Abstract
This conversation between Peter McLaren and Petar Jandrić brings about some of the most recent and deepest of McLaren’s insights into the relationship between revolutionary critical pedagogy and liberation theology, and outlines the main directions of development of McLaren’s thought during and after Pedagogy of Insurrection. In the conversation, McLaren reveals his personal and theoretical path to liberation theology. He argues for the relevance of liberation theology for contemporary social struggles, links it with social sciences, and addresses some recent critiques of Pedagogy of Insurrection. McLaren identifies the idolatry of money as the central point of convergence between liberation theology and Marxism. Developing this thought further, he asserts that Jesus was a communist. McLaren analyses the revolutionary praxis of liberation theology in Latin America, and concludes that the struggle needs to avoid violence and endure without losing tenderness. He analyzes the international politics of liberation theology and shows that liberation theology was demonized by the US administration because it works for the poor. McLaren then expands experiences from Latin America towards a global ethics of solidarity, criticizes Church positions on various matters, and insists on a critical approach to Church dogmas. He explores theoretical and practical dissonances between Marxism and Christianity, and expands them towards a more general dichotomy between the material and the spiritual. He explores the Christian eschaton – the arrival of the Kingdom of God – and links it to Marx’s prophecy of the future socialist society. Finally, he explores ecumenical opportunities of liberation theology and firmly links it with the arrival of the socialist society.
Keywords
Introduction
During the past few years, Peter and I have co-written several conversational pieces (i.e. McLaren and Jandrić, 2014, 2015). For the purpose of republishing one of these pieces in my forthcoming book (Jandrić, 2017), I wanted to update the text with Peter’s insights in liberation theology. In the hope to get an additional page or two for the existing article, in Autumn 2016 I emailed Peter few questions. In only a couple of days, however, I received almost 10,000 words of Peter’s writing at its best – sharp, bold, powerful, straight to the point testimony of many years of deep thinking about the relationship between revolutionary critical pedagogy and liberation theology. Peter’s initial answers provoked more questions, then more answers, then even more questions … after several days of furious email exchange, this text had finally arrived into being.
Peter and I immediately understood that this conversation is much more than a mere extension of our ongoing work. Instead of rephrasing the content of his recent book, in this article Peter responds to a lot of critical feedback to Pedagogy of Insurrection (McLaren, 2015), looks into the historical roots of liberation, presents fresh ideas, and answers questions emerging from his recent work. Thus, this conversation brings about some of the most recent and deepest insights of Peter McLaren into the relationship between revolutionary critical pedagogy and liberation theology, and outlines the main directions of development of Peter’s thought during and after Pedagogy of Insurrection (McLaren, 2015).
The path to liberation theology
I became serious about revolutionary politics about the time of my conversion to Catholicism and at the same time I was drawn to numerous spiritual traditions. Around this time, too, I was receiving invitations to speak in Latin America and the Caribbean, eventually over the years working with educators and activist groups in Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico, etc. Well, the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were especially brutal years for campesinos, workers, activists, teachers, and revolutionaries throughout Latin America, especially in the Southern Cone. After the government assassination of six Jesuit scholars, their housekeeper and her daughter on 16 November 1989 on the campus of Universidad Centroamericiana in San Salvador, El Salvador, the world finally started to take serious notice, especially since the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, had been assassinated in 1980 while offering mass in the chapel of the Hospital of Divine Providence after famously speaking out against poverty, social injustice, and torture.
Then there was the clandestine Operation Condor (Operación Cóndor or Plan Cóndor; McSherry, 2005) that was a major plan of interservice and regional cooperation and a sharing of joint intelligence among the USA and the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America, including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, in order to maintain an intelligence-sharing program of state terror and political repression. The program began in 1968 but was fully implemented by 1975 and was responsible for as many or more than 60,000 deaths up until 1989. In Argentina alone over 150 priests and nuns were killed, along with peasants, workers, intellectuals, and anyone associated with being part of or sympathetic towards leftist guerilla movements. The program – which can be traced to the infamous US School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation because of its historical association with the training of Latin American death squads) – was created to advance joint counterinsurgency operations designed to eradicate communist subversives and ideas, and to suppress the influence of liberation theology and other oppositional political or ideological positions.
Through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the US military, and the State Department, the US government helped to bring military dictatorships to power and secure their stability by imposing sanctions to destabilize the economies of socialist-leaning regimes and by supporting and training “black op” and execution squads. While the USA was not an official member of the Condor consortium, documents that were later uncovered revealed that during this time the USA provided major organizational, financial, and technical assistance to the repressive regimes involved. The secret papers of the 17th Conference of American Armies in Mar del Plata in 1987 revealed that the US military initiated numerous discussions about how to wage socio-psychological warfare against liberation theology, ecclesial, and base communities through LIC (Low Intensity Conflict) strategies using misinformation and ideological subversion (Duchrow, 1999). Of course, when the assassinations of the Jesuits broke into the news there was international pressure to shut down the death squads.
However, John Paul II was very much opposed to communism and he considered liberation theology a dangerous development within the Church. In the late 1970s, shortly after he was elected Pope, he began to oppose liberation theology directly and the church hierarchy moved decidedly to the right. He put Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) in charge of countering the theological interpretations and actions of liberation theologians. It was no accident that Pope John Paul II made numerous trips to Latin America. In 1983, the Pope visited Nicaragua to scold Father Ernesto Cardenal and to oppose liberation theology. I had the good fortune of meeting Ernesto Cardenal on a television show hosted by President Hugo Chavez in 2006. John Paul II defrocked Cardenal because of his participation in liberation theology. Fortunately, Pope Francis overturned this decision in 2014.
