Blood Entanglements
Evangelicals and Gangs in El Salvador
By Stephen Offutt
Oxford, 248 pages, $29.95
My life as a missionary came to a sudden halt when unknown assailants slipped death threats under my door at Peace House, in Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala. The threats didn’t arrive because I was brave and noble, proclaiming the gospel, risking martyrdom. Rather, the cruel work of gangs and their acts of extortion were finally landing. Violence had swirled around me for four years, but this was now a direct risk. My bishop in Canada pulled me home.
Gangs in Central America — especially in the “northern triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — have muscled hard into rings of power in the past few decades. They move in the shadows most often, but at other times act flagrantly, running — or at least manipulating — the state apparatus. During the past decade, Guatemala and El Salvador have competed for the ignoble world record of the greatest number of murders per capita. In the same period — the past 35 years or so — the number of Salvadorans attending evangelical churches has also grown rapidly.
In Blood Entanglements, Dr. Stephen Offutt, associate professor of development studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, has written a precise analysis of the relationship between illegal networks and the growing evangelical movement. Offutt identifies, correctly, that gangs and most evangelicals occupy the same geography and class identity. Both gangs and most of the small, multiplying evangelical congregations thrive in poor neighborhoods, and have overlapping relationships and worldviews. Gangs and evangelicals maintain relationships, sometimes fraught and uneasy, or resigned, but at other times, hopeful or even apparently mutually beneficial.
Offutt posits that rather than the “haven thesis,” which claims that gangs and evangelicals exist in opposition, the on-the-ground reality is much more complex and intertwined. Fluid relations within families and neighborhoods, and even in individual lives, means that many Salvadorans move in their lifetime, or intergenerationally, between gangs and church.
El Salvador is a small Central American country just about the size of Massachusetts, with a 2023 population of 6.5 million. Decades of civil war and centuries of crushing poverty have forced millions of Salvadorans to seek safety abroad with, as of 2021, almost 2.5 million of them settling in the United States. Gangs gained traction in the 1980s in El Salvador, alongside the intensification of the civil war. Many scholars trace the increasingly violent element of gang involvement and activity to the massive deportations of Salvadorans who had been involved in gang life in Los Angeles. With these deportees back at home in the small villages of the Salvadoran countryside, or the chaotic capital city, San Salvador, without the means, land, education, or job opportunities to build a life even of basic survival, gang activity exploded. By 2020 there were an estimated 60,000 Salvadorans in gangs, according to Human Rights Watch.
Non-mainline evangelical churches, in the meantime, have seen a growth parallel to that of the gangs. Offutt reports that the first non-Roman Catholic missionary landed in El Salvador as early as 1893. But for almost a century, evangelicals saw little growth. By 1980 the estimated evangelical population of El Salvador was still only 5 percent. Twelve years later. 15 percent of Salvadorans identified as evangelical. But by 2008, the numbers had mushroomed to a little more than a third of the population, and by 2020, more than half of impoverished community members identified as belonging to an evangelical congregation, according to Offutt.
Offutt’s study focuses on a narrow question: what is the precise relationship between these seemingly opposed groups? His thorough study, settled into one community, Las Palmas, a coastal city of 90,000 inhabitants, offers precise details and helpful insight into the internal workings within these parallel worlds. Particularly revealing is his description of how the worldviews of gang members and evangelicals essentially mirror each other. They share a cosmology that marks clear forces of good and evil, of heaven and hell, of God and Satan, of demons and angels, in permanent struggle. Describing the universe in this way echoes the experiential day-to-day life of most impoverished Salvadorans, who have little access to traditional legitimate power, whether in church or state.
But while Offutt’s study is thorough, precise, and focused, it is also limited. The critical question of why the number of gangs and evangelical congregations have exploded in the past four decades remains unasked — and therefore unanswered. Although he notes that the exponential growth beginning in 1980 — the year of the notorious assassinations of Archbishop Oscar Romero and four American nuns, the year the civil war began in earnest — he doesn’t offer any analysis of why this might be. The diminishment of the Catholic Church, and the rise of other religious movements, and the gangs, seems to have happened in a vacuum. There is a gap here, a missing piece of history.
Beginning in the 1960s and growing tremendously through the 1970s, particularly in the impoverished countries of Latin America, a new movement was arising in Catholicism: liberation theology. El Salvador was a particularly vibrant part of this new church experiment, as ordinary Catholic Christians began to claim more power, within the church and beyond. The reaction of the political and economic structures — the oligarchy that had run the country for centuries — was swift and brutal. The massive killing of directly targeted Roman Catholics in El Salvador (and even more fiercely in Guatemala, where I practiced my ministry) is a story still to be fully recognized and told.
This state and oligarchy-sponsored violence shattered the whole country — according to a United Nations Truth Commission, more than 75,000 people died, while thousands more disappeared without a trace, and 1 million more were displaced. The full story of the rise of gangs and evangelicals cannot be told without taking into account the profound trauma of this historic violence. Peace accords, signed in 1992, brought some relief to the acute crisis, but never resolved the centuries-long framework of economic injustice, and ineffective state apparatus.
Impoverished Salvadorans have carried an unjust burden, the harvest of historic violence and greed, for decades, if not centuries. If we follow the trail of this evil, we might find that it leads far beyond the decisions by individual “bad” men, or the unsettling acts in small though growing bands of desperate individuals. The roots of evil are deeply embedded in unjust international power structures. If we dare to dig deep enough, we will find that the roots of the greatest waves of bloodshed are sunk into our own soil, in the North, in the dark rooms of Cold War powers that used proxy wars — in Central America and beyond — to exert their dominion.
The other problem with Blood Entanglements is one that all scholars face when they commit their research to the printed page — their lifelong work becomes immediately outdated. Offutt — through no fault of his own — tells a story that has already whisked on downstream. He mentions, briefly, the rise of the law-and-order political leader Nayib Bukele. Bukele came to office in 2019, after serving as mayor of San Salvador. He entered negotiations with the powerful gangs, as had other presidents before him. A truce was signed, and then shattered when homicides spiked in March 2022.
The Bukele government responded by declaring a state of emergency. Without due process, arrests swept across the country, gathering up people with obvious gang affinities, but also individuals with disabilities, LGBT people, anti-mining activists, opponents of all sorts, and ordinary people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Within a year, more than 65,000 individuals had been jailed. Though severely critiqued by international human rights organizations, Bukele’s actions have proved immensely popular.
One of the strongest opponents to the recent governmental collapse of civil rights has been Cristosal, an organization founded with support from the Episcopal Church, both in El Salvador and the United States. Cristosal has maintained a consistent witness to community struggles for justice and democracy. Cristosal’s director, Noah Bullock, warns: “In El Salvador, both obscure negotiations with gangs and iron-fisted security policies have failed to address gang violence in a sustainable manner.”
Blood Entanglements offers a deep dive into the story of the intertwined gang-evangelical relationships in the 2010s. For a fuller understanding of the historic causes of the decisions, actions, and shifting identities of impoverished Salvadorans, readers will need to augment their study with readings that offer a wider analysis. What happens in this small country — which boasts of being the only country named after Our Savior — mirrors the twists and struggles of our wider world.
