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Freedom of Belief

8 May 2024

7 min read

Nicaragua in peril

Daniel Ortega's power grab fuels persecution.

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

An balding man with a moustache turns to look at a camera.

President Daniel Ortega.

Nicaragua is the largest country in Central America with a varied and beautiful landscape; towering volcanoes, unique freshwater habitats - Lake Nicaragua is the region’s largest lake - and spectacular marine environments. It has huge potential for development according to the World Bank. But despite this, not only does Nicaragua remain one of the poorest countries in the region but it is caught in the grip of an increasingly totalitarian regime that, according to a recent all-party “Nicaragua Inquiry Report” by UK Parliamentarians, is taking consistent steps to silence democracy and close civic space. This includes human rights violations against religious leaders, particularly within the Catholic Church, as well attacks against political opposition, journalists, scholars and human rights defenders.

The Ortega dynasty

President Daniel Ortego returned to power after a break of seventeen years in 2006. Historically a Marxist revolutionary, on his return as President, Ortega threw out his left-wing ideals for more achievable policies. However, in 2012, his politics took a disconcertingly authoritarian turn when he pressured the Nicaraguan Supreme Court to authorise his bid for a second presidential term. And more recently, the Nicaraguan Government, which includes Ortego’s wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, and several of their nine children in prominent positions, has escalated its campaign of persecution against Christians and the Catholic Church.

The harassment started in 2018 with a wave of protests across Nicaragua. University students and others took to the streets to demonstrate against the Government’s proposed social security reforms set to increase pressure on workers whilst providing fewer benefits. Ortega, seeing these protests as a threat, responded with violence using pro-government militia and security forces. According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), 355 people were killed and approximately 2,000 injured making it the deadliest and most violent protest since the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979. Following these protests, the Ortega regime then escalated its human rights violations raising concerns internationally. According to the UNHCR, since 2018, neighbouring Costa Rica has hosted over 300,000 Nicaraguans seeking asylum.

The intimidation and incarceration of clergymen under the Ortega regime in Nicaragua is particularly chilling. It sends a clear message of contempt for God’s priests.

Persecution of Christians in a Christian-majority country

The World Watch list is an annual report published by Open Doors, an NGO which supports Christians worldwide, and lists the fifty countries in which Christians face the ‘most extreme persecution’. The latest report shows Nicaragua has risen up the list, from number 50 last year to number 30 in 2024 rankings. Over 95% of the Nicaraguan population profess to be Christian, so this is perhaps a surprising development.

In 2022, according to the Nicaragua Inquiry, President Ortega was reported to have:

“ordered the arrest of, forced into exile, and verbally attacked priests and bishops, labelling them ‘criminals’ and ‘coup-plotters,’ and accusing them of inciting violence.”

Most publicly known about is the Bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez, who was sentenced to 26 years in prison and later exiled to the Vatican and stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship. At the end of 2023, the Government arrested and detained seventeen clergymen including Father Silvio Fonseca, an open critic of the Nicaraguan government’s intense persecution of the Catholic Church, and two Bishops who publicly offered prayers for Álvarez before they were arrested.

In Latin America, culturally there is a reverence for clergymen that differs to what we see in the West. I lived in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil for a number of years and worked with my husband (who is an ordained Anglican priest) in a favela (shantytown) routinely patrolled by armed gangs. When we first enquired about the safety of walking into the community on our own, a local resident assured us that we would be fine, saying “They will never shoot a pastor”. Perhaps that is why the intimidation and incarceration of clergymen under the Ortega regime in Nicaragua is particularly chilling. It sends a clear message of contempt for God’s priests that will strike to the very core of people of faith across the country.

Over the past year, according to the Inquiry, the Nicaraguan government has also systematically targeted and closed religious organisations that it views as opponents and banned Catholic traditions such as street processions during Holy Week. A journalist was recently sentenced to eight years in prison for reporting on an Easter procession. And perhaps most insidiously, the government has begun to routinely intimidate worshippers, with uniformed and plain clothes government agents visibly monitoring religious services to intimidate clergy and churchgoers.

