Liberation theology

Based on Wikipedia: Liberation theology

In 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero stood at his pulpit in San Salvador and called on Salvadoran soldiers to disobey orders to kill their fellow citizens. The next day, a gunman shot him through the heart while he celebrated Mass. Romero had become one of the most prominent voices of a theological movement that argued something radical: that God takes sides, and that side is with the poor.

This was liberation theology—a reimagining of Christianity that emerged from the slums and peasant villages of Latin America in the 1960s. Its central claim was deceptively simple: the Gospel is not primarily about saving souls for the afterlife, but about liberating the oppressed in the here and now.

The Birth of a Radical Idea

The movement coalesced in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, a gathering of Catholic bishops from 1962 to 1965 that sought to modernize the Church. Pope John XXIII had famously declared his intention to "open the windows" of the Church to let in fresh air. In Latin America, that fresh air carried the smell of poverty.

The region was, by most measures, the most unequal place on Earth. A tiny elite controlled vast estates while millions lived in what can only be described as feudal conditions. The Church had traditionally sided with the powerful—blessing military dictatorships, legitimizing colonial hierarchies, and preaching patience to the poor.

A group of priests and theologians decided this had to change.

In 1971, a Peruvian priest named Gustavo Gutiérrez published "A Theology of Liberation," giving the movement its name. He introduced a phrase that would become its rallying cry: the "preferential option for the poor." This wasn't merely a suggestion to be charitable. It was a theological claim that God's own preference runs toward the marginalized, and that any authentic Christianity must do the same.

The idea drew from an unlikely source: Karl Marx. Liberation theologians borrowed Marx's tools for analyzing society—his focus on economic structures, class conflict, and how systems perpetuate inequality—while rejecting his atheism. They argued you could use Marxist analysis without becoming a Marxist, much as a doctor might use a stethoscope invented by an atheist without abandoning belief in God.

This synthesis proved explosive.

Reading the Bible from Below

Liberation theology didn't just add social concern to traditional Christianity. It proposed reading the entire Bible through a different lens—from the perspective of the oppressed rather than the powerful.

Consider the Exodus story. Traditional readings often spiritualize it: God liberates his people from the slavery of sin. Liberation theologians insisted on the material reality first. God saw actual slaves doing actual backbreaking labor under an actual empire, and God acted to free them. The spiritual meaning flows from the physical liberation, not the other way around.

Or consider the Magnificat, Mary's song in the Gospel of Luke, where she proclaims that God "has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble" and "has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty." Traditional interpretations often treat this as poetry. Liberation theologians read it as policy.

Jesus himself became a different figure in this reading. Not the gentle shepherd of Sunday school illustrations, but a prophet who announced his mission by declaring he had come "to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed." These weren't metaphors. The poor meant the poor. The prisoners meant the prisoners.

Base Communities: Faith in Action

The movement spread not through universities but through something called "base ecclesial communities"—small groups of ordinary people, often illiterate peasants, who gathered to read Scripture together and ask a simple question: What does this mean for our lives?

These communities became something remarkable: spaces where people who had been taught to accept their poverty as God's will began to see it instead as an injustice God wanted them to resist. They organized. They demanded land reform. They confronted military governments. They died in large numbers.

In El Salvador, where Romero was murdered, an estimated 75,000 people were killed during a twelve-year civil war in which the military targeted anyone associated with the Church's social programs. In Guatemala, the numbers were even higher. Brazilian Archbishop Hélder Câmara, who worked in the slums of Recife, captured the movement's spirit with a famous observation: "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."

When asked about armed resistance against oppressive governments, Câmara gave an answer that troubled both the left and the right. It was not his road, he said, not his way of applying the Gospel. But he refused to condemn those who chose it. He would never say that using weapons against an oppressor is immoral or anti-Christian. The situation was too complicated for such easy judgments.

Rome Responds

The Vatican was not pleased.

Pope John Paul II, who had fought communist oppression in his native Poland, saw liberation theology's Marxist influences as a dangerous flirtation with an ideology responsible for millions of deaths. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—later Pope Benedict XVI—led the Vatican's response. In 1984 and 1986, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued instructions warning against the movement's excesses.

The Vatican's critique had several dimensions. First, it accused liberation theology of reducing salvation to political liberation, forgetting that Christ came to save people from sin, not just from economic exploitation. Second, it worried about the violence that could flow from identifying class struggle as central to Christianity. Third, it argued that liberation theologians had been naive about the actual track record of socialist governments.

Several prominent liberation theologians were silenced or disciplined. Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian Franciscan whose books had sold millions of copies, was ordered to stop publishing for a year. Some left the priesthood entirely.

