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Hello everybody. This brief is called the US versus Liberation Theology and it is part one of a two part miniseries with part two dropping on Monday on Patreon for subscribers. My name is Matthew Remsky. This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cult pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. You can follow me, you can follow Derek and Julian as well on Blue sky, and the podcast is on Instagram and threads under its own handle. You can also support our Patreon if you're hearing this on Patreon already. Thank you so much. And you can also find me on YouTube and TikTok NTIFascistdad so in these two episodes I'll be exploring a question that I first stumbled across years ago when reading about the rise of Hayu Bolsonaro in Brazil and why he won so much support from evangelical Christians on his ascent, and why in 2016, as he was consolidating support for his presidential run, he'd gotten baptized in the Jordan river by the evangelical Christian leader of the Christian Socialist Party in Brazil, and why all of this was happening in a majority Catholic country. And it took me a little digging to sort of start to put the pieces together. Bolsonaro was hostile to Catholic liberation theology as well as to Catholic defenders of environmental protections for the Amazon. But his personal pivot to evangelical Christianity was not unique. It wasn't unexpected. It was part of a broader trend in which evangelicalism was instrumentalized in the portfolio of US soft political power in the global South. Now, the reasons for CIA picking sides on what kind of Christianity they like are clear, because evangelicalism generally bypasses the social gospel to focus on individualistic sin and salvation, and often the bootstraps theory of prosperity, as in if you are rich, God has blessed you, whereas liberation theology says the absolute opposite, which is that if you are poor, God speaks through you, asking to be recognized. So in this first episode, I'll lay out a basic outline for liberation theology and its internal tensions and its tense relationship to church orthodoxy and and I'll start to finish up with how the then Cardinal Ratzinger's attack on liberation theology in 1984 was largely echoed by the CIA in an internal research paper in 1986. And then in part two, I'll look at how American foreign policy had actually been trying to derail liberation theology themes and figures since the 1960s. References for all this work are in the show notes, but you won't find any one slam dunk book on this topic. I do believe that in time the research on CIA backed manipulation of various forms of Christianity will catch up to what we know about CIA backed political and military coups. And I think it's a next step for me in digging into the conspirituality story as it pertains to Trumpian fascism, because as a podcast we have pretty much sealed the deal on the types of religious charisma anxiety, corruption and purity fetishism that animate the cultic qualities of the MAGA movement. We have noted that most of this religious and spiritual stuff is highly individualistic. There's a lot of prosperity gospelers, there's a lot of New Age kooks, there are a lot of tech bros on psychedelics. So if MAGA has a spirituality, I think we know that it's the spirituality of self aggrandizement. But of course that's not all the spirituality there is. And in the Catholic sector, the liberation theology movement has countered these Christianities directly. Now, the reason we don't know a lot about it is that the CIA and Catholic think tanks poured huge resources into undermining liberation theology. But I wonder how many, even conservative Catholics, wanted that sort of thing to come back and bite them in the ass in the form of Paula White speaking tongues at the White House, maybe even using lines from Revelation to help tear down the East Wing. In the subjects I've looked at in past months, the overall historical pattern I'm noticing is the pattern of the boomerang. So Aime Cesaire famously posited that fascism in Europe in the 1920s was the imperial boomerang of the prior two centuries of colonial adventurism, militarism and exploitation. It was colonization turned back against Europe itself. Then when I recently reviewed Mahmoud Mamdani's Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, this is his account of the U.S. recruiting and training fundamentalist jihadis to battle communist influences in the Muslim world. This highlighted another boomerang effect, as those same jihadis eventually turned against the global American hegemony when they realized they were being used and that the US had zero interest in supporting autonomy in the Muslim world. Now, with this story, I see an evangelical boomerang spinning in the air across the equator. The CIA's active promotion of evangelical conversion in Latin America and has not only weakened the global visibility of liberation theology, it has also bolstered the American evangelical movement with a renewed