Whatever happened to liberation theology? New directions for theological reflection in latin America

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2001 by Kater, John L Jr

Do we perceive the novelty? What is new in the current world conjuncture is that capitalism arrived at a stage in which it is presented as an integrated whole: market, liberal democracy and capitalist culture. It is in its character of integrated whole that it proposes itself to the world as a global solution. It no longer admits alternative systems and it is not disposed to make concessions.

In this mode, he notes, free-market capitalism has been "messianized" and the dogma of a self-regulating market, working for the common good without any human intervention, is presented as a world-saving gospel. Assmann's perspective leads him to posit an economic analysis of neo-liberalism as a "sacrificialism" in which "all the sacrifices are 'necessary.'"23

Franz Hinkelammert, of the Ecumenical Department of Research in Costa Rica, has also undertaken study of the underlying assumptions and structures of the neo-liberal "gospel." He points out that it pretends to be the most "rational" of economic systems, yet its rational efficiency is calculated only in means and ends. If the enormous human cost of the system is taken into account, its vaunted rationality turns out to be entirely irrational: "The business oriented by calculating money and earnings rationalizes its proceedings, but this rationalization is the origin of an irrational process of destruction of the human being and nature."24

Others, whose approach is primarily philosophical and ethical, place their analytical reflection in the context of modernity and its critics. The Mexican ethicist Enrique Dussel points out that globalized liberalism represents "the only 'world-system' that there has been in planetary history."25 But, he insists, its utopian nature is revealed "in the light of its own pretensions of freedom, equality, wealth and property for all, and of other myths and symbols in contradiction with themselves, since the majority of its affected participants find themselves deprived of fulfilling the necessities that the system itself has proclaimed as rights" (emphasis mine).26 "The neoliberal utopia of the total market," like that of Soviet Communism and Nazism, is a utopia "that justifies] the existence of the victims."27 Nor does postmodernism offer a solution, since "the postmoderns deny any subject and therefore eliminate the possibility of strategic organization among subjects."28

To pursue reflection from a perspective that affirms the fundamental value of human life over against a dominant viewpoint that considers most people expendable, "extra" and therefore fundamentally useless, raises profound spiritual questions. Some liberation theologians now ask why they permitted Marxism to define not only their analytical tools but even their understanding of the Gospel and of Christian faith. Many more recognize that if neither politics nor economics as they are currently practiced offers any sense of ultimate human value beyond potential usefulness to the market, what is called for is a radical affirmation of the Gospel that speaks in God's name to each human being: "You are my beloved child." What is required is an articulation of the Gospel that transcends political categories in favor of a broader understanding of spirituality that encompasses the whole of the human reality in its relationship to God.