ABSTRACT
Traditionally, neither the political right nor the left has viewed religion as a positive force for changing society. For the right, such change has hardly been necessary and, in any case, should not be the task of religion. Tor the left, religion has indeed been a factor in social change, but only as a deterrent—in Marx’s famous phase, a sedative. Neither the right nor the left has been prepared to see any distinction between hierarchical religion, organized from the top down, and popular religion. Cristián Parker refuses to accept the stereotypes of the left or the right. Instead, he insists on a careful and systematic examination of the actual religious beliefs of the masses.
Even before completing his dissertation on urban popular religion in Chile (written for the Department of Sociology at Louvain University in Belgium), Parker was a principal figure in an acclaimed study of religious attitudes in the impoverished población of Pudahuel. Since returning from Louvain in 1985, he has continued his research on the relationship of religion to secular values among the urban poor and has been an active member of the Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, a kind of alternative university originally sponsored by the Archdiocese of Santiago. In July 1990, he coordinated an important conference, “Five Hundred Tears of Christianity,” in Santiago that attempted to read Latin American history since Columbus from the perspective of the indigenous and the poor.