sense of universalism. And one of the results of that strengthening is, of course, the rise of Trump. Now, when pollsters tackle the question of why the Democrats lost so many Hispanic voters to Trump, they mostly find that it was economic kitchen table issues and that Trump won them over with his faux populism, which, of course, he lost no time in betraying. However, after the 2024 election, the public Religion Research Institute also found that about 63 to 64% of Hispanic Protestant voters, most of whom are evangelical, voted for Trump, while only 43 to 45% of Hispanic Catholic voters supported him. Now, consider this. The fastest growing population of Protestant evangelicals in the US Right now is the Latin American population, with estimates that half of us Latin American folks will be evangelical by 2030. Now, I can't sort of make up a causal link between the CIA manipulation of faith in Latin America over the past 40 to 60 years and the rising tide of US Latin American evangelical support for Trump, or. But I wouldn't be shocked if there's no connection there. And it also makes me wonder how much these guys grasp that they actually need those Latin American votes, unless they're not really thinking about votes anymore anyway. But here's the thing. For every boomerang, there might be a reverse boomerang. And what do we see in the character of Robert Francis Prevost, now known as Pope Leo xiv? He spent his formative years in Peru, which is ground zero for liberation theology. And in late September, he released his first apostolic exhortation document. It's called Dilexi Te, or On Love for the Poor. Now, the document is spreading through the Catholic world as Trump unleashes fury against all immigrants and gathers warships in the Caribbean poised to strike Venezuela. And what do you suppose that Leo's main reference point is for Loving the Poor? Well, he quotes heavily and extensively from the classics of liberation theology. So what is liberation theology? In 1971, this is the year I was born, Gustavo Gutierrez Merino, O.P. published a book called A Theology of History, Politics, and Salvation. This was in his home city of Lima, Peru. The mantra of this book is that spiritual salvation and social liberation are inseparable. There's no daylight between them. And that the life of Jesus embodies this fact. So Gutierrez published this book through a small press that he helped found to distribute social Gospel scholarship. And then the first English translation came out two years later from Orbis Press in the States, and it sold 50,000 copies in 20 months. That's a lot. Here's one of the book's most famous but the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a byproduct of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence, the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order. Okay? In other words, you don't reform a broken world with tinkering and band aids. You change how it works. Now, off the bat, you might hear Gutierrez reject the common reading of Jesus saying the poor will always be with you as a kind of resignation of humanity to permanent inequality, or, you know, some sort of advising passivity. Gutierrez is saying that poverty is a political choice, and he uses distinctly non Catholic language. The exploited proletariat, for example. And then he rejects the notion of charity in favor of positive economic and social revolution. Now you'll also hear him pointing to what he called the preferential option for the poor. And this is a core liberation theology idea that our lives and our society and our religions are defined by how we care for the poorest among us. As liberation theology develops, some of its proponents begin to point out that this is not just a moral argument. It is an economic truth. When poverty rates decrease, general well being increases for everyone. Now, I also want to point out something rhetorically or tonally or affect wise about liberation theology if we listen to this line again. The poor are a byproduct of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. Any personal accusation or blame casting is kind of hard to hear in that rhetoric. And I assure you that if you heard Gutierrez or Pope Leo read that passage, it would sound very, very gentle. Liberation theology uses the language of class conflict, but it also tends to favor depersonalized phrases like structural violence. You're not going to hear liberation theologians shout out eat the rich or all cops are bastards or Death to the idf. It's a lot gentler than that. Now, as a Catholic growing up, I was reminded constantly that I, like everyone else, was a sinner. I had frailties and selfish habits, and I would always have to discipline and humble myself and avail myself of the examples of the saints. What liberation theology added for me was that we do not choose the systems of sin that encourage our worst instincts. We do not choose those systems. And that means that we can choose otherwise, that those systems can be changed. Okay, so who is Gutierrez? He was a Peruvian