From the family pluriverse to the small worlds of community life in Costa Rica: Towards a policy for the management of belief?

Introduction

The objective of this article is to examine the results of two research studies carried out in Costa Rica on the transformations linked to the experience of belief and gender in family and community environments characterized by religious diversity. Examination of these experiences reveals actions and discourses that constitute forms of belief management that contribute to non-hegemonic values which eventually become liberators from oppression. Such narratives may be moved from the private to the public sphere in a decolonizing movement that favors equality and religious freedom. The findings analyzed come from the studies Retos de la convivencia en familias interreligiosas o interconviccionales (2018–2021) and Pluralismo religioso en comunidades: Preferencias minoritarias y construcción social de instituciones intermedias (2015–2017), both undertaken at the Universidad Nacional (Costa Rica).

These studies were conducted in an officially Catholic state, as established in Article 75 of Costa Rica’s Political Constitution. Nonetheless, since 2015 Article 1 of the Constitution also states Costa Rica to be a democratic, free, independent, multiethnic and pluricultural Republic. Although multiethnicity and pluriculturality are mentioned descriptively, this implies the recognition of other identities in the construction of the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 2016 [1983]).

A 2021 survey ¹ conducted by the University of Costa Rica (CIEP, 2021) found that Costa Ricans self-identified as follows: 47.5% Catholic, 19.8% evangelical or Pentecostal Christian, 1.4% Jehovah’s Witness, 1.2% traditional Protestant, 0.3% Mormon, 0.1% Islamic, 2.7% other, and 27% non-religious (atheist, agnostic and deist). This last grouping is not disaggregated, and may induce misunderstandings about the number of believers. It is thus advisable to refer to the 2018 survey ² conducted by the Universidad Nacional (Díaz et al., 2018), which found that 2.4% of the population do not believe in God, any deity or higher force, while 97.5% do believe in any one of these elements.

This singularization is relevant given that the analysis proposed is inscribed within the decolonial turn in Latin America (Quijano, 1992; Castro Gómez and Grosfoguel, 2007; Fornet-Betancourt, 2009; Walsh, 2010; Escobar, 2012), insofar as it seeks to root itself in a critical reading of local contexts.

In Latin America, the role of religion is notorious in the process of the (re)construction of a citizenship whose beliefs and practices have been eliminated, while others have been imposed, syncretized, or commodified, and who are engaged in resistance through social agency. This has occurred throughout the different phases of human extractivism that are inherent to the economic, socio-political and cultural exploitation that continues to this day, as indicated by Quijano (1992).

In this scenario, religion and gender constitute structures of thought and action that determine women’s participation in social life in a complex fashion, as studied by numerous researchers in the subcontinent since the mid-1980s and referenced by Bandeira, García Somoza and Mazo (2021). The intertwined problematization of these categories contributes to opportunities for the transformation of subjectivities formed from the colonial wound, as well as to the questioning of the colonial and heteropatriarchal power matrix (Lugones, 2010; Bidaseca, 2011; Paredes and Guzmán, 2014). This perspective shares Mahmood’s (2001) view that social agency is experienced on an everyday basis in the management of belief ‘as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create’ (2001: 203).

Addressing the relationship between the public and the private is fundamental, given the inherent tension this implies. As noted by Walby (2000), the domestic world of women has been separated from the public sphere and excluded from the notion of citizenship, which as a colonial and patriarchal construct was thought to be lived in the public world made up of male citizens.

Sexual difference was constructed as a political difference, expressed through the public/private dichotomy that establishes the limits between freedom and subordination. The private sphere embodies affective, economic and political intimacy and is considered to be stripped of the connotations of citizenship, remaining relegated to the margins of freedom, equality and justice. Neither the patriarchal edification of Western liberalism nor its feminist questioning have politicized the affective and identity components linking the intimate sphere with spiritual belief. This depoliticization occurs to the extent that undervaluation occurs not only of the private, but also of the intimate practices concerning belief.

This article explores the disruptive practices arising in the private sphere to counter values that promote discrimination and the violation of human rights, as found in the aforementioned research on interconvictional families and on minority religious groups acting in their communities. The importance of these practices lies in the fact that they can favor the exercising of citizenship based on a process that inscribes religious freedom and equality, contradicting the fabrication of the public sphere, originally constituted on a basis of inequality and domination. This premise arises from the study of populations that, to the extent that they have constructed themselves as political subjects from their family or community nucleus, negotiate recognition of their citizenship on a daily basis.

