Rev Left Radio - Liberation Theology: Jesus Christ and the Fight for Human Emancipation

Episode Date: October 11, 2020

In this episode Matt Bernico and Dean Dettloff from The Magnificast podcast join Breht to discuss the history and ideology of Liberation Theology.  Check out Dean's course that he is currently teaching on liberation theology HERE Follow The Magnificast on Twitter HERE Please Support Rev Left Radio HERE LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

The main contribution of liberation theology to, say, global Christianity, the preferential option for the poor. And to start the language of talking about the church of the poor. The current Pope Francis has used that language, the church of the poor. And I think that's really important for us to get our heads around. The preferential option for the poor is the idea that we do, this Christianity thing that we're about, this witness to the gospel that we're about,

has a deep preference for the poor, the outcast, the oppressed, those people on the margins that were left out. Jesus didn't go to the halls of power. He didn't march into Rome and want to meet with Caesar and to say we're going to change this system from the top down he went out

and he found the people on the outskirts of the society the people that were forgotten or just in the margins and that's where he concentrated his effort and his energy and through that

that work the the whole church was organized from the bottom up, not from the top down. And I think what Gustavo Gutierrez, who is essentially the founder of liberation theology, what he was doing by emphasizing South American churches' discovery and their, say, discovery, their emphasis on the preferential option for the poor was to say, no, the church is not about these big hierarchies and about structures and ordering power from the top down, it's about

supporting and encouraging and being shaped by the poor. Not what we can offer the poor as a way of going to them as an other, but to say that God is at work amongst the poor, and that's where he will speak to the church. So it's subtle. Sometimes our language of concern for the poor is about what we bring to the poor and how we can change them or how we can help improve their situation. But the preferential option for the poor really ought to say,

what is God saying to the church from the poor? And to say, that's where God is at work. How do we let God speak to us from that position? And that is a threat to those who are in power. And so the church, all the churches have really been hesitant to embrace that language and embrace liberation theology because of that

because it is such a threat to the institutionalized power structures. But I think that's a word that we need to hear today. And we need not to be looking for how do we fix the poor, but how does God speak to us through the poor? How do we invite the poor to teach us?

How do we go to the poor and learn from them? How do we hear God in what's happening there? It should unsettle our addiction to power and prestige and wealth and authority and then get back into what it really means to be a leader like Jesus who did not consider his status something to be defended but he willingly gave it up.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode I have back on the show, Matt and Dean, from the wonderful Christian socialist podcast, The Magnificast, to talk about the history and some of the major thinkers within the tradition of liberation theology. So this is an episode I wanted to do for a very long time, and I knew that Matt and Dean, given not only their political knowledge, their theological knowledge, would be the perfect guests to come on and tackle this topic with me. So that's what we have for you today. Before we get into the show, as always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left Radio,

You can always support us at patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. And in exchange for a few dollars a month, you get access to bonus content. We really appreciate everybody who supports the show. It means the world to us and our family. So thank you to anybody who has done it or who might support the show in the future. Without further ado, let's get into this wonderful conversation with Matt and Dean from the Magnificast about the history and major thinkers in the tradition of liberation theology. Enjoy.

I'm Dean Detloff, one of the co-hosts of the Magnificast. I'm a Catholic, a communist, and I live here in Toronto, Canada. And I'm Matt Bernico, the other co-host on The Magnificast. I am Episcopalian, a communist, and a labor organizer in St. Louis, Missouri. Beautiful. Well, for people that have listened to Rev. Left for a while, you might remember a dean and Matt from a very early Rev. Left episode on Christian socialism. So I'm happy to have both of you back on to tackle this topic, which I wanted to tackle for a long time, and that is Liberation Theology. I know you both mentioned your religious and political identifications. Can you talk before we get into the topic itself, maybe a little bit about how you've sort of woven your religion and politics together.

And maybe some of the pushback you might get from the broader Christian community. I see sometimes you guys go into war with other reactionary Christians on Twitter. So maybe we want to talk about that for a second? Yeah, for sure. I don't know if I have anything really too profound to say about it. Honestly, I just, well, I think that Christianity is at its best about love. loving other people and serving God and serving people. That's what Jesus was all about.

That's what a lot of Christianity is about. And I think that being a communist and being a Marxist particularly helps me do that better and helps me kind of understand all the things that are wrong with the world in sort of a systemic way. And, you know, if you want to really love your neighbors, you might need to figure out how to seize the means of production first. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, we do get some pushback from other Christians. Obviously, it's no secret that by and large, Christians don't seem to make good on that promise to take care of the poor and look after the least of these and all that kind of stuff.

So, you know, we're not naive about that. A lot of the stuff that we talk about in the Magnificast is trying to figure out exactly why our co-religionists, if you will, are doing a bad job or, you know, what makes them think the way they do and all that kind of stuff. we get some hate mail as you might expect but yeah you know it's also it's encouraging there's been I think a lot more Christians tackling questions about socialism and Marxism in the last few years even since we started our own podcast so yeah it's a it's a mixed bag and we're trying to find our place within it yeah absolutely it is probably worth saying that last time we were on Rev left you know a thousand years ago right afterwards somebody wrote a very mean article about us on a Catholic hate site so that's cool

Cool. Wow. That's right. So, you know, we get a little bit of pushback from from other places and negative publicity and it's all right. Now, do you think that's a direct result of our Rev Left episode or just coincidental? Well, it's cited the Rev. Left episode in the article. So I guess so. But we're not mad at you about it. It's funny. Sorry about that. You know, it's funny that you mentioned the whole idea of Christ being about serving the people, about Christianity being about serving people. And I was thinking about this today. I was out fishing. and listening to some Buddhist philosophy and, you know, like many Buddhist teachers will again and again talk about the need to stop obsessing about yourself and a main mechanism of doing that is to serve other people, to make your life about service to others.

And then, of course, you know, in the communist tradition, obviously huge with Mao, but across the communist tradition, there's this urge to go out and serve the people, feed the people, meet the needs of the people. And Christ himself, obviously, is another. representative of that. So I like those intersections where, you know, time and again, the things that I become deeply interested in keep pushing me towards this idea of increasing service to other

people. And yeah, so that is good to talk about because that is in the large part some fundamental pillar of liberation theology. So before we get into the details, for those who might not know, can you just give us a kind of a quick definition of what liberation theology is? And then maybe talk about when and why it arose formally as a significant religious and political current in our world. Yeah, I'll take a stab at beginning, Matt, and you want to

take over maybe part way through to fill in the gaps. Yeah, liberation theology is a complicated thing because it's a name for a really loose collection of theologians around the world to try to think about their faith from the perspective of oppression and liberation

and people who also try to translate those faith traditions into social action. So there is a lot of different strands of liberation theology. Some people have a habit or tendency or it's very popular to kind of say that any kind of faith tradition that is radical or political is liberation theology, it's not exactly true. There are other kinds of revolutionary theologies that are different, and maybe we can talk about that later on. But as it relates to liberation theology specifically, there is black liberation theology, there There's womanist theology, which is pioneered by black women and deals with black women's

