A Materialist Theory Of Religion A View From Latin America (MTSR)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341236
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 24 (2012) 430-444 brill.com/mtsr
METHOD
THEORY in the
STUDY OF
RELIGION
&
A Materialist Theory of Religion:
The Latin American Frame
Jennifer Scheper Hughes
Department of Religious Studies, UC Riverside
900 University Ave, Riverside, CA 92521
University of California, Riverside, USA
jhughes@ucr.edu
Abstract
This review essay engages Manuel Vásquez’s new book, More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of
Religion, from the perspective of Latin American religious practice and thought. Vásquez’s mate-
rialist theory of religion is shaped by Latin American intellectual strands, including liberationist
intellectual concerns and commitments. While Vásquez’s focus remains primarily on the body,
his work allows for and invites a more extended theorization of material religion (or material
culture)—bringing new attention to the “objects,” the “things,” that so often anchor and define
religious practice in Latin America and across the globe.
Keywords
Latin America, material religion, material culture, liberation theology
Make no mistake, the reasoned and systematic, measured and precise critique
of religious studies that Manuel Vásquez levels in More than Belief: A Materialist
Theory of Religion (2010) in fact upends our discipline like so many money-
lenders’ tables in the temple. From the perspective of Latin American and
Latino religions, the subject of his scholarly analysis for almost two decades,
Vásquez addresses himself to the lingering blindnesses that continue to afflict
our discipline: the near absence of the body as an interpretive analytic, the
preoccupation with religious belief that enables the continued marginalization
of religious practice, and a reluctance to address the material conditions that
constrain human action (including religious action). These are the problem-
atic cultural bequests of the historical-cultural origins of religious studies
which has not yet been able to free itself from Cartesian-dualism, a Protestant-
normative cultural ethos, and enlightenment concepts of the autonomous,
sovereign subject. These all come under systematic scrutiny here. In More than
Belief, Vásquez, a sociologist of religion, offers a model for the theoretical

J. S. Hughes / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 24 (2012) 430-444 431
“rematerialization” of religious studies, by which he means a critical approach
to religion that takes seriously both the material conditions and conditioned-
ness of human existence as well as the material consequences of embodied
religious belief and practice (5, 149).
In the last decade others in the field have called for or explored materialist
approaches to the study of religion. Robert Orsi has suggested that scholars be
attentive to the impact of religion upon “the material realities of existence”
(2005: 175). In The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic
Slavery (2008), African-American historian Vincent Brown tells us that he has
written a “materialist history of the supernatural imagination” (5) in which he
labors to account for how the memory of the dead (specifically those whose
lives were lost via the institution of slavery) shaped the religious, social and
political institutions of the Atlantic world. Brown’s discussion of religious ritu-
als, beliefs and institutions is embedded in the details of daily life, struggle and
politics and explores how the very spirits of the dead shaped history and cul-
ture. Both Orsi and Brown mean to point to the interpenetration of the mate-
rial and religious planes. Yet neither of these has theorized this rematerialization
nearly so thoroughly and explicitly as Vásquez. His rematerialized theory of
religion is so comprehensive and so compelling that I have begun to rethink
my own work as a labor in this vein, as I am sure will many other scholars of
our generation.
More than Belief is also well-contextualized within a recent theoretical turn
in the humanities and social sciences generally, specifically in relation to the
emergence of “new materialist” theories, which track across many fields but
which have found especially fertile ground among political theorists. With
“new materialism” political theorists resist the dominant (now forty year old)
turn that “privileges language, discourse, culture, and values” while neglecting
material processes (Coole and Frost 2010: 3). This is not to say that Vásquez
has been directly influenced by these thinkers, rather he has come to these
conclusions from his own sources and materials, some of which will be
addressed here.
