Kant Sucks!

Reconciled to a secularized world come of age, liberation theologians ushered in a de-privatized religion as a socially energizing force and made a singular American contribution to change in the theo-political conversation (10).

This beautifully written, succinct and substantive opening is typical of the rest of the book.  The World Come of Ageis a delight to read and engage.  In the rest of this review, I will try to unpack Barger’s statement.

Liberation theology is presented here as a “trans-American conversation” (4) mainly among professional scholar- and educator-activists.  Their common foe was the Cold War liberal theological and political consensus.  Barger’s title “world come of age” was lifted from one of the liberationists’ progenitors, the martyred German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to suggest that an upheaval in religious consciousness was underway.  This is the most comprehensive examination of liberation theology to date and certainly the most broadly and deeply contextualized.  Certainly, familiar names dominate the narrative—including the Catholic revolutionary Gustavo Gutierrez, the feminist theologians Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Black Theology founder James Cone—although the addition of fresh voices like radical educator Paulo Freire are most welcome. What is really new here is the scope of the conversation.  Barger traces liberation theology back to debates between Martin Luther and Thomas Muntzer. Liberationists were not simply mad at liberals such as Jacques Maritain and Reinhold Niebuhr (her takedown of the latter is devastating); they were really pissed at Kant.  The sheer breadth of coverage makes The World Come of Agean important addition to American religious history but also to studies of what Barger terms the “hemispheric New Left” (7).

“De-privatized” might be the most important word in this work.  It gets at all the ways that liberationists were trying to subvert modernity. Modernity (ala Kant) is here synonymous with dualism—the segregation of the religious from the secular, the private from the public, the theological from the political.  To make the world safe for self-determination for minorities, women, and the global poor, liberationist scholars believed they had also to secure freedom from the intellectual past.  Their attacks on liberal theological and political establishments throughout the Americas were part of a much more profound philosophical assault on binary ways of thinking and living—the most disastrous being the conviction that salvation was to be found only in the hereafter.

But “de-privatized” also points to Barger’s two greatest achievements in this study.  First, she effectively transcends the historiographical wall between political theology and intellectual history.  She does justice to many of the technical (read esoteric) aspects of theological scholarship while keeping her narrative accessible to those without a seminary education.  Her casting of religion as a public as well as private intellectual force was demanded by her subjects, as they, too, trafficked in the main streams of Western philosophy and not just theology.  Perhaps more importantly, Barger also overcomes the divide between story and storyteller.  At several points, she speaks with and alongside the liberationists and not merely for them or as their archivist.  In no way is that to suggest that Barger is making up material or that she has a sourcing problem (her notes and bibliography sections are nearly one hundred pages long!).  Rather, Barger knows the liberationists so well that she can become one of them when needed.  It is a wonderful thing to behold.

As is often the case, debates arise in trying to evaluate the “contribution” of any intellectual and political movement.  Barger seems to insist (I’m not 100% sure) that liberation theology was a positive development within the Americas and for the world, but not necessarily for reasons that one might think.  Certainly Barger recognizes the great value of the “theologies”—Black, feminist, (Latin American) liberation theology proper, and so on—in permanently revolutionizing Western Christianity’s white hetero-male orientation, but she doesn’t see that as liberation theology’s chief legacy.  She opens her book with Pope Francis’s apparent turn toward Gutierrez and the global poor, yet she still does not present much hope for a revival of liberation theology proper.  Instead, Barger finds liberationists’ greatest contribution in the realm of intellectual history.

Simply put, liberationists’ detonation of all the prior charges laid against the liberal consensus forever exploded the sacred-secular binary and meant that the political would be the brave new world of collective, this-worldly salvation.  Ironically, that seismic shift affected the hemispheric right more than the left.  While liberationists continued to fragment after their historic meeting in Detroit in 1975, hamstrung by “deep divisions” that made it “all but impossible” to create common institutions (10), Catholic and Protestant conservatives mobilized around and over the left-liberal blast zone, promising to put America back together again.  While one would think that evangelicals more so than the Niebuhrs were liberationists’ worst enemies—Billy Graham and his followers, after all, were that real purveyors of the “heart religion” (42-46) that Barger and her subjects despised—actually Barger sees the religious right (and the prosperity gospel) as the fulfillment of liberation theology’s secular political faith.  As she concludes:

Liberation theology acted as a catalyst for the secularization and de-privatization of religion.  By forwarding the idea that the construction of the world mattered, and advancing the possibility of locating divine actions in history, they underwrote the entry of militant religious claims, left and right, into the political process.  Breaking down the difference between this world and the next, and locating transcendence in the immanent, liberation theology opened up the political arena to divine initiative.  In a liberal society, turning the focus from private values to socially situated ones necessarily meant the embrace of the political.  Compelled into a political choice, religious faith, as liberationists argued, could not escape ideology (263).

To the extent that Barger is right about liberation theology aiding the overthrow of the universal by the particular, it was ground zero of the culture wars.  I thus have a hard time seeing liberation theology as a wholly welcome contribution to American and world thought, and that’s not just because my “side” has been losing of late.  To be sure, no one wants to go back to the time when minorities, women, and the LGBTQ community had to sit behind Harry Emerson Fosdick at Riverside Church, but it is hard to see how even the liberationists themselves would be fully satisfied with their achievement.  All of them were universalists.  Reuther and Daly, like their fellow women’s liberationists, believed their cause was THE ONLY cause, the endgame of all the others.  Cone’s Black theology contained the charge to white audiences to “get Black” by entering and transforming “the Ghetto”—by which he meant any place of human misery and exploitation.  This universalism-within-particularism continues to this day (Barger quotes BLM which claims “when Black people get free, everybody gets free” 258).  So the pressing question seems to be how to move beyond the liberation theology of the culture wars in order to fulfill liberation theology’s competing commitments to self-determination and solidarity.

When I began this review, I thought I would be advancing the old Marxist critique of identity politics. Perhaps I still am.  But I’m also more convinced of the wisdom of keeping church and state separate.  Hopefully that feeling also conveys how significant I think this book should be to readers inside but also outside of American religious history.