Decolonizing Liberation Theologies: Past, Present, and Future 3031311302, 9783031311307

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
References
Part I: Legacies, Testimonies and Stories
50 Years of Latin American Liberation Theology
Liberation Theology: Its Historical and Intellectual Origins
Latin American Liberation Theology
Ecclesiastical Theological Disputes
Black Liberation Theology
References
Are the Poor Human Beings? Neoliberalism and Theology
Blindness: The Poor Are Invisible
Changes in the Understanding of the Poor
Transformations of Christianity and Western Culture
The Imitation Model of Desire and Temptation
Conclusion
References
Liberation Theology and Its Fruits: Some Bibliographical Milestones
The Sources of the Gospel in América: A Colonial Project
A Theology of Liberation: Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, Clodovis Boff
Jon Sobrino and the Poor as “Victims”
Conclusion: Searching for a Political Holiness
References
Liberation Theology and Other Theologies in Latin America: Challenges for Today
The Confrontation with Human Sexuality
The Confrontation with Feminist Anthropology
The Confrontation with Ecology and the New History of the Universe
Confronting New Politics and New Ethics
Where Are We Going?
References
Part II: Liberation in Contextual Focus
The Weavings of Ancestral Spiritualities in Indian/Indigenous Theologies as Paths to Liberation
Words of Connection with Times and Spaces
Starting from the Transgressive Memory That Breaks with Single Narratives
Indian/Indigenous Theologies and the Decolonization of the Theological Discourse
Indian/Indigenous Christian Theology and Liberation Theology
The Weaving of Ancestral Spiritualities and Their Relationship with Christianism
References
The Noble House of La Virtual QTL Voguing Queer Liberation Theologies in Latin America Since Marcella Althaus-Reid
Introduction: Strike a Pose!
Marcella Althaus-Reid: Striking a Pose with Her “Indecent Theology”
The First Generation of Queer Theologians in Latin America: Spinning Promiscuous Conversations
A New Generation: Throwing Shade at a System That Continues to Oppress Queer Communities
Conclusion
References
Islamic Liberation Theology and the Decolonial Turn: A Historical and Theoretical Introduction
Coloniality and the Muslim World
The Crusades: The Foundation of Coloniality
Coloniality Going East: Da Gama’s Route
Coloniality to the North and East: Russia, Then China and India
Islamic Liberation Theology: An Intellectual Genealogy
Intellectual Trends and Objectives in ILT
Defining the Margins: A Floating Signifier
References
Liberation Themes in Latin American Literatures: The Case of Changó el gran putas by Manuel Zapata Olivella
Introduction
Liberation Theology and Literature in Latin America
Manuel Zapata Olivella and African Colombian Literature
Liberating Chants in Changó el gran putas
The Narrative of a Rebellion
Re-enchantment of the World and Liberation in Changó el gran putas
References
Liberalism, Liberation Theology, or Decolonial Theology? North American Latinx Theologies at the Crossroads of Ambivalence
What’s in a Name?
Remembering Manuel Mejido’s Propaedeutic
From Liberation Theology to an Anti-systemic Decolonial Theology
On Cuban American Dreamers Drinking Trump’s White-Nationalist Kool-Aid
What Does It Mean to Be Anti-systemic?
Reframing Latinx Identity in Light of Quijano’s Theory of The Coloniality of Power
Forging a More Vocal Pro-Black Antiracist Reflection in Latinx Theology
A Wider Latinx Theological Engagement with Marxist Critical Theory
Against American Dream Thinking
Conclusions
References
History, Memory, and Forgetting: Epistemological Challenges for Latin American Biblical-Theological Studies
Stolen Legacy
The Ancient World: A Challenge for Bible Studies
For an Adequate Inclusion of Africa in Latin American Bible Studies
References
Part III: Critical Perspectives
The Current Status of Latin American Liberation Theology
Introduction
The Spirit of the Empire and New Perspectives
The Role of Marxism
Conclusion
References
Other Worlds, Other Epistemes, Other Subjects: The Flame (Never Extinguished) of Latin American Liberation Theologies
Post/De-colonial Critique and the Paradox of the Modern Spectrum: A Theological Perspective
Toward a “New Generation” of LALTs in a Post/De-colonial Key
Another Episteme
Another History
Other Subjects
Conclusions: A New Generation in the LALTs?
References
Part IV: Looking to the Future
Looking Back and Looking Forward from the Margin of the Margins
The Margin of the Margins
Decolonial Feminist Insights and Limitations
Women Doing Theology from the Margin of the Margins
What Can We Know? What Have We Learned?
References
Looking Back and Looking Forward from the Underside of History
Latin American Liberation Theology from a Decolonial Point of View
Lessons from Frantz Fanon 60 Years After His Passing
Lesson 1: Understanding the Catastrophe of Modernity/Coloniality
Lesson 2: Fanon’s Decolonial Turn Against the Coloniality of the Human Sciences
Lesson 3: Countering the Coloniality of the Religion/Secularism Divide
Lesson 4: Fanon’s Unlearning, Relearning, and Post-secular Epistemic Practices
Lesson 5: Open Paths in Conversation with a Post-secular Fanon
References
Index

Citation preview

POSTCOLONIALISM AND RELIGIONS

Decolonizing Liberation Theologies Past, Present, and Future Edited by Nicolás Panotto · Luis Martínez Andrade

Postcolonialism and Religions Series Editors

Joseph Duggan Postcolonial Networks San Francisco, CA, USA J. Jayakiran Sebastian United Lutheran Seminary Philadelphia, PA, USA

The Postcolonialism and Religions series by its very name bridges the secular with the sacred through hybrid, interstitial, and contrapuntal inquiries. The series features the scholarship of indigenous scholars working at the intersections of postcolonial theories, theologies, and religions. The editors welcome authors around the world in an effort to move beyond and interrogate a historical North American and Eurocentric postcolonial studies disciplinary dominance. The series seeks to foster subaltern voices especially from Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and the liquid continent.

Nicolás Panotto  •  Luis Martínez Andrade Editors

Decolonizing Liberation Theologies Past, Present, and Future

Editors Nicolás Panotto Arturo Prat University / Otros Cruces Santiago, Chile

Luis Martínez Andrade Brussels, Belgium

Postcolonialism and Religions ISBN 978-3-031-31130-7    ISBN 978-3-031-31131-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

With this anniversary volume, the seventeenth volume that is now published, we celebrate ten years as the Postcolonialism and Religions series. We celebrate Palgrave’s vision from the time the series was proposed through their commitment to every single volume and their ongoing support to always expand the reach to publish quality scholarship around the world, especially from under-represented voices. We cherish Phil Getz, senior editor at Palgrave Macmillan, with his advocacy for the series’ vision and his ability to bring all the global resources of Palgrave to execute the series’ vision. The series goal is to provide a bridge between postcolonial theories, religions, and theologies. Every single volume has brought a sophisticated and nuanced postcolonial lens to themes as broad as, among other things, biblical hermeneutics, liturgy, mission, philosophy, poetry, and biopolitics. During these first ten years we have provided readers with a diverse range of Majority World authors, editors, and contributors who work in a variety of settings and contexts. Our series contributors have spanned the globe with priority for under-represented scholars in the scholarly canon. Over the last ten years, reviewers have praised the series for its coverage of overlooked contexts and thematic content such as the Pacific and indigenous influences, as well as minoritized readings of issues and themes. These contributors have done in-depth gender, race, and class analysis, using postcolonial approaches. The series continues to grow and expand its scholarly reach. With this tenth anniversary volume, our editors and contributors provide another v

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PREFACE

bridge with a postcolonial and decolonial approach to critically investigate Liberation Theologies. Nicolás Panotto and Luis Martínez Andrade expand the breadth of the series with their cutting-edge Latin American liberation and decolonial theological and theoretical work. As we look toward another ten years of this series, we seek to expand scholarly content beyond Judeo-Christian traditions, broaden Southern Hemisphere contributions, and build wider interdisciplinary bridges with critical and constructive investigations. We congratulate all our series authors, editors, and contributors who have enriched the quality of the series’ first ten years. We also appreciate those who have read and cited the series scholarship in academic literature. We encourage and welcome future contributors to propose cutting-edge postcolonial thought and scholarship to our series. Congratulations to Nicolás Panotto and Luis Martínez Andrade, editors for this fine tenth anniversary addition to the Postcolonialism and Religions series! Philadelphia, PA, USA San Francisco, CA, USA Fall 2022

Jayakiran Sebastian Joseph Duggan

Acknowledgments

Following the lessons of Paulo Freire, we believe that all knowledge is the result of a collective effort. That’s one of the most important lessons from Liberation Theology’s heritage. For this reason, we want to thank all the people who have thought of this book from its inception, to all those who have made it possible. We would like to give a special recognition to Joseph Duggan, our longtime friend and series founding editor, who is one of the mentors of this project. From the beginning, he followed the whole process closely. His comments and hints helped us to maintain the coherence of the project, in each of its stages. Undoubtedly, Joe was an important pillar of this book. Therefore, we would like to emphasize that thanks to Joe’s work many of the voices from the Global South are disseminated in the Global North. We also thank Jayakiran Sebastian, series co-editor, for his meticulous reading of the manuscript and recommendations. His support was also important in bringing this book to fruition. A key person behind this project is Alexander Holmes-Brown, who, with his passion for Latin American Liberation Theologies, made a significant contribution to source potential scholar contributors to the volume. He was also key in offering significant complimentary translations and comments to authors’ works. His generous commitment has been invaluable and deeply appreciated.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We also want to make a special mention to Phil Getz and the Palgrave team for their support for the publication of this work. Finally, to the peer reviewers, whose feedback strengthened our work. The timely suggestions and observations of the peer reviewers were fundamental to enrich the texts gathered here.

Contents

Introduction  1 Nicolás Panotto and Luis Martínez Andrade Part I Legacies, Testimonies and Stories   7  50 Years of Latin American Liberation Theology  9 Luis N. Rivera-Pagán  Are the Poor Human Beings? Neoliberalism and Theology 23 Jung Mo Sung  Liberation Theology and Its Fruits: Some Bibliographical Milestones 37 Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer  Liberation Theology and Other Theologies in Latin America: Challenges for Today 51 Ivone Gebara

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Part II Liberation in Contextual Focus  67  The Weavings of Ancestral Spiritualities in Indian/Indigenous Theologies as Paths to Liberation 69 Sofia Chipana Quispe The Noble House of La Virtual QTL Voguing Queer Liberation Theologies in Latin America Since Marcella Althaus-Reid 85 Hugo Córdova Quero  Islamic Liberation Theology and the Decolonial Turn: A Historical and Theoretical Introduction109 Iskander Abbasi  Liberation Themes in Latin American Literatures: The Case of Changó el gran putas by Manuel Zapata Olivella135 Juan Esteban Londoño  Liberalism, Liberation Theology, or Decolonial Theology? North American Latinx Theologies at the Crossroads of Ambivalence153 Jorge A. Aquino History, Memory, and Forgetting: Epistemological Challenges for Latin American Biblical-Theological Studies183 Maricel Mena López Part III Critical Perspectives 201  The Current Status of Latin American Liberation Theology203 Luis Martínez Andrade

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Other Worlds, Other Epistemes, Other Subjects: The Flame (Never Extinguished) of Latin American Liberation Theologies217 Nicolás Panotto Part IV Looking to the Future 241 Looking Back and Looking Forward from the Margin of the Margins243 Nancy Elizabeth Bedford Looking Back and Looking Forward from the Underside of History257 Nelson Maldonado-Torres Index277

Notes on Contributors

Iskander  Abbasi is a Palestinian-American PhD candidate at the University of Johannesburg. His work focuses on the fields of Islamic Liberation Theology, decolonial studies, race and religion, critical Muslim studies, Islam and ecology, and Qur’anic studies. Luis  Martínez  Andrade  received his PhD in Sociology from Ecole des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His previous books include Religion Without Redemption. Social Contradictions and Awakened Dreams in Latin America (2015); Feminismos a la Contra (La Vorágine, 2019); Ecología y Teología de la liberación. Crítica de la modernidad/colonialidad (Herder, 2019); and Textos sin disciplina. Claves para una teoría crítica anticolonial (University of Guadalajara, 2020). In 2009, he won the first International Test Prize “Think Against Current” awarded by the Cuban Book Institute, the Ministry of Culture of Cuba and the Social Sciences Edition. He currently holds the position of scientific collaborator at Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Jorge A. Aquino  is chair of the Department of Theology & Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco, California (USA). He teaches on the history and perspectives of Latin American and North American theologies of liberation, particularly as they engender theologies of race relations and sexuality. Aquino is a past president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (2014–2015) and now serves as a principal researcher in a working group on theo-politics of the Latin American Council on Social Sciences (CLACSO). xiii

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Nancy Elizabeth Bedford,  Argentine, is Georgia Harkness Professor of Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, author of many articles and books, including Who Was Jesus and What Does It Mean to Follow Him? (2021) and (with Guillermo Hansen), Nuestra Fe. Una introducción a la teología cristiana (Fortress, 2023). Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer  holds a degree in Social Communication from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (1975), a Master’s in Theology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (1985), and a PhD in Systematic Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University (1989). She is currently a full professor in the Department of Theology at PUC-Rio. For ten years she ran the Loyola Faith and Culture Center at the same university. For four years, she was an evaluator of graduate programs at the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES). For six years, she was dean of the Center for Theology and Human Sciences at PUC-Rio. She has experience in the area of theology, with an emphasis on systematic theology, focusing mainly on the following themes: God, otherness, woman, violence, and spirituality. In the last few years, she has been researching and publishing on the thought of the French philosopher Simone Weil. Nowadays, her studies and research are primarily directed toward the thinking and writing of contemporary mystics and the interface between Theology and Literature. Ivone Gebara,  Brazilian, holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Catholic University of São Paulo and PhD in Religious Sciences from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. She is the author of several books and articles from the ecofeminist perspective. She worked for several years in Recife, where she taught philosophy and theology at ITER. She currently lives in São Paulo and works as an advisor to several popular and university groups. Juan Esteban Londoño,  Medellín, Colombia, 1982, is a writer, teacher, and researcher in the areas of theology philosophy and literature. He holds a PhD (ThD) in Theology from the University of Hamburg (Germany). He studied Philosophy and Master’s in Philosophy at the University of Antioquia (Colombia). He also has a BA and MA in Biblical Sciences from the Universidad Bíblica Latinoamericana (Costa Rica). He has published the following research books: Kreuzesdeutungen in der gegenwärtigen Literatur Lateinamerikas: Hugo Mujica, Raúl Zurita und Pablo Montoya (Germany, 2021); El nacimiento del liberador (Costa Rica, 2012); and

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Para comprender el Nuevo Testamento (Costa Rica, 2013). His books of essays are Hugo Mujica: el pensamiento de un poeta en la poesía de un pensador (Argentina, 2018) and Hugo Mujica: pensar poético (Spain/Germany: 2017). Among his literary creations, he has the novel Evangelio de arena (Colombia, 2018) and the poetry books El país de las palabras rotas (New York, 2019) and Oráculos de Jezabel (Medellín, 2022). He has written several scientific articles on philosophy, literature, and religions. His short stories and poems have been published in different magazines and translated into English and Russian. Maricel Mena López  is Doctor Honoris Causa and postdoctoral fellow of Feminist Hermeneutics in the Higher School of Theology, Brazil, and has completed Doctor and Master’s in Sciences of Religion in the areas of Hebrew and Greek Bible from the Methodist University of Sao Paulo. She was coordinator for Latin America of the gender program of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT). She is a member of the directing team of the Latin American Biblical Interpretation magazine. She is a senior researcher and director of the Gustavo Gutiérrez research group: Latin American theology category (A) by the Ministry of Science and Technology (Minciencias). Her field of research refers fundamentally to the study of the Afro-Asian world (Egyptian-­Ethiopian) in the Bible in its intersectionality with contemporary studies of gender, class, and ethnicity. Her main research topics are female deities and leadership in Egyptian, Ethiopian and Israelite religious traditions. Her publications includes Teología y Casa Común. Reflexiones teológicas en torno a la cuestión ecológica (2022) and Biblia y ciudad: Pedagogía del buen vivir en contextos urbanos (2017). Nelson  Maldonado-Torres  is a Puerto Rican philosopher trained in Puerto Rico, the United States, and Mexico. A former president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, he is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and holds honorary appointments at the University of South Africa, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. He also co-chairs the Frantz Fanon Foundation. Recent publications include the co-edited anthology Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges (2022). Nicolás Panotto,  Argentine. Panotto is a theologian and holds a PhD in Social Sciences and Master’s in Social and Political Anthropology from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO Argentina). Director

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of Otros Cruces (www.otroscruces.org); associate researcher in the International Relations Study Center of the Arturo Prat University (Chile); and a professor at the Chilean Evangelical Theological Community. Panotto is the editor of Indecent Theologians: Marcella Althaus-Reid and the Next Generation of Postcolonial Activism (2016) and Pope Francis in Postcolonial Age. Complexities, Ambiguities & Paradoxes (2015) and author of Fe que se hace pública (2019), Descolonizar el saber teológico (Decolonizing the Theological Knowledge, Mexico: CTM-CTE 2018), and Religión, política y poscolonialidad en América Latina (Religion, politics and postcoloniality in Latin America, Buenos Aires, 2016) Hugo  Córdova Quero  is Associate Professor of Critical Theories and Queer Theologies and director of Online Education at Starr King School, Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley, California. He is also director of Institute Sophia in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies in Religion, Migration, and Ethnic Studies (2009) and an MA in Systematic Theology and Critical Theories (2003) both from the GTU; and an M.Div. (1998) from ISEDET University, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a member of the research groups Emerging Queer Asian & Pacific Islander Religion Scholars (EQARS), Multidisciplinary Study Group on Religion and Public Incidence (GEMRIP), and the Queer Migrations Research Network; and a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Asian Religions (CERAL), Pontifical University of São Paulo (Brasil). Sofia Chipana Quispe,  Aymara from Bolivia, is a member of the Andean Theology and Pastoral Community of Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. He holds Bachelor’s in Biblical Sciences from the UBL. He has several articles published in various magazines, including Concilium. Luis N. Rivera-Pagán  is the Henry Winters Luce Professor of Ecumenics and Mission Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books, among them: A la sombra del armagedón: reflexiones críticas sobre el desafío nuclear (1988), Senderos teológicos: el pensamiento evangélico puertorriqueño (1989), A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (1992), Los sueños del ciervo: Perspectivas teológicas desde el Caribe (1995), Entre el oro y la fe: El dilema de América (1995), Mito exilio y demonios: literatura y teología en América Latina (1996), La evangelización de los pueblos americanos: algunas reflexiones históricas (1997), Diálogos y polifonías: perspectivas y reseñas (1999),

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Teología y cultura en América Latina (2009), Ensayos teológicos desde el Caribe (2013), Peregrinajes teológicos y literarios (2013), Essays from the Margins (2014), Voces teológicas en diálogo con la cultura (2017) [editor], Voz profética y teología liberadora (2017), Evocaciones literarias y sociales (2018), Evangelización y violencia: La conquista de América (2020), and Historia de la conquista de América: Evangelización y violencia (2021) Jung Mo Sung  Professor of the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at the Methodist University of Sao Paulo. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies. He was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1957, and has been living in Brazil since 1966. He holds a PhD degree in Religious Studies and is Professor of Religious Studies at Methodist University of São Paulo. He has published 22 books. In English: Desire, Market and Religion; Subject, Capitalism and Religion; Beyond the Spirit of Empire (co-authored with Joerg Rieger and Nestor Miguez).

Introduction Nicolás Panotto and Luis Martínez Andrade

From the 70s, when Liberation Theology (LT) shook through a transforming theoretical-methodological proposal the categorical framework of hegemonic theology, some things have changed, and others are still on the same stage in this new millennium. Among the socio-political mutations we can mention factors like (1) the transition to democracy in Latin American societies, (2) the emergence of new political subjectivities expressed in the indigenous, feminist, LGBTIQ+, and environmentalist movements, (3) the reconfiguration of the right wing together with its correlates in religious fundamentalisms (and its consequences in the emergence of authoritarian governments, weak democratic models, persecution, and discrimination of minorities, among other elements), (4) the beginning, development, and decline of the “progressive cycle” of some governments in Latin America, and (5) the incipient awareness of the climate chaos fostered by the neo-extractivist process. In addition to this, we

N. Panotto (*) Arturo Prat University/Otros Cruces, Santiago, Chile L. Martínez Andrade CriDIS/SMAG, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_1

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would like to point out two issues, on the one hand, the passage from the ecclesial winter to the springtime of the church represented in the pontificate of Pope Francis and, on the other, the contribution of critical perspectives generated from the margins, for example, the decolonial turn (Silber, 2018; Brazal, 2019), the various feminisms (Marcos, 2022), the eco-­ territorial turn (Porto-Gonçalves, 2017), and, of course, the epistemologies of the South (de Sousa Santos, 2009; De Franco & Panotto, 2021). But there are scenarios that remain as a backdrop in a work that still maintains many points in common with the rise of Liberation Theologies. Rising, in turn, does not point to the “beginnings,” but rather the highlighting of a historical and geopolitical context, then rooted in the wounds of Latin American history, which are still open. With regard to these socio-­ political and economic continuities, we can point out the following: (1) a reconfiguration of the coloniality of power/knowledge both in theological discourses and in the social sciences; (2) the consolidation of a racial capitalism expressed in racial/social inequalities; (3) the validity of the coloniality of gender expressed in the wave of feminicides in the region and the patriarchal matrix that still shapes socio-political and cultural practices; (4) the necrophilic dynamics of capitalist modernity represented in environmental destruction; and (5) the consolidation of the consumerist culture in some sectors of the population. Each of these points remains as epicenter of struggle and resistance, then and now more than ever. We note then that the socio-political context in which Liberation Theology emerged is no longer the same; however, the pattern of domination of modernity/coloniality is still present (Martínez Andrade, 2015). Faced with this scenario, Liberation Theology addressed other forms of domination and developed new perspectives ranging from eco-theology (Leonardo Boff, Marcelo Barros, Frei Betto) to decolonial (Enrique Dussel, Sylvia Marcos, Agnes M. Brazal, Allan Coelho, Santiago Slavodsky) and postcolonial (Nicolás Panotto) perspectives, through queer theology (Marcella Althaus-Reid) or eco-feminism (Ivone Gebara, Cecilia Titizano). Although some academic cenacles and political circles considered Liberation Theology to be dead, we observe that, through the new perspectives developed in the key of liberation, this constellation of thought is more alive than ever. As we know, Liberation Theology is a perspective that starts from the context, as a “reflection on historical praxis” (Gutiérrez). In this sense, history and contexts are not means but rather epistemological places where theology as critical reflection is constantly reformulated in the light

 INTRODUCTION 

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of its transformations. That is why the value of Liberation Theology was to build a method that allows the constant resignification of theological work from a set of axes that enable the reformulation of discourses, narratives, and hermeneutics. Thus, for example, we see how various constitutive elements of this scaffolding represent not so much specific “themes” as fundamental nodal points for a methodology that manages to re-signify itself in the light of new socio-political configurations, as well as to serve as an epistemic framework for theology in toto. We see this, for example, in how the category of “poor” has been articulated to the analysis of other forms of domination including gender (patriarchal structure and heteronormative discourse), race (structural racism), and, of course, nature (capitalocene or anthropocentrism). The category of “victim” used in recent years accounts for the multiple forms of domination that can be suffered by diverse communities. In If God Were a Human Rights Activist, the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos emphasizes the fact that all religions possess the same potential to develop progressive or emancipatory theologies capable of integrating into anti-hegemonic struggles (de Sousa Santos, 2014). In other words, some discourses on faith can contribute to struggles against the dominant paradigm. In this regard, we argue that the critique made by Liberation Theologies from the Global South is not limited to a superficial critique—very much in vogue in some sectors of Europe— of neoliberal globalization, but precisely unveils the sacrificial dynamics of capitalist modernity (Tamayo, 2017). Liberation Theologies adopt a critical position as a utopian vision of the world since they denounce the harmful consequences on the economic (poverty, exclusion, land concentration), political (corruption, clientelism, repression), social (sexism, racism), and environmental (destruction of nature, agribusiness) element intrinsically related to capitalist modernity/coloniality. These theologies defend ethical principles to demonstrate that their true realization is not possible in the current social formation. However, it should be made clear that Liberation Theologies are not traditionalist in the conservative sense of the term, but, precisely, they try to subsume tradition and modernity in the key of liberation. This volume consists of and examines the exchange of ideas that accompanied the rise of a uniquely Latin America theology, philosophy, and sociology focused on “liberation,” now conceived as part of a lineage of Decolonial Turn that continues today in critique not only of oppression

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but to the liberationist approach itself.1 The dialogues and debates that Latin American Liberation Theology advocates participated in with other Third World thinkers during the 1970s came to the tension of Liberation/Inculturation: variously conflicting and collaborating in order to free people to be themselves within or be free from, to overthrow and redeem dominant narratives, popular cultures, economies, marginalities, representations, identities in conflict, and collaboration. Instead of inculturation, today we may speak of interculturality, of borderlands, of in-­ betweenness, in ways that complicate, confirm, affirm, and interrogate the “underside of history,” and the spaces that are marginalized but de-­ centered centers of liberation struggle, within, alongside, underneath, over-against societal projects that claim and exclude them. In intersectional and interdisciplinary perspectives, the chapters of this book constitute a complex whole: a volume that does justice to the justice-­ seeking originality of Latin America Liberation Theology, Philosophy, and Sociology as it emerged in the 1960s–70s and developed into the present, and justice to the peoples and cultures liberating themselves not only from outside economic programs set for them, but from theological programs too, including projects aimed in name, spirit, and practice at “liberation.” This volume, through its multiple lenses, asks the critical double question: liberation from what and from whom, liberation for what and for whom? By coupling interculturality with liberation and decoloniality, the volume seeks to go beyond binaries of liberators-oppressors, or oppressed-­ oppressors, to ask about how communities, living in a hemisphere indelibly marked by religious activism, and specifically by Liberationist Christian

1  Here we refer specifically to the link between Latin American liberation philosophy, Latin American Liberation Theology, and the so-called decolonial turn”. Although we are aware of the impossibility of making a direct historical link between these currents, we could do so in genealogical terms. Names such as Enrique Dussel, Severino Croatto, Hugo Assmann, and José Míguez Bonino have been referents in the link between philosophy and Liberation Theology, a framework that served as a platform for the debates that gave rise to the birth of the Modernity/Coloniality Group. In this process, the decolonial turn has not worked with such force the theological question in general and Liberation Theology in particular, except for cases such as those of Enrique Dussel and certain marginal mentions of Walter Mignolo or Santiago Castro-Gómez. However, in this genealogical conjunction that we want to identify, it seems important to highlight that there are many common points, both historical and epistemological, that open the door to several of the debates that we wish to develop in this book (Castro-Gómez & Grosfoguel, 2007; Restrepo & Rojas, 2010; Mota Neto, 2016; Escobar, 2003).

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thinking, seek freedom in their own terms, in ways that disturb and disrupt oppressive situations and liberation struggles alike. In other words, the articles compiled in this work enter into a rethinking of the new fields of Liberation Theologies, from their new approaches as well as interpellations (internal and external). Some of the guiding questions are the following: Where does the relevance of Liberation Theology lie? What has been its historical development to reach this moment? What are the elements that enable this discursive, methodological, and narrative diversification? What is the particularity of its proposal, and how does it enter into dialogue with other contexts, other methods, and other theories? How can we establish that Liberation Theology continues to be a relevant voice of our times? Hence, this book is structured around four central sections. The first one—Legacies, Testimonies, and Stories—focuses on a historical perspective, as well as its genealogical (Luis Rivera-Pagan), academic (Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer), and political (Jung Mo Sung) elements, alongside a general and critical review in a genealogical and ecclesiological view (Ivone Gebara). The second part—Liberation on Contextual Focus—concentrates on developing in a plural and broad key the different reappropriations that Liberation Theologies have had from specific contexts and identities, namely from interculturality (Sofia Chipana Quispe), political theology, sexual diversities and feminisms (Hugo Córdova Quero), Islamism (Abbasi Iskander), Latin American literature (Juan Esteban Londoño), Latinx theology (Jorge Aquino), and Afro communities (Maricel Mena López). The last two sections—Critical Perspectives and Looking to the Future—focus on taking a global and critical look at the present and projecting it into the future, from methodological and epistemic challenges (Luis Martínez Andrade and Nicolás Panotto), as well as from the specific viewpoints of theology (Nancy Bedford) and decolonial philosophy (Nelson Maldonado-Torres). What drives this book is a common spirit and conviction: Liberation Theologies of the Global South remain valid because they still have much to say about a sociocultural and geopolitical context, which still maintains the same dynamics, exclusions, and resistances as the origins of Liberation Theologies. They arise not only to interpret the socio-economic structures of sin but also to propose solutions so that the victims become subjects of their own liberation. It is true that some themes or conceptualizations have changed over the last decades, but the concern for the liberation of human and non-human beings is still present and continues to be part of our believing and political commitment today.

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In the face of the climate chaos, we are suffering due to a fossilist capitalism, the growing violence (socio-cultural and gender-based), the threat to democratic environments, and the deepening of an increasingly exclusionary capitalism; in other words, in the face of the Thanatos of modern and colonial civilization, the theologies of liberation—theologies of life!— have much to contribute in the search for alternatives that banish the idols of death and put the Gods of life back at the center.

References Brazal, A. (2019). A theology of Southeast Asia. Liberation-postcolonial ethics in the Philippines. Orbis Books. Castro-Gómez, S., & Grosfoguel, R. (dirs.). (2007). El giro decolonial: Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global. Siglo del Hombre/Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. De Franco, C., & Panotto, N. (2021). Decolonização do campo epistemológico da(s) Ciência(s) da(s) Religião(ões) e Teologia(s) pela via contra-hegemônica dos direitos humanos. Estudos de Religião, 35(3), 33–54. de Sousa Santos, B. (2009). Una Epistemología del Sur. Siglo XXI. de Sousa Santos, B. (2014). Si Dios fuese un activista de los derechos humanos. Trotta. Escobar, A. (2003). Mundos y Conocimientos de otro modo. Tabula Rasa. Bogotá, (1), 51–86. Marcos, S. (2022). Indigenous spirituality and the decolonization of religious beliefs. Embodied theology, collectivity, and justice. In W.  Goldstein & J.  P. Reed (Eds.), Religion in rebellions, revolutions, and social movements. Routledge. Martínez Andrade, L. (2015). Religion without redemption. Social contradictions and awakened dreams in Latin America. Pluto. Mota Neto, J. C. da. (2016). Por uma pedagogía decolonial na América Latina. Reflexões em torno do pensamento de Paulo Freire e Orlando Fals Borda. CRV. Porto-Gonçalves, C. W. (2017). Lucha por la tierra. Lucha por la Tierra. Ruptura metabólica y reapropiación social de la naturaleza. In H. Alimonda & C. Toro Pérez (Eds.), Ecología Política Latinoamericana: pensamiento crítico, diferencia latinoamericana y rearticulación epistémica (Vol. II). CLACSO. Restrepo, E., & Rojas, A. (2010). Inflexión decolonial: fuentes, conceptos y cuestionamientos. Universidad del Cauca. Silber, S. (2018). Poscolonialismo. Introducción a los estudios y a las teologías poscoloniales. Itinerarios editorial. Tamayo, J. J. (2017). Teologías del Sur. In El giro descolonizador. Trotta.

PART I

Legacies, Testimonies and Stories

50 Years of Latin American Liberation Theology Luis N. Rivera-Pagán

We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled—in short, from the perspective of those who suffer. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2000, 16)

Liberation Theology: Its Historical and Intellectual Origins Liberation Theology was the unforeseen enfant terrible in the academic and ecclesial realms of theological production during the last decades of the twentieth century. It brought to the conversation not only a new theme—liberation—but also a new perspective on doing theology and a novel way of referring to God’s being and action in history. Its project to reconfigure the interplay between religious studies, history, and politics

L. N. Rivera-Pagán (*) Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_2

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became a meaningful topic of analysis and dialogue in the general theological discourse. Many scholars perceive in its emergence a drastic epistemological rupture, a radical change in paradigm, and a significant shift in both the ecclesial and social role of theology. Its origins are diverse, and not exclusive to theological and ecclesiastical horizons. One important source, neglected by some accounts, was the complex constellation of liberation struggles during the 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of social turmoil, when many things seemed out of joint: a strong anti-war movement protest (directed against American military intervention in Vietnam and the global nuclear threat); a spread of decolonization movements all over the “Third World”; the feminist struggle against patriarchy and sexism; a robust challenge to racial bigotry, the Stonewall rebellion (June 1969) against homophobia and gay discrimination; student protests in Paris, Prague, Mexico, and New York in opposition to repressive states of all stripes; and guerilla insurgencies and social unrest in many Latin American nations. Many of these agents of social protest adopted the title of “liberation movement” as a means of public self-presentation, while “Fronts of national liberation” flourished all over the Third World. Another significant factor regarding the intellectual origins of Liberation Theology was the development of a non-dogmatic Marxism that read Marx’s texts as an ethical critique on human oppression and as a projection of a utopian non-oppressive future, something akin to a kingdom of freedom. This heterodox reading of Marx, by authors like the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, made possible something considered largely unthinkable, until then: a constructive and affirmative dialogue between theology and Marxism, located at the margins of church and party hierarchies with their rigid orthodoxies. Bloch’s 1968 Atheismus im Christentum (Atheism in Christianity) set forth a hermeneutic that interpreted the biblical texts as a struggle between the voices of the oppressors and those of the oppressed, and provocatively asserted that whoever wants to be a good Marxist should constantly read the Bible (and vice versa, whoever wants to be a good Christian should have Marx as bedside reading). Other iconoclastic authors like Herbert Marcuse (1969) and Franz Fanon (1965) were passionately read from Buenos Aires to Berlin, from Berkeley to Nairobi, with intellectual perspectives not limited exclusively to the academia. Exiled from Brazil, Paulo Freire (1967, 1968) delivered scathing critiques of traditional educational systems and promoted a pedagogy for the liberation of the oppressed. Martin Luther King, Jr. and

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Ernesto “Che” Guevara became emblematic icons and martyrs of those turbulent times. Paul Éluard’s poem Liberté, recited and sung in many languages, became a poetic hymn that captured the passions and intentions of many: By the power of the word I regain my life I was born to know you And to name you LIBERTY

Within the churches, important processes were also occurring. To the surprise of many, Pope John XXIII summoned the Second Vatican Council. Progressive Roman Catholic theologians consider Vatican II an important turning point in the modern history of their church (Flannery, 1996). According to their interpretation, the council had three main objectives: (1) To change the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church toward the modern post-Enlightenment intellectual world, from censure and condemnation to openness and dialogue. The Italian word aggiornamento (“bringing up to date”) became the watchword of those seeking to update the church. (2) To heal the fragmentation of Christianity by positioning the Roman Catholic Church within the emerging ecumenical movement. Delegates from Protestant and Orthodox churches were invited to observe the proceedings of the council (Lindbeck, 1965). A series of bilateral and multilateral dialogues began between Rome and other Christian denominations. (3) To face the plight of a world marked by suffering violence, oppression, and injustice with honesty and compassion. The council took place in a global context sundered by national liberation struggles, civil wars, and the painful gap between the haves and the have-nots of the globe. The quest for peace and justice was conceived as an essential dimension of the church’s presence in the world. John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical Pacem in terris, published in the context of that conciliar process, seemed to be another sign of renewal, favoring a shift away from anathemization and hostility toward the modern world

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and promoting a spirit of dialogue and solidarity. Such ecclesiastical openness was accompanied by several theological projects that seemed to shape an alternative way of looking at social conflicts (Moltmann, 1966; Metz, 1968). An attempt was made to configure a “political theology” as a way to design a creative dialogue with Marxism and post-Enlightenment secular ideologies (Sölle, 1971).

