Abstract
In mid-twentieth century Latin America, many disenfranchised groups confronted brutal socio-political regimes that were theologically supported by the Catholic Church. Thus, liberal members of the Vatican officially launched liberation theology, a spiritual commitment to the socio-economic liberation of the poor, in order to reorient Christianity toward social justice. Many leading male liberation theologians encouraged solidarity through a foundation of sameness, in which unity between leading theologians and the poor revolved around shared realities of oppressions on the basis of class, geopolitical region, and religion. Yet, experiences of additional forms of oppression were peripheralized, ultimately limiting the scope of liberation. This multi-book review closely traces liberation theology and its legacy as they relate to the historical movement’s foundation of sameness, concluding with a recommendation as to how and why Marxists of “secular” academia can help transform the foundation of sameness into a foundation of difference.
Nearing the end of the Cold War, much of Latin America’s poor confronted injustices in their physical form. In Central America, civil wars broke out between the poor who demanded justice and the elite who defended the status quo. In various parts of South America, the poor faced severe reprimands from military dictatorships that were heavily supported by the U.S. government. Halfway across the world, conservative members of the Vatican such as “God’s Rottweiler” Joseph Ratzinger, Pope John Paul II, and Benedict XVI turned their attention away from the brutal material realities of the poor towards a seemingly greater war on communism. They portrayed the purportedly modern political entity as ungodly, encouraging the socioeconomically marginalized to move beyond its appeal of the uncritical and seek liberation where it truly counts: in the afterlife (Gutmann, 2016: 38; 41).
Within different divisions of the Vatican, critically observant members understood the Vatican’s conservative reaction as an epistemologically violent one that was tied to a larger systemic effort toward annihilating collective social organization. While certain Latin American systems physically oppressed continent’s poor, the conservative side of the Vatican provided the abstract grounding. Consequently, at the 1968 Medellin Conference of Latin American Bishops, those same members declared a spiritual-social contract consisting of the “preferential option for the poor” (Gutmann, 2016: 39). With this new contract, they called upon Latin American church leaders to help the poor systemically reorient institutions like the church in favor of the impoverished. These liberal members specifically called for ecclesiastical base communities, communities where clergy and local residents connected scripture to structural violence and justice (Gutmann, 2016: 39-40). Women liberation theologians focused on the liberation of Latin America’s poor women, advocating that liberation of the poor could only be radically achieved if theologians (especially the male ones) actively illuminated and helped dismantle hegemonic power structures beyond class and region.
Yet, just as quickly as liberation theology sparked in Latin America, so too did it fizzle. The movement became historically short-lived largely because its most powerful leaders encouraged mobilization on the foundation of sameness. Forms of oppression that resided outside of a positionality resembling that of the Vatican’s liberal Latin American members were neglected. More specifically, ecclesiastical base communities privileged reading literacy, and the unique hardships of poor women were often ignored. This article turns a critical lens on liberation theology’s enduring legacy by tracing its lines of descendants through the review of the first four books listed above, each book framed as a unique descendant of liberation theology that perpetuates and or/transcends liberation theology’s foundation of sameness. The fifth book highlights the limitations of ascribing Christian traditions such as evangelicalism to the legacy of liberation theology. I conclude with my own recommendation as to how the foundation of sameness can be transformed into a foundation of difference. I specifically address Marxist scholars of “secular” academia, recommending they take theology seriously because such intellectual endeavors can create a bridge between “secular” and theological approaches in the collective overcoming of alienation. 1
Beginning with A Grammar of Justice: The Legacy of Ignacio Ellacuria, it is no mere coincidence that the work was published in 2014, the same year that marked 25 years since the mass murder of Jesuit members of the University of Central America [UCA] in El Salvador, including UCA President, Father Ignacio Ellacuria. As co-editor Kevin F. Burke explains, “. . .this book itself attempts to be but one more small act of remembrance. Written in dialogue with the philosophical and theological vision of Ignacio Ellacuria, it seeks to continue and expand his profound theoretical praxis” (Matthew Ashley, Burke, and Cardenal, 2014: XV). The contributors of the work not only wanted to commemorate Ellacuria’s unwavering commitment to liberating the Salvadorian poor from brutal political forces, but also elaborate upon his theoretical praxis, a “grammar of justice” which fiercely opposed postmodern apathy.