Three centuries of religious persecution across the world

Religious persecution is etched firmly into the history of humanity through to the modern day. From Emperor Nero’s outlawing of Christians across the Roman Empire to the persecution of Muslims and Jews in the Crusades, to the Armenian genocide in Turkey following the First World War to attacks on the Rohingya in modern-day Myanmar.

Today religious freedom is a hallmark of a developed society, widely considered to be a basic human right. And indeed, the right to freedom of religion or belief is relevant to an array of SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) aiming to reduce inequality and improve health, education, gender equality, access to justice and climate action. Religious inequalities and discrimination are key obstacles for progress in many of these areas.

According to UN’s Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion… either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

But in spite of this global commitment, and although 123 of the 193 Member States of the United Nations have served as Council members on the UN Human Rights Council (of which Nicaragua is currently a member state), religious freedom is under threat in many parts of the world today. And it takes many different forms. Some countries in the Middle East expressly forbid all religions except Islam whilst others, such as North Korea, do not permit any religion at all. The most recent annual report of the USCIRF lists 28 countries—home to well over 50 per cent of the world’s population—with Governments actively persecuting their citizens for their religious views.

But is it about religion or is it all about power?

In Nicaragua, the Catholic Church has power in numbers and therefore an influential voice. When Christians such as Bishop Álvarez, a vocal defender of civic freedoms, began to join other civil society actors in speaking out more critically against the Government, the persecution began. Catholic clergymen have long been targeted for speaking out against authoritarian regimes in other Latin American countries. For example, Archbishop Romero y Galdamez was assassinated in 1980 in San Salvador when he appealed to the military dictatorship to stop the brutal repression of the people.

But arguably, the Ortega regime’s crackdown on Christians isn’t only because of its fears of the Catholic Church’s power and influence in Nicaragua.

Having the capacity and choice to believe in God - to have faith - is a profound and powerful characteristic of being human. For Christians, faith in God and Jesus Christ comes first, before any political, social, or economic order. Humans who have a real and living faith in a higher power are defined by it, both individually in how they live out their lives and collectively in how they come alongside others who share the same faith. Perhaps that is why totalitarian regimes that lay claims on the whole person and want ultimate power and control over the collective, are so intent on destroying or co-opting religion.

Thankfully the international community is on alert. Ortega is being called out for his regime’s spiralling human rights record and persecution of Christians. But there is no room for apathy. In the book of Proverbs in the Bible, it says “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves… Defend the rights of the poor and those in need.”

As the words of the poem, First They Came by Pastor Martin Niemöller presented at the start of the Nicaragua Inquiry Report movingly remind us,

First, they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

How to survive a culture war

Blaise Pascal shows us what really underlies our contemporary battles.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Maxime Gilbert on Unsplash.

We often say these days that we are more polarised as a society than ever before. But we're wrong. Maybe the USA is experiencing a particularly sharp divide right now, but they have had their own, much more violent troubles in the past. And in Europe, and especially in Britain, we know a fair bit about culture wars that were literally that – wars.

In the 17th century, we English had our own civil war where we literally killed each other over religion and politics. We even killed a king. The French did something similar and even more vicious just over 100 years later. That is real polarisation. However spiteful Twitter/X arguments may get, I don't think Charles III or even Kier Starmer is quaking in their beds expecting to be put on trial for treason.

So maybe our history has something to teach us about how we navigate culture wars.

The literary critic Terry Eagleton once wrote of our age:

“the world is accordingly divided between those who believe too much and those who believe too little. While some lack all conviction, others are full of passionate intensity.”

We tend to think our contemporary divide between left and right, progressives and conservatives is something new. But we can find echoes of this in previous times.

A case in point was the mid-17th century – the time of many other upheavals in Europe. Part of the febrile atmosphere of the time saw fierce arguments between rationalists and sceptics.

There were at the time, two broad strands of thinking about the human condition. On the one had there were the ‘Dogmatists’ who were sure that they knew everything through use of reason or the application of philosophical or scientific method (like René Descartes). On the other hand, there were the ‘Sceptics’ who thought everything was random, or custom, and there is no final Truth to be found (like a figure from the century before – Michel de Montaigne).

