Recent scholarship on the long 1960s has moved beyond the solely political dimensions of the era to recognize the religious impulses that shaped cultural and social transformations across the Atlantic. This article contributes to this trend by examining the Christians for Socialism (Cristianos por el Socialismo, CpS) movement in Chile in the early 1970s, demonstrating how clergy and laity played a central role in converging Marxism and Christianity during Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government.

Drawing on personal archives of CpS members, Chilean Episcopal Conference documents, oral interviews, and published primary sources, the article argues that CpS creatively leveraged the concept of utopia to reconcile revolutionary politics with Christian faith. The movement emerged when eighty priests publicly declared their support for socialism in April 1971, eventually attracting hundreds of participants who worked primarily in working-class and rural areas. These religious actors drew on liberation theology, political theology, and concepts like Che Guevara’s “New Man” and Camilo Torres’s “Integral Man” to argue that Christian salvation must occur in contemporary history through concrete political action rather than only in the afterlife. Central to the article’s analysis is how CpS members engaged with utopian thinking, particularly through the influence of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy and Gustavo Gutiérrez’s liberation theology. However, internal debates emerged over implementation—whether through direct partisan affiliation or maintaining critical distance from political parties to preserve religion’s prophetic voice.

I situate the CpS within hemispheric and transnational contexts, examining its connections to similar movements across Latin America and its role in organizing the First Latin American Encounter of Christians for Socialism in Santiago, Chile in April 1972. This gathering, which attracted over four hundred delegates, positioned Latin America’s liberation as intimately interconnected to “Third World” anti-imperialist movements.

Meeting of Chilean Christians with Fidel Castro, photo from https://www.npla.de/internationalallende/es/opio-o-revolucion-cristianos-socialistas-en-tiempos-de-la-unidad-popular/

The 1973 civil-military coup abruptly ended CpS in Chile, forcing many leaders into exile and silencing public discussion of the movement. However, its legacy continued through exiled members who helped establish the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians in 1976. Utopian thinking helped transform the conventional notions of both Marxism and Christianity. Such thinking allowed CpS to navigate uncharted epistemological territory as it sought to undo the hold of dogmatic perspectives that so influenced the Latin American Left of the 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, CpS pointed the way forward for a dynamic and creative convergence between the two most important forces behind twentieth-century social movements, Marxism and Christianity. By highlighting this often-overlooked component of the “Chilean Road to Socialism,” the article contributes to histories of Cold War Latin America and demonstrates that religious actors were not marginal but central to socialist and revolutionary movements and their aftermath.

‘The Chilean Christians for Socialism Movement: Liberationist, Third Worldist, and Utopian’ by Denisa Jashari is out now in the issue of Latin American Research Review.