Pedagogy of insurrection
I think social science is very relevant for theology, and vice versa. Just as Marx’s work revolutionized the science of history in his discovery of the workings of the mode of production by means of scientific dialectics, so Christian theology has revolutionized our understanding of faith. Theology challenges positivistic science and empiricism, but that does not render it unscientific. Liberation theologians may challenge the materialism of the anti-Hegelians, or they may take a different approach. Certainly, the principles of natural science are not the only principles by which to verify truth. But liberation theology needs social science as much as social science needs theology. We need to understand the world in order to change it – after all, this was a major imperative for Marx as it was for Jesus. Jesus taught us not through social science theories but through parables.
Remember, Petar, that Paulo Freire wrote that the prophetic position of the Church “demands a critical analysis of the social structures in which … conflict takes place. This means it demands of its followers a knowledge of socio-political science, since this science cannot be neutral; this demands an ideological choice” (1973: 14). Here Freire admits to the notion that all science is a form of ideology and that there is an ideological choice in choosing particular types of science with which to clarify and deepen our understanding of the struggle for liberation. Part of the prophetic vision of the Church demands an engagement with social science that can help unpeel the veneer of mystification that keeps us from knowing reality. Freire writes that a prophetic perspective “does not represent an escape into a world of unattainable dreams. It demands a scientific knowledge of the world as it really is” (1973: 14). But note that for Freire, this scientific understanding of the world is found through praxis, through revolutionary praxis. Freire warns that “to denounce the present reality and announce its radical transformation into another reality capable of giving birth to new men and women, implies gaining through praxis a new knowledge of reality” (1973: 14). Freire criticizes the petit bourgeois dimension of the Church today and urges theologians to consider in their work the so-called Third World that exists within their own so-called First World – in the outskirts of their cities. And I would add – within our segregated inner cities.
What is the connection between left-wing and right-wing critiques of your work? Here, I am especially interested in critiques arriving from the left: the closer they are, the more they hurt. Some left-wing theorists, especially those arriving from anarchist circles, say that religion and capitalism are mutually foundational – in this view, religion simply does not work together with socialism. What do you make of this critique? How, and under which condition, can we divorce religion from capitalism and build a theist socialist future?
As a revolutionary Marxist humanist who works in the tradition of critical pedagogy, which I have developed over the years as “revolutionary critical pedagogy” – and as a Catholic – I have been greatly influenced by the work of the great Jesuit theologian and educator Jose Porfirio Miranda. So much of what I am offering as a response to your question is indebted to his work, especially his classic work, Marx against the Marxists (Miranda, 1980), that readers will need to seriously engage this work in order to get the details. In his world-shaking critique of capitalism, Marx regards people as endowed with the capacity to make history. Marx affirms “the cunning of reason” as the means by which human actors shape history. This type of reason is neither an abstraction, nor is it attached to the notion of history as some kind of abstract entity of its own that floats above the messy web of human strife and turmoil. Reason in this larger sense has, according to Marx, created the conditions of possibility for a truly humane society to emerge out of the ruins of capital. But the foundational issue here is: Why must a new society emerge from the extraction of surplus value from alienated labor?
The destruction of capital becomes, for Marx, the immanent form for a higher principle that makes possible capitalism’s ability to cede its place to a communist society. Marx’s entire corpus of works is orientated towards this historical eschatology in his denunciation of the worship of the god of money. The cunning or subtlety of reason creates the conditions of possibility for results that are contrary to those which the capitalists were pursuing. Miranda is very convincing here when he affirms that Marx appeals to this eschatological aspect of history – this affirming of the eschaton or Kingdom of God of which Jesus preached. This eschaton is occurring in history itself and not in some other world, some cosmic hinterland where people float around as disembodied spirits. Churches and Christians everywhere tragically refuse to hear this message. Marx has this eschatological awareness, his writings are full of it, and I do not have space here to recite all the instances in his writings where this is evident – they can be found in the works of Miranda.
God is the intervening Absolute who relativizes the eternal return of the same and delinks us from it so that we can seize the torch of liberation. Jesus came to revolutionize the social structure of religion, not to occupy a throne reserved for him by “religious” functionaries of the state who have been made illustrious in the capitalist world by their unslakable thirst for power and class privilege. As Miranda argues, rebellion against religion is mandatory for anyone who wants to bring justice to the world. Charles Reitz, who has adumbrated a Marxist atheist position, is correct here in arguing for a communal politics of justice and commonwealth by means of a dialectical sublation of religion, surpassing its inadequacies yet preserving its worthwhile historical contributions. Here, Reitz (2015) starts with humanity’s oldest philosophical and religious sources in Africa that reflects that “communally laboring humanity can be seen as the source of ethics.” This ethics of caring, reciprocity, and the “golden rule” includes emancipatory religious practice, as in the civil rights movement. Here the struggle for justice includes the struggle against racism, sexism, patriarchy, and capitalism. Can we not hear the words of Jesus: “Woe to you rich, for your consolation is now” (Luke 6: 24) or “Blessed are you poor; the reign of God is yours (Luke 6:20)?