experience. There's liberationist eco theology, all these different kinds of strands, queer theology, etc. Basically, if there's a liberation movement, there's probably a theology for it. But I think in terms of where it comes from is maybe the best way to locate some kind of unity to it. So it emerges really in the late 60s with people, especially in Latin America, like Gustavo Gutierrez, who's a Peruvian theologian, Leonardo Boff, and Freibetto, who are Brazilian theologians, lots and lots of names that we could say. But it emerges really in Latin America in the late 60s and early 70s. In the U.S., there's kind of a simultaneous or like coincidental movement among people like James Cohn, a Black Liberation theologian, Rosemary Radford-Ruther,

a feminist theologian. So kind of as the left is changing too, and all that kind of stuff, is getting really exciting in the 60s and 70s, there are these new wild theologies that come to be known as liberation theology. So there's a lot of complexity, but at least in sort of the Catholic world, liberation theology also emerges following this really big event in the Catholic Church that's called the Second Vatican Council, which I don't know, you can read a lot about it if you want. But the short of it is that the church itself, all the bishops and the Pope, Pope John at the time tried to encourage Catholics to engage the modern world more proactively rather than defensively,

including in areas like social justice. So it really sort of opened the pathways for a very conservative expression of Christianity to get a little more wild and exciting. Matt, you want to add more to that? Yeah, totally. You know, talking about all these theologians is very cool, but I guess it's really only like half the story. You know, liberation theology is about, yeah, it's about figuring out God and Christianity and all these things, but it's also about negotiating those like theological commitments into action. So the books are cool. Everything is cool like that. But I think what's also really interesting about liberation theology is the ways that the, you know, the lives of these Christians played into the practice of liberation

movements themselves. You know, there's a ton of different examples that we'll get to you throughout this episode, I'm sure. But one that I think everyone goes to kind of to start off with is Camillo Torres. He was a Colombian Catholic priest. He was super smart, sociologist, and he was also a socialist who ended up kind of forsaking the priesthood in some ways and joining the National Liberation Army on religious grounds. So, you know, he actually took up arms and he fought alongside other socialists. And eventually, you know, he was martyred in a gunfight against the Colombian military, but like he did this out of religious motivation. And I think in And someone like Torres, we can kind of see the ways that people take the, you know, they take their

commitments to God and like and to other people very seriously. And so much so that, you know, he stopped being a priest and became a gorilla. Yeah. This may be a silly question, but, you know, just to, just to hammer this down, liberation theology, it arose out of Catholicism, if I'm, if I'm not incorrect. And is it fair to say that liberation theology exists solely within Catholicism or has it spread out and just become a Christian phenomenon that people under different sort of tendencies of Christianity pick up and run with. It's definitely, it owes a lot to Catholicism, but it would be wrong to say that it's an exclusively Catholic phenomenon. And like I said before, there's lots of different strands. So, for example, like James Cohn was not a Catholic or lots of

Protestants, really radical Protestants, the Latin America, also pioneered different kind of liberation theology. I don't know. I keep using pioneer. I don't like that metaphor. I'm so sorry. I get rid of it. But what I mean is there's lots of very influential voices in Protestantism. For example, in Brazil, you know, which is a thoroughly Catholic country by the numbers, there's lots and lots of radical liberation theologians there. It's kind of one of the main hotbeds for liberation theology, both in the ideas and in the social movement side. But there's also lots of important Protestants there, like a guy named Ruba Malvez, is one of the most famous, who's a Protestant trying to think about liberation theology, you know, outside of the Catholic Church.

So all that to say, the Catholic side is very important, genealogically and historically, and even in terms of influence, I think Catholicism is kind of the, you know, when people talk about liberation theology, it's not wrong to sort of associate that automatically with Catholicism, but it's important to recognize that lots and lots of Protestants to, especially in the United States and in Canada, which are largely Protestant, kind of. countries, they sort of, you know, took it in some different directions. I see. I see. That makes sense. Okay. So can you talk a little bit more about the, the ideology of liberation theology and so far as there is one and sort of what elements of Christianity and Marxism it emphasizes? Yeah, definitely. Well, okay, we can start with Christianity and then kind of go from there. So Christianity, you know, like one slogan that got popularized in Latin America by bishops and these liberation theologians that we just talked about is that in Christianity, there is, or there should be, aspirationally speaking, maybe, that there is a preferential option for the poor, that basically this means that God is on the side of the poor and the oppressed first. So, you know, when it comes to, you know, political struggles or even reading the Bible, like those are the people we should always be thinking about first. So then that means that on the other side of things, calls for repentance are usually framed sort of in like a structurally, like a structurally oriented kind of way.

So toward the privileged and the rich and the powerful, like, those are the folks that are always going to be called to repentance first. So a lot of doctrines that are often thought of as, like, individual, especially in Protestant Christianity in the United States, are made into, into more social doctrines. And they're addressed along really structural lines. So, like, in liberation theology, sin isn't so much that it's not just something that a single person does, though, I mean, it can be. but liberation theologians would want to talk about all of the social sins and the same thing goes for salvation, right? Not something that's personal, that you know, you get saved and it's all over for you, but like how do you work with your community and with your comrades to be saved and to do sort of like the works of justice and mercy that might save other people? So it kind of like opens up the individualized forms of Christianity to speak more toward social justice and like communities. And, you know, I mean, obviously you can see like a lot of the Marxism stuff coming in there already, right? Those are the structural means that a lot of these theological terms are kind of getting worked out with.

Yeah, we could probably add to, you know, I was thinking earlier you mentioned, Brett, that there's this affinity between liberation theology and the communist commitment to serve the people. Those are connections that liberation theologians themselves made and drove them to read all kinds of Marxist literature and hang out with Marxists. But one example, I think at least my favorite example, is an example that happened in Nicaragua in this very poor chain of islands called Salentaname. One of our heroes, Matt Nize is a priest named Ernesto Cardinal, who we can talk about later too. But he moved to Salentaname as a priest before the San Anista Revolution because he wanted to work with the poorest peasants who were there. And he, you know, usually if you've ever been to Catholic Mass, like you go to church, you think, sit through it. At one point, the priest gets up, does a homily, and then that's kind of that, right? That's the Bible part of the service. But Cardinal, as a priest, actually invited all of the peasants who were

at the mass, like the people who were coming to church, to just, like, tell him what they thought about the Bible. And he published the, like, transcribed recordings of that conversation in a book called the Gospel in Solentename. And it's this real trust that people can speak from their own experience and interpret the biblical text from their own experience. And what you see in those conversations is like a really incredible sort of emergent revolutionary interpretation of the Bible through the experience of what it's like to be poor in Nicaragua. So that's just like one example, I guess, of how this works out on the ground, right?

