On The Ethical Significance of Liberation Theology for Unitarian Universalists

May 15, 2004
By Jim Weller

We liberal religionists really enjoy having our cake and eating it, too. (I trust I may be permitted this metaphoric generalization, if only for rhetorical purposes – I think it points to an elephantine general truth about us.) Unitarian Universalist congregations rightly regard themselves as the radical and revisionist avant garde of Protestant Congregationalism in North America. In lieu of any religious creed, we mutually covenant to affirm and promote a set of theological/ethical principles which are fully consistent with the liberation ethics articulated in the most progressive theologies of our time.

Most of us in the Unitarian Universalist religious movement (we avoid the term, “denomination” since any hierarchical authority is anathema to our traditions of congregational polity) would agree that the dominant social, economic, cultural, and political power structures of the United States and much of the world are fundamentally unjust and evil, and that these systems must be transformed radically in order to promote the ideals of peace, liberty and justice for all, which we so publicly affirm. We see as well that our times demand an inclusive humanistic revision of the socio-religious ethos of the dominant Judeo-Christian traditions, for the same reasons.

Yet it is uncomfortably clear to some of us that we are the oppressors the prophetic voices we recognize in our Covenant warned us against – or, at least, we are among the relatively privileged minority by and through whom their oppressive powers are derived. As welcoming of psycho-social and cultural diversity, as willing to incorporate into our fellowships all souls of every sort of identity or ethnicity as we profess to be, we are nonetheless still predominantly WASP religious groups. The center of gravity of our association of congregations remains where it was established some three centuries ago – on Beacon Hill in Boston.

We advocate publicly for social justice on behalf of the poor and oppressed, and our socially oriented institutions have made significant contributions toward those ends. Our religious identity and group self-esteem are based upon this ethic, and though we don’t use the Catholic term, “preferential option for the poor” in our congregational discourse, it is the same. This is the justice cake we celebrate. Yet exceedingly few of our members live in conditions of material poverty or socioeconomic oppression. We take full part in the social class once called the Bourgeoisie, now perhaps better described as a “meritocracy,” in appropriating for ourselves much more than our share of the common wealth. Thus we gladly eat the justice cake the poor lack.

We UUs, and typically, WASP church members in general, tend not to relate easily to the concerns of practical theology, per se. Such a one might very likely ask, “What has theology got to do with social and political reality?” Asked by UUs, the question reflects the fact that most have rejected and become alienated from the “straight and narrow” religious orthodoxies of the social milieux in which we came of age, and therefore, many are chary of “God-talk” of any sort. Asked by other more or less liberal Protestants, it reflects the belief that the realm of religious observance is to be strictly maintained within the community of the church and one’s separate, personal “spirituality.” In either case, it is not at all clear how the articles of one’s faith and the methods of theology can or should be integrated with one’s way of living in the secular sphere of economic, social, and political life, and especially in relation with people of different religious affiliations.

So-called liberation theologies began to be explicated, first among Latin American Catholics, and then others, at about the time of the merger of the Universalist and Unitarian congregational associations in the early 1960’s. As I have said, the social ethics of Christian liberation theologies and ours are completely coherent, and the fundamental religious witness to human equality in God’s image (though the Imago Dei metaphor is off-putting to some) is the same as well. Since so many of us have difficulty relating to the language of theology (probably simply because of having become unaccustomed to it), we might as well speak, instead, of “liberation ethics.” I think we can manage to recognize these as generically religious ethics, despite our aversion to conventional piety, since even we rationalists will assent that our common ethics are grounded in fundamental non-empirical beliefs about human morality.

Thus wrote the ancient Hebrew prophet Jeremiah of God’s “new covenant” in the socio-religious reform of his time: “I have put my truth in your innermost mind, and I have written it in your heart. No longer need you teach your fellows about God. For all of you know Me, from the most ignorant to the most learned, from the poorest to the most powerful.” Or, as the eighteenth-century Japanese poet Ryōkan, put it, “In all ten directions of the universe, there is only one truth. When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same.”

What then, explicitly, are these UU liberation ethics, and what is their significance for us? They are, precisely, the same as the terms of our Covenant. The ethics of our “creedless faith” were articulated by a series of consultative assemblies of our congregations’ ordained ministers and lay leaders – themselves deeply religious theologians – to translate into summary postmodern terms the substantive practical theological legacy of our religious forebears:

"The living tradition we share draws from . . . Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love; Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves."

The significance of this Covenantal ethos of ours for the ways and means by which we ought to live our private and public lives, as congregants, as congregations, and as an association of congregations – our religious praxis - will become clear with a review of the subject of contemporary Christian liberation theology.

