Liberation is God’s intention. Liberation from all the spiritual, structural, and ideological shackles which bind and oppress -- is the promise of God’s salvation in history. The God of the Bible is about the creation of a new peoplehood who begin to experience the reconciliation, the justice, the healing, the wholeness, the fellowship that God wills to restore to men and women and to the entire creation. If liberation is so close to the heart and purpose of God, liberation must clearly be on the agenda of the people of God.
In addressing the question of liberation, the church faces a double danger. First, there is the constant tendency in the churches to withdraw to the private religiosity that spiritualizes liberation into personal piety, removes the gospel message from its concrete historical situation, and retreats into the contradictory religious experience that seems to deny the world while being totally conformed to its dominant values, structures, and ideological assumptions.
The other danger is to reduce the meaning of liberation to a particular political option, to equate it with movements and systems, and to replace one set of idols with another.
Both of these dangers are clearly evident in the present discussions and controversies surrounding the emergence of “liberation theology,” a movement born out of the experience of oppression especially in Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World. This is the subject of this issue of Sojourners.
This new way of “doing theology” has put forward a clear and prophetic challenge to the capitalist captivity of the churches in the rich nations, as Wes points out in his editorial. In unmasking the idolatries of North American and European theology, however, it must be said that liberation theologians run the danger of establishing new idolatries and falling into new ideological captivities which may, ultimately, be as difficult to escape as the ones which presently bind the life and paralyze the witness of the affluent churches.
The familiar piety of American evangelicalism has been shaken to its foundations in recent times. Harsh revelations come by way of such events as the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and Watergate and have uncovered the racism, violence, and economic greed at the heart of the American spirit and system. Religion that was merely private and not public seemed empty after such shattering experiences. A gospel given solely for the sake of our eternal salvation and not for the sake of the world seemed painfully inadequate. The old evangelical advice to keep your personal life morally upright and trust the government and the economy for the rest was no longer enough.
It was the trust in the legitimacy of the system that gave rise to the political and economic conformity which has bankrupted evangelical ethics. Belief in the system is always required of those who seek a place in it. So, as established evangelical leaders and institutions have struggled to extricate themselves from the cultural backwaters of fundamentalism and carve out for themselves a place of cultural and intellectual respectability, they had had to pay the price of success. Evangelicalism has become rich, fat, patriotic, and very comfortable with the present order of things.
It is therefore difficult to grant the integrity of evangelical critiques of liberation theology from an evangelical theology which has spent much of its energy justifying the privilege of the powerful and the poverty of the poor. It is very hard to accept the scathing attacks on the violence of liberation movements from evangelicals who have defended every American military, political, and commercial aggression for decades. Denunciations of the abuses of socialism ring quite hollow when being offered by the affluent and loyal beneficiaries of American capitalism, clinging to a system that is morally dead and ought to die, justifying a way of structuring the world that can only be preserved by the use of the superior firepower of the rich against the poor. Clearly, the proponents of liberation theology have more to say to evangelicals than most evangelicals have to say to them.
More liberal brands of American religion have been advocating social reform for some time, almost to the point of suggesting that the gospel is intended to change election results, laws, and institutional policies more than to change people’s lives. Social action agencies have sought to persuade the government to do a better job, tried hard to make the system work, and, most importantly, advised us on how to make our Christianity more politically realistic. The unspoken hope seems to be that our reforms, programs, agencies, and institutional pressure shall overcome.
Here too, the legitimacy of the system has been an article of faith and a reason for trust. Liberal religion and liberal capitalism have enjoyed a close friendship and mutually advantageous alliance for years, both financially and ideologically. The desires for cultural respectability and political recognition have taken their toll in this segment of the church as well.
In particular, the influence of the “Christian realism” formulations in liberal theological ethics have resulted in a far too eager willingness to meet the system on its own terms. The efforts to develop a “responsible theology of power” have predominated over the desire to bring the presence of the kingdom into the midst of current historical realities with explosive and disruptive power.
