Breaking faith: the Sandinista revolution and its impact on freedom and Christian faith in Nicaragua

National Review, Feb 28, 1986 by Chilton Williamson

WHILE IT IS impossible to overestimate the lunacy of "revolutionary" Christians, still there may be some (a bit long in the tooth, perhaps) who look back with something like embarrassment on such figures of the past as Hewlett Johnson, the "Red Dean" of Canterbury, who praised Josef Stalin as a leader who was taking "his people down new and unfamiliar avenues of democracy." Perhaps, forty years from now, there will be a bedraggled, disillusioned remnant of today's Christian supporters of the Sandinista Marxist-Leninist cadre in Nicaragua who will remember, at least with embarrassment if not with actual shame, their distressingly naive defense of criminal totalitarianism masquerading as Christian democracy.

Humberto Belli, author of Breaking Faith: The Sandinista Revolution and Its Impact on Freedom and Christian Faith in Nicaragua (The Puebla Institute, Crossways Books/Good News Publishers, Westchester, Ill. 60153; $8.95), is a Nicaraguan lawyer, sociologist, and journalist, who was active for some years in the Sandinista movement until he resigned (if that is the word) in 1975, becoming a convert to Christianity two years later and, three years after that, editorial-page editor of La Prensa, an independent newspaper in Managua devoted to, as he says, "the goal of presenting a daily Christian perspective on the important events we were living through." Two years later the Sandinistas imposed total press censorship on Nicaragua, and Belli left the country for the United States, "primarily to help Christians outside Nicaragua understand the religious dimension of recent events there." Since then, using the Puebla Institute in Garden City, Michigan, as his base of operations, he has written two books (the first, Nicaragua: Christians under Fire, was published by Puebla in 1984 and reviewed in this space) and in other ways established himself as perhaps the chief expatriate bearer of witness to the fate of Christianity (and other things) in his native land. He explains: "My aim in communicating about Nicaragua has not been to influence the foreign policy of the United States or other countries. Important as it is for citizens of other nations to take responsibility for their nations' policies in Nicaragua, my attention has been elsewhere."

Almost from the moment the junta seized power from the fleeing Somozas, a theme much heard in Christian circles (and elsewhere) was that the Sandinistas represented the party, not of Marxism-Leninism, but of enlightened nationalism: that their way is neither socialism nor capitalism but a "third way," the way of "humanitarian socialism." Ron Sider, the left-wing Christian journalist and author, wrote: "If the Sandinistas intende eventually to promote totalitarianism, atheistic Marxist-Leninism, then they are proceeding in an unusual way. A number of Christians are in government posts crucial for ideological indoctrination."

True enough, if he had thought to palce the word "Christians" in quotation marks. Belli distinguishes between three categories of contemporary Nicaraguan Christians: the conservative, who does not believe in confusing religion with reformist politics; the progressive, typified (one should perhaps says exemplified) by Miguel Obando y Bravo, the mulatto cardinal of Managua, who emphasizes the importance of fostering social justice from the perspective of the Catholic Church's teachings on the subject; and the revolutionary, whose idea of being a Christian is consonant with the following statement: "For me there is no Christian who is not a revolutionary. . . . If somebody tells me that some priest is a good Christian and that he does not love the revolution and does not understand it, for me he is not a Christian; he is the opposite."

With a cleverness that would seem obvious if it were not for the fact that so few people (outside Nicaragua) appear to have noticed anything amiss, the Sandinista government has in fact created a situation in which two Christianities exist within the country: the government's ("the people's") and the people's ("the bourgeois hierarchy's"). It is a lot like the movie in which alien usurpers fabricate pseudo-people to prey upon, and eventually replace, the genuine ones; it is also of a piece with the greater Sandinista scenario by which, in accordance with the purest Marxist-Leninist theory, vestiges of traditional (read: "human") society will be tolerated during a "transitional period," following which they will be effectively annihilated as the revolution slips into third gear. Humberto Belli (who should know, after all; he was there) argues that from the beginning the Sandinistas, far from being intent upon a "third way" (whatever that might be), have kept the Soviet Union and its satrapies in mind as models, and are speeding toward their goal, driving forward on a collision course with the no-longer-unsuspecting citizenry in general and the huge Christian majority in particular.

For which, Belli reminds us, the Pauline understanding of the Church as the body of Christ points to a responsibility of all Christians: "If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together." Yes, Brother Sider, there is religious persecution in Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua. But it is only just beginning.