The Issue on Religious Tolerance in the Early Chilean Republic

THE ISSUE ON RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE IN THE EARLY CHILEAN REPUBLIC (1823–1830)1 Valentina Verbal Introduction Between the years 1823 and 1830, after the Chilean War of Independence against Spain and the Bernardo O’Higgins’ government (1810–1823), the country had extensive discussions on the kind of society that would be best for its future. A truly critical debate was related to the issue of religious tolerance. This debate was conducted in various newspapers, with two major political groups clashing over the subject: the conservatives and liberals. While the former believed that Chile was essentially a Catholic country and should not even recognize Protestant denominations, the latter wanted to grant a certain recognition to those denominations brought to the country principally by the British. Historiography typically considers only the conservative standpoint. Two exceptions to this rule are, however, worth mentioning: Ricardo Donoso and Ana María Stuven. Donoso devotes an entire chapter to what he calls “The fight against the influence of the Church,” referring to the power that the Catholic Church still had in the nineteenth century. Donoso affirms that nineteenthcentury liberals set out to fight for the consecration of two great civil liberties: freedom of the press and religious tolerance.2 For her part, Ana Maria Stuven argues that the Chilean elites, at least in the period studied here, never sought to discard the Catholic faith as an axis of social and political life in Chile.3 To do this she studies, as does Donoso, one of the intellectual discussions between Juan Egaña and 1 This lecture was presented at the DOGHSA 20 annual Conference (March 26, 2021). DOGHSA is the Department of History Graduate Student Association at Florida International University (Miami, Florida). 2 Ricardo Donoso, Las ideas políticas en Chile (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1946), 175. 3 Ana María Stuven, “Tolerancia religiosa y orden social. Juan Egaña vs. José María Blanco White,” Ariadna histórica. Lenguajes, conceptos, metáforas, N° 5 (2016): 24 [23–44]. 1 José María Blanco White from 1824 to 1826. Egaña was the main author of the 1823 Constitution, a document that categorically denied religious tolerance, and Blanco White passionately criticized that position.4 The particular aim of this presentation is to explain the big debate between conservatives and liberals on religious tolerance in the 1820s. I argue that this debate expresses the typical fight between tradition and modernity. In other words, while conservatives wanted to maintain the predominance of the Catholic church in society, liberals believed that guaranteeing religious tolerance (in conjunction with other civil rights such as freedom of the press) was a necessary condition to abandon colonial backwardness. To support this argument, my presentation has two main sections. First, I will explain the conservative standpoint, paying special attention to Juan Egaña’s stance, the most important ideologue of that political faction. Second, I will review the newspaper El Liberal, published between 1823 and 1825, which presents the liberal point of view. Considering the duration of this presentation (15 minutes), I do not pretend to develop the subject matter in great detail, so I will mainly show some passages from primary sources which are representative of both the conservative and liberal positions. Chile is a Catholic Nation. Juan Egaña against Religious Tolerance Juan Egaña (1768–1836) was one of the most important political ideologues involved in the Chilean state formation. After the O’Higgins’s government (1817–1823), Egaña was the principal creator of the 1823 Constitution. Although this document came under discussion in parliament, Egaña’s respected juridical opinion prevailed. As the British historian Simon Collier asserts: “The 4 José María Blanco White (1775–1841) was a former Spanish priest who, due to abandoning the Catholic faith, fled to London because of fear that he might be tried by the Inquisition. In London, he followed the process of Independence and early state construction in Latin America very closely. 2 small liberal element in Congress violently opposed many of the proposals and presented a counter-draft on 16 December. This was ignored. Egaña’s ascendancy was now sufficiently complete to ensure an easy passage for the Constitution.”5 Despite the fact that the 1823 Constitution was enacted on December 29, during the first semester of 1824, it was subjected to several critiques by political leaders, especially liberals, who expressed their opposition in the press. One critique was that the implementation of the Constitution was impossible due to its cumbersome nature. Specifically, these liberal opponents asserted that the constitution created a complex system of public bodies and required the elaboration of more than thirty complimentary laws and the hiring of a large number of state officials.6 A second critique was related to the authoritarian and traditional nature of the Constitution, article 10 of which stated: “The religion of the state is the Apostolic and Roman Catholic religion, to the exclusion of the worship and exercise of any other.”7 The relevant point in this article was not that the Catholic religion was the official state religion, but that it expressly excluded the worship of any other denomination. Egaña defended the constitution against its critics in a pamphlet entitled Instructive Examination on the Political Constitution of Chile. But why did he defend this specific exclusion of religious practice? First of all, Egaña was convinced that laws change customs and then customs transform themselves into civic virtues. For Egaña, there was no clear separation between law and 5 Simon Collier, Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence 1808–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 261. 