Cutting through the sanctimonious bullshit, Evangelical Christianity wasn’t spread across Latin America out of a pure desire to save souls. It was a psychological operation, a weapon of imperial control wielded by the United States to crush a genuine spiritual uprising and protect its economic interests. This wasn’t faith; it was a hostile takeover of God, a calculated campaign to replace a dangerous faith with a compliant one that taught the poor to accept their chains as divine will.
In the 1960s, a fire was lit in Latin America. It was called Liberation Theology, and it was revolutionary. Catholic priests and laypeople were reading the Bible not with the powerful, but with the poor. They saw a God who stood with the oppressed, not with the oppressors. Theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez declared that poverty was an affront to human dignity and therefore a sin against God’s will. This wasn’t some academic theory; it was a call to action. As Leonardo Boff put it, you could only be a true Christian by making common cause with the poor and fighting for their liberation. This was a faith that demanded justice.
This was a direct threat to the American empire and the local elites who served it. The U.S. government saw it clearly. A 1969 CIA memorandum warned that these “liberation-oriented priests” were a disruptive force threatening the established order. President Nixon himself called the shift in the Catholic Church “the single most important event in Latin America over the previous decade.” The response was not theological debate. It was death squads. It was torture. It was U.S.-trained rapists and murderers in El Salvador slaughtering nuns and priests who dared to stand with the oppressed. It was Operation Condor, a U.S.-inspired reign of terror that disappeared an estimated 30,000 people and killed 50,000 more, all suspected of being communist sympathizers. The CIA personally instructed these security forces in methods of torture and bomb construction.
While the dictators did the bloody work, the evangelical missionaries provided the spiritual cover. They were the clean-up crew, mopping up the mess with a gospel of submission. The primary vehicle for this was the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), the academic arm of Wycliffe Bible Translators. On the surface, they were linguists. Behind the facade, they were a front for imperial power. USAID flooded them with money. They were given military equipment, including Vietnam-era helicopters, so these evangelical pilots could act as “soldiers for Christ” in the most remote regions of the world. With helicopters running on Texaco fuel, they flew into remote villages, not to liberate, but to pacify. They told indigenous people whose land had just been stolen by oil companies that their desire for justice was a “sin of envy.” This was the perfect religion for a conquered people.
These missionaries were also spies. They were the eyes and ears of U.S. intelligence in resource-rich regions where no one else could go. A 1975 article in Christianity Today admitted that between 10-25% of America’s foreign missionaries had given information to intelligence authorities, with the number being much higher in areas of unrest. They built the infrastructure of conquest—airports, schools, and communication networks—that served U.S. corporations and military-backed dictatorships.
And where were the great evangelical leaders during this reign of terror? They were cheering it on. Billy Graham coordinated with dictators, calling Chile’s Augusto Pinochet “a great Christian leader” while his secret police were electrocuting dissidents. In Guatemala, born-again Pentecostal dictator Efraín Ríos Montt carried out a horrific genocide against the Maya people while Jerry Falwell openly supported him and Pat Robertson gave him a friendly interview on The 700 Club. Reagan praised Montt as “a man of great personal integrity.” These men weren’t misguided; they were willing accomplices in a campaign of mass murder, providing the moral justification for American-backed fascism.
The result is a continent spiritually scarred and politically neutered. The fire of Liberation Theology was systematically extinguished, replaced by a faith that serves power rather than challenges it. Morally permitting the extreme brutality of states and corporations is exactly what this brand of evangelical Protestantism was shaped to do. It is not cruel in spite of itself. It is a permission structure for cruelty and always has been. This was the perfect tool for empire: a faith that anesthetizes the oppressed and sanctifies the oppressor.
The final lesson is the most chilling. In 2026, this machine is now doing to the people of the United States what it has always done to people in other nations. Fascism, as they say, is simply colonialism turned inward. The weapon that was perfected abroad, the weapon that taught the world how to be conquered, is now being aimed at home. The gospel of submission, once reserved for foreigners, is now being preached in our own towns.
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