The idolatry of money
Freire calls for a type of class suicide in which the bourgeoisie take on a new apprenticeship of dying to their own class interests and experiencing their own Easter moment through a form of mutual understanding and transcendence. Freire argues that the theologians of Latin America must move forward and transform the dominant class interests in the interests of the suffering poor “if they are to experience ‘death’ as an oppressed class and be born again to liberation” (1973: 6). Or else, they will be implicated within a Church “which forbids itself the Easter which it preaches” (1973: 5–6). Freire borrowed the concept of “class suicide” from Amilcar Cabral, the Guinea-Bissauan and Cape Verdean revolutionary and political leader who was assassinated in 1973. For Freire, insight into the conditions of social injustice of this world stipulates that the privileged must commit a type of “class suicide” where they self-consciously attempt to divest themselves of their power and privilege and willingly commit themselves to unlearning their attachment to their own self-interest. Essentially, this was a type of Easter experience in which a person willingly sacrifices his or her middle or ruling class interests in order to be reborn through a personal commitment to suffering alongside the poor.
Of course, this class suicide takes place in the context of a larger mission to end the social sin of poverty itself. It is a transformational process in which a person identifies with the poor and the oppressed and commits oneself to taking down all victims from the cross. Here we find an echo of the teachings of St Francis. Both Freire and St Francis understood that a transcendence of oppression – a striving upwards – in the struggle for liberation was not enough. As Leonardo Boff notes in his study of St Francis, a striving “upwards” away from the travails of the world through the attainment of a mystical consciousness is not enough. What is also needed, and even more so, is a “trans-descendence” – a kenotic act of self-emptying, an openness to the lives of those below – the poor, the stigmatized, the despised –and a willingness to integrate them into a community of love, kindness, and solidarity – a fraternal solidarity with those suffering from the scourge of life’s deprivations. Christ encountered such trans-descendence in the wretched of the earth, in the crucified of history.
I cannot permit myself to be a mere spectator. On the contrary, I must demand my place in the process of change. So the dramatic tension between the past and the future, death and life, being and non-being, is not longer a kind of dead-end for me; I can see it for what it really is: a permanent challenge to which I must respond. And my response can be none other than my historical praxis—in other words, revolutionary praxis. (1973: 7) Critical pedagogy is the lucubration of a whole philosophy of praxis that predates Marx and can be found in biblical texts. If we wish to break from alienated labor, then we must break completely with the logic of capitalist accumulation and profit, and this is something to which Marx and Jesus would agree. (McLaren, 2015: 54–55)
I was fortunate to participate in a public dialogue with Freire and Boal at the Rose Theater in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early 1990s. It was the first time Freire and Boal had appeared together in such a venue and I was honored to have been a part of this historic event. Symbols have a fecundity that become animated in rituals. They are brought to life, and live inside of us, through play, through rituals, and their elaboration can be seen in the evolution of drama and thought. Symbols are enacted and work synergistically with other symbols; I have termed this process “enfleshment.” Here religious and secular symbols can, under specific historical and existential circumstances, hemorrhage into each other and can work in very liberating and also in very dangerous ways. Just think of Francoist Spain and the rituals that linked Catholic symbols to fascism.
According to Miranda (1980), Jesus was the first human being in history to denounce money as the object of idolatry, which centuries later Marx referred to variously as the Biblical idols of Baal, Mammon, and Moloch. In fact, when discussing the commodity form of production, he used these terms as much as he did the word “fetish.” When Saint Paul talks about the “lust which is idolatry,” he is referring to money. Book Three of Capital (Marx, 1981) makes clear that the capitalist mode of production is not the origin of class violence in capitalist society. As Miranda (1980) notes, the class division is created outside the sphere of production, when money becomes god, and it was this god that created the conditions of possibility for the capitalist mode of production. Money as exchange value stands outside production and circulation and yet dominates both. Money represents the autonomous existence of value as the concretization of human labor. It is when money no longer represents commodities, but when commodities represent money, that money becomes a god. Money is the god of all people living under the commodity mode of production and money had already become a god during the time of Jesus. In other words, the accumulation of capital is not enough to automatically create the mode of production we know today as capitalism, because it takes a certain type of historically produced civilization. The transformation of money into capital requires a certain kind of historical circumstance. Today, capitalism still functions as the institutionalization of the worship of Mammon.
Marx does a brilliant job of explaining how money was transformed into a god ruling human beings. Marx reveals how money is both the object and fountainhead of greed, of auri sacra fames, the product of a historically conditioned environment. According to Miranda (1980), Marx perceived the switching of the subject into an object and the transformation of the ends into the means as the centerpiece of the making of a false religion. Marx then applied this “conversion” to economics, to the production of value. Capital finds a way to exchange itself for a commodity that produces more value than the commodity itself – labor power. Capital moves into production through an exchange with labor power, via wage labor, which brings about the separation of the direct producers from the owners of the means of production. Interest-bearing capital is a fetish, a self-expanding value, and it expands its value independently of reproduction, which is a reversal of the relationship between persons and things – all pointing to Marx’s anathematization of the worship of money as god. Miranda (2004) points out that at the very central point of his analysis of capital, at the very point where he uncovers the birth of money as a commodity, Marx cites two entire versus from the Apocalypse (Bible, 17:13; 13:17). Marx offers a scientific elaboration of Christ’s teaching about the god Mammon.
Jesus was a communist
Actually, three types of profit are attacked in the scriptures. The Bible itemizes its reproof of profit-taking as occurring through commerce (Ecclus 27:1–2), loans on interest (Exodus 22:24; Leviticus 25:36, 25:37; Deuteronomy 23:19; Ezekiel 18:8, 18:13, 18:17, 22:12; Psalms 15:5; Proverbs 28:8.), and productive activity or the process of production (James 5:1–6). There is something about the process itself of being able to grow rich that is wicked and unjust (Isaiah 53:9). The acquisition of wealth itself is possible only by exploiting the poor (Job 20:19; Psalm 37). Micha 2-1-2, as well as Isaiah 5:8, focus on how the rich keep acquiring property. Miranda (1974, 1980) makes a convincing case that the Bible condemns the exploitation suffered by the poor at the hands of the rich and creates an identity between the rich and the unjust (Isaiah 53:9). Jesus’ teachings that enabled the first Christians to base their community on communism can be found in Mark 10:25, Luke 6:20, 24, Matthew 6:24, and Luke 16:19–31.