Latin American Liberation Theology Vatican II was followed by regional synods of bishops. The most famous of them was the general meeting of Latin American Roman Catholic bishops that took place from August 26 to September 6, 1968, in the Colombian city of Medellín. To the amazement of many observers, the Roman Catholic Church, which the radical intelligentsia in the continent had considered an ideological bulwark of prevailing social inequities, made a decisive pastoral shift, treating solidarity with the poor and destitute as a central concern. If Vatican II opened the theological dialogue with modern rationality, Medellín was perceived as a prophetic convocation against poverty, inequality, and oppression. If Vatican II was mainly concerned with the gap between the church and secular modernity, Medellín was more concerned with the scandal of social injustice in a Christian continent. In a crucial section of their final resolutions, the Latin American bishops linked the Christian faith with historical and social liberation: The Latin American bishops cannot remain indifferent in the face of the tremendous social injustices existent in Latin America, which keep the majority of our peoples in dismal poverty that in many cases becomes inhuman wretchedness… A deafening cry pours from the throats of millions of men and women asking their pastors for a liberation that reaches them from nowhere else… Christ, our savior, not only loved the poor… he centered his mission in announcing liberation to the poor. (Hennelly, 1992, 114 and 116)

Certainly, the Medellín conference was a meeting of bishops, not of theologians. But several Roman Catholic theologians were present and collaborated substantially in the drafting of the final documents. The general tone emerging from the conference allowed the possibility of rethinking the theological enterprise from the perspective of the liberation of the poor and the downtrodden (Gutiérrez, 1999, 59–101). Prior to the

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Medellín meeting, in July 1968, Gustavo Gutiérrez gave a lecture in Chimbote, Perú, significantly titled “Toward a Theology of Liberation,” that established a close connection between spiritual redemption and human liberation. This lecture proved to be a pioneer text for Latin American Liberation Theology. It also inaugurated Gutiérrez’s decades of fertile theological production (he was already 82 years old when, on July 17, 2010, he gave a lecture at Princeton Theological Seminary at the invitation of the Hispanic Theological Initiative). In 1971, the first edition of Gutiérrez’s most famous book, Theology of Liberation, was published, a landmark in Latin American theological writing. His triadic understanding of human liberation—liberation from social and economic oppression, history as a process of self-determined humanization, and redemption from sinfulness—became classic and a model to be universally reproduced (Gutiérrez, 1973, 67–69). Hugo Assmann’s book Opresión—Liberación: Desafío a los cristianos was also published the same year. Assmann placed the emerging Liberation Theology in the wider context of the Third World: “The contextual starting point of a ‘theology of liberation’ is the historical situation of domination experienced by the peoples of the Third World” (Assmann, 1971, 50). Gutiérrez and Assmann were followed by a spate of several other theologians (Leonardo Boff, José Porfirio Miranda, Juan Luis Segundo, Jon Sobrino, Pablo Richard, Jorge Pixley, among others) whose writings were conceived as expressions of a new intellectual understanding of the faith: Liberation Theology. Among the many texts that rocked the placid realm of theological production during those early years of Latin American Liberation Theology were José Porfirio Miranda’s Marx y la Biblia (an important contribution to a liberationist hermeneutics and also sort of a theological companion to Bloch’s Atheismus im Christentum) and Juan Luis Segundo’s Liberación de la teología, with its frontal challenge to traditional scholastic ways of doing theology (Miranda, 1972; Segundo, 1975). What could be considered the main tenets of this theological movement? I would identify five. 1. The retrieval of the “subversive memories,” inscribed in sacred scriptures, which are hidden below layers of cultic regulations and doctrinal orthodoxies but never totally effaced. This theological movement also gives hermeneutical and exegetical priority to the Exodus story, understood to be a paradigm of the liberating character of God’s actions (Croatto, 1981; Pixley, 1983); to the several

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prophetic denunciations of injustice and oppression (Houston, 2006); and to the confrontations of the historical Jesus with Judean religious authorities and Roman political powers, alongside Jesus’ solidarity with the “nobodies” of Judea and Galilee (Sobrino, 1999). 2. A historical understanding of Jesus’s proclamation of God’s kingdom. The kingdom is conceived as referring not to some otherworldly postmortem realm, but rather to the unceasing hope of a social configuration characterized by justice, solidarity, and freedom. Leonardo Boff (1972) and Jon Sobrino (1991) identified Jesus as the Liberator, thereby recovering the semantic roots of the term redemption (the deliverance of a captive or a slave). This Christology is one attuned to the plight of the indigents and, to use Frantz Fanon’s term, to the “wretched of the earth” (Martínez-Olivieri, 2016). 3. The divine preferential option for the poor, the excluded, and the destitute of this world. The church must become the church of the poor by sharing the poor’s sorrows, hopes, and struggles. Initially the emphasis of the preferential option was socioeconomic, but it was gradually widened to include other categories of social exclusion: indigenous communities, racial and ethnic minorities, women, and sexual orientation (Boff, 1981). 4. Theology cannot be reduced to an intellectual understanding of the faith; it must also be a practical commitment for historical transformation. The category of praxis, partly borrowed from Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of liberation, partly an adaptation of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (“philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”), acquired normative status (Marx, 1978, 145). History, therefore, understood as the realm of the perennial struggle against oppressions and exclusions, emerged as the locus for Christian praxis (Pixley & Bastian, 1979). 5. God is reconceived not as an immutable and impassible entelechy but, in line with the biblical narratives, as a compassionate Eternal Spirit who hears and pays close attention to the cry of the oppressed and whose action in human history has the redemption of the downtrodden and excluded as its ultimate telos. Herein might be located Liberation Theology’s main theoretical epistemological rupture and reconfiguration: a novel way of thinking about God’s being and action in history (Pimentel Chacón, 2008). Instead of contriving arcane scholastic definitions of the divine essence, God is named as Liberator.

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Latin American Liberation Theology strove to forge a new way of being the church in the world: the base ecclesial communities were understood as seeds for reconfiguring the church as “the people of God.” These congregations were considered expressions of the church’s solidarity with the poor and oppressed in their aspirations for liberation and the promotion of human flourishing. They produced an impressive wealth of liturgical, musical, exegetical, homiletical, ethical, and literary resources in order to promote social and human emancipation. Their key theme was historical transformation. Leonardo Boff even advocated a new genesis of the church (Boff, 1977).

Ecclesiastical Theological Disputes However, many in the hierarchical church, including some members of the Roman Curia, viewed these potential disruptions of episcopal authority with marked distrust and moved to restrict the autonomy of some Latin American theologians. Rome was also concerned about the consequences of this new theological perspective for dogmatic orthodoxy. A long, protracted confrontation emerged, one that continues into the present. Political power matters. Since their colonial inception, an official linkage between the state and the Roman Catholic Church has characterized Latin American nations. The royal patronage exercised by the Iberian crown entailed the acknowledgment by the church of the sovereignty and authority of the metropolitan state, but was paired with the state’s recognition of the Roman Catholic Church’s primacy in religious affairs. It was sometimes the source of acute conflict, whenever the ethical conscience of bishops, priests, missionaries, and theologians clashed with the severe exploitation of the native communities. Bartolomé de las Casas, to whose historical significance Gustavo Gutiérrez (1993) devoted a magnificent book, is perhaps the most astute theological analyst of such conflicts. Yet it was a convenient arrangement for both partners, since it conferred a sacred aura upon metropolitan sovereignty and, conversely, provided the church with state protection. The governments of the new states that emerged after the nineteenth century wars of independence promptly recognized the advantages of the papal patronage and tried to preserve it. This heritage forged a particular brand of Latin American Christendom closely linking the state and the

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Roman Catholic Church—a condition juridically inscribed in several national constitutions and Vatican concordats. If the official connection of church and state was venerable, it was also vulnerable. The prophetic and evangelical subversive memories inscribed in the Christian scriptures and traditions surfaced powerfully during the somber and violent times of Latin American military dictatorships (1964–1989), shaking the alliance between political powers and church authorities. The most famous of the ensuing conflicts took place in the midst of the violent civil war in El Salvador, a nation where nuns, priests, lay workers, and even the Primate of the Roman Catholic Church, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, were assassinated by the military or their right-wing allies. Archbishop Romero tried to steer his church to become a defender of the poor and persecuted. He recognized that the forbearance of the ruling clans was as limited as their economic interests were great. Two weeks before his assassination, in an interview conducted by a Mexican newspaper, Archbishop Romero foreshadowed his death and gave a theological and pastoral interpretation of his personal destiny: I have frequently been threatened with death … If God accepts the sacrifice of my life, then may my blood be the seed of liberty, and a sign of the hope that will soon become a reality … May my death, if it is accepted by God, be for the liberation of my people, and as a witness of hope in what is to come. (Romero, 1998, 50 and 51)

His assassination convinced many church authorities that Liberation Theology was seriously jeopardizing the social status of the Roman Catholic Church, and that a convenient, longstanding church-state covenant was endangered by the radical political interventions of some members of the clergy. Those church authorities thus moved decisively to suppress liberationist thought. Ecclesiastical and social political considerations were not the only issues of concern for Vatican authorities. Doctrinal orthodoxy matters for the Roman Catholic Church. Under the prefecture of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith strongly criticized what it considered Liberation Theology’s ominous doctrinal deviations. On August 6, 1984, with the approval of Pope John Paul II, it issued the admonishing “Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’,” followed by an admonition to Leonardo Boff, and another

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general critique, “Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation” (March 22, 1986). Liberation Theology was accused of borrowing improperly from Marxist thought, emphasizing historical and social liberation to the detriment of spiritual salvation, promoting class struggle instead of reconciliation, disdaining the church’s social doctrine, and politicizing biblical hermeneutics, Christology, and the church. The goal of the authoritative reprimands was to draw attention … to the deviations and risks of deviation, damaging to the faith and to Christian living, that are brought by certain forms of liberation theology … the ‘theologies of liberation’ especially tend to misunderstand or to eliminate … the transcendence and gratuity of liberation in Jesus Christ, true God and true man … One needs to be on guard against the politicization of existence, which, misunderstanding the entire meaning of the kingdom of God and the transcendence of the person, begins to sacralize politics and betray the religion of the people in favor of the projects of revolution. (In Hennelly, 1992, 393–414)

Traditionally, indictments like these were able to silence the accused theologians. Not this time. Prompt reactions by Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, and Juan Luis Segundo (1985) were evidence that Rome had lost the capability to repress this new theological movement. On April 9, 1986, John Paul II sent a letter to the Brazilian bishops, which several scholars interpreted both as an attempt to quell the growing dispute, and thereby avoid a sharp rupture in the Latin American church, and as a validation of the claim that the concept of social and political liberation is an important dimension of the church’s pastoral mission (Hennelly, 1992, 498–506). Since then, several Roman Catholic theologians have sustained an effort to convince Rome that Liberation Theology is a valid and legitimate rethinking of the apostolic tradition, and to demonstrate that this new form of theology does not constitute a threat to the church’s orthodoxy or integrity (Ellacuría & Sobrino, 1990). However, some influential sectors of the Roman Curia still look askance at Liberation Theology, as evidenced by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s scathing critique of Jon Sobrino’s Christology (“Notification on the works of Father Jon Sobrino, SJ,” 11/26/2006). Many Roman Catholic narratives disregard other sources that contributed to the birth of Liberation Theology. In the 1960s, several Latin American Protestant churches were undergoing similar processes of

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rethinking the relationship between salvation, history as the sphere of divine-human encounter, and liberation (Neely, 1977). In fact, the first extensive monograph that focused on historical and social liberation as the central hermeneutical key to conceptualize the Christian faith was the doctoral dissertation of Rubem Alves (1968), a Brazilian Presbyterian. In May of 1968, Alves successfully defended his dissertation at Princeton Theological Seminary, which was titled Towards a Theology of Liberation. Alves wrote it under the direction of Richard Shaull, who for a good number of years had been working in theological education in Latin America, first in Colombia and later in Brazil, and who was crucial for the development of a Liberationist Theology in Protestant Latin American circles (Shaull, 1965). Shaull had also been instrumental in the 1970 English publication of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a key text in the development of Latin American Liberation Theology. Alves’s dissertation is a powerful text, written in a splendid literary style. It was published as a book in 1969, two years before Gutiérrez’s, but with a significant change in the title: A Theology of Human Hope. Apparently, the publishers believed that the concept of “hope,” with its obvious connotations to the writings of Jürgen Moltmann, would be more commercially attractive or relevant than “liberation.” Yet, despite the change of title, Alves conceptualizes the temporal dialectics proper to theological language in terms of a historical politics of liberation. The acts of remembering and hoping that determine the language of the community of faith, therefore, do not have any reality in themselves but in the engagement in the ongoing politics of liberation which is the situation and condition of theological intelligibility …. (Alves, 1969, 163)

Black Liberation Theology If it is wrong to locate the birth of Liberation Theology exclusively in Roman Catholic circles, it is also a mistake to situate it solely in Latin America. During the times of slavery and racial discrimination in the United States, Black churches were communities of solidarity and hope for enslaved peoples of African ancestry. In this context, the exodus story, the prophetic denunciations, and the story of the crucified but resurrected Jesus were sung, preached, and hoped, sustaining the narratives of the suffering Black communities. Bodies might have been in bondage to white masters, but hearts and minds were nourished and comforted by the biblical stories of retribution and redemption (Raboteau, 1978, 1995).

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African American churches became important protagonists in the civil rights movement for the elimination of racial discrimination. All over the North American South, Black preachers became leaders in spreading the challenging message and Gospel music acquired a more political edge. The speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. are saturated with the cadences, intonations, and biblical images typical of African American preaching (Carson & Shepard, 2001). The lyrics of “We Shall Overcome,” the emblematic hymn of the civil rights movement, is a variant of a prior hymn, “I’ll Overcome Some Day,” written in 1901 by Charles Albert Tindley, one of the founding fathers of African American Gospel music. The melody of this song is based upon an even earlier, defiant Black song: the nineteenth century spiritual “No More Auction Block for Me,” revived in the twentieth century, first by the powerful voice of Paul Robeson and later by Bob Dylan: No more auction block for me No more, no more No more auction block for me Many thousands gone No more driver’s lash for me No more, no more No more driver’s lash for me Many thousands gone No more whip lash for me No more, no more No more pint of salt for me Many thousands gone

In this social and ecclesiastical environment, some African American theologians began to rethink their intellectual role in the epic struggle of their people. Black Liberation Theology, rooted in the historical experience of slavery and racism, took on an important role in theological dialogue, bringing the issues of racial and ethnic discrimination into the conversation. The foremost thinker among African American Liberation Theologians was the recently deceased James Cone. In his 1969 book, Black Theology & Black Power, Cone still tentatively wrote: “the work of Christ is essentially a liberating work, directed toward and by the oppressed” (Cone, 1969, 42). It was the foretaste of his 1970 groundbreaking text A Black Theology of Liberation. Cone was not one to mince words in his radical transformation of theology:

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It is my contention that Christianity is essentially a religion of liberation. The function of theology is that of analyzing the meaning of that liberation for the oppressed so that they can know that their struggle for political, social, and economic justice is consistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian. Christian theology is a theology of liberation. It is rational study of the being of God in the world in light of the existential situation of an oppressed community, relating the forces of liberation to the essence of the gospel, which is Jesus Christ. In view of the biblical emphasis on liberation, it seems not only appropriate but necessary to define the Christian community as the community of the oppressed which joins Jesus Christ in his fight for the liberation of humankind (Cone, 1970). It is fair to say, in fact, that Black theology of liberation became an important partner of theological discourse in the academic, ecclesiastical, and public social realms in all places where the African peoples have been subjected to dominion or control (Erskine, 1998). This theology has been able to dwell very creatively with the cultural and artistic traditions of the Black communities (Cone, 1972). And, in times like ours, when racism has had a violent political reawakening and African American communities have to proclaim that “Black lives matter,” it is essential to remember and retrieve James Cone’s superb theological link between the cross and the lynching tree. (Cone, 2011)

Allow me to finish quoting a preamble to Liberation Theology by none other but the great Karl Barth (1949, 244 and 245), who once wrote the following: [God] is on the side of the poor… The gospel was proclaimed to the poor, while on the contrary the rich are often shown in suspiciously close proximity to the mighty evildoer, whose pride goes before a fall…Thus the Bible is on the side of the poor, the impecunious and the destitute. He whom the Bible calls God is on the side of the poor…

Amen!

References Alves, R. (1968). Towards a theology of liberation: An exploration of the encounter between the languages of humanistic messianism and messianic humanism. PhD dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton. Alves, R. (1969). A theology of human hope. Corpus Books. Assmann, H. (1971). Opresión – Liberación: Desafío a los cristianos. Tierra Nueva.

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Barth, K. (1949). Poverty. In Against the stream: Shorter post-war writings 1946–52. SCM. Bloch, E. (1968). Atheismus im Christentum. Suhrkamp. Boff, L. (1972). Jesus Cristo libertador; ensaio de cristologia crítica para o nosso tempo. Editôra Vozes. Boff, L. (1977). Eclesiogênese: as comunidades eclesiais de base reinventam a Igreja. Editora Vozes. Boff, L. (1981). Igreja, carisma e poder: ensaios de eclesiologia militante. Vozes. Bonhoeffer, D. (2000). Letters and papers from prison. Folio Society. Carson, C., & Shepard, K. (2001). A call to conscience: The landmark speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Warner Books. Cone, J. H. (1969). Black theology & black power. Seabury Press. Cone, J. H. (1970). A black theology of liberation. Orbis. Cone, J. H. (1972). The spirituals and blues. Seabury. Cone, J. H. (2011). The cross and the lynching tree. Orbis. Croatto, J. S. (1981). Exodus, a hermeneutics of freedom. Orbis. Ellacuría, I., & Sobrino, J. (1990). Mysterium liberationis: Conceptos fundamentales de la Teología de la Liberación. Trotta. Erskine, N.  L. (1998). Decolonizing theology: A Caribbean perspective. Africa World Press. Fanon, F. (1965). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press. Flannery, A. (1996). Vatican Council II. The basic sixteen documents: Constitutions, decrees, declarations. Costello Pub. Freire, P. (1967). Educação como prática da Liberdade. Paz e Terra. Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogía del oprimido. Tierra Nueva. Gutiérrez, G. (1973). Teología de la liberación: perspectivas. Sígueme. Gutiérrez, G. (1993). Las Casas: In search of the poor of Jesus Christ. Orbis. Gutiérrez, G. (1999). The Meaning and Scope of Medellín. In The density of the present: Selected writings (pp. 59–101). Orbis. Hennelly, A. (1992). Liberation theology: A documentary history. Orbis. Houston, W. (2006). Contending for justice: Ideologies and theologies of social justice in the old testament. T&T Clark. Lindbeck, G. (1965). Dialogue on the way: Protestants report from Rome on the Vatican Council. Augsburg. Marcuse, H. (1969). An essay on liberation. Beacon. Martínez-Olivieri, J. (2016). A visible witness: Christology, liberation, and participation. Fortress Press. Marx, K. (1978). Theses on Feuerbach. In R. C. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels reader. W. W. Norton & Company. Metz, J. B. (1968). Zur Theologie der Welt. Matthias-Grúnewald Verlag. Miranda, J. P. (1972). Marx y la Biblia. Ediciones Sígueme. Moltmann, J. (1966). Theologie der Hoffnung. Chr. Kaiser Verlag.

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Neely, A. P. (1977). Protestant antecedents of the Latin American theology of liberation. PhD dissertation, American University, Washington DC. Pimentel Chacón, J. (2008). Modelos de Dios en las teologías latinoamericanas. Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica. Pixley, J. (1983). Exodo, una lectura evangélica y popular. Casa Unida de Publicaciones. Pixley, J., & Bastian, J.-P. (1979). Praxis cristiana y producción teológica. Ediciones Sígueme. Raboteau, A. (1978). Slave religion: The “invisible institution” in the antebellum south. Oxford University Press. Raboteau, A. (1995). A fire in the bones: Reflections on African-American religious history. Beacon. Romero, O. (1998). Voice of the voiceless: The four pastoral letters and other statements. Orbis. Segundo, J. L. (1975). Liberación de la teología. Ediciones Carlos Lohlé. Segundo, J. L. (1985). Teología de la liberación: Respuesta al Cardenal Ratzinger. Ediciones Cristiandad. Shaull, R. (1965). Hombre, ideología y revolución en América Latina. ISAL. Sobrino, J. (1991). Jesucristo liberador: lectura histórico teológica de Jesús de Nazaret. UCA. Sobrino, J. (1999). La fe en Jesucristo: ensayo desde las víctimas. UCA. Sölle, D. (1971). Politische Theologie. Auseinandersetzung mit Rudolf Bultmann. Kreuz-Verlag.

Are the Poor Human Beings? Neoliberalism and Theology Jung Mo Sung

Blindness: The Poor Are Invisible There are people who cannot see what is right in front of them. They are blind. Not because they were born without sight, or lost it, but because they do not want to see. Their blindness is born of the desire to not see reality as it negates ingrained desires and preconceptions. Logical arguments do not work with those who walk blindly outside the realm of reason, beyond reason-ableness. Fortunately, there are many others who are able to see that the world is in danger and that the way we produce and distribute goods, material and symbolic, endangers the lives of billions, the sustainability of our environment, and human civilization. The ecological crisis is so serious that even large capital funds that control a good part of the world’s investment flow are conditioning and imposing restrictions in an attempt to reduce environmental degradation and global warming. When these companies, which by definition have as their ultimate objective the maximization of profits for the benefits of their

J. M. Sung (*) Methodist University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_3

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shareholders, come into this conversation, it is because what is at stake is sustainability, not only of the environment but also of their business. The environmental crisis, we can say, is the great long-term point of convergence uniting a good part of the world’s institutions and countries. COVID-19, of course, is also a fundamental point of convergence as I write this, although it is expected to be fleeting. Despite less global consensus, another great crisis afflicts us: great social inequality, the so-called 1% versus the 99%. For those concerned with the concrete suffering of people, the great problem is the social and economic exclusion of large sectors of humanity. The notion of social inequality is a statistical issue and does not necessarily address the life or death of people. For example, we can hypothetically think of a country where eight people have more wealth than the sum of the poorest half of the population—as is the case in Brazil—and where no one starves or lacks the basic necessities to survive. We know, of course, that Brazil is not alone. In Latin America and on other continents, there are the many poor alongside the few rich. What I want to draw attention to is that the concept of social inequality is not synonymous with social exclusion. It reveals the size of social tension, which is important, but that is only part of it. This is not the whole picture of poverty. In any case, this concept of social inequality is fundamental for our times and for our discussion in this chapter. In the introduction to Combating Inequality: Rethinking Government’s Role, a volume that brings together work on social inequality in rich countries, the editors remark that “[i]nequality is widening, posing major moral, social, and political challenges to which policymakers must react” (Blanchard & Rodrik, 2021, 13–346) and that “[…] nobody at the conference challenged the view that inequality is a first-order problem requiring significant policy attention” (Blanchard & Rodrik, 2021, 15–346). What I want to call attention to in this quotation is its imperative character: must react. Necessary for what? The “must” presupposes a purpose, the need to overcome a problem and reach a final objective. In the presentations they reference, “[t]here was a widespread agreement that policies should focus on more than poverty reduction.” “[…] if anything, the implicit assumption in many of the presentations was that inequality is restraining economic opportunities for the lower and middle classes and fostering (or reflecting) monopolistic rents for the very wealthy” (Blanchard & Rodrik, 2021, 15–346).

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Economists and social scientists think in terms of the system, which is their object of analysis and improvement. Therefore, their criterion is not the life of the poor or of the middle classes but the growth or decline of economic opportunities. We know that poverty cannot be overcome without improving or modifying the existing economic and political system, but it is necessary to make it clear what the ultimate objective and necessary means are. That is, the main objective of a society that intends to be “human” must be the lives of the people, including the poor who are outside the market. Social and economic development must be understood as the means to this end. In this discussion about social inequality and the efficiency of the economic system, it is worth bringing here an idea presented by Christine Lagarde, then managing director of the IMF, at the first conference of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism. She took up Marx’s thesis that capitalism, with its excesses, carries in itself its own destruction because it leads to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, leading to great conflicts and cyclical crises. Recognizing that this logic, which is dominating our time, endangers the capitalist system itself, she, along with other individuals and institutions, proposes “inclusive capitalism.” She states, “By making capitalism more inclusive, we make capitalism more effective, and possibly more sustainable. However, if inclusive capitalism is not an oxymoron, it is not intuitive either, and it is more of a constant quest than a definitive destination” (Lagarde, 2014). It is not worth discussing in this text whether inclusive capitalism is possible or not—in other words, whether Marx is right or wrong—but it is clear that there are many people who are seeing not only the ecological crisis but also the problem of social inequality and, most importantly, that of social exclusion as dangers to the sustainability of capitalism and global society. It is important to highlight that the arguments of the authors mentioned above refer to the sustainability of the current capitalist economic and social system and not to the concrete life of poor people excluded from the market. In this sense, the logic of the defenders of the reform of capitalism, or of the proposal of inclusive capitalism, can lead to a process of calculation about how many people need to be included to bring the system to a situation of sustainability. That is, to the extent that the inclusion process requires spending, which means more taxes and regulations or laws that restrict “market freedom,” groups that recognize the unsustainability of the capitalist system need to calculate the minimum cost for the inclusion of the poor in the system. This also means the need to

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calculate the balance point between the costs of the inclusion process and the systemic sustainability curve. In simple language, calculate how many lives need to be included, saved. In addition, how many can be excluded, taken down the path of slow death, without endangering the system that generates more wealth for the wealthiest. In short, we have two groups. Those who do not see, because they do not wish to see, the two great threats to the environmental and social system that can bring our civilization to collapse. In addition, those who see the reality of these threats and recognize that capitalism is the actual principal cause of the current crises and that something needs to change to maintain its environmental and social sustainability. Undoubtedly, there are great differences between the two groups, but it is necessary to recognize that there is also a common perspective: both see reality from the capitalist system’s point of view and, even those who see better, do not see the humanity of the poor, the excluded of the economic-cultural system of globalized capitalism. The invisibility of the poor is the common vision of all social groups that think and see reality from the point of view of the capitalist economic-cultural system. In addition, when they do see the poor on the margins of society, or when the excluded irrupt into the good lives of those included in the system, those poor and excluded are seen as immoral: enemies and potentially—or even certainly—criminals. As Z.  Bauman (1997, 43) said, “Increasingly, being poor is seen as crime; becoming poor, as the product of criminal predispositions or intentions— abuse of alcohol, gambling, drugs, truancy and vagabondage.” As a Latin American liberation theologian, my main concern is not so much the general theme of social inequality or poverty—two concepts that come from the social sciences—but rather the lives and struggles of the poor for their social rights. One of the main characteristics of Liberation Theology is that theoretical-theological reflections must (a) start from concrete problems and struggles; (b) seek contributions from diverse areas of knowledge; (c) learn from the biblical-theological tradition a critical-­ prophetic perspective to discern the action of the Spirit of God in our time; and (d) place ourselves at the service of actions that critique the sins of the world and of Christianity itself, making room for the hope of a more dignified life for all. From this perspective, the concrete question that I want to reflect on in this text is: are the poor human beings who deserve to be defended and supported in their struggles for a dignified life? Why do so many voters and so many churches seem to vote more in favor of the rich, advocating,

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for example, tax cuts for the rich and large corporations and against policies of income redistribution that would benefit the vast majority of the world’s population? Or in theological terms, paraphrasing Jesus’ question (Mk 8.27): what do churches and people say about the poor? Are poor people sinners to blame for their poverty or are they victims of an unjust society?

Changes in the Understanding of the Poor To discuss this issue, I want to bring up a conflict between two very well-­ known religious figures in Brazil: Father Júlio Lancellotti and Pastor Silas Malafaia. Father Júlio Lancellotti has always worked with the poor, homeless people and other groups in different situations of vulnerability. With the increase in the homeless population and people starving, because of the economic crisis worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, he has become a symbolic figure on social networks as a presence of God in the lives of the poor, a sign of human solidarity. In a recent interview, he said, “I don’t work with homeless people. I live with them. Because ‘work’ feels like they are objects. You have to look at life in a human way. This is not just for the religious. However, I would not be able to live the religious dimension without humanizing life” (Betim, 2020). He is a concrete expression of the “option for the poor” of liberationist Christianity. It is important to remember that the poor are not abstract concepts or disembodied souls to be saved for eternal life but corporeal beings who feel the pain of hunger and the pain of humiliation. According to the report by ECLAC (CEPAL)—the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean—the total number of poor people in Latin America increased to 209 million at the end of 2020, 22 million more than in the previous year. It is estimated that almost 24% of the Brazilian population currently lives in a situation of moderate or severe food insecurity. This means that 50 million people, including children, stopped eating for lack of money or had a significant reduction in the quality and quantity of food ingested. According to the FAO, 2 billion people worldwide are in a situation of severe or moderate food insecurity. However, lack of food is not the only kind of hunger that affects the poor. The poor are also hungry for recognition of their human dignity. They want and have the right to be treated as human subjects in intersubjective relationships in which their hungers are placed as one of the priorities of society and of churches or religious movements. Recognizing the

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human dignity of the poor and their social rights is the other side of the coin of “loving your neighbor.” On the other hand, there are many sectors of the Christian, Catholic, Protestant, or Pentecostal churches, which accuse Father Júlio Lancellotti, a well-known priest on the social network in Brazil, of being a communist and a heretic for helping and living with the poor. Pastor Silas Malafaia, one of the main leaders of neopentecostal churches in Brazil, an ally and friend of the president of Brazil, Bolsonaro, is one of the best-known religious figures on social media and in the media accusing Father Júlio and Pope Francis of being communists. He is one of the leading preachers who teaches that God’s blessing or curse on people’s lives must be measured in terms of wealth. A rich man’s wealth would be proof of God’s blessing in his life, while the poor man’s poverty would be proof that he is a sinner and, therefore, cursed by God. It is a theology that calculates the “distribution” of God’s grace in the world in terms of financial values. The grace of God ceased to be free and began to be calculated monetarily.

Transformations of Christianity and Western Culture José Miguez Bonino, one of the leading names in first-generation Liberation Theology, already in the early 1970s realized the cultural shift that was affecting North American Christianity about what Jesus said regarding wealth and those who have it. This change would affect the churches of Latin America and the rest of the world as well. He said: Even a cursory look at Biblical commentaries in the Protestant tradition shows the almost uniform ideological train of thought: riches (in themselves) are good—therefore Jesus could not condemn them as such, nor rich people as such—consequently the text must mean something else—this something else must be found in the ‘subjective’ sphere (intention, attitudes, motivations). Once this framework of interpretation is in operation, all texts gather around it in one coherent whole. (Míguez-Bonino, 2006, Kindle Locations 1015–1019)

This theological change in Western Christianity, which helps to understand the theology of many church leaders who associate divine blessing with wealth, is articulated with the emergence of a new culture in capitalist societies. John K. Galbraith, a leading twentieth century economist, called this culture the “culture of contentment.” From the perspective of this

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culture, which currently predominates in globalization, the wealth of the rich is simply deserved, and if “good fortune [is] earned or the reward of merit, there is no equitable justification for any action that impairs it—that subtracts from what is enjoyed or might be enjoyed” (Galbraith, 1992, 18–19). This means that the suffering of the poor is seen as deserved due to their incompetence or lack of effort in their work. Therefore, the state does not have the right to interfere in the economy with economic-social laws and policies or with social programs that aim to change the situation of income and wealth distribution. After all, the serious social inequality operating is now seen as fair, commensurate with the merits of each one. This notion of “just distribution of wealth” presupposes a judge or a system of justice. We know that there does not exist an infallible human judge, and thus, the legal systems have created possibilities of appeal to a higher court. In the cases of convictions for the poor, there is not a traditional judge but an economic system that sentences like a judge in the court of the last resort against whom no appeal can be made. In this sense, the condemnation of the poor to a life of suffering and hunger cannot be questioned, much less be corrected with social programs or economic policies that show the poor favor. It is presupposed that the market (capital M), free from the interventions of the state and civil society, functions as an omniscient judge, perfectly fair and powerful enough to impose its will on the economic-social world: the characteristics of a divine being. This means that we are no longer only in the field of economics or even social ethics but also of theology. This theological and cultural transformation reveals a break with modern Western civilization. The modern Western world was built upon some fundamental principles, including (a) democracy; (b) human rights, including civil, political, and social rights; and (c) the project of economic and social development for all. Liberals and socialists have come to share the same utopian horizon: the myth of socioeconomic development. The struggle between these two groups was about the best or only true path: socialism, with state planning, or the capitalist market. In addition, that has changed. Not only with the end of the Cold War with the victory of the United States against the Soviet Union but also with the transition from Keynesian to neoliberal capitalism, from the myth of development to the myth of the free market. Celso Furtado, one of the leading economists in Latin America, wrote in the early 1970s that almost all of the literature on economic development between 1945 and 1970 was based on a myth that economic

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development led by the most industrialized countries would bring progress to all of humanity. Within this mythical horizon was the promise that the average standard of consumption in the richest countries could and should be accessible to all humanity. Furtado, who was not a scholar of religions, much less a theologian, said at the beginning of his book, The Myth of Economic Development, that “myths have exercised an undeniable influence over the minds of men who endeavour to understand social reality. […] [S]ocial scientists have always sought support in some hypothesis rooted in a system of values that they rarely make explicit” (2020, 1). In this sense, we can perceive a convergence between Furtado’s thought and Assmann’s and Hinkelammert’s, two of the first-generation liberation theologians who worked most on the interplay of economics and theology, who said: “economic theories boil down, in the end, to an eternal revolving around a mythical core of astonishing simplicity” (Assmann & Hinkelammert, 1989, 125). For Furtado, the role of myth in the social sciences, as in any kind of empirical science, “is to orient, on an intuitive plane, the construction of what Schumpeter called the vision of the social process, without which analytical work would have no meaning whatsoever. In this way, myths function as lighthouses that illuminate the perceptual field of the social scientist, allowing him to have a clear vision of certain problems and to see nothing of others” (2020, 1). This myth of economic development offered the developed capitalist countries and the underdeveloped or developing ones a path: the rich countries saw themselves and presented themselves as the economic model to be copied and thus determined that the peripheral countries in the system should imitate and follow their “teachings.” In this process, the elites of underdeveloped countries felt motivated and even impelled to buy and display the consumer goods that were consumed by the elites of rich countries. In other words, the imitation of the consumption pattern of the elite of rich countries by the elites of other countries was and is an anthropological-­economic element of the globalization process. It is clear that this imitation, by the elite of countries not yet developed, is only possible with the high level of exploitation of labor and high concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few. In the case of Brazil, Edmar Bacha, an important economist of the Brazilian government, popularized, in 1974, the expression “Belíndia,” that the country had within itself a Belgium—a small country with very, very rich people—and a large India, full of poverty.

