streets. Here was a show of collective attention only paralleled during the national soccer team’s decisive matches and sustained, this time, for a much longer transmission. If, according to news reportage at the time, it was the representatives of the Civic Strike movement who insisted that the dialogues at the negotiation table be televised²⁴, against the reluctance of the government’s officials, it is because they were building on the political force of the people’s trust in the process. They knew that in this regard, if not in others, the balance of forces with respect to their interlocutors was highly in their favor. And they knew, as well, that this affective connection had everything to do with people’s sense that this was being done together with them just as they had together marched in the streets. The members of the Civic Strike movement also thought it crucial to make the government representatives feel that at the closed negotiation table where policy decisions were being accorded, the pressure of the people outside was tacitly working.

Beyond the strategic political rationale for this move, this interplay of juxtaposed scenes and spaces (the TV screens, the people in the streets coming together to watch, the filmed negotiation table bringing face to face representatives from both sides), in its complex play of presences and absences, alerts us to the spatiality of an affective fabric that rendered porous and destabilized otherwise naturalized spatial divisions of the social. Such divisions are typically configured in a horizontal inside/outside axis and in a vertical up/down one: inside the State’s orbit and outside of it in the sphere of the Church, or vice versa; up in the sphere of the State’s policy decisions, and down in the street protests or everyday life practices, etc.

This play of presences/absences through which the TV transmission of the negotiation table’s dialogues takes place speaks to an experience of collective articulation built on an affective relation. The trust that interviewees talked about when discussing the Church’s leadership in the Civic Strike is hence conveyed in this scene in its spatiality. It can move through across institutional settings in the overlaps and gaps between the assembled bodies in the streets²⁵, the Church and its leaders during the street demonstrations, the representatives of the Civic Strike movement, and the State’s orbit in the policy making space of the negotiations. As Father Reina’s testimony suggests, the trust between the people and the social movement representatives in the negotiation table depended on how the force of this affective constellation could be moved from one institutional setting to another. The scene of the televised political negotiations between the government officials and the Civic Strike movement’s spokespersons behind closed doors, shows a first challenge to this motion: how to relocate the affective intensity of the massive street demonstrations, and its political force, into the sphere of governmental decisions and policy making. If the enthusiasm and cohesion mobilized in the former had to do in some degree with the local Church’s leadership and the people’s relation of trust to it, the force of the Civic Strike movement’s negotiation team vis-à-vis the government implied the re-direction of this trust to them. This is why the leadership of Father John Reina is crucial in this interplay of spaces: he is an active member of the Civic Strike movement and usually appears seated at the center of the people of Buenaventura’s side at the negotiation table.²⁶

This trust that circulates in this way has a dense historicity, which leads us from the televised political negotiation to the iconic postcard. The historical threads of this institutional trust in the Church in this region of Colombia’s pacific littoral are crucial for understanding the forms of religious political militancy staged here. They have to do with the collective spiritual memory of the Church’s pastoral practice, one that has been marked since the early 1960s by the work of a few remarkable bishops and many religious actors who have had a lasting influence in people’s lives, their sense of belonging, and the dense texture of an ethos of citizenship that goes well beyond occasional participation in electoral processes (which actually tended to be perceived with skepticism and distrust, up until the popular election in 2019 as city’s major of one of the movement’s leaders). Rather, it is a practice and sense of citizenship related to a militant desire, at times more latent, at times more explicit, to struggle for what is conceived to be common; and for what from this vantage point is reclaimed as just (sometimes called “life with dignity,” or “peace,” or the “territory,” or “our rights,” or “who we are”). This ethos of citizenship has been cultivated to an important extent in the pastoral practices of these church members, priests and nuns. Their practices are characterized by the resolute immersion in the people’s everyday struggles in a harsh context of social, economic, and political exclusion and marginalization, and by a hands-on commitment to work with them shoulder to shoulder to resist this state of affairs and make it more livable. Among these historical Church leaders, the figure of Msgr. Valencia Cano, who was given by the locals the name of the “bishop of the poor,” stands out. He was an active participant in the most important historical milestones of the so called “progressive” Church in Latin America at large, and in Colombia: Vatican Council II, and Medellin’s Latin American Bishop Conference in 1968. And he was above all, during the thirteen years of his work in Buenaventura (from 1959 up to the day of his tragic death in a plane accident in 1972), a bishop who made the people’s everyday struggles the core of his pastoral practice. He is up to this day dearly remembered as a milestone of the city’s collective memory.²⁷ And another key figure in this history is that of Msgr. Hector Epalza, active bishop of the Buenaventura Dioceses in May of 2017, whom we have already mentioned. When I first visited him, before even starting our conversation, he handed to me a postcard sold for tourists in downtown Buenaventura’s shops that had two pictures side by side: Msgr. Valencia Cano on the left, and him on the right, with the respective captions underneath reading: “the bishop of the poor,” and the “bishop of the people.”

