Toward a Truly Liberating Theology for UU’s ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
February 11, 2024
It was Dr. Paul Farmer, the late founder of Partners in Health, who introduced me to the concept of Liberation Theology. I was devouring Tracy Kidder’s book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, about Dr. Farmer’s work in Haiti and later in Peru. I learned that he became deeply motivated to serve the poorest of the poor in Haiti and Latin America because of his exposure to the teachings of some Latin American Catholic priests who spoke out against the conditions experienced by the poor. They declared this abject poverty to be a sin, and that the church had a duty to follow God’s love and to provide a “preferential option for the poor.” (Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder, p. 62.) Tracy Kidder describes Paul Farmer’s discovery this way: “In Haiti, the essence of the doctrine (of liberation theology) came alive for him. Almost all the peasants he was meeting shared a belief that seemed like a distillation of liberation theology: ‘Everyone else hates us,’ they’d tell him, ‘but God loves the poor more. And our cause is just….’ Tracy Kidder went on to say that ‘the Christianity of the peasants Farmer talked to had a different flavor (than what he had grown up learning): ‘the shared conviction that the rest of the world was wrong for screwing them over, and that someone, someone just and perhaps even omniscient, was keeping score.” (Ibid., p. 78.)
The preferential option for the poor is a key element to Latin American Liberation Theology, first put forward in a book by Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez, that declared that God is always on the side of the oppressed.
Many Bible passages seem to bear this assertion out. In the Hebrew Bible, we can see the emphasis on justice in Psalm 33: “For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice: the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.”
Think of the comfort offered in Psalm 23, that we heard a moment ago: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Then there is this well-known passage attributed to the prophet Amos: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:21,24)
In the New Testament, a rich young man asked Jesus how he could have eternal life. Jesus told him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven…Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven…It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:21,23)
The message – that God favors the poor and the oppressed, and stands on their side – seems clear enough in the Bible.
Years after learning about Paul Farmer and the preferential option for the poor, I went off to seminary. And there I was exposed to the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez and others. I could understand the importance of this new theology in giving a voice to the poor, who are so often unheard. I had to remind myself that this represented a considerable change in the study of theology – until then so much more focused on academic debates and Euro-centric issues. A theology oriented to poverty was an important development. So I wanted to be excited about it, but I just – wasn’t. I found myself reacting with skepticism.
Ever the good heretic, the dyed in the wool Unitarian Universalist, I couldn’t get past what I saw as a major flaw in liberation theology, and that is, that if God loves the poor, and prioritizes the poor, why is there never an end to poverty?
Back in the 1960’s it seemed as though we might be able to eradicate poverty; during the years of The Great Society there was a dramatic shift in government focus, with all sorts of programs intended to make people healthier, better fed, better educated, and to give them the tools they need to break the cycle of generational poverty. And many strides were made.
And yet, today, my eyes and my ears are telling me a different story. Cities small and large now have encampments of unhoused people. We look at life here in Gloucester, with a homeless shelter, a day shelter at the Grace Center, Wellspring House, and the Open Door, which began as a food pantry and keeps expanding its services. And the need keeps growing. We had a growing homeless camp in our cemetery up the street last year, and I’m told that one day someone started to pitch their tent outside on the allée. People are living, in the words of Tom Wolfe, in cracks in the sidewalk. Across the country my colleagues are grappling with the issues arising from people living in their cars in church parking lots. We see the migrants coming to our southern border, and overwhelming services in cities across the country. We worry about the impact of the climate crisis, creating even more homelessness and forced migration.
God doesn’t seem to be doing anything about poverty, or providing a safety net.
Last fall, I shared with you an opinion piece by Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation. Perhaps you remember it. Mr. Walker reported that even before the pandemic, income inequality in the United States was rising. (NYT, “Are You Willing to Give Up Your Privilege?” Darren Walker, June 25, 2020). Income inequality is continuing to rise, as more and more wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires. People are pitching tents on sidewalks, and billionaires are building their own spaceships. We have reached a point, wrote Mr. Walker, where philanthropy – charitable giving – is not going to be able to fix this inequality. The gap is simply too great. There is a structural problem in our economy, that has been created since the time of The Great Society by what could be called the ‘preferential option for the wealthy’.