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How was this social separation socially justified? By utilizing the myth of economic development, it would be a transitory situation, this poverty, because we were on the path of development and, in the end, everyone would have a place at the table. Myth thus offers a hypothesis for economic science and an explanation and justification for social inequality, an ideology that maintains a certain social sustainability. In the 1960s, it is worth remembering that there were groups of young university students, worker leaders, and politicians who criticized the capitalist myth of the era using an alternate hypothesis of social transformation: Marxism. Moved by socialism’s mythos, they faced off against sectors of the bourgeoisie in the name of the same promise of modernity: equality and social rights for all. Faced with the actions of popular social movements and revolutionary movements, the defenders of capitalism reacted by “suspending” the values of democracy and human rights, as well as the promise that the fruits of development would be for all. This helps us to understand why a good part of Latin America has experienced military coups and repressions.

The Imitation Model of Desire and Temptation Within this myth of economic development, we have some fundamental points that we must discuss. Every idea of progress, evolution, or development presupposes the ideal model to be copied and pursued. In the case of economic development, this myth presents the consumption pattern of rich countries as the ideal model that should guide the economy of dependent countries and the desire and behavior of those who want to be like the elite of rich countries. In this sense, F. Hayek, one of the leading names in neoliberalism, says something very similar: At first, a new good is commonly ‘the caprice of a chosen few before it becomes a public need and forms part of the necessities of life. For the luxuries of today are the necessities of tomorrow.’ (Hayek, 2011, 97)

The transition from a luxury consumer good to a necessity is the “magic” of marketing: getting people to feel the need for things they do not need. (There is no space here to delve into this topic, but we can simplify it by saying that there are two types of necessary consumer goods: the basic ones—such as food, housing, education, health—and the need to consume goods that allow me to be socially recognized.)

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Although in an advanced society the unsatisfied wants are usually no longer physical needs but the results of civilization, it is still true that at each stage some of the things most people desire can be provided only for a few and can be made accessible to all only by further progress. Most of what we strive for are things we want because others already have them. (Hayek, 2011, 98)

The desire to have what others have and those things that are considered desirable by others is central to the development of capitalist economic progress. Since childhood, we learn by an imitation process, through which we learn what to desire. In this sense, Hayek says, “However, a progressive society, while it relies on this process of learning and imitation, recognizes the desires it creates only as a spur to further effort” (2011, 98). Hayek, however, breaks with the myth of economic development when he says: It does not guarantee the results to everyone. It disregards the pain of unfulfilled desire aroused by the example of others. It appears cruel because it increases the desire of all in proportion as it increases its gifts to some. However, as long as it remains a progressive society, some must lead, and the rest must follow. (2011, 98)

The description of the pain of unfulfilled desires and their cruelty shows that Hayek does not subscribe to the development myth. He assumes the explanation of the relationship between the imitation of desire and technological progress, but he does not accept the idea that all humanity will reach a situation of satisfaction. Celso Furtado also criticizes the development myth based on an empirical fact: the impossibility of universalizing the consumption pattern of rich countries due to nature’s limits. The notion of unlimited economic growth presupposes a constantly expanding planet. The study formulated by an interdisciplinary group at MIT in 1972, The Limits to Growth, already showed that this way of living is so costly, in terms of the degradation of the physical world, that any attempt to generalize it would lead inexorably to the collapse of an entire civilization. It is the environmental crisis that we face today. “We thus have definitive proof that economic development—the idea that poor people can someday enjoy the ways of life of today’s rich people—is simply unfeasible,” Furtado said (2020, 63). We have two fundamental options before us: (a) to maintain the logic of imitating the consumption of the rich to guarantee technological

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development while imitating the desire of the rich and middle class with its cruel cost of not only unfulfilled desires but also of social exclusion of the poor; (b) to reduce the consumption pattern of the rich to guarantee the life and human rights of the poor, especially social rights, and maintain environmental and social sustainability. The economic and political changes in the late 1970s and early 1980s show that the concrete option, irrespective of political discourses, was to change the fundamental myth of capitalism from the “myth of development” to the myth of the “Free Market.” After the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Hayek in 1974, we had the consolidation of neoliberal ideology as a respectable, “hard” economic science. Then, with the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, in the early 1980s, neoliberalism was no longer restricted to the field of economics. In 1981, in an interview given to the Sunday Times, when asked by the reporter about her priorities, M. Thatcher replied: What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it is always been toward the collectivist society. People have forgotten about their personal society. In addition, they say: do I count, do I matter? To which the short answer is yes. In addition, therefore, it is not that I set out on economic policies; it is that I set out truly to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you truly are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul. (1981, italics mine)

With the emergence of neoliberalism as the main ideological force of capitalist globalization, the philosophical and anthropological foundations of the modern world entered into a crisis. We can find in the thinking of Ludwig von Mises, Hayek’s mentor, some fundamental aspects of this new myth. The main difference between the modern-liberal development myth and the neoliberal myth of the free market that interests us here is the notion of universal rights, the promise of the development myth to universalize social-economic achievements. For Mises, the main mistake and illusion of those who criticize capitalism—including the World Council of Churches, which he explicitly cites—with the charge of social injustice is the idea “that ‘nature’ has bestowed upon every man certain rights. According to this doctrine nature is openhanded toward every child born” (von Mises, 2008, 81). For neoliberalism, there are no noncontractual rights for humans. Contrary to human rights defenders or religious groups

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who believe that all human beings were created by God with the right to life and liberty, neoliberals do not recognize social rights, only the rights that arise contractually in the free market. For people who are used to the notion of human rights and are shocked by governments or church leaders who are against the notion of human rights, it is worth remembering what Amartya Sen wrote: The sharp contrast between the widespread use of the idea of human rights and the intellectual scepticism about its conceptual soundness is not new. The American Declaration of Independence took it to be ‘self-evident’ that everyone had ‘certain inalienable rights’, while thirteen years later, in 1789, the French declaration of ‘the rights of man’ asserted that ‘men are born and remain free and equal in rights’. However, it did not take Jeremy Bentham long, in his Anarchical Fallacies written during 1791–2 and aimed against the French ‘rights of man’, to propose the total dismissal of all such claims. (Sen, 2009, 355–356)

From the perspective of neoliberal economic growth, the fulfilment of the rich’s desires for consumption and for the accumulation of wealth is not only just and deserved but also the only viable path in human history. In this sense, the cruelty of the exclusionary capitalist system toward the poor is a necessary sacrifice for everyone, even the rich. Among them, there are rich people who also have a heart and sensitivity to the eyes of the hungry, but they have or must have a “spiritual” force that keeps them firm in their mission to guide humanity to the fully free market. That is, social insensitivity as a virtue and a mission. For these groups, pro-poor social programs are temptations that lead society and the economy to failure. Thus, the poor and those who defend their social rights are seen as enemies of progress and history.

Conclusion In our time, there is an elective affinity between conservative Western Christianity, with patriarchal sexual moral values, and neoliberalism, with its myth of the free market. This affinity has enabled political alliances between sectors of conservative Christianity and neoliberals around the denial of human rights, especially the social rights of the poor and minorities. Political leaders, such as Bolsonaro (current president of Brazil) and D. Trump, and their allies, are expressions of an articulation between politics and religion that embody the “spirit of the world” of our time. Faced

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with the process of idolatry of the market, prophetic theologies have the task of confronting it, for what is at stake is the life and death of poor people. Dictatorial states directly kill their enemies, the market does not. The “free” market does not let the poor and excluded live. With globalized neoliberalism, the poor are not exploited but excluded because they are good for little else. Their lives and deaths are invisible, and when they appear, they are seen as enemies, criminals, or sinners. Faced with this reality of inversion that denies the human dignity of all people, we need to recover or strengthen the prophetic character of Christian theologies, especially that of Liberation Theology, which reveals the idolatrous theological character of the current capitalist system. In that regard, Hugo Assmann and Franz Hinkelammert wrote about “the ways in which economic rationality ‘hijacked’ and functionalized essential aspects of Christianity: ‘economic religion’ unleashed a massive process of idolatry, which finds its most evident expression in the supposed self-­ regulation of market mechanisms. This economic idolatry feeds off a sacrificial ideology that implies the constant sacrifice of human lives” (Assmann & Hinkelammert, 1989, 7). Sacrifices of human lives, idolatry, and faith in a God of Life, a God who makes an option for the life of all people and so also of the poor, are fundamental theological issues for our time. For the Christian Western world, there is no doubt that Jesus is the son of God or, at the very least, that he is a great prophet. The question asked by Jesus, what do people say about me? (Mk 8: 27), can and ought to be updated in our time: are the poor recognized as human beings with social rights? The central theological question of our time is not whether Jesus is the son of God or a great prophet but whether faith in Jesus leads us to see the dignity and social rights of the poor today. This question is kind of strange, but we live in strange times. Translated by Alexander Jordan Holmes-Brown

References Assmann, H., & Hinkelammert, F. (1989). An idolatria do mercado: ensaio sobre economia e teologia. Vozes. Bauman, Z. (1997). Postmodernity and its discontents. New York University Press. Betim, F. (2020, November 10). Padre Julio Lancellotti: “Não se humaniza a vida numa sociedade como a nossa sem conflito”. El País, September 20, 2020. Retrieved from https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2020-­09-­20/padre-­julio-­ lancellotti-­n ao-­s e-­h umaniza-­a -­v ida-­n uma-­s ociedade-­c omo-­a -­n ossa-­s em-­ conflito.html

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Blanchard, O., & Rodrik, D. (Eds.). (2021). Combating inequality: Rethinking government’s role. MIT Press. (epub). Furtado, C. (2020). The myth of economic development (Jordan B. Jones, Trans.). Polity Press. Galbraith, J. K. (1992). The culture of contentment. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Hayek, F. (2011). The constitution of liberty (The Definitive Edition. The collected works of F. A. Hayek, vol. XVII.). University of Chicago Press. Lagarde, C. (2014, May, 27). Economic inclusion and financial integrity—An address to the Conference on Inclusive Capitalism. Retrieved from https://www. imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sp052714 Míguez-Bonino, J. (2006). Marxist critical tools: Are they helpful in breaking the stranglehold of idealist hermeneutics? In R. S. Sugirthharajah (Ed.), Voices from the margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World. Orbis Books. Kindle Edition. Sen, A. (2009). The idea of justice. The Belknap Press. Thatcher, M. (1981, May 1). Interview for Sunday Times. Retrieved from http:// www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104475 von Mises, L. (2008). The anti-capitalist mentality. Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Liberation Theology and Its Fruits: Some Bibliographical Milestones Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer

The historical roots of Liberation Theology (LT) are to be found not only after Vatican II (Bingemer, 2016). Those roots are in the prophetic tradition of evangelists and missionaries from the earliest colonial days in Latin America—churchmen who questioned the type of presence adopted by the church and the way indigenous peoples, blacks, mestizos, and the poor rural and urban masses were treated. Those are the predecessors of Liberation Theology. The names of Bartolomé de Las Casas, Antonio de Montesinos, Antonio Vieira, Frei Caneca, Antonio Vieira, and others can stand for a whole host of religious personalities who have graced every century of the short history of our continent. They are the source of the type of social and ecclesial understanding that emerged in the years after the Council—years 1970 and 1980—and that seems to reemerge today with new force and vigor (Boff & Boff, 2015).

M. C. L. Bingemer (*) Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_4

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The first theological reflections that were to lead to LT had their origins in a context of dialog between a church and a society in ferment, between Christian faith and the longings for transformation and liberation arising from the people. The Second Vatican Council produced a theological atmosphere characterized by great freedom and creativity. This gave Latin American theologians the courage to think for themselves about pastoral problems affecting their countries. It was a movement to make the whole church go “from projection to source” (Vaz, 1968). This process could be seen at work among both Catholic and Protestant thinkers, with the group Church and Society in Latin America (ISAL) taking a prominent part. There were frequent meetings between Catholic theologians (Gustavo Gutiérrez, Segundo Galilea, Juan Luis Segundo, Lucio Gera, and others) and Protestant Emilio Castro, Julio de Santa Ana, Rubem Alves, José Míguez Bonino, leading to intensified reflection on the relationship between faith and poverty, the gospel and social justice, and the like. In Brazil, between 1959 and 1964, the Catholic left produced a series of basic texts on the need for a Christian ideal of history, linked to popular action, with a methodology that foreshadowed that of LT; they urged personal engagement in the world, backed up by studies of social and liberal sciences and illustrated by the universal principles of Christianity. At a meeting of Latin American theologians held in Petropolis (Rio de Janeiro) in March 1964, Gustavo Gutiérrez described theology as critical reflection on praxis. This line of thought was further developed at meetings in Havana, Bogotá, and Cuernavaca in June and July 1965. Many other meetings were held as part of the preparatory work for the Medellin conference of 1968; these meetings acted as laboratories for a theology worked out based on pastoral concerns and committed Christian action. Lectures given by Gustavo Gutiérrez in Montreal in 1967 and at Chimbote in Peru on the poverty of the Third World and the challenge it posed to the development of a pastoral strategy of liberation were a further powerful impetus toward a theology of liberation. Its outlines were first put forward at the theological congress at Cartigny, Switzerland, in 1969: “Toward a Theology of Liberation.” The first Catholic congresses devoted to LT were held in Bogota in March 1970 and July 1971. On the Protestant side, ISAL organized something similar in Buenos Aires the same years. Finally, in December 1971, Gustavo Gutiérrez published his seminal work, Teología de la liberación (Gutiérrez, 1971). In May, Hugo Assmann conducted a symposium, “Oppression-Liberation: The Challenge to

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Christians,” in Montevideo, and Leonardo Boff published a series of articles under the title Jesus Cristo Libertador, which afterwards were grouped in the book of the same name (Boff, 1973). The door was opened for the development of a theology from the periphery dealing with the concerns of this periphery, concerns that presented and still present an immense challenge to the evangelizing mission of the Church (Boff & Boff, 2015). The desire and the struggle for putting together faith and justice have been at the heart of this continent since the colonizers arrived. However, it is true that in the quick and sometimes dramatic transformations of the Latin American continent, so well illustrated by the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the same as the deep changes in the church during the twentieth century and by John XXIII’s pontificate, there is a fertile soil for the appearance of LT. To take the whole of reality as sign of the times and call of God in history; to put theological reflection at the intersection of faith with economy, politics, social sciences; to read reality from the point of view of the poor and the victims, the excluded, to whom the God of life reveals Himself/Herself in a privileged way; to embrace their cause and their dreams; to strive for the changing of this unjust reality as essential part of the following of Jesus Christ—those are some elements that configure what we commonly call LT (Beozzo, 2014).

The Sources of the Gospel in América: A Colonial Project Doing theology in América—and very especially in the south of America— has been from the beginning to do a theology not only as a reflection upon revelation and faith in an abstract sense, disconnected from the context where the Word of God is heard and the response of the believer happens, but also as a reflection upon revelation and faith moving forward through history inseparably from social context, political issues, and practice. Using the word Latin American theology likes very much: doing theology from the “reality” (realidad) (Ellacuria, 1975). That is where our reflection here wants to point out. The question of injustices and justice was from the beginning inseparable from the announcement of the Gospel and the practice of Christian faith in Latin America and was courageously raised during the colonization period by ecclesial voices, as we mentioned before. Dominican Fray Antonio de Montesinos, in his preaching at the Island of Hispaniola

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(Dominican Republic) in an Advent sermon in 1511, presented himself as the voice crying out in the desert, and this desert was the conscience of his listeners. That is how he plead with the colonizers: “Those are not men? Don’t they have rational souls? Aren’t you obliged to love them as yourselves? Don’t you understand that? Don’t you feel that?” (Montesinos, 2015). It is not surprising that liberation theologians and historians, writing five centuries after that, seeing oppression and injustice in the present, have turned their eyes to this past and drawn inspiration from figures such as Montesinos (Dominican Republic), Bartolome de las Casas (Chiapas, Mexico), Antonio Valdivieso (Nicaragua), Diego de Medellin (Chile), and so many others. Together with this connection of evangelization and injustice, there was another perverse approach: the conception of European culture as the only existing in the world and the consideration of native cultures as inferior or unimportant. This can be explained by the evolution of Christianity not only as faith and religion but also as a civilizatory matrix. Here, history also shows positive efforts from the church to do a different synthesis. One of the most obvious examples is the famous Guarani Republic, where the Jesuits not only passed on the Gospel and Christian culture to the indigenous people but also affirmed all the native customs in the lives of those tribes, which seemed to them compatible with human dignity and with a Christian lifestyle. We can think first and foremost of the native languages that the Jesuits themselves studied and used as means of catechesis, of native arts, and of native community structures. Nevertheless, this project endured only if it could avoid interference by Spanish or Portuguese colonizers. It is very possible that had the Jesuits not been forced to leave these areas, their experience might have led to a fruitful engagement with languages and culture more generally. It would have led to a constructive dialog with the scientific and technological developments of modern civilization (Neves, 1978; Lugon, 1980). However, this did not happen. This project, which pointed toward the possibility of globalization that respects cultural particularity, was brutally stopped. The recently discovered “new world” suffered from an evangelization process that was not always coherent with the sources of Christian faith. At the beginning of Christianity, the process of evangelization was rooted in culture and sought to preach the Good News from within the different cultures into which it had penetrated. However, the close relationship between the Christian faith and the culture, which developed in Europe

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throughout the Middle Ages—and soon was considered “the” culture that shaped the whole West of the world—led the church to lose sight of the fundamental link between the gospel and cultural diversity. Instead, it tended to make a straightforward identification between Christianity and Western Christendom. It was in this historically conditioned form that the Christian faith was carried by European populations as they spread geographically and embarked on the colonial enterprise from the sixteenth century onward. Thus, conversion to Christianity came to be identified with the adoption of the invading culture and a corresponding rejection of the local native and endogenous values (Bingemer; Neutzling; Macdowell, 2007). Ibero-American colonization—either Spanish or Portuguese—has left a strong legacy to all the peoples of Latin America. Therefore, we think of Latin America as one cultural, geopolitical, and economic reality in a real, and not just an ideological, sense. However, another aspect of this legacy is a Eurocentric mindset that tends to blind Latin Americans to the links connecting them, whether they speak Portuguese or Spanish. This harmful inheritance from colonialism often weakens our ability on the continent to set proper priorities, to sort out our own problems and to understand how our self-understanding is now anachronistic, given the strategic role that Latin America in fact plays in the global system (Filomeno, 2014). In the postcolonial period that we are living through for more than five centuries up to now in Latin America, we need to be aware that globalization in its present form, sponsored as it is by financial capitalism and by the interests of a small minority of investors, is having a negative effect on the continent. It is threatening cultural identity, and it is undermining the possibility of justice and respect for human rights into the future (Warren, 2010). The challenge consists of reconciling values and rights of a universal scope with new rights arising from the sheer difference of the colonized peoples and from their previous subordination. How are we to answer the challenges arising from the social sciences in Latin America to the effect that we must universalize values and particularize universal values? Alternatively, we must find a plurality of universalisms and create networks between them. How can we put forward a “pluriversal universe” or “a sense of the universal concrete” enough to include all the epistemic particularities inherent in a transmodern and postcolonial distribution of social power? (Grosfoguel, 2008; Mignolo, 2009).

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By recalling the history of the church in Latin America between 1960 and 1990—years of great development of LT—we may find some indications that will help us in this important political, intellectual, and mostly theological task. For that purpose, we mention here some writings that are milestones that guide our understanding of the continent’s church process and identity.

A Theology of Liberation: Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, Clodovis Boff The bibliographical production of LT was abundant and powerful. Soon, it left only the Spanish or Portuguese typical idioms of the continent to be translated into many Western languages, such as Italian, German, and English. Among the vast quantity of books and articles, some merit should be highlighted, as they are true milestones in the history of LT. 1. Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation. History, Politics and Salvation, NY, Orbis. The first edition in Spanish was published in 1971 and the first English edition in 1973. This book intends to bring a new subject for Christian theology: the poor and oppressed who must be active in building his own project and destiny. For that, LT proposes a reflection and a discourse centered not on abstract concepts but on praxis. This praxis includes the political level. It is not only about personal conversion but also about the political transformation of an unjust reality. Practicing justice is the operative consequence of doing theology. If all human praxis are theologically connected to divine praxis, social and political praxis also obey this rule. As with every human praxis that obeys the criteria of ethics and justice, political praxis can be and effectively is often a mystery of going out of oneself. It is a movement that can be defined and understood as an ecstasy when the self goes toward the other and understands oneself through him or her. Every ecstasy corresponds to a self-surrender, a going out and leaving behind the own interests in favor of the interests of the other, the person and the community, the collectivity. That is why the concrete works deriving from these “ethical and political ecstasies” are demonstrative of their greater authenticity.

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With his book, the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez dares to ask Christians and his own church: how can we believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and continue to treat social inequalities in a lukewarm way, putting apart faith and justice? With this book, Gutierrez demonstrates, making his theology dialog with social sciences such as sociology, political theology, and economics, that the church and consequently Christian theology cannot separate itself from economic and political realities. Accordingly, practical elements are central and inescapable. Theology cannot understand itself as simply a theory. It must be directed to praxis and must also be fed and inspired by praxis. The example is Jesus himself, who showed his love for the poor in practical ways—healing the sick, feeding the hungry, liberating the oppressed. His example shows that economic, political, social, and spiritual development are all deeply connected. In his book, Gutiérrez shows and concludes that the church must become politically active if it wants to struggle against and confront poverty and oppression across the world. His reflection shows that politics, history, and salvation are intimately connected, as the lives of the poor and oppressed directly reflect the divine life of God. In addition, and in a contrary direction to many suspicions and critiques it received, the interconnection between mysticism and ethics, mysticism and politics, and mysticism and transformative action is possible and necessary. There are no irreconcilable polarities between one and another, and both spirituality and political praxis can happen together if they find their correct point of intersection. Social and political praxis inspired by universal ethics can even be space and nourishment to an authentic mystical experience. The theme of the mysticism of action, of spirituality closely linked to a transforming commitment, which affects the polis and therefore is closely related to the topic of mysticism and politics, is present from the beginning in the theology that emerged and grew in Latin America, with this classic and pioneering book by Gustavo Gutiérrez in the early 1970s. However, before that, it is already present in the actions, thoughts, and words of many men and women, clergy and laity, Catholics or Protestants, to whom the experience of the Spirit of God awakened to the ineluctable need not to separate mysticism from ethics, the experience of God from the practice of justice. Gustavo Gutierrez’s book, therefore, puts the basis of a new school of theology, resting over the primacy of praxis and a deep encounter with the face of the Lord in the face of the poor.

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2. Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator: a Critical Christology for our time, NY, Orbis, 1978, being the original version, in Portuguese, published in Brazil in 1973. In this book, the author tries to rethink the person of Jesus Christ from the context of today’s world and society and mostly from the south of the world where he is situated. From within that context, he asks: Who is Jesus Christ for us today? By what names do we call him? Just as the early Christians developed different names for Jesus, so too must we discover the meaning of Jesus for our days. The book Jesus Christ Liberator is his ex-­ Franciscan friar, today well known and respected all over the world as a distinguished thinker—significant contribution to contemporary Christology. Boff writes his Christology, departing from what is thought out and vitally tested in Latin America. Because of that, the author’s proposal shows it must have characteristics of its own. In this work, we can perceive the closeness to the Latin American context and challenges throughout the whole book, despite using much foreign literature. This ought not deviate attention from what Boff’s real goal is. For him, it is with perspectives that are Latin American, taken from the Latin American context, that it is necessary to reread not only the texts of the New Testament but also the most recent commentaries written in Europe. Boff will make in this book a portrait of Jesus Christ very human and trying to be very close to history. However, not with a static reading of history. Instead, history is seen with its conflicts and difficulties, the same that Jesus of Nazareth had to face. Boff’s Jesus does not run away from the political implications of faith. His “political” portrayal of Jesus Christ is carried out via a complex hermeneutic reevaluation of what and how Jesus Christ “signifies.” He situates Jesus Christ in special reference to the forms of repression alive in certain Latin American contexts. In his hermeneutical effort, Boff revisits and critically appropriates some interpretations of famous authors about Christology and Bible exegesis. For instance, Rudolf Bultmann’s concept of “demythologization.” However, mostly, Boff’s Christological hermeneutics tries to dig on today questions about Jesus Christ and face the answers that point out in the era of criticism, what means: our era. Therefore, he brings questions like, for instance: how do you know that Jesus existed? The intention is not to make a biography of Jesus or to discuss questions such as the

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primacy of the Christ of faith over the historical Jesus or of Biblical history over chronological history of interpretation over facts. He also brings an anticipation of a question that is today the most important about Christology: the return to the historical Jesus. The difference between Jesusology and Christology is the continuity between the Jesus of History and the Christ of glory. For that, he makes a deep and serious review of the many Christological positions available to theological studies Trying to build a Christology for the Latin American context, the author highlights the primacy of the anthropological element over the ecclesiastical, of the utopian element over the factual one, of the critical over the dogmatic: briefly, of the orthopraxis over the orthodoxy. Within a reflection that wants to seize the whole figure of Jesus Christ, Boff clearly privileges his humanity as an object of study of theology. It is not important to speak about Jesus Christ as a glorious Messiah of God without passing by the words and gestures of the historical carpenter and prophet of Nazareth from Galilee. Facing that human Jesus, the author asks what he truly wanted. Which was his project, his utopia, his deep desire. Then, he unfolds the relationship of Jesus with this world created by God’s Father. Jesus, according to Boff, is not intending to preach on heaven nor to bring people to leave out the earth to elevate to a pure spiritual level. The Kingdom of God, his project, is not a territory but a new order, material order and not merely spiritual. In doing so, he truly encountered all human deepest longings and expectations. To Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ is liberator of human condition and the project of his kingdom brings a revolution of oppressed human conscience and of the human world. He depicts Jesus as a person of extraordinarily good sense, fertile imagination, and original and creative phantasy. He lives all the authentic feelings and experiences a human being lives and feels anger, joy, goodness, toughness, friendship, sorrow, joy, and temptation. Boff’s Christology intends to be a Christology from the periphery of the world, showing the relevance of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God to liberate the whole human being and all human beings. For that, concludes the author, the appeal is not to study Jesus or to reflect on him but to follow Jesus and practice his praxis to anticipate absolute liberation into history. In addition, to follow him implies in paying the price as he did with his death, expecting in his resurrection. The intention of writing a

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Liberation Christology, as Leonardo Boff says, is of central relevance for worldwide Christological faith. To date, this book, which gives a new view of Jesus Christ inserted in the Latin American context, is a reference for those who dare to think of the central mystery of Christian faith in a perspective according to contemporary challenges. 3. Clodovis Boff, Theology and Praxis: Epistemological Foundations, NY, Orbis, 1987. The Portuguese original edition was published in Brazil by Petropolis, Vozes, 1977. Clodovis Boff is well known as the younger brother and equally brilliant theologian of Leonardo Boff. They are both grandchildren of Italian immigrants who arrived in southern Brazil and were established in Concordia. Clodovis performed studies of theology in Brazil and received a doctorate in Leuven, Belgium. The book we are reviewing here is his doctoral thesis, presented in Leuven in 1976, which was published and knew a great success, as it finally had a rigorous systematization of the method of LT. In the latest 1970s, it was more than time for LT to offer a systematized view of its method and its specific way of doing theology. That is what Clodovis’ book offered Church and Society. It is undoubtedly the major book on the methodology of LT (Boff, 2009). Clodovis Boff systematized the method put in practice by Action Catholique, a lay movement in France, known by its three steps: to see, to judge, to act in a rigorous and coherent way, using categories that are more academic: 1. Socioanalytical mediation: analyzing reality with the instruments of the social sciences (To see) 2. Hermeneutical mediation: Bible (and Philosophy) (To judge) 3. Theological product. Theology of politics (To act) It is very impressive that the same Clodovis Boff, in 2008, happened to write an article where he criticizes in a hard and sharp way the same LT of which he was one of the strongest apologists. He accuses LT of making the poor the center of Theology, which could mean putting them in the place of God Himself. He goes on to reaffirm that the only principle of Theology is Christ the Lord and that the poor are something derived and not substantive in Theology (Boff, 2007a, b).

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Many other Latin American theologians, including Clodovis’s brother Leonardo Boff, answered his statements and criticized them strongly (Boff, 2008; Susin & Hammes, 2008; Aquino, 2008). Clodovis then replied to them making an autocritique of having fallen into the temptation of magnifying and idealizing the poor (Boff, 2007a, b). He reaffirms then, with strength and undoubtedly, that a legitimate LT has to have a clear conscience of being a partial theology, keeping far from the pretension to be a total theology, coextensive to the whole Christian mystery. LT—says Clodovis—has a particular perspective within the major perspective of faith. He invokes Karl Rahner, who, writing in favor of LT, and just before his death, in 1984, wrote: “LT is conscious of its limited meaning within the whole of catholic theology… This theology, then—continues Clodovis Boff—needs to be conscious of not being a totally new theology, disrupting with the substance of the great theological tradition, but understanding itself in continuity with this same tradition, as a ‘new step’, the way John Paul II states in the instruction Libertatis Conscientia” (Bingemer, 2016).

Jon Sobrino and the Poor as “Victims” The last book we would like to bring to this annotated bibliography on LT is that of Jon Sobrino, a Spanish (Basque) theologian who lived his life as a Jesuit in El Salvador in Central America. He wrote many works on Christology (Sobrino, 1988, 1987, 1978, 1984) and worked with Ignacio Ellacuria, another Jesuit who was a bright philosopher and disciple of Xavier Zubiri. Both worked together with the archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who was murdered in 1980, writing together articles and essays or homilies for the archbishop. Sobrino and Ellacuria also organized a very important work, a compendium called Mysterium Liberationis. Conceptos fundamentales de la Teologia de la Liberación (Sobrino, 1990). It is a posthumous publication, as on 16 November 1989, the whole Jesuit community to which he belonged at the Catholic University of El Salvador (UCA) was murdered by the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit of the Salvadoran Army. Jon Sobrino was away from El Salvador and narrowly escaped the massacre. The Jesuits were targeted for their outspoken work to bring a resolution to the brutal Civil War in the country that left approximately 75,000 men, women, and children dead, mostly civilians. The book we want to mention here is born from this

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experience, as was all the action of Sobrino after this event, mostly recalling and preserving the martyrdom of his brothers’ memory. Sobrino’s book we refer to here is Christ the Liberator: A View from the Victims, NY, Orbis, 2001 (Sobrino, 1999). In his previous books on Christology (Sobrino, 1985, 1991), Sobrino examines the identity of Jesus in relation to his message, his interlocutors, and the conflict that led to his death. In this volume, he takes up the Resurrection of Christ, the Christology of the New Testament, and finally the Christological formulae of the early church councils. Throughout Christ the Liberator: A View from the Victims, Sobrino writes from the reality of faith, as set in motion by the event of Jesus Christ, and from the situation of the victims—the “Crucified People” of history—particularly the poor of El Salvador, with whom he works. Sobrino’s Christology takes its place among the most significant contributions of Latin America to the church and theology today, as his theology identifies the poor with the “victim,” proclaiming the necessity of a political holiness that would assume the risks of an incarnation in the life of the poor to fight for their liberation (Sobrino, 1978, 1987, 1984). Sobrino’s concept of victim—although he refers it explicitly to the poor—will open Latin American theology to think and investigate theologically other victims and other anthropological poverties, issued from the questions of gender, race, ethnicity, religious intolerance, and so on. His book is effectively a turning point for Latin American Theology today and to its future.

Conclusion: Searching for a Political Holiness Following the life and memory of Oscar Romero closely, Jon Sobrino argues, “Political holiness is historically necessary today for the poor to receive the good news and for history to move toward the coming of God’s kingdom” (Sobrino, 1988). It is necessary as well for the church to return to the Gospel and to show the world a more credible face, possible only by means of a radical and effective love of the poor (Sobrino, 1988). For the option for the poor is not only directed toward a personal level (conversion, perfection of Christian life) but also to political and structural goals concerning society and church. Pope Francis puts at the core of the teachings of his pontificate the great importance for the church to be a church poor and of the poor; to take special care of the poor of all sorts. This is the track that Latin

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American theology has walked and followed for more than five decades following Vatican II. The Pope also underlines that politics is the highest form of charity (FT 180/POPE FRANCIS, 2020). The beautiful theological spring the continent is living at this exact moment with this pontificate wouldn’t be possible if LT hadn’t opened the paths to build a new way of doing theology and pastoral action.

