The media outcry against The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, is hardly surprising, if you consider Rev. Wright’s prophetic theology—a theology of liberation, transformation, and reconciliation.
Liberation theology is a radical form of Christian theology which emerged in Latin America in the 1960s and was inspired by the Second Vatican Council (1961-65) and Pope Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio (On the Progress of Peoples). The main thrust of this theology is a “preferential option for the poor.” Within a few years after its inception liberation theology spawned thousands of small, lay-led Christian communities throughout Latin America. Many of these so-called base communities had their origins in small village Bible study groups that stressed not Catholic doctrine but community action aimed at solving very real social and economic problems. Some coalesced around specific projects such as digging a well, building a road, negotiating with wealthy landowners, and defending the village from guerilla attacks. Above all, base communities were not passive. Indeed, they were often made up of political activists who some called revolutionaries.
Many villages owned collective farms as well as collective stores, pharmacies, health clinics, and schools. In other villages families owned their own small plots of land. Base communities fostered an atmosphere of cooperation, trust, and sharing as well as a strong sense of community.
Unfortunately, Latin American base communities became victims of their own success. Wealthy landowners, conservative Roman Catholics, and right-wing military governments found the community action and direct democracy practiced by base communities to be threatening. Under pressure from Pope John Paul II, Vatican power broker, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and the Reagan administration’s foreign policy in Latin America, the Catholic Church withdrew its support from base communities in the 1980s and did everything in its power to snuff out liberation theology.
Before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger was John Paul II’s hatchet man. He was responsible for leading the war against liberation theology and enforcing Catholic dogma worldwide. Among the prominent Catholic theologians investigated and disciplined by Cardinal Ratzinger were German theologian, Hans Kung; left-wing, California, priest Matthew Fox; Belgian priest, Jacques Dupuis; Brazilian liberation theologian, Leonardo Boff; and Peruvian priest, Gustavo Gutierrez, who actually coined the term “liberation theology.”
Anti-democratic John Paul II and his henchman Cardinal Ratzinger, along with their fascist-friendly allies in Opus Dei, ripped out the heart and soul of modern Christianity. Stripped of liberation theology, Christianity becomes the religion of George W. Bush and his Christian fundamentalist and neocon friends. John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger did irreparable damage to Christianity in general and to the Roman Catholic Church in particular. “What would have happened, Guatemalans and El Salvadorians ask to this day, if Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II had regarded the Latin American call for liberation from autocratic rulers with the same force with which the European churchmen supported the Polish Solidarity revolution?” wrote journalist Mary Jo McConahay for Pacific News Service.
Although base communities are by no means a panacea, they do offer a mechanism whereby impoverished people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, so to speak, using a combination of grass-roots democracy and direct action. For example, there may be a great deal that desperate inner-city neighborhoods can learn from them.
There is considerable evidence to suggest that the early Christian churches in the Roman Empire resembled Latin American base communities and subscribed to a theology remarkably similar to liberation theology.
Arguably, Rev. Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ is a large, sophisticated, Southside Chicago base community where liberation theology is actually practiced. The motto of the radical church is “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.”
New York Times writers Alessandra Stanley and Bob Herbert are abysmally ignorant of liberation theology. Stanley described Wright’s National Press Club speech as “cocky, defiant, declamatory, inflammatory, and monomanical.” Herbert accused the pastor of “living a narcissist’s dream.”
Jeremiah is no narcissist but rather a living example of his Biblical namesake Jeremiah the Hebrew prophet. Jeremiah began prophesying the fall of the Kingdom of Judah to the Babylonians around 627 B.C. Jeremiah correctly perceived that the sins of the people of Judah would bring down their nation. When he called for repentance, his message was received with anger and hostility, not unlike the reception Rev. Wright has gotten from his criticisms of the American Empire. Jeremiah was accused of being a traitor, arrested, and nearly lynched. After surviving the destruction of Jerusalem, he began calling for reconciliation, hope, and a new moral order.
After spending twenty years in Rev. Wright’s church there can be no doubt that Barack Obama has been positively influenced by Wright’s prophetic message of liberation, transformation, and reconciliation. Indeed, all of Obama’s speeches about change and hope are laced with Wright’s theology.
Obama may now find it politically expedient to distance himself from Wright, but he is clearly a better man for having known Jeremiah Wright.
Rebél
Thomas H. Naylor
May 15, 2008