Spirituality in the Service of Social Justice

In providing an intellectual history of liberation theology, Lilian Calles Barger operates between and around conventional categories.  The book’s title, The World Come of Age, borrows words from a theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who accepted the Enlightenment premise about the power of human reason to gain mastery over aspects of the world traditionally attributed to divine mystery.  Yet while “reconciled to a secularized world” (10), he also remained loyal to “a religion of God’s transcendent presence in the immanent suffering of the world” (5).  Liberationists applied this traditional theological belief with a worldly approach to religion, in support of reformist and radical political change.  While some recent religious studies have followed this type of path with focus on the material and bodily aspects of religious belief, Barger evaluates the intellectual life of liberation theology. With still more boundary crossing, the centerpiece of this intellectual history is not the top-down thoughts of intellectuals influencing their followers, but instead “the suppressed truth emerging from below.”  Liberationists looked squarely at the political and social power dynamics of the mid-twentieth century from the point of view of the religious ideas and feelings of “the outcast, the suffering, and the oppressed” (5).

Yet in their radical critique, the liberation theology of “black people, the poor, women, and other excluded groups” did not support the secular rejection of religion; instead, they developed new spiritualities, even within their own religious traditions, to generate a “profound change in … understanding of the divine relationship to the world” (5).  Barger’s story of liberation theology, especially in North and South America, becomes a microcosm of the worldwide challenges, cresting in the 1960s, to centuries-old business as usual in social and individual relations.  In evaluating the emergence, fate, and enduring significance of liberation theology, Barger integrates religious and intellectual history on a transnational stage, and sheds light on the revolution in consciousness and in rights awareness for the powerless that disrupted widely assumed hierarchies and challenged conventional left-right debates. Liberationists cut across boundaries of denominations, institutions, and religion-secular divides to wake churches and political leaders with the voice of the voiceless.

1-Institutional Awakening:

A major voice for liberation theology in Latin America was Paulo Freire, the Brazilian philosopher who advocated conscientization, or consciousness raising, inPedagogy of the Oppressed(1970), with education designed to raise awareness of the oppression, generally simply assumed, that weighed on the powerless.  Conventional education had been providing instruction generally for learning knowledge and skills in order to win places within existing structures.  This, Freire maintained, helped a fortunate few, but without raising questions about the hierarchical structural norms of society, so this form of education simply reproduced oppression.  Education to raise consciousness, shined a light on the structures that kept the oppressed in their subordinated places.  Then, with the powerless gaining greater awareness of their conditions, their newly refined reason and stores of knowledge could be used to develop their own political consciousness for taking action to break the shackles of their oppression and improve their well-being.

Freire contributed to the ideology of liberation by pointing to the way that, as Barger explains, “the subordinated were bound to the systems of oppression because they believed them,” as reinforced by the lessons of both conventional education and traditional religion that simply assumed conventional power structures.  A radical amplification of John Dewey’s call for more democratic and participatory educational practices, Freire called for a critical education that would provide the first step toward liberation, by cutting “the umbilical cord of magic and myth that binds [the powerless] to the world of oppression” (76).

In the 1960s, the Catholic Latin American Bishops Conference enlisted conscientizationas a means for pastoral education in lay-led base ecclesiastical communities.  Motivated in part by the increasing shortage of priests, and by an urge to forestall gains by evangelical Protestants and Marxists who openly defied Catholicism, the Bishops sought to renew the faith of the poor and encourage lay commitment to the church. The Catholic strategy to acknowledge and incorporate aspects of their opposition, with use of methods skirting authority structures as pioneered by Protestants and with endorsement of versions of Marxist messages that “poverty was not the will of God but the result of exploitation” (77), resulted in encouragement of revolutionary changes and debates within their own church over liberation theology.

Even these bold steps, however, had roots in Catholic tradition.  While Protestants traditionally emphasize the centrality of the Bible to connect fallen humanity with original Christianity, Catholics surely also respect biblical revelation, but also recognize the operation of the divine operating in the world.  Catholics express this orientation through their reliance on the sacraments as tangible worldly vehicles of spiritual messages.  Liberation theology extends that sacramental orientation, emphasizing history as part of divine process, in particular part of the process of human liberation.  The Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, arguing for the “interlocking domains” of state and church, also lent support to this turn toward “lay people’s political involvement” with support for liberal Catholic social action movements earlier in the twentieth century, a moderate precursor to liberation theology (42).