In fact, Miranda (1980) makes the claim that Jesus was a communist, which can be seen in John 12:6, 13:29, and Luke 8:1–3. Did not Jesus make the renunciation of property a condition for entering into the Kingdom of God? How can God make it possible for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God? The answer is clearly provided by the Bible. According to Miranda this answer is: By ceasing to be rich (Mark 10:21, 25, 27) and giving away one’s wealth to the poor. The scriptural exegesis undertaken by Miranda is, to me, thoroughly persuasive. As a revolutionary Marxist, I am certainly drawn to a number of Miranda’s works, Marx and the Bible (1974) and Marx against the Marxists (1980).
This conscienticizing of the preaching of the Gospel, which rejects any aseptic presentation of the message, should lead to a profound revision of the pastoral activity of the Church … the oppressed themselves should be the agents of their own pastoral activity. (1988: 154–155)
Liberation theologians focus on the socio-historical captivity of people in the grip of the pretentions of absolute authority and who are the gravest victims of the alienation brought about by capitalism. They seek a reciprocal salvation in their universal and ontological solidarity with the poor and with all of humanity, which is the possibility of our redemption and liberation. This is what critical pedagogy is about. Beginning with biographical experiences of the people, their lived, hermeneutical engagement with others, and interrogating those experiences in the context of those experiences being situated on a larger locus of the capitalist mode of production and what Jesus refers to as “the money of iniquity” (Luke 16:9,11). A subversive praxis of faith challenges the systemization of governing authorities and their closed systems of authority and reprobates all measures of accumulating profit under the vice grip of their authority. Established authority that protects freedom and establishes the conditions of possibility of freedom from necessity and from senseless suffering can certainly be conserved, but in other instances when it works to despoil society it should be challenged by seeking a qualitative transformation of society in the interests of justice and solidarity.
To endure without losing tenderness
Prior to this horrendous event, in 1980, (the now beatified) Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero was gunned down saying mass in a small hospital chapel. Before the military regime came to power in 1970s’ El Salvador, a number of Jesuits there had begun rethinking and re-pivoting their work in a concerted attempt to embrace fully the preferential option for the poor that emerged from the conference in Medellín, Colombia, and to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and heart-to-heart with the poor and powerless campesinos. They understood this to mean actively supporting the rights of campesinos and civilian movements promoting social, economic, and political reform.
During the years of the military regime, it was Father Ignacio Ellacuría, rector at the UCA, who played an influential role during the tumultuous decade of military rule in reframing the university’s mission that involved standing in solidarity with the country’s impoverished majorities. Ensepulchred in a cemetery of silence and fear, the campesinos were in dire need of government reforms as well as protection from the church, which often stood silent in the face of large-scale torture and mass killings carried out by the heavily armed military regime. Echoing the language of Medellín, the university’s 1979 mission was inextricably linked to the service of the people and, in fact, the mission of the university was in a large sense oriented by the oppressed campesinos themselves (Ellacuria and Sobrino, 1993).
Evidently, the Salvadoran government viewed Father Ignacio Ellacuría and the UCA as a serious threat to the USA’s continued financial and political backing. The US-backed military dictatorship was well aware that if Salvadorean liberation theologians flagged the US Congress about human rights abuses by the government, it might withdraw its crucial financial support, weapons sales, and military training (including methods of torture) in the School of the Americas operated by the USA. The US-trained Atlocatl battalion (who trained the Salvadorean death squads) massacred thousands of unarmed peasants during the dirty war and hundreds were slain in El Mozote alone in 1981. They did not want the Catholic Church interfering in their practices of slaughtering innocent peasants whom they suspected of supporting guerrilla fighters. The government saw this reign of terror as a necessary step in ridding the country of a communist menace that, if not stamped out, would eviscerate the established Salvadorean ruling class.
In my book, Pedagogy of Insurrection (McLaren, 2015), I wrote a last chapter that I named “Critical rage pedagogy.” Here I unleashed a critical rage – using a combination of spoken word and other literary tropes – at the history of human atrocity.
To me, the Kingdom of God is not isolated to, say, a Beethoven symphony, Gregorian chants, the ecstasy of contemplating a mathematical formula, or to a painting by one of the great masters (although I certainly love art and music – not so much mathematics, I will confess). For me, the Kingdom of God is found more tangibly on the picket line, in solidarity with the suffering of those who are being brutalized everyday by capitalism by governments, by death squads and by religious edicts that marginalize them and exclude them from their full humanity. The Kingdom of God is found in the act of struggling and sacrificing for the other. Not speaking out for the other, since groups can very often speak for themselves, but speaking alongside and with others, as allies, as friends, as comrades, and as brothers and sisters in Christ.
