Conference Papers & Current Trends
Discussion of Rational Choice Theory
Round 3: Discussion of Rounds 1 & 2
Phillip Berryman
Author of many books on religion; has years of field experience in Latin America
Having been alerted by Manuel Vasquez, I've read rounds 1 and 2 of the discussion of Rendering Unto Caesar and can't resist jumping in. Rather than respond to specific points in the critiques or rejoinders, I'm going to make some observations that I hope are at least partly relevant. I come at the discussion as one who was first involved with church questions in Latin America as an actor (priest in Panama, 1965-73; spent most of 1968 in Ecuador and traveled around Latin America by land twice 1968-69 and 1974-75; worked with church people in Central America, 1976-80) and only later as a researcher.
In my observation, initiatives in the Catholic church came primarily from priests and sisters, not from bishops. A "progressive" bishop was one who allowed and encouraged particular types of work, but could not command it; a "conservative" bishops could put some restraints on what was done publicly but again limits were real. The exception is in a relatively small rural diocese where a bishop over time might build a team along his own lines (Pedro Casaldaliga in Araguaia and Samuel Ruiz in Chiapas).
Although you could categorize priests as "progressive" and "conservative" it was perhaps even more relevant to see them as doing maintenance (responding to requests for mass, rituals, classes for sacraments etc) and doing outreach. The first category would be the overwhelming majority of priests up to mid-century; they had plenty to do in response to the existing demand for their services. Gradually some became aware of the need for outreach, prompted by the sense that many people were not "good Catholics" by the usual norms of mass attendance, etc. and also by the "dangers" to the flock from communism, Protestantism, etc. as Gill points out. Things gathered momentum in the late 1950s when the Vatican urged the North Atlantic churches to send a tenth of their priests and sisters to Latin America .
In terms of this discussion, it is the church people on the front lines, priests (and increasingly sisters) who felt the problem--it is not accidental that Hurtado was a priest, not a bishop. Also I think one would find that the various forms of Catholic Action (whether conservative Italian or liberal Belgian) were championed by priests first, and had to win acceptance from the bishops. Most ordinary Catholics whose religion centered around periodic saints feasts (the majority of the poor) but not regular church attendance did not feel the problem (the were the problem). Bishops, in my view, did not generally provide leadership in meeting challenges. Their time and attention was taken up almost entirely with administration and their own sacramental rounds.
Vatican II brought the unexpected in two ways. First, in four years (1962-65) ideas that had been held and advocated by a small minority of theologians and pastoralists went from being suspect and suppressed to being adopted by the world episcopacy. And then, in the post-council which people had assumed was going to be largely a matter of implemented the Council decisions, suddenly everything was up for grabs. Clergy who had been taught to preach on the necessity of the church for salvation, suddenly themselves doubting the existence of the devil, hell, mortal sin--and, logically, their own raison-d-etre. It was all made more vertiginous with the world wide "Sixties" including (talk of) revolution (political, cultural, sexual).
My point is that priests and sisters were the ones most jolted the most by the council and its aftermath. If everyone was saved, what need for the church? And a fortiori for priests. Many decided to leave the priesthood and/or religious life. Those who stayed had to work out at least a provisional answer to that and also a new model of life and work as sister or priest. In Latin America this often took the form of abandoning a more traditional style of work (teaching middle and upper class children in Catholic schools) and going to live and work directly with the poor. The jolt of Vatican II-Medellin affected a particular generation--those coming of age in the 1960s (they may have had their coming-of-age while in their thirties). Let me suggest, in other words, that the Catholic renewal (Vatican II & Medellin, perhaps Puebla) was a once-only event, as sometimes happens in history, e.g., the Mexican revolution. Subsequently you can try to "explain" why the event that no one foresaw was "inevitable" but it is still hindsight into a peculiar event.
With reference to the present discussion: agreed with Gill that there were gradual steps of Catholic renewal for a couple decades prior to the council; agreed with Brett that the significance of the renewal is hard to overstate, although I would add that its impact was greatest on those who were most "bought into" the Tridentine church: clergy who had internalized its theology, middle class lay people who had gone to Catholic schools and had internalized mortal sin, the need to confess etc. By contrast, most poor people had never internalized that type of Catholicism, and hence could tranquilly live in common law marriage, and have only very intermittent contact with their parish (baptisms). In Panama I recall people not at all concerned about, say, the vernacular mass or the papal refusal to reconsider contraception; they were, however, incensed when the Vatican in its modernization sought to eliminate some saints who legendary rather than historical, from the official roster. (One man told me it was as though they had taken St. Christopher before a firing squad.)
Appeal and limitation of base communities.
