Religion as an Instrument of Psychological Warfare

Abstract

Since the beginning of the civil war in El Salvador in 1980, a significant movement toward conversion to evangelical, pentecostal churches has occurred. Social psychology tends to analyze religious conversion on three dimensions: process, motivation, and generality. This article proposes the need for a fourth dimension—an ideological one, which is explicitly psychosocial—and this approach is demonstrated for the case of religious conversion and affiliation of Salvadorans. Without denying the personal meanings of conversion, this article hypothesizes that conversion to pentecostal movements is an objective in the psychological warfare carried out in the strategy called “low‐intensity conflict.” With data obtained from various studies, relationships between religious affiliation and sociopolitical attitudes are examined. The data show that almost all the members of the Catholic base communities tend to assume active and critical postures toward the social order, while a significant portion of the evangelical and Catholic charismatic church members tend to adopt individualistic attitudes favoring passive submission to the social order. For the latter, social change is left in the “hands of God.” On the basis of this analysis, brief reflections on the state of social psychology are offered.