You say you don’t want anything to happen to me … .I’d prefer it that way myself – but I don’t see that we have control over the forces of madness, and if you could choose to enter into other people’s suffering, or to love others, you at least have to consent in some way to the possible consequences. Actually what I’ve learned here is that death is not the worst evil. We look death in the face every day. But the cause of the death is evil. That’s what we have to wrestle and fight against. (Dear, 2006)
I look at the US social order today in terms of the popularity at the moment of Donald Trump; there appears to be a blend of social Darwinism and the racial superiority of white Europeans, nationalism in the form of American exceptionalism and, of course, a religious triumphalism in terms of a God that has given the USA a providential role to play in history. Against this White Jesus of the diseased colonial imagination that secured the privilege of Whites is the Black Jesus, which grasps the perils of racism and imperialism and the prosperity gospel that has grown out of the prosperity gospel of US capitalism. Reggie Williams (2014) has written an interesting book, Bohhoeffer’s Black Jesus, that illustrates the impact that the preaching of Adam Clayton Powell Sr, pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, had on Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he was a Sloane Fellow at Union Theological Seminary in New York for the 1930–1931 academic year. His understanding of the Black experience of suffering, resistance, and transcendence helped him to understand what the Nazis were trying to do to the oppressed peoples of his homeland and also helped him understand the perils of developments within European Christianity.
The first religious war of the 21st century
Another major contextual issue for the visit is the challenge to the traditional Church played by liberation theology. Pope John Paul (aided by the current pope when he was Cardinal Ratzinger) made major efforts to stamp out this Marxist analysis of class struggle. It had come to be promoted by a significant number of Catholic clergy and lay people, who in a political compromise sometimes sanctioned violence “on behalf of the people.” The more orthodox form of liberation theology that sided with the poor and oppressed had undergone a reductionist reading that the Vatican sought to correct. To a large extent, Pope John Paul II beat down “liberation theology”, but in the past few years, it has seen a resurgence in various parts of Latin America. (Kovalik, 2013) Also important — and disturbing — to the Holy See is the resilience of Latin American liberation theology. During his time as the powerful Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the 1980s and 1990s, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger opposed liberation theology for its overt sympathy for revolutionary movements. Some of the supporters of this theology — including former clerics — now occupy prominent political positions in countries like Bolivia and Paraguay, a phenomenon that one commentator has described as the secular reincarnation of liberation theology. For the Holy See, the Church Magisterium (the teachings of the Catholic Church) on social issues already advocates strongly for the rights of the underprivileged. This advocacy, often described as the Church’s “preferential option for the poor”, should not include clerics assuming high level governmental positions or running for office. In calling for a reduction of domestic tensions in Latin America, the Holy See hopes to prevent a climate fertile for activist, progressive clerics to coalesce with populist, authoritarian governments. (Kovalik, 2013) In 1977, former Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero adopted an outspoken stance in favor of “liberation theology” that alienated many of the church’s most influential members. Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas followed Romero’s example during his 1983-1994 tenure. Much changed in the years following the 1992 Peace Accords, which ended repression and violence on the part of government forces and guerrillas. With the selection of Fernando Saenz Lacalle as Archbishop of San Salvador in 1995, the Catholic Church entered a new era during which it withdrew its support for “liberation theology”; Saenz-Lacalle has placed a renewed emphasis on individual salvation and morality. However, an underlying division still exists within the Salvadoran Catholic Church vis–vis such political issues. (Kovalik, 2013) … what is left unspoken is that it was the murder of good people like Archbishop Romero that led to the Church “re-Romanizing” – a term with a double meaning, for it can properly mean that the Church is again in line with the Vatican in Rome (the intended meaning), but also that it has returned to the pro-Empire stance the Church has maintained (with limited interruption after the second Vatican Council in 1962) since 324 A.D. In other words, mission accomplished for both the Vatican and the U.S. (Kovalik, 2013) During the 12 year Salvadoran civil war (1980-92), the FMLN attempted to overthrow the government utilizing a strategy that included armed struggle, terrorism, socialist/communist political indoctrination. The liberation theology movement within the Catholic Church and labor unions largely supported these efforts. The group received monetary support and arms from the Soviet Bloc and Cuba. (Kovalik, 2013) … the U.S. Army helped defeat liberation theology, which was a dominant force, and it was an enemy for the same reason that secular nationalism in the Arab world was an enemy – it was working for the poor. This is the same reason why Hamas and Hezbollah are enemies: they are working for the poor. It doesn’t matter if they are Catholic or Muslim or anything else; that is intolerable. The Church of Latin America had undertaken “the preferential option for the poor.” They committed the crime of going back to the Gospels. The contents of the Gospels are mostly suppressed (in the U.S.); they are a radical pacifist collection of documents. It was turned into the religion of the rich by the Emperor Constantine, who eviscerated its content. If anyone dares to go back to the Gospels, they become the enemy, which is what liberation theology was doing. (Cited in Chaudary, 2007)
Computerized programs like this one – which the researchers argue are better equipped to assess personality traits than living and breathing human beings – are very likely to be utilized by future employers. This type of research goes much further than the “predictive analytics” used by Facebook and other social media sites. Certain algorithms or websites that you visit will determine that you are unsuited for jobs that you want. How has technology turned into such a companion of the security state? Freire maintained that “education for liberation does not merely free students from blackboards just to offer them projectors” (1973: 4). Computer science here has become completely domesticating. They are the result of the contradictions within their own power structures, serving capital by instrumentalizing our personalities and subjective agency.
Is this so surprising today, when public education is being turned into a series of investment opportunities? We see it in the retooling of colleges in order to serve better financial and military-industrial interests, in the overuse and exploitation of contingent faculty, in the growth of for-profit degree-granting institutions, in rising tuition and, not to mention, the assault on critical citizenship in favor of consumer citizenship. There are many struggles to take up in the making of the Kingdom of God.