The first section presents the characteristics of interreligious and interconvictional coexistence in mixed families, and in particular, their use of belief management strategies made up of confrontation, negotiation and convergence, as well as the results of these strategies in the everyday lives of the 21 people interviewed. The second section explores four cases of minority religious groups, which become mediating institutions that generate meaning in areas of high social vulnerability, wherein some residents creatively use their resources to (re)create community. The conclusions analyze the above in light of Lugones’ (2010) concern with ‘how to think about intimate, everyday resistant interactions to the colonial difference’ (2010: 743), with a particular interest in the approach of the family and the community as a pluriverse. This conforms with the Zapatista concept of thinking-feeling (senti-pensar) ³ formulated by Escobar (2012) as ‘Un mundo en donde quepan muchos mundos’ (A world with room for many worlds). These lines emerge from a decolonial branch of study applied to practice, which supposes the construction of designs in and of human diversity, creating an interreligious or interconvictional coexistence that questions the ‘universal’ dynamics of family and community life, as well as the reductionist perception of gender identities linked to belief.

Policies of belief management within the family pluriverse

The study Retos de la convivencia en familias interreligiosas o interconviccionales (Fuentes Belgrave, Quesada and Fajardo, 2021) analyzed the characteristics, strategies and practices involved in interreligious and interconvictional coexistence for mixed families through the identification of their belief itineraries and the strategies of confrontation, negotiation and convergence put into practice in these families’ daily lives. Confrontation involves directly resolving a potential or actual conflict between opposites; negotiation involves dialog to limit or silence the expression of differences; and convergence involves an unequal balance, in which the dominant member imposes his or her beliefs and practices by virtue of the subordinate member’s acceptance of or submission to these.

Varro (2003) defines mixity or heterogamy as the union of two elements of a different nature by virtue of the socialization of individuals in an affective relationship. Early studies on mixed marriages predominantly used religious criteria to characterize mixity, such as unions between Jews and Christians (Bensimon and Lautman, 1977). Later the criteria of nationality and ethnicity were added to studies on mixed families.

The Costa Rican study found varying degrees of mixity beyond the distinction of residing with those who do not share the same religion. In-depth interviews were made of 21 people, who were located using the snowball sampling technique. In addition to religious mixity, mixity of ethnicity and nationality predominated, followed by mixity of sex/gender, as well as of age and family recomposition.

A portion of the interviewees had abandoned the faith they were brought up to believe in, representing 15 of the 21 people. These came from Catholic, evangelical Christian, Jewish and Muslim families, thus constituting interreligious families, while only three cases came from heterogamous families. It was found that in the family nucleus of those who had abandoned their childhood beliefs, authoritarian and, in some cases, abusive attitudes had predominated, both towards the interviewees and towards other family members. At the time of the interviews, the interviewees identified as follows: two evangelical Christians, one Jehovah’s Witness, two atheists, one Candomblecista, two Bonpos, four spiritual seekers, one Muslim, two Jews, one Methodist, three agnostics and two Catholics.

The strategies these deployed to coexist within their family mixity are grouped into three tendencies defined in the study as confrontation, negotiation and convergence, further explained below. Each family had dominant and subordinate members who practiced strategies of coexistence/resistance/agency in the private sphere. These strategies can be translated into policies for belief management that interrelate the public and the private, drawing on Lugones’ (2010) conception of this link as reflecting the tension of the colonial wound that both conjoins and separates these spheres.

Confrontation implies a temporary or permanent break with significant others, as well as a reworking of identity and the performance of acts that directly communicate changes in subjectivity, for example, through abandoning the religious tradition of one’s upbringing or revealing a sex/gender identity or sexual orientation that is different from that which was assigned. This is followed by the progressive renunciation of or abstention from participating in the traditions of the confronting party’s upbringing, with this latter seeking to affirm the legitimacy of the changes undergone. Likewise, progressive involvement in other traditions, or otherwise the religious desymbolization of the personal sphere occurs.