In his new book, Poverty, by America, Mathew Desmond wrote, “This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy… The American government gives the most help to those who need it least. This is the true nature of our welfare state, and it has far-reaching implications, not only for our bank accounts and poverty levels, but also for our psychology and civic spirit.” Think about it for just a minute: the tax cuts, the mortgage deductions, all benefit the owning class. But many voices insist that we cannot afford health care for all, or rental subsidies, even subsidized childcare. We live surrounded by messages of scarcity; that there is not enough for all, even as corporate profits rise and executives reap ever larger bonuses.
The idea that God is on the side of the poor simply doesn’t ring true for me. For if God is omnipotent – all-powerful – then God could intervene. And that does not appear to be happening.
I’m sure I’m not the only person who reacts this way. It can be hard for Unitarian Universalists to embrace Christian liberation theology for that reason. For those of us who identify as humanist, including me, we simply don’t see evidence that a deity is actively at work righting wrongs in the world. As a result, I have been keeping liberation theology at arm’s length.
But there are now numerous liberation theologies: black, feminist, Latin-American, and so on. Human liberation is studied through many different lenses, including humanist lenses. And I found affirmation in the writings of Black theologians Anthony Pinn and William R. Jones. Jones, for example, asserted in his book Is God a White Racist? that there is no evidence to indicate that God is actually on the side of the oppressed. For Jones, it is humans that are causing the oppression, and humans who need to stop it. (as quoted in “Liberation Theology,” a sermon by Rev. Angela Herrera. https://www.uufsma.org/uploads/7/9/9/5/7995066/liberation_theology-july_7_2019.pdf).
Anthony Pinn had this to say, “I could not accept that the suffering of those I saw on a daily basis had any value at all…I needed to explore an alternative response that uncompromisingly affirms – at all costs, even the rejection of such concepts as the Christian view of God – the demonic nature of Black suffering. I believe that human liberation is more important than the maintenance of any religious symbol, sign, canon, or icon.” (Why, Lord? By Anthony B. Pinn, p.10)
Dr. Paul Farmer took the message of the preferential option for the poor, and adopted it as his own mission. He offered a human response to the needs of the poor, keeping the justification, the language of mission, grounded in liberation theology. He did not wait for God to intervene, or for the poor to receive their reward in the next life. In his too-short life, he moved mountains.
That is the message and the model for Unitarian Universalist humanists. We can work to end poverty and oppression without having to use the language of Christian liberation theology. But neither are we free to ignore the call to help end oppression and poverty. We must not allow language that doesn’t speak to us stop us from acting.
There is plenty of room for a humanist theology of liberation. If, as Universalists, we believe that all people should be given the opportunity to flourish, to become all that it is possible for them to be, then we are called to help them; to side with love, to side with justice. Our theology that teaches us that everyone belongs, that no one should be left behind, is all we need.
Earlier, I spoke about the differences between equality, equity, and justice. The Darren Walker essay makes it clear that the problems of poverty and injustice in our country cannot be addressed merely with more charity, which is looking more and more like a Band-Aid. It’s clear that we need to work toward reform – reform of our economy, of the structures that continue to funnel wealth toward fewer and fewer people.
My friends, we can believe in a God that loves justice, or we can believe in a force of Love and Life that fosters growth and healing and an end to suffering, as I do, or we can believe in human action. In the end, the words we choose do not matter. We must acknowledge that the problems we see around us are created by humans. They must be solved by humans. We are called to do the work; to advocate, to offer our time and talent to address the climate crisis, to help create more affordable housing, to push for people to be paid adequate wages to be able to survive, to level the playing field permanently, not just to offer a bag of groceries. It is our work to do.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
