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Religion and politics have depended on and influenced one another since the origins of what we know as Latin America. Their relation is both mutual and multifaceted; mutual because religion and politics have evolved together over the years, taking material and symbolic support from one another, and multifaceted because it embraces interinstitutional conflict and accommodation (e.g., the "church-state" relations which dominated earlier scholarship) as well as more subtle and elusive exchanges whereby religious and political orders gave legitimacy and moral authority to one another. In this process, religious notions of hierarchy, authority, and obedience reflected and reinforced the pattern of existing social and political arrangements to such an extent that the two orders often seemed indistinguishable.

The question of whether the Left's rejection of religion in favor of art & philosophy is valid, or whether religion also provides a basis for human emancipation, is explored. Statements obtained from 21 Rs are presented: Russell A. Berman, Casey Blake, Laura Boella, Paul Breines, Halina Charwat, John A. Coleman, Harvey Cox, Charles Davis, David Gross, John Hellman, Joel Kovel, Jackson Lears, Patrick Murray, James A. Ogilvy, Robert A. Pois, Rudolf J. Siebert, Dorthee Soelle, Amedeo Vigorelli, Joel Whitebook, & Kurt H. Wolff. W. H. Stoddard.

Anthropological studies of religion have been largely concerned with belief, with ritual, and with the general integrative significance of religious institutions for society. But many issues in the power relations of religious affiliation are still not clear. The political implications of religion involve grave practical as well as theoretical problems. Abstractly, religion and politics are often conceived as opposed; concretely, they interact. While religion can be a powerful political instrument, it can also adapt to political ends and generate its own political structures. In contrast to the broadly affirmative role assigned by anthropologists to religion in society is Karl Marx's thesis of religion as political ideology. Reasons for granting some validity to this position but also for questioning its basic assumptions are given. The whole analysis is illustrated by a wide range of examples, from Polynesian ethnography to the history of Christianity and of Islam, and the situation of religion in modem socialist states.