Mixity of sex/gender and religion stands out in this strategy, which was implemented by six individuals who perceive themselves as lesbian, gay, non-binary and transgender, and who were raised in Catholic, evangelical and Jehovah’s Witness traditions. This was the case of a homosexual youth raised as an evangelical Christian in a rural area, who is now a spiritual seeker:

The church found out first, then they talked to dad and they called me. (...) They took me by force and I was sitting there in the middle of other people watching my parents cry. It was one of the most critical moments of my life, it was the moment when they broke my heart, seeing my parents crying, just because I was a little different in terms of tastes. (...) I said I’m going to keep quiet, I’m going to let them talk all they want to talk, let them do everything they want to do. (...) Then there was an exorcism, so to speak, where they told me, ‘You are fine now.’ And I said, ‘Okay, fine.’ And then they assumed that I had changed. (...) The subject wasn’t mentioned again until I turned 18 and I said I am not going to go to school anymore, I’m not going to continue going to church anymore. (J18, spiritual seeker, 23 years old, April 30, 2019, Puntarenas. Own translation from Spanish)

The confrontational acts reported in the study seek to affirm dissident identities that can be transferred to the public sphere. Such acts are founded on the defense of a principle of autonomy representing individual liberation in situations of abuse, also commonly found in the other cases of sex/gender mixity, and they confront both religious traditions and the colonial and heteronormative power matrix. The interviewee recounts the exorcism members of the Pentecostal church in which his father was a pastor subjected him to due to his homosexuality. Upon reaching the age of legal majority, he confessed to his family that he had not changed his sexual orientation nor would he continue to attend religious services, becoming a spiritual seeker instead.

In the other cases of sex/gender and religious mixity, confrontation is commonplace. Gender, like belief, is of a fluid character and has inherent plasticity in its construction and reconstruction processes. The contradiction is that both are transmitted, experienced and understood through socialization processes that introduce these in a compact, binary fashion, as if they present neither fissures nor malleability.

In unveiling the mechanisms of gender construction, Butler (2007) demonstrates this to be a social temporality open to reformulation. Understanding contemporary belief to be a fluid transit between provisional identifications does not disassociate this from religious traditions and spiritualities; although like gender, it can be reproduced dichotomously, the revelation of its contingent status opens up opportunities for its circulation and reformulation.

Negotiation is another strategy for the management of identified beliefs. Its migration to the public sphere can contribute to the design of a pluriverse located within the family, which at once is plural and interrelational with the public sphere. The construction of gestures of negotiation is characterized by dialog about differences and similarities between beliefs, and even between belief and unbelief, as well as inquiry into the beliefs of the other. This involves the definition of joint agreements involving the search for intermediate points in doctrinal and ritual matters, as well as in the use of texts and symbols. A bricolage of religious rituals also frequently occurs, as in the case of an Afro-Brazilian Candomblecista raised as Catholic, whose religious and ethno-national mixity was increased on her marrying a Costa Rican evangelical Christian:

The preparation of the marriage (...) was very much out of the ordinary (...). Our text was that of Ruth and Naomi, the marriage of two women who come from different texts and cities (...). The first wedding was in the Afro religions. A small ceremony in Brazil. The first blessing we had was from Yemanyá. Then we got married there in my house in an ecumenical rite. There were 5 priests and 3 Methodist pastors, and then we got married here. There it was more Afro and ecumenical, and here it was more Indigenous, because a Mayan priestess and a pastor came to do the ritual. (S10, Candomblecista, 56 years old, 4 September, 2018, San José, Brazilian origin. Own translation from Spanish)

This testimony shows the reinterpretation of some rituals from a re-symbolized perspective, a characteristic common to cases where negotiation is the rule. For the interviewee, this later entailed raising a son who was socialized in the religions of his parents and who currently is an atheist. The couple additionally tries to be tolerant of each other’s religious practices, giving affectionate support to each other in conversion processes and refraining from disturbing each other’s religious rituals.

As in the other cases in which belief within the family is negotiated, this involves individual commitment, honesty in the expression of convictions and beliefs, recognition and the valuing of differences, security in the decisions made regarding belief, and respect for autonomy. The latter is related to personal ethics, and becomes an issue in cases where there is no family agreement and religious doctrines are prohibitive, for example, regarding the voluntary interruption of pregnancy and euthanasia, issues that Bonpas defend against the criteria of their parents, Catholics and evangelical Christians who uphold their own doctrines.

