ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an Andean or a Latin American syncretism to those who take their religion as a given, but it does not from the viewpoint of a historian or an anthropologist. The issue of cultural legitimacy is inseparable from that of political legitimacy. The phenomenon of religion is present in all these issues: present from the very beginning of Latin American history, from the moment indigenous societies came into disastrous contact with Latin Europe. As a central element in Andean self-definition, Christianity can now be used against the colonial Christian or from the Indian point of view, anti-Christian power. But that self-definition had to be defended with weapons against those who using essentially the same means weapons blessed by self-definition. With the Theology of Liberation the issue of syncretism resurfaces, because it not difficult to conceive opposition to it presented as opposition against the illegitimate combination of Marxism and Christianity.