This postcard icon-like image allows us not only to see how this history of an immersed and committed pastoral practice of the local Church has left affective traces that circulate through places, people, objects, signs, and the social topography in which they are embedded. It also helps us to understand how one has to make a shift away from the habitual conceptions of trust as a subjective feeling experienced by someone toward a determinate object or person, with a specific motivational force, in order to grasp this trust in its political and religious registers.

It is clear that “charismatic” religious leaders like Msgr. Gerardo Valencia Cano has been involved in this history, and that the relations between these leaders and the people influenced by them have been crucial in it (this is what the postcard conveys). However, the trust lived by and in these relations cannot be adequately understood as happening at times “inside,” or at times “in between,” subjects or individuals. The total exteriority and lack of depth of the postcard image, its rather trivial and ordinary circulation as a tourist’s souvenir, in which people’s relationship of trust to the Church is condensed, signals this affect’s spatiality. Neither interior, nor subjective, nor inter-subjective, this trust, here condensed in a postcard, takes place and its occurrence is forceful: people experience it, feel it, and speak of it. But it is not interior or subjective, it becomes attached to places and things; and to institutional assemblages and their sensoriums, even when linked to specific persons or individuals. Yet individuals are implicated, insofar as this affect impregnates or saturates the spaces they inhabit. Individuals can at times intensify or condense this spatial affects and their motions (as we have seen the figure of Father Reina doing during the televised negotiations, and thereafter in his role as representative of the Civic Strike movement in the negotiation table). In its image-like spatial character, but also in the spatiality of its circulation as a souvenir, this popular image-icon of the two Bishops tends, paradoxically, to undo the Weberian notion of charismatic authority. Even if Weber recognized “charisma” as a quality that could attach itself to objects as much as to persons²⁸, its relevance was always related for him to the elicited subjective rationality and motivation of a conduct. Here it is more about how the spectrality of memories saturates spaces, and how this spectrality relates to what we might characterize as the “collective flesh” of the uprising.²⁹

Emiliano, a retired Economics professor from the local University, recalled this image of Msgr. Valencia Cano, an image that for him captured a historical legacy in virtue of which the people of Buenaventura trust the Church:

Monseigneur was an easy going man … one saw him all the time walking through the neighborhoods. One could see him there in a corner, any corner, standing there as any other ordinary citizen, and he got into our meetings to talk. (… .) He was like that, a very humble straightforward man that talked to us as a friend to a friend (December 5, 2018)

What else is a specter, a spirit, if not an affectively dense memory that saturates a space, a place?

A political process like the one in which this Civic Strike movement is inscribed, and the leadership enacted by a Church with a distinctive history, solicits a different social topography for thinking the affective reality of the “trust” to which people testify. This is one in which the spatial or atmospheric character of a religio-political affect brings forth the undoing and destabilization of a two-dimensional flat social topography (inside/outside, up/down), and the conceptual dichotomies associated with it, that turn out to be analytically untenable and unproductive. Inside or outside the Church’s orbit? Inside or outside the State’s orbit? Down in civil society or up in the sphere where state governmental policies are decided? The answer to all these questions here would be both. Yet, this “both” does not collapse entirely the distinctions into an undifferentiated sameness. In its agency and force, one that passes through specific people and actors but that also exceeds their intentionality, this spatial trust destabilizes profoundly these dichotomies and demarcations.

