Liberation Theology

LIBERATION THEOLOGY. In the wake of Vatican Council II (1962–1965), Latin America Catholics began to raise new questions: How should the church relate to the existing extremes of poverty and wealth? What does Christian faith require in Latin America today? Out of this questioning came new pastoral strategies, especially in small, Christian-base communities in villages and barrios. The Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez first spoke of “liberation theology” in 1968. He advised the Latin American Catholic bishops who met in Medellin that year and produced a set of documents that served as a magna carta for a generation of church people in Latin America who sought to create an “option for the poor.”

In contrast to the time-honored methods of proceeding from doctrine to application, liberation theology insisted upon the primacy of praxis: the critical reflection on practice already underway. Out of the suffering and struggle of the poor comes new insight into traditional Christian themes (God, creation, Israel, Jesus Christ, the church), and a critique of injustice (“structural sin”). In seeking to understand society, church people and theologians utilized Marxism, as did many Latin Americans who were serious about social change. Significantly, this theology emerged in the late 1960s, just when novelists and social scientists were expressing a new sense of Latin American identity. The theologians assumed that the present struggles would lead to a new order, a kind of Latin American socialism, although they rarely used the term and did not spell out what it might mean. Before long, some bishops and by the mid-1980s the Vatican explicitly attacked liberation theology, forcing its adherents onto the defensive.

Latin American liberation theology had something in common with the liberal “social gospel” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It had more in common with the Christian Socialism in the circles around Norman Thomas during the 1920s-1940s, especially the currents supporting radical and revolutionary movements in touch with radicalized former missionaries and, in later years, the children of missionaries. Hard hit by McCarthyism, a Christianity of peace and progress expressed by Willard Uphaus and others failed to break through the newer, hard-line consensus represented by former socialist Reinhold Niebuhr, later seen as a godfather of theological neo-conservatism.
By the early to middle 1960s, the scene had changed again. Black theologians in the United States took their inspiration not only from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, but also from the Black Power movement. Likewise, thinkers and activists in Africa and the Caribbean produced their own liberation theologies. So did feminist and LGBT theologians in North America and Europe in later decades. And so did a small but influential current of Jewish progressives including Arthur Waskow, Michael Lerner and Marc Ellis. They sought to renew an old theology of liberation long since displaced by a power-oriented and sometimes an outright conquest narrative. In making a radical critique of the existing social order, these writers were influential if minority currents in theological schools and in some churches, synagogues and (still later) mosques.

Several movements and currents in US churches showed the particular influence of liberation theology. Witness for Peace grew out of a 1983 vigil in northern Nicaragua where the contras were attacking civilians. Thousands of Americans went to Nicaragua through church groups inspired by liberation theology. Likewise, the Sanctuary movement rose out of efforts to protect fleeing Central Americans from deportation. In the same years, the ideas of Liberation Theology found their way into influential liberal, secular publications like The Nation and the Village Voice.

The promise of Liberation Theology as a grand and radical social movement was largely drowned in blood. The armies paid and trained by US government agencies effectively destroyed the armed rebels, and US influence on the national economies ruled out any escape from the commodity basis of national economics and from the appeal of consumerism to the Latin American middle class in particular. Governments here and there attempted to apply the principles of Liberation Theology alongside “indigenism,” that is, respect for the rights and cultures of the indigenous. They achieved electoral victories, then met well-funded opposition, fell back, only to rise again to face the same foes heavily supported by the United States. A small, peaceful cadre of US journalists and scholars faithfully reported these events from Latin America and the Caribbean in Left publications, while the US commercial press, conservative magazines and political lobbying groups in Washington pushed back, insisting that US corporate prerogatives and US “security” offered the only hopes for regional progress.

After 1990, many theologians admitted the need for rethinking while insisting that “Another world is possible” (World Social Forum). In 2007, the Latin American bishops met at Aparecida, Brazil, and produced a book-length set of pastoral guidelines, which the liberation theologians welcomed, particularly in its urging that the church must go out to the poor. The main redactor of the Aparecida document was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, who in 2013 became Pope Francis. Bergoglio had been the superior of the Jesuits in Argentina in the 1970s during the brutal military dictatorship, and as archbishop of Buenos Aires he had spent much of his time with poor people. While not using the term liberation theology and renouncing the armed path to power for the poor, he incorporated its spirit into his vision for the Catholic Church as a whole.

The newer, greatly enlarged American Left emerging after 2010 knew little of this history, but thanks to the Internet had access to levels of information earlier unavailable. Ongoing interest in the region tended more toward economic and social crises, in Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba and elsewhere, and less toward religious issues. The sharp rise of the Latin American far Right, imbued with Protestant fundamentalism and rigidly hostile to environmental concerns or indigenous peoples, attracted new attention on the Left and in liberal publications like The Nation.

Berryman, Phillip. “Liberation Theology: History and Trends,” in David Thomas Orique, O.P, Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, and Virigina Garrard (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Boff, Leonardo. Francis of Rome and Francis of Assisi. A New Springtime in the Church. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014.

Ellis, Marc. Toward a Jewish Theory of Liberation. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2004.

Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Rev. ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 1988.

Lerner, Michael. Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing the Transformation. New York: Putnam, 1994.