6 This Constitution implied the recruitment of 20,000 state officials. Luis Galdames, Historia de Chile. La Evolución constitucional, tome I (Santiago: Balcells & Compañía, 1925), 641. It is worth remembering that the census of 1835 shows a population of 1,103,036 people. See Repertorio chileno año de 1835 (Santiago: Imprenta Araucana 1835). 7 “La religión del Estado de Chile es la católica, apostólica y romana, con exclusión del culto y ejercicio de cualquier otra”. Constitución Política del Estado de Chile, promulgada en 29 de diciembre de 1823 (Santiago: Imprenta Nacional, 1823). 3 morals and the law, therefore, was a necessary tool to change the moral of the citizens.8 For this reason, in his Instructive Examination, Egaña asserted that the best constitution is the one that allows customs to become civic virtues.9 For him, the presence of the Catholic faith was a fundamental pillar of civic morality, and it is no coincidence that, in the same pamphlet, Egaña bluntly said: “Without uniform religion a town of merchants will be formed, but not of citizens.”10 Clearly, for Egaña, the only uniform religion was the Catholic one. To assert this, he made two main arguments: first, in Chile it is not possible to speak of religious tolerance because in this country only Catholic worship is known; and second, the history of other countries has shown that the acceptance of various religious denominations has led to bloody civil wars.11 Let me reiterate, however, that Egaña’s most important argument is that religious unity (based on the Catholic faith) was a necessary condition for the existence and practice of civic virtues in society.12 The pluralism of values was an unimaginable concept for him, even as a modus vivendi in favor of peaceful coexistence between people of different beliefs or ideas. On the other hand, it is necessary to clarify that Egaña did not believe in the persecution of private worship of Protestant denominations. His central point is that these denominations should not be recognized by the state because the role of the state consisted in fostering a civic morality that, for him, depended on religious unity. The contrary could imply the destruction of the state.13 8 See article 249 of the Constitution of 1823. “Examen Instructivo sobre la Constitución de Chile,” en Guillermo Feliú Cruz, Colección de antiguos periódicos chilenos 1824–1825 (Santiago: Ediciones de la Biblioteca Nacional, 1966), 8 [7–51]. This document was first published in 1824. 10 “Sin religión uniforme se formará un pueblo de comerciantes, pero no de ciudadanos”. Ibid., 39. 11 Ibid., 38–39. 12 Ibid., 39. 13 This relevant nuance is well explained by Ricardo Donoso, Las ideas políticas en Chile, 184. 9 4 The Other Side of the Coin. A Look at the Newspaper “El Liberal” As I already noted, almost all secondary sources overlook the views of liberal supporters of religious tolerance. This oversight is probably due to the fact that in 1830 there was a civil war between the liberals and conservatives; the conservatives were victorious, giving rise to an authoritarian regime that lasted three decades (1830–1860). Given this context, my impression is that the majority of that historiography tends to see the state formation process in Chile as “manifest destiny” in favor of a closed society. El Liberal was a newspaper characterized by its strong defense of building an open society based on two great civil rights: freedom of the press and religious tolerance. This newspaper, which survived only three years, presented views opposed to those presented by Juan Egaña in popular conservative newspapers or pamphlets. In essence, the editors of El Liberal (Diego José Benavente and Pedro Trujillo among others) believed that the country should surpass their colonial backwardness, which was largely represented by the enormous power of the Catholic Church in Chilean society. Moreover, since most of the historiography has ignored them, it is interesting to observe the specific arguments that these editors promoted in favor of religious tolerance. In the following, I will highlight four arguments posed by El Liberal in favor of religious tolerance: a) an historical argument (Chile’s transition to an adult and modern society), b) religious argument (regarding the Old and New Testament), c) a utilitarian argument (which states that diversity allows innovation and progress), and d) a liberal argument (only individuals can determine their own beliefs and ideas). Let us examine an excerpt from each argument. a) To begin with the historical argument. The editors of El Liberal believed that the country had to abandon their colonial backwardness and transition to an adult and modern society. In their first publication (on July 28, 1823), El Liberal likened the colonial period to childhood: “Three 5 hundred