From Popular Insurgents to Insurgent Intellectuals: Peasant Catechists in the Salvadoran Revolution. By Leigh Binford

Popular Insurgents to Insurgent Intellectuals: Peasant Catechists in the Salvadoran Revolution, is the second in a trilogy about northern Moraz� an department, El Salvador, during the years of the civil war (officially 1979-1992, though violence started somewhat earlier).The first work is about El Mozote, the location of the largest single massacre of citizens by their own government in the Americas in modern times (1981).The subject of this second book is the participation of Christians mobilized through liberation theology in El Salvador's armed popular organizations, the ERP (Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo), and later the coalition known as the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Mart� ı para la Liberaci� on Nacional).It is well known that radicalized Christians, specifically Catholics, played a significant role in the leftist movements that sought reform or even complete revolution in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s.Liberation theology, of course, was the Latin American Church's expanded interpretation of the watershed teachings of the Second Vatican Council (1962Council ( -1965)); it promoted a socially conscious reading of the Bible and encouraged critical thinking.It called on even ordinary people to adopt a praxis built around the heuristic mandate of "read-judge-act" in order to combat the "structural sins" embodied in institutions, social hierarchies, political and economic systems that enriched the few while oppressing the poor and powerless.Many politicized Christians, even those who promoted simple economic reform, basic education, and fundamental human rights, found themselves targeted by the military, far-right actors, and even their own governments for their activism.The assassination of El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero and the aggravated murder of the three American churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980 are two of the best-known examples of the hundreds of church people who were killed for their faith-based commitment to justice for the poor during this period.Binford is careful to point out that liberation theology was, in fact, an actual theology, not just a pretext for political affiliation with the armed Left, as the Salvadoran government, the Reagan administration, and others have claimed.He writes: "[It] combined the eschatological vision of Christianity with a Marxist-inspired or -influenced analysis of the historical present.It collapsed supernatural and historical planes so that material worldly struggle became part of the otherworldly struggle" (p.148).To prove this, he looks to the foot soldiers of liberation theology: catechists, who, in Moraz� an, were almost entirely campesinos (peasants).Through participation first in local CEBs (Christian base communities, which were conscious-raising Bible study groups), Binford describes how catechists advanced into what "priest-teachers" referred to as "peasant universities."These peasant universities were church-run educational centers where the most promising young men (and some women, although Binford concedes that he is inattentive to their role) received additional advanced religious and theoretical instruction.Additionally, they received training in leadership, community organizing, catechetical pedagogy, and public speaking, thus making the transition from the "popular" to the "insurgent intellectuals" of the book's title.These semi-professional skill sets were almost unheard of among peasants and would eventually make them valuable assets to the guerrillas.