Insubordinate religion, motions of churchstateness, and unusual social innovation

In this section, I will elaborate on how this shift of perspective provoked by the previous analysis of the historically cultivated trust between people and Church in Buenaventura and its spatial character, calls for rethinking standard liberal and secularist accounts of the relations between Church and State, and the social topography that underlies these accounts.

The recent trio work Ekklesia challenges the State vs. Church social topography by proposing a novel angle from which to think the historical entanglements of the religious and the political in the Americas. This novel angle is genealogical, in that it unearths archives that contest an official dominant history of colonialism and post-colonialism in the continent that tends to mark a clear-cut break between monarchical colonial governments -theologically grounded, and then republican or federative governments, presumedly democratic and secular, after the independence wars. The work shows how the forms of domination and oppression associated to the history of settler colonialism cannot be understood in a chronology outlined around that break that associates to the Nation-State period the separation of Church and State (however partial); but rather through heterogeneous and disputed forms of “churchstateness” that perdure and transform across and throughout the monarchical colonial order, and the federative or republican “secular” State orders. The work also calls for an ethnographical scale type of observation, that attends to how “stateness” and “churchness” as social spaces and ways of feeling, doing, relating, sensing, acting, governing, are interlocked and entangled in people’s lived experiences on the ground.³⁰ I encounter this analytic helpful and expand it beyond its exclusively historical or genealogical approach. Ekklesia is mainly concerned with how colonialism in the Americas, in its actual colonial period but also in the persistence of its social structures in the modernizing project of State-making in the post-colonial era, has always implied the undoing of forms of counter sovereignty often deployed in configurations of churchstateness. I am interested here, rather, in how this notion can allow us to understand current or recent movements of popular resistance where something like forms of churchstateness take shape. This is, where social experiences in which the political and the religious, and their presumedly discrete institutional settings, are rather inextricably intertwined, and in the process of reconfiguring or remaking themselves in the midst of profound social conflicts.

The history of Buenaventura is interesting in this regard insofar as the complex heritages of the local Catholic Church are almost indissociable to the history of people’s struggles for social, racial and environmental justice that can be traced back to the 1950s and 1960s. This is mostly the case due to the figure of Msgr. Gerardo Valencia Cano, whom I have already mentioned. During his 14-year tenure as Bishop in Buenaventura he worked for the common good of the city’s inhabitants in the midst of conditions of extreme duress. He built seven education centers in all levels of schooling which are still today among the most important in the city, and mobilized the resources of the Church to protect people from forms of violent displacement aggressively driven by the economic interests around the port; as well as to assist them in meeting their daily needs in conditions of precarity. He was an important religious thinker that conceived ahead of his time the need for a specific Afro Colombian Pastoral in the Church, one immersed within, and sensible to, the deepness and richness of black cultural heritage in the pacific region. He was a great diplomat able to secure funding from international cooperation to build not only schools but also a significant number of church buildings in rural and urban areas of Buenaventura. A common sense “progressive” narrative might say that due to the premodern deficiencies of an absent State, the Church came to fill in under his lead, somehow disfunctionally, to respond people’s needs. But this narrative would miss the point. Buenaventura’s port has functioned as a stately strategy since the sixteenth century, and its expansion and consolidation were the main form of statecraft in the second half of the twentieth century. The largest naval base in Colombia’s pacific coast was built in the 1980s in Buenaventura’s rural area, in lands handed over by the State to the army since the 1940s. So the State was present in the commercial and military ventures of the city during Msgr. Valencia Cano’s tenure, only not promoting access to education, health and dignified conditions of livelihood to its inhabitants as he attempted to do through his intense pastoral work as Church leader. And the ecclesial authorities of the centralized Church in Colombia were always quite suspicious of his resolute public and social engagements of a notable pastor in the country’s peripheries, to the extent that after his death he was replaced by a conservative Bishop aligned with the interests of the country’s centralized elites in order to undo his legacy, which was perceived as dangerous. A purpose in which, as we have seen, they failed badly. But all this serves to underscore another aspect of the notion of “churchstateness” which is crucial for us in the context of Buenaventura’s civic strike process: the decapitalization of both nouns church and state. And hence, the emphasis this notion puts on these institutions as internally heterogenous, conflicted, and constantly disputed on the ground.