It's not just ideas. It's like really transforming how people experience church. Yeah, I love that. I love that entire idea of just going to regular people and having them reflect on what the Bible means to them and how it makes sense in their life, particularly those that are oppressed or living in deep structural poverty. I know that you've touched on a few of the major figures, but maybe we could dive a little deeper on this front. Can you mention maybe some more major figures and thinkers in the liberation theology sort of tradition and, you know,

the ones that have existed maybe in the early days all the way up until today that stand out to you as really seminal figures in this field? Yeah, for sure. Since Dean just mentioned our personal favor, Ernesto Cardinal. I'll talk about him a little bit more. He's a cool guy. So he's a Catholic priest. He's Nicaraguan. He ministered to the very poor in Nicaragua, just like Dean said, and this chain of islands called Solentaname. But, you know, not only was he kind of with the people and like reading the Bible with the people, but he got involved with a Nicaraguan revolution. He became a Sandinista. And, you know, he was a part of the struggle against Samosa in Nicaragua. And then even more interesting than that, after the revolution, he, he became the minister of culture and the revolutionary government. So he really threw in with the socialist for sure. His involvement in the revolution led to, I mean, to say the very least, a very tumultuous

relationship with the Catholic Church. Basically, he gave up the priesthood for his spot in the Sanneista government. But he was a hugely influential figure in Nicaraguan culture, for sure, and also in liberation theology. He was also like a really prolific poet. He wrote, I mean, I think that's kind of where a lot of his, his best ideas come from is from his poetry. But, you know, he he would travel to Cuba and like that was a huge part of his life too and kind of like learning from the farmers that he lived with

in Sultaname, but learning from other socialist governments and revolutions was, you know, a big part of Cardinal's life. Beautiful. Yeah, a few others. I mean, you can't talk about liberation theology without talking about Leonardo Boff, for example, who's a really famous Brazilian theologian. He's still alive. Cardinal just. passed away. I guess we should say generationally, like, these figures are either recently passing away. Like, within the last five or six years, we've lost kind of tragically some of the most amazing and revolutionary theologians. And others are still out there. Boff is one of those who's still out there. I mean, he and this other Brazilian theologian named Freibetto, who's a favorite of

ours, they both are like constantly writing about how much Bolsonaro sucks. And they call him Bolsa Niro, which is a very funny Christian pun, and just like really active folks in the struggle. So Boff is a big one, but Freibetto is another one of our heroes on the show. He's a priest in Brazil, who's a member of the Dominican order. He was imprisoned by the military dictatorship, you know, in the middle of the 20th century. He became a real friend to Cuba. Famously, he did a really long interview with Fidel Castro, where he asked

Fidel about his thoughts about religion. It's published in a book called Fidel and Religion, which is really an amazing text that I think more people should read. But the book is credited with also being part of the reason that the Communist Party of Cuba gave up atheism as a membership requirement. And the state changed its official ideology from atheists to secular, in large part probably, at least in part because Fribello and other liberation theologians were willing to dialogue with Fidel and vice versa. Fidel was really quite interested in liberation theology. So Beto and Boff are two characters who are like, they write all kinds of great books, but they're also people who are invested in the struggle for international socialism,

both in Brazil and around the world. Yeah, really fascinating characters. We could list like a ton more, I guess. I mentioned James Cohn. He's a founder of Black Liberation Theology in the U.S. He was trying to think about how to be a Christian after Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were assassinated, but also in light of the growing black power movement, which was, you know, like a really important thing to be theologizing about because a lot of people kind of get stuck in like the previous iteration of the civil rights movement. So Cohn was trying to like carry that forward and, you know, respond to some different movements that were growing. He really criticized white Christianity in the U.S. and interpreted the Christian story from

the perspective of black oppression and liberation. really an important character, I think, for understanding U.S. politics in general, not just Christianity. Maybe one of the person, I mean, there's like so many people that we could name, and they're all very cool. One would be Marcella Althus Reid. She was an Argentine theologian who passed away as well. But she was part of a sort of younger generation of liberation theologians, wrestling with the oppressive ideologies that were still operative within liberation theology. So it's a self-critical tradition. She developed like, a really important and influential queer liberation theology that tried to criticize the

heteronormitivity that was still part of a lot of liberation theology. So it's important to attend to those figures too, right? Like the tradition is kind of always wrestling with itself in light of that horizon of liberation. And what's so impressive about it is that theologically, these are people who are not willing to necessarily retreat into like a conservative defense of whatever this or that doctrine, but are really trying to learn from the experience of people who are being oppressed. Yeah, beautiful. Do either, are other of you familiar, and this is sort of a side issue, but are either of

you familiar with the Christian mystic Thomas Merton? Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's, there's some interesting connections between Merton and liberation theology as well. Ernesto Cardinal, the guy from Nicaragua that we've been talking about so much. He, for a time, studied with Merton, even. So there's a strong connection between Cardinal and Merton.

I mean, both being kind of poets and stuff, too. In fact, Merton almost went to Salentaname with Cardinal, actually, to establish the community there. He was kind of like wanting to get out of Kentucky, and he was pretty close to going, but his order, at least if I remember the story, right, the Trappist stopped him from going because they were, like, nervous that he would get a little too wild and revolutionary. And at one point, Merton and Cardinal, their correspondence was barred by Merton's order because they were like Cardinal's a bad influence. So, yeah, there's a really kind of interesting, I mean, Merton has kind of a weird relationship to revolution. I don't want to make him sound too radical, but he could have been probably further radicalized, I would say. Absolutely. That's so interesting. I had no idea. I just, you know, I've gotten into

to Merton. I've throughout my life and have recently gone back to one of his works, No Man as an Island, and working through that again. For those that don't know, Thomas Merton was like sort of a Christian monk that was weaving in. insights and practices from Buddhism, particularly, but also probably Taoism, into his Christianity and was also a social activist. I know he wasn't a full-on revolutionary, but certainly left leaning in that little intersection between him and the history of liberation theology is something I did not know at all, so that's incredibly interesting. Man living under certain economic conditions is no longer in possession of the fruits of his life

His life is not his. His life is lived according to conditions determined by somebody else. And I would say that on this particular point, which is very important indeed in the early marks, you have a basically Christian idea. Christianity is against alienation. Christianity revolts against an alienated life. But let's go ahead and move on. we've mentioned the huge and sort of essential history of Latin America and how it's tied up with

liberation theology. So can you talk about the direct impact that liberation theology has had on socialist revolutions and movements in Latin America, particularly, as already mentioned, Cuba, Brazil, and Nicaragua? Yeah, for sure. Well, I guess we can kind of start with, we'll start with Cuba. How about? Because that's the easiest one, maybe. So in Cuba, there is no liberation theology when the Cuban Revolution started. It's really complicated because Cuba, like, wasn't really an overly religious country to begin with. Before the revolution, priests were largely, you know, sort of situated within urban areas, like cities, and not so much in rural areas. So that sort of, like, you know, definitely made religion sort of a class element within the Cuban society.