References Aquino, F. J. (2008). Clodovis Boff e o método da TdL. Uma aproximação crítica. Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira, 68(271), 597–613. Beozzo, J. O. (2014). O êxito das telogias da libertação e as teologias americanas contemporâneas. SP, mimeo. Bingemer, M. C. (2016). Latin American theology: Roots and branches. Orbis. Boff, C. (2007a). Teologia da Libertação e volta do fundamento. Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira, 67, 1001–1022. Boff, C. (2007b). Volta ao fundamento: Réplica. Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira, 68(272), 892–927. Boff, C. (2009). Theology and praxis. Epistemological foundations. Oregon, Wipf and Stock. Boff, L. (1973). Jesus Cristo libertador. Petrópolis, Vozes. Boff, L. (2008). Pelos pobres e contra a estreiteza do método. Notícias do Dia – IHU On-Line: 27/05/2008. Boff, L., & Boff, C. (2015). A concise history of LT. http://www.landreform.org/ boff2.html. Accessed 5 June 2015. Ellacuria, I. (1975). Liberación y cautiverio: Debates en torno al metodo de la teologia en America Latina. In E. Ruiz Maldonado (Ed.), Mexico, encuentro latinoamericano de teologia (p. 626). Filomeno, F. A. (2014). De frente para a América Latina. http://outraspalavras. net/posts/de-­frente-­para-­a-­america-­latina/. Accessed 24 Sept 2014. Grosfoguel, R. (2008). Para descolonizar os estudos de economia política e os estudos pós-coloniais: transmodernidade, pensamento de fronteira e colonialidade global. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 80, 115–147. Gutiérrez, G. (1971). Teología de la liberación. CEP. Lugon, C. (1980). A república comunista cristã dos guaranis. Paz e Terra. Macdowell, J.  A. (2007). Os jesuítas e a globalização: uma alternativa? In M. C. L. Bingemer, S. J. Inácio Neutzling, & J. A. Mac Dowell (Eds.), A globalização e os jesuítas: origens, história e impactos. Edições Loyola. Mignolo, W. (2009). Local histories/global designs: Essays on the coloniality of power, subaltern knowledge and border thinking. Princeton University Press, citado por I. Shcerrer-Warren, art. Cit, p. 26. Montesinos, Antonio. “Are Not the Indians

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Men?” https://www2.stetson.edu/secure/history/hy10430/montesinos.html. Accessed 04 June 2015. Montesinos, A. (2015). “Are Not the Indians Men?” https://www2.stetson.edu/ secure/history/hy10430/montesinos.html. Accessed 04 June 2015. Neves, L. F. B. (1978). Os soldados de Cristo na terra dos papagaios colonialismo e regressão cultural. Forense Universitária. Pope Francis. (2020). Fratelli Tutti: On fraternity and social friendship Fratelli Tutti. Encyclical Letter. Sobrino, J. (1978). Christology at the crossroads: A Latin American approach. Orbis Books. Sobrino, J. (1984). True Church and the poor. Orbis Books. Sobrino, J. (1987). Jesus in Latin America. Orbis Books. Sobrino, J. (1988). Spirituality of liberation: Toward political holiness (Robert R. Barr, Trans). Orbis Books. Sobrino, J. (1990). Mysterium Liberationis. Conceptos fundamentales de la Teologia de la Liberación Madrid. Trotta. Sobrino, J. (1991). Jesucristo liberador. Lectura histórico-teológica de Jesús de Nazaret. Trotta. Sobrino, J. (1999). La fe en Jesucristo: ensayo desde las víctimas. Trotta. Sobrino, J. (2001). Christ the liberator: A view from the victims (Paul Burns, Trans.). Orbis Books. Susin, L. C., & Hammes, E. (2008). A Teologia da Libertação e a questão de seus fundamentos: em debate com Clodovis Boff. Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira, 68(270), 277–299. Vaz, Henrique C. de Lima. (1968). Igreja Reflexo / Igreja Fonte. Cadernos Brasileiros [Rio de Janeiro], 46, 17–22. Warren, S. (2010). Movimentos sociais e pós-colonialismo na América Latina. Ciências Sociais Unisinos, 46(1).

Liberation Theology and Other Theologies in Latin America: Challenges for Today Ivone Gebara

Throughout Latin America, questions have been raised about Liberation Theology, especially from new theologians, as well as about the current pertinence of this theology. Where would be the heirs of this thought that launched so many challenges not only for traditional theological “doing” but also to so many groups mobilized in favor of the struggle for justice and rights in different countries? Why is it that today when we speak of Liberation Theology in Latin America, it is always the old names of old theologians that appear? Sometimes flanked by one or another younger name, but without great popular projection, they are still the ones who occupy the scene when the subject is Liberation Theology. Why do we continue to remember the icons of the past intermingled with the figure of the poor of our cities and countryside? What do we want to remember with them? What are we looking for?

I. Gebara (*) Instituto de Teologia do Recife, São Paulo, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_5

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The documentary film organized by Father José Oscar Beozzo in 2015 and published by Verbo Films From the Pact of the Catacombs to Francis brings us this post Vatican Council II as a reminder that the Church, in the person of some bishops, made the pact with the poor 50  years ago. However, where is the church today? Is Pope Francis the most important figure to represent it? Would he be the Liberation Theology representative even though he never claimed to belong to this group? Is he, today, the ecclesial officialdom of “liberation” manifested in some of its official political positions? Those who were paraded before our eyes in the precious video are almost all dead, and the few living witnesses are very old men… quite old men. It is a video and memory text of the history of the church! I was part of this whole movement. I participated in many national and international meetings. I read, studied, and taught theology along the lines of liberation. Together with others, we wrote the collection “Theology and Liberation”, a project that sought to rewrite theology starting from the poor and from that moment in Latin America and in the world. Today, like them, I feel at the same time challenged and perplexed as I become aware of the existence of so many paradoxical worlds within what we call “our world” and our theology. The violence of before seems to take on other modalities today with the most widespread banalization of human life and the life of the planet from a collectivized terrorism and many subtle forms of destruction. In the same way, there is a growing number of Christianisms1 in opposition to each other within what we call Christianity. In addition, the most serious thing is that our ethics, the Christian ethics, has also lost its strength and unfolds in many behaviors that are often contradictory to each other. The diversity and pluralism of which we spoke perhaps in theory or perhaps even believing that everyone would be converted to our truths seem to be actually happening among us, but not in the way we had anticipated. We are as if lost in a world where many roads open up to the desired “better world” but in the midst of a world violence never seen before. The whole world seems to be at war. In our cities and neighborhoods, we are at war, protecting ourselves against each other, building barriers, walls and 1  Christianisms: In Latin America there are a growing number of new Christian churches presenting themselves as inspired by the Bible. They develop different theologies as the theology of prosperity and others. So Christianity became a plural label for different religious and political approaches. There is a competition among them to have more and more members.

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alarms, cameras everywhere. We control the steps of our children against the children of the poor. We look with fear even at the children who stop us in the streets saying they are hungry. The poor fear the police, disease, and hunger that have returned in an astonishing way when a truce was imagined. In addition, we often fear the poor and the miserable, we who fight material poverty, maintained by the economic structures of power! We who fought the dictatorships of the right are now beset by the growth of other dictatorships, not one, but many, spreading in our countries and in the different church groups that organized in a militarized way, occupying large spaces in the media. From the order they preach, they attract thousands of insecure and dissatisfied people due to the many disorders and fears of the world. In addition, these dictatorships even come to inhabit our hearts, making us repeat the behaviors we criticize! The media bring into our homes the many Christianisms that have become a religion of entertainment, consolation, and individual miracle. Many of our sons and daughters are participating in these new cults and healings, sons and daughters of those who once spoke of the “Kingdom of Justice and Peace” proclaimed by the Gospel. With many other people we often seem like old wanderers without a path, we need to remember the times when we seemed to have the present in our hands and especially in our hearts and minds, the paths of the future liberation of Latin America. In addition, in this wandering, something is trying to be lived, convinced that the ethics of the Gospels can be reactivated in our world and present itself in ways to the appeals of the present moment. In this situation, I believe that Liberation Theology, with all its limits and greatness, was in fact a contextual theology—that is, it tried to answer the circumstantial questions of the moment, although these questions were also identified with the cast of the great and universal human questions. Today, the world context is different, and the Latin American context is different. In this new context with its local differences, the question of human dignity and, in particular, the dignity of the poor and marginalized continues to be even more relevant. Coated by and without denying the validity of the first, it is made explicit in many other ways and encompasses precise groups affected by the plague of injustice. It also demands new working methodologies and new tools for understanding a world that is at the same time complex, plural, and in great migratory movement. It is in this context that I sense the difficulty of

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Liberation Theology, born in the 1970s, to welcome in its core and in its formulations the new problems of our century and respond to them. I will try to reflect on some of them to briefly show some theoretical and practical difficulties that present themselves to the theology in question. This does not mean in any way that Liberation Theology has not had its value and continues to be part of an important historical moment in the world theological thought. However, today, something different is appearing on the horizon, something much more complicated and that I sense does not fit into the theoretical and cultural framework of twentieth century Liberation Theology. In addition, it does not seem to fit into the traditional forms in which Christianity was formed and spread, especially in European countries. Forms marked by colonialism with its well-known consequences on the cultures of the peoples. I point out four challenges as a way to illustrate my hypothesis and reflection on the current difficulties of Liberation Theology: . The confrontation with human sexuality 1 2. Confrontation with feminist anthropology 3. Confrontation with ecology 4. Confrontation with new politics and new ethics

The Confrontation with Human Sexuality It seems strange to start talking about sexuality when we are going to reflect on Liberation Theology. It was not the main theme of its reflections, although Enrique Dussel (1977) has worked on some important issues in light of liberation. I want to present sexuality as one of the greatest challenges of today that has not had and does not have space in the structure and epistemology of the thought of hegemonic Liberation Theology. Today, the question of sexuality breaks out with new forms of visibility and permeates all areas of knowledge because it permeates all human relations. Claims based on sexuality are daily in the culture, in the economy as in politics, law, and religions, especially in the popular classes. It is no longer an analysis based on binary sexuality—man/woman—but on the multiple variations that the experience of sexuality contains. These variations used to be obscured or simply considered abnormal behavior requiring tolerance and charity. Today, these sexualities impose themselves in

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their citizen right to exist, to come out of closets, to leave the confessionals, to uncover themselves and demand, even from theology, a radical epistemological and ethical revolution. This, without a doubt, is the traditional content of the theology that believed itself to be asexual and, at the same time, heterosexual by divine will. Our actions, feelings, and thoughts are confronted with a new phenomenology of human beings. From some theologies of sexuality, such as Marcella Althaus-Reid (2000), we become more acutely aware of the presence of sexuality in theology. A presence omnipresent although pretentiously absent in the most important texts, especially because of the polarization of some issues. It is enough for us to remember that God the Father, approached from a masculine sexuality, or as asexual, seen as “Pure Spirit”, becomes today a concept with multiple meanings. The different meanings of God are different meanings of the human being about himself and different meanings for theology, Christology, Mariology, ethics, and so on. In this line, the Bible becomes a reference to be interpreted and reinterpreted in light of the multiple challenges of our time. A text from our common tradition that supports social and personal attitudes. Therefore, the expression “Bible, Word of God” encounters a great deal of resistance today, especially in feminists, homosexuals, transsexuals, and ecologists, not to mention the whole postcolonial line of thought. Here, the argumentation that these social actors are not poor is not valid. There is today a tremendous mixture of classes in the midst of the different social actors embracing the same causes and living plural sexualities. In this way, the question of class analysis today is challenged to review its ways of understanding social relations since sexuality crosses social classes and reproblematizes them. In the same way, social issues that touch on racism are today reproblematized based on social classes and their relationship with sexuality. There is a world of unfolding brought to the surface by the different approaches to sexuality that make the fixist models of our theology anachronistic. These developments destabilize the “patriarchal” sexual foundations of theology and Liberation Theology, denouncing the production of an idealistic ideology of normalization of sexuality and behavior. They break heterosexual binary symmetry and allow bodies living different sexualities to speak of their pain and exclusion. They reveal the sexual and gendered entrails of established powers over others. Moreover, they question the very meaning of the word “theology” as well as the subjects and the places of its production.

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The Confrontation with Feminist Anthropology The feminist anthropologies developed in different parts of the world have tried to the old hierarchies present in the male philosophies that have shaped the theologies up to the present. The notions of relationality, interdependence, and blending have become critical concepts to the binary and hierarchical fixism2 of male anthropologies (Gebara, 2015). This fixism is also present in Liberation Theology, especially in the dogmatic conceptual orthodoxy of this theology. There have not been substantial anthropological changes that would propose another theological dogma, a dogma that is symbolically more inclusive. In other words, the dogmas of Christianity remain the same, and the authority of the Bible and, for Catholics, the Magisterium of the Church remain equally present and active in a centralizing way. There are no significant ruptures in relation to the contents and the model of Christianity that the fourth century bequeathed to us despite the many historical upheavals, protests, and ruptures that took place. We continue with the same Christian metaphysics, and from it, we deduce the ethical postures justified by an idea of good according to the divine will. We forget that this metaphysics, whose summit is “God the Father almighty creator of Heaven and Earth”, has a doctrinal aspect that is fixed and ends up valuing the principles that emanate from it more than the daily life of people. Statements such as the “Queer God”, God without definitions and predefinitions, various models of God, God as Infinite Mystery, Real as God, God as the Real, God as the Real, or silence about God never appealed much to Liberation Theology. This is because a more “floating and imprecise” God was not very helpful to a leftist understanding of society, the understanding that prevailed in Liberation Theology. The “leftist” God had plans for his people, had a catechism to be followed, and, above all, a more or less orthodox instrument of analysis of reality. This God found in the Bible was also found in relationships of justice. For this reason, it was stated that “God is found in the encounter with men, in the commitment to the historical development of the historical development of humanity” (Gutiérrez, 1971, 238). The strength of the 2  Fixism means that some philosophical and theological contents were fixed as something that we cannot change. For example, some dogmas that have less meaning in our time. We keep them as revelation of God but they are in fact a production of masculine thoughts.

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commitment to the poor and to the marginalized nourished the lives of thousands of people who found historical paths to express their faith. There was a kind of directed reading, and even a certain biblical. There was a kind of directed reading and even a certain “scientifically” explicit biblical concordism that prevented the manifestation of different experiences and expressions. To be a liberation theologian was to believe in a specific “model” of God. Liberation Theology begins its fall among the people at the same time that the leftist movements began to fall. It is enough to see how the popular organizations on the Latin American continent lost their strength. There was no concern to prepare for continuity. Perhaps there was too much faith in the spontaneity of the formation and continuity of the process, well oriented by its precursors. Today, there are some novelties in social movements, but it is still difficult to characterize them and to know where they are going. All these concerns and critiques were present in North American and Latin American feminism and feminist theologies of the 1980s and the following decades. However, were not taken seriously by liberation theologians who continued their mission of being also guardians of the patriarchal tradition and heralds of a new theology. They developed a “homo sociability”, a coexistence and theoretical complicity between them. In the same way, they continued to stress more the same difficulties of peasants, workers, and indigenous people, as if the male subjects were the historical subjects par excellence. There is no doubt that some clerics and religious people more recently have become concerned about feminism and have been willing to dialog. However, the problem in this attitude was/is the illusion and ambiguity in behavior of openness and acceptance to the sexually “different” on the part of some enlightened church authorities. In quite simple terms, these authorities were able, for example, to welcome the preaching of women in parishes, the presence of a transsexual distributing communion, or even suggesting the reading of a feminist text in the liturgy. However, they do not realize that their act of “fraternal integration” also hides a belief in the capacity of the patriarchal world to welcome differences without substantially modifying its structures of power, of thought, and its traditional structures of symbolic support. “Come to us” you who suffer the burden of rejection, that we will welcome you and show the world that the church

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welcomes the diversity of her sons and daughters. From then on, the excluded are apparently integrated into some spaces even though they know that the wider institutional space only tolerates them. The emotion of feeling welcomed in their differences is great; however, it does raise questions, since in the same space where they are now admitted, they were once rejected. There are no guarantees of real change if the foundations that sustain theology and religious institutions do not change. This is because nothing guarantees that, with the change of a priest or a pastor in a parish, the welcoming behavior will still subsist. The point is that in the hierarchical patriarchal world, the community revolves around the pastor or the priest. Therefore, he is the one who commands, welcomes, or rejects the novelties introduced. In reality, with very few exceptions, it is not the community that exercises its choices in a democratic way, following the ethics of the needs of the moment. It is the authority over the community that decides and sanctions the behaviors, and many often propose them. Therefore, wouldn’t another gesture be necessary? Would not it be important to take another path capable of revolving structures of thought and behavior? Saying this does not mean not to praise initiatives of this kind, but only to affirm that they are insufficient if they only revolve around welcoming us into the same “bosom of the Father”. Reorganizing the church, collectively taking on new meanings and not patching old clothes seem to be an evangelical direction, in spite of the many and recognized difficulties. Listen to each other more. Accept the collective need. Reflect, understand, and analyze together. My intuition may be madness, disorder, but it is a bet for the construction of another fraternity, another sorority, another community in which we are not integrated by hierarchies, but creators of our new meanings and of our symbology of significations. The world of youth and movements without historical ballast that multiply around us can be an inspiration for a conversation starter. In addition, above all, to think our organizations based on more democratic and plural structures of functioning. We are not unaware of human contradictions, of the affections capable of paralyzing us and want to eliminate the others that get in the way of the path that we believe to be the “liberation” of the people. However, there are also the affections that mobilize good news that led us to begin to act differently and to review in ourselves the reproduction of colonialist behavior that substitutes common responsibility.

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The Confrontation with Ecology and the New History of the Universe I think that the entrance of ecological science into Liberation Theology did not mean a radical change of paradigms and structures of thought. If in fact, there was a welcome by some theologians of ecological science of the new history of the universe and of evolutionary elements coming from astrophysics, this happened more as an addition to their theologies. This rich adherence did not accompany the critique of a colonialist and patriarchal view of the Bible and the tradition of Christian dogmas. The ecological question was for many an addendum, an inclusion, an incorporation in the libertarian discourse, and perhaps even encouragement in view of some social practices. I believe that these processes are very slow, especially for the generation that has lived with focus limited to the centrality of the relations between humans with their leftist analytical categories. In these processes, the Bible and even the tradition of some Fathers of the church could enter into these processes, but not for ecological issues. Ecology was almost a detour from a concentration on the human, on the simply human as it was said. Speak of nonhuman beings, of the common destiny of other life forms, of the interdependence among all life forms was to deny the anthropological privilege of theology. For this reason, for many, ecology meant a detour from the great questions of liberation. Without realizing it, perhaps, they still place the human being at the center of the universe or at the center of history and imagine that to speak of the death of forests, rivers, seas, fish, and other animals is a kind of romanticism without real political solutions. They cannot link the cause of agrarian reform with the destruction of forests and the homes of many native peoples, animals, and thousands of species of plants and insects. Their social focus is of an often asphyxiating orthodoxy. They reveal the presence of a patriarchal and masculine hierarchy in dealing with life. Interdependence for them is just a class struggle phenomenon and cannot admit the relationality and complexity between the different aspects of life in a clear and everyday way. Linking the social problems of many with local biosystems and ethnic identities seemed and still seems to many an aberration. This is not a specific religious problem, although Christianity in its anthropocentric and androcentric structure has contributed to accentuating partial and limiting behaviors. This is where the new history of the universe comes in, a

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common history for all humanity or a new common myth, which in a certain sense includes all traditions in an interdependent evolutionary process. In other words, to consider the different religious traditions as contextual and arising from the needs proper to the evolution of peoples and the Earth at different moments in its historical process seems to be an important step for today (Berry, 1988). The new history of the universe combines data from science and from the common life of peoples and is able to show how the evolution of the materiality of life accompanies what we can call the evolution of human spirituality. Our evolution is, therefore, both physical and spiritual and is in a continuous process of transformation. To perceive this is not an easy task. I sense that we have not yet acquired in theology the ability to intimately connect the evolution of the earth with our own evolution. It is enough to see where the soil of the planet today is most assaulted and killed. Without a doubt, it is in the regions where “capital” has made the land its main object of profit without thinking about preserving the soil and its inhabitants. The Earth/soil in ecological theological perspective is the first mediation, the nourishing and vital mediation for not God the Father Almighty, image and likeness of the patriarchal and hierarchical powers of this world. It is from this very Earth/earth that we not only live but also create cultures, knowledge, beliefs, and religions from generation to generation. This new focus causes turbulence for theologies and even for Liberation Theologies that see their theoretical tools of analysis shaken by considerations that may deviate from what has been recognized as the method of Liberation Theology. The traditional aspiration affirmed by theologians for social, political, and economic liberation, especially of impoverished countries, had difficulties in accepting other contributions that equally sought the affirmation of a more dignified human life for all. Today, despite our increased awareness of these processes, I don’t think we have advanced very far. Ecology has become almost a separate science, and although there are many movements in favor of the life of the planet in its different expressions, as well as important texts such as that of Pope Francis (2015) and of the World Council of Churches, the problem persists. In other words, the same dogmatic and metaphysical theology that wants to incorporate or introduce in its bosom the ecological challenges of the contemporary world. There is no awareness of the inadequate affirmations of Theology before the actuality of world problems. Without a

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doubt, the need for changes in the thinking and acting of theology is a long road that has already begun to be traveled, but it has encountered many obstacles and hindrances from different groups.

Confronting New Politics and New Ethics Here, the problem of the churches, and in a special way the Roman Catholic Church, faces great complexity in the face of the demands of including groups that are increasingly plural. I am convinced of the limits of my reflection. I see, I intuit, I try to understand what seems important to me, but it is undoubtedly difficult to deal with so many arguments, opinions, positions, diversified subjects seeking rights, and so many theories in conflict. Moreover, it is complex to deal with the mixture of powers that mark people and particularly of the poor to whom Liberation Theology wanted to be oriented. As Vladimir Safatle writes, “There is no power that does not create a ‘psychic life’ through life through the marks it leaves on the bodies” (Safatle, 2015, 194). What marks do the new powers of liberalism, of the new churches, of conservative politics, have imprinted on our multiple bodies with multiple desires? Finding new ways out of millenary repetitive habits and new impositions of the market is an adventure with no certainty of positive advances. It calls my attention that the churches, even those centered on “liberation”, still maintain a system of government of very little popular representation, or more precisely, of very little listening to the diversity of its members in view of a real participation. In general, a few people are chosen who will confirm the direction of the ideology of the church and who will not create major problems for the decision of the highest religious authority. The behavior of the faithful who attend the churches also amazes me. Seeing the ears fixed on the voice of the priests/pastors, the ears seemingly open to the readings and homilies, the repetition of the same gestures reveals the weight of a tradition that has become for the majority its own naturalized religious body. I feel that this people of listeners are often far from what happens in the churches and in the wider world. They are present perhaps in a precise place and wrapped in a feeling of seeking help for their many ills. They are oblivious to what happens in the “sacred” environment and behave mechanically through the slogans: “Sit down, stand up, listen, do, sing, praise, applaud”. Rituals, perhaps even beautiful, but

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distant from the daily life that inhabits those present. Daily life is another reality, as is the Christian religion as well. In it survive sayings, songs, pieces of Bible stories, prayers considered strong, novenas prayers, and various rituals. All far removed from the official theological elaborations! The community in most cases is an agglomeration of individuals with no power of decision making in the governing structures of the churches and even less in the international centers of religious power. Most do not think about what they hear or repeat. They just repeat or consent. They seem to obey, although most of the time. They transgress, lie, deceive despite appearances to the contrary. What feelings or affections run through their experience that make them silent and repetitive before the religious institution? What behaviors have been naturalized to the point that they fear any challenge to the authority that gives them access to the right to approach the “sacred”? As many philosophers (Safatle, 2015) have said, “fear” is the most important affection in “social life”, and I also believe that “fear” is the most important affection of religion. We only have to remember how the Greeks, Romans, and other peoples created their gods out of different fears and even created the god Phobos, the deity of fear! Christianity does not bring other alternative affections. It was also built as a religion based on the search and the fear of God, although it affirms the absolute need and love of God. Fear of sin, fear of death, and even fear of the afterlife. We all know something of these fears from our childhood! Liberation Theology for years proposed the social struggle for justice as the way to exorcise our fears of hunger, homelessness, disease, and lack of social and political rights. It has given us a God who “hears the cries of his people” and wants to establish justice. However, justice happens in the midst of injustice, hope in the midst of fear and doubt. The risks of death are inevitable, and the risk of not “entering to the promised land” or “heaven” is a known corollary. Therefore, we cannot escape from these affections seem to be constitutive of our humanity, and for this very reason, they should be reflected upon with more acuity. Today, social insecurity seems greater, and the libertarian discourses of yesteryear seem increasingly ineffective. For this reason, many decide that it is better to lock ourselves up in the securities of the past, in Latin, in the old theological certainties, in priestly robes, the Bible, the specific identity of our church, the authority of one man over the authority of the community in detriment of the authority of the community. Churches and

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theologies follow the different dance of the different societies. They follow, although they do not explicitly recognize it, the conservative politics of the present world. They make “liberation” a discourse and a practice of the past where “to give one’s life for freedom and justice” was a sign of fidelity to God and to his Christ. Could the theologies and the faithfulness of the churches propose something new? I dare say yes, to the extent that they welcome the positive dimension of many things that today shake them just as they shake theological and libertarian thinking. In other words, to welcome the different world that is unfolding before our eyes and our bodies. To realize how dependent we truly are on each other and how vulnerable we are. To recognize from deep within ourselves this condition perhaps would help us to understand the responses that different groups give to their common experience, and at the same time full of small differences, of their “exposure” to life. Perhaps we should not care too much about our identity, about the “hard core” of traditional dogma and enable each other to learn how to think and to lead ourselves. It cannot direct us to the point of exempting us from responsibility for our lives and the lives of others. It cannot direct us to the point of absolving us from responsibility for our lives and the lives of those who are close to us. Its primary function is to open spaces for conversations about the precarious life we live as well as spaces for the construction of brief answers, provisional answers, and renewable answers. The astonishment and insecurity about possible novelties and initiatives can be creative of new solutions, which are also provisional. Finally, living in the awareness of the provisional when all institutions want to believe in and encourage the definitive. The space of the churches and of the theologies should get out of static theological concepts. Go out to theological theories that are variations of “the same one”. Open up to the chronicles of daily life, reminding us that when hunger is great, suddenly someone remembers that he has put in his bag some bread and some fish. Or that far away there is a small spring of pure water, and it is possible to access it. In addition, further on there is someone in love with someone who was able to compose a love poem. In addition, someone else who has sown flowers in the middle of a path of stones. In addition, yet another began to cry out for mercy, to leave the ideals of conduct, to leave the corporate Christianity in which we have to produce fruits of righteousness

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or fruits for eternity or to please God or to follow in imitation of Jesus Christ. To come out of a rigid, patriarchal, and repetitive rationality that no longer serves to rebuild the current human fabric that is so torn and shredded. To listen and feel the emotions that invade us, mixed with some hopes and many fears. Reinventing Christianity for today, rethinking theologies for today. This is not a negation of the historical past. It will subsist in many ways, even if only in the great Christian libraries of the world and in the fragile traces of our common human memory. What is important is the diverse humanity that is living today. We will never have a perfect society, perfect Christianity, perfect church, or perfect humanity. That’s what life is: a path, a walk with and among others. A tragic beauty, a fear married to a hope, a fragile love, an anger that rises, a suicide, a murder, the burning of a forest, the planting of a tree, a river that comes back to life, a baby that is born. Life is this mixture in which we have to live and survive as “mixed humans”. That is why we have to build together new policies and organizations because this destiny is the same for all. By building together, we know that we are in the same common precarious condition of humanity, although some live it much more than others. We are all capable depending on our strengths and even on the theft we have made of the strengths of others to build and destroy ourselves as humanity. It is just a statement that has many consequences! A new church politics requires different religious political thinking. To think it out, to rehearse it, to test it on a small scale in different cultures and human situations. It is also in this line that there are many attempts to rethink Christian ethics in light of plural situations and people who seek in it some orientation in life and behavior. Increasingly, we are being challenged to think of ethics as a form of inclusion of people and diversity. The question about “who counts for us and who are we excluding from rights” shows how much our ethics is based on unequal ways of valuing people. And a question that cannot remain silent: Are egalitarian modes a real possibility or just a figment of our egalitarian imagination and a mysterious, legitimate desire that inhabits us? There is no conclusive answer to this. For me, it is a belief in common dignity, and it is this that must guide us as if it were a gentle breeze that is suddenly lost and suddenly gets lost and is suddenly found again.

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Where Are We Going? This question, which was addressed as a conclusion to this text, permeated my entire reflection. Once again, we are being invited to pay attention to the signs of the times and not hesitate to new trials of life, new precarious and fragmented meanings, sharing doubts and uncertainties. Can we seek a theological meaning for this moment in time that we are living today in the world and especially in Latin America? In his magnum opus Liberation Theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez (1971, 10) warned us about the methodological importance of clarifying the terms of our questions. In this sense, the importance of asking ourselves about some current meanings that we are giving to theology especially in light of Liberation Theology in its critical function. It is a matter today of a critical function in relation to the performance of women and men in the present history in view of the dignity and rights that we have in relation to each other. If theology, as Gustavo says, is “intelligence of faith” (Gutiérrez, 1971, 15), it is important to always ask anew about the values on which the life of the Christian community rests in its absolutely stunning pluralism, especially in our century. Yes, because today, to be a Christian community does not necessarily mean a community linked to the Catholic Church, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist. The title Christian community takes on the pluralism and the contradictions of the world in which we live. A huge number of Christians today in our countries call themselves Christians without a church, and others claim to have faith without God, and still others relate different faiths among themselves without declaring to be specifically linked to any of them. This amazing liquidity of the so-called Christian communities is a phenomenon of our time. In addition, it is among us. Such an observation also demands a redimensioning of religions, welcoming the challenge of insecurity. This realization also demands a rethinking of religions, accepting the challenge of insecurity and a certain degradation of the term theology. This human discipline should perhaps leave its role of “auxiliary” to the magisterium of the Catholic Church and the ministries of the different churches. It should cease to be the science that looks for the “truths revealed” by God since the creation of the world to try to be the activation of an ethical heritage from ever new contexts. To stop being a masculine word about the world to become a plural word, capable of uniting and not dividing. To unite from the verifiable fact, from

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the pain that shows itself, from the wound exposed, from the violence experienced. To stop being a word of only one book, the Bible, but to enter into dialog with the great traditions of the Latin American peoples, the peoples of the Amerindian, Afro-Indian and other newly arrived peoples facing their real problems, their oppressions, dispossessions, and longings for citizenship. All this is not new and is in the lines and between the lines of the Liberation Theology authors of the 1970s. However, it must be assumed and thought about differently in today’s times. There are convergences regarding this stance in different small groups. These are the lights that have illuminated our darkness and sorted our confusions, as well as the nourishment in the many difficulties of coexistence that we have and will have among us. I end this brief reflection with the words of Gustavo Gutiérrez in the conclusion of his book “Liberation Theology”: “we will not have an authentic liberation theology when the oppressed themselves can raise their voice freely and express themselves directly and creatively in directly and creatively in society (…)” (Gutiérrez, 1971, 373).

References Althaus-Reid, M. (2000). Teología indecente. Bellaterra. Berry, T. (1988). The dream of the Earth. Sierra Club Books. Dussel, E. (1977). Filosofia ética latino americana. Edicol. Gebara, I. (2015). Filosofia feminista. Doble Clic. Gutiérrez, G. (1971). Teología de la Liberación. CEP. Pope Francis. (2015). Laudato Si’. Libreria editrice Vaticana. Safatle, V. (2015). O circuito dos afectos. Cosac Naify.

PART II

Liberation in Contextual Focus

The Weavings of Ancestral Spiritualities in Indian/Indigenous Theologies as Paths to Liberation Sofia Chipana Quispe

Words of Connection with Times and Spaces I share these words from the Andean territory, which is covered in the pluriverse of peoples that continue being and habiting in the extensive ancestral territoriality that the Guna peoples call Abya Yala.1 This text is interwoven from the territories pregnant with the telluric force of the high mountain ranges of the Andes, assumed as tutelary beings named Apus, protective ancestralities present according to the territorial location of the peoples, and linked to the force of Aya Marcay Quilla (November), full time of bonding with the loved ones who left the human 1  Abya Yala comes from the language of the Kuna or Guna people of Panama and means “land in full maturity”, “fertile land”, “flourishing land”. Since the assignment of Latin America is Eurocentric and colonial, so Constantino Mamani (Takir Mamani), in 1977, proposed this name after his visit to the Kuna peoples.

S. C. Quispe (*) Comunidad de Teología y Pastoral Andina, La Paz, Bolivia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_6

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body, to live their time of transformation to other forms of life. It is a celebration of encounter, since their presence arrives with the first rains that will nourish the seeds deposited with the hope of good harvests, which the regenerative force of the wiñay pacha, the time of the return to the vital sources, offers. It is about the seed bodies that not only offer life but also wisdoms, since in the memory is located the amuyu, which is the capacity to understand life that is cultivated with commitment. It will be from the altars and the shared meals that are prepared with love to receive the beings that visit us and to offer it to those who have recently departed, that I offer the sentipensar2 of the ancestral spiritualities that begin to let go of the Christian tutelage, since in consensus the expression of spirituality is being assumed with pleasure because it gathers the sense of the relational cosmo-­ livings that agrees to the diverse peoples in Abya Yala. While this impulse enriches the articulation of Christian Indian Theology, it also challenges it to listen to other dissonant voices that come out of Christian equivalences, which will lead not only to moving from inculturation to interculturality but also to an interspiritual approach, which entails the dignification of the peoples who recognize themselves in the ancestral memory of their knowledge, wisdom, and spiritualities. This makes it possible to ratify that despite everything, they continue being and linking themselves to “the many worlds that the world contains, the different music of life, its pains and colors: the thousand and one ways of living and saying, believing and creating, eating, working, dancing, playing, loving, suffering and celebrating” (Galeano, 1999, 25).

Starting from the Transgressive Memory That Breaks with Single Narratives Making memory for the ancestral peoples is part of wisdom, since we find in it the stories that are interwoven, as the weavers do in the Andean territorialities who articulate the paths of memory that pass from the oral to the visual, that is, from designs that take oral narratives. They create ties in the memory that connect people, times, and places; thus, in the face of destruction and deprivation of connection with vital sources, textiles, from 2  Translator note: Sentipensar is a Spanish expression that combines the words sentir (to feel) and pensar (to think), as a way of highlighting the emotional dimension of thinking and knowledge.

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their corporeality, are not destroyed or lost but trace paths, creating “broader and evolving confederations of ceremonial, political and exchange ties” (Arnold, 2009, 222) among peoples. In turn, for Arnold, the “textile is the site of ongoing land claims and power relations” (Arnold, 2009, 222), since the circulation of textiles between communities and villages forms a kind of spider’s web (simpa) of relationships created by women that help to circulate the ancestral force, since the textile texts receive the force of the burial places, thus establishing a memory that walks, acquiring greater value for its antiquity. It links the memory and life of the villages and their other ways of narrating their histories. In that sense, the connection with textiles maintains the memory that helps to reread the resistances and re-existences, which were celebrated after 500 years of colonial invasion that extends in the current days. Event and memory that made possible the agreement of many peoples and the strengthening of their vital processes, to continue generating fissures in the dominant culture that presents the stories from a Unique Story, designed by those who not only had the power of the word, but the power of writing from which laws were configured, which gave the power to the invader over the lands and the narration of incomplete stories that deprived the dominated peoples of their dignity. Therefore, it will be significant to remember that in the first visit of John Paul II to Peru in 1985, a group of Aymara and Quechua3 returned the Bible because they considered it an instrument of domination: “it was the ideological weapon of that colonialist assault. The Spanish sword, which by day attacked and murdered the body of the Indians, at night became a cross that attacked the Indian soul” (Richard, 1993, 385). This fact, more than a symbolic act, manifests the denunciation of the colonial imposition by means of the writing, since the spelling for many of our peoples was unknown, but ended up imposing itself as it is related in diverse chronicles, of the disagreement of Atahuallpa and Pizarro in the territorialities of Cajamarca (Peru), in which the Bible4 is presented. 3  Denouncement of three well-known Indian leaders: Máximo Flores (Movimiento Indio de Kollasuyo, Aymara), Emmo Valeriano (Partido Indio, Aymara), Ramiro Reynaga (Movimiento Indio Tupac Katari, Keshwa). 4  According to the chronicles of Pedro Cieza (1553), the text is a breviary. While other chronicles narrate that the text presented by the priest Valverde is the Bible, and that it was thrown by Atahuallpa, the Inca emperor, a gesture that was taken as an offense.