In a conversation in which Father John Reina expressed his vision of the local Dioceses’ Social Pastorate, which, at the time of the strike, he had been directing for already a few years, it became clear how he conceived of the Church’s pastoral work as a space of “churchstateness.” As I have mentioned this notion is pertinent here because it argues for a quite radical shift in the understanding and characterization of Church and State relations, away from the idea of clearly demarcated and separate institutions that relate to each other in a “zero sum game”.³¹ Instead, “stateness” and “churchness” are proposed by these authors as “analytically distinct but as, in practice, also an interlocking series of documents, procedures, practices, discursive registers, buildings, uniforms, lawlike rules, sounds and ways of seeing”.³² Also, the authors of this trio work propose to think churchness and stateness as interlocking discursive, bodily, normative, and sensorial social spaces.³³ In this section I will analyze the way in which a churchstate assemblage of this kind was conceived in the plan for the local Dioceses’ social pastorate, under Father Reina’s tenure, building on the collective spiritual memory passed on by the distinctive history of the Church in this territory.

Father John Reina explained how he conceived the Church’s social pastorate as an institutional setting that could facilitate passages and synergies between everyday life in the neighborhoods (a popular decentered religiosity of ecclesial base communities), the church as a social and spiritual agent, and the state’s institutions as contested and disputed sites of governance. As his presentation made clear, the inspiration of this plan draws from passages of the Church’s Social Teaching that emphasize the link between evangelization and “human promotion,” passages that he called “jewels from the Social Catholic Doctrine that we have but are not promulgated enough” (9 June 2018). Take this one, for example:

The links [between evangelization and human promotion] also include links in the theological order, since one cannot dissociate the plan of Creation from the plan of Redemption. The latter plan touches the very concrete situations of injustice to be combated and of justice to be restored³⁴

In order to respond to this call for redressing structural injustices, the churchstate assemblage envisioned by Father Reina is constituted by a double slant through which the borders of the Church’s Social Pastorate open up, centrifugally, in two potential passages. Through one slant, a passage from/toward the everyday concerns, struggles, and feelings of the people in the neighborhoods through the consolidation of already formed ecclesial communities conceived of under the guise of a rather standard figure for the social pastorate promoted by the Latin American Church’s orthodoxy in these matters: the Integrated System for a New Evangelization, or “SINE.” The other slant would open up the Church’s social pastorate in a passage from/toward the State’s institutions at the most local level, starting with a rather unconventional religious and political call from the Church addressed to the lower level instances of local political representation constitutionally recognized: in the urban neighborhoods the Assemblies for Communal Action (Juntas de Acción Comunal or JAL), in the rural areas black people’s communitarian Councils, and indigenous communities’ Cabildos. The call was to work, listening attentively to people’s concrete situation, necessities and aspirations, on the collective design of plans for a common living. These plans would be first composed at a neighborhood level, then at a sectorial level, and then presented with enough leverage before the city’s Council. All this, after having passed through an unprecedented instance of representation and articulation that is not constitutionally recognized anywhere, and yet appeared in Father Reina’s social pastorate plan, phrased in a sinuous formula: “space for the formation in the exercise of incidence to consolidate … . identity and development in the neighborhoods,” in the context of urban areas; or “ … .identity and autonomy in the territories”³⁵, in the context of rural areas where the juridico-political figures of self-governance for afro and indigenous communities are in place.