As a survivor of the UCA massacre, church historian and co-editor Rodolfo Cardenal, S.J., underscores the material grounding of Ellacuria’s theoretical praxis: “Ellacuria does not begin with books as traditional theologies do but with a theology that springs from life itself” (Matthew Ashley, Burke, and Cardenal, 2014: 147). During the mid to late twentieth century, while religious entities like the Vatican prioritized liberation in the abstract sense, Ellacuria recognized this Hegelian thesis as an attempt to alienate the Central American poor from making their Garden of Eden into material fruition. As Brazilian philosopher Francisco de Aquino Júnior illuminates, Ellacuria came to this conclusion in part by critically engaging with the writings of Spanish philosopher, Xavier Zubibri, who pointed out that classic philosophy involves a process of “unification” rather than correctly acknowledging “human sensibility and intellection. . .they constitute, in their intrinsic and formal unity, one single act of apprehension” (Matthew Ashley, Burke, and Cardenal, 2014: 90). In the context of liberation theology, the poor as God’s chosen people is not a process of unifying an already established ideal of paradise in the afterlife with a material grounding. This dialectic exists as a “one single act of apprehension” through a material grounding. The poor are and have been God’s chosen people, not merely will be. Ellacuria attempted to help much of the poor overcome this seeming separation of the material and ideal by developing a praxis based on personal experience with local Christian communities that molded “a new way of being church” (Matthew Ashley, Burke, and Cardenal, 2014: 147). Contributors like Cardenal and de Aquino Júnior accentuate the material foundation of Ellacuria’s praxis in order to encourage Latin American theologians to support the poor by advancing the material fruition of ideal paradise, rather than succumb to the reactionary nature of postmodernism that merely rejects modern theory as a potential epistemological site of liberation.
With extensive knowledge about Ellacuria and Ignatian theology, 2 co-editors Burke and Matthew Ashley, S.J. specify how Latin American theologians can help the poor overcome alienation of their own divinely designated position. By illuminating the struggles of the poor as a history that inextricably connects past and present, they can help transform contemporary liberatory efforts from an isolated struggle to that of a grander unfolding of God’s will. According to Burke, witnesses like Ellacuria 3 form a great dialectical chain that extends across space and time (Matthew Ashley, 2014: xiv). While Ellacuria’s discourse was grounded in the specific socio-political conditions of El Salvador during his lifetime, both his surrounding conditions and own discourse relate to the socioeconomic conditions and liberatory efforts of twenty-first century El Salvador, such as liberation from brutal penitentiary and corrupt judicial activities (U.S. Embassy, 2014). As Ashley states in the conclusion, “The ‘greater’ of God’s glory is discerned only by catching sight of a ‘greater’ in history” (Ashley, Burke, and Cardenal, 2014: 261).
The way in which the co-editors work together to unfold the complexity of Ellacuria’s historical material grounding resembles the official start of liberation theology, in which the liberal members of the Vatican advanced the “preferential option for the poor” (Gutmann and Lesser, 2016: 39). Unfortunately, A Grammar of Justice also resembles the demise of liberation theology by sustaining a patriarchal framework of liberation. As the table of contents and contributors section readily indicate, all of the contributors are men. Whether intentional or not, excluding women severely limits the scope of liberation. Rather than amplify their voices and subsequently help channel the vast power of the poor granted by God, the great chain of witnessing narrows down to the supposed supremacy of Latin American men and their liberatory efforts on the basis of class and region.
Within the same year A Grammar of Justice was published, so too was Witnessing: Prophecy, Politics, and Wisdom, as “this volume is inspired by the twenty-fifth anniversary of the martyrdom of the Jesuit community in El Salvador” (Bingemer and Casarella, 2014: back cover). Both works critically observe witnessing as a generative site of theological wisdom that stems from the radical adaptation of modern theory. Yet, Witnessing stands as its own unique intervention. The volume’s broader framework and inclusion of female scholarship encourage a more collective approach toward liberation, revitalizing the transformative power of liberation theology that was quickly squandered at its historic start.