Of course, our own time has its fair share of people with an overwhelming confidence in the power of human knowledge, and the physical sciences in particular, to unlock the secrets of life, the universe and everything. The ‘new atheist’ project of Richard Dawkins and friends was hugely confident in reason and its capacity to tell us all we need to know, dispatching religion to the dustbin of history and instead placing an unshakable faith in the empirical methods of science. It had - and has - definite similarities with this picture of human knowledge.

Yet on the other hand we also have, in the progressive postmodern project, those who reject any kind of underlying rationality or sacred order either above us or beneath us. For them, there is no underlying Truth to be discovered, and they delight in revealing the instability and illusory nature of any claim to truth. It sounds very much like the culture wars of our time.

One enigmatic 17th century figure charted a way through this dilemma - Blaise Pascal. When he looked at his century’s culture war, he thought both sides had a point. There is, he observed…

…open war between men in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or with the sceptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a sceptic par excellence…. Who will unravel such a tangle? This is certainly beyond dogmatism and scepticism, beyond all human philosophy. Humanity transcends humanity. Let us then concede to the sceptics what they have so often proclaimed that truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry, that it is no earthly denizen, but at home in heaven lying in the lap of God, to be known only insofar as it pleases him to reveal it.

So far, he says, the sceptics, like Montaigne, are right. Truth is beyond our grasp, it does not reside here on earth, openly obvious and ready to be found. If it exists, it exists in some world above us, beyond our reach. How do we even know if we are asleep or awake, given that when we dream, we are as convinced that we are awake as we are when we are truly awake?

And so, modern progressives, looking to dismantle the assumed results of previous understanding, due to its inherent colonial, patriarchal or abusive past, delight in showing how random and arbitrary is so much of what we take for granted from the past. And, Pascal would add, they have a point. Many of our legal, political and cultural assumptions are purely cultural and arbitrary, and sometimes simply serve to the advantage of the rich and powerful rather than the poor and marginalised.

Yet on the other side, the ‘dogmatists’, like Descartes, have their strong point, which is that we cannot doubt natural principles. The acids of deconstruction can only take you so far. The most sceptical philosopher still puts the kettle on assuming that it will boil to make a cup of tea. She gets up in the morning assuming that the sun will rise and set again at the end of the day. Despite the corrosive effects of scepticism, Pascal wrote,

“I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”

Despite all our doubt, we still live in a world with order and predictability. Scepticism keeps bumping up against reality.

So, modern conservatives point to a deeper ‘givenness’ to things, an order within the natural world that we did not create, and yet, mysteriously, seems to be prearranged before we got here. Scientific exploration does make sense. There is a regularity to nature that we can, indeed have to, depend on. Sexual differences exist and can’t be ignored. We are not entirely free to override the natural order of things - there is a deeper rhythm to nature and its capacity for renewal that we only mess with at our peril, as climate change has taught us. As a result, the age-old battle between rationalists and sceptics, progressives and conservatives, will never find resolution, as the arguments flow back and forth.

Christian faith includes both progressive and conservative impulses. Christians are aware of the brokenness of the world and therefore long to see it changed. The progressive impatience with the way things are, and the yearning for a better world has its roots in Christian faith.

Yet at the same time, Christianity discerns a divinely created order to the world, a rhythm to the natural world, that cannot be broken and needs to be respected. Therefore, an inherent conservatism is part of Christian faith as well. In other words, the Christian story can explain both and offer a bigger picture than either.

For Pascal, Christianity offers a diagnosis for this mystery of the human condition, the complex mix of grandeur and misery, infinity and nothing, sceptic and rationalist, in the simple, yet endlessly generative idea that we humans are gloriously created, deeply fallen and yet offered redemption through Jesus Christ. Our sadness is heroic and tragic. In Pascal’s suggestive image, it is “the wretchedness of a great Lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king.”

“We show our greatness,” says Pascal, “not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.” For him, the very existence of such culture wars points to the truth of the Christian diagnosis of the human condition.

Pascal offers us a way between the Scylla of Progressivism and the Charybdis of Conservatism – or perhaps better, to embrace the best of both. Culture wars are tricky to navigate. Yet they might find resolution if we allow them to point us to a deeper reality - our strange mixture of greatness and sadness. And not losing sight of either side of this enduring truth.

Graham Tomlin is the author of Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World (Hodder) £25.

Watch Graham explain why he is fascinated by Pascal.

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