This constitutional “nowhere,” was conceived in Father Reina’s vision as a space created by the Church’s pastoral work of “solidarity and accompaniment” in the communities, and in their already instituted spaces of political representation. In this sense, the Social Pastorate plan would allow the Church to make the affective force of its practices of religious and spiritual solidarity and accompaniment (the trust built and cultivated here at a very local and small scale between Church and people), slide from its ecclesial base communities in marginalized neighborhoods (from the “poor”), into the state’s institutions to transform them. In his vision and interpretation of the “jewels of the Catholic Social Doctrine,” the neighborhood ecclesial communities were meant to be not only spaces of encounter for ethical and spiritual cultivation in community interrelatedness, but also, and precisely because of this, places for the cultivation of a distinctive ethos of citizenship. One which would, in the words of one of the closing slides of Father Reina’s powerpoint presentation of his social pastorate plan, strive for:

… the solution to the multiple problems of the population which require the resolute support of all, and to start to build from the base a process of becoming conscious so as to change the unjust social structures that are pushing the community in Buenaventura towards chaos.

As pastoral agents we seek to make people aware of the need of assuming a central role in the social, economic, political, cultural and spiritual growth of the city (…) until we are able to live with dignity in our territory (June, 2018)

Again, we hear echoes of the civic strike’s motto: “to live with dignity and peace in the territory,” and not just by coincidence. This pedagogy in an insubordinate form of popular citizenship (an afro, indigenous, mestizo and Catholic one) did not come to happen in the structure of the ecclesial base communities as it was envisioned here, in Father Reina’s pastoral plan. But it started to happen somewhere else, in the civic strike’s street demonstrations, gatherings, and innovative practices of political organization.

Something changed out of the civic strike’s experience in the people of Buenaventura’s perception of their role as citizens, in their political culture. While we were talking in the empty Church after a mass at the barrio Lleras, guarded in silence by a beautiful mural depicting Msgr. Gerardo Valencia Cano surrounded by the territory’s landscape, Father Oscar Denis Torres, a black priest who has had a long trajectory of immersed pastoral work very close to people’s everyday struggles, joys and vicissitudes, expressed it in this way:

I compare the Civic Strike with the French Revolution. A very strong social cohesion brought about by a historically shared pain. Something very special happened there. Liason (sic), mixture. The points of encounter were points of dance, people resisted with music and with prayer. Something different was happening. It is no longer possible to speak in Buenaventura in the same way than before … it is no longer possible to speak as if people didn’t think (June 09, 2018)

This transformation in political collective awareness and engagement, and its force in shaping governmental institutions toward the necessary structural changes that can lead to advances in the path of people’s vision of what it means to “live with dignity in the territory,” was mobilized by the Civic Strike’s process through quite different circuits to the ones envisioned, initially, by Father Reina’s Social Pastorate plan. Nonetheless, the church’s institutional reach and influence, and the sphere of State government, continued to overlap and dis-encounter in different and shifting ways throughout this process. A singular churchstate assemblage continued to take form in these dynamic overlaps and dis-encounters. In one of the meetings with the national government’s officials in order to follow up the implementation of the agreement, which I attended in early December of 2018, the agenda opened with a moment of prayer that he conducted:

God we give ourselves to your Holy Spirit so that we can all have discernment, wisdom and openness to listen to the reasons of our brothers and sisters. I ask to all who are here present today to be grateful to You for this moment, a very important one because there are here people that can make decisions in benefit of the people of Buenaventura that may allow us to close and heal so many rifts in our society (December 09, 2018)

Then an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a Glory to the Lord, collective prayers by all those present (among them ministers and vice-ministers of the national government), ensued.

The spatial trust between people and Church and the churchstateness of sorts it enables, are unthinkable from the liberal secularist topography of the social formulated by the divisions between Civil Society and State institutions in an up/down vector, or between Church and State in an inside/outside one. They defy this topography and call for another conception of the social space.