Towards a global ethics of solidarity
Liberation theologians openly contest certain positions taken by the established Church, just as Pope Francis does. Francis is more moderate in many of his views than many of the prominent exponents of liberation theology. Nevertheless, he has taken strong positions against global capitalism and environmental destruction that I welcome and applaud. Do we obscure the spiritual nature of the gospel by calling for more than just an identification with the poor but rather a robust confrontation with the rich and powerful? Do we administer to the poor without asking why they are poor? Here we need to recall the words of Brazil’s Dom Hélder Câmara, whom Paulo Freire very much admired: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist” (Câmara, 2009).
In 1965, as the famous Vatican II Council was coming to a close, Hélder Câmara led 40 bishops late at night into the Catacombs of Domitillia outside of Rome. After celebrating the Eucharist, they signed a document under the title of the Pact of the Catacombs, challenging themselves and others to live lives of evangelical poverty and to dedicate themselves to serving the two-thirds of humanity who live in poverty and deprivation. There are certainly ideological differences within the Church and in some countries – such as Croatia and Poland – the right-wing factions of the Church hold sway.
Going back to powerful analysis by Noam Chomsky, we should also consider the conditions in which these positions are being developed. Speaking about the US context, Chomsky says: There is a correlation, common in other parts of the world as well. When life is not offering expected benefits, people commonly turn to some means of support from religion. Furthermore, there is a lot of cynicism. It was recognized by party managers of both parties (Republicans and Democrats) that if they can throw some red meat to religious fundamentalist constituencies, like say we are against gay rights, they can pick up votes. In fact, maybe a third of the electorate – if you cater to elements of the religious right in ways that the business world, the real constituency, doesn’t care that much about. (Cited in Chaudary, 2007)
We have, all of us, been here since the beginning of the universe and are made out of star dust. And it is the guiding principles of the universe that brought us here, and that has resulted in the potential for our self-actualization, and that has taken 15 billion years of evolutionary processes. We had better start to listen to indigenous sages who have understood this far better than we Euro-Americans here in Babylon. We need to abandon our anthropocentric and mimetic desires and subject ourselves to a global ethics of solidarity, compassion, and fellowship so that our outer ecologies can be brought into cosmogenetic harmony with our ecology of the mind and spirit. And here we bring our maieutic processes of pedagogy into dialogue with a Freirean approach to conscientization. In other words, we bring together history, mind, and spirit. I reject a turgid monotheism that would cleave us from spiritual traditions that predate Christianity. In short, I would say that we must act in accordance with our own conscience.
Between the material and the spiritual
I work as a Marxist materialist but I believe there is a world beyond physicalism. That is a world of hope. Hope is conjugated in opposition to injustice and gestated in the struggle of humanity against inhumanity. Rubem Alves (cited in Boff, 1987: 124) writes of hope as follows: Hope is the presentiment that the imagination is more real, and reality less real, than we had thought. It is the sensation that the last word does not belong to the brutality of facts with their oppression and repression. It is the suspicion that reality is far more complex than realism would have us believe, that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the present, and that, miraculously and surprisingly, life is readying the creative event that will open the way to freedom and resurrection …
Here, Teillhard de Chardin’s work (1959, 1964, 1965, 1966a, 1966b, 1968) becomes even more interesting and relevant. In this view, God can influence the course of revolution without interfering with the laws of nature. Some physicists argue that the original presence of this information can be ascribed to a transcendental creative act where the growth and development of this information is considered immanent. I am not well-versed enough in physics to evaluate this speculative argument. However, there are several practice-oriented codes of moral behavior that have been generated out of this work by Ervin Laszlo (2014), who has come up with a minimum moral code (live so that others can live) and a maximum moral code (act so as to further the evolution of a humanly favorable dynamic equilibrium in the biosphere). I would modify this, however, to include non-human animals. To me, holistic and local domains of consciousness are interdependent and material and mental domains are bidirectional so that when unconscious contents become conscious, this transition could possibly alter the unconscious memories left behind.
I am not here trying to push a neo-Platonist line of reasoning – yet, I remain open to various explanations of how the cosmos came into being. In my political work, I remain very much a historical materialist. I think this is the best approach for understanding the dialectical relationship between capitalism and labor (and materialism and idealism, for that matter) in the larger struggle for a socialist future. While I do not deny the material world, I am very interested in the nature of consciousness, and I would not in the least be surprised if consciousness exists independently of the brain, with the brain serving as a type of filtering device to gain access to the deep layers of the psyche. The brain here is conceived as a system that constrains the supraliminal conscious expression of normally inaccessible subliminal contents. And here I am echoing the work of FWH Myers and William James and the work of contemporary researcher Edward Kelly (Kelly et al., 2007, 2015) and the notions of the subliminal self and the supraliminal self.
Now all of this interest I have in religious experiences, the nature of consciousness, etc., is mostly just engaging in thought games. One day perhaps I will be able to make more nuanced reflections about the nature of the cosmos, our role on this earth, and the place that faith plays in our lives. Yes, I do return over and over again to certain questions, figures, and memories. I return to questions “on the ground,” questions that involve what Michelle Alexander calls “the new Jim Crow.” The massive discrimination policies directed towards people of color in the areas of education, employment, public benefits; the mass incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos through the war on drugs and anti-crime policies; a criminal justice system responsible for creating and reproducing the racial hierarchy in the USA; or what could be called the American Caste System – the privatization of prisons ensuring large incarceration rates of prisoners of color.
