With the book “AMLO and religion. The lay state under threat”, researchers and academics Bernardo Barranco and Roberto Blancarte seek to create a debate on each of the religious issues that the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has put on the public agenda and that, say the authors, could threaten the secular state.
For Blancart, although President López Obrador says juarista, in terms of dogma, opened the door to the religious and has broken the principle of separation, which exists not to annoy the churches but to put limits on participation and the areas that correspond to the State.
Read: If it’s for moralizing, churches may have facilities to access television, says AMLO
In AMLO and religion, the authors present a series of 11 essays divided into two parts, in which they discuss each of the topics that the Mexican president has referred to about religion.
The first part is titled Laicity in times of populism, written by Roberto Blancarte with five texts ranging from the political-religious scheme of López Obrador, the Constitution Moral and López Obrador’s debt to the secular state.
In the second part entitled AMLO and the political eruption of the Churches, Bernardo Barranco writes six texts in which he discusses the transformations of the sacred and the political eruption of Pentecostal evangelicals, in addition to the granting of electronic means to the evangelical churches, as well as the debate of the Moral Cartilla and the re-accommodating of religious actors.
Just in December 2019, the Brunist Senator María Soledad Luévano Cantú presented the initiative to give the state freedom of association to religious cults, an action that, according to the experts in this book, poses a great risk of eliminating the principle of separation.
Read more: AMLO invited us to plead the moral card in the country, says evangelist leader
“it is useful for being the way we prevent a ruler from imposing upon us his personal conceptions: on life, on religion, on morality, it is an important principle, and that is why we have it; because we have a secular state that respects not only religious freedom but freedom of conscience. All that would be broken if you finish including or putting religion in the realm that doesn’t belong to you,” Blancarte said.
As for the Moral Chart, Blancarte explained that there cannot be a constitution that imposes on us all a moral, what may be a constitution that says what is the law that we must all respect, not impose morals or seek the welfare of the soul.
“That which I leave to priests and ministers of worship, to take care of eliminating insecurity, violence, inequality and we will all be happy with it,” he added.
With authorization from the publishing house Grijalbo and Penguin Random House, as well as the authors Bernardo Barranco and Roberto Blancarte, in Animal Político we give you the first gift chapter of the book AMLO and religion. The lay state under threat.
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