As just noted priests (and increasingly sisters) found themselves bereft of former certitudes and trying to figure out what they were supposed to do. Priests of course could continue the maintenance model, i.e., spend their time supplying ritual on schedule and on request. But how do outreach? A new model almost miraculously drops out of the sky: form base communities. It seems to be the answer to a pastor's prayer: it is a way to bring in people who are not currently practicing Catholics; it is respectful and uses a dialogue pedagogy; it is built around the bible; its point is to connect faith and life; it develops lay leadership and hence has a multiplier effect; it can appeal to biblical authority (house churches); it makes sociological sense to work with face to face communities rather than the masses of a large parish. In the post-1968 years pastoralists Edgard Beltran (Colombia) and Jose Marins and his team (Brazil) gave hundreds of workshops on them all over Latin America.
Note that I have not described them in political terms, and in fact for the first several years they were not seen that way. The emerging liberation theology and base communities traveled along separate tracks (I don't think they are mentioned in the first edition of Gutierrez' book (Spanish edition 1971). They were a pastoral initiative, essentially from priests and sisters working in parishes, and they were an attempt to meet the problem of the "priest shortage" and at some level (although not often mentioned) to respond to some emphases of Protestants (then typically assumed to be from the historical churches).
Their political implications were seen under the dictatorships of the 1970s: base-communities were a way of coming together and holding out hope when all forms of gathering were suspect. They could also be a source of leaders for community action projects, or a place where activists in different areas could come together as believers. This was so, even though, Hewitt and Burdick have shown, pastoral agents may view base communities more politically than most lay participants.
In the early years, some thought and assumed parishes of the future would be networks of base communities; priests would be coordinators of these networks; laymen (gender intended) would eventually be ordained for eucharist although they would continue in their secular jobs. The priest shortage would be solved; Latin America would have developed its own church model (which might in fact be repeated elsewhere); the base community would be the cell of authentic development.
So what happened? Why have base communities remained a minority phenomenon, and in some places seem to have disappeared entirely? Although Vatican opposition is often mentioned, I would emphasize the following:
- Catholic base communities have almost always been very dependent on pastoral agents, priests and sisters. Even though the theologians and those pastoral agents emphasize the role of the lay people, those lay leaders do not have true independence. They cannot start communities as can Protestant lay people. If the priest or sister is transferred and no one with the same vision takes their place, the community is likely to wither unless a pastoral agent from somewhere else can cross parish lines and serve as a kind of chaplain to them.
- Typically base communities have tended to flourish during the early stages of a barrio, for example, when people are struggling for electric power, water, clinics, bus lines, etc. Once those things are achieved there tends to be a withdrawal from community to household. It may well be a rational choice to expend your energy and resources for your family once community organizing has gotten what it can reasonably expect to get. Activists and pastoral agents who hoped that those efforts were steps toward building a new kind of society are disappointed to see that it is harder and harder to get people out to meetings.
Social theory and churches and religion in Latin America
I recall two features of Latin American social science literature that I began reading in the 1960s: 1) it was long on marco teorico and short on fresh research (empírico had a pejorative sound in academic Spanish, quite different from the quite positive sense of the English cognate). 2) it crossed disciplinary boundaries: if you picked up an essay by a Latin American social scientist you would be hard pressed to know whether the author had been trained in history, sociology, economics, or political science--it tended to sound the same. Perhaps understandably, social scientists were looking for an overall interpretation of their "reality," one that would not simply be an application of social science developed elsewhere and one that seemed suited to a society that needed radical change. Dependency theory and various Marxist interpretations seemed to fit the bill. Moreover, it seemed possible to grasp the realidad nacional in a long essay or a book and perhaps justifiably: national economies were relatively simple, class structure seemed obvious, the major phases of a country's history as a class struggle pointing toward a future egalitarian society seemed to make sense--and that seemed to be more urgent than micro studies within disciplinary boundaries.
A generation of Latin Americanist academics to some extent followed suit. Moreover, they may have chosen to go into Latin American studies out of a sense of participating in this vast historic movement, making their contribution as scholars, teachers, and often activists. The repression of the military regimes of the 1970s (and the 1980s in Central America) reinforced the sense of the need for engaged scholarship, and especially in writing on the church.
The trend among Latin America social scientists for some years has been away from the generalist model. To some extent it reflect a shift from European to American models of social science. It must also reflect a sense that individual countries and their relationships can no longer be summed up under the heading of a realidad nacional--if they ever could. Likewise, I get a sense that Gill is seeking to move a body of literature which from his viewpoint is perhaps only descriptive and perhaps "pre-scientific," into a genuinely scientific mode, e.g., with testable hypotheses submitted to procedures with explicit assumptions, and so forth. At some points he seems to imply the superiority of such an approach; at other times he admits that it is only one approach whose fruitfulness will be known only through results.
