Entre o reino de Deus e o reino do carvão: a teologia da solidariedade fiel de Richard Charles Smith nos EUA e no Brasil

Abstract

This work, inserted in the line of research Christianity and History in Latin America, produced an analysis of Richard C. Smith, a Presbyterian U. S. missionary who carried out ecclesiastical work in social rights in the U.S. and in Brazil. The analysis was carried out based on postulates of theology, history and social sciences, with overlaps which deal with biography and theological production. Based on the sociological alerts about the importance of studies of religious praxis, the research went beyond these aspects including emphasis of social relationships. Besides this, it was based on the presuppositions of a history which problematizes reality and does not emphasize the political feats of institutions or the biographies of only the famous. Therefore, it is an investigation which does not only narrate compiled sources but problematizes them, being interested in that which is little known. The central issue, which emphasized the practice and the written theological production of Richard C. Smith, sought to analyze this theological and religious content from a social perspective, but above all, also from a theological perspective through the analytical tools of other knowledges, without neglecting the transcendent. It is about a theology which asks about the here and now, since it is presupposed to overlap into history, confusing itself with the latter. Being historical and serving an analysis of history proper, it serves to analyze religious content. This legacy of the theology which analyzes reality is foreseen in various theological branches, above all in Latin American Theology. In this sense the analysis of the project based on the above referred and described postulates, revealed that the religious praxis of Richard C. Smith and his theological production do justice to a logic foreseen in the so called North American Social Gospel born in the 19th century and intensified in the first half of the 20th century. It also revealed a personalistic character of a theology which gained a title: the Faithful Solidarity Theology. It is a theology which opts for the coal miners and their world, not just of work but of daily living. It is a theology which repels ethnic segregation. It is a theology which criticizes a church which becomes a bourgeois ghetto repelling the worker while at the same time criticizing a communist union which usurps the place of the church. It is a theology which transcends boundaries and brings a connotation of liberation to the miner and his people approaching itself to the perspective of Latin American Theology, even though it is prior to the latter. It is a theology which presupposes that the Kingdom of God manifests itself socially against the problems which dehumanize the worker and his people.