Liberation Theology
Liberation Theology
KEY IDEAS, DEBATES, AND REPERCUSSIONS
Liberation theology, or theology of liberation, is among the movements for social change that emerged in the Americas in the 1960s. Born within Christian churches, it upholds an understanding of the Christian faith as demanding an “option for the poor,” that is, a continuous commitment to the self-liberation of the oppressed. From its inception, it has had important ties with grassroots organizations and actions for social change—siding with the victims of socioeconomic oppression and of political and military repression.
Since early on liberation theology attracted the attention of social scientists and policymakers, as its effects both belied scholarly assumptions—for example, religion having a decreasing influence and a predominantly conservative function in the larger society—and raised fears of grassroots opposition to capitalism among the economic, political, and military elites north and south of the Rio Grande.
ROOTS AND DEVELOPMENT
Several factors influenced the emergence of liberation theology. The growing resistance throughout the Americas in the 1960s to economic exploitation, political repression, and official complicity with both is indeed among these. This resistance, partially inspired by the Cuban Revolution (1959), found mounting echoes among urban youth, the poor, students, and intellectuals—including a rising number of church activists and thinkers. These stimulated attempts (including a “theology of revolution,” “Christian left,” and Christian “communitarianism”) to ground the struggle against exploitation and repression in the biblical tradition, especially in Jesus’s actions, words, death, and resurrection—and thus to disprove the claim (shared both by Christian capitalists and Marxist atheists) that the churches’ social role could only be a conservative one. Following suit, churches started not only initiatives for economic development and respect of human rights, but also theological foundations for such initiatives. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the social encyclicals of Popes John XXIII (1963) and Paul VI (1967), as well as the 1968 Second General Conference of Latin American Roman Catholic Bishops, were all particularly influential in that change of direction—particularly through their explicit Christian affirmation of the divine right of all peoples to govern themselves democratically, and to have access to the material goods necessary to satisfy their basic material needs, even through revolutionary social, economic, and political change, if necessary. On the Protestant side, the World Conference on Church and Society in Geneva, sponsored by the World Council of Churches (1966), a follow-up Consultation on Church and Society in São Paulo, Brazil, sponsored by a provisional commission for the Unity of Latin American Evangelicals (1967), and the Third Latin American Evangelical Conference (Buenos Aires, 1969), all contributed to Protestant Christians’ embracing movements for social justice. In both Protestant and Catholic quarters, a growing chorus of voices, official and otherwise, affirmed much more clearly from the 1960s on than in earlier times the Christian obligation to fight for socioeconomic justice, political democracy, human rights, and world peace, especially in defense of the poorer populations. Entwined with these, in the United States, the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the antiwar movement, the United Farm Workers movement, the women’s movement, and the American Indian liberation movement, all contributed to the emergence of a rich diversity of theological reflections from the late 1960s on.
A first digest of some key ideas of a liberation theology, as well as a first Spanish use of the idiom itself, theology of liberation, appeared in the lecture “Hacia una teología de la liberación” (Toward a theology of liberation), delivered in 1968 to a clergy meeting in his native Peru by Roman Catholic priest Gustavo Gutierrez (b. 1923), dubbed “the father of liberation theology” since. About the same time, the former Brazilian Presbyterian pastor Rubem Alves (b. 1933), exiled in Princeton Theological Seminary, used the expression in his dissertation Towards a Theology of Liberation, with ideas converging with Gutierrez’s. In 1969 the African Methodist Episcopal minister/theologian James H. Cone independently finished his book A Black Theology of Liberation, the cornerstone of black liberation theology—deeply inspired by the revolutionary call of the Black Power movement for the black population in the United States to take in its own hands the task of achieving equality, autonomy, and respect “by any means necessary,” as well as by its criticism of the complicity of churches and theologians with white supremacy.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the movement grew in numbers, visibility, and influence across the churches in the Americas. In response, military dictator-ships—in at least ten countries of the Caribbean, Central America, and South America—unleashed violent repression against those linked to liberation theology. Among the hundreds of thousands of lives thus lost, Msgr. Oscar Arnulfo Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, murdered while celebrating mass in a hospital chapel in 1980, was the most remarkable victim of that backlash, becoming a popular saint-martyr symbolizing the Christian commitment to the liberation of the poor. That year, a document outlining the inter-American strategy of the Reagan administration stated: “U.S. foreign policy must begin to counter (not react against) liberation theology as it is utilized in Latin America by the ‘liberation theology’ clergy” (Committee of Santa Fe 1980).
The military repression; the stifling of dissent in Roman Catholicism under Pope John Paul II (1978–2005), with parallel processes in many Protestant churches; the accelerating impoverishment of Latin American peoples under the new global economy; the emergence of fragile democracies in the wake of most military dictatorships; and the growing appeal of Pentecostalism among the Latin American poor stunned and beset liberation theology through the last two decades of the twentieth century.
KEY IDEAS, DEBATES, AND REPERCUSSIONS
For liberation theology God is the God of the poor. God’s self-revelation is first and foremost in, to, and through the poor—not least in the incarnation, birth, words, deeds, persecution, torture, execution, and resurrection of Jesus, as expressed, among others, in Matthew 25: 31–46. Modern poverty is not a result of accidental scarcity (as it might have been in other times and places), but of systemic exploitation by the few at the expense of the many. Poverty is the result of the sin of the powerful, not of the poor: the product of a free human rejection of God’s call for caring for the poor and oppressed. Salvation is, therefore, inseparable from the radical embracing of God’s option for the poor, and thus entailing, among others, a call against capitalist exploitation.