Overall, Catholicism in Cuba was sort of, I mean, it was a bourgeois phenomenon, for sure. I don't want to pull any punches, I guess. Though, after the revolution, liberation theologians thought of Cuba as sort of like a success story about what was possible with regards to socialism. So, like we mentioned, Freibetto and Resto Cardinal and many other liberation theologians would end up taking trips there to meet with Fidel. And Fidel would, you know, make other trips elsewhere, too, and meet with them. So Cuba would end up having, like, a bigger impact on liberation theology than liberation theology

on Cuba. But, you know, that's probably because of the chronology of all of this that's going on. Yeah, Dean, what else can we say about Cuba or some of the other places? It's also maybe worth adding that, yeah, so chronologically, the Cuban revolution happened before liberation theology and then was kind of an impulse maybe within it. But subsequently, as Matt was mentioning, liberation theology has an effect on Cuba going forward, right, opening up some of Cuban society to kind of think about the revolutionary potential of religion in important ways that did affect the, countries developing policies toward religion. And of course, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict and Pope Francis all visited Cuba during their papacies, which is very important for a lot of reasons. But all that to say, you know, there's a kind of interesting dialogue there. Other countries are

obviously far more affected. Like Brazil, Nicaragua was the best story, so we'll say that for last maybe. But Brazil, you know, the church was on both sides of the military dictatorship. So that kind of, because the country is mostly Catholic. It's kind of like, you know, you're just going to end up with, like, the people who are on one side or the other of class contradictions are also going to church, you know, which is a bizarre contradiction within Catholicism itself. But after the dictatorship was deposed, the Brazilian, and during too, I should say, the resistance, the Brazilian Catholic Church and a lot of Protestants were really quite radical. And people trusted, like, progressive bishops, for example, as authorities to lead them into different struggles or important priests like Beto and Boff. So in Brazil, they organize these things that are called base communities, which are communal organizations that kind of provide the seeds for things like trade unions and literacy programs and peasant federations. People might know about somebody like Paolo Ferreira, the critical pedagogy founder, really incredible character. He was a Christian and a liberation theologian in addition to being all kinds of other things. And he was part of these base communities as well. so these are kind of like they're like more than civil society organizations but less than like a commune I guess you could say if you had to like figure out exactly what they are and in Brazil like bishops were a pretty big thorn in the side of Pope John Paul II who was a pretty anti-communist pope to say the least and Cardinal Ratzinger who was kind of like his like doctrine cop and Ratzinger would become Pope Benedict later so the Brazilian bishops who were really

in massive conflict with the Vatican for all of that period. A lot of them were disciplined or silenced, which means they couldn't publish books or give public talks and stuff like that. So there was a real struggle emanating both from the Vatican and then also within society itself, of course. And the last thing to say about it is, like movements in Brazil, like the MST, the landless workers or landless movement, and then the workers party, they owe a lot of their popularity.

to organizers influenced by liberation theology and to explicit endorsements from bishops and popular priests. So in a place like Brazil, liberation theology is not just kind of like a thing you might be curious about. It's like a piece of public life or a piece of the political tradition in a way that's kind of hard to imagine in somewhere like the U.S. or Canada maybe. Matt, do you want to say something more about Nicaragua? Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, like he said a minute ago, Dean, Nicaragua was like the most successful experiment in bringing together liberation theology and a socialist revolution and like a party. In the end, four priests took up post in the San Nista government,

which is pretty significant. There were also just a ton of faithful lay Catholics in the government as well and that fought in the revolution. There was movement in both directions during the revolution too, I guess. I'm not trying to say that Christians are all on the good side, but they're on both sides. The San Nistas, they realized that they couldn't make a revolution by themselves and especially toward like the last moments in the revolution, they wanted to create opportunities for the masses to participate in demonstrations that weren't explicitly armed. And they saw the relationship with the church as like an important presence to like sort of mediate between the armed struggle and, uh, and more like civil disobedience and other types

of demonstrations. So priests like Ernesto Cardinal, uh, meanwhile had been like organizing people in remote areas since before the Sandinistas even took up arms. Uh, So there's, like, revolutionary energies there amongst sort of, like, the poorest of the poor. Cardinal was, like, really impressed by Fonseca and the other revolutionaries, and a lot of other people in his Christian community ended up fighting in the Sanista army and, like, giving their lives to the revolution. So, yeah, those, those, like, it's actually really interesting because in some of the literature, in Cardinal's book, The Gospel in Solentaname, you know, he'll be reading the gospel with, like, these peasant farmers on this island. And then later you can kind of follow their story later on and like what they did in the revolution. And you can kind of see their progressionist people. Really interesting documentary, documentary texts on these people.

But yeah, you can kind of see them how they've gone from sort of these like Christians in this really small community on an island. And then they end up fighting in the revolution. It's pretty wild. Beautiful. Yeah, that's incredible. And I know you mentioned a little bit of the history of the U.S., but I want to kind of dive a little bit deeper into that. So what has the history been of liberation theology in that tradition in the U.S. specifically? And how does it differ from or even intersect with other major currents of American Christianity?

It's a really good question. You know, we mentioned there's lots of different strands of liberation theology that are formed in the U.S. Black liberation theology is one of the most kind of famous and probably like more obvious places to look, I guess. But certain kinds of feministologies were produced in the United States. in the 60s and 70s, there were lots of big forums for theological discussion about liberation. And there was all kinds of interesting connections, but also like really important disagreements among theologians about trying to sort out like how to talk about oppression and liberation in Christianity. There was a really important like indigenous or

Native American liberation theology movement within Christianity. So all these things are kind of finding a voice, as many other social movements are finding a voice too. So that is totally present. In the 70s and 80s in the United States, the liberation theology from Latin America also gave like a lot of energy to leftists in the U.S. Maybe like one example would be in Chile, there was this movement called Christians for socialism and it spread throughout North America. So it was founded in Chile to support Salvador Allende. It was a group of nearly 100 priests and then a lot of late Catholics too who were kind of like all right we're going to do this thing we're going to be part of this project as Christians

specifically after the coup they obviously were in trouble and a lot of them fled to the United States and when they got there they met up with other Christians they already knew and that kind of exported liberation theology to the U.S. in one way there's lots of other channels of export too but as a result of that one specifically there were a lot of Christian energy that was against like the coup in Chile, and there was a Christians for Social and Movement in the United States and in Canada that had been sparked by trying to be in solidarity with those folks. So, you know, by the 80s, that movement kind of dissipates like the stories of so many things on the left. But anyway, it's a really important thing.

Matt, do you want to maybe talk about how that relates to other kinds of Christians in the U.S.? Yeah. I mean, back before the 80s, liberation theology intersected with all kinds of other like progressive Christian denominations and groups as well is all like very messy. But yeah, like you said, Dean just sort of like follows the same path as the left in general sort of waning and losing steam in light of state oppression and like also like church repression, neoliberalism, you know, the collapse of other things that intersected with like the radical trade union movement and like anti-imperialist movement. So as those things kind of waned, a lot of like the energy of liberation theology in the United States did as well. yeah I mean we can talk about the well we can talk about the rest of it later like what happens to it in a minute but yeah and that's kind of like what it looked like at its height in the United States and I was wondering as you were giving that answer are there like you know if liberation theology represents the

revolutionary side of the Christian sort of perspective what are the most reactionary strains of American Christianity in the last few decades up even till today white evangelicalism just as a whole movement. Yeah, I think it's all bad. And is the prosperity gospel fall out of that? Oh, boy. Dean, what do you think? It doesn't. It doesn't. Like, a lot of evangelicals don't like the prosperity gospel because they, like, they rightly understand that, you know, like, the prosperity gospel is just like an extremely cynical, abusive Christianity for the purpose of making money and nothing else. But, like, they wrongly don't think that that's what Republicans are doing, for example. So yeah, there's all kinds of weird stuff going on. But I would add to, like, white

Christianity in general is the most reactionary force. Like, I don't know, elections are what they are, but like if you want to draw conclusions from them, like in 2016, the most reliable voting block that Trump had was white evangelicals for sure. I mean, it was like overwhelming, like over 80% or something. But underneath that, too, like every other Christian denomination, whether it's Catholic, mainline Protestant, whatever you can think of. When you, when you sort the, like, the demographics by race, it's always the white Christians within those denominations vote for Trump. Whether it's by a slight majority or a greater majority, it's always the majority over 50%. So, you know, there's a real, like, Christianity does not at all sort of escape the racial dynamics

present in the United States. But certainly, if you wanted to talk about, like, the most reactionary, it would definitely be white evangelicalism, I think. Yeah, interesting. What's the relationship before we move on to the next question with Martin Luther King, Jr., because obviously he was assassinated towards the end of the 60s, so I don't know if there was explicit overlap or if he even was explicitly introduced to liberation theology as such. Do you have any insight on that front?