In the preface to his first monograph, The Brazilian Popular Church and the
Crisis of Modernity (1998), Vásquez traces the autobiographical roots of his
chosen field of inquiry. In the mid-1970s, he was educated by the radicalized
Jesuits at the Externado, a Catholic high school in San Salvador. At the time
when Vásquez was a student there, Salvadoran Jesuits were at the forefront of
innovating and implementing the liberationist vision that emerged from the
Second Vatican Council and the Council of Latin American Bishops’ meeting
at Medellín in 1968. The Jesuit’s ministry organizing ecclesial base communi-
ties in poor neighborhoods north of San Salvador closely corresponded to the

432 J. S. Hughes / Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 24 (2012) 430-444
period of Vásquez’s adolescence and young adulthood. The activities of the
progressive Church soon led to conflict with El Salvador’s oppressive military
regime. State-sanctioned violence escalated during these years and culminated
in the murder of the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande (March 1977), the assassina-
tion of Archbishop Oscar Romero (March 1980), the slaying of four Ameri-
can churchwomen (December 1980), the death squad murder of six Jesuit
priests, their housekeeper and her daughter (November 1989), and the disap-
pearance of many tens of thousands of ordinary Salvadorans over the course of
the civil war. Vásquez recalls that some of his teachers and classmates were
among those who gave their lives for the Church’s utopian and liberationist
vision. Of the Externado, Vásquez writes: “my years there represented without
a doubt the single most important period in my intellectual formation” (xii).
The influence of these liberationist Jesuits and the faith-based struggle of
the Salvadoran people upon Vásquez’s scholarship is clearly evident in The
Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity in which he analyzes the
declining influence of the liberationist base community movement in Brazil.
The book is organized around a case study of an ecclesial base community in
“Pedra Bonita,” a working class neighborhood on the outskirts of Rio de
Janeiro where Vásquez took up residence for several months from 1990-91.
For Vásquez, the decline of the base community movement resulted, above all,
from an ideological crisis brought about by the progressive church’s failure to
fully confront the complex material constraints under which poor people live,
constraints that ultimately limited the historical agency of the poor to realize
the utopian (and millennial) vision of liberation theology.
My contention is that the influence of Vásquez’s early formative years at the
Externado are also manifest in his most recent work, More than Belief. In fact,
in a three-part interview with the Bulletin for the Study of Religion, Vásquez
himself traces the origins of More than Belief to his early years at the Exter-
nado. However, these influences are not explicated within the text itself. In
this essay, I explore the ways in which Vásquez’s materialist theory of religion
is shaped by Latin American intellectual strands, including the liberationist
intellectual concerns and commitments embodied by the Externado Jesuits.
In particular, I identify the Latin American origins of the key analytical cate-
gories Vásquez employs including, most importantly, the categories of body,
practice, and constraint that are fundamental to his critical, Marxist, social-
scientific approach. Each has deep roots in Latin American theoretical para-
digms as well as being responsive to Latin American religious practices.
In so doing, I respond to what I see as the primary shortcoming of Vásquez’s
text. That is, if there is a criticism to be made of this extraordinary book,
it is that it does not explicitly engage some of the obvious Latin American

theoretical paradigms that seem to have helped to shape the author’s mate-
rialist theory of religion. Latin America is not only the location of religious
expressions and practices, a source of data which poses interpretive problems
for scholars, but it has been throughout the twentieth century one of the most
vital and vibrant locations for the production of theoretical models for com-
prehending the nature of religion: models which are fundamentally materialist
in their orientation. Vásquez himself acknowledges this theoretical debt in his
interview with the Bulletin for the Study of Religion, in which he indicates the
Latin American origins of his engagement with critical theory and Marxist
analysis. Yet these connections are not elaborated in the book itself, which
cites or engages few Latin American thinkers. This omission will give less than
careful readers the impression that Latin American faith communities are fit
and fertile subjects for interpretation but not themselves agents of analysis. I
take this opportunity then, to point to some of the Latin American theoretical
currents that I believe ground More than Belief and from which I believe the
author derives his sense of urgency. This is not to suggest that Vásquez’s mate-
rialist theory is derivative of these sources. On the contrary, it is an original
and unique contribution to our field.