Convergence constitutes another belief management strategy; however, this tends towards the imposition of the religious beliefs and practices of the dominant family member on this person’s children or spouse. This situation sometimes leads to the acceptance of submission, and is typified by the dominant member’s insistence on convincing family members of the infallibility of his or her beliefs, along with authoritarian actions justified by the doctrine, which is imposed in parallel to the renunciation of the beliefs of the other family members. In these cases, the inability to engage in dialog as part of everyday coexistence predominates, typically violating the lives of women due to patriarchal sex/gender roles. This is exemplified in the following excerpt from an interview with an Egyptian Muslim man married to a Costa Rican Catholic woman:

The Muslim religion sees the difference between man and woman due to the role that each undertakes. Many people sometimes say that the Muslim religion is sexist, that men are allowed to work and women are not (...). God created us to worship Him, before working we must worship God (...). God decreased women’s obligations so they can stay at home, take care of children and raise them properly. (HM7, Muslim, 45 years old, 20 September, 2018, San Jose, Egyptian origin. Own translation from Spanish)

There are also convergence attitudes that come close to those of negotiation, such as the recognition of religious difference in the search for its societal normalization. This was also seen in the previous case, in which the Muslim son studies in a Catholic school under an agreement reached by his parents to facilitate his insertion into Costa Rican society, which is predominantly oriented towards Christianity, as noted in the previously cited survey. This agreement thus constitutes a bridge to the public sphere emerging from the private one, so visibilizing the coexistence of religious diversity.

Within this approach, acceptance of the weaknesses and strengths of the different members’ cultural and religious heritage can also be found, with the establishment of egalitarian agreements for religious transmission to children and the favoring of a ‘distanced perspective’ to seek non-assimilationist social integration, an approach particularly observed among the Jews interviewed. In another example, in a family in which an elderly Catholic woman lives with her agnostic son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren, an agreement was made for reciprocal self-limitation regarding the expression of beliefs and practices. Convergence predominates where in cases of greater age and ethno-national mixity, including Indigenous peoples, Spaniards and Peruvians.

In families where negotiation prevails, there is room for discrepancies, so improving the conditions for interreligious coexistence in the private sphere. These families are characterized by an interest in researching and discussing the beliefs of other religions, which allows them to value their own beliefs and convictions as well as those of others. In the process of getting to know other faiths, such families agree to prioritize the transmission and sharing of common ethics, values and affection above any doctrine.

Limited pluralism in the small worlds of community life

In the study Pluralismo religioso en comunidades: Preferencias minoritarias y construcción social de instituciones intermedias (Fajardo and Fuentes Belgrave, 2017), the consequences of religious pluralism were analyzed in terms of the social meditation role played by minority religious groups in the construction of community meaning and values for given populations.

Reconfigurations of religious matters in local contexts are linked to the development of minority religious groups, whose constitution as mediating institutions (Berger and Luckmann, 1997) was notable in this study in their autonomous emergence in particular communities (via revelation or conversion) as the result of religious missions, the expansion of transnational spiritualities, or the propagation of secularized technical-spiritual discourse (yoga, meditation, etc.).

Four groups were worked with: the Centro Cristiano de Alabanza (CCA), a Pentecostal organization located in Alajuelita, San José, Costa Rica’s capital city; two Salvation Army (SA) Youth Leagues, one in Hatillo, San José, and the other in Nicoya, Guanacaste; the Bahá’í Assembly in the Bribri Indigenous region of Telire, Limón; and the Asociación Nacional de Profesores de Yoga (Asoyoga), in San José. All groups’ actions focus on communities that live in contexts of poverty, unemployment, violence and drug trafficking. A qualitative approach was used to conduct a case study of each group.

According to Berger and Luckmann (1997), the transformations provoked by religious pluralism can lead to latent crises of meaning that can be mitigated through mediating institutions. This is pertinent to Costa Rican society, where religions can be seen to play the role of mediating institutions relating the subject to society, providing a source of meaning for the subject and his or her divergent group located within a confessional State.

The groups are situated in a context of limited religious pluralism, but are localized and integrated in their community based on the performance of social functions derived from each doctrinal program, in districts characterized by the lowest rates of social development.

Their social functions include facilitating spaces for comprehensive health, education and care provision, aimed at generating respectability and dignity for residents. These mediating institutions, whose purpose is to create meaning in and for the community, offer educational programs, rehabilitation for drug addicts, children’s meal centers, day care centers, homeless shelters, housing and classroom construction, the teaching of traditional farming techniques, and yoga classes for populations in prisons and hospitals.

