Liberation Theology

So the Pope, it turns out, was the one who prodded Obama to open up relations with Cuba.  As an unrepentant Protestant, I reserve the right to challenge the Pope.  But it’s more interesting than that.  Pope Leo in the 1891 published Rarum Novarum, an encyclical about how the church is to view systems of government.  And in particular it launched an idea called Social Justice.  Social  Justice holds that it is the responsibility of governments of Christian countries to uplift the poor economically. Labor unions were applauded.  Monarchies, which had always been allies of the Catholic Church, could then claim, as part of a divine right to rule, that they favored and helped the little guy.  The imperative on “helping” is collective and progressive (seizes assets, by gov’t force, from those who aren’t inclined to share).  I really gagged when I read Rarum and have always wanted to call Sean Hannity on his radio show and ask how a conservative Catholic reads this document.  (He’d probably say, Thanks for your opinion, Father.)

What this has to do with Cuba and Francis is this.  During the 50s, Protestants began to evangelize Latin America.  Catholic thinkers diagnosed Protestant success as an mere appeal to poverty relief. The Church, established and rich, was heavily invested in land and tyrannical governments often taxed individuals as mandatory tithes on behalf.  So they borrowed an idea from a Peruvian priest, who justified communism by Christianity and Social Justice.  The theology was rather suspect because it proposes ‘collective salvation’, a doctrine of Islam. (‘Acting together’ as in voting or revolution, brings salvation.  This violates the biblical standard, “Each man shall die for his own inquities”Dt. 24:16, Jer.31:30)  It directly linked to Karl Marx and Che Guevara.  It was anti-capitalist and thus anti-US businesses.  It was thinly veiled politics. 

I had the experience of having a Lutheran pastor who had done his Doctor of Divinity on Liberation Theology.  I befriended him since he was such a loner, a strange thing for a pastor.  I found out he watched CSPAN 6 hours a day, was vegetarian with a heavily liberal belief system and that is why the strange sermons on Buddha and other new age things.  He was greatly saddened that the Lutheran church had passed a resolution that Liberation Theology was heresy and he had to swear off of it in order to remain a reverend. 

Liberation theology appealed to many leftist intellectuals, priests and nuns.  Yet it died out in Latin America with few followers among the laity.  The primary proponent of Liberation Theology today is Pope Francis who declared “Inequality is the root of all evil.” The other guy who loves LT is Reverend Wright of Obama’s Chicago church.  In fact, Obama was mentored by Frank Marshall Davis of the Communist Party USA as a teenager.  Some of his former Harvard classmates, labeled Obama a closet Marxist. And Islam is what Obama learned as a child.  It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that Obama’s “”conversion” from Islam to Christianity, which occurred at Wright’s church was through Liberation Theology.  And between likeminded Obama and the Pope, they decided to politically redeem the murderous Castros.

But I sit in my chair thinking about the Good Samaritan.  In the story, the half-dead guy is bypassed, first by a priest, the local leader and head of theocratic government, like a modern politician.  Then the Levite, the human services guy in charge of social relief of orphans and widows, passed by.  Finally, an individual, a Samaritan, had compassion, spent his own money and time. The collective salvation thing has no voice in Jesus.  The individual faith does.  And so I ask the liberals, who believe that pulling voting levers collectively makes them compassionate, why they don’t do something personal?  If you love the homeless, why don’t you take them home?