More than Belief also inspires me to theorize in a more extended way the
place of material religion (or material culture) in the rematerialized theory of
religion that Vásquez proposes. The recent explosion of the study of material
religion brings new attention to the “objects,” the “things,” that so often
anchor and define religious practice across the globe. My recent book, Biogra-
phy of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to
the Present (2010) is, among other things, a study of material religion. How-
ever, in our haste to employ this new interpretive approach to religious objects,
scholars of religion run the risk of rehearsing and reinscribing the theoretical
inadequacies Vasquez identifies here, importing these inherited deficiencies
into this new area of study. Our focus on the object may become myopic; thus
will we remain mired in a de-materialized approach that fails to adequately
contextualize these objects in relation to material processes and structures.
Finally, I also emphasize Latin America as an interpretive frame for Vásquez’s
most recent work because it allows me to bring to bear my own scholarly
expertise in the field of Latin American religions upon More than Belief.1
Vásquez and I share some small overlap in our intellectual biographies. In
1989, just a year before he embarked upon his Brazilian research, I spent eight
months living in an impoverished rural community in northeast Brazil,
1
I would like to thank UCR doctoral student, Allison Solso, for our helpful conversations
about this book as well as my Fall 2011 graduate seminar for the same.

working with the base community movement and researching the popular
church for my undergraduate thesis in Latin American Studies at UC Santa
Cruz. My experience with the base community movement and my first hand
observations of the institutional dismantling of liberation theology by the
Church magisterium shaped the course of my graduate studies and continues
to frame the theoretical questions and methodological approaches that guide
my scholarly engagement with lived religions in Latin America.2
I. The Latin American Frame
Religious studies has only begun to account for the dimension, diversity and
complexity of Latin American and Latino religious practice. Precisely the
inability of the predominant theories of religion to encompass the lived reli-
gious practices of Latino communities leads Manuel Vásquez to make the case
for a rematerialized theory of religion. Vásquez’s text is deeply responsive to
the realities of Latin American and Latino emplaced and embodied religious
practice. Indeed, he shifts the interpretive center so that Latin American,
Latino and other U.S. immigrant religions become the epistemological start-
ing point for thinking about (or theorizing) religion. More than Belief opens
with the theoretical problem posed by Latino religions: the public display of
popular religion by Latino migrants in small towns in North Carolina, ritual
exorcisms and divine healings performed by Latino Pentecostals, and the
bodily “investments” of Mexican pilgrims who suffer discomforts and pain as
they make the rigorous and physically demanding journey to the shrine of the
Virgin of Guadalupe at Tepeyac (2). None of these are easily explained or
interpreted by theories that regard religion as primarily interior, private, and
belief-based and which regard written texts as the most important evidence
for religion.
Vásquez’s project thus shares a common starting point with Thomas
Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (2006), a text with which
Vásquez engages substantively and critically in More than Belief (286-290).
When confronted with the diversity of religious practices at the shrine to
the Cuban Virgin of Charity in Miami, Florida, Tweed experienced a similar
2
The Theological Institute of Recife (ITER), with which I had been involved, was the most
important regional center for the practice of the theology of liberation. In October of 1989,
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the recently appointed conservative archbishop of Recife José
Cordoso, arguing that ITER’s radical activism in the surrounding rural areas surpassed the
parameters of Roman Catholicism, officially closed ITER’s doors. I joined several hundred
campesinos, in their vigil outside of ITER in the hopes of a reversal of the decision to close.

dissatisfaction with the traditional theoretical lexicons available to him. The
feelings, the things, the sounds, the motion and movement that abounded at
the annual celebration of the Virgin brought him to the conclusion that what
was required was a new theory of religion, one that “made sense of the reli-
gious life of transnational migrants and addressed three themes- movement,
relation, and position,” (5).
I experienced a comparable frustration when researching devotion to images
of Christ’s suffering, the agonized and pained crucifixes that are ubiquitous in
Mexico and throughout Latin America. In my Biography of a Mexican Crucifix
(2010), I narrate the devotional history of one particular crucifixion image:
the Cristo Aparecido (or the Christ Appeared) of Totolapan. There were few
resources in traditional theories of religion that I could draw upon to interpret
the agentic potency, the “vital materiality” (to borrow Jane Bennet’s term),
that such images frequently hold for devotees (Bennett 2010). I came to
address this lack of an adequate theory by structuring my book around the
premise of the Cristo Aparecido’s vitality: he appears in my text as he does in
the lives of devotees, not as a person, per se, but as a persistent power who has
consciousness, makes decisions, and shapes the course of historical events. The
place of material culture and religious objects in Vásquez’s materialist theory
figures in the concluding section of this essay, where I offer a more extended
reflection on my work in light of Vásquez interventions, but the point here is
that close study of Latin American religious practices reveals the inadequacies
of traditional theories of religion.