The editors of Orbis Books’ “Theology and Liberation Series” introduce the topic saying, “Its proponents have insisted that liberation theology is not a subtopic of theology but really a new way of doing theology.” The approach of this theology involves the oft-mentioned “preferential option” for the poor and oppressed. The theological “starting point” of the liberation ethic is in the lived experience of the dispossessed, disadvantaged, and disenfranchised peoples of the earth. Contrasted with orthodox, liberal, and neo-orthodox Christian ethics, this is a radical way of “doing theology,” in that its central concern is identical with the root themes of both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Gospels: the universal moral imperative of justice for the liberation of the oppressed.

The alternatives to beginning this way, in situ, with the religiosity of the contemporary human person-in-society, are more conventional approaches which mainly serve the interests of the dominant social order, oppressively attempting to impose the fixed interpretations of established ecclesial doctrine upon people’s living religious experience in their actual social situations. The responses of today’s liberation theologies involve not only a radical focus on social, political, psychological, and cultural liberation, but also a far-reaching theological revisionism, sometimes antagonistically disparaged as religious “syncretism.”

The radical aspect of this approach is well described by Gustavo Gutierrez, one of the first to articulate the concerns of a liberation theology, who writes, “The product of a profound historical movement, this aspiration to liberation is beginning to be accepted by the Christian community as a sign of the times, as a call to commitment and interpretation. The Biblical message, which presents the work of Christ as . . . liberation, provides the framework for this interpretation.” He explains that “the word ‘liberation’ allows for another approach leading to the Biblical sources which inspire the presence and action of man in history.”

James Cone expresses the revisionist imperative of a liberation theology, declaring, “Although I am a Christian theologian, I contend that a just social order must be accountable to not one but many religious communities. If we are going to create a society that is responsive to the humanity of all, then we must not view one religious faith as absolute. Ultimate reality, to which all things are subject, is too mysterious to be limited to one people’s view of God.” Peter Paris states the case even more pointedly, writing “The prophetic aim of liberation theologies is for ecclesiastical change both in thought and action.”

Cone describes the common standpoint of liberation theologies succinctly, stating that “our primary theological question and problem arise from the encounter of God in the experience and misery of the poor. The chief issue of our theologies is the problem of the non-person, the poor person.” He also expresses the “preferential option” of liberation theologians for empowerment for social and political action, viz: “To be a Christian is to love one’s neighbor and that means making a political commitment to make the world a habitable place . . . [and] not only to pray for justice but also to become actively involved in establishing it.” This is an option for activism made clear in the frequent use in liberation theologies of the term praxis. As Paris writes, “liberation theologies view themselves as practical throughout – praxis designating its origin, agency, form, and end . . . [and, further] liberation theologies argue that every theology is political in a similar way; none is transcendent of its sociopolitical context.”

Contemporary liberation theologies have arisen among Christian communities along with people’s liberation movements in the twentieth century, as responses to social, political, economic, and cultural oppression throughout the world. Wherever Western European colonialism and neo-colonial capitalism has extended its dominion, investing superior privilege and supreme power in a predominantly white male ruling class, it has gone hand in hand with co-opted ecclesiastical authority and “establishment” theology. In these places, liberation theologies have developed among people in churches claiming their ethnic and sexual identities, demanding justice in their struggles against oppression, and insisting upon recognition of their inherent worth and dignity on religious grounds.

Diverse though the subjects of liberation ethics are, chief among their commonalities, as Paris identifies it, “is their vigorous denial that theology can ever be culturally transcendent and epistemologically universal. Rather, liberationists argue that sociopolitical values inhere in the basic suppositions underlying all theologies. More specifically . . . the presuppositions underlying the Western theological tradition reveal [its] solidarity with the . . . societal values of their ruling elites . . . which by definition [have] always stood in opposition to the struggles of oppressed peoples for liberation.” Thus, we witness the motivation for radical, revisionist theologies of liberation embodying the values of oppressed humanity.

The various forms of liberation theology which have been developed reflect the identities of the distinct classes of humanity of whom they are representative. Thus, there are liberation theologies enunciated on behalf of Latin American people, Black American people, Black African people, and Asian people. In addition, women’s liberation movements have given rise to feminist critiques in North America and elsewhere, identified among Latina women as "Mujerista" theology, among Black women as “Womanist” theology, and among Asian women as Asian Women’s theology. Similarly, people of GLBT identities and orientations have contributed from their own experience of injustice, as people also marginalized and discriminated against by established social and ecclesial tradition.

Thus, there are the “Womanist” perspective of Professor Katie Cannon and the "Mujerista" perspective of Professor Ada Maria Isazi-Diaz. Both advocate a revision of principles for the practice of Christian moral theology, or religious ethics, so as to integrate the marginalized feminist consciousness with the androcentric approaches of the first enunciations of liberation theology.