In Witnessing, various scholars reflect on the testimonies of liberation theologians like Ellacuria, Archbishop Oscar Romero, and Reverand Jon Sobrino, expanding their meanings as they continue to relate to the modern world. With a keen interest in the developing method of liberation theology, Catholic theologian Paulo Fernando Carneiro de Andrade importantly clarifies that the liberatory power in witnessing is not that it illuminates reality itself, but rather critically examines reality (Bingemer and Casarella, 2014: 77). The poor as God’s chosen people are not divinely designated to the role of totally realizing God’s design of reality. Rather, they express their memories of injustice, which activates the history of the poor in the present tense and accompanies the present moment in solidarity and toward liberation. This clarification about witnessing is indispensable because it avoids misinterpreting the dialectical nature of witnessing as an all-knowing structuralist view of reality, the epistemological posit of many modern theories. In liberation theology, witnesses cannot and do not care to attain a God-like view of reality. Being God’s humble servants, they share testimony with the collective aim to re-affirm the poor’s divine position as God’s chosen people, granted grace for liberation on Earth. In the words of Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, “Memory is not history, if by the latter we understand a simple relating of past events. . .Memory is the present of the past. . .This is a crucial insight, which makes of history a theophany. . .” (Bingemer and Casarella, 2014: 137).
The chapters written by female scholars accentuate that women have been indispensable in liberation efforts because they radically move such efforts beyond the epistemological confines of modern theory and postmodernism apathy. With an intellectual focus on systematic theology and mysticism, editor Maria Calar Bingemer considers witnessing as “mysticism with open eyes,” meaning that becoming intimate with the mystery of God is not merely about engaging with Scripture and institutional tradition. Witnessing generates one’s own testimony about experiencing God and transforms word (the abstract) into flesh (the material). “The experience of union with God characteristic of mysticism is far from being a grace-filled realization of the delights and wonders of the contemplation of the eternal mysteries. It is, primarily, a sending into the world and the assumption of responsibility in relation to others” (Bingemer and Casarella, 2014: 9). Like Carneioro de Anande, Bingemer clarifies that the poor’s role is not to unravel God’s design of reality. Instead, mysticism becomes open-eyed when embracing the liminality between the ambiguity of discourse and the concreteness of collective action in the tangible world. In relation to liberation theology, if many leading liberation theologians would have considered this kind of mysticism, it would have opened their eyes when it came to the oppression of the most vulnerable poor and helped to achieve greater liberation.
Two years after the publication of A Grammar of Justice and Witnessing, Global Latin America: Into the Twenty-First Century was published for students and educators in Latin American studies. Like the aforementioned scholarship, legacy is an important theme in Global Latin America; more specifically, Latin America’s global legacy through some of the region’s leading figures. As U.S.-based anthropologists and historians of Latin America, editors Matthew Gutmann and Jeffrey Lesser trace the popular iconography of Argentine Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, concluding that Guevara’s global presence represents “Global Latin America:” the global diffusion of Latin America’s rich geopolitical tapestry by adapting such tapestry to local conditions. Many additional authors continue examining Global Latin America through the lens of leading figures, such as writer Kiyoshi Konno and manga artist Chie Shimano who depict how many modern-day youth resonate with the images of Che.
However, Global Latin America is not always an eclectic site of revolutionary resistance and empowerment. In the second chapter of Global Latin America, medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes and historian of Latin American religion Jennifer Scheper Hughes trace how Pope Francis’s “neutral” stance on global politics stemmed from liberation theologies and the Vatican’s patriarchal foundation, ultimately revealing that Global Latin America can be an insidious agent of colonial hegemony. According to the scholarly dynamic duo, both liberation theology and the Vatican shared a larger enemy in a wider war: women liberation theologians of Latin America.
Less recognized was the central role of Latin American women theologians. . .[they] identified a lacuna in the failure of progressive theologians to recognize and acknowledge the suffering of women, including those who were designated as “sinners” and “indecent” because they were single mothers. . .However, liberation theology’s greatest threat to papal authority was its empowerment of women as theologians and at the grassroots level as community leaders, catechists, and pastoral counselors and representatives of the new church (Gutmann and Lesser, 2016: 40-41).