Vásquez’s engagement with Marxist and Marxist-inspired modes of inter-
pretation can also be well comprehended within a Latin American frame.
More than Belief is, quite fundamentally, a theoretical model for a non-reduc-
tive Marxist approach to the study of religion. On the whole, U.S. religious
studies has been resistant to Marxist interpretive paradigms, including critical
theory and other post-structuralist analyses of power. These more recent
engagements with Marxist theory have been current in other disciplines in the
humanities and social sciences for more than a generation. Therefore, our con-
tinued resistance serves to further entrench and isolate religious studies as an
increasingly parochial discipline, limiting the possibility of sustained interdis-
ciplinary conversations. This is evident, for example, in religious studies’
engagement with the field of anthropology, that, for the most part, has not
overcome its infatuation with the theories and methods of Clifford Geertz,
even as anthropologists themselves have moved on to more critical (and ethi-
cal) forms of cultural analysis. Vasquez’s critique of Geertz is particularly wel-
come precisely because it is long overdue in the field. For Vasquez, Geertz’s
textual approach to reading cultures “understands all human practices through

the prism of representation and signification” (212), ultimately serving to de-
contextualize cultural systems thereby erasing structures of power (217). For
example, Geertz’s theory of the cultural system allowed him to engage in a
“thick description” of a Balinese cockfight that failed to acknowledge, or per-
haps even deliberately obscured, the political violence wracking the country in
the same period.3
In their Geertzian preoccupation with the internal coher-
ence of religious practices as symbolic systems, scholars of religion frequently
find themselves, like Geertz, incapable of (and without the theoretical tools
for) more critical interrogations of social structures. Objections to More than
Belief will certainly come from those in the field who continue to worry that
Marxist approaches cannot escape being reductive. In fact, this criticism was
leveraged at More than Belief in a session devoted to the book at the American
Academy of Religion meetings in November of 2011: clear evidence of the
ongoing resistance to Marxist approaches to the interpretation of religion
within the U.S. academy.
This scholarly reluctance has not been the case in Latin America. In fact,
from the 1970s, Latin American liberation theologians have employed Marxist
interpretive tools to engage in the critical analysis of structures of oppression,
framing these structures theologically as “social sin.” That is, in its insistence
that the Church not simply be concerned with the salvation of the soul but
also address itself to the liberation of the body, Latin American liberation the-
ology calls for a theological and political attentiveness to the material realities
of the poor and the marginalized. In its non-reductive appropriation of criti-
cal social science (including its rejection of dialectical materialism), liberation
theology contains within it a well-elaborated materialist theory of religion. It
holds, as one of its fundamental premises, a theory of social constructivism
that illuminates the ways in which social structures “enable and constrain”
human bodies and spirits. Argentine liberation philosopher, Enrique Dussel is
author of more than forty books including a three-volume substantive engage-
ment with the early works of Marx. He asserts that liberation theology repre-
sents nothing less than “the Latin Americanization of Marxism” (1993: 89).
That is to say, liberation theology is not only a confessional expression but
also contains within it a set of theoretical interventions regarding the nature
and function of religion within the larger society that are as much analytical
as they are prescriptive. For Dussel, “theology is nothing but a theoretical
3
“Clifford Geertz’s celebrated Balinese ‘cockfight’ scenario was developed within the larger
context of a national political emergency that resulted in the massacre of almost three-quarters
of a million Indonesians, though it took Geertz three decades to mention the killings that had
engulfed his Javanese field site, now forever associated in our minds with those semiotic fighting
roosters.” (Nancy Scheper-Hughes 1995: 437)

discourse” (85). However, until now, the contributions of liberation theol-
ogy to the interpretation of religion have been neglected and ignored. Largely
owing to our discipline’s resistance to Marxist theoretical approaches as
described above, U.S. scholars rushed to prematurely declare, sometimes in
almost celebratory tones, the death (and therefore the intellectual irrelevance)
of liberation theology as an intellectual movement. They thereby exempted
themselves from ongoing theoretical engagement with this body of literature,
a literature which represents the most comprehensive and sustained Marxist
reflection on religious phenomena in our age.
