Desprivatización católica, políticas morales y asociacionismo neoconservador: el caso de los grupos laicos de inspiración cristiana en el estado español

Abstract

Recent decades have shown that the relationship between religion and modernity has gone beyond classical theses in the West. In this article I argue that the link between these two constructs is one of complex coexistence, particularly in Catholicism. Through internal transformations, the institution has built a field from which to continue influencing the management of politics and law. Since the 1980s, Christian-inspired collectives have been articulated at the global level and among civil society, making use of their participants´ dual condition of laypersons and believing citizens, to influence the normative ordering of societies from a deprivatizing perspective. Based on the theoretical apparatus proposed by José Casanova, I argue that this deprivatization movement is a strategy in the face of the growing process of societal secularization and the tension of the privatization/deprivatization dichotomy through contemporary dynamics of political mobilization. In order to understand this movement through the laity, the article focuses on the study of Christian-inspired discourses from members of Spanish Neo-conservative collectives. The fieldwork was carried out between 2017 and 2018 in Madrid, Bilbao and Pamplona, three of the most active cities in Christian-inspired mobilizations. Based on the discourse analysis of interviews, of non-participant observations of such mobilizations, and of Vatican documents and deprivatization collectives, the article allows us to understand how this institution has stimulated the laity to mobilize in the public space in defence of Catholic worldview as a form of political repositioning.