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Pope Francis November 14, They were intent on responding with mercy to a crisis that at the time showed no signs of slowing. Liberation theology emerged in Latin America in the s and s, looking to Scripture for the principles and inspiration for freeing people from unjust social situations. And while some proponents of liberation theology made mistakes, others in the Church made blanket condemnations of the theology and even of all Central American Jesuits, he said.
Francis told the Jesuits how he once asked a Central American bishop how the sainthood process was progressing for the assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador. It would be like canonizing Marxism. The possibility of a coalition splintered over this, and the subsequent history of liberation theology is a very splintered history.
We still see that today—there are different groups of oppressed people who are basing their work on some core element of their identity. Though this unifies each group separately, it also alienates each from potential allies.
LCB: Prior to the s, the conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist varieties of American Christianity were very focused on the idea that society could be healed by appealing to the hearts and minds of individuals. The primary concern was eternal salvation. Their politics was individualist, and they did not believe in advocating the type of social reform that had been endorsed by the social gospel. To their minds, individual believers had a moral obligation to help the poor, for instance, but the state did not.
Social justice as a political matter was relegated to the Christian left. But once the liberation theologians had emphasized that theirs was a political vision, bent on radically changing the structure of society via a public Christianity that refused to remain a matter of private life, conservatives began to respond.
Leaders like Carl Henry and Jerry Falwell really changed their positions from the s to the s. They went from emphasizing the soul-saving mission of Christianity to declaring that Christians needed to be an active presence in society, to elect Christian leaders, to advocate for laws based on Christian ethics, etc.
That move—from an individual emphasis to a public policy emphasis—required a theological change within conservative circles. From then on, both the Christian left and right would be very active in pursuing alternative social visions and supporting them with theological reasoning. This was a moment when Christianity broadened out from the church and the home and became a political force on both sides of the spectrum.
For religious conservatives who had a high regard for scripture, that required a new theological justification, not just a political one. Does it have a future? LCB: By the s, it seemed like liberation theology had disappeared. It became sequestered in the academy where it was more or less irrelevant.
But then in we had the situation with Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright , which brought black liberation theology back into discussion, and a few years after that, Pope Francis was elected, which essentially revitalized the Catholic posture toward social issues.
More recently, the election of Donald Trump has galvanized the Christian left, creating a situation in which liberation theology may be relevant once again. Christianity is not monolithic. Many Christians are concerned about social inequality of all sorts—as it affects African Americans, women, poor people, and others—and will respond to a situation in which inequalities are worsening. When things fall apart, the urgency of these causes becomes much more real. So a movement that was considered dead two decades ago now has much more resonance.
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