Even as Vásquez’s thinking in this book is clearly shaped by liberationist
theoretical strands, in particular with Latin Americanist engagements with
Marxist social analysis, Vásquez himself is critical of the extent to which lib-
eration theology itself is fully materialized. Thus, the materialist strand inher-
ent in liberation theology from its origins is amplified and extended in More
than Belief, reframed in relation to the major theories of religion and worked
into a more useful set of theoretical tools for religious studies.
II. The Body, Praxis and Constraint
Here my attentions turn to a more focused analysis of the key analytical cat-
egories elaborated in More than Belief: body, subjectivity, constraint, and the
de-centering of belief. I frame these categories in relation to their Latin Ameri-
can referents. Fundamental to Vásquez’s proposal is the recovery of the body
that, he argues, has been neglected in religious studies. Vásquez began to for-
mulate this concern in the conclusion of his first book, on Brazil, in which he
writes, “[T]he bodies of the poor are under constant attack by illness, hunger,
heavy work schedules, long bus rides, violence, and premature death. Bodies
cannot bear the brunt of pain, suffering, and illness indefinitely...” (270).
Vásquez attributes the neglect of the body, at least partially, to the linger-
ing influence on the discipline of reformation Protestantism’s rejection of the
body and, by extension, the entire material world (32). Although he recog-
nizes that there has been a “recovery of the body” in religious studies in recent
years (21), nonetheless, the full integration of the body into the theoretical
apparatus of religious studies has only been partially achieved. The body thus
remains eclipsed analytically. Vásquez’s purpose, then, is to anchor the emplot-
ted and emplaced body in the discipline: “The body is not something we can
reject or bracket...Rather, the body, within all its materiality, positionality,
finitude, and contingency, is essential to the production of our life-world”
(2010: 84). If we follow his call for a fully materialized religious studies we

should avoid interpretive engagements with the body (i.e., embodied religious
practice) that ignore the political dimensions of embodiment and which fail
to re-theorize human subjectivity in this light.
This attention to the body arises not only from Vásquez’s careful observa-
tions of lived religious practice in Latin America and among U.S. Latinos, but
also draws upon one of the primary emphases of Latin American theoretical
trajectories in the last third of the twentieth century. Liberation theology artic-
ulated concern for the bodies, not just the souls, of the faithful. Bodies—
hungry, tortured, ailing, impoverished, and disappeared—come to the
forefront of Latin American liberationist thinking. It was not simply the theo-
logical and theoretical eclipse of the body that preoccupied liberationist think-
ers, but the actual physical violation and disappearance of bodies in dirty wars,
dictatorships, and military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, and
Argentina among others. Liberationist political efforts responded to these vio-
lations. Brasil Nunca mais: Um Relato para a Historia (1985), edited by the
liberationist cardinal Evaristo Arns, documented human rights abuses com-
mitted by the military dictatorship and took particular care to record and
document the physical torture suffered by thousands of Brazilians. Liberation-
ist priests also advocated for the families of the disappeared in both South and
Central America. The terrible political salience of the desecrated and oppressed
body shaped Latin American theoretical and theological reflections on reli-
gion: so that, in addition to these practical and political engagements, the
body emerges centrally in the reflections of liberation theologians. Franz Hin-
kelammert, in his foundational treatise, The Ideological Weapons of Death: A
Theological Critique of Capitalism, frames part of his critique in relation to the
body. The entire third section of this text substantively engages the “bodili-
ness” of human experience (1986: 154). Salvadoran theologian, Ignacio Ella-
curía, emphasizes a different dimension of human embodiment in his
interpretation of the poor of Latin America as the “crucified body of Christ.”