2-Intellectual Awakening

The liberationist turn also had roots in the intellectual transformation, most sharply expressed since the late nineteenth century, described by Arthur Lovejoy as The Revolt Against Dualism(1930).  The philosophical reaction against the spectator theory of knowledge brought awareness of the interaction of objective and subjective aspects of knowing.  Pragmatists turned from the abstractions of dualism to bring awareness of the interaction of ideas and lived experience, which enabled, as William James explained in Varieties of Religious Experience(1902), a view of religion as each person’s “total reaction upon life” (quoted in Barger, 96).  This way of thinking about belief prepared the way for liberationists to apply this non-dualist thinking to a view of “religion as ideology.  While traditional theology emphasized the hallowed objective truth of religious traditions, liberation theologians emphasized the human hand in their construction, and with that awareness, they were emboldened to challenge the prevalent “ideological role of religion as a conserving force” (105). Similarly, because of the significance of subjective factors in shaping traditional truths, they accepted, with shades of James’s argument about “the sentiment[s in our] rationalit[ies]” (“The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879), Essays in Philosophy, in The Works of William James, Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), that “the theologian always … held a set of presuppositions about the world before encountering the biblical text,” and they frankly read the Bible for its messages of liberation (102).

Another theological parallel to the turn toward non-dual philosophy was an erosion of the line between the transcendent and immanent dimensions of religious experience.  Transcendent religion focuses on the divine and human hopes for salvation beyond this world; immanent religion emphasizes worldly concerns often with support of moral causes and political reform.  While there is no total separation of these religious orientations, liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, contrasted their ideas with the transcendental commitments of earlier religious affiliations; the liberationists “did not separate the temporal from the spiritual.”  Instead of only attending to “the pristine doctrine of spiritual salvation,” they maintained “concerns for this world” (28).  That emphasis did not mean rejection of other-worldly dimensions, but “a relocated transcendence” so that “human history was the theater in which we encounter God.”  By looking for “transcendence within the immanent,” the liberationists recognized, as did secular liberals and radicals, the corruptions and alienations of the world, but like religious traditionalists, they searched for the leaven of spiritual possibilities.  And so they maintained that even bleak conditions contained “latent salvation” (72).

The push for liberation from oppression surely recalls the Enlightenment-era democratic revolutions and secular calls for human rights. However, those progressive impulses were connected to the “conservative propositional objectivism” of rational inquiries, especially in science, with their results expected to produce “epistemological certainty” (36).  Just as James Turner, in Without God, Without Creed(1985), critiqued modern religion for linking its fate to modern standards of rational certainty, liberationists sought to uncouple their beliefs and their commitments from those human standards.  Maintain faith in transcendent truths, liberation theologians argued, but put that faith to work on worldly issues—otherworldly means to worldly ends.  And besides, these advocates for the oppressed observed, the intellectual standards of enlightened rationality were often among the tools of oppression by the ruling classes, as reinforced by the “historical concession of [traditional] theology to modern politics” (40).  Rather than settle for the objective answers of rational discourse, liberationists listened for the muffled voices of the untutored; rather than abide by the assumptions of existing power relations, they sought to give power to the powerless.

Barger recognizes the paradigm shift embedded in liberationist ideas.  While traditional theology approached social questions, such as poverty, with a “gospel of individualism,” promoting the personal kindness of charity for individuals in need, liberation theology brought an “awareness of the deeply embedded nature of social practices” that placed individuals in poverty (7).  The paradigm shift also reached into approaches to personal aspects of life and private needs.  In place of the tradition of largely ignoring the identity issues with race and gender, liberationists viewed these as still more worldly vehicles for comprehending the operations of the spirit.  American theologian James Cone declared that “freedom means the affirmation of blackness” (73) and feminists called for a “woman-centered theology” (64). Liberationist also debated over the priority of each identity.  For example, Cone raised concerns that the liberation of affluent women could be a “distraction from the real issue of race,” while theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether called women the “’first … proletariat’” (31) and identified patriarchal domination as “the basis for all other forms of oppression” (33-34).

3-Political Awakening

The teaching in base communities and thinking beyond objective and otherworldly norms meant that, for liberationists, “theological interpretations should be based on real-world engagement” (28). And by the middle of the twentieth century, the real world of political relations in the Americas meant recognition of United States domination of Latin America, ruling classes in those southern domains who reinforced those power relations, and the assumed power of whites and males including in the US.  These power dynamics, Barger points out, have roots in the “irony of America,” North and South.  With European contact, the American hemisphere became a setting for the liberal promise of European progressive hopes; the Americas were, in theory, “the land of the future,” as philosopher Georg Hegel hoped (51).  Historian Henry Steele Commager, in The Empire of Reason(1977) popularized the notion that “Europe imagined and America realized the Enlightenment.”  But as Barger points out, “nation builders” in this hemisphere “reproduced oppression rather than utopia,” especially for Africans and indigenous people” (52).

