In this book Samuel Silva Gotay treats the significance of Christians as revolutionary theorists and as political activists in Latin America today. He hopes to reconcile Marxist sociology with the liberation theologians’ sociology of religion to prove that they have the same aims—to destroy the legitimacy of and to overthrow the prevailing capitalist order and bourgeois ideology (including organized religion), and to establish a new social order based on justice and Christian faith.
The author traces the source of liberation theology to the deplorable socioeconomic conditions of Latin America, and to the example of the Marxist revolution in Cuba in the 1960s. At that time Protestants and Roman Catholics began a search for the historical roots of Christianity, their biblical exegesis eventually resulting in a hermeneutics of liberation: the possibility of the kingdom of God on earth, with the abolition of social classes and with justice for all.
There were stumbling blocks to overcome, however, before Christian socialists could join with Marxist revolutionaries to pursue the common goal of ousting the bourgeoisie. Marxist atheism had to be dismissed as inconsequential; instead, the love of the modern-day revolutionary for his fellowman was extolled. Christians had to accept the use of violence to wrest the means of production from international and national bourgeoisies. Marxists had to recognize the legitimacy of faith; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had failed to distinguish between the faith of the masses and the bourgeois religion-as-ideology when they wrote that religion was the opiate of the masses and would disappear in a proletarian, secular society. For liberation theologians, religion is a faith that will establish the ethics of the “new man” in the new, pluralistic societies of a socialist order.
Silva, however, like other partisans of liberation theology, leaves unanswered whether Marxists will accept this socialist Christianity and a pluralistic order. His implication that Christian socialism is morally superior to other ideologies and political economies in Latin America and the world, is, indeed, based on faith rather than on the evidence of the social sciences that he claims are used by theologians of liberation. He has overlooked the roles technology and trade have played in enabling mankind to transcend the limits of feudalism, and he too easily dismisses capitalism as obsolete and leading inevitably to dependency and poverty for Latin Americans.
Yet, Silva has perhaps unintentionally demonstrated that religion and theology, as important as they are, have always adjusted to the necessities of economic survival and development. Thus, the theology of liberation might prove to be an excellent strategy whereby Christian faith and teachings can survive in an increasingly secularized and radicalized Latin America, beset by the problems of overpopulation and scarcity of resources.
This book is the best synopsis available today of liberation theology in Latin America. It is a carefully documented development of the theology of liberation in all of Latin America (among Protestants and Roman Catholics), as well as in Europe and North America. It is well written, with frequent chapter summations, and the terms of liberation theology are fully explained. This book is invaluable for those interested in theology and religion, Marxism, the history of ideas, and Latin America. One can only hope that it will soon be issued in English translation.