Conclusion

I have analyzed here the entanglements among religion, politics, and law-making in a specific political event and process, Buenaventura’s Civic Strike. I have done so from a “theologico-political” perspective developed through the notions of spiritual memory, spatial trust, and churchstateness, from which I interrogate critically the paradigm of secularism (laicismo) and the liberal State, and show the insufficiency of their tacit conception of the social space. Whereas secularism conceives of religion and politics as separate spheres and seeks to define normative criteria for the regulation of their relation, a theologico-political approach assumes an ineradicable entanglement between the religious and the social, the religious and the political, and construes from there alternative frames of comprehension and intelligibility of social and political phenomena.

Hence, this “theologico-political” commons performed in Buenaventura’s 2017 uprising, thought otherwise beyond secularist platitudes, opens a rather sui generis angle from which to think the social and political conflicts in Colombia’s post-accord era.³⁶ It also shows the pertinence and necessity of a critical analysis of secularism as a technology of power, or a distinctive form of government of the religious, in a geopolitical and cultural context in which this type of analysis has been rather scarce: Latin America. In order to understand how is peace-building a political agenda conceived and practiced by people and communities on the ground at a “small scale”³⁷, and not just one administered and decreed by normalized technocratic forms of stately governance, the frictions and gaps between how is religion governed, and how is religion lived on the ground, in transitional scenarios, becomes a generative angle for reflecting on the transformative dimension of peace-building processes. I have argued throughout this paper that this transformative potential is also related to how grassroots processes of community organizing challenge pervasive and dominant epistemologies of the social. Secularism and the liberal state are normative ideals, technologies of power, complex institutional networks, and they are also, for the most part tacitly, a dominant form of understanding the social space and social life. Peace-building grassroots movements like Buenaventura’s Civic Strike process and uprising, defy not only the roles assigned to specific social actors by hegemonic forms of governance; but also, and perhaps more importantly, they defy ways in which the social as milieu of a common life is experienced and comprehended. This is what the concrete political event and process I have analyzed throughout this paper, and the forms of religiously inflected political affects, practices, and forms of collective action staged there, do. The diagram of the social space that the secular liberal State imposes, is subverted by the theo-political force³⁸ of the forms of collective memory, affectivity and action performed in Buenaventura’s Civic Strike.

This other Pentecost of a people’s uprising experienced in a troubled city-port of Colombia’s pacific littoral, calls then for attending to the work of re-imagining social and political life performed by religiously inflected political engagements in the global south. Our conceptualization of these vernacular political theologies also requires new and creative tools of analyisis to describe and understand the topography of the social, and even the ontology of the political, otherwise. Throughout this paper I have attempted to contribute in this direction, elaborating on how the notions of spiritual memory, spatial trust and churchstateness allow us to think the religio-political entanglements mobilized and performed in this historical, and affectively intense, event.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fulbright Association Grant Number [17-31-334]; Universidad de los Andes Grant Number [9603].

Notes on contributors

Carlos A. Manrique

Carlos A. Manrique is Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department in the Universidad de los Andes. He received his Ph.D. on Philosophy of Religions from the University of Chicago in 2009. His recent research explores the creative work deployed in everyday practices of social movements and community based organizing, and how they mobilize alternative understandings of peacebuilding and democracy beyond the levelling frame of consensual liberal democracy. He studies the role of popular forms of religiosity and spirituality as significant forces in the struggles for social, racial and environmental justice of under-privileged communities in Colombia and Latin America. His current project is about how configurations of the “theologico-political” enable new angles of analysis of diverse religious experiences related to the challenges of peace building in the fragile transitional post-accord scenario in Colombia.

Notes

1 Philpott, “Introduction: Searching for Strategy in an Age of Peace-Building,” 9; Appleby and Lederach, “Strategic Peacebulding: An Overview,” 22.

2 Indepaz, “Violencia Contra Líderes Sociales.”

3 The work for this paper has been in progress, in different stages, from 2019 to 2022. This version written in 2021 cannot take into account an important turn of events in Colombia’s political landscape with the triumph of Gustavo Petro in the presidential election of June, 2022. This government has decidedly reactivated the implementation of the Peace Accord agenda, which was substantially frozen or neglected by the previous government; and it has even enhanced its understanding of peace-building with the notion of paz total (“total peace”) in ways that are significant for this larger research project, but surpass this paper’s reach. Buenaventura, significantly, has been declared very early in this new government as a “laboratory” of this “total peace” agenda. For an overview of peace-building initiatives from community based activism in Colombia's post accord era, and one that pays special attention to Buenaventura's context, see Jaramillo-Marín, Jefferson. "Participating in peace"

4 Manrique, “Religious Practices, State Techniques and Conflicted Forms of Violence in Colombia’s Peacebuilding Scenarios*.”