After hundreds of years of oppressive colonial control, recent centuries have brought a new form of colonialism without territorial mastery but with economic and cultural influence from the metropole parts of the world, especially the US.  At its worst, this new form of colonial power brought to practice shades of George Fitzhugh’s ruthless view, in his pro-slavery tract, Cannibals All!(1857), of “slaves without masters,” with continued flow of profits and power to the wealthy, but without the pesky responsibilities of on-the-ground governance. Liberationists confronted this neo-colonial form of imperialism directly, seeking to “decolonize the minds” of the subject people of the Americas, to raise awareness of the parallel colonized status of the Third World and of non-whites in the US (77 and 7). That liberation of mind would be a first step toward unshackling the powerless from living conditions in subordination to political powers in their own lands, and from the economic power of global trade centers.  And liberation theologians critiqued religious powers that did not challenge these dynamics of worldly control.

Barger shows awareness of the transnational connections of religious calls for liberation.  She shows that Martin Luther King, Junior’s well-known turn to ways that poverty amplifies racism, and his critique of the Vietnam War, grew from his awareness of “world society stricken by poverty” (14).  His connection of the US Civil Rights Movement to the “world house” was emphasized by many liberationists, including activist Julius Lester who connected “the Indians of Peru, the miner in Bolivia, the African and the freedom fighters of Vietnam” because each of these powerless people is fighting for “the right to govern his own life” (14 and 18).  In a similar spirit, Malcolm X directly equated the conditions and struggles of African Americans in the US with the contemporary surge of decolonization in Africa. With still more overt militancy, Che Guevara presented the Cuban Revolution as a fight for the “dispossessed of the world” (25).  Barger also presents the activist and Democratic Party leader Jesse Jackson “in dialogue with the religious and political experiences of the world community, particularly the Third World,” in the words of Civil Rights veteran Benjamin Chavis (257-58).

Lilian Barger has performed a great service to historians of race and gender, of politics and religion, and of North and South America, by placing religious debates within intellectual history.  In the pages of her book, we can find not only the ways that theologians advocating liberation interacted with the secular New Left, but also reminders about the cultural functions of the intellectual life. Thinking carefully about the human condition contributes not only storehouses of knowledge, refined methods of inquiry, and sharpened ratiocination; intellectuals also provide to their cultures, welcome or not, the questioning of assumptions.  That was the depth of liberal theology’s power when it began to challenge complacency across the political spectrum, directed not only to conservatives, but also to the more-generous liberals—liberationists demanded that liberalism live up to its own ideals.  The radical call for liberation was a demand for authenticity, for pragmatic implementation of longstanding ideals and commitments, for belief with action.

Barger’s book also reveals that assumptions about the death of liberation theology are greatly exaggerated.  Her coverage of the prevalent Catholic leaders of the movement serves as a reminder that for all of its issues, ranging from its immersion in medieval ways to its sex-abuse scandals, Catholicism is the only major institution which can both appeal to a range of classes, genders, races, and ethnicities, and also serve as a counterforce to the ideology of market globalization.  And as Barger points out, the liberationists, even when not overtly successful, were able to “transform the assumptions of the cultural conversation” (260).  Barger fully recognizes the opposition of conservative theologians, such as Richard Neuhaus, who insisted that “the kingdom of God remain[s] a transcendent reality”; from the perspective of that “different plane of experience,” liberation theology is ideology, which is “no replacement for theology” (226).  Despite this resistance, liberation gained a persistent hearing; for example, theologian John Coleman interpreted this radical movement in terms of mainstream ideas about “civil religion,” with a vision that reached out to “disparate groups seeking social justice” (242-43).

Even conservatives, ranging from anti-abortion activists to charismatic preachers, now reckon with new assumptions that religion is not just a matter of private piety.  Liberation theology, as Barger concludes, effectively “inaugurated … rethinking of the inextricable relationship between politics and religion, “even when the results were not congruent with its goals” (263). And even those liberationist goals, while eclipsed by so many tribal and security worries from conservatives, have surged to life in vital calls for social justice in the Occupy movements, critiques of globalization, indigenous movements, calls for environmental justice, and the Black Lives Matter and Me Too Movements.  And now even the most ancient of Christian churches is led by a Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis, who declares, “I want a Church which is … for the poor.”  Just as New Testament evangelist Paul’s innovation in early Christianity was to define this small sect emerging in Israel as a religion for all, Jews and Gentiles alike, so liberation theology offers a worldview for all the dispossessed around the world.  The liberationist call to live up to our ideals lives on—and struggles on.