Both the CCA and the Salvation Army are distinguished by their strong proselytism, while the Bahá’í Assembly maintains weak proselytism and Asoyoga does not proselytize at all. Only the first three employ conversion as a strategy to attract new members, as well as relying on building controlled spaces for the expression of practices and beliefs limited to each group.

In the case of the CCA, founded in 1994 after the revelation and conversion of its pastor, worship attendance is mandatory for those participating in rehabilitation, such that respect for the beliefs of those not professing Pentecostalism is nonexistent. Attending worship in this religion is considered therapy, as justified by the ‘Christocentric’ approach attributed to this methodology, which is partially financed with public funds.

No respect is shown to the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion of non-believers and those professing other religions who participate in the rehabilitation program. A vulnerable population is thus made to observe Pentecostal practices on a mandatory daily basis under the assumption that if they can remain silent during the ‘spiritual therapy’ sessions, their own convictions are being respected.

Nonetheless, dialog with community members and beneficiaries of the group’s social programs reflects the way in which CCA programs can make contributions – even from the perspective of a welfare dynamic – towards resolving some disparities present in the intersection of sex/gender and class in everyday life, as this conversation with a working-class woman shows:

I am a recovering addict (...). I didn’t have the opportunity to be admitted, but I made the decision and started worshipping here. Through the church I have received support, they give me outpatient therapy at the Women’s Restoration Center. I receive a little assistance every month and now I have a special situation, my son has a behavioral disorder problem (...). Many good things are done here for addicts, the elderly (...). I’ve received support from the church, for me the work done by the children’s center, the community kitchen, is very good. I participate in the community kitchen. Sometimes there’s no lunch, because I go to San Jose, but they gave me the benefit of eating at the Restoration Center. As I have to attend to my son, I can’t always make it at lunch time. They’ve understood those situations and they put food aside for me. (Participant No. 3, CCA, September 27, 2015, San José. Own translation from Spanish)

The CCA is linked to the community both through the recipients of its social action and though those participating in its congregation. The cases of some women show that the ways in which they associate with the religion are pragmatically related to their family economy and family care, such that they reinterpret hegemonic religion based on their domestic context.

Nonetheless, the experiences of CCA employees show that while conversion is not a mandatory requirement to work there, it is necessary to identify with Christianity. While some workers are Catholic or Messianic Jews, religious diversity is scarce. The attitude of the employees who participate in Pentecostal activities beyond what is required by their work schedules embodies recognition of the CCA’s religious work, the repercussions of which they value in terms of the social reintegration of program beneficiaries.

The task of resignifying the universes impoverished by the colonial experience is nourished by putting interculturality into practice as a process and a strategy under permanent negotiation. This might lead us to agree with Walsh (2010: 79) that a vital contribution of interculturality is its understanding, construction and positioning of sets of wisdom and knowledge as a political, social, ethical and epistemic project. Walsh further notes this implies the need to change not only relationships, but also the structures, conditions and power devices that maintain inequality, inferiorization, racialization and discrimination. From this perspective, the relationships forged within the CCA still follow the logic of an asymmetrical project, reproducing structures of submission to the singular to the detriment of plurality.

With regards to the Salvation Army (SA), Davies-Kildea (2009) has characterized this group by the tension between its evangelical mission and the social service it performs. It was established in Costa Rica in 1907, and its Youth Leagues are led by heterosexual married couples with the rank of ‘lieutenant’, who understand their mission based on their life experience of being ‘rescued’ from situations of vulnerability, also seeing their work as holding social meaning. They seek the imposition of policies of restraint and abstention over physical bodies to ‘morally regenerate’ people exposed to what they consider a sinful environment, characterized by increases in commercial sexual exploitation and the rise of the drug market in these localities.

The social intermediation carried out by the SA Youth League can be observed in these cases of a 20-year-old girl from Nicoya and a 19-year-old girl from Hatillo, insofar as the League individually ‘rescued’ these young women from contexts of risk to become Salvation Army ‘officers’. These two young interviewees claimed that their involvement in the programs and their subsequent training as pastoral leaders in the Youth League changed the destiny of their bodies, such that they went from the risk of street exploitation to the Salvation Army. This guarantees them access to secondary education and a job in the future, which from a gender perspective prevents early pregnancies, although restricting their freedom of choice over their bodies.

The interviewee trained at the SA officers’ training college from the marginal urban community of Hatillo stated that her friends represented anti-Salvationist values, despising religion and inducing her to consume drugs. She therefore renounced them, assumed the status of ‘soldier’, and appropriated the Salvationist uniform. This makes her feel proud of her appearance and gives her the self-perception of respectability (Skeggs, 1997) when walking the streets of her neighborhood.