Yeah, a bit. I mean, he's obviously a towering figure in the history of U.S. Christianity in general, so everybody kind of has to deal with it at some point or another. But one thing that's really interesting is a lot of the like civil rights alumni, if you will, like the Christians who marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr., went on to really dialogue with liberation theology in important ways. All those people we just mentioned who were involved in like Christians for socialism, for example, in the 70s and 80s, almost all those people were like first activated by the civil rights movement and by resistance to the Vietnam War. So for a lot of people, this was kind of a maybe like,

natural next step after the civil rights movement and you know just like the black power movement has a really intriguing relationship to MLK where it's kind of like on the one hand you sort of like obviously appreciate and respect what MLK did but you also are maybe open to other kinds of tactics that he wasn't it's the same kind of thing with these Christians like you know they all you know everybody likes Martin Luther King and you should but like there's liberation theologians in Nicaragua obviously are not pacifists right so there's a certain difference there that Christians in the United States were kind of willing to be open to I see I see yeah that's that's very interesting I'm almost tempted to talk about

John Brown's Christianity because I'm reading a book on them right now but I think that might take us too far afield James Cohn a long-time professor of theology at New York's union Theological Seminary wrote the groundbreaking books that defined Black Liberation Theology, interpreting Christianity through the eyes and experience of the oppressed. Among them, Black Theology and Black Power, Martin and Malcolm in America, and this most recent bestseller, The Cross and the Linching Tree. Before we talk, let's listen to these words from Martin Luther King, Jr., spoken at Stanford University just a year before his assassination. It's as if he were saying them today.

There are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful for situation. Innocence, this America is overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people. who have food and material necessities for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, freedom and human dignity for their spirits. But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America.

This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America, millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in such for jobs that do not exist. In this America, millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America, people are poor by the millions, and they find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. Welcome to you both. Thank you. As he was trying to converge economics, race, social and political equality, what was he struggling for at that time when he, alone among his colleagues, wanted to take on the tough structure

of prejudice in economics in the North? I think he was thinking about class issues. He talked about class issues to his dad. He didn't do it primarily in. any speeches because of the kind of anti-communism spirit that was so deep in America at that time. But on many occasions, he talked about the economic and about America having 40 million people who are in poverty, in the richest country, in the world. He was talking about restructuring everything.

And if you talk about restructuring, you're talking about class, too. Yes, you've got to have to understand that some of this class tension was also within the black community. That's right. Some of King's most stinging speeches were to the members of his own, like Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, saying you spend more money on liquor at your annual convention than you contribute to the NAACP. This is, we're more concerned about, I know ministers who are more concerned about the wheelbase on their Cadillac than they are the spiritual base of their commitment to this world. So King drew an awful lot of sustenance and biting challenge from the basic notions of, I think that his favorite parable was the parable of Lazarus and Davies in Luke, about not noted.

It was about the rich man who passed Lazarus begging at his door and didn't notice him and went to hell and saw Lazarus up in heaven. And King interpreted this thing as saying, Lazarus, the rich. man did not go to hell because he was rich. He went there because he didn't notice the humanity of the man who was passing at his gate and it was about humanity. Remember how the sanitation strike started. It started because two members of the sanitation force were crushed in the back of a garbage truck that was a cylinder, one of those compacting cylinders in a torrential rainstorm

and they were not allowed by the city to seek shelter in storms because the white residents didn't like it. If black garbage men stopped. All the garbage workers were black. And so they weren't allowed. The only place they could get shelter and they wouldn't all fit in the cabin. So the ones that could fit in the cabin and two of them had to climb in the back with the garbage and a broom fell on the lever and it compacted them with the garbage.

And that is the origin of the slogan. I am a man. I am a man, not a piece of garbage. And that connects to King's philosophy. And the sanitation workers carried those signs. Remember, I am a man. I am a man. And to them, that was about Echle Cole and Robert Walker. Their two friends who had been literally crushed with the garbage and nobody noticed. And King is saying, you're going to go to hell as a nation if you don't notice the humanity of Echle Cole and Robert Walker. And that's why justice is so centrist. for King and why poverty became the focus of his ministry after that civil rights and voting

rights because the civil rights and voting rights is not going to get rid of poverty. And so King, King, King saw that as central. Let's listen again to Dr. King from the speech he made to those striking sanitation workers in Memphis just weeks before he was shot to death. What he said about poverty still rings true. Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working every day? But they are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. which must be seen, and it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income.

Could anything be more current right now? No, it's hard to imagine, and of course it's chilling to think what the distribution of wealth was when he made that indictment compared to what it is. now, it is much more skewed now than it was then, and it was bad then. So you really get a sense of King's power. So obviously liberation theology extends, you know, well beyond the Americas. Can you talk about some of the movements around the rest of the world outside of Latin and North America? Yeah. I mean, there are liberation theology movements, I don't know, basically everywhere. But some of like the, I think of the high points are the ones that we

at least like to talk about, or we're good at talking about, are the Christians for National Liberation in the Philippines. So it's a pretty cool movement. And I think it, man, it is, it's a pretty radical one, too. So, like, in response to the declaration of martial law by the then president of the Philippines, this is talking some time ago, priests, nuns, and, like, lay people started a big resistance movement called the Christians for National Liberation. And they took a lot of their cues from the Maoist movement that was already there. Later, they would end up becoming like an allied movement with the NDFP. And the Christians for National Liberation, it uses like, I mean, you'll find a lot of

similarities between what they say and what they think and their social action and liberation theology. But the Christians for National Liberation falls back on something particular that they call the theology of struggle. So just like a little bit of a different, you know, a different, you know, a different. different strain of theology because of, you know, different material conditions that they're kind of coming out of. But it's a really inspirational movement. It's still exists. It's still around. There's still an, you know, an allied movement with the NDFP. It's

really cool. Yeah, that would be one. There's lots of liberation theology. So, okay, I mentioned earlier, like, there's liberation theology, and then there's other kinds of revolutionary Christianity's. So liberation theology itself is, like, most prevalent in Latin America, for sure. And then there's all kinds of third world Theologies that, I mean, that's what they call themselves. Third World is like a, you know, contested term in the left. So I'm just, that's what they say.

So that's what I'm saying. And they, a lot of them engage in liberation theology explicitly. Like they use that term, places like Africa and other parts of different countries in Asia, et cetera. In Europe, there's kind of like a more academic version of liberation theology, but it's like not as exciting. So, I don't know. I'm not disparaging it. It's cool. It's just, you know, it's different because it's Europe.