The theoretical and political interventions of these thinkers on behalf of the
bodies of the Latin American poor have been of real consequence: Ellacuría
was one of the Salvadoran Jesuit martyrs assassinated in 1989: his own body
desecrated and destroyed.
In addition to the reassertion of embodied religion, Vásquez calls scholars
of religion to refine new ways to imagine human subjectivity. He writes, “the
task of the scholar of religion is to study how embodiment and embeddedness
in time and place enable and constrain diverse, flexible, yet patterned subjec-
tive experiences that come to be understood as religious” (7). One of the fail-
ings of dominant theories of religion to which Vásquez addresses himself is the
continued reliance on the concept of the fully-autonomous (religious) human

subject as actor and agent. The concept of the sovereign subject, our modern
bequest, remains fully intact and almost completely unproblematized in most
current theories of religion. That is to say, the complex structures of power
that limit human agency and shape religious action have not been interrogated
or accounted for.
We have been stopped short in the critical interrogation of human agency,
relentlessly pursued by other disciplines in the humanities in the last decades
of the twentieth century, by our discipline’s reverence for the religious, believ-
ing “subject” and for the integrity of her interior experience of the sacred
which we are called to regard and defend as fundamentally authentic. We have
been reluctant to refashion our conception of the religious self as religious
actor and agent along Bourdieuian lines, as Vásquez suggest, (241-245). It
would seem that this is because of religious studies’ particular attachment to
the fully agentic, humanist self which arises, as I have just described, from a
sentimentality about the integrity of the religious believer’s experience of the
sacred. Vásquez himself observes, “I trace a widespread tendency in religious
studies to treat inner subjective states as autonomous and to see ‘external’
practices, institutions, and objects (including the body as both creative actor
and constructed artifact) as derivative manifestations of those states” (89-90).
This is precisely the source of his criticism of Tweed: that the theory Tweed
elaborates in Crossing and Dwelling falls short in its failure to fully incorporate
the aspect of power and domination. As discussed earlier, Vásquez levels a
related (and much overdue) criticism of Cliﬀord Geertz who failed, “to con-
nect localized practices to the larger context in which they are embedded,
which includes national, transnational, and global economic, political, cul-
tural, and environmental processes” (254).
Latin American liberationist thinkers have been consistently attentive to the
ways in which social structures impinge on human freedom and shape human
subjectivities. In fact, it is capitalism’s very violation of human subjectivity
that leads to liberation theology’s emphasis on the “non-person” as the pri-
mary interlocutor. In the works of liberation theologians, the religious subject
is comprehended neither as a fully autonomous and individuated agent nor as
a believing subject. Instead, Peruvian theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez, explic-
itly de-centers belief as a primary theological axis in his system and refocuses
attention instead upon the “non-person”: that is, the one who is disregarded as
something less than fully human by global economic and political systems:4
4
Jon Sobrino makes a similar assertion in his focus upon the “non-person” over the atheist
(from Sobrino’s Mexico City address, as cited by Alfred T. Hennelly’s book Theology for Liberat-
ing Church: The New Praxis of Freedom [1989: 41]).

To be sure, when we say “nonperson” or “nonhumanbeing,” we are not using
these terms in an ontological sense. We do not mean that the interlocutor of lib-
eration theology is actually a non-entity. We are using this term to denote those
human beings who are considered less than human by society, because that soci-
ety is based on privileges arrogated by a minority. We see to call attention to the
historical and concrete conditions of the situation of the poor and the exploited.
We refuse to attempt to conceal the conﬂictive nature of society under the cloak
of generic, innocent-looking terminology. (1983: 92)
Vásquez criticizes belief-oriented interpretations of religion as being impotent
to interpret the full dimensionality of religious practice and experience. Lib-
eration theologians similarly perceived that belief was only one very partial
way of framing religion, one that is not generally conducive of more critical
interrogations of social structures which allows us to understand the constrains
under which these so-called believing “subjects” exercise and express their reli-
gion. In this way, Latin American theoretical strands account for the con-
straints on human religious action to a greater degree than U.S.-based and
European scholars of religion have been willing to do to date.