The cases of these young women reveal that recruitment to the SA can provide women with certain conditions to develop independence and empowerment; although they must pay the price of repressing of their sexual life in accordance with the SA doctrine, they find forms of self-fulfillment within the religious institution.

The Bahá’í faith, present in Costa Rica since 1941, is a spiritual proposal that integrates other cultural traditions, such as the Bribri Indigenous worldview. The Bahá’í objective is the creation of a new world order characterized by the recognition of equality and education as the driving forces of society. This translates into ethical principles that guide life and foster the development of autonomy, though implying submission based on ‘personal commitment’ that includes absolute fidelity to the project ‘willed by God’.

Other religions typically exclude the interweaving of Indigenous cultures and beliefs with the faith of conversion. Christianity, whose colonial antecedents continue in Bribri territory, provides a strong example of this. In contrast, the Bahá’í faith allows the coexistence of Bribri culture and Bahá’í beliefs, a situation that is reproduced among the Lakota and Dakota native peoples in North America, according to Horton’s (2013) research.

Horton (2013) argues that Bahá’í conversions of Indigenous people should be understood as contexts of ‘combination’. Believers are understood to have fluid identities that, on becoming Bahá’í, can better embrace becoming fully Indigenous through the recovery of memories and rituals forgotten in modern colonial contexts as a survival strategy. Nonetheless, this process of cultural reintegration only accepts elements that do not contradict Bahá’í values (such as the value of not ingesting alcohol). This approach allows the construction of an intercultural bridge, in contrast to identities essentialized from colonial perspectives into discrete Indigenous and Bahá’í identities.

A Bribri interviewee expressed that before the conversions to the Bahá’í faith, marriage among the Bribri only occurred by arrangement between the eight clans, from the age of 12, after which couples lived together in free union. With Bahá’í teaching, this situation has mostly changed, although relationships between minors and older men still occur.

I talk a lot with my daughter because she is about to turn eighteen and she is not married. We have really struggled for her to understand (...). At 12 years old, Indigenous people could already do everything and no one would say anything, because our culture said this young lady can do everything, so it’s a challenge for us. Culturally this continues, they say she is old enough to do everything, and no... The Bahá’í influence is helping, because they cannot be doing this, the different stages must be respected and fulfilled, we must not combine them, we cannot do this thing of getting married or living in a free union so soon, because here most people live like that (...). I talk with my daughter, but also, I get a book called sexuality, dating and all that in the Bahá’í devotional bookstore, so that she has more information. (Mayra, Bahá’í Assembly, Telire, Limón, June 4, 2016. Own translation from Spanish).

The interviewee states that parents are needed for sex education, but information is also provided in the Bahá’í pre-teen group. The Bahá’í faith has not marked entry into modern coloniality, but rather the arrival of postmodernity as a consequence of globalization, in the sense that sex education does not imply repression of the body, but rather access to information for responsible sexual and reproductive health.

It is necessary to consider the sex/gender differences present in native cultures since the entronque colonial, or ‘colonial junction’, understood by Paredes and Guzmán (2014: 83) as the union of ancestral patriarchy and European colonial patriarchy. Because Bahá’í highly values education, sex education is also important insofar as this corresponds with the religion’s axiological values, since only Bahá’í literature is consulted to deal with sexuality. This is one of this faith’s legitimization strategies that contributes to the formation of self-esteem in young people, together with the call for equal rights for women and men.

The final group, Asoyoga, was founded in 2008. Its practices oscillate between religiosity and spirituality, following from the ‘revelation’ of a mission on behalf of its leader, considered to be a guru by the group. It offers experiences similar to conversion for its followers. Its practices are otherwise secular, with yoga being understood to be a discipline of a spiritual substrate due to its historical origins, but where the instructor provides the approach, which students may or may not apply according to their needs, be they spiritual or physical. Nonetheless, the association considers this latter perspective to be reductionist given its objective to ‘create community’. Likewise, it aspires to establish the practice of yoga in public schools. Its members have held national yoga festivals since 2008, and have taught yoga to prisoners, drug-dependent minors, psychiatric patients, children with cancer, senior citizens in rural areas, and children with Down syndrome. These projects have been implemented through agreements with public and private institutions, and mostly have been financed by Asoyoga.