priest, philosopher and theologian, and he had early academic interests in medicine and literature, but then he moved on to sociology. He was ordained as a rank and file diocesan priest in 1959 at the age of 31. And he served in a parish as pastor at the Iglesia Cristo Redentor in Rimac, which is a working class district in Lima. And while there, he helped parishioners organize mutual aid projects. He ran study groups in a kind of Marxist education style three step process of seeing, judging and acting. So that started from listening to the realities on the ground of the poor and the marginalized, judging those realities theologically, like what are the ethics of those realities, how should we respond to them? And then acting collectively for change. Now, key to this model was the belief that theology was must follow direct observation to provide maybe an exploratory, perhaps explanatory framework for how to think about it. So you don't start with the Creed and then work your way down to the sidewalk. You start with a lucid examination of material conditions and then you ask your intellectual and religious heritage how you should respond. Throughout his life, Gutierrez talked about how much those parishioners taught him about hope amidst suffering through all of that co learning that they did together. Now, how did Gutierrez learn about Marxist theory? Well, it was just in the water in Latin America in the 1960s and early 70s. But he was also most likely personally influenced by and maybe even enthralled by a guy named Camilo Torres Restrepo. He was a a Colombian priest and a Marxist Leninist revolutionary and an early adopter of liberation theology. Bit of a complex guy. Now, Restrepo was a class traitor from a wealthy Bogota family, and he initially studied law, but at some point changed his path to become a Catholic priest. And he was ordained in 1954 at the age of 24. Now, I haven't been able to track down a precise timeline here, but somewhere around 1958, Gutierrez and Restrepo were actually classmates in Europe at the Catholic University in Louvain, Belgium. And this was a university that was at that point known for innovating a synthesis of social sciences and theology. And that, of course, suited the interests of both Gutierrez and Restrepo, who were thinking about and steeped in Marxism, but also deeply steeped in their theology. Now, I found two brief references to these guys forming a friendship during their studies, but I really just have to daydream at this point about their cafe conversations, because they were temperamentally different to mythic extremes. Torres was more of a doer than a thinker. But Gutierrez really sensed the disconnect between abstract theology and everyday realities, and he wanted to channel his energy into written work that would resolve that. And because of these temperamental differences and, you know, patience with bookishness and so on, their paths diverged in a way that illustrates the broad inspiration but also interpretability of liberation theology as it intersects with a spectrum of radicalism, from the radical impatient to the radical and fixed on the long game type of activist. Restrepo's activism and support for Marxist ideas led to tensions between him and the Church and the Colombian government. Now, he was kicked out eventually or laicized by the Cardinal of Bogota in 1965, and as soon as that happened, pretty much, he left the city to help form the National Liberation army, or the eln. In the mountains of San Vicente de Cucuri with Fabio Vazquez, who was the ELN's military leader, Restrepo provided ideological and spiritual leadership before his death at the age of 37. This is in February of 1966, during his first combat experience as a guerrilla fighter. During an ambush, Torres was attempting to retrieve a soldier's rifle when he was injured and killed. There were some reports from the battlefield that indicate that the national army targeted him specifically, that he was brutally beaten before being shot at point blank range. Now his body was buried in an unmarked grave. And he attained this martyr status, which has made efforts to recover and honor his remains part of ongoing talks with the eln. If Jesus were alive today, Restrepo famously wrote, he would be a Guerrero. And the Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin, unquote. So he went really hard. Then of his laicization, his defrocking, he wrote, I have left the privileges and duties of the clergy, but I have not ceased to be a priest. I believe that I have given myself up to the revolution out of love of neighbor. And when my neighbor has nothing against me, when I have achieved the revolution, I will offer Mass again. Now, Restrepo never raised the bread and wine again at that ceremonial table. And in hindsight, his hopes for revolutionary change, at least through the eln, now seem idealistic at best, although one has to wonder how this organization would have progressed if he had stayed on, if he had stayed alive and continued to advise them from a Catholic perspective. But