Yet the relationship between Rome and the movement was never simply antagonistic. The Vatican affirmed that the phrase "theology of liberation" was "a thoroughly valid term" and that concern for the poor was essential to Christian faith. The dispute was over methods and emphases, not the basic insight that Christianity requires solidarity with the marginalized.

Beyond Latin America

The movement's influence spread far beyond its birthplace. Its framework—reading faith through the experience of the oppressed—proved adaptable to very different contexts.

In the United States, James Hal Cone developed Black theology, arguing that the God of the Bible identifies with African Americans suffering under racism just as that God identified with Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Cone's prose burned with prophetic fire: "The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God's presence in Jesus Christ, condemning the rich and empowering the poor."

In South Africa, theologians like Allan Boesak and Desmond Tutu applied liberationist principles to the struggle against apartheid—the system of racial segregation and white supremacy that governed the country until 1994. They argued that apartheid was not merely unjust but heretical, a theological error that contradicted the Gospel's message of human equality before God.

In India, Dalit theology emerged among the "untouchables"—people at the bottom of the Hindu caste system who had converted to Christianity. They too found in the Exodus story a mirror of their own experience, and in Jesus's proclamation of freedom to the oppressed a word addressed directly to them.

Palestinian Christian theologians developed their own version, interpreting the Gospel through the experience of displacement and occupation. Naim Ateek, an Anglican priest who founded the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem, argued that Palestinian Christians had a unique perspective on Jesus's message precisely because they lived in the land where he walked and suffered under their own empire.

Even in Ireland, during the Troubles—the decades-long conflict over Northern Ireland's status—a priest named Des Wilson articulated a liberation theology for communities he believed had been systematically failed by both state and church. He defended their right to create alternative institutions: alternative education, alternative welfare, alternative ways of providing security. More controversially, citing Câmara's example, he suggested this might extend to alternative means of defense.

The Most Unlikely Pope

Then something unexpected happened.

In 2013, the cardinals of the Catholic Church elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as Pope Francis—the first pope from the Americas, the first Jesuit pope, and a man shaped by the liberation theology debates even when he kept his distance from the movement's more radical elements.

Francis has not fully embraced liberation theology. But he has rehabilitated some of its central figures, lifted sanctions against disciplined theologians, and made the preferential option for the poor central to his pontificate. His 2015 encyclical "Laudato Si'" extended liberationist analysis to environmental destruction, arguing that the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of the poor flow from the same root: an economic system that treats everything as a commodity.

In 2015, Francis canonized Oscar Romero as a saint.

The Quieter Forms

Not all liberation theologies involve confrontation with military governments. Some address oppression so subtle it becomes invisible.

Deaf liberation theology emerged from the experience of deaf people in hearing churches—communities that technically welcome them but often fail to make worship genuinely accessible. The movement argues that the deaf experience of marginalization within Christianity mirrors other forms of exclusion, and that deaf culture itself offers theological insights unavailable to the hearing majority.

Feminist liberation theology, which developed alongside the Latin American movement, applied the same analytical framework to the oppression of women within church and society. It asked why a faith centered on liberation had so often been used to keep half of humanity in subordinate roles.

The Christian peace movement has drawn heavily on liberationist ideas, arguing that authentic liberation cannot come through violence even against oppressors. This created tension within the broader movement—some liberation theologians defended armed resistance as a last resort, while others insisted that Christ's way excluded such methods entirely.

What Remains

Liberation theology's moment of maximum influence has passed. The military dictatorships it opposed have mostly given way to democracies. The Soviet Union, whose specter haunted debates about the movement's Marxist influences, no longer exists. The base communities still function in many places, but they no longer represent the leading edge of theological innovation.

Yet its core insights have become mainstream in ways its founders might not have anticipated. The idea that theology must be done "from below"—from the perspective of those who suffer—now seems almost obvious in many Christian circles. The critique of economic systems that generate poverty while proclaiming themselves inevitable has, if anything, become more relevant as global inequality has grown.

And the questions it raised refuse to go away. Does God take sides? If the Gospel is good news for the poor, is it therefore bad news for the rich? Can Christians use the tools of social analysis developed by atheists? When does resistance to injustice become an obligation rather than merely an option?

Perhaps the movement's most lasting contribution was also its simplest: the insistence that how we treat the most vulnerable reveals what we actually believe about God. "The option for the poor," as church law now states it, "is simply the idea that the Christian faithful are obliged to promote social justice and, mindful of the precept of the Lord, to assist the poor."

This sounds unremarkable until you remember how many Christians it has gotten killed.