Asoyoga has introduced yoga as a therapeutic detoxification tool at the Institute for Alcoholism and Drug Dependency (IAFA), a state-run facility where the teenaged female inmates mostly come from the working classes. Some are opposed to performing meditative yoga, alleging that it involves a type of religious worship. According to the instructor, meditative yoga indeed implies devotional worship; the literal meaning of puja, a term used by the instructor, is ‘prayer’. IAFA officials exert no pressure and respect the decisions made by those young Catholic and evangelical Christian women opposed to including yoga as part of their rehabilitation program, arguing that this goes against their religious beliefs, despite the fact that no mention of the doctrine concerned is made.

Asoyoga has also undertaken programs in La Carpio, a settlement on the outskirts of the capital that arose in the 1990s. It is inhabited by Costa Rican squatters and undocumented migrants and is home to approximately 52,000 people who have no deeds to their homes, nor access to water or electricity. Through the Community Development Association, Asoyoga implemented yoga classes for pregnant women. These stated that yoga helped their personal growth and assisted them to get along better within the community, despite the fact that some religious leaders prohibited its practice. None of the interviewees saw any negatives associated to the postures nor the meditation, and they continued to practice these post-pregnancy, although they acknowledged that some women missed the opportunity to participate in yoga classes due to following a religious leader.

One withdrew because of the church; she said the pastor banned yoga because it’s a religion and it’s bad. I haven’t had any problems being Catholic. I only heard what a Catholic priest said on the radio, saying that certain postures are to worship certain gods, but evangelical Christians talk about altars (...). When we went to Yoga Mandir, we saw they had images of Buddha, they light candles to them. But you don’t practice that, I’m very clear about that, but my friend had problems with it, she said that if she went to church, she couldn’t go to yoga and if she started going to yoga, she couldn’t go to church. (Yessenia, ASOYOGA, September 20, 2016, La Carpio, San José. Own translation from Spanish)

The women who continued with yoga considered that this did not conflict with their beliefs, as they found that it helped them to develop greater sensitivity in confronting situations of conflict and to develop attitudes in favor of generating change in their lives.

[The instructor] looked for ways to help us, trying to teach women to go out, to empower themselves, to be themselves, to better themselves, to study. (Reina, ASOYOGA, September 9, 2016, La Carpio, San José. Own translation from Spanish)

These women still meet to practice yoga, now without an instructor; they began a process of self-knowledge from which they created an undisciplined micro-community in the face of the coloniality of patriarchal religions projected by pastors and priests towards those participating in yoga classes. Asoyoga’s practices contrast with those established by institutionalized religions, as seen in the cases of the CCA, the Salvation Army, and the Bahá’í Assembly, in which the community aspect makes up a major part of conversions. Such conversion becomes the means to obtain membership of a large ‘family’ (Hervieu-Léger, 2004) that tends to exclude those who are not members, in contrast to mixed families. These religions additionally increase their followers through social programs perceived to result from divine action.

Conclusions: Breathing through the colonial wound

In the cases of the CCA, the Salvation Army and the Bahá’í Assembly, the individual embraces a ‘new life’, which implies involvement in a community and reorganization of the individual’s inter-subjective project. The faith is chosen, but that choice implies the renunciation of autonomy in pursuit of the construction of community based on service to the group.

The groups allow little space for the expression of dissent despite their acting in communities with limited but recognized religious pluralism. In contrast, in interconvictional families where negotiation is prioritized – and even in those in which confrontational acts are manifested – dissent plays a democratizing role. Nonetheless, in institutionalized groups the latent transfer of some gender-disruptive practices from the private to the public world also can be found.

In the CCA, some women have introduced domestic management into the religious sphere. If this group were to take up such actions, with personal histories being shared with the other following the practical wisdom of interculturality as proposed by Fornet-Betancourt (2009), this would allow it to shed its internal colonialism.

Despite the implementation of policies by the Salvation Army that are not very given to the pluralization of religion, its Youth League acting as a meditating institution contributes to the empowerment of young women, allowing them to achieve study and work goals despite the scarcity of opportunities in their communities and the weight of their bodies, exploitable in their environment and repressed by the SA doctrine.

The Bahá’í proposal offers a socio-cultural integration project that encourages the sexual education of girls in a context of tension with Bribri traditions – not remarkable given that these reproduce relations of sex/gender domination – and ‘colonialidad cosmogónica’, or cosmogonic coloniality, as Walsh (2010) denominated the mainly Christian characteristic of the Bribri territory.