And anyway, these other kind of revolutionary theologies are always important to bring up, though, because, like, people do assume everything is liberation theology. So Matt mentioned, like, theology of struggles a little bit different. Another one that's different is in China, there's a movement called the Three Self Movement. So during the Chinese Revolution, Christians, especially Protestants in particular, created this movement based on three principles, the three self-principles. So they are self-propagation, which means they don't have any foreign missionaries. They don't allow foreign missions. They're self-financing, so they don't take money from Christians outside of China, and self-governance, so they don't have, like, bishops overseas

or, you know, they don't have, like, a pope or something. And so all those three self-principals were designed to build a Christianity that was indigenous to China and also an anti-imperialist version of Christianity. I mean, it's really fascinating stuff. So this is developing as Mao is fighting in the Civil War, and, you know, they're trying to find out, like, how to sort of link up with that, basically, on their own terms. After the revolution succeeded, they became a state-supported organization called the Three Self-Patriotic Movement. During the Cultural Revolution, that was actually very brutally repressed, and I don't know, people have complicated feelings about the Cultural Revolution, and that's fine. But, like, if you were a Christian, it was very bad. And even if you were a revolutionary Christian, it was also very bad.

But again, say what you will about dengism. I don't know, whatever you want to think about it is fine. But after the Cultural Revolution, that movement was refounded as the Three Self-Patriotic Movement. And it was refounded as part of the Popular Front efforts in that country. And today, the Three Self-Patriotic Movement is one of the biggest Protestant groups in the whole world. And essentially, their express purpose is to, like, find a way of participating in building Chinese socialism as Christians. There are like analogous Catholic movements, but they're like way more complicated than the Protestant movement because like obviously it's very hard to say that you want to be self-government governed as a Christian community if you have like a Pope in Italy. But anyway, all that to say, the three self-movement is another kind of revolutionary Christianity that is not the theology of struggle in the Philippines and also not liberation theology elsewhere.

Wow. Yeah, that's so interesting. I did not know that history with regards to the cultural revolution and, uh, how Christians specifically were treated within it. So that is interesting, and it's certainly, even for those who might critically uphold it as an experiment in proletarian history, I don't think anybody denies that it had its complete failures and rabbit excesses and deserves plenty of criticism. And that's just one element of it. But let's go ahead and talk a little bit more about the relationship between liberation theology and the Catholic Church. I know you touched on it a little bit. but what has that relationship been like over the years has it always just been a relationship

of of tension with sort of reaction emanating out of the vatican or has there been moments of coming together and and where does the pope today sort of stand in relation if at all to liberation theology i'll uh maybe start fielding a mat and if you want to help me um with all the catholic things i forget all right yeah so you know the relationship is complicated that's the best way to put it. I mentioned Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict. They were, they spent a lot of time severely disciplining liberation theology. They were kind of like theological cold warriors in some respects. You know, people may or may not know, I guess Pope John Paul II was from Poland, and, you know, he grew up in Soviet Poland,

and so that was complicated for him. And he kind of like, you know, he did not like communism, him and he sort of saw that everywhere and wanted to put it down. And Cardinal Ratzinger was from Germany. So again, just complicated geopolitics that feed into ecclesiopolitics. But yeah, so people like Leonardo Boff, who we've mentioned several times, was someone who was officially silenced by the Vatican, which was like a global scandal. Like people did not, they were not into it. And Boff is like progressive in a lot of ways.

But I mean, he was not like commilatory. So like he did not go by gun and like run into the mountains and quit being. a priest. He was just saying like, hey, maybe there's other ways of doing this, and they did not like it. So he couldn't write or speak and remain a priest in good standing, and eventually Boff did leave the priesthood. So there are like real personal casualties as a result of that situation. And in amidst that tension, there are a lot of, I mean, people, I think often look to the Catholic bishops as like a completely reactionary institution. And in many ways, they are and can be. I mean, they are often some of the most reactionary people in the church.

But it's important to have maybe a more multidimensional view because a lot of progressive bishops also tried to defend themselves in their theologians, which was pretty ugly. Like in Brazil, as I mentioned, like Brazilian bishops would get called to the Vatican all the time to, like, be disciplined. And they would either just, like, not go and, like, force the hand of the Vatican to come. Or they would go and have, like, a huge argument and basically say, look like if you're going to silence this person, then like don't bother coming to Brazil next year

or something. So you can read a lot about that. There's actually a pretty good book by this journalist named Penny Lerno called People of God, The Struggle for World Catholicism, and she lived in Latin America and reports on that sort of disciplinary energy. So you can read that. It's like on archive.org. But anyway, that's one example. Another would be like, so we've held Nicaragua up as like the success story. As you might as you might. imagine that was also troubling to John Paul the second. So when he went to Nicaragua in the 80s after the revolution succeeded, he was also pretty famously publicly heckled while he was saying mass, which he did not like. And he was photographed chastising Ernesto Cardinal at the beginning of his

trip, which really pissed off a lot of people in Nicaragua because he was a hero of theirs. So it's not just the case that like the Vatican tried really hard to, use its power to wipe out liberation theology, but they couldn't because people just resisted that. And they eventually were forced to try to affirm parts of liberation theology and to greater and lesser degrees, I guess. So that's JP2. I'll make the rest of the story short. When Pope Benedict became the Pope, a lot of people thought that would be the end of liberation theology, because he was the, his nickname was that he was God's Rottweiler. because he, yeah, he did not like liberation theologians and made that very clear.

For what it's worth, Benedict did have some kind of progressive things to say in a marginal sense, but not nearly as far as liberation theology. And all that, though, is very different from Pope Francis, who is the first Pope from Latin America, he's from Argentina. He is not a liberation theologian, but he has rehabilitated a lot of liberalism. Theologian, and he's clearly learned from that movement and is trying to like make a space for them in the church, whereas the church had previously tried to push them out. So to give you an example, like we mentioned Cardinal was barred from being a priest because he chose to stay with

the Sandinistas. Before Cardinal died, which was in 2018, I think it was, Pope Francis restored him to the priesthood and made sure that he was a priest and could take communion before he died, which Cardinal happily received. So that's, like, actually a huge deal, like a very big deal. He is publicly celebrated mass with people like Gustavo Gutierrez, which is also a very big deal. So Pope Francis is not perfect. I mean, he's a really weird guy for a lot of reasons.

But as far as liberation theology goes, he is, like, undeniably softening the stance and in many cases reversing the trend that happened in the Vatican at least. Wow. Matt, did you have anything to add to that? No, I mean, I think that's good. Dean's the Catholic here, so I'll let him talk about it. Yeah, that's really incredible. So, you know, with Pope Francis, how would you put him on the political spectrum?

Would you just say he's a left liberal or is even more radical than that? How do you think of him? Yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, like, Catholicism is a weird thing because it's not liberal as a religion. Like Protestantism is often very liberal, not always, but often. I mean, liberalism sort of emerges from Protestant thinking. Catholicism is just like uncomfortable in modern society at all for better and for worse. You know, it's a medieval institution, right?

So, yeah, in light of that, like Pope Francis is, I would say, a left-wing Catholic, which is to say, you know, he's very critical of, like, capitalism explicitly. Like, he says that there are problems with capitalism, et cetera. He's also much warmer towards socialism, but he's not, like, a socialist pope. Apologies to Rush Limbaugh, he is not a secret Leninist. I mean, would that he was. That would be great. Yeah, exactly.