As a teenager I was very interested in Theosophy, eastern religions, the Christian mystics, the desert fathers, and the lives of saints. I do not pay much attention in my recent work to Bruno Giordano, Marcion, Valentinus, Simon Magus, Appelles, or the Christological or ecclesial Gnosticism or Docetism that is associated with their teachings, which is not to say they do not offer some interesting points of debate. In this respect, however, I follow Jon Sobrino in defending the living, breathing, bleeding, and pulsating flesh of the man we call the Christ, the ecce homo. Of course I am inspired by the life of the saints and martyrs such as Saint Maximilian Kolbe, patron saint of drug addicts and political prisoners, whose prison cell I visited last year in Auschwitz. In my own work I have found it important to uphold the humanity of Christ without de-emphasizing Christ’s divinity, and for me the humanity of Christ is best embodied historically in Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection, and all that occurred during his dispensation among us. Here I am emphasizing Christ walking among us, among the victims of the brutality of structural sin, among the sick, the homeless, the diseased, the despised, those who despair of life, those whose pilloried flesh stand as a testament to the injustice meted out by the powerful to the most vulnerable. In other words, I try to concern myself with the story or narrative of Christ, his narrative being that in no way denies Christ’s divinity.
But we can very easily become lost in the unreality, the mystical body of Christ, or the Church, for that matter. Our humanness, our soft flesh, and breakable bones is what Sobrino (2001: 276) refers to as “the condition of possibility of salvation” through the “homo verus” (Sobrino, 2001: 278), that is, through Christ’s constitutive relationship with God and history, and history and transcendence. We need, as Sobrino argues, a truly humanized Christ, not simply a demythified Christ produced in the libraries and sanctuaries of Rome by theologians of various ecclesiastical stripes. Let us not get too tangled up in what is real in Christ and what is divine, for what is truly human is that which can bring us victory over inhumanity, over the anti-Kingdom, through speaking truth to the demonic power ensepulchred in the vaults of alienation wrought by capitalism and its attendant antagonisms. So, for me, developing a philosophy of praxis means learning how to walk in history, as both the subject and the object of our human story, lacing up our thirsty boots and refreshing our parched spirit as we journey alongside the victims of social sin, moving from the historical to the transcendent through faith.
The socialist Kingdom of God
But here I need to emphasize something Sobrino (2001) has discussed at length in his many important writings. While we focus on the divine in Christ, we have forgotten the Kingdom of God of which Christ speaks. So when we identify as Catholics, why have we forgotten the primacy of creating the Kingdom of God and bringing it forth as Christ exhorted us to do? In my view, it is because our entire system operates as the anti-Kingdom. Christianity itself is undergirded by the imperatives of the anti-Kingdom in that it has attached itself to the imperatives of capitalism. To create the Kingdom of God means seeking the creation of a social universe outside of value production, or the production of profit for the rich. Creating the Kingdom of God means liberating the poor and this means ending the brutal war against the poor unleashed by the deregulation of the market. It means challenging the anti-Kingdom that stands against immigrants seeking a better life, against migrant workers, against refugees, and the intergenerationally reproduced barrios of planet slum. We focus instead on eternal life, on gnostic mysteries, and distance ourselves from the Kingdom of God with reality TV and the hundreds of TV channels we have at our disposal. We confuse the drive to increase material wealth with the drive to produce value, or create endless profits that can be expanded indefinitely.
In our forays into the hinterlands of mysticism, we cannot forget that the Kingdom of God is, in Sobrino’s terms, a “type of historical-social-collective reality” (2001: 334) and not, as the old union song has it, a “pie in the sky when you die.” The Kingdom of God is not some metaphor for an unearthly paradise, some ecclesiastical makeover of the earth in terms of the divine Christ or such that the holy and apostolic church becomes the prime sign or marker of the Kingdom. Clearly, for me, the Kingdom of God is not some place where well-heeled and aristocratic-looking souls lounge about in togas and golden wreaths. For me, the Kingdom of God is more likely found on the picket lines, in the temple cleared of the money-lenders, in a world where the rich no longer dominate, a world where death squads do not murder peasants with impunity, and where poor tenants do not confront racist landlords and developers do not build themselves towers in glorious homage to their wealth and power while others are forced to sleep under bridges.
The Kingdom of God is not suddenly going to appear after the apocalypse that is haunting us retroactively from the future has eliminated evil once and for all. The Kingdom of God is not designed to save capitalism but to replace it with a more just and humane system that is not driven by the profit motive. The eschaton is now, and it is the struggle for social justice that makes it immanent. We are not talking about the struggle shouldered by liberals singing their sundry progressive platitudes all the way to the offices of their investment bankers. The struggle for social justice stipulates that we come together and figure out how to create a social universe outside of capitalist value production, where the profit motive is eliminated. Education should play a significant role in this struggle, but it does not. This is why I have been trying to advance critical pedagogy as a transnational social movement to bring progressive educators together to face the problems of contemporary capitalism and to seek alternatives, because we are facing a capitalism that has continuously played a role in genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide, the latter referring to the abolition of ecologies of knowing of indigenous peoples.
The international law introduced by the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide makes it abundantly clear that the USA systematically sought the complete expiration of native Americans amounting to genocide against first nations peoples. Have we not recently destroyed the nation of Iraq? Have we not tortured and traumatized its population? Have we not soaked its gene pool in depleted uranium and ensured birth defects for generations to come? Has not the USA intervened militarily in approximately 50 countries since World War II? We have a long revolution ahead of us to stop such a global system of war and aggression and to replace capitalism with a socialist alternative.
