The Public Sphere as Sacred Space

In our religious histories of the nineteenth century, we often talk about how the cultural construction of private and public spaces gave rise to the particular formulation of religious and social movements. That the public/private dichotomy, which was gendered male/female, worked to suppress women from public life but to promote women’s leadership within the “private” realm. Because religion was often associated with women and child-rearing, the private/public dichotomy served to nurture a number of women’s movements which marked themselves as “religious” awakenings. These included, among other things, abolitionism, women’s rights, and advocacy for poor children.

However, we rarely talk about how, when, and even if this cultural construction of private and public spaces comes to an end. Our histories of the women’s liberation movements of the 1960s are largely social histories (not intellectual histories). Moreover, with a few notable exceptions (like this bookby Dan McKanan), most historical discussions of liberation theology concern class, theology, and citizenship, and never even meet feminist religious histories of the women’s movement. This dearth of cultural theory undergirding twentieth century religious movements has probably been part of the reason that liberation theology and feminist theologies have largely been ignored by US intellectual historians.  How and why did the religiously-infused, “private sphere” transform throughout the twentieth century? How did the religious and private sphere shape new formulations of religious movements?

In her carefully-written intellectual history of liberation theology, Lillian Calles Barger explores just these questions. Her argument rests on the idea that the public/private, political/spiritual binary in Protestant North America allowed religion to be a private experience throughout the nineteenth century. This meant that American Protestants ceded religious authority to the private sector and political authority to the state. The Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, she argues, did not fundamentally change this cultural formulation. Churches expanded their role in public life, but they did not substantially retheorize the relationship between public and private spheres.

It was not until the mid-twentieth century, Barger argues, that church leaders began to substantially reformulate the relationship between religious (private) and political (public) spheres. At first, European and American theologians and philosophers began to challenge this binary in their writings about the poor. They encountered very poor people who were alienated from society and from opportunities for human thriving, and rejected the old suggestion that these people simply needed to hear the gospel. Instead, these early liberation theologians conceived of new theologies of the sacred that declared the alienated, by their very nature, to be the sacred people of god. In rendering the barrios and ghettoes of Latin America and other parts of the world sacred spaces (often by joining these communities themselves), ministers and theologians began to challenge the long-standing assumption that church leaders had no place in politics. These liberation theologians essentially nominated the state (and all of society) as a sacred space. This reconceptualization, Barger argues, opened the door for Catholic and Protestant liberation theologies, including African American and white feminist liberation theologies.

The book offers several important contributions to the field. First and most importantly, it reframes liberation theologies as a trans-national and trans-denominational phenomenon of the mid twentieth century, and not simply the theological outgrowth of a particular set of ministers. This is very important. While both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologies were always connected to earlier thinkers within their own tradition, new energy for reconstructing the state emerged from a variety of forces that cannot be entirely explained in that tradition alone.  After a rich history of twentieth century political philosophy in the US and Europe, Barger argues that the 1960s was a turning point. At last, she writes, “it was possible to imagine a potentially salvific social order—one that had the power of divine-human reconciliation. This theological development… gave the political realm increased urgency” (132).

Second, the book teaches us the effects of liberation theology on modern understandings of both religion and politics. Liberationists christened the public sphere as a religious space and christened the state as one apparatus through which God’s justice could be expressed. As Barger put it, after the flowering of liberation theology, “Modern politics was no longer a place of proximate truth and negotiation but a place to make ultimate claims to justice and the social order” (255). Barger even suggests that liberation theology forestalled the secularization of society. For, by sacralizing political space, liberation theology helped recreate a place for religion in the modern public sphere.

Barger’s book offers historians a much-needed, new theorization of the rise of liberation theology its impact on the reformulated, sacred and secular spheres of the late twentieth century. One wonders, however, about the choice to place the rise of liberation theology in the 1960s (and not the 1930s, or even the 1910s). Surely, it was in the 1960s that liberation theology took hold among significant numbers of religious leaders within African American, feminist and Latin American contexts.

However, other historians have offered compelling accounts of how efforts to render the public sphere a sacred space took place much earlier. Barger could have drawn more attention to this scholarhip. In his Urban Pulpit, Matthew Bowman argues that liberal evangelicals of the 1910s and 1920s conceived of church services among Christians and non-Christians as a “sacramental community.” Their religion rested on the presumption that serving the public good was an expression of their religious faith. In her No Depression in Heaven, Alison Collis Greene argues that Protestants and Catholics turned to the state for help in the Great Depression because their own charities were no longer sufficient to serve the public good. Once again, American Catholic and Protestant religious leaders sacralized the state in the 1930s.

Other accounts illustrate the importance of the papal encyclicals on labor, Rerum Novarum(1891) and Quadraegessimo Anno (1931) in encouraging Americans to entrust the state to help secure a living wage and minimal social welfare. David O’Brien (American Catholics and Social Reform) and Benjamin Masse (Justice for All) have done especially good work on this. Barger sees these encyclicals as vague and ultimately as divisive as they were directive. She emphasizes the ways that Quadraegessimo Annoforced Catholics to “remain apolitical and not beholden to any political party” (135). However, while the encyclicals did discourage turning the social teachings of Christ into a single political party with a simplistic political agenda, Quadraegessimo encouraged Catholics to entrust the state to do justice. Roman Catholics began to do so not only in the United States, through the New Deal, but also within the newly-established social democratic republics in Europe—long before the rise of liberation theology. Quadraegessimo transformed the way many Catholic religious orders behaved vis-à-vis the poor.

Barger may have summarized the distinctions between the early and late twentieth century political theologies too quickly. She writes, “[T]he social Christianity that dominated two-thirds of the century and the post-war political theologies did not cause or necessarily lead to liberation theology but nevertheless provided a useful set of ideas for building a theology of liberation” (132).  One wishes the book did more to explain how and why the liberation theologies of the 1960s offered such a departure from the earlier social teachings of the century. It seems to this reader that there are far more consistencies between the early twentieth century Social Gospels and the liberation theologies of the 1960s than the author indicates. However, perhaps only further research can tease these out.

In the end, the book is a welcome, theoretically-informed complement to the many new social and political histories of religion and politics in the twentieth century. For intellectual historians, it offers a fresh look at how and why the category of religion has shifted with the rise of secularism. But, even for social and cultural historians, the book offers a much-needed and precise roadmap of liberation theologies in the US and around the world.