Realpolitik has come to replace prophetic witness as religious social activists have been willing to operate within the structural realities and official parameters of public policy rather than to openly challenge basic assumptions. The results have been similar to the evangelical bankruptcy -- a paralyzing conformity, a numbing affluence, and a prophetic impotence.
Much of this is changing now, and the emergence of liberation theology is part of this change. From both evangelical and liberal religion, many are openly challenging the church’s misplaced trust in the system itself. But what happens when Christians cease to believe in the basic values and structures of their society and culture and rather repudiate them?
Chances are that many will begin to look for another system in which to place their trust, another ideological explanation of things that is more worthy of their allegiance. This transferring of trust from one system to another, this shifting of faith from one ideological consensus to another, is common in the churches. It has been a persistent practice ever since the time when Emperor Constantine wedded the church to the Roman regime and thereby converted the church to the world.
The identification of the church with the regime, either with the established regime or with the new regime that is seeking to replace the old, is Constantinianism. It has manifested itself in many different forms and circumstances. As more Christians become influenced by liberation theology, finding themselves increasingly rejecting the values and institutions of capitalism, they will also be drawn to the Marxist analysis and praxis that is so central to the movement.
That more Christians will come to view the world through Marxist eyes is therefore predictable. It will even be predictable among the so-called “young evangelicals” who, for the most part, have a zeal for social change that is not yet matched by a developed socioeconomic analysis that will cause them to see the impossibility of making capitalism work for justice and peace.
Now that the “new socialist society” is replacing the capitalist system in the minds of many as the hope for the future, growing numbers of Christians will join the movement and seek to provide a convincing religious rationale and justification for what is defined as historically inevitable. They will join for many of the same reasons that their predecessors put their faith in capitalism, when, at its inception, it too seemed to be the hope of the future.
The reasons for the new Christian alliance with Marxism (which is much further advanced in Europe and elsewhere than here) will be understandable: an acute sense of political injustice, a sharpened social analysis which perceives the essential corruption of the present system, and a compassion for those who suffer from the existing order of things.
Unfortunately, it has been the conformity to the inevitabilities of history that has been such a common and debilitating failing in the history of the church. The distinctive and decisive witness to the Word of God, and the uniquely crucial role that can be played by the gathered community of God’s people, can become obscured or completely lost in that process of conformity.
There is another possibility. Those who study the biblical witness seriously will discover that their alienation from the present system can be understood as the normal existence for the people of God. They will find that biblical politics are invariably alien to the politics of the established regime and will also question the politics of the new regime that any revolution will eventually establish for itself. They will see that to break free from one system only through an allegiance to another is no break at all.
Ideology does not ultimately liberate but rather captivates, and no idolatry can ever deliver liberation from itself. We begin to understand that we have been programmed for idolatry, for putting our trust in systems, governments, revolutions, declarations of independence, and new socialist orders.
To place our faith solely and completely in the efficacy of the Word of God, to hope in the gospel alone, is to establish an eternal revolutionary posture in the world which unceasingly and in every circumstance perpetually seeks justice, liberation, and peace, never being satisfied to rest false hopes in the powers and idols and systems of the world that continually claim to be our salvation.
Biblical politics take, as their starting point, the manner of God in Jesus Christ. Biblical politics thus exemplify the political authority of the Incarnation. Jesus rejected the political realism of the Sadducees and the revolutionary violence of the Zealots out of their mutual subservience to the politics of power, which is common characteristic of both established regimes and the revolutionary forces which seek to replace them. The subordination of persons to causes and ideological necessities has always been alien to the gospel.
The new order which Jesus called the kingdom of God created a new peoplehood centered around a new way of living more than a new system or political program. That new way of living, and its radical meaning in relationship to money, power, race, violence, and our relationships to one another is intended to bring revolution to any society and bring revolution to any revolution.
Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.
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