The Resonance of Church and State: “Churchstate” Geopolitics, the 2009 Honduran Coup, and the Antidemocratic Turn in the Americas

Abstract

AbstractThroughout the Americas, in countries such as Honduras, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, and the United States, right‐wing governments allied with conservative Christians have increasingly pursued violent and antidemocratic means to acquire and maintain political power. Understanding the success of these regimes requires clarity about the ways that “church” and “state” both fuse and diverge. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Honduras during the 2009 coup, this article details the right‐wing de facto government and Pentecostal churches’ conjoined efforts to bolster support for the coup by focusing on a specific mode of governance: the mapping and moralizing of space. In this case, church and state were unified in both their description of Honduras as a single, bounded entity and their division of other Latin American nations into the categories of friend or enemy. Yet, church and state did not align in their temporalities, ultimate aims, and the agents they depicted as active in the political struggles after the coup. Nevertheless, rather than fragmenting the pro‐coup movement, this combination of overlap and divergence strengthened this mode of governance and brought together a broad coalition in favor of the coup. [state, Christianity, governance, geography, secular, Honduras]