Thank God for the Violence: Church-Peasant Relations on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency, 1940–80

This paper explores the historiographically overlooked role of religion and the Church in Chuschi, the symbolic birthplace of the 1980s Shining Path insurgency. I argue that indigenous chuschinos’ local views and experiences with respect to religion and the Church conditioned their favorable response to Shining Path’s people’s war. Before the 1980s insurgency, villagers had been involved in a decades-long struggle with the Church’s local representatives that raised a host of economic, racial, and cultural concerns. This mounting conflict convinced many chuschinos that the Catholic Church—seen as too corrupt, incompetent, or indifferent to meet their local demands—was part of the problem. For some, Shining Path, with its fervently anti-Catholic disposition and commitment to breaking down traditional power structures, offered a viable solution to this problem. Most, however, were drawn to Shining Path not because of its anti-Catholicism, but in spite of it. These peasants supported the rebel group because it offered a tangible corrective to many of the social problems that the Church itself had been unable or unwilling to resolve. In violently punishing accused thieves, adulterers, drunkards, and the like, the guerrillas provided the kind of moral authority that local peasants had formerly demanded of their religious leaders.
In emphasizing the crucial role that indigenous peasant attitudes about religion and the Church played in Peru’s armed conflict, I highlight the historiographical importance of examining modern political struggles through a religious lens. Rather than take leftist leaders at their word when they taut the atheistic ideals of their political movements, scholars would do well to examine the extent to which those ideals hold true on the ground. They might find, as I have, that religion remains a critical element of leftist politics.