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Writing that allowed a tangible permanence of the revelation of their God, which guaranteed to the preachers to fulfill their will and to govern their moral codes of superior order, from which the constitution of the “Indian” is configured, as a “not being”, although for the expansionist purposes of evangelization, the “salvation of the soul”, will grant to the Indians the constitution of an “inferior being”, the other governable and tutelary by the religion for its demonic “vocation”. As Manuel Marzal sustains, In that Spanish culture, the devil served to explain many things: the similarity between Christianity and the American religions was a diabolical parody… In addition, in general, everything bad or inexplicable was attributed to the devil. This ideological dimension also happened in the process of indigenous transculturation…. (Marzal 1988, 213)

The demonic narrative became part of indigenous history as a memory that condemns, as presented by Eduardo Galeano in the narrative “Your past condemns you”: Corn, the sacred plant of the Maya, was baptized with various names in Europe. The names invented geographies: they called it Turkish grain, Arab grain, Egyptian grain, or Indian grain. These errors did nothing to save it from mistrust or contempt. When it became known where it came from, it was not welcome. It was destined for pigs. Corn yielded more than wheat and grew faster, withstood drought and gave good food, but it was not worthy of Christian mouths. The potato was also a forbidden fruit in Europe. It condemned it like corn, its American origin. However, the potato was a root raised at the bottom of the earth, where hell has its caves. Doctors knew that it produced leprosy and syphilis. In Ireland, if a pregnant woman ate it at night, she would give birth to a monster in the morning. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the potato was destined for prisoners, the insane and the dying. Later, this cursed root saved Europeans from starvation. However, even then, people did not stop wondering: If the potato and corn are not the Devil’s thing, why does not the Bible mention them? (2010, 27)

This memory is supposed to deny one’s own in order to assume the system that denies it. It can be seen in one of the outstanding chroniclers, Huamán Poma de Ayala, located in 1534–1616  in Cuzco, Peru, who sought to link himself to the colonial system that would offer him the

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authority to denounce the structure of the colonial government and to address his writing to the king to request “the moral reform of his conquerors and clergy who had turned the Andean world upside down”.5 This writing never reached the king’s hands due to the various vicissitudes he had to go through, due to his “Indian” condition, until the text was lost. Despite the complex vision of the Inca religion, the traces of the chronicle reflect the force of the textile text in which the cosmo-living of the Andean world that evokes long memory is presented. From the other ways of weaving the histories of the worlds crossed by the colonial matrix, the liberation of the peoples in Abya Yala goes through the dismantling of racism that imposed the classification, hierarchization, and subalternation of human beings, societies, knowledge, and peoples, extending in the narratives of the politics of extermination, exclusion, and acculturation. However, the resistances and re-existences of the peoples do not have a purely anthropocentric notion. From its holistic perspective, raised by the anthropology of life as a relational ontology, it seeks to reintegrate the link with the living memory of the territory, which implies the reestablishment of relations with the communities of life from which flows the reciprocity of the vital forces that sustain the Living Well, Life in Harmony, the Beautiful Living, Life in Plenitude.

Indian/Indigenous Theologies and the Decolonization of the Theological Discourse The processes of evangelization in the indigenous contexts in its various stages did not undergo significant changes until the Second Vatican Council (1962), despite the configuration of the nation states and their break with the hegemony of the Spanish monarchy and, therefore, with colonial religion. However, it is worth remembering that the independence campaigns were focused on the “West”, so that the relationship with the indigenous population would be a serious obstacle to the developmentalist perspectives that would be undertaken, which would lead to extermination policies, as seen reflected in the Argentine one hundred-­ pesos bill that was commissioned by Julio Argentino Roca, 5  Presentation of the New Chronicle and Good Government of Huaman Poma de Ayala. Version by Carlos Araníbar URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJL7zpmkzq8 [28 September 2021].

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to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the so-called Desert Campaign, which represents the victory of progress and its expansion over a space considered empty: the desert. The idea of the army as the bearer of civility is symbolized by the presence of scientists identified with European positivism (who were not in the campaign either). The triumph of civilization over barbarism is expressed in the figure of the Indians and the captive, a woman who holds a mestizo child in her arms and looks at Roca showing submission. (De Gennaro (n.d.))

Policies of extermination and acculturation that were extended in turn through religions, as seen in the discovery of the bodies of children in Canada. The report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of that country in 2015 estimated that at least six thousand children died in state boarding schools run by the religion of the Catholic Church between 1867 and 1996, showing a clear colonizing and civilizing objective. These were the policies of colonial extensions, involving various Christian denominations since the presence of Protestant and evangelical churches burst into the indigenous territories as pagan lands that needed to be converted to the gospel. It is in these contexts that the denunciation issued by the 1970 International Americanist Congress in Barbados is located, in which the content of the evangelizing action of the churches is criticized and recommends the cessation of missionary action for the good of the indigenous populations in order not to “incur in the crime of ethnocide or connivance with genocide” (cf. Colombres, 1975, 24–27). Although the response was not long in coming, in the ecumenical meeting of 1972 in Paraguay, in which other forms of evangelization of the indigenous populations were assumed, which in some way marked a new era. Considering the aforementioned antecedents, we locate the path of indigenous or aboriginal pastorals that are framed in some way in the indigenist notions6 of the Abya Yala context that had its peak in the 1920s and 1970s, from which the agrarian reforms that sought to free the indigenous populations from the “traditional yoke of landowners’ power” (Favre, 2007, 13) and the subsequent articulation of Indianism from the 1970s onward as “the expression of aspirations and demands authentically Indian” (ibid.) related to its organization and the vindication of ancestral 6  According to Favre, this movement is not the manifestation of an indigenous thought, but the expression of a Creole and mestizo reflection on the Indians, from which he seeks to determine his destiny according to the higher interests of the nation.

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religions, which will manifest themselves with greater momentum in the 1990s, a time when the indigenous movement burst forth as a social and political actor that had been silenced, and the positioning of ancestral spiritualities that survived in hiding. It will be in this context that the articulation of the Indian/indigenous Christian theology arises, with the purpose of situating the approaches of Christianity in relation to the peoples from inculturation, following the route of the Second Vatican Council, but in a concrete way in the Catholic sphere from the Document of the Episcopal Conference of Santo Domingo (1992) and later that of Aparecida (2007), although it is worth mentioning that this articulation is gestated in an ecumenical context. It is a theological proposal that seeks to significantly assume the colonial historical burden that crosses the diverse territories of Abya Yala, which the perspectives of Liberation Theology did not explicitly question. This is a challenge to the rational worldviews of anthropocentric modernity present in the perspectives of Liberation Theologies, as Raimond Panikkar points out: Let us not forget that Western history has been colonialist, generally in good faith (which is the most dangerous thing), and its protagonists have believed that they were defending universal values, often called “development”, “civilization” and even “Judeo-Christianity”. (Panikkar, 2010, 114)

Another aspect to consider in the processes of the Indian/indigenous Christian theologies is that they have as one of their sources the resistance of the peoples not to be completely colonized. It is sustained in the holistic ancestral spiritualities that despite living violent profanations in their religious pluriverse, they integrate some aspects of the dominant religion into their cosmo-living to harmonize the contradictions and follow the routes of the ancestral wisdoms from which they recreated, reinterpreted, and strengthened themselves as peoples, thus avoiding a total transculturation. In this sense, for Eleazar Lopez, who accompanies the process of Indian/indigenous theologies, “the problem is not the indigenous people; but the nonindigenous people who have difficulty to respect and receive with joy the sacred texts of the indigenous people, recognizing them, as the Second Vatican Council says, as revelation given by God to these peoples” (López Hernández, 2015, 29). While this approach responds to the processes of inculturation of the Gospel in cultures to

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generate certain symmetries, it does not enunciate that there are other ways of feeling and living the relationship with the sacred, as Raimon Panikkar states, that demonstrate that “the divine mystery is not the monopoly of any culture” (2010, 116). In this sense, the community of indigenous wise women and theologians of Abya Yala7 states that from the wisdoms and ancestral spiritualities, there are other ways of feeling the presence of divinity in the life of the peoples. That is why the call to “deconstruct an andro-­anthropocentric theology that uproots from the earth and from the harmonious relationship with other beings, and to build theologies impregnated with the Good Living that generates links with the earth, because we feel part of it and we are earth”, since the peoples linked to their ancestry recognize themselves in the cosmic long memory, from which they seek to make connections with the diverse vital forces that inhabit the territories as cosmic ancestral sources, and to locate the place of humanity in the cosmic order. Therefore, the inculturation processes from which the Indian/indigenous Christian theologies are proposed are limited, since they tend to present, as Raul Fornet-Betancourt would say, “a corrective message in the cultures”, from the transcultural character of the “gospel”, by which every culture is renewed from new forms of transposition or juxtaposition, from the equivalences between some aspects of the ancestral spiritualities and the Christian message. This process takes distance from the link with the cosmic and telluric ancestral vital forces, which were associated with the demonic, generating certain prejudices in the same people, since it is about other comprehensions and relations that some wise men and women still conserve and that are generally associated with witchcraft. Although there is a need to make the step from inculturation to interculturality in indigenous theologies that would enable symmetrical dialogs, there is little progress in this regard. Despite the good intention presented from the theoretical contributions, its functional character cannot be denied, since it operates from the logics and interests of Western culture, and, as Javier Lajo would say, “it is a culture that does not know about companies”. Moreover, paradoxically, the intercultural is associated with indigenous populations, as if after a long memory of misunderstandings with that world of colonial matrix, we now have to learn to welcome 7  I extract some thoughts from the Living Word of the second meeting in Pujilí, Ecuador, October 15, 2013.

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it in a good way through a series of translations. As we said before, the peoples do not deny the dialogs, but interculturality may have to go through a just reparation for the mistreated peoples, and as long as this process does not take place, the relationship will continue to be asymmetrical. On the other hand, within the peoples of Abya Yala, exchanges and encounters have taken place and continue to take place in various ways and are not limited only to the human sphere, which is why we have the beautiful biodiversity that inhabits the various territories. On the other hand, interculturality that does not question the asymmetries generates suspicions. Following Panikkar’s approaches, the intercultural process supposes a “cultural disarmament”, which entails the abandonment of the trenches in which the “modern” culture of Western origin has sheltered itself, considering acquired and nonnegotiable values, such as progress, technology, science, democracy, the world economic market, in addition to state organizations…. Disarmament… is a condition for establishing a dialog on equal terms with the other cultures of the earth…. (Panikkar, 1993, 62)

This approach questions the colonial matrix that generates a culture of death, as Panikkar continues, that “it is even an affront to speak of dialog to those who are dying of hunger, to those who have been stripped of their human dignity or to those who do not even know what we are talking about, because their suffering or their different culture makes them incapable of doing so” (ibid.). Therefore, it will be significant to evoke the words of the priest Domingo Llanque in the processes of Indian theology in the Andean region: “why are the missionaries and social scientists interested in knowing the Aymara religion and the role it has played in the struggle for their liberation… to help them in their liberation… or to introduce more easily the Christian content, thus displacing the Aymara content?” (Llanque, 2015, 8). This responds to the underlying intentionality of inculturation but also of interculturality, since the encounter and dialog is not possible if it is mediated by the invasive character of the gospel, but of the resignation that makes the encounter possible, as expressed in the sense of relational reciprocity, expressed in the words of the Mayan people: “I am another you, you are another me”.

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Indian/Indigenous Christian Theology and Liberation Theology The criticism posed by Llanque is located in the question of how theology favors the liberation of peoples. For Eleazar Lopez, the Indian/indigenous Christian theology articulated in various territories, “as a struggle for the dignity and rights of the oppressed and dominated peoples, is identified as part of the Latin American theology of liberation” (Gorski, 1998, 16). It developed at the same time, as we have already presented in its antecedents between the 1960s and 1970s, reaching a greater strength in the 1990s, a time when the resistance of the peoples to the colonial invasion was commemorated. Although the process of Liberation Theology was not explicit in locating its proposal in a colonial context, the nation-states emerged from liberal perspectives centered in the West and established a social and economic order—according to José Carlos Mariátegui—“without the Indians and against the Indians” (Mariátegui, 1981, 65) based on the construction of biological inequalities in which racism is sustained. However, the location of this reflection from the impoverished communities—as a marginalized socioeconomic class, in which the diversities made invisible and alienated by the colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist system are located—breaks down with the hegemonic character in the understanding of the sacred, therefore, with the colonial religion that had legitimized the current order. In turn, it will be significant that Liberation Theology, in its process, could consider the reality of the impoverished, their histories, their struggles, their faith, as a first act of theology, which sought in some populations, excluded and dominated, to assume themselves in their liberation processes, as an answer to the challenge of Gustavo Gutiérrez: “we will not have an authentic liberation theology until the oppressed themselves can freely reach their voice and express themselves directly and creatively in society” (Gutiérrez, 1971, 10). A proposal that in these times is sought to be directed from the theological plurality, which presents the polyphony of voices that acquires bodies, words, and life. It cannot be denied that there is a shared path among the diverse theologies that have their links with Liberation Theology, from their own nuances, although the axes of their orientations, as well as their methods, are still found in the modern Western matrix in which the Bible is located. The processes of Christian Indian/Indigenous Theology, centered on the liberating notion of the Gospel, seek to establish the link with the ancestral

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memory and its experience in community, looking for its source in them. In this sense, it challenges the same liberating perspective of theology. For, in the contexts of indigenous peoples, the location of the long memory will be fundamental, not limited to the biblical text, as the first text, nor to the salvation or liberation of Christ as a reference, but as forces with which we can dialog and conspire. These are processes that seek to bring out hiding the silenced and erased histories, and the dignified development of their spiritualities for a long time tutored, guarded, and controlled, a process that, for the peoples, is an act of liberation and healing. Therefore, to limit indigenous populations as “the poorest of the poor” without the analysis of the colonial categories of societies and religion could deny the history of invasions that burst into the organization and development as peoples and their constant processes of embodiment in order to strengthen self-­determination in their organization and strengthen their ancestral cosmological wisdoms and spiritualities, from which they seek to generate cracks in the epistemologies of colonial matrix that prevails in modern thinking that permeates in the political, social, and economic instances. Therefore, in the memory of more than 500 years of misunderstandings and encounters between Christianity and indigenous peoples, it is necessary to recognize the indigenous uprisings that took place in different times and territories as part of the memory that sustains resistance, the recreation of their historical projects as peoples, and the dignification of their territories, where the dismembered, burned, and silenced bodies seek to recompose themselves in the community of life to continue accompanying from the cosmic and telluric forces of the journey of the peoples in the face of the interests of the dominant classes.

The Weaving of Ancestral Spiritualities and Their Relationship with Christianism In the processes of Indian/indigenous Christian theologies, assumed from liberating perspectives, the challenge of double fidelity to indigenous and Christian identity is posed, which does not cease to be disjunctive, as echoed in the strength of the word shared in the second meeting of Mayan theology (1992): Today, we have seen with immense pain the weeping in the eyes of our grandparents, who have been preserving in the heart of our mountains the

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original roots of our Mayan tree; they, when they look at us, their children, their offspring, hardly recognize us anymore: “You have abandoned our religion in exchange for a strange religion that while it spoke of love, it killed; that while it spoke of respect, it profaned. Despite everything, you are our family, and we love you. However, forgiveness cannot be given by us on behalf of our people. It is necessary first that you recognize your sins, that the people know it, that you change your words into actions. We ask for respect, the respect that we have always had for the Catholic and Protestant churches, but that we have not received in return. They still call us witches, idolaters… It is necessary to sit down to dialog. It will be a long process of reconciliation and healing of wounds….” (s/a. p. 12)

However, in these words, there is a recognition of the imposed identity. It deserves a time of healing and reconciliation, since this other identity generates imbalances in the peoples, since the spirit that inhabits the human body needs its harmonization with the other forces. Therefore, liberation and decolonization go through the sense of healing, which implies reconciliation with cosmic ancestrality. Lorena Cabnal rightly proposes the healing of the body and land territories as a cosmic-political path for the vitality of the healing memory of human and cosmic ancestrality, which makes it possible to resist and persist in the dignification of life in the territories. At the same time, the shared word reflects the tense relationship established between indigenous peoples and Christianity in its various denominations, which is why a dignified and respectful treatment is proposed, not only by recognizing them as “the poor of the gospel” or presenting the notion of a liberating God in favor of their liberation. Each person recognizes his God with diverse features but does not assume it as the hegemonic rector of the sacred but as one more force in the pluriverse of beings considered “sacred” or “beings of respect”. In the diverse languages of Abya Yala, there is no equivalent to the word God, but the relationality of dual vital forces that seek to correspond, as is made explicit in the Mayan expressions U′k’ux Kaj (Heart of Heaven) and U′k’ux Ulew (Heart of Earth). These correspondences are not limited to the notions of feminine and masculine. The word of the grandmothers and grandfathers gathers the feelings of the peoples who seek to trace the paths that lead to deepening what is called Indian theology to differentiate it from Christianity, although the term and the concept of theology are foreign to the peoples. Moreover,

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the sense of the interrelations of plural vital forces is not collected in the notion of theology. The term that expresses the sense of interrelationality in and with the cosmos is spirituality, as expressed at the First Summit of Indigenous Women of the Americas in 2002, differentiating it from religion. In 2019, it was declared by 2500 women from more than 130 peoples of Brazil that “territory is our own life, our body, our spirit”. The connection with the ancestral roots and their spiritualities is undertaken in different territories, establishing certain agreements with external allies that make possible the encounter with the profaned ancestrality, as expressed by the wise men and women of the Guna people: In this search for ways and support for such a big undertaking as recovering and reviving our cultural values, we noticed that the Catholic Church in Gunayala was concerned… Therefore, we were invited by their leaders and we entered into conversation. Our principle was always not to let ourselves be replaced by anyone because we are the real subjects, and we must always be convinced of that. (Wagua, 2011, 10)

This undertaking reflects the encounter of knowledge in dialog in the face of the gradual loss of communal lands and the uprooting of their populations, although agrarian reforms sought their recovery and autonomy, which made communal organization possible, but left as a legacy the notion of private property, therefore mercantile, which distorts the sense that the land has other owners. Therefore, the untiring resistance to the extractivist policies that are the cause of the great imbalance in the cosmos is because the relationships of correspondence with these beings are altered, which makes it urgent to deepen the meanings of the ancestral spiritualities that are interwoven in the territories of origin. Although the colonial pretension of Christianity presents the territories of Abya Yala as Christian, the pluriverses generate fissures in that hegemony, from the connection with the ancestral sources stored in the territories, in the memory, and in the bodies that weave, embroider, and sing their stories of full and dignified lives to the rhythm of the melodies of the rivers inspired by the singing spirits, where the cycles of the moon accompany the dance that germinates in the web of life; stories that transgress the spaces of museums, studies, theologies, and become present with the gaze and the spoken word. Evoking the strength of this time, the peoples, as a strong fabric of dignity, seek to establish alliances for the defense of life in the face of the

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powers that threaten the web of life. While it cannot be denied that it is a time of flowering of the beautiful spirituality from which we seek to generate links, interrelationships, complementarities, balances, and harmonies, which awaken the force of encounter, exchange, and reciprocity, it is also the time of imbalances that cannot be resolved, as expressed in the narratives of ends and births of worlds. Finally, we intend encounters that do not suppress and distort the feeling of the ancestral worlds, since the life in harmony of the peoples supposes a harmonious coexistence in the human community and of the cosmos, as expressed in the Zapatista word: “the earth is blue, but it is also yellow and red and black and white and brown and violet and orange and green…”.

References Arnold, D. (2009). Cartografías de la memoria: hacía un paradigma más dinámico y viviente del espacio. Cuaderno de la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales – Universidad Nacional de Jujuy, 36, 203–244. https://www.redalyc. org/pdf/185/18516802011.pdf [Consulta: 10 de septiembre de 2021]. Colombres, A. (1975). Por la liberación del indígena: documentos y testimonios. Ediciones Sol. De Gennaro, F. (n.d.). Los billetes un pasado común. https://www.teseopress. com/iconografiadelpapelmoneda/chapter/aspectos-­t ematicos-­d e-­l os-­ billetes-­4/ [Consulta: 20 de julio de 2021]. Documento 25 años de los Encuentros de la teología india mayense (s/a). El aroma de las flores en la Milpa Mayense. Favre, H. (2007). El movimiento indígena en América Latina. Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos. Galeano, E. (1999). Patas arriba: La escuela del mundo al revés. Chanchito. Galeano, E. (2010). Espejos: Una historia casi universal. Siglo veintiuno. Gorski, J. (1998). El desarrollo histórico de la “Teología India” y su aporte a la inculturación del Evangelio. En: P. Suess, J. Gorski, B. Dietschy, M. M. Mires, F. Martinez, & J. L. Quito (Org.), Desarrollo histórico de la Teología India (pp. 9–34). Abya Yala. Gutiérrez, G. (1971). Teología de la liberación. Perspectivas. Lima, Perú: CEP. Llanque, D. (2015). Perrier, Christine. Diálogo entre la religión Aymara y el cristianismo. En: Camino de herradura: 25 años de Teología Andina, Verbo Divino, IDECA vol. 1. López Hernández, E. (2015). La Biblia y los pueblos indígenas de América: Puntos a repensar en la acción misionera de las iglesias. En: E. Zwetsch (Org.),

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Conviver: Ensaios para uma teología intercultural latino-américana (pp. 25–30). Sinodal – Facultades-EST. Mariátegui, J. C. (1981). Peruanicemos al Perú. Amauta. Marzal. M. (1988). La transformación religiosa peruana. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Panikkar, R. (1993). Paz y desarme cultural. Sal Terrae. Panikkar, R. (2010). Teología de la liberación y liberación de la teología. In J.  M. Vigil (Ed.), Por los caminos de Dios V: Hacia una teología planetaria (pp. 114–117). Abya Yala. Richard, P. (1993). Teología india y Biblia cristiana. En: Teología India Mayense. Memorias, experiencias y reflexiones de encuentros teológicos regionales, México–Tegucigalpa. CENAMI/CCD/ABYA YALA. Wagua, A. (Comp.) (2011). En defensa de la vida y su armonía: Elementos de la espiritualidad guna. Proyecto EBI Guna/Fondo Mixto Hispano Panameño.

The Noble House of La Virtual QTL Voguing Queer Liberation Theologies in Latin America Since Marcella Althaus-Reid Hugo Córdova Quero

Introduction: Strike a Pose! Recent US television drama series Pose (Murphy and others 2018–2021) has embarked individuals and communities into a voyage to (re)consider and recover long-forgotten histories within the queer communities. The story narrates Bianca’s adventures—and challenges—a Puerto Rican transwoman who starts her own House and becomes the mother of a gifted dancer and a sex worker. The show intermixes personal situations with the community events in the ball scene in New York in the late 1980s and the struggles over the beginning of the HIV/AIDS pandemic (1987–1997). It also pays tribute to the often invisibilized African American, Latina/o, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latin American individuals who paved the way

H. Córdova Quero (*) Starr King School, Córdoba, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_7

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for the “gay scene” to emerge with strength in New York and, later, across the country. Some of them were children thrown out of their homes even at the age of 10 years because they were queer. From that young age and up, folks were safe to develop and experience liberation through the countless “mothers” who took them into their houses/homes. The history of the pilgrimage of Latin American Queer Liberation Theologies and theologians since Marcella Althaus-Reid may not be that different. The publication of the book Indecent Theology (2000) by Althaus-Reid secured a road already taking shape within feminist and lesbian-gay theologies, molding and consolidating a new era for sexual theologies. For many of us in Latin America who were suffering theological, ecclesiastical, and even academic ostracism because we were queer, her work became a beacon of hope and true liberation. La Teología Latinoamericana de la Liberación [Latin American Liberation Theology]—hereafter cited as “TLL” for its acronym in Spanish—and liberation theologians paid little to no attention to us, with the exception of Jaci Maraschin and Otto Maduro (Althaus-Reid, 2006, 2). The same situation arose with the leftist liberation movements since the 1960s, for which queer individuals and communities in Latin America were the outcasts that nobody wanted to relate. Even feminist, indigenous, or afro-descendant Liberation Theologies and theologians failed to offer solidarity and support to queer individuals and communities. Thus, those theologies, theologians, and leftist liberation movements often blocked our participation in ecclesiastical spaces, denied us inclusion in research groups and projects; even— some liberationists—condemned us for “disgracing” their freedom project. Many of us were forced to leave our churches, academic/formation goals, and even countries. We became sexiles (Guzmán, 1997) both in the social and spiritual/theological sense. It was Althaus-Reid who took us into her house. She knew our histories and struggles. Like her, I studied theology at the Instituto Evangélico Superior de Estudios Teológicos (ISEDET) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I began classes in 1993, the same year that she finished and defended her doctoral thesis in the UK. Although she had emigrated a few years before to complete her doctoral dissertation at St. Andrew’s University in Fife, Scotland, the halls of ISEDET could still smell the memory of her presence. That emerged when people disparagingly and unashamedly called her la loca [the crazy] or la pervertida [the pervert] even when she was

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long away. Little did I imagine that because I was gay, the hallways would soon hear people referring to me as la loca [the crazy fag] and el pervertido [the pervert] as well. What a tremendous power of a sexuality that does not conform to cis-heteropatriarchy! Reflecting years after that, I cannot help thinking about two things. On the one hand, Argentinean society defined the Madres de Plaza de Mayo [May Square Mothers] as las locas [the crazy ones]. Because of the pain of the disappearance of their daughters and sons, they struggled with one of Latin America’s bloodiest military dictatorships. Their example and resilience became a pivot for social movements. What a delicious honor the comparison with them! On the other hand, I cannot but feel with all those locas [crazy women] and locos [madmen] who walked the halls of such a sacred house of studies, among them Althaus-Reid and myself. We were feared in the same way as the Goddess Kali, with the creative-destructive power of sexuality. Feared, but often very much desired. Other times, when no one was a witness, even sought after for tricks in the back alleys of double-standard morality and pseudo-liberation. Nonetheless, the dynamics of “public/private” work in the religious world through odd (un)logical cis-hetero hegemonic ways. Often those who catalog something as negative are deeply involved in what they criticize. Many of those who called both Althaus-Reid and others—including me—as la loca secretly would crave freedom from the theological, ecclesiastical, and cultural closets of which they could be out. Yet, that sacred house of liberationist higher studies—as well as many other spaces—never welcomed us completely. We were eternally second-­ class beings. Years later, when I started working with Marcella and she became my PhD advisor—along with queer Muslim theologian Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé—something that crossed our paths and brought us together was the “love-hate”—“critique and continuity?”—relationship with TLL.  There is no denying that TLL took us to the depths of our worldview. To paraphrase a famous sexual saying, “once you go TLL, you never go back!” In those years, Marcella welcomed me into her House, the noble house of La Virtual QTL. I joined other wonderful friends who became partners in my pilgrimage: Jaci Maraschin, Mario Ribas, Claudio Carvalhaes, Roberto González y Norberto D’Amico, André Musskopf, and Otto Maduro. And there was Marcella, taking the locas and opening a space where we would have a place to call home within the spectrum of

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Liberationist Theologies. In the recent decade, Althaus-Reid (+2009), Maraschin (+2009), Maduro (+2013), and Ribas (+2019) departed from this world. However, soon others joined the House. We set ourselves to continue striking a pose amid theological discourses, to spinning conversations that others do not dare to address, and to throwing shade to the cis-heteronormative discourses that have imprisoned God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the saints, beliefs, and spiritualities within the closets of doctrine, tradition, and orthodoxy. In the words of Althaus-Reid (2006, 2), “(…) this informal network has produced collective reflections on Liberation Theology and sexual dissidence, while at the same time sharing research and other everyday issues of our lives as academics and/or ministers.” Two decades of solid work deeply rooted in the production of sexual theologies in the 1980s–1990s emerged as a continuation with and a critique to the contribution of TLL.  I believe it is necessary to identify, review, and evaluate the new ways queer theologies have begun to develop, especially in Latin America. Thus, Latin American queer theologies challenge us to establish networks with contextual and regional theologies in their approach to the reality of people in our continent. These local theologies are inscribed within the paradigm of queer theologies, even when they do not identify themselves by that name, as in the case of Althaus-­ Reid, who called her theology as Indecent Theology. This chapter examines the paths along which these Latin American queer theologies travel. It seeks to be a road map to understand the course of queer theologies in Latin America from Althaus-Reid’s contribution. Due to space, it is impossible to explore each work and author who has assumed her contribution and continues with her work. Therefore, the first part of the chapter focuses briefly on delimiting the significance of Althaus-Reid in the construction of queer theologies in Latin America. I highlight some ideas emerging from her vast oeuvre. The second part is devoted to the first generation of queer theologians who were Althaus-­ Reid’s fellow travelers and who embraced his postulates. The third part seeks to present the work of the second generation of queer liberation theologians in Latin America. For this chapter, I have not only resorted to the theological work of each author presented but also to a historical progression. I show how queer Liberation Theologies in Latin America have emerged and established their bases in the vast religious field in the past two decades.

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Marcella Althaus-Reid: Striking a Pose with Her “Indecent Theology” Althaus-Reid is one of the most prominent queer theologians worldwide, especially in Latin America. Her book Indecent Theology (2000) marked a shift in how queer theologies have evolved within Christianity, especially for our continent. Deeply rooted in Latin American Liberation Theology, her work fully embraced queer theory to challenge classical theologies and TLL to address issues of gender and sexuality. Arguably, there is a “before” and an “after” her. For many reasons, Althaus-Reid was a pioneer of Latin American queer theologies, and her book also gives its name to her theology. Indecent Theology is genuinely a Latin American queer theology of liberation that seeks to embody the continent’s context and its flavors, pleasures, dilemmas, ecclesial hopes, and changing social reality. Althaus-­ Reid’s work, Indecent Theology, is one of the most finished projects of sexual theology in Latin America. Althaus-Reid consolidated a path already taking shape in the Global North with the development of feminist1 and lesbian-gay2 theologies in the previous decades, thus modeling a new epoch. In this work, Althaus-Reid set out to liberate the TLL from the closet of its limiting traditions. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the publication of Indecent Theology was itself a revolutionary element in the academic world. On the one hand, it contributed to the development of a queer theology politically engaged with the work of the TLL.  On the other hand, it was a staunch critique of the distinctly cis-heteropatriarchal tone of the early works of liberation theologians. Her emphasis on (re) connecting the dignity of those under oppression—especially when exercised against individuals and communities of gender and sexual diversity— was commendable. Althaus-Reid wisely showed in her Indecent Theology how queer theologies subvert the cis-heteronormative dicta of societies. His analysis always kept on the horizon her strong vocation to include in

1  It is important to recognize the works of Rosemary Radford Ruether (1993), Mary Hunt (1994), Lisa Isherwood and Elizabeth Stuart (1998), Isherwood (1999, 2000), Ivone Gebara (1999), Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1999a, b, 2000), and Elizabeth Johnson (2000) as milestones, among others, of this important movement. 2  We can list here the aforementioned works of Robert Shore-Goss (1993) and Stuart (1995, 2003), among others.

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the theological conversation the different sexual realities, primarily through their histories and, mainly, their actors. On the other hand, her solid formation in the works of the most prominent liberation theologians—in masculine since the TLL in the 1970s and 1980s came predominantly from the hand of male theologians—can be observed throughout his work. Due to her education at the now-defunct Instituto Superior Evangélico de Estudios Teológicos (ISEDET), she was also in contact with the work of Beatriz Melano-Couch, the latter a specialist in the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, whose disciple she was. Althaus-Reid thus received a solid formation in hermeneutic and epistemological issues. Therefore, her critique and challenge to TLL reflected masterfully in her doctoral dissertation. Recognizing the importance of sexuality, Althaus-Reid (2000) called this new paradigm for talking about God and humanity “indecent theology”: The paradigm is an indecent paradigm, because it undresses and uncovers sexuality and economy at the same time. Not only do we need an Indecent Theology which can reach the core of theological constructions, insofar as they are rooted in sexual constructions, for the sake of understanding our sexuality, we also need it because theological truths are currencies dispensed and acquired in theological economic markets. (2000, 101)

Althaus-Reid’s second book—The Queer God (2003)—proposes to queerify the divine and the human—especially in terms of their relations with the divine—to challenge the cis-heteronormative tone of classical theologies about God. Taking the everyday experience of queer believers, she also aims to liberate God from the closet of traditional Christian thought. Indecent theology becomes a vehicle and spokesperson for a very Latin American way of doing theology, listening to people’s experiences as a theological act. However, I wonder if this is the only way to do sexual theology in Latin America, and I would risk saying no. I sincerely believe that our challenge is to sexualize theologies in Latin America. In other words, our query is to (re)take Althaus-Reid’s work and open the range of possibilities to the tangible reality of the multiple queer experiences across the different contexts in the continent. To carry that task out, we must work at the intersection of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and racial ideologies, nationality, bodily abilities, social class, and nationality. Althaus-Reid’s work is vast. In her article “Outing Theology” (2001a), she delves into the subject of queer theologies through the image of

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Xena—the epic warrior of the eponymous U.S. television show of the same name—in whom she sees a Christ figure. Based on that icon of Western popular culture, the author embarks on a process of revisiting Latin American history through the image of Christ in Peru after the conquest of the Inca empire. El Cristo Morado [the purple Christ] is also an icon of popular culture and religiosity. Both the Xena/Christ and el Cristo Morado resist cis-heteronormativization and defy to happily endure oppression and domination. In comparison, the Xena/Christ disobeys the mandate of dying on the cross. She descends to protect and fight for the one she loves. El Cristo Morado embodies the plight of the ancestral peoples of Peru—the Incas—massacred and subjugated by the Spanish empire. She thwarts and challenges the imposition of a medieval blood-thirsty theology that legitimates the ab/use and exploitation of subaltern people. Yet, “(…) the Peruvian indigenous Christ is as unreal as the Xena one, in the sense that they are both ahistorical, although theologically valid at the same time, as attempts to contextualize Christ, or embody Christ in people’s contexts” (Althaus-Reid, 2001a, 61). Nevertheless, both of them are rich examples of how queer theologies consider the historical past, the process of colonization, the images constructed about the divine, and how believers engage with that context. As I mention elsewhere, Althaus-Reid addresses the hermeneutic circle in particular ways (Córdova Quero, 2010). On the other hand, her article “Sexual Salvation: The Theological Grammar of Voyeurism and Permutations” (2001b) introduces us to the theme of salvation. There, she also takes the opportunity to connect that dogma with an important topic: the methodology of queer theologies. The novelty in Althaus-Reid’s work is to talk about salvation not only from a sexual point of view but specifically from a sadomasochistic perspective. The point is not without importance due to its central connection to the ways that—in favor of dogma and rigor—classical theologies have domesticated sexuality and its dis/orderly conventions of emerging. In other words, salvation aimed for “the soul,” but it little related to the body and—God forbids!—to sexuality. The result was symbolic violence in which the core of Christianity—the body of Jesus in the incarnation— disappeared to give way to a more spiritualized form of decent salvation. By resorting to fetishism—the Voyeur’s Gaze—Althaus-Reid recovers the disorderly contradiction of the incarnation, namely, a God who becomes fully human, embodied, and embracing all of humanity. Thus,

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(…) God in Jesus was opened to operations of change and to exchanges. (…) Thinking and discerning God from a voyeur’s epistemology, favours mutuality in the construction of God’s identity. God is then here not the big eye which follows us like an Orwellian policeman, but a God dependent on people’s relationships. (Althaus-Reid, 2001b, 246)

In the end, the fetish of God toward humanity and humanity toward the contemplation of God is nothing else than the Gelassenheit [releasement??] proposed and experienced by the mystics. They experienced it with all of their humanity, not only with their soul. In Jesus, God showed Godself, allowing Godself to be an exhibit for the human gaze at the cross as a final rehearsal of repetition and engagement with the voyeur. That script defies the expectations of churches for a decent spirituality. It also challenges the notions of Christian ethicists who would label the power emerging from God-humanity voyeur play as “(…) tainted, dirty, although it is temporary and easily reverted” (Althaus-Reid, 2001b, 247). What stands at the foundation of that rejection is not the “dirty salvation” but the impossibility for power to be shared and distributed among all believers, as the Christian Church has traditionally capitalized and concentrated that power for domination and, in the end, for selective normative salvation which only a few can attain. Finally, in “Gustavo Gutiérrez Goes to Disneyland” (2004a), Althaus-­ Reid explores the themes of postcoloniality and popular theology. The use of Disneyland as the epitome of worldwide amusement parks is a clever device to show how the theologies of the Global North exoticize the Global South. Using a postcolonial tone, Althaus-Reid (2004a, 135) employs the concept of “theme parks” and adapts it to the Global South imagery: pampas, horses, gauchos, “natives,” and jungles to analyze the relationship between TLL and Global North theologies. Facilitated by a “postcolonial suspicion,” she reveals how the Global North’s “fantasy-­ land mentality” has constructed the Global South as the alien other. The process emerged as the fruit of a colonialist exoticization. The dynamic at play was a dualism that pervaded all the analysis, and it did (…) not help the cause of liberation, because the mechanisms of dependency are perpetuated in repetitive models, Pavlovian models—a sort of resurrection paradigm of the western style of obsessive clarification and moralization of ideas and behaviours. (Althaus-Reid, 2004a, 127)

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As a result, those “Cinderella tales” kept the people of the ex-“Third World” in a position of “object” instead of theological “subject.” Mainly, Althaus-Reid (2004a) affirms that the value of the Global South—as if it were a visit to the “botanical garden”—resides in the visitor: It is the visitor to the theme park who carries meaning to the product. Moreover, the fact of being presented as a theme park accentuates the imaginary aspect of the construction of regional theologies. They highlight by their mere native presence the fact that real theologies are elsewhere, and, as such, may be called ‘theologies of the margins’ in more than one sense. (2004a, 129)

To solve the tension that this global capitalism of theology has produced, Althaus-Reid proposes tracing back the origin of popular theology and its engagement with the sacred texts. In doing so, the very colonized mentality of Latin American theologians may present itself as a mimicry of the European theologies. Yet, amid that dynamic, we may recover a “(…) phantasmatic nature of a crucial site of subversion” (Althaus-Reid, 2004a, 141).

