Fighting Fire with (Holy) Fire: Las Casas’ Theological Case for Democracy

• In Event: Political Theology and Democracy in Modern Political Thought

Abstract

Many of the challenges to democracy in the West are defended by appeal to Christian theology, whether in the form of Catholic Integralism, Kuyperian dominionism, or populist Christian nationalism. Kevin Vallier has traced the history of this anti-democratic tradition back to the Salamanca School, particularly in the writings of Francisco Vitoria, whose praiseworthy calls for protecting Indigenous peoples were nonetheless saturated in a theological vision of empire and commercial expansion (Vallier 2023). Comparatively less attention has been paid, however, to the extent to which Vitoria’s contemporary Bartolomé de Las Casas, although drawing on the same Thomistic heritage, arrives at fundamentally different conclusions regarding Indigenous rights to self-determination. He particularly develops these theological arguments in De Regia Potestate, which remains untranslated into English and therefore inaccessible to much Anglo-American scholarship. While in this work Las Casas gives lip service in support the pope’s “donation” of the Americas to the Spanish Crown, a closer reading reveals how Las Casas’ interpretation of this document fundamentally undercuts any political claims Spain might make in the New World.

For the Christian nationalist today, Las Casas’ combination of democratic rhetoric and uncompromising zeal to see the kingdom of heaven on earth counters the notion that Christian commitment requires hostility to the democratic project, including in cases where political majorities would not be Christian, as was the case with Indigenous communities in Las Casas’ day. Las Casas offers a theory of Indigenous rights similar to what Mark Goldie and Theresa Bejan have described as “evangelical toleration” in figures like the Puritan Roger Williams, who called for religious toleration on the grounds that it would lead to more effective evangelism (Goldie and Popkin 2006, Bejan 2015). Las Casas goes beyond Williams, however, to articulate an entire system of rights, including democratic rights, on the basis of evangelism, which I describe not merely as a theory of “evangelical toleration,” but “evangelical rights.” While this thoroughly theological basis for a political system that strongly resembles liberal democracy is taken for granted in much of Latin American political thought, which has been said to look to Las Casas as a forerunner of human rights (Carozza 2003), it challenges the assumptions of many Anglo-American liberal democratic theorists, like Isaiah Berlin, who contend that “monism” is an inherent problem for democracy and inevitably leads to violations of negative liberty (Berlin 2002). Las Casas shows this need not be so, and – for Christian nationalists today – should not be so.

Author

• Logan Gates, University of Toronto