Cannon adopts the definitions of the term “Womanist” introduced in 1983 by the acclaimed novelist Alice Walker. Isazi-Diaz and her Hispanic feminist colleagues adopted the cognate term "Mujerista" for their theological perspectives in 1988. Both demand recognition of the fully equal worth and dignity of women’s moral agency, among their different, but equally oppressed, ethnic groups, amidst the dominant WASP society of the United States. The thrust of their work is to express and honor the significant differences that their differences make, for the goal of empowerment and redemption of their afflicted, abused, aggrieved communities, for the triply oppressed women of those communities, and for their just reconciliation with the larger society.

Isazi-Diaz’ approach elucidates the dialectic of traditional Catholic moral reasoning with the “lived-experience” of individual Hispanic women of distinct social and ethnic backgrounds in the United States, through conversational interviews with them concerning their struggles to effectuate their moral agency despite variously oppressive social, cultural, political, and economic circumstances. She explores how each of these women’s ways of living cohere in the hopeful and faithful future orientation she describes as their "Projecto Historico" – the movement toward redemption for the people of the "Mestizaje diaspora."

Cannon engages the “real-lived” historical experience of African-American women from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries in segregated and slave communities, as represented in the literature of Black women authors. The context for her ethical exploration of women’s moral agency is backward-looking in order to reconcile our understanding of who we are with how we have been, as contrasted with Isazi-Diaz’ contemporary sociological context, examining how we will be in society, given the way we are. Both ultimately orient themselves toward the project of becoming the more just and blessed society we can be.

Both scholars uphold and celebrate a communitarian ethic, which is a consequence of the special integrative role of women as mothers having to cope with the vital needs of children and families in distressed situations. The two contrast the ways in which the popular religiosities of marginalized Black women and Hispanic women, in their respective communities, have assimilatated and accommodated the dominant ecclesiologies of the Protestant Evangelical and Roman Catholic social milieux in which they are situated.

In contrasting particularities, but similarly in spirit, Cannon and Isazi-Diaz demonstrate that the religious liberation ethic, for these women, is a moral struggle for survival as fully-human persons against inimical social structures. Both confront oppressive and enervating forces with the courage of faith, in the theological establishments where they are situated professionally, as well as in the common social predicaments of the sisterhoods with whom they identify ethnically.

Our UU social ethics affirm that justice is to be found in equitable sharing of life’s blessings. We say, “From each according to one’s means, to each according to one’s need,” in countervailing against the dominant ethos which says, “More for me is always better; enough is never enough.” Contrary to the ideal of individualistic self-interest though it is, it is nonetheless true that at any given stage, political economy is a zero-sum game. At the end of the day, “them what has gets and them what ain’t don’t” – and we say that just ain’t right. For those of us nearer the top of the unjust socio-economic pyramid than most, righteousness calls us not only to lend those below a hand up, but to roll down the stones on which we stand, bringing down those on top and leveling out the structure for all.

We see that it is unjust for the few to enjoy superabundance, having much more than is needed by the many who have much too little. But what are we to do, give away our hard-won surplus? Let others take the gains that are ours? As a matter of fact, yes. As M.K. Gandhi urged us, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” There are many in need, who are prevented from having by those who do have, and don’t need it. Give away what you have and don’t need; and don’t take any more than you need. This is what it means to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Since we, the privileged, recognize the injustice of the social, political, and economic systems by which the few benefit excessively at the expense of the many, and we ourselves are benefited more than most, it is up to us to use our relative empowerment not only to modify these systems, to help liberate the oppressed, and to oppose the excesses of the willfully unjust among us, but to liberate ourselves from the spiritual oppression of unjust enrichment by renouncing it.

It is written that, when Jesus was teaching, a righteous and pious man, who yet despaired of redeeming grace, came to him and asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life? I have observed the law and honored the conventions of church and society all my life, but I fear that I am still not saved.” Jesus loved him in his anxiety, and said, “You know not what you lack. Go, sell all that you own; give the proceeds of it to the poor, and follow me.” The man was aggrieved by this, and went away despairing more than ever, for his estate was large. “How difficult it is,” Jesus said, “for the wealthy ones to enter the kingdom of God; it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.”

The rich man in this story was a good man, but he was oppressed by his privilege, and remained spiritually unliberated. He missed the point of Jesus’ hyperbole, which was not that he needed to be abjectly impoverished to enter the kingdom of God, but only to become “poor in spirit,” for eternal life is here and now, on earth as it is in heaven, within us, not in worldly riches. We are called to enter into a state of solidarity with the poor, in communion with the oppressed, to be blessed in the spirit of the meek, not in the power and glory of the mighty.