The First Generation of Queer Theologians in Latin America: Spinning Promiscuous Conversations The anthology Liberation Theology and Sexuality made the work of the first generation of queer theologians in Latin America. Edited by Althaus-­ Reid (2006), the collection disseminated the work of ten authors who made their proposal of Latin American queer theologies. Mario Ribas—in his essay “Liberating Mary, Liberating the Poor” (2006)—focuses on the Christian iconography of Mary. This author reflects on the cis-heteronormative view and contrasted it with a queer understanding of Mary. In doing so, he connects that icon with sexuality in everyday life experiences. Although the faithful venerate Mary in Latin America as the pristine model of motherhood, the presence of Mary icons even in brothels or bars reveals a mixture of the sacred and the profane whose boundaries are difficult to determine. Therefore, “undressing” Mary from her cis-heteronormative holy garments can bring her humanity closer to the experiences of poor women amid their daily struggles in Latin America. Addressing the theme of Mary implies deconstructing one of the main aspects of Christianity in Latin America. Christianity indeed believes in

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God represented as the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. However, Mariology is a central theme of faith and devotion in Latin America because of the medieval Roman Catholicism brought by the conquistadors. That is also true for Anglican/Episcopalians and the Orthodox churches, which are also present in Latin America. In a lesser way, this also relates to the Lutheran churches throughout the continent. Mariology is a pivotal feature of Latin American religious life and thus a powerful device for cis-heteronormativity. The careful delimitations of the cis-heterosexual division of labor in Latin American societies reflect the establishment of the cis-heteropatriarchal tone embedded in Christianity, especially in Roman Catholicism. Mary is a symbol that proclaims liberation and resistance. Her description in the Gospels concerning the Magnificat (Lk 1:46–55) exudes that idea. However, she suffered co-optation to become its opposite. Thus, Mary has been cis-­ heteronormatized to reinforce cis-heteropatriarchalism and oppression of women and males. Thus, the image of the Virgin becomes the most destructive element of confrontation for women to reconsider their “place” and “role” in Latin American societies and “approve” male privilege. Especially in popular religiosity, the image of the Virgin has commonly adopted the Christian ideal of femininity and motherhood. Moreover, she has traditionally represented a clear example of what it is to be “decent” compared to those labeled “indecent.” For centuries, a very destructive dynamic judged women’s lives in Christian contexts. They were condemned or approved by their conformity—or lack of conformity—to the image of the Virgin Mary. What emerges from this dynamic is that religion and sexuality have been two categories that hardly ever came together for centuries. When they did intertwine, they did so under the strict supervision of cis-heteropatriarchal power. We should bear in mind that Ribas (2006, 123) does not refer in this work to the Virgin of Guadalupe but Nossa Senhora de Aparecida, the national Marian symbol in Brazil. It is fair to say that the co-optation of the Virgin of Guadalupe invisibilized other representations of Mary in Latin America. Every country—and I would even assert that almost every region, city, or town in Latin America—has a particular depiction of the Virgin. That is commonly known as “advocations of the Virgin.” Undoubtedly, the Virgin of Guadalupe is significant for the people of Mexico. Yet, she is not a central symbol for all the peoples of Latin America since each nation venerates its local advocation. Connecting with

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Althaus-Reid’s (Althaus-Reid, 2004a) notion of “theme park” theologies, the Virgin of Guadalupe failed to escape that situation. She became Mary’s “only” icon in Latin America, imposed to everyone regardless of not only their local veneration but even their particular Christian affiliation. It is noteworthy that not all Christians in Latin America are Mary’s devotees. In line with what Ribas discusses in his chapter, feminists and queer activists contested the cis-heteropatriarchal tone assigned to Mary. The queerification of her image involves the distortion of supposed cis-­ heteronormativities of decency that denied a deep spirit of faith to the powerful expressions of gender and sexuality in the history of Christianity. However, cis-heteropatriarchy is constantly present and reminds us—as Butler (1990) would affirm—that it is impossible to live outside that matrix. Nevertheless, living exactly within the matrix, it is possible to interrupt its mandates and produce performativities that counteract its assumptions and dictates. Queer theologies in Latin America—in a constant way—deconstruct and liberate this Christian icon. It would be impossible to analyze all the chapters in this collection of essays, so I would like to end with Roberto González and Norberto D’Amico entitled “Love in Times of Dictatorships” (2006). It details the struggles of a queer minister and theologian with his partner. They narrate their struggles in the midst of one of the bloodiest military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s marked by cis-heteronormative present in society and religious organizations. As González narrates, he studied with José Severino Croatto at ISEDET where he was a classmate of Althaus-Reid. Both had already left ISEDET when I began my theological studies in 1993. The chapter is a biography, which aligns with the TLL. Daily life and religion, politics and faith, and personal and community struggles interrelate with liberation theologians. They enrich and illuminate each other. Gonzalez does theology by living it through his life and community ministry. It is fair to remember that many lost their lives due to military regimes in Latin America from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. For example, Gonzalez and D’Amico mention Dr. Mauricio Amilcar López, a professor at ISEDET and a member of the Free Brethren Church in Mendoza, Argentina. López was a professor of Philosophy at the Schools of Psychology and Pedagogy of the Faculty of Sciences of the National University of Cuyo. In 1973 he was elected rector of the National University of San Luis. He was kidnapped from his home in Mendoza in

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1977 (Universidad Nacional de San Luis, 2019). Indeed, these were difficult times in Argentina and throughout Latin America. D’Amico and González’s chapter, in particular, is a unique piece, as there are not many articles, chapters, or biographical books on those who were forerunners of gender and sexual diversity amid religious organizations in Latin America. Their memories and experiences join the invisibilization of nearly 400 queer individuals abducted and killed by the military regime. Their names often are absent from the tributes to those murdered by the armed forces during the civil-military dictatorship in Argentina. There were many whose faith and sexuality, along with their political commitment, made the target for assassination. Yet, the political commitment is visible at the expense of invisibilizing their faith or sexual orientation. A year after Althaus-Reid’s death, Mark D. Jordan and Lisa Isherwood published the anthology Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots (2010). In that book, Nancy Cardoso Pereira and Cláudio Carvalhaes teamed up to write “God’s Petticoat and Capitalism-full Fashion” (2010). The chapter draws on examples from Afro-Brazilian religions and poetry to address the theme of bodies and the divine. Using the image of the petticoat, they continue a theme that began with Althaus-Reid in her chapter “Queer I Stand: Lifting the Skirts of God” (2004b). The work of Adélia Luzia Prado Freitas is featured extensively in this chapter, which brings this incredible confessional poet into the conversation. She was born in 1935 in Brazil and began writing at the age of forty. Until that age, she was a teacher, which also made her familiar with Paulo Freire’s pedagogy. Her poetry was translated into English (1990). Prado Freitas connects God and eroticism in ways that are crucially Latin American, as queer theologian Genilma Boehler (2010) states: God and the representation of God in an erotic perspective is very present in Adelia Prado’s texts, combining the biblical, the religious and the theological with the body, the erotic, and sensuality. (2010, 12)

The connection of theology and religious studies with other disciplines is essential in the TLL and, therefore, in different Latin American Liberation Theologies. As exemplified by the work of Cardoso Pereira and Carvalhaes, films, poetry, novels, and other art forms are placed side by side with anthropology, sociology, or philosophy, among other disciplines. That produces a much richer analysis that considers the diverse production of the human intellect and expands the theological gazes of queer

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theologians. The connection with the body and sexuality is crucial for an embodied TLL, something that the first generation of liberation theologians forgot when talking about poor people (Carvalhaes, 2005). As in Asia or Africa, Latin America is a diverse region in terms of languages, cultures, spiritualities, and ethnicities, and this is visible in the work of André Sidnei Musskopf, a queer theologian from Brazil. Through his prolific work in writing, teaching, and activism, he has become a beacon of queer theologies in Brazil and throughout Latin America. His first book was called Uma brecha no armário: Propostas para uma teologia gay [A gap in the closet: proposals for a gay theology] (2015 [2009]). There, he focuses his analysis on the experience of queer believers in Brazil to propose a queer theology that dialogues with the multiple religious experiences of believers. In a predominantly—but not exclusively—Roman Catholic context, the numerous religious affiliations— some of which are not cis-heteropatriarchal—suggest that the closet of religious experiences may have gaps that allow the existence of third spaces of negotiation and spiritual creativity. His proposal is innovative. One of the central elements of this book is that it details vital information to understand queer movements better and their connection to queer theory in Brazil. It is noteworthy that Musskopf chooses the term queer to articulate his theology in the Brazilian context. The terminology in Spanish and Portuguese is a crucial issue in working with both queer theory and queer theologies. The problem of how to define activism or sexual and gender diversity often becomes a central issue that blocks any possibility of dialogue. His second book is Via(da)gens teológicas: itinerários para uma teologia queer no Brasil [Queer theological journeys: itineraries for a queer theology in Brazil] (2012). In that piece, Musskopf has also significantly contributed to the grounding of queer theologies in Brazil. His analysis considers the elements present in Brazilian society, tracing them back to the time of the Portuguese colony. That period marked the cis-­heterosexual division of labor and the expectations of gender roles from cis-­ heteropatriarchy aided by Christianity. Because of this, Musskopf speaks of ambiguities in both religiosity and sexuality. While on the surface affirm one thing, underneath, they (re)produce another situation in intimacy. One of the prominent contributions of this work is the life stories of queer individuals who keep their spirituality alive along with their sexuality. At the same time, in his article “Ungraceful God: Masculinity and Images of God in Brazilian Popular Culture” (2009), Musskopf leads us

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to reflect on the representation of God in Brazilian popular culture. The connection between theology and popular culture is not new, as it is a crucial feature of the TLL. However, Musskopf marks a continuation of that line in queer theologies by addressing aspects that relate God to gender, especially notions of masculinity. A vital feature of the article is how Musskopf relates God to the images of the Gaúcho [cowboy] from the Rio Grande do Sul region—in southern Brazil—and the Malandro [slacker] from Rio de Janeiro—in western Brazil—as two iconic metaphors for masculinity. Musskopf’s article represents a magnificent connection of the divine with local, autochthonous representations of masculinity. He allows us to (re)construct an invisibilized archaeology of gender fluidity through the analysis. Finally, in his essay “Cruising (with) Marcella” (2010), Musskopf asserts that although Althaus-Reid and other queer theologians seem to “sexualize” theology, the truth is that all theologies—in one way or another—are sexual theologies. His analysis highlights the need to acknowledge this fact to demystify the assumption that only queer theologies engage the sexual. Since the origins of Christianity, the sexual has been present in some measure in theology/ies. Even if that presence was one of rejection or condemnation, the fact that there is such negativity is evidence that they took into account sex. In this sense, Musskopf joins other queer liberation theologians in Latin America who denounce the absence of sexuality in classical theologies and TLL.

A New Generation: Throwing Shade at a System That Continues to Oppress Queer Communities The work of Althaus-Reid, Ribas, and Musskopf, among other theologians, has borne fruit in forming a new generation of queer theologians in the continent. On two occasions—2015 and 2019—this generation also elaborated statements on the relevance of queer theologies in the Latin American context. In his book Mundo de las princesas: Hermenéutica y teología queer [World of princesses: hermeneutics and queer theology] (2011), Darío García Garzón connects philosophy and hermeneutics in order to examine not only the emergence of queer theologies but also the critique and destabilization of cis-heteronormative theologies in Latin America. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein [being there], García Garzón points to the process of “becoming” as a hermeneutical tool for

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understanding the fluidity of sexual and gender diversity. Taking the Marxist critique of capitalism as an ally, the author states: In this sense, a queer theology would proclaim itself anti-gay as negation in the movement of non-synthetic dialectical circularity, and a de-construction of the captivities of the gay world, through liberation and new difference. […] The queer perspective in theology would be a way of seeing from the ontological sense of a posture of the existential: a way of being, as a habitus vitae, a disposition of life with a transcendental, salvific sense and praxis of liberation, in the occurrence of the ease of the contemporary Latin American world. (García Garzón, 2011, 106 and 107; emphasis in the original)

At the same time, his analysis focuses on how this impacts, shapes, and enriches the understanding of the divine. Significantly, he examines the situation of humanity concerning the Divinity. Thus, García Garzón (2011) concludes: […] [A] queer theology will consist of retracing what has been walked, along the paths opened and traversed in the forests of the trajectories traveled in the imbrication between theology, religion, and sexuality, from the horizon of the gaze of a prophetic and liberating theology. (2011, 110)

On the other hand, it is noteworthy that—together with queer theologians and ministers in Latin America—García Garzón denounces the deep-rooted resistance against the religious on the part of LGBTIQ+ activism across the continent. Many activists reject outrightly any connection to religious or theological aspects. That situation is the result of often unreflected conceptions of secularism, anticlericalism, and anti-Roman Catholicism: Given the resistance of some LGBT activists and scholars, as well as some social scientists to incorporate the issue of theology into their analyses, it seems that their understandings obey the synonymy between [Roman] Catholic religious institution and dominant theology, as well as with hegemonic morality. Moreover, because it underlies an understanding of theology as a set of dogmas, from the perspective of a positivized theological rationalism, legislator of a dominant ecclesial and social order. Placing this issue on the table of theologians in dialogue with activists, LGBT scholars, and social scientists is of vital importance because it is about addressing humanism in the facticity of the contemporary world manifested in its contradictions. (García Garzón, 2011, 31)

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García Garzón’s work is dense and affluent because he enters into little-­ traveled paths of Latin American thought in his objective of relating philosophy, theology, and queer theory. However, therein lies its unique contribution to Latin American queer theologies. It is vital to mention the connection that highlights the place of faith and the often invisibilized experiences of queer believers. On the other hand, Talita Tavares in her article “As Igrejas Inclusivas prescindem de teologias que tratem da sexualidade? Uma discussão na ótica das atuais Igrejas Inclusivas brasileiras” [Do Inclusive Churches dispense with theologies that deal with sexuality? A discussion in the optics of current Brazilian Inclusive Churches] (2015) examines the situation of inclusive churches in Brazil. This author asserts that—by not considering homosexuality as a sin— Inclusive Churches seem to occupy a place of redemption for queer people. She points out that queer theology(s) have developed discussions on power relations in which genders and sexualities were—and are—continuously produced. Therefore, she highlights the necessity to analyze to what extent the dialogue between Brazilian Inclusive Churches and queer theology(s) can contribute critical reflections on the different practices within these institutions. One of Tavares’ (2015) findings is that—in some cases—there is a homonormativization operating within these churches: These norms of behavior instituted within inclusive churches underscore the most common problem of any institution: the interest in control of the body! It seems very difficult to escape this control in any institutional setting that attempts to organize its practices in a certain way. And to say this even assumes a pessimistic view of institutions. But let us think that if they were to engage in bringing discussions that would serve as ammunition for critical thinking, control would certainly pulverize and perhaps promote not order. Still, the relevant disorder is provoked by those who question themselves, their practices, the contexts surrounding them and even pass through them, etc. (2015, 102)

It is challenging to admit that even religious institutions that honor and respect gender and sexual diversity assume cis-hetero/homonormative positions in the censorship and control of their faithful. However, this is a tangible reality. According to the author, the solution to this is the decolonization and deconstruction of these hegemonic positions:

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These and the other cases cited above strongly suggest that it is not just the failure to condemn homosexuality in inclusive churches. It turns out that people are still alienated in the same way if they do not think critically about their problems. My possible contribution to this work may be to think that the need not to control bodies and incite reflections that destabilize normativity is the point! In this sense, discussion of theologies that address issues of gender and sexuality in the religious context is very likely to be of great value. Clearly, it may not resolve all the institutional problems in the religious context, and, for that reason, I would not present queer theology(ies) as a medicine that would cure all ills. It advances issues of sexuality while providing leaders and believers with reflections as critical as those developed in queer studies. That would serve as a clear obstacle to uncritical obedience to the institutional norms created by conservative leaders of some inclusive churches. (…) The understanding is that such discussions are equally crucial in other religious spheres, apart from inclusive churches. (Tavares, 2015: 104; emphasis in original)

The counterfactual of the liberation sought by religious organizations of sexual and gender diversity is an aspect that deserves further analysis. It is vital not to repeat past mistakes that produced the exodus and sexualization of queer believers who left—or were expulsed from—traditional churches. In 2019, Lisa Isherwood and Hugo Córdova Quero hosted a symposia at the University of Winchester under the title “Fetish Boots and Running Shoes 2: Latin American and Asian Perspectives.” The goal of the event involved gathering eight scholars—four from Asia and four from Latin America—working at the forefront of the legacy of Althaus-Reid. Fruit of that symposia, Isherwood and Córdova Quero edited The Indecent Theologies of Marcella Althaus-Reid: Voices from Asia and Latin America (2021), a collection that gathered the papers presented at the symposia. In that collection of essays, we find the chapter by Beatriz Febus Pérez entitled “The Sexual Subject in Queer Theologies: Implications for a Latin American Queer Theology of Liberation?” (2021). In that paper, she identifies the main critiques advocated by queer theory to analyze how “the sexual subject” makes queer theologies. Thus, she states: The sexual subject of queer theory makes queer theologies by revisiting and deconstructing aspects of the Christian faith that have been considered part of the “heteronormatively sacred” (Córdova Quero 2015). It can use the

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resources of the hermeneutical circle of sexual suspicion, to rescue the sexual and erotic elements denied by traditional theologies. (Febus Pérez, 2021, 138)

In this way, the author also relates TLL to queer theologies to propose a proper Latin American queer Liberation Theology. Febus Pérez (2021) concludes: The emergence of the sexual subject in the queer theory has implications for theology and for TLL. It invites us to reflect on our ideas of God, to whom we have ascribed the characteristic of masculine, of Father, to question the heteropatriarchal control over female sexuality and the so-called “virginal virtue,” with the usual submission of the feminine to the masculine and its repercussions in the relations of couple, that is to say the control on the bodies and the sexuality, as well as in other areas. This new sexual subject from the margins promotes changes in the discourses of demonization about this population with sexual practices outside the heteronormativity and the eventual acceptance of these in the churches. It also questions the way in which classical theologies have traditionally interpreted the sacred texts. (2021, 143–144)

The author joins other queer theologians in the continent with the challenge to destabilize and subvert the foundations of cis-­heteropatriarchy. They do so by embracing how cis-heteropatriarchy has affected and hampered religious experiences and theological reflections. In the same collection we find the work of Damián Nicolás de la Puente. In his paper titled “Taking Marcella Althaus-Reid Into the Alleys: Towards an Incarnated Indecent Theology in La Rioja, Argentina” (2021), he dares to think about how Althaus-Reid’s legacy may find its root in a particular context. De la Puente finds that currently, the queer movement militancy in the province of La Rioja in Argentina estranges itself from the Roman Catholic Church and any other religious institution. That is a painful situation faced by LGBTIQ+ activists throughout the Latin American continent who profess a particular faith. The violence—symbolic, verbal, psychological—that they endure often hamstring their commitment and activism. De la Puente (2021) notes: (…) [T]he queer movement criticizes the Roman Catholic Church as an institution since it condemns the loving relationships between people of the same sex, equal marriage and written laws that are conquests of this group

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in the last decade. (…) Others severely criticize the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the constitution of the State and society (…). One thing is always evident in the criticism: it is a common understand- ing that there is a difference in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and the common of the faithful. Therefore, the objection is always directed to the top because this is the one that makes the deci- sions and is more reactionary to the changes that occur in civil society. (2021, 106)

The criticism is always evident: it is well-extended in different sectors of Argentinean society. Therefore, this author’s analysis focuses on the possibility that Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology can become an ally of the militancy of sexual and gender diversity. De la Puente (2021) offers three proposals that we should consider for this. First, to recognize “(…) the diversity of inclusive churches that exist in the country, which positively value gender and sexually diverse people. [And they] become places of liberation and resistance” (2021, 109). Second, to bring into the discussion the “(…) different ‘Catholicisms’” (2021, 109) as a way of destabilizing the hegemony that the Roman Catholic Church has over Christianity, the ecclesial realm, and the Catholic tradition. Finally, deconstruct and “(…) demystify the fals(ifi)e(d) binary of religion vs. sexual diversity” (p. 111) through which society attempts to maintain both aspects—religion and sexuality—as two trenches in a constant fight. The contribution of De la Puente, a member of the Ancient Church of the Americas (IADLA)—an ecumenical and interreligious church across the continent—is vital. It shifts the focus from the Roman Catholic Church’s hegemony to a queer theology that recognizes the spirituality and theologizing of individuals and communities who are gender and sexually diverse in the footsteps of any Christian tradition. Finally, Ana Esther Pádua Freire (2021) takes us onto a different route. Called “Dirty Martini: Toasting with Marcella Althaus-Reid,” the paper narrates the first queer worship service of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC BH) of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The event marked a shift in how to conceive and organize worship services in Latin America. The arrangement of the sanctuary—laid out as a bar—invited parishioners to breach the divide between sacred and profane by interlacing a religious ceremony to the familiar scene of the gay bars. The whole event deeply embraced Althaus-Reid’s proposal of an indecent theology that is not afraid to be controversial, counter-cultural, and cutting-edge. In the end, to be genuinely indecent!

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Reflecting on the relation between Althaus-Reid’s proposal and its concretization amid MCC BH, Pádua Freire (2021) concludes: MCC BH singled out this perverted proposal through openness to experience. What was perceived in the queer worship service was that—through destabilizing the categories of traditional theological doing—Queer Studies approached MCC BH. They did it not only by the new hermeneutic proposals of queer theology but also by new religious subjects. Those subjects created another religiosity from the affirmation of identity that considered the corporeality and sexuality of their particular experiences. (2021, 20)

The chapter highlights a tension underneath all versions of queer theologies in Latin America, namely the connection between the theological reflection and the pastoral, liturgical, and ecclesiological praxis of queer believers. It defies and challenges inclusive churches and queer believers to follow necessary steps to unlearn and question the traditionally learned truths. Concurrently, it invites to denaturalize and criticize the essentialized truths, thus beginning searching for answers. The proposals of queer theologies and theologians in Latin America push believers and communities toward a revolutionary and scandalous ecclesiology. That queer and revolutionary ecclesiology embraces and roots in the daily life of each one of the individuals that integrate the community of faith. Unlike cis-­ heteronormatized environments, in these communities, any difference is not a threat but a communitarian strength, a sign of “unity in diversity” (Córdova Quero, 2018). Queering and decolonizing ecclesiology implies that different individuals begin to have a place at the table. Regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, or sexual desire, each believer is an equal member of the body of Christ. The work of Pádua Freire requires a continuation as ecclesiology is a pivotal element to move from reflection to praxis.

Conclusion Because theologies emerge in a cultural and social framework, they anchor in time and space. In other words, they do not escape the multiple maneuvers of the cis-heteropatriarchal system. Therefore, the construction of queer Liberation Theologies at different moments in the past two decades bears the marks of that reality. Moreover, both queer theologies and theologians immerse entirely in the cis-heteropatriarchal system to defy and resist it.

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Queer theologians and communities in Latin America must consider that doing queer theologies and analyzing situations where religion intersects with gender, sexuality, and other socio-cultural aspects always imply risks. Many queer theologians and communities in Latin America are precarious concerning their colleagues in the Global North. That is because their lives are often in danger. Cis-heterosexual allies often face the same situation, especially when they do not conform to the dictum of cis-heteropatriarchalism. Therefore, the exercise of doing queer Liberation Theologies in Latin America is also a prophetic task. Althaus-Reid, the noble house of La Virtual QTL, and the new generation of queer theologians continue the path opened by TLL, but they do so as a continuation and a critique. The history of the struggles of queer theologians and communities in Latin America shows that even liberationist spaces such as those related to TLL could display covert cis-­ heteropatriarchy. Despite the struggles, queer theologians in Latin America continue to vogue new ways of becoming and embracing liberation.

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Cardoso Pereira, N., & Carvalhaes, C. (2010). God’s petticoat and capitalism-full fashion. In L.  Isherwood & M.  D. Jordan (Eds.), Dancing theology in fetish boots: Essays in honour of Marcella Althaus-Reid (pp. 240–253). SCM Press. Carvalhaes, C. (2005). Oppressed bodies don’t have sex: The blind spots of bodily and sexual discourses in the construction of subjectivity in Latin American liberation theology. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Philadelphia, November 19–22. Córdova Quero, H. (2010). Risky affairs: Marcella Althaus-Reid indecently queering Juan Luis Segundo’s hermeneutic circle propositions. In L. Isherwood & M. D. Jordan (Eds.), Dancing theology in fetish boots: Essays in honour of Marcella Althaus-Reid (pp. 207–218). SCM Press. Córdova Quero, H. (2018). Sin tabú: Diversidad sexual y religiosa en América Latina. Red Latinoamericana y del Caribe por la Democracia / GEMRIP Ediciones. De La Puente, D.  N. (2021). Taking Marcella Althaus-Reid into the alleys: Towards an incarnated indecent theology in La Rioja, Argentina. In L.  Isherwood & H.  C. Quero (Eds.), The indecent theologies of Marcella Althaus-Reid: Voices from Asia and Latin America (pp. 92–115). Routledge. Febus Pérez, B. (2021). The sexual subject in queer theologies: Implications for a Latin American queer theology of liberation? In L. Isherwood & H. C. Quero (Eds.), The indecent theologies of Marcella Althaus-Reid: Voices from Asia and Latin America (pp. 128–147). Routledge. García Garzón, D. (2011). Mundo de las princesas: Hermenéutica y teología queer. Torres Asociados. Gebara, I. (1999). Longing for running water: Ecofeminism and liberation. Fortress Press. González, R., & D’Amico, N. (2006). Love in times of dictatorships: Memoirs from a gay minister from Buenos Aires. In M. Althaus-Reid (Ed.), Liberation theology and sexuality (pp. 179–188). Ashgate. Guzmán, M. (1997). Pa’ La Escuelita con mucho Cuida’o y por la Orillita’: A journey through the contested terrains of the nation and sexual orientation. In F. Negron-Muntaner & R. Grosfoguel (Eds.), Puerto Rican jam: Rethinking colonialism and nationalism (pp. 209–228). University of Minnesota Press. Hunt, M. (1994). Fierce tenderness: A feminist theology of friendship. Crossroad. Isherwood, L. (1999). Liberating Christ: Exploring the Christologies of contemporary liberation movements. Pilgrim Press. Isherwood, L. (2000). The good news of the body: Sexual theology and feminism. Bloomsbury Publishing. Isherwood, L., & Quero, H. C. (Eds.). (2021). The indecent theologies of Marcella Althaus-Reid: Voices from Asia and Latin America. Routledge. Isherwood, L., & Stuart, E. (1998). Introducing body theology (Introductions in feminist theology series). Pilgrim Press.

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Islamic Liberation Theology and the Decolonial Turn: A Historical and Theoretical Introduction Iskander Abbasi

The story of coloniality in many ways starts with Islamicate civilization. There is no 1492 without three centuries of the Crusades preceding that moment. The Crusades (1100–1400  CE) were a period in history that fortified the socio-economic and epistemic origins of what later became known as modern Europe. Fanon stated in the Wretched of the Earth, “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World” (1963, 102). Well, what created Europe? Europe was psychologically and materially born out of the Crusades (Asad, 2004, 5). The Crusades were launched in large part against the racial-religious figure of the Muslim and Islamicate1 1  Using Islamicate versus Islamic civilization signifies that said civilization was constitutive of many non-Islamic cultures, peoples, and institutions—such as Eastern Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, non-Abrahamic Traditional African Religions, or Hindus—yet still encapsulated by an overall Islamic socio-cultural and political framework. See Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam (1974) for further reference.

I. Abbasi (*) University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_8

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civilization (Mastnak, 2002). The Crusades’ offspring was what we now call the modern West or what Decolonial Studies describes as the modern/colonial world-system. Like others who experienced modernity from below, Muslims have long resisted the PLATO-to-NATO narrative of Western civilization (Sayyid, 2014, 37). There are many instances of Muslims engaging in liberatory theologies against the invasion of their lives and lands by racist/sexist colonial/crusading merchants, militants, and explorers—whether it was forcibly converted crypto-Muslim Moriscos post-1492 fighting the so-called Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula (Green-Mercado, 2012, 292–293); Malabari Muslims post-1498 struggling against Vasco Da Gama’s colonial exploits of the South Asian coast of Malabar (Kunju, 1989, 131); or the West African Muslim Mandinka peoples fighting their way on slave ships and on plantations in the Americas (Gomez, 1994, 694). While being inspired by the life of the Prophets and various struggles throughout post-Revelatory history, Islamic Liberation Theology (ILT) as a discourse proper is a term coined in the latter half of the twentieth century. The conversation around Islamic Liberation Theology and Decoloniality— like the broader global “decolonial turn” (Maldonado-­Torres, 2011)—has greatly increased in the last two decades. While detailing the long history of Islamic resistance against coloniality is a worthy endeavor, it is not the focus of this chapter. This chapter rather focuses on two issues, (1) first, an alternative historiography of coloniality from the perspective of the Muslim world2 which highlights a few ways that the story of coloniality must expand3 in order to more fully grasp coloniality’s historical and theoretical 2  By “Muslim world” we largely mean Islamicate civilization and communities, whether it be in the traditional homelands of many Muslims or cultural non-Muslims such as Arab Christians and Jews from the East, or that of newer homelands in the West. For further definitions of the turn, see Cemil Aydin’s The Idea of the Muslim World (2017), Zareena Grewal’s Islam is a Foreign Country (2014), or my article on The Maydan “Why the Muslim World Matters” (2020). 3  From a decolonial Muslim perspective, this deconstruction of Western historiography— in effect, one of the functions of naming and framing coloniality—is part of a field of study inaugurated by Egyptian Muslim philosopher and liberation theologian Hassan Hanafi (d. 2021) who called for the development of ‘ilm al-istighrab, or the science of Occidentalism, that is, the critical study of the West to counter the historical discipline of Orientalism (Hanafi, 2012). This act of reversing the gaze of who studies and writes history and about whom is indeed part of the long decolonial turn, deprovincialization of non-Western thought, and pluriversal knowledge production as informed by Muslim scholars analyzing the West.

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development and (2) second, a brief ­introduction to the discourse of Islamic Liberation Theology (ILT), highlighting its main thinkers, influences, and theoretical objectives. The chapter aims to provide readers with a general understanding of these two themes and provide references for further research. While the two themes seem distinct in certain ways, there are many ways that their historical and theoretical development run parallel. The conversation on what defines coloniality is one steeped in a social analysis of how power at large works in the modern world. The development of Liberation Theologies is a response to that power structure from the perspectives of those involved in the decolonial turn.

Coloniality and the Muslim World The coloniality of power is fundamentally tied to 1492 and Europe’s encounter with the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean through systems of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Grosfoguel, 2011; Mignolo, 2009, 2012; Gordon, 2009, 2011; Wynter, 1994, 2003). However, the story of coloniality is not only fundamentally tied to that date and those geographies. When it comes to the broader relationship between the West and the Rest, particularly the Muslim world, we see that the system of coloniality as understood from an Atlantic-Americas-centric view has some limitations. There are three ways the coloniality of power must be expanded upon in order to more fully grasp its origins and rise: (1) first, as an extension of the Western Christendom’s medieval crusading civilizing mission which viewed Muslims as its primary political enemies, (2) second, accounting for coloniality that travelled East and South via Vasco Da Gama route in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, (3) third, the rise of coloniality in North and East of the Muslim world, especially in relation to imperial Russia/Soviet Union, and later its internalization in non-Western places like China and India in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. The aim of this new historiography of coloniality is an attempt to build upon pre-existing pluriversal dialogues as to the nature and structure of the coloniality of power.