Latin American women theologians not only illuminated the Vatican’s anachronistic theology as the theoretical underpinning of right-wing military regimes (Gutmann and Lesser, 2016: 40-41) but undermined “progressive” male liberation theologians and their way of mobilizing Latin America’s poor through the foundation of sameness related to class, region, and gender. Latin American women theologians such as Marcella Althaus-Reid, who describes “indecent theology,” 4 reveal that this foundation of sameness is weak, as it allows certain structural forms of oppression to continue harming Latin America’s most vulnerable. In the case of Pope Francis, rather than listen to “the wisdom of strong women to help him navigate the other half of the world—shall we call it the invisible 50 percent. . .,” he metaphorically sits between “the legacy of the old colonist, patriarchal church” (Gutmann and Lesser, 2016: 55; 52) and what liberation theology theoretically stands for. Consequently, Pope Francis allows the same kind of injustices to continue oppressing Latin America’s extremely impoverished, rather than amplify the voices of Latin American female theologians, some of the most dignified representations of Global Latin America leading liberation efforts of the poor.
In 2018, Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries was published for transdisciplinary scholars, revealing how certain Puerto Rican Pentecostal drug ministries resolve certain faults of liberation theology while perpetuating others. As an anthropologist with a sophisticated approach to ethnography, Helena Hansen intimately explores Pentecostalism as it is rooted in the brutal material realities of “ex-addicts” and becomes the driving force of self-transformation. According to Hansen, the ministers actively confront the material reality that lacking socioeconomic capital leads to relentless marginalization, then reframe it as a tool of spiritual empowerment. For the male members, one such tool they embrace is that of their own personal testimony, consequently reframing their sociopolitical position in Latin America. Unlike liberation theology, which may privilege (biblical) literacy and emphasizes the past, Pentecostal male “ex-addicts” focus on the imminent presence of God through direct personal contact with the Holy Spirit. During this contact, they each embrace this “ultimate authority” (Hansen, 2018: 20) as spiritual renewal which exceeds the bounds of human social constructs and becomes in tune with the divine. In the words of Hansen, “The details of how people imagine and interpret their alternatives matter. . .addicts are the unlikely instruments through which the Holy Spirit redeems an apocalyptic reality, placing addicts at the center, rather than the margins of world events” (2018: 6-7).
While Hansen conducted ethnographic research on Puerto Rican Pentecostal drug ministries, she unexpectedly learned that at the foundation of their Pentecostal conversion lies a reinvented patriarchy. “When I started fieldwork in Puerto Rico. . .I did not anticipate. . .how central redefined gender roles and negotiation of one’s position within one’s family were to ex-addicts’ newfound identities as Christians” (Hansen, 2018: 92). While male members are encouraged to explore their revitalized role of provider for themselves and familial(-like) relations, this role depends on women being rigidly placed within the role of victim. At one of the ministries, Hansen specifically notes how incredibly difficult this is for recovering female addicts who possess a history of sex work and/or abuse from men (2018: 113). Unlike many male members who can focus on their individual present and future during contact with the Holy Spirit, the role of victim on these female members makes it extremely hard for them to shed their past. But patriarchy is not a unique oppressive structure within the ministries. Hansen’s time with the women of Victor Academy reminded her that “. . .addiction treatment is profoundly gendered because addiction is profoundly gendered” (2018: 114). Within the context of liberation theology’s legacy, the ministries’ re-inscription of patriarchy demonstrates that liberation efforts still revolve around a concept of sameness centered on those who are male. Anyone who is different is an outcast, consequently allowing many oppressive structures to indisputably continue.
The most recently published scholarship, The Gospel in Latin America: Historical Studies in Evangelicalism and the Global South (2022), adamantly reminds readers to continually recognize evangelicalism (including Pentecostalism) as an organically growing presence that precedes global situations of the mid-twentieth century, such as the official start of liberation theology. With an array of contributors to the edited work, including Peruvian theologian Véronique Lecaros and political scientist Matt Marostica, this collection encourages religious studies scholars and theologians of Latin American Christianity to continuously transcend the simple notion that Latin American evangelicalism was the mere result of Western imperialism, instead honoring it as an internal diffusion of the Gospel through complex socio-historical processes. For instance, in chapter seven, Pentecostal studies scholar Joseph Florez historicizes the spread of Pentecostalism through the personal conversions of early twentieth century Chilean people. Florez begins with the “master narrative” (Bebbington, 2022: 143) that Chilean Pentecostalism was primarily import-based, then proceeds to peripheralize such a false narrative by examining the personal conversions of Chile’s socio-economically marginalized, the genuine catalysts of Pentecostalism’s diffusion in Chile. Examining personal experiences based on their accounts in the periodicals Chile Evangelico and Chile Pentecostal, Florez determines that their evangelical outreach traveled “outward” throughout their own region, and consequently, in Pentecostalism’s greater global setting. “. . .[B]elievers’ letters and statements made in periodicals portrayed a very nuanced process in which local religious contexts played a crucial role in shaping Pentecostal religious worldviews” (Bebbington, 2022: 143; 160). It is vital to accentuate Latin American evangelicalism’s internal growth as it precedes liberation theology because failing to do so imposes a colonialist historiography on Latin America, collapsing the region into one simple narrative and chronology. Latin American history and the region itself have always been so much more complex than that.