III. Things that Matter: The Material in the Materialist Theory
of Religion
In More than Belief, Vásquez elaborates a model for the theoretical “rematerial-
ization” of religious studies which takes seriously both the material conditions
of human existence but which is also responsive to Appadurai’s description
of “the stubborn materiality of things” (2006: 21). That is, Vásquez criticizes
the eclipse of the body in the theory of religion, but he also means to judge
(and address) the neglect of the entire material world, including the objects
of material religion that so often anchor religious practice in Latin America
and in diaspora. Here then, we continue to explore the theme of material-
ity in all of its complex dimensions, as it pertains to Latin American and
Latino Religions.
Until very recently the discipline has seemed ill-equipped to interpret reli-
gious materiality. The Protestant-normative, Reformationist, Western and
utterly “American” ethos of religious studies have hindered the development
of a theoretical apparatus capable of interpreting, categorizing, explaining,
encompassing the fact that in many, maybe most, of the world’s religious
expressions, the sacred is encountered ﬁrst and foremost (and sometimes
wholly) in its penetration and animation of the material world. This is par-
ticularly true of many Latin American and Latino religious practices, many of
which draw on Native American traditions, some of which share a common

religio-affective posture of tender regard for the mundane objects of the mate-
rial world and for the presence of the sacred they contain within them.
Vasquez’s text has brought me to reconsider my own book, published the same
year and by the same publisher as More than Belief, as a work of materialist
religious studies, one that strives to rematerialize the study of religion in order
to elaborate and refine more useful vocabularies for describing the lived reli-
gious experience of Latin American communities of faith.
In the last decade, the study of material religion has moved to the forefront
of investigation. At the American Academy of Religion meetings in November
of 2011 there were no fewer than seven sessions dedicated to the study of
material religion: from Latino theology and materiality, to material culture of
the Mediterranean world, to the place of the object in western esotericism, to
materiality and apocalypticism.5
Just a year prior there were only three panels
dedicated to the topic, and in 2009 not a single session addressed itself explic-
itly to the study of material culture as such (a session on relics, for example,
did not use the category of material religion or material culture in its title or
description).
Many of these recent studies of material religion cannot be regarded as also
necessarily “materialist” in their interpretation of these objects. That is, often
the discussion of material religion remains mired in those blindnesses that
Vazquez seeks to remedy. Analyses of objects of material religion can still
emphasize belief and experience, they can still privilege the autonomous
believing subject as an interpretive lens, and they can easily neglect or ignore
the social structures (and power relations) that “constrain and enable” reli-
gious actors’ engagements with the material world. In fact, there is significant
risk inherent to this new emphasis on objects. Most perilously, if we shift our
focus to materiality and to explorations of material objects (as agents or act-
ants, for example) this has the potential to create analytical and interpretive
distance from the material realities and conditions of the religious communi-
ties that we study. This is particularly problematic if these studies are con-
ducted in marginalized, impoverished, or so-called “third world” contexts.
When I began my research in Morelos, Mexico a decade ago, I was far less
interested in the object (the crucifix) itself than I was in the community’s
experience of that object, in, for example, the extent to which they saw their
own suffering and struggles written there, in the pained and suffering body
of Christ. In the course of my research, I was forced to confront the reality
that for devotees the Cristo Aparecido is not a statue that abstractly references
5
I myself presented three papers on the subject at AAR 2011 and co-organized, with Jalane
Schmidt, a panel on Latin American materiality.

the person (or suffering) of Christ, but is instead their beloved santo, a mate-
rial manifestation of the divine, to whom they attribute animus—existence,
being, desire, and potency. The Cristo’s sentience, his vulnerability, his depen-
dence on his community of devotees for wellbeing and survival, and occa-
sionally his willingness to intervene in human matters—this is what figures
most prominently in local devotion. Vásquez accounts for this precisely, “A
scholar working within a non-reductive materialist framework, thus, begins
with the acknowledgment that the practioners’ appeals to the supernatural,
god(s), the sacred, or the holy have powerful material consequences for how
they build their identities, narratives, practices, and environments” (5). And
somewhat later: “Both our material practices and the material world in which
we are embedded are agentic. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: it is ‘flesh applied
to a flesh’” (83).