Is that also why his book gets our juices going? Correctly or incorrectly, we get a sense that he sees most of a body of literature to which some of us have contributed as descriptive, lacking in rigor, and that his book represents a serious attempt to move it to a new phase in which much of what we have done will be superseded? If he's right, have we been wrong?
As systematic human knowledge, the social sciences can perhaps be seen as positioned between the physical sciences, and the hermeneutic scholarship (e.g., art criticism). Some aspects of human individual and collective behavior can be isolated and quantified, while some cannot. "Hard" social sciences like economics seem to be more scientific than, say, anthropology, and within particular fields advocates of "hard" and "soft" approaches find themselves at odds. The terms hard and soft themselves are evaluative.
Yet behind the disdain that "hard" advocates may show for practitioners of "soft" approaches may be a reductionism that is by no means uncommon, e.g., it seems to me that as bright and engaging as Edward O. Wilson undoubtedly is, in Consilience, he seeks to unify human knowledge by ultimately wanting it to come down to one type, the scientific model. Something similar is often found in scientists addressing wider audiences, and in science writers. An opposite blind alley, I also believe, is that of many academic post-structuralists who spin off ideas that may be provocative but are untestable or whose relativism puts current physics and creation stories from around the world on the same footing: they're all myths trying to make sense of the world. They got their due come-uppance in the Skokal controversy of a year or so ago
What is called for is a differentiated grasp of human knowledge and understanding that takes into account the full range of human endeavors: ordinary common sense, and the kinds of knowing practiced in art, philosophy, physics and other sciences, mathematics, history, and the social sciences. Human history, and intellectual history, is partly the story of a growing differentiation of knowledge (e.g. astronomy out of a mishmash of astrology and observation). In our century, social sciences (or human sciences) have become more differentiated and have become more methodologically self-conscious and continue to do so. (I have found the work of the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian, Bernard Lonergan most helpful, especially Insight: A Study of Human Understanding [1957]).
My own sense is that social sciences are heavily--perhaps primarily--interpretive or hermeneutical disciplines and their practitioners need not be apologetic on that account. Hermeneutical methods are most appropriate to the complexity of the object, the behavior of human beings individually and collectively. Social scientists should not feel or be made to feel that they are prescientific because their methods do not approximate those of physics or chemistry. Their object, human action in society, requires a suitable approach.
To take an example mentioned earlier, can the Mexican revolution be "explained"? Has the application of the techniques of the cliometricians, introduced a couple decades ago, made history more "scientific"? Even if some interesting correlations have been found--as I suspect they have--and even if the "great man" theory of history has been exposed, giving an account of something like the Mexican revolution is still primarily a matter of seeking the fullest possible interpretation--not that of isolating certain explanatory factors.
Rational choice theory may well have fruitful applications. It is implicit, I think, in work by Caroline Moser, who describes who women in Guayaquil barrios have to budget their time and energy between maintaining a home, earning money, and participating in community organizations and activities, e.g., they will take part in a community organization as long as it makes sense in terms of things needed e.g., a local school, but when there is no longer anything that can reasonably be expected, they may choose to spend more time attending to their families, and are unlikely to respond to moral appeals to support the community. Rational choice theory might be applicable in the sense that choosing among these fields--only one of which brings in revenue--entails a calculus of best use of one's time and energy for employing particular means as a way of pursuing personal and household ends. I can imagine an elegant research project. And yet Moser may have gotten the gist of it without invoking rational choice theory.
The foregoing no doubt strongly suggests where I am heading with regard to Gill. Even so, when I began reading the book I was quite aware that what he was proposing was indeed a fresh approach--and at least an implicit reproach to work on religion and politics in Latin America. I was also open considering the need for greater rigor and explanatory power.
I found the central effort of Rendering Unto Caesar more suggestive from a distance, i.e., when giving an account of the Catholic church's behavior when it enjoyed a quasi-monopoly and hence its lack of motivation to change. The central test, the comparison between the reactions of the hierarchies of Chile and Argentina I find suggestive, i.e., that the Chilean Catholic episcopacy had been forced to face its loss of the working class even in the 1940s and had a prior history of initiatives so that in 1973 it was more inclined to face up to the dictatorship than was the Argentine episcopacy from 1976 onward when facing an even more ruthless dictatorship. Even so I have some reservations.
Gill casts his argument in terms of the "option for the poor." (That phrase, in my recollection, gained currency only in the discussion leading up to Puebla, i.e., in the late 1970s, and was qualified by the adjective, "preferential," meaning non-exclusive. Of course the move by priests and sisters to barrios and villages was taking place by the late 1960s.) In any case, bishops are a lot more responsive to the sensitivities of middle class people and their priests than to the poor. . It is well to be reminded that the worst features of the repression in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s was the abduction and murder of activists, themselves disproportionately of a kind of middle class. Perhaps referring to the poor is a form of shorthand, but it may be misleading.