It is here that it is necessary to recognize evangelicalism’s spread not only at the start of liberation theology but before the initiation of that movement. Along these lines, I recognize Western academia’s historical upbringing through theology and maintain that Marxist scholars in “secular” academia should not minimize the importance of this genesis especially on the pompous ground that such an epistemological tradition is archaic. To do so is to be totally uncritical, denying both the “historical” aspect and “materialism” in historical materialism. The study of God has not merely been shaped by religious institutions. It persists as acts of resistance. Scholars genuinely interested in the collective overcoming of alienation must take theology seriously, handling this kind of knowledge production with as much care and rigor as the discourse of fellow Marxist scholars in “secular” academia. Through this academic exercise, a naive boundary between strict objectivity and subjectivity collapses at the same time that distinct epistemological standpoints can become transparent.
With my recommendation to take theology seriously, I intentionally use the broad term “theology” as a way of calling attention to the larger power dynamic between institutionalized religion and liberation theology. Residing at the center of power is institutionalized religion, like the Vatican during the late Cold War era in which conservative members advanced a Eurocentric world order. At the periphery is liberation theology, such as the local participants of ecclesiastical base communities. The two entities are never isolated, but rather exist in dialectic relation. 5 Those in the center do not and cannot generate their own musings about the mysteries of God. Instead, they actively rely on the knowledge production of the periphery in order to demarcate an epistemological boundary, as otherwise the center would not exist as the center. While the poor of Central and South America developed praxes of communism as means of survival, the conservative body of the Vatican condemned these praxes and subsequently the livelihood of the poor by fixating on the afterlife. Establishing an epistemological boundary, those in the center actively rely on those in the periphery to uphold the established power dynamic, such as the liberal members of the Vatican who perpetuated certain logics of eurocentrism in the official start of liberation theology. When the periphery centralizes knowledge productions that undermine the authority of the center, those in the center proactively attempt to suppress the voices of the periphery. Returning to Pope Francis, during the pandemic, he declared chisme (gossip) “a plague worse than COVID,” ignoring the plight of the most vulnerable to Coronavirus while simultaneously trying to dismantle a primary mode of communication between Latin America’s disenfranchised (De Anda, 2020). 6 As Marxist scholars take theology seriously, they must remain cognizant of theology as a larger cycle of power because failing to do so dangerously dwindles into a one-dimensional view of liberation efforts: nihilism stemming from a hyperfixation on the center, or an illusion of progress stemming from a hyperfixation on the periphery.
With the unwavering acknowledgement that theology still exists as a social structure of domination and resistance, holding space for this kind of complexity in a postcolonial world can radically reorient social structures in which no center nor periphery exist, but rather a vast network of an eclectic yet thriving human condition. To go from possibility to the realization of liberation requires a praxis of grace, meaning that in many capacities, domination can only be dismantled through mutual sharing of truths rather than a single person or group being all-knowing of the nuances of power at a structural and practical level. What I am advocating as a form of radical liberation is not new. Within the mere history of Western academia, many women scholars of color have advocated for this kind of liberation effort. Since the official start of liberation theology, many female liberation theologians have been studying the diverse experiences of poor Latin American women as they connect to the virginal yet enigmatic figure, La Virgen de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe). Succeeding the Chicano movement, Chicana and Indigenous Xicana scholars popularized las mariposas monarca (the monarch butterflies) and their migration as the tangible imagination of a world without borders. Black women intellectuals have been advancing intersectionality long before its academic popularity and continue to do so through their lived realities beyond the confines of Western academia. Openly reflecting on her life with breast cancer, the late black poet Audre Lorde expresses, “Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone. . .” (2020: 132).