years slaves of an absolute king, children of a cruel and foolish mother who, fearing our growth, did not want to take away the walkers of childhood.”14 Then, when answering the question on the challenges of the present, El Liberal responded that a key challenge is to avoid religious fanaticism, which “wants to return us to centuries of barbarism.”15 b) Let us turn now to the religious argument. The editors of El Liberal constantly insisted that their aim was not to attack religion itself but the lack of freedom in this matter. For this reason, they did not hesitate to use arguments of authority drawn from the Bible. For instance, on January 3, 1824, El Liberal said that Abraham learned that he should receive foreigners in his house even if they possessed a different God.16 c) The editors posed an utilitarian argument. Perhaps, this argument is the most frequent. It states that the diversity of beliefs and opinions is a fundamental tool for the flowering of the best ideas or great things. On January 16, 1823, El Liberal posed the issue in binary terms: “We can still return to ignorance, to brutalization, to servitude. [But] we are already more intelligent [because] our ideas have flown more highly, [so] we are capable of great things. Everything is an effect, a series of your virtues, which were communicated from your hearts to ours.”17 d) Finally, the paper made the liberal argument. When criticizing article 10 of the 1823 Constitution—which, we remember, establishes the Catholic religion as the official state religion and excludes the worship of any other—the editors of El Liberal clearly established that the state cannot have dominion over religious beliefs because “my conscience and my opinion do not belong but to me alone, and I must not give account of them but to the same “Trescientos años esclavos de un rey absoluto, hijos de una madre cruel e insensata que temiendo nuestro crecimiento, no quería quitarnos los andadores de la infancia”. “El Liberal,” en Guillermo Feliú Cruz, Colección de antiguos periódicos chilenos 1823–1824 (Santiago: Ediciones de la Biblioteca Nacional, 1965), 10 [9–342]. 15 Ibid., 11. 16 Ibid., 120. 17 “Podemos todavía volver a la ignorancia, al embrutecimiento, a la servidumbre. [Pero ahora] somos ya más inteligentes, [porque] nuestras ideas han tomado más vuelo, [por lo que] somos capaces de grandes cosas: todo es un efecto, una serie de vuestras virtudes, que de vuestros corazones se comunicaron a los nuestros.” Ibid., 133. 14 6 God that I adore.”18 I qualify this argument as liberal in itself because the center of its reasoning is the idea that individuals have rights that cannot be taken away by any other power, including the state. A Brief Conclusion To conclude this presentation, I want to say three brief things about related to the argument I posed at t the beginning: that the debate on religious tolerance in post-independence Chile (and I believe that in Latin America as a whole) can be understood as a dispute between tradition and modernity. Why? In the first place, because even though the conservatives also believed in material progress (Egaña loved science and was a gifted inventor), at the end of the day they defended the idea that social and moral order should be protected by a certain religious belief, the Catholic faith. In this sense, religious tolerance was represented as a path towards disorder or chaos. In other words, they feared cultural changes. The liberals, unlike their adversaries, wanted to establish civil liberties, such as freedom of the press and religious tolerance. They understood the establishment of these civil liberties to be the transition from childhood to adulthood, from ignorance to wisdom. Likewise, they believed that the apparent disorder of freedom would allow for the emergence of better and more innovative ideas. Finally, I believe that much of the recent historiography on Chile and Latin America tends to downplay the distinctions between conservatives and liberals. These distinctions, with all the necessary nuances that must be made, can be recovered seriously through resurrecting relevant primary sources, such as the newspaper El Liberal, which are all but missing in the historiography. “[…] mi conciencia y mi opinión no pertenecen sino a mí solo, y yo no debo dar cuenta de ellas sino al mismo Dios que adoro”. Ibid., 141. 18 7 Sources “El Liberal,” en Guillermo Feliú Cruz, Colección de antiguos periódicos chilenos 1823–1824 (Santiago: Ediciones de la Biblioteca Nacional, 1965), 9–342. “Examen Instructivo sobre la Constitución de Chile,” en Guillermo Feliú Cruz, Colección de antiguos periódicos chilenos 1824–1825 (Santiago: Ediciones de la Biblioteca Nacional, 1966), 7–51. Collier, Simon, Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence 1808–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). Constitución Política del Estado de Chile, promulgada en 29 de diciembre de 1823 (Santiago: Imprenta Nacional, 1823). Donoso, Ricardo, Las ideas políticas en Chile (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1946). Galdames, Luis, Historia de Chile. La Evolución constitucional, tome I (Santiago: Balcells & Compañía, 1925). Repertorio chileno año de 1835 (Santiago: Imprenta Araucana 1835). Stuven, Ana María, “Tolerancia religiosa y orden social. Juan Egaña vs. José María Blanco White,” Ariadna histórica. Lenguajes, conceptos, metáforas, N° 5 (2016): 23–44. 8