Often it was a personal experience that pushed bishops over the edge. For Cardinal Arns, for example, it was his experience of going looking for people who had been arrested around 1969, e.g. he encountered a nun who had been arrested and tortured. I suspect, in other words, that there is a lot of contingency in the way these things happen and that may be lost in seeking to isolate causal factors.
Is it possible to line up episcopacies neatly into those that resisted and those that did not (pp. 111-119)? The Guatemalan episcopate is categorized with bishops who did not resist. On the basis of my experience in Guatemala, I would say that although the bishops did not make many statements of condemnation, those they made were understood as clear condemnation, e.g., Unidos in La Experanza 1976, was ostensibly a post-earthquake pastoral letter and the condemnation of violence was only a couple sentences, but those sentences were eloquent in Guatemala.
Moreover, how do you weigh the episcopate as a body vs. the archbishop of the capital city? In Guatemala, most of the bishops would have been willing to make more vigorous statements, but they were thwarted by Cardinal Casariego who refused to sign strong statements, and even when they were made he could neutralize them by just giving a press conference. After one statement--Unidos en la Esperanza, I believe--he joked that he not become a priest he might have gone into the military. It was featured prominently in the right-wing press thereby undercutting the episcopal conference as a whole, but even so the clase política understood that the bishops had stood up to the military when no one else could do so publicly. In El Salvador, by contrast, the episcopal conference at least tacitly supported the military, (pace Gill) but Romero and Rivera, and then Rivera and Rosa Chavez, were able to outweigh the episcopal conference in public perception. What is most interesting in El Salvador is the undeniable split in the episcopacy, quite at variance with the general practice of maintaining a united public position. In Chile wasn't the Vicariate of Solidarity a structure of the archdiocese of Santiago? There the bishops came to a position of opposition, but more eloquent than statements was what was done by church agencies, primarily in Santiago, but with a national impact.
Moreover, how do you weigh the effect of one statement in Guatemala against a murderous military as opposed to perhaps several in Panama against an authoritarian regime that did not practice systematic murder? Can you really isolate a stance of opposition or acquiescence in disparate situations? The closer you look, the less explanatory rational choice based on Protestant competition seems to be even of this limited phenomenon of the behavior of Catholic bishops vis-à-vis authoritarian governments.
Earlier I noted that bishops are extremely limited in their effect at the parish level. On the national level they could have some effect in legitimizing or delegitimizing. How influential that was is much harder to say. Those of us who write on church and state can easily fall into the post hoc propter hoc fallacy, i.e., General X said or did this, Bishops Y did or said that, and the military high command responded with Z. I recall that when I was working on my account of church and state in the Sandinista period I read Arturo Cruz Jr.'s book, Memoirs of a Counterrevolutionary (1988), I believe, and was struck by the fact that the churches which others had seen as central actors (Obando, the Cardenal brothers, , Bishop Vega, Pat Robertson, etc.) were not even mentioned. There could be other reasons, of course, but what I came away with was a sense that what seemed central to one participant was marginal or off the screen to another. In writing, Stubborn Hope I was aware of that danger, but that does not mean I always successfully avoided it. Any of us seeking to give an account have to be aware that we perceive only a portion of the proverbial elephant.
To summarize:
- I appreciate Anthony Gill's effort to apply rational choice theory to the behavior of church representatives in church state conflicts in Latin America.
- I find the approach most useful for accounting for the longstanding Catholic church behavior under monopoly conditions (e.g., it is easier to seek continued state support than to compete with incoming religious groups).
- Gill seems to exaggerate the impact of what bishops do, i.e., in my observation they are administrators, and initiative comes from the level of priests (and sisters) who have to face directly the church's weakness. Of course bishops were once in pastoral situations, but they become bishops not on the basis of their pastoral effectiveness, but by staying out of trouble, cultivating contacts, and perhaps displaying some administrative ability.
- Vatican II-Medellin may be best viewed as a once-only event, most strongly affecting those who were forced to deal with the upheaval it unleashed, a generation that is now approaching retirement age.
- Rational choice theory is not a superior form of "explanation," but a tool within social sciences; those disciplines may be expected to be remain largely interpretive, not because their practitioners are "soft" but because their subject matter is complex human behavior.
- The very effort to isolate the decisive factor, in this instance the perceived presence of competition from Protestants, as suggestive as it might be, entails a simplification so extreme as to rule out elements that were crucial in the actual behavior of the episcopacies. In the pursuit of a single crucial explanatory variable, understanding of the phenomenon to be explained may be sacrificed.