The women in the Asoyoga program acquire knowledge at the intersection of gender and class that allows them to create an alternative community based on the resignifications they attribute the spiritual in their daily lives as sources of individual and communal power.

In the small worlds of community life, decolonizing transferrals from the private to the public world are carried out by women and sexually diverse people of oppressed classes, who seem to be able to un-mirror themselves from images constructed by hegemonic religious perspectives, to instead mirror themselves based on others, so changing the type of colonial link established with their othernesses. This can be witnessed in the application of domestic logic in the Pentecostal sphere, in the opportunities for economic independence for young Salvationists in contexts of risk, in access to sexual education for Indigenous Bribri/Bahá’í youth, and in the empowerment of female heads of households practicing yoga in marginal urban areas.

Decolonizing narratives in mixed families can be observed in confrontations over abandoning the family religion and imposed sexual orientations, as well as in the negotiations required for re-symbolized rituals. These imply forging agreements to raise children following diverse religious traditions, self-recognition as religious minorities seeking integration without losing differences, and engaging in collective research on the practices, doctrines, rituals, texts and symbols of other religions.

It is no coincidence that the deconstructed domestic logic that nurtures policies of belief management within the family pluriverse is ideal for exchanges of the private and the public, the inside and the outside, and the creation of interstices that can drain internalized colonialism. Belief management policies can seep into the public arena of symbolic struggles and installed dichotomous meanings. The latter are reshaped through experiences that resignify practices and identities such as those explored in both studies, giving rise to what Lugones (2010) considers the infrapolitics of subjectivity in resistance to the coloniality of gender and power.

It is proposed that the deployment of negotiation and confrontation as belief management policies for the public sphere, through secular, intercultural and decolonial education on religious diversity, promotes the pluralization of knowledge and the shared production of active subjectivity without implying the repression of beliefs nor forced conversion. The agency of the subalternized subjects in both studies arises from their belonging to ‘impure communities’ (Lugones, 2010) due to their sex/gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, class, or their choices with regards to belief. They thus all come from what Lugones’ (2010) denominated a ‘fractured locus’:

The fractured locus includes the hierarchical dichotomy that constitutes the subjectification of the colonized. But the locus is fractured by the resistant presence, the active subjectivity of the colonized against the colonial invasion of self in community from the inhabitation of that self. (2010: 743)

The subjects interviewed in both studies creatively (re)create plural belief through the social agency in which each subject fabricates him/herself in a practical fashion. Confrontation allows defense of the principle of autonomy over the imposition of beliefs, while negotiation facilitates the development of relational ways of being, doing and knowing, as Escobar (2012) suggests, although these do not always imply individual emancipation, given that the development of this type of agency also aims to guarantee the stability of mixed families or plural communities. This leads us to agree with Mahmood (2001) that ‘we might think of agency not only as the capacity for progressive change but also, importantly, as the capacity to endure, suffer, and persist’ (2001: 217).

This is the double face from which the colonial wound breathes, and this is how colonized subjects un-mirror their images to be able to mirror themselves, as shown by contrasts in what they do with their faith: homosexuals of evangelical Christian upbringing converted into spiritual seekers; families of religious and ethno-national mixity; drug-addicted Pentecostals and Catholics; Salvationist adolescents at social risk; Indigenous/Bahá’ís growing up in the ‘colonial junction’; and female heads of households practicing yoga in marginal urban areas. The colonial wound also breathes through what faith does for these people, involving them variously in a bricolages of rituals, integration without assimilation, securing food and childcare without paying tithes, opting for non-spiritual forms of detoxification, choosing to work for the salvation of others to save themselves from sexual exploitation, learning that ancestral traditions do not always safeguard sexual and reproductive health, and defying local religious mandates to grow with other women in equality and freedom.

These are the voces bajas (low voices) studied by Bidaseca (2011), as opposed to voces altas, high or hegemonic voices. Their practices, in which both gender and belief are kept in circulation, involve tuning the ear to listen to the daily murmur caused by breathing through the colonial wound. Assuming along with Escobar (2012) that family homes and neighborhoods shelter relations of interconnectivity and interdependence allows us to trace displacements of pluriversalist values from the private sphere to the public one in favor of the radicalization of democracy, arising from the implementation of belief management policies rooted in everyday life and social agency.