Colombia Legal Clash Over Religion in De la Espriella’s Institutional Politics
The relationship between religion and power is opening another front of conflict in Colombia, this time between the government of Abelardo De la Espriella and the judiciary. A Bogota judge ordered the president to issue a public apology, ruling that he violated the state’s religious neutrality during his inauguration.
The decision puts one of the most visible characteristics of the new government under judicial scrutiny: the recurring presence of Christian symbols, rhetoric, and practices in spaces linked to the exercise of public power.
The clash is not limited to a presidential ceremony. Even before taking office, De la Espriella has presented his faith—discovered a few years ago after he publicly identified as an atheist—as a central element of his political project.
The episode now before the courts also coincides with another judicial decision that struck down the so-called “Bible Day” in Chia, a municipality north of Bogota. Although the two cases are unrelated, they share the same underlying question: how far can religious expression go when it directly involves a state institution?
Colombia Legal Clash Over Religion in De la Espriella’s Institutional Politics
The fifth labor judge of the Bogota Circuit Court concluded that De la Espriella violated religious neutrality during his inauguration ceremony, held in Cali on August 7. The event included a period of “invocation and praise” involving two Catholic priests, an evangelical pastor, and a rabbi.
In the judge’s view, the presence of religious representatives and the incorporation of an explicitly religious moment into an official ceremony associated the state with particular expressions of faith.
The order requires the president to issue a public apology on September 30, through radio and television, and instructs him to refrain in the future from public actions that imply a preference for the Catholic Church or any other faith.
Congress President Honorio Henriquez must also apologize for allowing religious expression during the ceremony. The decision, however, can still be appealed before the Bogota Superior Court and could eventually reach the Constitutional Court.
The constitutional basis for the ruling is clear. Colombia has been a secular state since the 1991 Constitution and guarantees religious freedom, but that freedom does not authorize the state to identify with a particular faith.
The Constitutional Court has established that authorities must maintain a neutral and impartial position toward different beliefs and cannot engage in official acts of adherence to a particular religion.
God at the center of government
The controversy takes on greater significance because of the repeated religious gestures surrounding the new president. During his campaign, De la Espriella made references to God and Christianity a regular part of his political rhetoric. In most of his speeches at public rallies, for example, he promised to “remove gender ideology from schools and bring God back.”
As president-elect, he gathered his cabinet for a spiritual retreat held just days before his inauguration and stated that “to build a great nation, you have to put God at the center of every decision.” Images of the entire cabinet on the floor or raising their arms in prayer drew considerable attention in Colombia, both from supporters and critics.
A similar example is the prayer gathering called by the De la Espriella government today in downtown Bogota for the victims of the earthquake on August 10, which has so far claimed 331 lives.
The legal issue, according to constitutional law experts consulted by this publication, is not whether the president may have a religion, pray, or publicly express his personal beliefs. Constitutional case law itself protects those freedoms.
“The issue changes when those expressions are linked to official acts or the institutional functioning of the state,” says Alejo Medina, an attorney specializing in constitutional law. The Court, he argues, “has held that secularism does not mean hostility toward religion, but rather separation, equality, and neutrality toward different faiths.”
That is why the image of the new Cabinet praying alongside the president at one of their first official meetings was particularly striking. For government critics, the scene symbolized the risk of transferring a personal religious conviction into the functioning of state institutions.
For the administration, by contrast, it is a legitimate expression of faith that neither replaces the Constitution nor turns Colombia into a confessional state. Presidential spokeswoman Carolina Gomez defended precisely that position, arguing that no one was replacing the Constitution with the Bible.
Chia and the limits of the secular state
The debate has a second setting, although it is independent of the presidential case. The Administrative Court of Cundinamarca upheld the annulment of the agreement that had designated September 30 as “Bible Day” in Chia. The measure had been approved by the Municipal Council in 2013 and, according to the court, violated the principles of secularism, neutrality, equality, and religious pluralism.
The decision shows that the conflict between religion and institutions is not exclusive to the new government. In Colombia, courts have for years been defining the boundaries of the role religious denominations can play in public affairs.
The dispute now pitting De la Espriella against the judiciary is, in reality, another expression of that tension: a deeply religious society that, at the same time, constitutionally decided that its state belongs to no religion.
What, according to legal experts, the new president must now do is “determine how far he can take his own faith without voluntarily or involuntarily turning it into a characteristic of institutional policy.” And the judiciary has already begun to draw that line.