ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a reproduction on the level of “political theology” in Latin America of the range of approaches from radical to liberal to conservative that one finds in political philosophy. It explains the content of their political thinking as it relates to political democracy and their impact on Latin American political culture. The chapter shows that mainstream Catholicism in Latin America supports democracy and that the extremes of left and right are much weaker than they have been in the past. In twentieth-century Europe a number of Christian Democratic parties of Catholic inspiration had emerged which combined the earlier “social Catholicism” with a commitment to political democracy, religious pluralism, and human rights. In the period of revolutionary lyricism of the early 1970s, the liberation theologians along with others on the left had denounced “bourgeois democracy” as a “fraud” and a “lie” and argued for “people’s power” to replace the outmoded representative institutions.