The Crusades: The Foundation of Coloniality Coloniality was, by and large, a product of the Crusades (Cardinal & Megret, 2018, 1–5). When Pope Urban II (d. 1099) proclaimed Deus Vult! to launch the first crusade in 1095 CE, a civilizational social order

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was set in motion that eventually laid the foundations for coloniality and a millennium of Western crusading (Garaudy, 1999, 3). While the Crusades proper only lasted three to four centuries, its social effects continue to be felt until today (Mastnak, 2002; Majid, 2009). The foundation of modern Europe’s racial consciousness was set during this time with anyone who was a “non-white” and “non-Christian” viewed as an ontologically inferior human being whose land and labor deserved exploitation. Muslims were the primary political enemy of Western Christendom during this time given they were the masses at the frontiers of Western Christendom disallowing it from expansion.4 All of the theories regarding civilizational inferiority from Western Christendom centered around the hegemonic character of the Muslim enemy, with other non-whites and non-Christians also being seen as threats, albeit nowhere near in number to Muslims as a totality (Abbasi, 2020a, 20). Some even argue that the socio-political order which led to the Enlightenment and modernity proper would have continued without Europeans having encountered the Americas5, meaning, the discovery of the Americas was not a “break” from the past, but its continuation. When Arab Muslims were responding to Western imperialism, the Zionist colonization of Palestine, and the wider movements of decolonization in the twentieth century, they analyzed the medieval Crusades as the first stage of European colonialism, as a type of isti’mar mubakkar (i.e., “early” or “proto-colonialism”) (Hillenbrand, 1999, 590). The extent to which this anti-Islamic crusading spirit of the medieval world affected European expansion going West is an issue that mainstream 4  In a sense, the figure of the Muslim and Islam was viewed as external to the body-politic of Western Christendom. Internal to Western Christendom, many crusades were also launched between white Christian “brothers,” with the crusades acting as a source of internal “tribal” fratricide between perceived heretical sects and powers. This led to the idea that “peace” needed to flourish internal to Western Christendom by way of external war against the primary enemy—Islam (Mastnak, 2002, 41–42). 5  Mastnak writes, “The basic structure of the argument regarding the extra-European worlds and peoples, canonically formulated in the mid-thirteenth century, was not shaken by the discovery of America. The discovery was not a break with the past. The immediate impact of the descumbrimiento [discovery] on Europe was all but revolutionizing.” Elliott has convincingly argued that, “at least so far as fundamental political transformations are concerned”—“[t]he refusal of states to accept the continuance of any form of subordination to a supra-national ecclesiastical authority; the absolutist tendencies of sixteenth-century princes; the development of new theories and practices to regulate relations between independent sovereign states—all these developments are entirely conceivable in a Europe which remained in total ignorance of the existence of America” (Mastnak, 1994, 138).

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Decolonial Studies has not sufficiently addressed (Abbasi, 2020a). In short, the Crusades created a military and civilizational social order which laid the conditions of possibility for the coloniality of power to develop under modernity.

Coloniality Going East: Da Gama’s Route 1492—the year when Christopher Columbus (d. 1506) “sailed the ocean blue” to begin Western Christendom’s expansion beyond its peninsular ghetto is a crucial historiographical date in Decolonial Studies. There is, however, another significant European explorer and conquistador who went East at the same time as Columbus went West. Vasco Da Gama (d. 1524) rounded the Cape of Southern Africa and landed on the South Asian coast of Malabar in 1498. What followed Da Gama was very similar to what followed Columbus—Europeans from many nations began to take over trade routes and attempt to colonize the land masses of Africa and Asia, as well as the seas of the Indian and Pacific Oceans (Cliff, 2013).6 Beyond explorers and military expansions, religious and mercantilist institutions were heavily involved in this process. The Catholic clerical order, the Jesuits, built networks that shared tactics of forcibly converting non-­ European natives to Christianity from the former Al-Andalus to the Americas, and to as far as South and Southeast Asia all within the sixteenth century (Abbasi, 2016). Trading companies—from Iberians to the British, Italians, Dutch, and French—began to form and change the directions of the markets and trade routes of land and sea of the old Muslim world in the

6  In Stuart Hall’s “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power” he argues there are two main events which caused Europe to break from its continental shell and expand: (1) first was early Portuguese explorations of the West African coast (1430–1498) and (2) second was Columbus’ voyages to the New World (Hall, 2007: 281). I would add a third: the Portuguese explorer, Vasco de Gama’s (d. 1524) rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, voyages across the Indian Ocean and arrival in South Asia in 1498 (Cliff, 2013). What is unique about these three events is that Islamophobia was one of the main drives in each context. In each instance of the three aforementioned European expansions, the explorers, colonizers, and their missions were guided by a desire of crusades, commerce, and conquest that always had active the Muslim as a political enemy who must be overcome and exploited in order for Western Christians to fulfill their spiritual destinies, economic imperialism, and salvific goals of reconquering the Holy Land (Cliff, 2013; Hall, 2007: 283; Hamdani, 1979, 1981).

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East (Lewis, 1958: 118).7 Europeans were not initially widely successful in terms of overt colonial governance in the East. However, they were able to start building the socioeconomic and political basis—alongside their adventures in the West—for formal mass colonization in the East in later modernity (eighteenth to twentieth centuries). Da Gama’s trail serves as a marker that laid the foundations for coloniality in all its facets—racial, gendered, class, ecological, and so on—from the sixteenth century onward in the East.

Coloniality to the North and East: Russia, Then China and India Though understudied, the history of Russia’s contribution to coloniality has had global impacts. In the traditional self-understanding of the modern West, Russia has been viewed as a type of eastern Spain and Moscow as a “third Rome.”8 Like other “dirty white” countries in southern and eastern Europe, Russia has been viewed through the lens of intra-imperial difference (i.e., still within the confines of white Christian empire) but not colonial difference (the divide between the West and Rest) (Tlostanova, 2010, 171). Muslims and other Indigenous non-Slavic peoples in Asia— especially Central Asia and Siberia—have served as a primary antagonism for Russian and Soviet body politics (ibid.). All the same dynamics in the relationship between race and religion in Europe—from people with “dirty” Muslim or Jewish heritage (a la moriscos and conversos in Spain) to destroying of mosques and waqfs (Islamic charitable endowments),  The Turkish scholar, Omar Talib, in 1625 CE remarked upon the reversal of the roles in the spice trade: “Now the Europeans have learnt to know the whole world; they send their ships everywhere and seize important ports. Formerly the goods of India, Sind and China used to come to the Suez, and were distributed by Muslims to all the world. But now, these goods are carried on Portuguese, Dutch and English ships to Frangistan [Europe], and are spread all over the world from there. What they do not need themselves they bring to Istanbul and other Islamic lands, and sell it for five times the price, thus earning much money. For this reason gold and silver are becoming scarce in the lands of Islam” (Lewis, 1958: 118). 8  Interesting to note is that the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans (1453 CE) seems to have reconfigured the identity of Eastern Christendom. For centuries prior to 1453, Russian civilization had accepted the Byzantine Empire as the legitimate orthodox Christian heir to classical Roman Empire, with Constantinople operating as the “2nd Rome” or “third Jerusalem” (Thackery & Findling, 2012: 202). Within a century after Constantinople’s fall, Russia assumed authority for Eastern Christendom and Orthodoxy; Moscow became known as the “Third Rome” or “Northern Rome”; and Russian emperors began referring to themselves as “New Constantines” in reference to the Roman emperor who made Constantinople a co-­capital along with Rome (ibid.) 7

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epistemicide, and denying access to Islamic pilgrimage sites—occurred in Russia’s Muslim colonies (Bennigson & Broxup, 1983, 12–16). The secular Soviet project continued and intensified this antagonism, including Muslims who had initially tried to join the Soviet project on their own pan-Islamist terms though were rejected by the Islamophobic Soviet state and civil society (Bennigson, 1980).9 Coloniality is global and has therefore been internalized in other non-­ Western locations. Nearly all of the Muslim-majority countries of the East uphold coloniality through capitalist postcolonial nation-states interwoven into economies of dependence on the Global North, and increasingly China in the twenty-first century (Sayyid & Vakil, 2010).10 Two places to note coloniality spreading in the East on a mass scale as it relates to Islam/ Muslims are modern China and India. China’s engagement with Muslims dates to the emergence of Islam itself in the seventh century CE (Frankel, 2021: 7). There were less systemic antagonisms between Chinese empires and Islam prior to the twentieth century (Yi, 2010: 190),11 but the ­modern  Sultan Galiev (d. 1940), a prominent Tatar Pan-Islamist and Muslim National Communist of the time, had warned others from the Third World that Soviet Communism was not intrinsically different from Russian Tsarism and that eventually it would become a tool of Russian imperialism (Bennigson & Broxup, 1983, 99; Mabruk, 2006: 146; Renault, 2014). 10  Islamophobia in majority-Muslim countries refers to the disciplining of the political aspect of Islam, that is, it is a form of racist governmentality which attempts to control— through Islamophobia and Islamophilia—what articulations of Islamic political agency are constitutive of the social sphere, or not (Sayyid, 2015). As James argues, the political ontology of race and religion is based on political representation and agency. Political ontology has to do with the agency of said group in determining the political salience of that group’s racial or religious identity (James, 2012). 11  Yi argues that “Chinese culturalism” has been a classical force that views non-Chinese as more or less civilized based on their adherence to Chinese Han values, such as the Confucian religio-social system or learning the Chinese language (2010: 186–187). Both Yi and Polk note that although these insider-outsider civilizational logics had existed in relation to Muslims since China’s first contact with Islam, it is through the Manchurian Qing regime of the Last Empire (1644–1911) where the view of the Muslim Other becomes more centralized (2010: 190; Polk, 2018: 418–434). The Muslim as “rebel” becomes more solidified during this period, leading to a normative discursive process in which Chinese writing about Muslims over the past 300 years has shared the theme of “violence” and has been articulated by “Chinese Confucian, nationalist and communist alike” (Yi, 2010: 190). The centralization of modern/colonial state-sponsored anti-religious propaganda and policy during Chinese Communist rule, in addition to recent Chinese renditions of War on Terror Islamophobia share more in common with Soviet and post-Soviet Russian Islamophobia (Yi, 2010; Byler, 2017a, b). For Yi, it is both age-old Chinese culturalism as well as importation of Eurocentric ideas of the secular and War on Terror that collide to define Chinese Islamophobia. 9

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state and Communist period in China in the twentieth century have more properly indigenized a form of coloniality which targets Islam and Muslims (Byler, 2017a, 2017b).12 Communist China developed a problem with Muslim institutions and peoples who have not conformed to forced sinofication. The current ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Uighur people are a part of this node of global coloniality and Islamophobia which has reared its head into China in the last century (ibid.). Regarding India, even during the British Raj period (1858–1947 CE), many Muslims started to feel that they would not be treated as equals under a supposed “secular” Indian nation-state because of the colonially inspired racist forms of governmentality expressed in relation to Muslim minorities (Shaikh, 1986: 539–557). At the same time, the colonial reconstruction of the caste system in South Asia through the global racial paradigm made the issue of casteism an internal mechanism of Indian socio-political development (Dirks, 2001). British colonialism reorganized India’s caste system with the help of local upper-caste elites to a new racial regime in order to maintain the local indigenous power structure without a change, that is, by marginalizing the indigenous and lower-caste people of India. The otherization of Muslims in India has worked to keep the caste system unchanging, which becomes the new “racism” of South Asia (Ansari, 2015, 40). The threat of the Muslim enemy has been effectively mobilized by the colonial forces and the post-colonial regime to divide the masses by pointing to the supposed extremal enemy of Islam. 12  Under the conditions of modernity, racism operates as a system of governmentality that controls racialized groups through forms of philia and phobia (i.e., anti-Semitism and philo-­ Semitism; Negrophilia and Negrophobia; Islamophilia and Islamophobia). In China, this has played out in relation to Islam by way of playing the “good Muslim-bad Muslim” card against the more ethnically Chinese Hui Muslim population and that of the more Central Asian ethnic Uighur Muslim population in the Xinjiang region. During the Qing dynasty, the Hui Muslim population were viewed as the “bad Muslims” (via Islamophobia) and the Uighurs as the “good Muslims” (via Islamophilia) (Brophy, 2019). With the growth of Chinese nationalism in the Republican period (1912–1949), the Uighurs became “bad Muslims” due to their “separate” “non-Chinese” Central Asian culture and claims to independence for East Turkestan, while the Hui became “good Muslims” for being more culturally and linguistically Han Chinese (Brophy, 2019; Beech, 2014). Chinese adoption of the model of the secular nation-state toward the end of the Qing dynasty, the intensification of Chinese racism via Han-supremacy, the centuries-long adoption of colonial practices in the Xinjiang province (Xinjiang literally means “new frontier” and “colony” in Chinese), and the more recent creation of internment camps and black sites to imprison Uighur and other Muslim groups from the Xinjiang region all point toward the full-scale adoption of coloniality by the Chinese state (Byler et al., 2022).

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The post-colonial Indian nation-state creates an external other in the body of Muslims—through Islamophobia—and an internal other in the body of lowered castes—through casteism—to keep the colonially inspired upper-­ caste and upper-class hegemony intact.13 In short, when viewing the rise of coloniality from the lens of both East and West—from the Mediterranean, to the Atlantic, to the Indian and Pacific Oceans—the seeds of coloniality were planted during the medieval era, started to sprout in the sixteenth century across the world, and began to fully blossom from the eighteenth century until today. The Western and Eastern aspects of the sixteenth century point toward a burgeoning global order that was white, Christian, and male supremacist. The long sixteenth century saw the West (from Spain to Russia) start to expand and colonize Muslims and many others. Both the Western and Eastern fronts eventually secularized, particularly through the nation-state model. Bringing in these various time-periods and geographies further maps coloniality’s origins and rise. The work of decolonial scholarship from the Americas and Atlantic are important pillars, yet an engagement with the Muslim world furthers the boundaries and complexity of the decolonial toolset and historiography of coloniality at large. In terms of responses to coloniality, a new discourse emerged in the twentieth century, Liberation Theology, which sought to challenge this global power structure through the lens of both secular and religious sciences. Since its initial founding in a Latin American Christian context, many other religious traditions have also named their own forms of Liberation Theology in order to confront coloniality.

Islamic Liberation Theology: An Intellectual Genealogy Like many Christian liberation theologians would argue, Islamic Liberation Theology (ILT) has always existed. The Prophet Muhammad’s da’wah (lit. “call”) to Islam started as a movement to liberate both the self and society from the clutches of tyranny and idolatry. While there have always been liberationist movements in Islam, as there have been non-liberatory

13  Alongside global coloniality, on the Asian continent there are three cases of traditional colonialism still ongoing against predominantly Muslim populations—that of Palestinians by apartheid Israel, the Kashmiris by India, and the Uighurs by China.

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movements,14 the focus of this chapter is to briefly introduce a number of figures who have named their interpretation of Islam a form of Liberation Theology in the late post/modern moment of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Several authors have explicitly used the term Islamic Liberation Theology to name their projects and to systematize15 their approach on those grounds. These include South African Farid Esack16 (b. 1955), Indian Asghar Ali Engineer17 (d. 2013), Iranian-American Hamid 14  ILT seeks to understand a liberatory historiography internal to Islam, as well as against external oppressors. Iranian Muslim liberation theologian Ali Shariati once asked, “It is not sufficient to say that we must return to Islam. We must specify which Islam: That of Abu Zarr or that of Marwan, the ruler […] One is the Islam of Caliphate, of the palace, and of rulers. The other is the Islam of the people, of the exploited, and of the poor” (cited in Abrahamian, 1982, 14–15). Like Christian Liberation Theology locating Constantine’s statist imperialization of Christianity to the fourth century BC, ILT largely locates the beginnings of an oppressive imperial Islam to the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate in the mid-seventh to mid-­ eighth century CE. After the Prophet Muhammad’s demise, there was always a struggle as to which type of Islam was the more just and radical, in the sense of staying true to Islam’s original liberatory roots. Muslim liberation theologian Hassan Hanafi (d. 2021) states that under modern colonialism, ILT’s historiography is defined, in this order, by the fight against (1) external colonialism and (2) internal oppression (Hanafi, 2009). While a historiography of ILT internal to Islam is indeed valuable and necessary to articulate, it is not the focus of this chapter. 15   Many authors and Muslim practitioners have used the term “Islamic Liberation Theology” in a popular and non-systematic sense. While such contributions are not invaluable, they are not included here due to the need to lay out necessary standards and parameters for the discourse; or else, “anything goes.” 16  Esack is a South African Muslim liberation theologian who cut his teeth in the struggle against Apartheid South Africa. He served as Commissioner for Gender Equality in the Mandela-led government post-1994 and is an eminent scholar of Qur’anic Studies and ILT.  Esack’s Qur’an, Liberation, and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity Against Oppression (1996) is the authoritative text when it comes to defining ILT in contemporary Islam. Other notable ILT works of his include But Musa Went to Fir’aun (1989), Islam and AIDs (2009), and On Being a Muslim: Finding a Religious Path in the World Today (2009). 17  Engineer (1931–2013) was a pioneering Indian scholar, Muslim liberation theologian, social activist, and the author/editor of more than 50 books. He was both an activist and intellectual known for his profound commitment to social justice issues in Islam. He has written extensively on justice, liberation, gender, reform, peace, violence, and modernism for the audience in India and outside. Some of his ILT works include Islam and Liberation Theology (1990), Islam: Restructuring Theology (2012), and Islam and Muslims: A Critical Reassessment (1985).

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Dabashi18 (b. 1951), British Pakistani Shabbir Akhtar19 (b. 1960), and Egyptian Hassan Hanafi20 (d. 2021). These authors all published using this term in the English language without communication between each other. This is an interesting aspect of the ILT discourse, it has primarily come into spontaneous existence by Muslim thinkers and movements that communicate in English,21 as well as across religious sects internal to 18  Dabashi is a pre-eminent postcolonial scholar-activist who writes widely across the fields of Post and Decolonial Studies, Islamic Studies, Comparative Literature, Aesthetics, and Cinema Studies. His ILT works include Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (2005) and Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (2008). His works in the field of Post and Decolonial Studies include Can Non-Europeans Think? (2015) and Europe and its Shadows: Coloniality After Empire (2019). 19  Akhtar is a scholar and public intellectual who has written widely in the fields of Comparative Religion, Philosophy, and Islamic Studies. His ILT work is titled The Final Imperative: An Islamic Theology of Liberation (1991). Other notable works include Islam as Political Religion: The Future of an Imperial Faith (2010) and Be Careful with Muhammad!: The Salman Rushdie Affair (1989). Akhtar’s writing on ILT is more politically normative and share much in common with the general resistance theology of Pan-Islamism and political Islam, giving less attention to issues internal to Islam. 20  Hanafi was an Islamic philosopher and theologian who predominantly wrote in Arabic widely on Islamic Legal Theory (Usul al-Fiqh) and Spirituality (al-Tasawwuf), Biblical and Qur’anic Hermeneutics and Western epistemology and International Politics. His works on ILT include From Dogma to Revolution (min al-Aqidah ila al-Thawra) (1988); his editing and publishing of the journal the Islamic Left (al-Yasar al-Islami) (1981); and a few of his English works, Islam in the Modern World (1995) and Cultures and Civilizations: Conflict of Dialogue (2006) (Hashas, 2022). Hanafi and Shariati studied in Paris at the same time, and, like many of the Leftist Islamists of the time, engaged seriously with the Islamic tradition, Marxism, and Third World anti-colonial nationalisms of the time (Dabashi, 2013, 98). 21  Debates in theology among religious traditions have always been co-determinous and hybrid even as they are particular or autonomous. One of the early theological debates in Islam was about the created (makhluq) or uncreated (i.e., eternal, qadim) nature of the Qur’an. This debate was nearly identical to debates in early Christianity and specifically Christology concerning the created or uncreated nature of Jesus Christ (Esack, 2008). The cross-fertilizing of a term such as Liberation Theology between Christianity and Islam due to its intrinsic and/or utilitarian value is one fully affirmed by Muslim liberation theologians. English has historically been a Christian-centric language, but has slowly become a valid Islamic language, with much knowledge being produced on Islam in English by believing Muslims occurring in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the largest English-speaking populations are now in South Asia and Africa rather than the USA, Australia, or Europe.

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Islam. Two other thinkers to name as part of this core canon of Muslim liberation theologians, the Iranian Ali Shariati22 (d. 1977) and Black American Malcolm X23 (d. 1965). While they did not explicitly name their projects Liberation Theology, they (1) follow the same hermeneutical and intellectual trends as the authors mentioned and (2) are nearly always included in the canon by way of consensus among Muslim liberation theologians to be part of the manifestation of ILT in the twentieth century. This is the first generation of Muslim liberation theologians. The second generation of ILT scholars has emerged either by way of encountering the thinkers mentioned above personally or at least by way of continuing their intellectual discourse in their respective capacities. Of note in this generation are the Pakistani-Canadian Shadaab Rahemtullah,24  Ali Shariati was an Iranian Muslim revolutionary thinker and activist. He is widely credited as the ideologue of the Islamic revolution in Iran (1979). He studied in Paris engaging the traditions of secular and religious leftism and anti-imperial internationalism. Alongside Hanafi, he can be considered the Eastern equivalent of the Argentinian-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel. Shariati has been widely influential in contemporary Islamic thought with his works being translated into many languages. A few of his ILT works in English include On the Sociology of Islam (1979), Religion vs. Religion (2000), Fatima Is Fatima (1981), and What Is to Be Done (1986). Many of his works can be accessed here in English: http://www. shariati.com/bio.html. The best biography of Shariati is Ali Rahnema’s An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shariati (1998). 23  El-Hajj Malik El-Shabaaz, otherwise known as Malcolm X, was a Blackamerican Muslim revolutionary. Alex Haley’s world renowned Autobiography of Malcolm X is one site of reference for his Liberation Theology interpretation of Islam; many people across the world have converted to Islam simply by way of reading the Autobiography. It is widely known that the founder of Black Christian Liberation Theology, James Cone (d. 2018), listed Malcolm X as one of his main influences. For reference on how his works have been interpreted in light of ILT, see Dabashi’s Islamic Liberation Theology (2008), Sohail Daulatzai’s Black Star, Crescent Moon (2012), maytha alhassen’s unpublished PhD dissertation To Tell What the Eye Beholds (2017), and Yussuf Naim Kly’s The Black Book: The True Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (1988). 24  Rahemtullah is a lecturer at the University of Edinburg (UK) and author of Qur’an of the Oppressed: Liberation Theology and Gender Justice in Islam (2017), the forthcoming Islam and Native American Suffering: Indigenising Islamic Liberation Theology, and “The Qur’an, the Bible, and the Indigenous Peoples of Canaan: An Anti-Colonial Muslim Reading in Resistance” to Empire and Militarization: Reclaiming the Sacred (2020). 22

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Indian Ashraf Kunnummal,25 Iranian-Canadian Siavash Saffari,26 Bosnian Adis Duderija,27 Turkish Ihsan Eliacik (b. 1961),28 Spanish Abdennur Prado,29 and the Palestinian-American author of this chapter.30 The second generation of Muslim liberation theologians, while seemingly small in number and as geographically distant from each other as the first generation, has built on the works of the first generation in various ways. Like the first generation, the second generation has come to ILT spontaneously, as a reflection of their praxis of Islam and/or social struggle, and without any 25  Kunnummal is an Indian scholar activist from Kerala who has been involved in anti-­ Islamophobia and anti-casteism activism in grassroots movements in India in the early twenty-first century. His PhD dissertation is entitled “A Critical Decolonial Reading of Liberation, in the Islamic Liberation Theology Works of Asghar Ali Engineer, Shabbir Akhtar, Farid Esack and Hamid Dabashi” (2018). Other ILT-inspired articles include “Asghar Ali Engineer and the Shifting Positions on 11 September 2001 Debates on Islam and Violence” (2019) and “The Decolonial Turn in Liberation Theology: Between Theory and Practice” (2020). 26  Saffari is Iranian-Canadian scholar and associate professor at Seoul National University. He has published extensively on the works of Ali Shariati and Neo-Shariati discourse in English. His ILT works include Beyond Shariati: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism and Islam in Iranian Political Thought (2017) and the co-edited Unsettling Colonial Modernity in Islamicate Contexts (2017). He also has a number of articles dealing with ILT and Decolonial Studies which can be found here: https://snu-kr.academia.edu/SiavashSaffari/ CurriculumVitae 27  Duderija is a scholar of Bosnian origin and currently Senior Lecturer in the Study of Islam and Society at Griffith University in Australia. His works on ILT include The Imperatives of Progressive Islam (2018). 28  Eliacik is a Turkish Muslim thinker and activist. He has published exclusively in Turkish, is not well-known outside of Turkey, and has gained popularity in recent years through his participation in Islamic anti-capitalist movements in Turkey and their opposition toward the neoliberal agenda of the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party). Like many Muslim liberation theologians of the first generation, he was heavily influenced by the mixture of Pan-Islamism, socialism and anti-colonial nationalism yet found his own expression of faith on the Muslim Left (2018). According to Ingleby, Eliacik “has over twenty books to his name, hosts a weekly talk show, and continues to organize protests that aim to unite religious and secular critics of the AKP” (2019). 29  Abdennur Prado (b. 1967) is a Spanish Muslim writer and activist. He was the co-­ founder and president of the Catalan Islamic Council (2005–2011). His works on ILT include “The Need for an Islamic Liberation Theology” (2012) and El islam como anarquismo mistico (2010). More information on his works and life can be found here: https:// es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdennur_Prado and https://second.wiki/wiki/abdennur_prado 30  Abbasi is a Palestinian-American activist and currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Johannesburg. His PhD dissertation is entitled “On Being a Steward of the Earth: Towards an Islamic Eco-liberation Theology.”

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formal or centralized network. This piece is the first attempt to systematize these two generations as a continuation of twentieth century manifestation of ILT.  While the list of names above is indeed non-exhaustive, it serves as an inevitably imperfect horizon for setting the terms of debate about what is considered an ILT canon. ILT is arguably not defined as a cult of personality around certain academic individuals. It is indeed a discourse that primarily arises from social movement and praxis and is critical of the idea that elitist intellectuals are the beginning and end of ILT. Yet, for the sake of providing a systematic intellectual genealogy of the discourse, this chapter only briefly mentions the aforementioned authors as an ever-developing and reflexive horizon.

Intellectual Trends and Objectives in ILT There are several central theological and philosophical characteristics to ILT. First is the centrality of the preferential option for the mustad’afun fi al-‘ardh (the oppressed and marginalized of the earth) in interpreting sacred texts (i.e., the Qur’an and Sunnah) and social reality (Esack, 1996, 98–103; Saffari, 2017, 287)—not unlike the Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, or other renditions of Liberation Theology. In the broadest sense, ILT is the bringing together of theology, social analysis, and action (Prado, 2012, 8). Second, similar to other Liberation Theologies, is the emphasis on a preference of orthopraxis over orthodoxy31 (Esack, 1996, 106–109; De La Torre, 2013, 47). Third is a commitment to a radical religious pluralism from below. This commitment is one that does not suspend Islam’s claim to Ultimate Truth in a manner akin to the demands of liberalism or Eurocentric secularism. It is one that finds radical interreligious engagement primarily in the context of social struggle and solidarity on the margins, and not in the liberal commonly found interfaith iftar (i.e., the sunset meal which breaks the Ramadan fast) or pan-Abrahamic “Islam, Judaism and Christianity mean peace” conferences (Esack, 1996, 179–180; Duderija, 2018, 80 & 85). Fourth, in terms of engagement with the sacred texts of Islam, Muslim liberation theologians generally prefer 31  There is a popular adage in Islamic traditional scholarly circles—al-‘ilm qabl al-‘amal (knowledge comes prior to praxis). ILT reverses this adage, ‘amal (good deeds/praxis) pre-­ necessitates ‘ilm (theoretical or accumulated knowledge). The foundation of belief is praxis, and reflection on that praxis (Esack, 1996: 106–109; Hanafi, 1995: 138–140f), as the Qur’an states, “And to those who strive in Us [Our path] to them We shall show Our ways” (29:69), as well as, “God does not change the conditions of a people until they change what is in themselves” (13:11).

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reception hermeneutics (Esack, 1996, 49–78; Hashas, 2022), as well as contextual and process theology (Duderija, 2018: 19–21) over that of liberal scholasticism or legal positivism (Dabashi, 2013, 154 & 158; Sayyid, 2014, 163 & 179).32 Fifth, in terms of philosophical trends, ILT is defined by its commitments to versions of post-essentialism and postpositivism (Dabashi, 2013, 98; Sayyid, 2014, 12; Esack, Forthcoming). Lastly, when it comes to the political, ILT takes as primary the contradiction between the West and the Rest (or the Global North vs. the Global South), while also being committed to the socio-political margins one finds internal to the Islamic ummah, whether that be along the lines of race, class, gender, nationality, or ecology (Hanafi, 2009; Abbasi, 2020b; Bouteldja, 2016). The main interlocutors of ILT have been Christian (and, to a lesser extent, Jewish) Liberation Theology, Pan-Islamism, the various trends of the Secular and Religious Left (Marxian and non-Marxian), Neo/ Traditionalists, and Post/Modernists (Esack, Forthcoming). In the broadest sense, ILT can be viewed as part of the left-wing of Pan-Islamism.33 32  By reception hermeneutics, process theology, and contextual theology we largely mean forms of scriptural engagement that take into account not just the seeming “objective” linguistic meanings of a sacred text, but also the subjective ways in which meaning is constructed and brought into the text by the interpreter who is inevitably influenced and tied to a context (Esack, 1996, 49–78; Hashas, 2022). By liberal scholasticism we mean the perennial form scholasticism—whether of the classical scholar in Athens or the modern academic— wherein scholarship is done for the sake of scholarship itself, and is innately defined by a form of political liberalism that relies on the consciousness of the individual scholar to form authoritative opinion on a subject, rather than scholarship for the sake of radical social transformation (Dabashi, 2013: 154 & 158, Sayyid, 2014: 163 & 179). By legal positivism we mean the obsession with knowing for knowing’s sake, in that law can be viewed as something—once empirically known or demonstrated—as nearly unchangeable or unreceptive to changes in context or interpretation of said law (ibid., ibid., Prado, 2012: 9). 33  In South Africa, those committed to ILT in the anti-apartheid struggle identified themselves as “Progressive Islamists” (Esack, 1996: 9–10). In Egypt, Hanafi identified ILT as a project of the Islamic Left (al-Islam al-Yasari) (Hashas, 2022, Duderija, 2018: 91). ILT is committed to Pan-Islamism and political Islam from the perspective of not surrendering the right to an Islamic universalism and post-essentialist grounds for Muslim autonomy in the modern world. The likes of more conservative or right-leaning pan-Islamist thinkers such as Sayyid Qutb, Ruhollah Khomeini, Hassan al-Turabi, and Abul A’la al-Maududi were a definite inspiration for the first generation of Muslim liberation theologians and to a lesser extent the second (Esack, Forthcoming). Muslim liberation theologians have long maintained a critical working relationship to the Islamist Right based on deep commitment to adab al-­ ikhtilaf (i.e., the etiquette of respectfully displaying difference of opinion, especially on matters of law and theology) even as we have felt the need to dissent from many of their positions and chart our own more independent course.

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When it comes to more normative theological and legal discourse, ILT falls within the gambit of what South African Muslim theologian Ebrahim Moosa calls “critical traditionalism” (Moosa, 2007: 118 & 126), though of a more radical and socially engaged bent. There are also fissures within ILT.  A number of thinkers can be described as political liberals in their social activism, such as Engineer and Duderija, versus more political radicals, such as Esack and Shariati. Like the second and third generation of Christian liberation theologians, a trend can be found within the second generation of Muslim liberation theologians tending to theorize—rather than practice in a historical project (Petrella, 2004)—social struggle more than the first, for better and worse. There have been new struggles of certain acclaimed progressive or liberationist Muslim scholars having transformed the term “progressive Islam” or even Liberation Theology to fit the narrative of American-led Empire and the causes and concerns of the Global North at the expense of the Global South in the last decade of the twentieth century and early decades of the twenty-first century (Esack, 2018). There is also a generational shift within ILT wherein some take on the intersectional approach of the New Left, particularly around gender/ sex. First-generation thinkers such as Engineer, Akhtar, and Hanafi did not take seriously the politics of gender/sex in the same way other Muslim liberation theologians who were more open such as Shariati (1981) or Esack and much—if not all—of the second generation. Second-generation thinkers have become weaker on the issue of socio-economic class and are facing planetary problems such as ecological catastrophe and the rise of the technological-industrial complex which are unprecedented in human history.

Defining the Margins: A Floating Signifier One of the central analytical concepts of ILT in analyzing text and context is that of the margins. The margins is a floating signifier (Kunnummal, 2018, 76–78) which signifies a type of anti-reality as counter-hegemony; the margins is a reflection of that which has been made ontologically “not” by the powers that “be.” The margins can be that of Muslims themselves in an Islamophobic world, the socio-economic “poor” or impoverished, racial minorities, the ecological margins of the earth, as well as the gendered margins. The margins are a totality through which ILT articulates discourses of resistance and counter-hegemony, including that of non-­ Muslims on the margins. Islamic feminism and theologies of gender and

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sexual justice are discourses which have emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to speak to the oppression of gender and sexual minorities in Islam as well as their interpretations of the text and reality.34 One of the central analytical concepts of Islamic feminism is that of gender and/or biological sex. ILT broadly views Islamic feminism as a contextualized response of Liberation Theology in Islam. The main difference between the two discourses is that ILT takes as a central category the totality of the margins while Islamic feminism primarily focuses on one or a few of the margins (i.e., gender/sex) rather than the whole when engaging theology or social analysis. One second-generation Muslim liberation theologian, Shadaab Rahemtullah, attempts to synthesize the two discourses in his book, Qur’an of the Oppressed: Liberation Theology and Gender Justice in Islam. While the affinities are indeed there in terms of certain intellectual tools being shared, the title of Rahemtullah’s book is proof of difference as well; why is Liberation Theology and gender justice separately stated in both the title and the make-up of the Muslim thinkers he investigates? The margins cannot be reduced to gender/sex, just as the margins must obviously account for and uplift the gendered and sexed margins, among other categories. The list of canonical Muslim liberation theologians in this chapter is indeed male and men dominated. This is a problem. It is a problem of which a number of us in the first and second generation are not unaware, and actively work to understand and address. Yet, at the same time, this is a universal problem across much of critical discourses of the twentieth and twenty-first century. It is also one that must be addressed rigorously and not in the sense of simply tokenizing authors who happen to come from a more marginalized background yet do not actually contribute systemically or explicitly to the ILT discourse. The debate on gender and Islam is complicated by the fact that due to the coloniality of power, Muslims as a totality are viewed as an ungendered species and largely feminized/queered as penetrateable, rapeable, or

34  For some of the foundational works in Islamic feminism and gender/sexual justice more broadly, see wadud (2018), Mernissi (1996), Barlas (2019), Shaikh (2012), Seedat (2013), cooke (2000), Kugle (2013), and Jahangir and Abdullatif (2016). It is also necessary to engage with Muslim women authors who do not identify with feminism yet deal critically with gender/sex. The life and works of Heba Rauf Ezzat (b. 1965) and Zainab al-Ghazali (d. 2005) are two Egyptian thinkers who are helpful in this regard, as well as contemporary scholar Sohaira Siddiqui (2020).