My attention to the vital materiality of the Cristo—the Cristo as living
matter- did not begin with a theoretical curiosity about objects, but rather my
starting point was a commitment to remain close to devotees and practioners
themselves—and to the lived material realities and conditions of their lives.
One of the early reviewers of the book manuscript referred to my approach
(not disparagingly) as “persuasive work of Marxist populism”, because of the
extent to which I identify with my subjects.
In taking the Cristo Aparecido as my focus, I did not want to privilege an
aesthetic (or even a Marxist aesthetic) over a materialist approach. I did not
want to neglect indigenous struggles and suffering under conquest and colo-
nial rule, and—in the present—the expansion of global capitalism including
the consequences of NAFTA, narco-violence, and the hardships and violences
wrought by US immigration policies (even the violence inherent to the fantasy
of a double-barreled electric fence along the border, as espoused by our current
Republican party candidates). This commitment ultimately led me to cast a
wide net so that by material realities I came to include, as the subjects of my
study seemed to, their struggles and sufferings, their labors in their milpas,
their material impoverishment and increased vulnerability to physical illnesses,
and also the material cultural plane in which they understand these struggles
to take place. For the residents of Totolapan, the matter of the Cristo, the mat-
ter of their daily lives, and the matter of their own human bodies are in some
very real sense continuous and contiguous. This is evident, for example, in the
way that the community struggles on a daily basis with the physical vulnera-
bility of the (aging and fragile) image and simultaneously with the social and
economic vulnerabilities that they face.
Political theorists Diana Coole and Samantha Frost address this apparent
tension in their call for “new materialisms” that offer new ways of thinking

about “living matter” but that are also critically engaged—that is, “devoted to
the critical analysis of actual conditions of existence and their inherent
inequality” (2010: 25). Vásquez himself posits that both the embodied and
emplaced person as well as the material objects that circulate in religious prac-
tice can be encompassed within a fully articulated materialist approach.
Vásquez’s theoretical rematerialization of religious studies includes the object
while simultaneously addressing the marginalization and domination of
human beings/human bodies. Otherwise, formulated: the body of the devotee
is a thing, just as the Cristo is a thing—the two are interpretively linked within
a new materialist framework. Indeed, in Caroline Walker Bynum’s most recent
book, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe
(2011), she follows medieval Christian thinkers, theorists, and theologians by
moving to resituate the body in/as matter (32). In this pre-modern thinking
there is a continuity between human bodies and the bodies of “things”: stat-
ues, stones, relics, totems, human flesh, blood—all are part of one shared mass
of vital, vibrant and agentic matter. What this implies for us, today, is that to
think differently about matter is to think different about human bodies and
their relationship to (and continuity with) the material world.
IV. Conclusion
More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion is a timely, relevant and occa-
sionally jarring theoretical intervention at a moment at which our discipline
perhaps needs it most. Our efforts to defend religious studies and religion
(religious experience) as a “thing unto itself,” a category of its own, has, until
now, made critically engaged materialist approaches inaccessible and illusive.
My purpose here has been to focus on the ways Vásquez’s materialist theory
is informed and shaped by the author’s scholarly engagement with Latin
American and Latino religion, and to argue that in many ways not only is his
theory encompassing of Latin American religious “realities” (for lack of a bet-
ter term) but that these theories are shaped by intellectual and theoretical
strands originating in Latin America. Because Vásquez himself attributes his
formation as a scholar to these movements, his newest book creates an avenue
through which scholars of religion can reengage with the work of Latin Amer-
ican liberationist thinkers who continue to write and publish relevant works.
Careful and considered, cogent and coherently written: Vasquez’s analysis
is the product of a scholar who has been thinking, writing and teaching in
the field for almost twenty years. One of the most important scholars of
Latin American and Latino religions, he has helped us theorize transnational

religion, religion and globalization, and the mobility of religious phenomena
and religious communities across the Americas. Now, in his rematerialized
theory of religion, he has given us another aid by which we might better com-
prehend religious phenomena.
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Bynum, Caroline W. (2011). Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe.
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