COUNTRY
ArgentinaPOPULATION
42,192,494 (July 2012 est.)GDP PER CAPITA
$17,700 (2011 est.)RELIGIONS
nominally Roman Catholic 92% (less than 20% practicing), Protestant 2%, Jewish 2%, other 4%AT THE CENTER
Matthew Scherer on 9/11, the Financial Crisis, and Climate Change as Conversion Events (Full Screen)
Argentina
Publications (3)
The society, culture, and politics of Argentina are deeply imbued with Roman Catholicism. The Church’s place in Argentine national identity, which spans across the ideological spectrum, stems from the perpetual ability of Argentines on different sides of political and social divides to find some level of support in the Church. The Church solidified its hold on the territory of modern-day Argentina during the period of Spanish colonial rule from the 16th to early 19th centuries. Church leaders variously supported and opposed the policies of Juan Perón (1946-55) and the violent tactics of the Dirty War (1976-83). Roman Catholicism remains the official religion of the state and Catholic representatives take part in many state functions. Freedom of religion is also guaranteed by the Constitution. Today, areas of Church-State contention include contraception, economic policies, and the disputed involvement of the Church in the Dirty War. Around 90% of Argentines self-identify as Catholic, though only 20% practice their faith on a regular basis.
Federico Finchelstein analyzes the rise of early 20th century Italian and Argentinean Fascism as both a transnational movement and as a set of distinct nationalist phenomena, with particular emphasis on its interaction with religion. Finchelstein illuminates the efforts of Mussolini and the Italian Fascists to export Italian fascism to Argentina, and the tandem effort of Argentinean fascists to repackage and re-conceptualize the Italian model in a locally relevant manner. The major...
Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008
Thomas F. Farr
The United States is a religious nation, but neither scholars of U.S. foreign policy nor its practitioners have taken religion very seriously. From the inception of international relations as a discrete discipline, its approach has been defined by the seventeenth-century Westphalian subordination of religion to the state. Consequently, as the international relations scholar Daniel Philpott has observed, most in the field have simply "assumed...
In his book For God and Fatherland: Religion and Politics in Argentina, Michael A. Burdick explores the crises in church-state relations in Argentina over the last century. Burdick's thesis is that the constitutionally-established Catholic Church was progressively disenfranchised by various governments, struggling to maintain its rights and speak as the moral conscience of Argentina. Burdick divides this disenfranchisement into three critical periods: the anticlerical period of the 1880s, the...