The pattern of revolution for social justice – for socialism – will not be a straight line but will always be up and down, a path of walking through darkness and light, fighting inside the belly of the beast until, like Jonah, we are spit out onto the shore of hope. Is Jonah inside the belly of the whale not a story of entering the darkness, of being betrayed, of being the scapegoat, of being victimized by power, in order, finally, to land on the shore where we can be regain our breath, where we can be bathed in the light of truth? Is not the story of Jonah inside the whale, really an anti-sign, another way of rendering the doctrine of the cross? Is this not what is called “the paschal mystery”? As Rohr (2016) reminds us, mystery is not something that is impossible to understand, it is “something that you can endlessly understand,” since at no point can you say, “I’ve got it!” Sometimes the descent is so great, so steep, that there seems no hope, just a vortex of horror and turmoil. It seems impossible at times to fathom how humanity can survive the horror of existence, especially during times of war, of economic catastrophe, of existential desperation and despair. How can God be found in this darkness? This truly is the paschal mystery.
Feuerbach believed that theological knowledge was subjective and that the final criterion for the truth was to be found in the senses. Here the ego remains passive and determined by objective reality. For Marx, truth was found through historical praxis, through the negation of the negation. What is interesting about Macfarlane was her ability to merge the ideas of socialism, left Hegelianism, and Marxism with the teachings of Jesus and in doing so spiritualize the struggle for social justice. In 1850 she wrote: We Socialist-democrats are the soldiers of a holy cause; we are the exponents of a sublime idea; we are the apostles of the sacred religion of universal humanity. We have sworn by the God who “made of one blood all nations of the Earth”, that we will not pause till we have finished the great work – begun by the Nazarean – of man’s redemption from the social miseries which destroy body and soul. (Macfarlane in Black, 2014: 22)
It is interesting to note that Marx and Engels entered an organization in 1872 that was founded by Wilhelm Weitling, the founder of German communism. Weitling’s organization was based on a communism grounded entirely in the gospel, as can be seen in his 1845 book, The Gospel of a Poor Sinner (Miranda, 1980). Marx was a great admirer of the Peasants’ War organized and directed by Thomas Munzer in the 16th century. This was, in effect, the first anti-capitalist revolution. Munzer argued that the Kingdom of God is a condition of society without class differences, without private property, and without state powers opposed to the members of society.
The God of the rich and the God of the poor
I have argued already that reason alone can face down a barbarous irrationalism, but that to do so it must draw upon forces and sources of faith which run deeper than itself, and which can therefore bear and unsettling resemblance to the very irrationalism one is seeking to repel. (Eagleton, 2009: 161) What we know as Christendom saw itself as a unity of culture and civilization. If religion has proved far and away the most powerful, tenacious, universal symbolic form humanity has yet to come up with, it is partly on this account. What other symbolic form has managed to forge such direct links between the most absolute and universal of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women? What other way of life has brought the most rarefied of ideas and the most palpable of human realities into such intimate relationship? Religious faith has established a hotline from personal interiority to transcendent authority—an achievement upon which the advocates of culture can only gaze with envy. Yet religion is as powerless as culture to emancipate the dispossessed. For the most part, it has not the slightest interest in doing so. (2009: 165–166) If Marxism holds out a promise of reconciling culture and civilization, it is among other things because its founder was both a Romantic humanist and an heir of Enlightenment rationalism. Marxism is about culture and civilization together—sensuous particularity and universality, worker and citizen of the world, local allegiances and international solidarity, the free self-realization of flesh-and-blood individuals and a global cooperative commonwealth of them. But Marxism has suffered in our time a staggering political rebuff; and one of the places to which those radical impulses have migrated is—of all things—theology. It is in some sectors of theology nowadays that one can find some of the most informed and animated discussions of Deleuze and Badiou, Foucault and feminism, Marx and Heidegger. (2009: 167)
Do we believe that the Christian God is monolithic? In the Christian Bible there is a plethora of gods – the God of Empire that Christianity has supported since the fourth century, the God of Eve, the God of Abraham and Moses, the God of Cain, the God of Satan, and the God of Jesus. According to Rivage-Seul (2008), Jesus is the prophet whose revelation ultimately decided that the God of Moses and Abraham (the God of the poor and the suffering) was the true God of Israel. Should we believe that the rich and the poor worship the same God? Take Hitler, for example. Hitler claimed to be Christian, but he only used “religious” language as a propaganda tool and he stated in Goebel’s diaries that “as soon as the war is over” the Nazis will go after “the real enemy” – the Catholics. Pius XII referred to Hitler as “an indispensable bulwark against the Russians” (Johnson, 1977: 490, as cited in Rivage-Seul, 2008: 109). According to Rivage-Seul, the God of the Bible is not neutral and could not have been the God of both Hitler and Yahweh. Was the God of Ronald Reagan the same God as the God of Reagan’s “Godless communists” – the Sandinistas? Are the God of Christian fundamentalism and the prosperity gospel not arrayed against Jesus who stands on the side of the poor and the oppressed?
Rivage-Seul (2008: 114) believes that liberation theology is closer theologically to the idea that God is experienced not just in nature but in history; is revealed primarily in Exodus; is concerned with justice as true worship; is class-biased in favor of the poor; endorses an ethic of love and self-sacrifice; protects freedom from exploitation; permits violence to defend the poor from exploiters; is anti-imperialist; considers the ultimate revelation of Jesus to be that God stands with the poor, and that an accumulation of riches presumes an engagement with forms of exploitation. We should always be careful about what we generalize to other religious systems of belief. If I were to generalize, however, it would be from the perspective of a theology of liberation. I would never want to generalize precepts and principles from any organization that serves mainly to strengthen and reproduce systems of power and privilege that serve the rich at the expense of the poor. To support the reproduction of the power and privilege of the rich would be counter to the teachings of Jesus, who was against any system that produced differentiating wealth or what some call today “economic inequality.” Such a term is too weak for me. I would call it, plain and simple, capitalist exploitation.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.