Well, he has his own idiosyncratic version of being a progressive political Catholic is what I would say. I see. Yeah, I like how you talked about the Catholic Church as being a middle evil institution. And it made me think of the recent sort of kind of, I guess you could call it a rise of the tradcats of the traditional Catholics. do you guys ever have to spar with those those weirdos? I try to say out of it, I think, but they're always there. They're always present. Reminding us that it's a medieval institution indeed.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I write for a Jesuit magazine called America Magazine, and as you can suspect, a lot of crappy traditionalist Catholics don't like that America employs me in particular and make that clear, I think. But thankfully, they keep paying my bills, so kudos for them. Beautiful. So that brings us up to today. What is the state of liberation theology today? Are there cutting-edge thinkers and figures still working in that tradition, trying to expand it, or is it just sort of slowly going along but not anything new or dynamic? How do you think about where the state of liberation theology at this moment in 2020? Well, it sort of depends on exactly where you mean. In the U.S. and Canada, liberation theology isn't doing great. I mean, it's like it's mostly an academic.

exercise, I think. You know, people who listen to our podcast and us, we like to read it and we're interested in it, but it's not like a thing that's motivating mass struggle in the United States, right? It's like a class you might take in a seminary or even worse. It's just like a topic that might come up in a class about the history of social movements in Christianity or something, right? So in the U.S. and Canada, liberation theology has mostly been liberalized and sanitized and kind of robbed of a lot of its really revolutionary content. There are definitely some younger theologians who are doing a lot of interesting work around it, though, and, you know, maybe it'll have a comeback, and that would be very cool. But, yeah, like I said, there's no, like, there's no mass movements of left-wing Christians doing sort of, like, the liberation work outside of the church.

I think that's kind of, it's not happening in the United States. But elsewhere in the world, it is, it is still a thing. Liberation theology still exists other places. Just like we mentioned a few minutes ago, right, like the Christians for National Liberation, they're still doing their thing in the Philippines. Liberation theology movements are still present in like Venezuela and Brazil and even with the Zapatistas. Since every place has its own sort of like material conditions and sense of liberation, you know, liberation theology looks different and acts different and is different everywhere.

But, you know, that sort of impulse, I think, is still alive and lots of other movements. But not so much in North America. Unfortunately. Yeah. I'd say like in the U.S., there's a huge research. and it's just with the Rides of Black Lives Matter, both the kind of first wave and the second way, with lots of people getting reinvested in black liberation theology,

which is really exciting and encouraging. That's probably, like, the most intriguing vector for liberation theology in the U.S. right now. So James Cohn died not too long ago, and I think that also kind of contributed in a weird way to, like, a renewed interest in his work. There's also, like, a lot of really fascinating studies that are just now coming out.

Like, there's a lot of people looking, for example, at, like, the young lords in New York and Chicago and trying to kind of think through, like, their relationship to Christianity and liberation theology, which there's actually, like, kind of a lot going on there. And the Black Panther Party also had some important connections to liberation theology. So there's, like, a lot of, like, really new historical work being done on that stuff. And I'm sure that that will contribute to social movements in some way or another down the line, or at least I hope. And, like, there's always Christians doing stuff. Like, you know, we shouldn't, we shouldn't say that, like, liberation theology is dead because it's not. But, like, Matt said, it's, it's not the case that it's like it is in Brazil, right? Like, in Brazil, you can, like, go to a rally in Leonardo Boff, a public theologian is out there with a big megaphone telling you why, like, you know, Bolsonaro is a big sinner and, like, good Christians should, like, oppose him.

Like, that's not really as commonplace, like, a U.S. rally, right? So that's an important difference. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's to the international communist movement, but to the American and Canadian communist movement, it's a disadvantage that we don't have more people within that tradition operating, trying to push these institutions further to the left.

And perhaps though with the current era, you know, of darkness that we're living in, in best case scenario, if it really is, as it might have been in some ways in previous instantiations in American history, a prelude to a sort of progressive renaissance, then I do hold out some hope that, you know, at least a sizable, significant portion of people in the mainstream religions in the U.S. and Canada might start agitating in that direction, and we can bring in, you know, the religious movements into a broad progressive or radical socialist, et cetera, a movement going forward. We certainly need the help of religious people, and we would love to have, you know, the help

of sizable portions within religious movements to sort of push this entire society in the direction it needs to go. And if you read the messages of Christ, if you read how Christ live his life and the messages that he was trying to convey, it's very clear that the state of America today is in so many ways directly antithetical to what Christ's entire life was dedicated to, you know, so hope that changes. Yeah, same. Yeah. So, you know, the question of whether or not communist movements should embrace religion is sort of kind of passe at this point. Most communist thinkers today are past the point of emphasizing atheism or insisting communism must stand against religion. And in fact, I would argue that most on the sort of principled materialist left

understand to some degree the important role that religion can play in liberation movements across nations and cultures. So instead of rehashing that specific debate, can you just talk about what we as revolutionaries, religious or not, can learn from the philosophy, and the history of liberation theology positioned as we are at one of the most precarious and important moments. And I think human history. Yeah, there's definitely a lot to say. And we probably won't say it all. But here's maybe a few ideas. So, you know, liberation theology is something that is primarily concerned about the marginalized in history. That's its whole orientation, a preferential option for the poor. That's, you know, the first step. And that makes it

affirm a lot of Marxist projects. But it's also not reducible to Marxism, you know, wholesale. They're not the same movement. But it also wants to point out, like, who's being marginalized even in, you know, a progressive movement or in a communist state or in a socialist movement or whatever, right? The way that liberation theologians do that is, I think, different than the way that liberals do it. And because they affirm, like, the very complicated histories of socialist movements, it's, it's important to listen to liberation theology as, you know, like Mark says, the heart of the heartless world. So I think that, you know, liberation theology can kind of give a really helpful backbone, I think, to lots of other progressive and socialist and communist movements

and that they, you know, they keep us all honest and pointing out exactly who is really, who's hurting in any kind of given moment. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And it's also, it's helpful to see that liberation theology is great and a good compliment to socialist struggles. But, you know, on the other hand, like, it's not wrong to maintain a suspicion of religious people as harboring reactionary tendencies because they, they do. I mean, we do. I do. As a Christian person that I'm constantly trying to learn about and think through. You know, in the context of a communist movement, I'm trying to learn about that and think through it. And I think, you know, history shows us that there's a lot of examples when Christians choose the side of capital. But this also

demonstrates exactly why socialist should open up spaces for Christians in the struggle. If you don't attend to religious people on their own terms, then they'll definitely find the, you know, they'll be driven happily into the arms of right-wing forces that are ready to, to affirm that all the communists don't like your Christianity, et cetera. You know, Fidel makes this point really effectively in Fidel and religion, for example, if people want maybe like a communist authority to tell them that instead of me. But yeah, like, what I mean by that, I guess, is liberation theology is an example of how people who, whether you're a Christian or some other faith or no faith at all, can at least

point to this and say, hey, look, like, you know, maybe you can't get down with being a radical atheist or something, but nevertheless, that doesn't prevent you from learning from all these other people who are part of your faith tradition, whether you like it or not. and that is an important sort of not only arrow in the quiver to like attack right-wing Christianity but also an important way to feel like you can authentically invite other people different from you into the struggle which like let's face it