after being nearly crushed by the government in the 1970s, the paramilitary increasingly turned to drug running, to terrorism and bombings, and to kidnapping to raise funds. And they have never managed to transition towards political legitimacy. So Gutierrez cut a very different path from Restrepo. It was one that allowed him to live to the age of 96 instead of dying at 37 on the battlefield. And a lot of that had to do with how he navigated the relationship between revolutionary social ideas and the likelihood of revolutionary violence, how much he distanced himself from the Restrepopath without directly condemning his old classmate. Now, taking that line didn't protect Gutierrez from harassment, because in his earliest work, he earned opprobrium by simply describing the violence of revolutionary struggle in plain terms, writing in 1971. So this is years after Restrepo was killed. Things like, quote, the political arena is necessarily conflictual. The building of a just society means the confrontation in which different kinds of violence are present between groups with different interests and opinions. Now, while you consider just how outrageous and inflammatory those sentences are, let me just pause here to note something. That part of what Gutierrez faces as a Marxist is being backed into a corner. And it's a corner that I'm personally becoming familiar with through my experience of working on anti fascism materials and watching people like Mark Bray have to flee into exile for simply reporting on facts and history. And that corner is that you can't be historically descriptive of the reality of conflict or violence in political struggle without being accused of advocating for it or even inciting it. Now, how did liberation theology fly in the broader Catholic world? One big impact it had was that it shone a light on class disparities within the church itself. So if you're into liberation theology, going to church on Sunday morning as a working person and standing behind the wealthy person while saying the same prayers gets a little bit weird. You start asking questions, are we all saying the same prayer? Do we all have the same same God? Does the sun really rise on the rich and the poor equally? This is the place where you're really supposed to get along, right? There's this great old Ukrainian film from 1965 called Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, and it starts exactly with this tension. I'll never forget this scene. It moved me really hard when I was 18 or so when I first saw this. So there's a peasant and a landowner who are both attending the same Orthodox service in a village in the Carpathian Mountains. This is the opening scenes of the film. Now, the landowner is done up in his finest. He's swaddled in furs, he's surrounded by his servants and family. He's been raising the rent on his tenants, and the peasant's family is starving. So the poor guy curses the oppressor under his breath. And then, in full view of the congregation, the rich guy takes out his axe and murders him for the intolerable insult. And the class rules in this village are so much more deeply embedded than the theology of the Orthodox Church, in which murder is probably wrong, that the landowner is allowed to walk away swaddled in his furs, with his train of family behind him, leaving the peasant's family destitute. Now, Gutierrez leans into this. So quoting from historian Travis Noel in the Boston Review, quote, the most controversial section of A Theology of Liberation addresses the universal call of Christian love in a region split into oppressive and oppressed classes. Gutierrez argues that the God of the Exodus story took sides and that Christians must as well. Quoting the French bishops, he points out that class struggles were a fact, not something one either advocated or deplored. More importantly, as Brazilian educator Paulo Freire argued in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968, liberating the oppressed would liberate the oppressors as well. One loves the oppressors by liberating them from their inhuman condition as oppressors, Gutierrez writes, that is, by liberating them from themselves. Okay, but here's that line that drives everyone bonkers. I'll just repeat it here. The political arena is necessarily conflictual. The building of a just society means the confrontation in which different kinds of violence are present between groups with different interests and opinions. In short, and now Travis Noel goes on to editorialize, violence was natural in the pursuit of liberation, even if one should do all one could to avoid it. So, oh my goodness, how dare Gutierrez reflect that different kinds of violence happen during political struggle. It's easy for a delicate mind to criticize him for ambiguity. And that's what started to happen almost from jump in 1975, a national Catholic reporter journalist covering a liberation theology conference in Detroit wrote that liberation theology posited that a Christian can employ violence when it is the lesser of existing evils.