5 Omer, “Religious Peacebuilding,” 12–13.

6 All the interviews have been conducted in the process of two research projects funded by Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), and approved by its Ethics Research Committee. They have consequently followed the corresponding protocols, including first and foremost informed consents from the interviewees.

7 The term “laicismo” is the one employed in Colombia, and most of Latin America, to mobilize the notion of secularism as a normative principle of the liberal State, and as a frame for understanding religion (individual subjective belief), law (merely human conrract), society, and their relations.

8 Taylor, “Why We Need a Radical Re-Definition of Secularism”; Habermas, “¿Una Sociedad Mundial Postsecular? Sobre La Relevancia Filosófica de La Conciencia Postsecular y La Sociedad Mundial Multicultural.”

9 Johnson, Klassen, and Sullivan, Ekklesia, 7.

10 Johnson, Klassen, and Sullivan, Ekklesia.

11 Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, 13.

12 Asad, “Trying to Understand French Secularism.”

13 Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject.

14 Lloyd, Black Natural Law.

15 Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom, 8–9.

16 “Consejos comunitarios” and “cabildos indígenas” are the relatively autonomous spaces for self-governance recognized by the 1991 Colombian Constitution to afro-descendant and indigenous communities, respectively

17 Manos Visibles, Carajo - Narración de Las Movilizaciones Sociales Paros Cívicos, 25.

18 The translations into English from the interviews’ excerpts quoted are by the author. Throughout this article, excerpts of interviews are quoted followed by the date in parenthesis.

19 El Pais, “Logran Acuerdo Para Levantar Paro Cívico En Buenaventura.”

20 Observatorio Pacífico y Territorio, “Para enterrar la violencia y vivir con dignidad.”

21 Levine, Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism. I employ the term “popular catholicism” in a sense of this term that comes close to that conceptualized by Daniel H. Levine and yet still calls for a necessary re-signification and displacement. It takes on the impulse of Levine’s work to stress processes of ethical transformation and intellectual emancipation in the communitarian forms of lived religiosity of the ecclesial communities, and to stress the passages between transformations of ordinary people everyday life experience, and larger structures of power and meaning Levine, xix. Yet I find problems with Levine’s understanding of religiously inflected ethical and political agency, as one still too constrained, in a Weberian legacy, to the linear causality of an intentional subject’s motivation-rationality-conduct.

22 Johnson, Klassen, and Sullivan, Ekklesia, 7.

23 De la Cadena, Risør, and Feldman, “Aperturas Onto-Epistémicas.”

24 La Silla Vacía, “Paros en vivo, un arma de doble filo.”

25 Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.

26 El Pais, “Logran Acuerdo Para Levantar Paro Cívico En Buenaventura.”

27 Echeverry P., Un profeta invisibilizado; Pérez and Argote, “Un profeta en Golconda.”

28 Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 2.

29 Mazzarella, “The Anthropology of Populism,” 50.

30 Johnson, Klassen, and Sullivan, Ekklesia.

31 Johnson, Klassen, and Sullivan, 7.

32 7.

33 Johnson, Klassen, and Sullivan, 6.

34 Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church,” No. 66.

35 Reina, “Espiritualidad de Comunión Solidaria En El Secretariado Diocesano de Pastoral Social.”

36 Manrique, “Political Theology Radical Democracy.”

37 Castillejo, “La Paz En Pequeña Escala: Fracturas de La Vida Cotidiana y Las Políticas de Transición En Colombia.”

38 McAllister and Napolitano, “Political Theology / Theopolitics: The Thresholds and Vulnerabilities of Sovereignty.”