I mean if you're going to have a successful communist movement in a place like the United States or Canada or whatever like you're going to have to find a way to at least talk to Christians whether or not you like them and liberation theology is like one way that perhaps you could find like a version of it that you could at least willingly stomach and kind of point people toward

for sure but no when I got the news that my dear brother Barack Obama President Obama was going to put his precious hand on Martin Luther King Jr's Bible I got upset and I got upset

because you don't play with Martin Luther King Jr. and you don't play with his people and by his people what I mean is people of good conscience, fundamentally committed to peace and truth and justice, and especially the black tradition that produced him. All the blood, sweat, and tears that went into producing a Martin Luther King, Jr., generated a brother of such high decency and dignity that you don't use his prophetic fire

as just a moment in a presidential pageantry without understanding the challenge that he presents to all of those in power no matter what color they are, no matter what color they are. So the righteous indignation of a Martin Luther King Jr. becomes a moment in political calculation. And that makes my blood boil. Why? Because Martin Luther King Jr., he died owing the three crimes against humanity he was wrestling with.

Jim Crow, traumatizing, terrorizing, stigmatizing, stigmatizing black people lynching and so forth, not just segregation, the way the press likes to talk about it. Second, carpet bombing in Vietnam, killing innocent people, especially innocent children. That's those war crimes. Martin Luther King Jr. was willing to die for. And thirdly, it was poverty of all colors. He said it's a crime against humanity for the richest nation in the history of the world that have so many of its precious children of all colors and living in poverty and especially on the chocolate side of the nations and on Indian reservations and brown barrios and yellow slices and black ghettos then we call them hoods now but ghettos then

so I said to myself okay it's nothing wrong with putting the hand on the Bible even though the Bible's talking about justice and Jesus is talking about the least of these but when you put it Martin's Bible I said this is personal for me because this is a tradition that I come out of This is a tradition that's connected to my grandmother's prayers and my grandfather's sermons and my mother's tears and my father's smile. And it's over against all of those in power who refuse to follow decent policies. So I say to myself, Brother Martin Luther King, Jr., what would you say about the new Jim Crow? What would you say about the prison industrial complex?

What would you say about the invisibility of so many of our prisoners? So many of are incarcerated, especially when 62% of them are there for soft drugs, but not one executive of a Wall Street bank going to jail. Not one. Martin doesn't like that. Not one wiretapper. Not one torture under the Bush administration at all. Then what do you say about the drones being dropped all of precious brothers and sisters in Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen?

Those are war crimes just like war crimes in Vietnam. Martin Luther King, Jr., what would you say? My voice hollers out, then don't tame it with your hand on his Bible. Allow his prophetic voice to be heard. Martin, what would you say about the poverty in America now, beginning with the children, and then the elderly, then our working folk and all colors? Not just here around the world.

Don't hide and conceal his challenge. Don't tame his prophetic fire. So as much as I'm glad the Barack Obama won, I think that Brother Mitt Romney would have been a catastrophe, and I understand my brother Newt told the truth of them about vampire capitalism, but that's true for the system as a whole, not just Mitt Romney in that regard. But when Barack Obama attempts to use that rich tradition of Frederick Douglass and I had to be Wells Barnett, use the tradition of A. Philip Randolph, use a tradition of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Hester, use the tradition of Tom Hayden. and so many others struggling to produce that voice that pushed Martin in the direction that he did, I get upset. People say, oh, Brother West, there's Smiley and West,

hating Obama. No, no. We just loving the tradition that produced Martin Luther King Jr. And we're not going to allow it to be in any way sanitized, deodorized, and sterilized. We want a subversive power to be heard. That's what made me think

when he said he's going to put his hand on that Bible. And I'm praying for him. I'm praying for him. As is Newt, both of us Christians, you Catholic, I'm Holy Ghost, Funky gut bucket Baptist. But we're praying for him. But putting pressure on it. I would just urge people out there who are listening,

regardless of sort of where you fall, I think plenty of people in our generation or maybe skeptical of mainstream religion, are agnostic or atheist. But I also think that there's a spiritual or even religious impulse in a lot of us that goes unnoticed, unfollowed up on, and sort of dismissed out of hand, or at least maybe even funneled into new directions

or different directions that are less obvious and explicit. And I would just urge anybody listening who feels in their heart that they might have something like a spiritual or religious impulse to really follow through with it and to dive into this world of trying to understand yourself in relations to these movements and traditions. And liberation theology gives a foothold for somebody who might be already be, you know,

marinated in the radical left-wing traditions, but might not have fully followed up on their own spiritual or religious impulse. I would urge you to do that. As always, Matt and Dean, thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. I really appreciate learning about this, and I'm going to continue to learn about this going forward. Before I let you both go, can you maybe give a recommendation or two for anyone who might want to learn more about liberation theology specifically and then let listeners know where they can

find you and your work and your podcast online? Yeah, read about Ernestor Cardinal. He's a great, he's a great guy. I want everyone to know about my personal hero, Ernestor Cardinal. He's primarily a poet, so I think you'll have to read some poetry to kind of get into it. He has a great book of poems called Pluriverse that are really beautiful. And man, he's got so much stuff going on. If you want to know more about it in the United States, you can learn about it. Christians for Socialism, come listen to our podcast. I don't know. What else, Dean? What are the good books? Yeah, lots of good books you could learn about. If you want a really interesting left-wing perspective, there's a good book by Michael Lowy, who's a Brazilian Jewish Marxist. He wrote a book

called The War of Gods, which is a pretty short, like, historical book about liberation theology. It was written before Pope Benedict was Pope, so it's dated now in some ways. But the history, he covers basically all the important stuff and he still ends with his apatistas, which is, you know, you miss out on all the cool stuff happening in like Venezuela and Bolivia and elsewhere, but it's a great book. So I'd direct people there if you kind of want to come at it from a different perspective. Certainly second the card and all suggestion. There's a number of other theologians. I mean, I would definitely tell people, you should read James Cohn, whether you're a Christian or not. I mean, just a very powerful sort of moral voice and theological voice. And

He also, like, if you're looking to interrogate white Christianity, for example, which I think Marxists should do, somebody like Cohen is going to help you do that in a way that's really unique because he's trying to criticize it from similar kind of religious tradition, but a political and existential reality that couldn't be more different. So anyway, an important historical character to learn about. Yeah, you can find our podcast, The Magnificast. We talk a lot about all this stuff over there. I should add one kind of shameless plug at the end here related to this. I teach at a place called the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, a very weird Christian school. And I'm hoping to teach an intensive class online coming up soon that's just about liberation theology, talking about the history of it and some of the major figures. And that'll happen, I hope, in October, but we'll kind of find out. In any case, you can find out more about it by following me on Twitter, I guess, at Dean Detloff. And you should follow Matt on Twitter. and that that's the best way to figure out what we're doing I think beautiful yeah I'll link to

the twitters and the podcast in the show notes if you haven't listened to the Magnificast definitely go check it out and thank you Matt and Dean once again for coming on let's keep in touch and work together again in the future yeah thanks a lot yeah thanks for it always great to be here and great to have you back on the Magnificast we'll see you again there soon absolutely