The theology of liberation has often been charged with reducing Jesus to a social revolutionary. Albeit the charge could be deemed unfair, the fact is that such an iconic image was quite pervasive during the first two decades of the history of the movement—more among some “followers” than amid the theologians in the movement proper. As the years went by, such images became less recurrent. As in any emerging movement fighting for deep structural change, liberation theology developed much more what distinguished it from conservative, dominant theologies, than what both might hold in common. Thus, an emphasis on the historical Jesus, on the human facet of the divine incarnation, and on the social dimensions of the life, message, passion, death, and resurrection of the Christ, have been critical in liberation theology. The image of Jesus in this theology is and has been that of someone essentially identified with “the least among us,” whose entire life was (is, and will continue to be) radically revolutionary—and not just marginally or accidentally—and thoroughly world-shattering in terms economical, social, political, ethnic, linguistic, and gender-based.
For liberation theology, theology is only a second moment—a moment of reflection on the actual praxis of faith—and dominant theologies are, all too often, unconscious sacralizations of the self-interested faith praxis of the elites. Theological work requires, therefore, an effort of critical social analysis of the social conditions and interests shaping its course, so that all theology moves toward bearing the good news of God’s liberation for the poor and oppressed. But, as Gutierrez would put it, what matters is not the fate of theology (not even of liberation theology), but the fate of the poor and oppressed.
Possibly, however, the most significant and enduring impact of liberation theology—including in places as distant as Chile, the Philippines, Korea, South Africa, and Los Angeles—has to do with its emphasis on the obligation of theology and theologians to involve themselves in the actual struggles for liberation of the oppressed themselves. One major facet of this emphasis on praxis are the so-called “basic ecclesial communities” (BECs): small gatherings of lay Christian neighbors—with or without a pastor present—to read the Bible in community, reflect on its practical demands for the larger life in community, and organize and mobilize to enact those demands in the real existence of the area. Such BECs sprouted in many places in South America and beyond (notably in Brazil, with estimates of more than 100,000 BECs in the 1980s touching the lives of several million people), turning the message of liberation theology into the actual development of neighborhood clinics, literacy campaigns, independent schools, labor unions, strikes, mass protests, housing projects, and neighborhood cleanups.
The social and political movements leading to the victories of more socially concerned leaders in Latin America from 1979 on (Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, Haiti’s Lavalas, Brazil’s Workers Party, Venezuela’s Chavez, Chile’s Bachelet, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales), are probably inexplicable without factoring in the influence, large or small, of liberation theology and BECs.
These initiatives have placed liberation theology, on the one hand, in dialogue and cooperation with other movements (Christian or not) fighting for social justice, democracy, equality, and peace, and therefore, on the other hand, also in conflict with both the elites—social, economic, political, military, and, often too, religious—of many nations, as well as with those Christians who view their faith from vantage points outside of the liberation of the poor and oppressed.
Liberation theology has been variously critiqued for being more Marxist than Christian; reducing the Christian faith, evangelization, and salvation to this—a worldly, socioeconomic agenda; promoting hatred of the rich, class warfare, and armed revolution; erasing the spiritual dimensions of the Christian faith; turning the church into a political party; and sacralizing the poor while demonizing the wealthy. Liberation theologians, responding more indirectly than directly to such accusations, have nuanced and deepened their reflections, especially from the 1980s on, while inspiring further critical analyses of the complex social and religious dynamics beneath the charges laid against them.
NORTH AMERICAN LINKAGES
The reach, yield, sway, and publicized persecution of Latin American Roman Catholic liberation theology have often created the impression that it is only, or at least mainly, a Latin American and/or Roman Catholic phenomenon. Liberation theology, however, developed simultaneously in North America, too, and, not much later, in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Black liberation theology was the first North American liberation theology. U.S. Hispanic/Latino theologies followed not long after both Black and Latin American liberation theologies. Feminist, pacifist, Native American, Asian American, and Jewish liberation theologies came immediately thereafter, followed by lesbian and gay liberation theologies. Each one has both advanced the critique of the ways in which their own religious tradition has been an unwitting accomplice of oppression, and contributed to reinterpreting such tradition in further solidarity with the victims of oppression and with their struggles for liberation. In the process, several forums have contributed to the dialogue, reciprocal critique, and cross-pollination between these liberation theologies—the most significant being the EATWOT (Ecumenical Association of Third-World Theologians).
At the onset of the twenty-first century, the multiplicity of liberation theologies, as well as the diversity of situations in which they exist, does not allow for any sweeping diagnosis or prognosis. It can be said, however, that it is not possible any longer to preach Christian theology without facing, sooner or later, knowingly or not, the key question raised by liberation theology: What have we done for the poor and oppressed in our midst? Simultaneously, at least in Latin America, it is hardly possible any longer to administer politics (leftist, centrist, or right-wing; civilian or military; governmental or oppositional; democratic or otherwise), without facing the demands of a significant sum of Christians for respect, justice, and peace for all—beginning with the most vulnerable.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Committee of Santa Fe. 1980. A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties. Washington, DC: Council for Inter-American Security.
Cone, James H. 1990. A Black Theology of Liberation. 20th Anniversary ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Gutierrez, Gustavo. 1988. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Trans. and ed. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Levine, Daniel H. 1992. Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Smith, Christian. 1991. The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Otto Maduro