Colombia’s Secular State Is Set to Be Tested Under Abelardo de la Espriella
Colombia’s secular state was never complete. That has to be the starting point for an analysis of the religious undertones of Abelardo de la Espriella’s inauguration last Friday in Cali. The Constitution of 1991 dismantled Colombia’s confessional state, which had existed since Rafael Nuñez and Miguel Antonio Caro wrote God into the preamble of the 1886 Constitution as “the supreme source of all authority.”
The new constitution replaced that framework with one built on pluralism, freedom of cults, and state neutrality. But it did not create a secular state in the strict sense. It created an aconfessional one.
Ley 133 of 1994, the statutory law that operationalized the new religious freedom framework, went a step further than the constitution required in one direction: It explicitly declared that the Colombian state “is not atheist, agnostic, or indifferent to religious sentiment,” authorized public-law agreements between the state and churches, and recognized a special legal status for religious institutions that secular organizations such as humanist groups, philosophical associations, scientific bodies do not enjoy.
Columnist Hernando Gomez Buendia from El Espectador put it precisely this week: Colombia did not move from a Catholic state to a secular state. It moved from a Catholic state to a Christian state. The monopoly was broken. The privilege was not. That context matters enormously for interpreting what the religious undertones of De la Espriella’s inauguration on Aug. 7 had, and what this could mean for the next four years.
The religious undertones of Abelardo de la Espriella’s inauguration
The inauguration was not a religious ceremony with political elements. It was a political ceremony in which the religious elements were overwhelming. A rabbi spoke. An evangelical pastor led the assembly in prayer. A Catholic priest followed. A monsignor followed him. In the corner of the stage, the Virgin of Fatima watched over the proceedings in a country whose constitution guarantees that no person shall be forced to receive religious instruction in state institutions.
De la Espriella’s first words as president, before any policy, before any promise to the people he had just sworn to represent, were directed at Jesus Christ. He closed his inaugural address with ¡Firmes por la patria, que viva Cristo Rey!”
The constitutionalist Juan Manuel Charry was asked by Colombian radio station La FM whether any of this violated the secular state. He argued that it did not. His reasoning is technically defensible: The state’s obligation is institutional neutrality, not the suppression of personal faith, and the participation of religious leaders in a ceremony does not by itself constitute an imposition of religion on citizens.
He is right as far as he goes. What he does not address — and what the formal constitutional debate consistently misses — is the cumulative signal these choices send.
The week before the inauguration, De la Espriella organized a spiritual retreat for his incoming cabinet. Ministers-to-be knelt and prayed. They watched Bible passages animated with artificial intelligence.
The president declared that “to build a great nation, you must put God at the center of every decision.” That phrase is not a personal expression of faith. It is a governing philosophy.
And when the person who holds executive power over a state that funds public education, administers welfare programs, regulates civil rights, and controls the armed forces announces that God will be at the center of every decision, the distinction between personal faith and institutional imposition begins to dissolve.
The cabinet is where the lines blur further
The most concrete answer to the question of whether this government poses a challenge to Colombia as a secular state is not found in the inauguration ceremony.
It is found in the ministerial appointments. Viviane Morales, the new Minister of Education, is the same person who, a decade ago, led the campaign against a sexual education booklet in schools, warning that the peace process included a plan for “homosexualizing” education, a claim that was false.
She is, not incidentally, the member of Congress who authored Law 133 of 1994, the very law that transformed Colombia from a Catholic state into what Gomez Buendia calls a Christian state. She now controls the curriculum.
Paola Holguin, the new Minister of Culture, was a member of the pro-life congressional caucus and posted this week that “it is impossible to govern the world righteously without God and the Bible” — attributing the quote, incorrectly, to George Washington. She now controls cultural policy.
Alejandro Ordoñez, appointed as ambassador to the Organization of American States, or OAS, is a Lefebvrist, a faction of ultra-conservative Catholicism that was recently excommunicated by Pope Leon XIV. He spent his years as Attorney General pursuing a campaign against abortion access and against the legal recognition of same-sex relationships.
He now represents Colombia before the Inter-American human rights system, the system that has sanctioned El Salvador for denying abortion access.
Jaime Andres Beltran, the new minister of Housing, is a pastor who, as mayor of Bucaramanga, organized monthly liturgies in municipal auditoriums. He now administers a ministry. Individually, each of these appointments can be defended within the constitutional framework, and with their own personal résumés.
State neutrality obligation runs to institutions, and no law prevents a minister from being religious. Collectively, however, they constitute a government whose stated governing philosophy is theological and whose most sensitive policy portfolios, education, culture, and international human rights representation, are held by people who have made the reversal of secular advances a career priority.
What the secular state is actually for in Colombia
The secular state established in 1991 was not primarily a philosophical position. It was a peace instrument. The Constituent Assembly that produced the 1991 Constitution was itself the product of a crisis: A state at war with drug cartels, guerrillas, and paramilitaries, fractured by decades of political exclusion that the confessional architecture of 1886 had reinforced.
The assembly was deliberately inclusive. It included demobilized guerrillas, indigenous leaders, evangelical representatives, and progressive liberals, because the architects of the new constitution understood that a state which required Catholic orthodoxy as the price of political legitimacy could not sustain a durable national pact.
Secularism was chosen not because religion was bad but because the official preference for one religion had proven structurally incompatible with a pluralistic republic in Colombia.
The Constitutional Court subsequently built on this foundation through jurisprudence that is worth understanding precisely because De la Espriella’s government will almost certainly test it.
In Sentencia C-350 of 1994, the Court struck down the official consecration of Colombia to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, establishing three principles that remain binding: That the secular state is an implicit constitutional requirement even without explicit textual declaration; that state neutrality prohibits official preference for any faith regardless of how many citizens share it; and that the distinction between official capacity and private conviction is legally meaningful — public officials retain the right to practice their faith privately, but cannot perform acts of religious consecration or preference in their official capacity.
It has been a few days since De la Espriella’s government began, and the third principle is already under pressure. When a president organizes a pre-inauguration spiritual retreat for his entire cabinet, declares that God will be at the center of every government decision, and then selects ministers based in significant part on their religious-political alignment, the question of where private conviction ends and official action begins becomes genuinely hard to answer.
The structural risk
The historian Ana Maria Bidegain, interviewed by El Pais this week, identified the governing ideology here precisely: Not religion as a source of wisdom or moral reflection, but religion as ritual, as a form of power validation.
“They understand the religious as something magical, which performs miracles,” she said. This is distinct from Catholic social doctrine or reformed theological governance. It is closer to what she calls “national Christianity,” the fusion of nationalist politics and evangelical aesthetic that has accompanied Trump, Milei, and now De la Espriella.
The risk is not that De la Espriella will formally repeal the 1991 Constitution or revert to the 1886 confessional model. He won’t, and he has explicitly pledged to respect institutional independence and the separation of powers.
The risk is more gradual: A slow reorientation of public institutions, the education curriculum, the cultural agenda, civil service appointments, regulatory posture toward reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, in a direction that uses the permissive spaces in Colombia’s aconfessional framework to do what a formally confessional state would do, without the constitutional vulnerability of being formally confessional.
Gomez Buendia’s point is the sharpest analytical frame for this: Colombia didn’t abolish confessionalism; it atomized it. One church with state influence became thousands of churches capable of electoral mobilization, policy negotiation, and institutional placement.
Law 133, which gave them legal recognition and tax status, also gave them structural access to the state. De la Espriella did not invent this. He is the most direct beneficiary of it yet.
Why the secular state matters for Colombia
The secular state matters not because religion is wrong but because official preference for any religion creates the precise structural condition that the architects of 1991 were trying to escape: A public sphere in which citizenship is implicitly conditional on religious affiliation, in which nonbelievers, agnostics, practitioners of minority faiths, and people whose lives do not conform to the dominant theological view find themselves at a structural disadvantage and are seen as less than.
Colombia has 3.8 million people who left poverty during the Petro government. Many of them are evangelical. Many are Catholic. Some are neither. The secular state is the guarantee that the school their children attend, the public hospital that treats them, and the civil servant who processes their paperwork do not operate according to the theological preferences of whoever happens to hold executive power at the moment.
That guarantee is, right now, softer than it has been at any point since 1991. The Constitutional Court retains the authority to enforce it, and it will almost certainly be called upon to do so before this government’s four years are complete. Whether it holds will be perhaps the most important institutional question of the De la Espriella era.
The 1991 Constitution was a peace pact. The secular state was one of its core guarantees. It remains to be seen if it will stay that way.