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otherwise ripe for sexual abuse by the Eurocentric gaze.35 During the medieval era, Muslims were largely viewed by Western Christendom as sexually promiscuous (El-Rouayheb, 2005). In the modern era, Muslim women are viewed as needing to be saved and bombed by the Western gaze (whether man, woman, or queer) while Muslim men are to be raped and domesticated by the same force in prisons, battlefields, and black sites all over the world (Thobani, 2021, 139–168). This dynamic has caused a widespread suspicion of feminism and critical gender analysis—whether of the Western or Islamic variant—more broadly among the Muslim world (Thobani, 2021, 29; Mahomed, 2019, 1366). There have simultaneously been very fruitful encounters between the best of what various critical feminisms and gender/sex theory have to offer for liberation when it comes to gender/sex in Islam. Many Islamic feminists have highlighted the necessity of “multiple-critique” (cooke, 2000)—that is, that critique must occur internal and external to the community as marginalized as the community itself may be. In the most practical sense, can a heterosexual male believer be against capitalism outside the house, but uphold patriarchy and homophobia at home? At other times, a la the likes of the Egyptian Mona Eltahawy (2016), Muslim feminists frame gender/sex liberation through a politically liberal or secular lens. This lens can be nearly theologically hostile toward Islam itself and promotes a severely compromised form of social analysis which ends up promoting colonial intersectionality rather than decolonial intersectionality. Houria Boutledja’s analysis of intersectionality, particularly as it relates to race, gender, and sex within the confines of coloniality, is poignant in defining the difference between colonial and decoloniality intersectionality (2016). In the broadest sense, colonial intersectionality is the centering of gender and sex over race as seemingly equal categories in all contexts of power relations. In the context of global Islamophobia, this causes issues within Muslim communities wherein a demand is made from mainstream colonial intersectional approaches to center the rights of Muslim gender 35  As a point of comparison, Black American scholars Hortense Spillers (1987) and Tommy Curry (2017) argue along similar lines for Blacks under the conditions of global coloniality and specifically anti-Black racism. While both authors deal with respective notions of Black masculinity and femininity, they both highlight the contentious relationship of Blackness with dominant notions of feminism and intersectionality which—like normative whiteness— view Black people as an ungendered non-human species to be controlled through various forms of governmentality.

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and sexual minorities over that of the supposedly backward, sexist, and homophobic Muslim community. This pits the community against its own minorities on the terms of the oppressor. Decolonial intersectionality is the centering of the community (i.e., race) prior to that of gender/sex— not as a means of suppressing internal critique—but as a heuristic principle responding to the reality of colonial intersectionality as well as “dirty laundry’ within the community at a more sustainable and strategic pace. In conclusion, ILT is a discourse which has been explicitly named in the twentieth and twenty-first century with two generations of Muslim thinkers and movements attached to it. While the discourse sees Islam itself as a liberatory discourse, there is an acknowledgement that Islam is not just a generic, ahistorical, or decontextualized Islam.36 ILT views Islam as a language which can be interpreted in various ways and which is defined by contention, or, in more liberationist terms, struggle and battle for meaning-­making and T/truth/s. This chapter has outlined an original and brief summary of the field as a means for developing the debate further. ILT is simultaneously a discourse that—due to its proclivity toward challenging hegemony and centers of power—becomes suspicious when contained. In one way, ILT is at its best when it is striving and becoming. In another, there is a serious need to systematize and be clear about its boundaries, least we submit to the liberal idea that religion and politics are simply about individuals debating relativist truths. With regards to the future intersection of ILT and decolonial discourse, there is much room for growth. Critical Muslim Studies and the ReOrient Journal37 is one such avenue pursuing this relationship in the intellectual realm. Muslims make up a majority of the non-Christian Global South and will likely 36  Islam always requires the human act of interpretation and contestation over competing and inevitably imperfect interpretations. Imam Ali (d. 661), the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammed and fourth Caliph of Islam, once stated, “When Mu’awiyah invited me to the Qur’an for a decision, I could not turn away from the Book of Allah. The Mighty and Glorious Allah declared that ‘if you dispute about anything, refer it to Allah and His Messenger’. [However,] this is the Qur’an, written in straight lines, between two boards [of its binding]; it does not speak with a tongue; it needs interpreters and interpreters are people” (Cited in al-Razi 1979, 248). 37  More information can be found at the site of the ReOrient Journal here: https://www. jstor.org/journal/reorient. There is a Critical Muslim Studies summer school which has taken place annually since 2011. Information on the summer school can be found here: https://www.dialogoglobal.com/granada/index.php

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become the quantitative global majority in the twenty-first century. Just as the encounter with Decolonial Theory broadens and strengthens the socio-analytical toolset of ILT, the encounter with Islam and Muslims further radicalizes decolonial discourse in ways previously unthought.

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Liberation Themes in Latin American Literatures: The Case of Changó el gran putas by Manuel Zapata Olivella Juan Esteban Londoño

Introduction The theological message of an art of work is contained not only in its direct message, but also in the style. We can see this clearly in the form that the Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella gives to the history of the Afro peoples in his novel Changó el gran putas (Changó the Biggest Badass) (1983) as an act of liberation from the cultural and religious aggressions of the European colonists. In this chapter we analyze how this specific case of Latin American literature interprets liberation not only from the angle of official Christianity or even from Liberation Theology (which is already increasingly accepted by the white and mestizo world), but from other symbolic places, such as the belief in the African Latin American Orishas and the re-enchantment of the world. J. E. Londoño (*) Philosophy and Theology Program, Philosophy and Critical Theology Research, Group of the Universidad Católica Luis Amigó, Medellín, Colombia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_9

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Liberation Theology and Literature in Latin America The relationship between Liberation Theology and literature is close and fruitful because Liberation Theology understands itself as a critical act that interprets the narrative of believing peoples within their social, cultural, and symbolic contexts, and literature is one of the main sources of people’s narratives, both in stories and novels, and in poetry and essays. Latin American Liberation Theology considers theology as a reflection that listens to the signs of the times in the social and cultural reality of persons and communities. Liberation Theology attends to concrete historical situations and comes from a reflection on popular beliefs. This is not a theology about professional theology, but a theology about and from what poor people believe. For this reason, theology is not the first word but the second act, which always comes after the experience and daily practice of the people. The encounter with meaning and mystery is in life and in people. Literature bears witness to these experiences. The second act is the systematic reflection on life, the search for signs of struggle and resistance in the midst of landscapes of death, as is the Latin American context. In this case, theology as the second act with respect to literature attends to the vital experiences of which literature speaks insofar as it shows the environment in which poor and marginalized people live. Liberation Theology does not arise from an academic or institutional interest in metaphysical problems, but from questions that correspond to human suffering and an interest in changing the lives of people who suffer adversity. Therefore, the interest of theology consists in listening to and interpreting this human suffering manifested in literature as a place of expression of these pains, needs, as well as a place of pleasures and joys of poor and marginalized people. The cases in which Liberation Theology and literature converge are numerous and can be divided into three forms: (a) Theologians who analyze the biblical or theological themes that they find in works of secular literature; (b) Literature written by people engaged in Liberation Theology processes (which is numerous and we will only mention a few cases here); (c) Secular literature that speaks of biblical, theological, or religious themes and that is systematized by different researchers, with theological or literary interests, many times these two interests are combined. (a) In the first case, Gustavo Gutiérrez’s work of interpretation of the work of José María Arguedas is remarkable, inasmuch as Gutiérrez

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considers the literature of the Peruvian narrator to be a source for his theology. Gutiérrez (1987, 346) affirms that both the characters and their expressions in Arguedas and in Latin American literature, in general, are a reflection of Latin American cries of joy and pain that become a source for theology. Pedro Trigo (1987, 262) also highlights the importance of the narrative theology that appears in the new Latin American novel (better known as the “Latin American Boom”) insofar as the novel is the organic sentimental expression of a people that clarifies the real situation of society and the church, beyond the official image that the church and society have of reality. Also noteworthy is the work of Luis Rivera Pagán (2012) in the study of the Caribbean religious phenomenon as a way of configuring identity, as evidenced in his approach to literary works as a source for understanding religion in authors such as Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Márquez. In the feminist and LGBTQ fields, the Brazilian theologian Genilma Boehler (2010) in her doctoral dissertation at the Escola Superior de Teologia in Brazil, under the tutelage of Rudolf von Sinner, highlights theological elements in the poetry of Adélia Prado that can be interpreted from the Queer theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid as a case of rupture with traditions in favor of an erotic God. (b) The second form of confluence between theology and literature is that which occurs in literature written by people engaged in processes of Liberation Theology. The greatest representative of this theological work is Ernesto Cardenal, who throughout his life put into practice a poetic work as an exercise of social commitment that includes in his writing contextual issues, news of the day, revolutionary experiences, and criticism of dictatorial regimes. Within his work, the Psalms (2007), a work that consists of a rereading of biblical texts within a new context: that of the social revolution in Latin America, is noteworthy. Along similar lines, the work done by Colombian Methodist pastor Hugo Oquendo-Torres is noteworthy, which combines a work of poetic and storytelling creation linked to Queer theology, such as his poem “El verbo se hizo látex” (2014) and his book of short stories entitled “Lo secreto” (2018), in which the narrative about priests and pastors in Latin America is abundant. It is also worth mentioning the work of Luis Cruz-­ Villalobos, Chilean psychologist and theologian, who has written books of short poems linked to mysticism and contemplation, such

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as Haikus al Cielo (2019). Also noteworthy is the ecumenical and interreligious initiative to publish a book of theological short stories in which the Ecuadorian editor Ángel Manzo Montesdeoca (2021) invites professionals in theology and philosophy of religion to write rereadings of biblical texts, including (among men and women) the Mexican theologian and activist Gabriela Miranda García, the Salvadoran theologian Brenda García, and the Cuban theologian and pastor Daylins Rufin Pardo. (c) The third case is that of a more systematized reflection on the relationship between theology and literature. These are authors who have dealt with biblical, theological, or religious themes within secular or expressly religious literature, from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Pablo Neruda. To the study and compilation of these works have been dedicated, for example, Daniel Attala and Geneviéve Fabry with their work entitled La Biblia en la literatura hispanoamericana (2016). In this work they highlight the role of biblical figures in authors such as César Vallejo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Miguel Ángel Asturias. More than a Liberation Theological reflection, this research work consists of the elaboration of a small encyclopedia to show and demonstrate the presence of biblical quotes, references, and images in Hispanic American literature. In a similar orientation, but with a view to a reflection on literature as a place of Liberation Theological reflection through hermeneutic theories such as effectual history and reception history, I have proposed in my doctoral dissertation entitled Kreuzesdeutungen in der gegenwärtigen Literatur Lateinamerikas: Hugo Mujica, Raúl Zurita und Pablo Montoya (2021) and defended at the University of Hamburg in Germany under the tutorship of Michael Moxter the thesis that literature is a place not only of theological observation, but also a source of study for theology. In my view, literature is a source for theological reflection that allows us to see human situations, such as their concerns, desires, joys, and struggles. Theology is a place of literature because it is encoded in linguistic codes and narrative and poetic characters whose image expands through history. Moreover, literature is a theological place insofar as it expresses the needs and narratives of peoples (as Gustavo Gutiérrez has already shown), but also because it expands the traditions and images of biblical figures and makes people understand Jesus, the disciples and the women disciples, and the figures of theological and religious history not only from the

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reproductions of biblical times but also from the transformations that these figures have in the tradition and struggles of the peoples, especially if they are traditions that challenge the core of the classical and orthodox interpretations of biblical characters such as Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary, or Jesus. This form of research that I propose is not only interested in biblical or Christian figures in the canonical or orthodox sense, but also in religious figures that play a fundamental role in contextual literature for postcolonial liberation. My research for the religious in literature asks what is the function of religious figures within the social processes of resignification with a view to the liberation of a community or a social group. This is the concrete case that we are preparing to study here under the questions: How the figures of the African tradition are mixed in a syncretic way or come into conflict with the religious figures of Christianity to promote a change of images and vision in the social struggles of Latin America, in particular in the novel Changó el gran putas by Manuel Zapata Olivella? What is the function of syncretic religious images in the liberation and the search for a dignified life in Latin America?

Manuel Zapata Olivella and African Colombian Literature In order to study the valuable themes of Liberation Theology in literature, it would be the most obvious thing to analyze the authors valued by critics, prizes, and the publishing world. In this line we could approach writers already worked by theology such as José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930), Augusto Roa Bastos (1917–2005), or the poet and theologian Ernesto Cardenal (1925–2020). However, I consider it a more postcolonial and liberating gesture to approach writers left aside by critics, marginalized by the media and forgotten by time. That is why my research focuses on the Afro-Colombian literature of Manuel Zapata Olivella (1920–2004). Afro-Colombian literature emerged at the end of the twentieth century as an exercise in resistance to hegemonic discourses that ignore or deny the mestizaje or hybridity. The Colombian critic and professor in Bonn (Germany), Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot (1989, 453) claims that until the mid-twentieth century Colombian (and most Latin American literature) imitated European and North American authors, because it copied Greek, Roman, or European style and mythology. This was a

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conservative literature that had some Enlightenment influences but remained within the cultural mold of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. This literature was a reflection of the conservative, white Colombian society, which did not recognize its hybridization and still exalted the colonial life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gutiérrez Girardot sees in this type of Latin American writing a marked racism that exalts a wealthy, white, and generally male minority as the heart of Latin American culture. Gutiérrez Girardot defines this type of literature as an aesthetic of domination. In the face of this type of writing, the poetics of resistance, the re-­ enchantment of the world, and postcolonialism are proposed. Although there are precursors of Colombian literature that address the interests of the Colombian African populations, such as Tomás Carrasquilla (1858–1940), it is the physician, anthropologist, and narrator Manuel Zapata Olivella who gives a turn in Colombian literature to read religious traditions from a critical point of view, especially from the Afro religiosity. There are also other authors and works worth mentioning, such as La ceiba de la memoria (The ceiba of memory, 2007) by Roberto Burgos Cantor (1948–2008) and in the poetry book Las semillas del muntu (The seeds of the muntu, 2018) by Ashanti Dinah Orozco (1980). But here we will concentrate on the central work of Afro liberation, Changó el gran putas (1983). Through Manuel Zapata Olivella’s novel we see how Afro-Colombian peoples constitute a narrative of liberation and resistance. This is a postcolonial proposal that assumes that the colonial empire is not only military but cultural, since the dominion was designed and exercised from writing. Writing implied colonizing, it implied inscribing, giving meaning to the colonial world. Zapata Olivella’s liberating response consists in responding from a writing that has different categories and gathers not only themes but Afro styles and structures, as in the novel Changó el gran putas, which begins with Afro-American chants to the Orishas or ancestral gods and combines the ritual chant with the novel. This is why I highlight another way of doing literature by Manuel Zapata Olivella as a paradigm shift from the place of the narrator. In this novel it is not the white person who writes about the Afro-American revolution (as is the case of Alejo Carpentier in his novel El reino de este mundo, 1949/1983), but it is the Afro-Latin American person himself who tells his own story of liberation.

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Latin American decolonial thinking calls for a literature that resists domination not only in terms of content, but also in terms of style and form. This is achieved by Manuel Zapata Olivella in his novel Changó el gran putas insofar as he challenges language by introducing African voices, even Afro-descendant, mestizo linguistic structures, which mark a desire to break free from the prisons of the dominant language. Zapata Olivella employs a language and style of resistance in which African beliefs in the Orishas are living and present. In this way, he confronts Western culture centered on written texts and proposes a narrative of liberation from a dancing poetic African point of view, no longer from Christianity but from syncretism. In this way, the question of whether it is necessary to be a Christian in order to achieve liberation is reformulated. Zapata Olivella, who is critiques Christianity, believes it is not necessary. But he recognizes that the process of hybridization between Christian culture and African cultures is irreversible, and liberation begins by recognizing the presence of African gods in the Afro-Latin American Christian tradition, which until then has been marginalized. In this sense, the syncretism of Changó el gran putas hides the clash and at the same time the fusion of worldviews. On the one hand, there are the Europeans, who believe they have been sent by God and the Pope to conquer the unknown world and seize slaves to exploit them. On the other, there are the Africans who cling to their Yoruba gods, called Orishas, to resist colonial violence and free themselves from their oppressors. From a liberating perspective, the narrator inverts the order of religious beliefs and the marginalized culture takes a central role in the story. The narrator believes the Orishas are with the freed slaves and incite them to revolt for their freedom.

Liberating Chants in Changó el gran putas In the first part of Changó el gran putas (6–34; 58–91) the postcolonial and liberating power linked to the religious gaze becomes evident. In both chapters there is a clash between the mythical world and the historical world. The mythical world seeps into the historical world to tell the story of the slave trade and a slave rebellion on a ship from the perspective of the enchantment of the world and the struggle for liberation. The first chapter of Changó el gran putas (6–34) is a challenge to European literature because of the density of its content and the poetic and musical style of its message. The work is full of African words that

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challenge the Western and even the Latin American reader, such as the names of mythical characters unknown to the average interpreter. The reader is confronted with the foreign language, which presents a worldview different from the Christian and colonial ones. Slowly he has to familiarize himself with this mode of language. The book begins with a series of chants that open the door to the narrative that comes after. The Colombian writer fictionalizes a Yoruba ceremony where he introduces the characters, the Orishas, and concentrates on the story of Changó and the mythical way in which his exile produces the exile of the Africans to America. The narrator invokes Elegba, the Orisha intermediary between the living and the dead, to allow him to tell what he knows. The chants narrate the destiny of Changó, who is presented as an individual character. It also tells of the Ekobios (Afro-descendants), who are the collective personification of the Orishas. The play tells the destiny of Changó and the exiled people, who suffer together but also enjoy together. The people are exiled with Changó and cry out for freedom and dance. The opening songs refer to different areas of Africa as a mythical place in mythical times. The story goes back to the mythical origin of life, in Africa, and moves with the black slave trade to America, moving toward a rupture with the supratemporal world toward the construction of human time and space, which is born with the fall or curse of Changó. The characters presented are the main deities and the Orishas, which are described by Zapata Olivella as the supreme deities of the Yoruba religion (525). By introducing these African deities, the author breaks with the Christian tradition and presents a view from an absolute otherness, the world of the Orishas. This religious chant is an example of this challenge to the dominant culture and is found in the first chapter, which is full of a mixture of African languages with Spanish. The author does not speak of the human being as man or woman, but as Muntu, which is understood as the singular of Bantu: ¡Oídos del Muntu, oíd! ¡Oíd! ¡Oíd! ¡Oíd! ¡Oídos del Muntu, oíd! (6). Translation: Muntu ears, hey! Hear! Hear! Hear! Ears of the Muntu, listen!

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The words Muntu and Bantu break with the idea of an equivalent translation from one language to another. Zapata Olivella is aware that, by keeping the original African expression, he brings to life the beliefs and experiences of the conquered peoples. With these words the author uses a concept that transcends the connotation of human being, since it includes the living and the dead, as well as the animals, vegetables, minerals, and things that serve him (p. 648). More than entities or persons, material or physical, Zapata Olivella alludes to the force that unites in a single knot person with his or her ancestry and descendants immersed in the present, past, and future universe. In this way, he introduces a challenge to Western theology by resorting to ancestral language and proposes an invitation to include syncretic beliefs.

The Narrative of a Rebellion In the second and third chapters of his novel, Manuel Zapata Olivella highlights his narrative with the tone of an epic. It is not an imitation of a Greek-style tale, nor does it exalt the actions of the colonists. On the contrary, it tells the story of a mutiny on a ship from the pain and suffering of the Africans. The Africans, inspired by their gods, seek to free themselves from the chains that bind them to the hold of the ship. These two chapters are set in secular space and time. The plot is the story of a voyage but also tells the tale of a rebellion. The narrative begins in Africa, where the blacks are embarked and the slavers talk about them as if from the perspective of merchants. The plot culminates when the narrator arrives in America, showing the ship’s shipwreck in American waters, thanks to a mutiny inspired by the Orishas who loosen the chains of the slaves. The survivors are the narrator, Nago, and a child. Nago is left alive to tell the story. The macro-space is the Atlantic Ocean, over which floats the micro-­ space, the slave-owners’ ship called “Nova India.” It is a scenario divided into different compartments, or micro-spaces, such as the captain’s office, the deck, the bow, the stern, and the hold where the slaves go. The captain’s office is described as a place where there are meals and drinks, small delights, even sexual experiences. The slaves’ hold is a place where putrefaction and suffering, bad smells, lice, rotting legs, worms in the skin, urine, beams, the smell of the pregnant slaves’ births are described. The plot does not present a specific chronological time. Although it is no longer a mythical order, but rather a historical time recorded in the

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travel log. Although the day to day is not described, nor are dates mentioned, the voyage from Africa to America is narrated and presents the time in which the decomposition of the bodies is accompanied by the decomposition of the spirits and souls, until culminating in the rebellion and the sinking of the ship. Although the spaces and time are historical, they are impregnated with a magical-religious gaze that challenges the Western rationalism of the narrator’s time as well as the Catholicism of the time of the narrated time, which is that of the conquest and the colony. The gesture that we could call postcolonial in Zapata Olivella consists in rescuing the African symbolic world. Thus, the author opposes the rationalist explanation to attribute the causes of events to magic. If Western literature has concentrated on rationally explaining the causes of the sinking of a ship, Zapata Olivella attributes the principle of causality to the re-enchantment of the world, and in this sense the perspective from which he narrates is postcolonial. Chapters 2 and 3 of Zapata Olivella’s novel are structured around two narrative voices. The first, presented in italics, is the voice of the slave master, the captain of the ship, who, from his Christian and colonial vision, influenced by biblical quotations, narrates the trajectory of the ship and what happens there. The second, presented in normal type, is the version of the story told by an African slave, impregnated with turns of phrase in a language full of Africanisms, and with an anticolonial worldview. In this way, the same events are seen from two different points of view and narrated from determined perspectives that, mediated by the religious, see the history of the slave trade: the slave settler and the slave through whom Zapata Olivella reflects a postcolonial perspective. The central characters of this narrative are Captain Coutinho, Governor De Dévora, the African medicine man Babalú Ayé, and the boatswain. In addition, there are collective characters named in the singular, such as the Muntu, singular of Bantu (523), which means man and goes back to the linguistic family that extends in Southern Africa, south of the Niger River (514). Another collective character is the White She-Wolf: “la loba blanca trae unos cuantos ekobios encadenados que no hablaban nuestras lenguas” (82) (the white she-wolf brings a few chained ekobians who did not speak our languages). This animal and totemic allusion is the symbolic way of naming the enslaving Europeans. The animal is described as a symbol of a

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dangerous predator. The color alludes, with a descriptive tone of contempt, to the skin color of the conquering Europeans. The she-wolf is named from the voice of the Africans. The symbol always describes her as a devourer and destroyer. In this way Zapata Olivella uses the resource of language to change names. By giving their own names to the oppressors and the oppressed, even to the gods and beliefs, the Afro-descendant resignifies reality to feel that justice and divinity are on his side. Thus, he can fight the oppressors. One character mentioned is the babalao (priest of the voodoo cult) Ngala Ngafúa, who is accused of leading the rebellion and ends up hanging from the mast of the ship (82). From this point of view, the causality attributed to the rebellion rests on magic or shamanic vision. From the perspective of the conquerors, it is seen as satanic, but from the point of view of the slaves, it is the call of the African ancestors to free themselves from the yoke. In this sense, there is a struggle of worldviews that, in Zapata Olivella’s perspective, what is considered demonic by the Christian slaveholders is the saving dimension for the oppressed. Another prominent character with her own name is Ezili, an African woman who was sold into slavery as a child. Now she is a slave trader and fulfills the function of representing Africans who reproduce the ideology of the dominator. But African memory and dignity also survive in her. This is why she murders the captain on the edge of the ship and then commits suicide (57), which reveals the double oppression of Africans, many of whom are slaves and slaveholders. With this Zapata Olivella does not intend to idealize the African characters as good and the Europeans as bad. From his postcolonial point of view, he does not fall into the Manichean game of separating the world between light and darkness, but reflects a double belonging or militancy to different sides in order to survive at a time when a multiple identity is emerging among Africans. But the identity that sells is that of ancestral roots. These chapters contain few dialogues. They concentrate rather on the narrative voices describing the situation experienced, in the manner of a navigation log. The few dialogues that appear are put in the mouths of the Europeans. They describe the Africans as “merchandise” (49). In addition, they reflect their fears about the beliefs of the blacks, the fabricated myths about America and its abundance, and the situation of the ship on the verge of mutiny. The European narrator speaks from his Eurocentric

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perspective regarding the Africans: “Me pregunto si estos animales realmente tienen razón y si muertos, sus almas pueden hallar en el cielo lo que no han tenido en su mísera vida terrena” (“I wonder if these animals are really right and if dead, their souls can find in heaven what they have not had in their miserable earthly life”, 74). The European narrator sees in the beliefs, practices, and realities of the Africans the wiles of the Christian Devil (75). The colonial vision reflects a denial of otherness, the body of the Africans as a negative mirror in which the European characters look to deny that they are alike. In Montenegro’s words, “it is not enough for the colonist to physically limit the colonized but he must make of the colonized ‘the quintessence of evil’” (2014, 60). Colonialism seeks to define the universe of the colonized by indicating to them the social behaviors they must follow, but Zapata Olivella resists this colonial vision and generates a transvaluation of all values in which the struggles of Africans are seen as a divine inspiration. The African Latin American vision turns to the Orishas in the form of prayer, for it expects its gods to intervene in human actions. But this gaze is not that of a Western mystic advocating stillness, but that of the activist who sees the gods and ancestors as intervening in the activity of rebellion. The African narrator is Nago. His interventions are crossed by the belief in the Orishas: “¡Tú que estás cerca de los Ancestros, revélanos cómo adueñarnos del barco! Desde anoche nos llega el aliento de la madre tierra y la flecha de los pájaros nos muestra el camino” (“You who are close to the Ancestors, reveal to us how to take possession of the boat! From last night the breath of mother earth reaches us and the arrow of the birds shows us the way”, 83). In this sense, the narrator sees in the Europeans the vision of evil, what they call Loba Blanca, while in the midst of their reality he sees the action of the Orishas, even the Orishas who send the plagues and the lice. Thus, Nago narrates from a mythical perspective the preparation of a revolt in the middle of the ship, the way they file chains, prepare weapons, escape to the deck and steal weapons, as they prepare for the attack (78). The slaves listen to their gods and see them in the symbols inside the ship. They faithfully believe that an open chain is the action of the Orishas and begin to rebel. Their symbolic universe is seen as superior to the rationalist or functional discourse of the Europeans and allows them to generate a rebellion that combines elements of a dance, a ritual, and a military action.

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Re-enchantment of the World and Liberation in Changó el gran putas Manuel Zapata Olivella writes in Spanish but he uses an African language that he gathers from the historical and anthropological research. In this way he presents the history of the Afro-American peoples in a mythical way. He presents their gods as a pantheon of warriors, hunters, and procreators inclined to compassion and fury. In this sense it seeks to place the stories of the slaves and their gods on a par with the great foundational literature of the West, such as the Bible and Homeric works. In this sense he imitates Western texts but also challenges them. Zapata Olivella generates a religious hybrid that recognizes the weight of the colony but fights it with its own symbols: with poetry. From this writer’s perspective, the hybridization between Christianity, Yoruba religion, and witchcraft should be recognized as part of the identity process of the Colombian Caribbean. The text of the first part presents a mythical society, populated by gods and demigods who live in polygamy and incest, and fight among brothers. The relationships and curses between gods cause effects in their own lives as well as in the lives of their children, the humans, who are exiled to America because of Changó’s exile. The way of believing and understanding is located in a mythical world, in which the circumstances of life are not due to natural or human causes (such as greed) but to divine motivations, such as the anger among the gods and the exile of Changó. Thus, in contrast to the disenchanted vision of the Europeans, Zapata Olivella presents us with a literary work of religious style that can be understood as the re-enchantment of the world. In Balcomb’s (2008) words, the re-enchantment of the world is “understood as the recovery of a way of seeing and being in the world that recognizes the subjectivity and personality of the world and that which is in it, and that re-engages body and mind, self and other, individual and community, God and world” (29). Liberation, for Latin American and indigenous African peoples, also means re-enchanting the world. The second and third chapters of the first part have as their central theme the enslavement and trafficking of African people by other Africans and Europeans. The narrator draws on the historical element of the slave trade to narrate it from a mythical or re-enchanted and postcolonial perspective, as it challenges the secularized beliefs of the West. In this sense, it coincides with the reflections of Latin American feminist theologians

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such as Ivone Gebara and Elsa Tamez, who state: “modern rationality is no more, as the dominant way of thinking and organizing the world” (2008, 51), and invites not to the total rejection of modernity, but to look at the world in an enchanted way. Zapata Olivella’s text does not seek to be a naive or superficial reading of slavery, but the way in which he interprets history is a form of resistance to the official colonialist discourse, which considers that the phenomenon of slavery was due to the ingenuity of the whites and the superiority of their religion, as well as to the stupidity of the blacks for allowing themselves to be enslaved or to the will of the Christian God, considered superior by the Europeans. Here Zapata Olivella attributes the divine cause of slavery to the gods themselves, and not to the Christian God. In this sense, he takes up the biblical belief that the Israelite Exile is due to the sins of its people and not to the power of other empires. The author takes up this belief to reverse it and show, from a pro-African point of view, that the story can be told without recourse to the belief in the Christian God. Zapata Olivella is deeply critical of Christians because they proclaim slavery. For the Colombian writer it is important that religion has an ethical dimension, and both Christians and Muslims are slaveholders, contradicting their own morality. So says one of the voices in Changó el Gran putas: “El babalao evocó a los ekobios muertos en las bodegas de los barcos, a los vivos que padecen en las casamatas, murallas y haciendas. Piensa en la falsa justicia del Dios de los blancos que hacía cristianos a los ekobios y los deja encadenados” (219). (“The babalao evoked the dead ekobios in the holds of the ships, the living who suffer in the casemates, walls and haciendas. He thinks of the false justice of the God of the whites who made Christians of the ekobios and leaves them in chains”). In this way, the anthropological perspective is inverted by presenting history from the African point of view, as the Israelites have told the story of their exile, as the will and punishment of their god, Yahweh, or Christians have narrated the death of Jesus as if it were the will of the Father. Here, Zapata Olivella presents a view in which the events are governed by the hand of the Orishas, and these themselves announce a future of freedom for the Afro-descendant peoples (25). Thus, we find the clash between two ways of understanding the world. On the one hand, the Europeans believe that God gave them the land and, when there are struggles with the slaves, the whites pray to the Virgin to protect them. On the other hand, the Africans evoke their Orishas to resist against the slavers (79). In this sense, we see the confrontation between

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one and the other as a spiritual war. The narration contrasts two points of view, the colonial Catholic and that of the African slaves. Zapata Olivella takes the African perspective in which the slaves are accompanied by their Orishas to rebel against the owners of the ship and thus transform the social order imposed on them. Manuel Zapata Olivella uses a language of resistance, mediated by African beliefs in the Orishas, and confronts graphocentric or bibliocentric cultures, such as Christianity, with cultures that consider oral narratives sacred. Here the Afro-descendant peoples are approached from the oral narratives and the beliefs in their gods and it is transformed into a novel that functions as a written testimony of the struggle against slavery, not only physical but also mental and spiritual, of the Afro-descendants. Zapata Olivella considers that liberation begins by freeing oneself from dominant beliefs in order to find a real and material salvation in Afro-Latin American and Afro-American life. The text reflects a social stratification that attends to the Conquest, the Colony and Slavery in a Eurocentric way. However, it seeks to resist colonialism from an African and Latin American religious perspective. This shows that the babalaos or African spiritual guides are more respected among blacks than the governors. This is why the African Ezili woman can kill the governor of the ship, or a rebellion of the Africans against the dominant lords can be gestated little by little through slow planning, which explodes in drumming and seizure of the ship. Rebellion is a dance. The mythical dimension by Zapata Olivella is an interpretation of the historical background of slavery in America. As historian Jorge Palacios Preciado (1989) says in the New History of Colombia, when the indigenous labor force enslaved by the Europeans was exhausted, the colonial economy was sustained on the backs of the enslavement of black peoples (154). The African, in his condition of slave and as a mere instrument of production, was brought to replace the aboriginal, as a reinforcement and to counteract—at least in part—the demographic crisis. After 1595, the introduction of slaves to the territory of New Granada (present-day Colombia) intensified. According to Palacios Preciado (156), a large part of the slave trade had as its source the African population already enslaved in their original continent by other Africans or Muslims. But the greatest number of slaves was obtained through the direct hunting of these people in their own lands, using violence, fraud, the promotion of intertribal wars, and the encouragement of greed among African princes and governors. With this, it must also be said that the transatlantic crossing took

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place in inhuman and cruel conditions, to the point of registering an immense amount of slave deaths inside the slave ships. The historical reality that imposes itself is that of the enslavement of many African people by Europeans. Zapata Olivella’s novel wants to tell this reality from a postcolonial and re-enchanted perspective, because using the symbolic imagination against rationalism is a way of resistance. The social practice that occurs is that of revolt, through the theft of weapons and instruments, such as files and hammers to break the chains in the hold of the ship. The African spiritual leaders incite the rebellion, and little by little, a struggle to achieve freedom or, at least, the destruction of slavery begins to take shape. This struggle takes place first at the symbolic level, when the Africans believe that the Orishas are with them, and then at the military level, when they put these symbolic struggles into practice. The trigger for this revolt is the worldview. Europeans think that, due to the presence and beliefs of Africans, the devil roams the ship. Africans believe, on the contrary (and without being aware of this Christian demon as a concept) that their Orishas help them to liberate themselves. In this way they are pushed by the belief in their gods to destroy the ship of slavery. Africans believe that it is feasible to find a rebellion, since they are accompanied by their Orishas. They know that they were brought to this situation also by the hand of their divinities. But, in the midst of pain, they do not resign themselves to believe that, although there is suffering, their gods give them hope. The enslaved African people confront the brutal trade and decide to stage a mythical rebellion that ends with the ship itself. For them, a dignified death is preferable to inhuman enslavement. As a result, the author invites his readers to take a stand in favor of Africans and their gods. Thus, the narrator opposes the Catholic beliefs of favor for whites and resignation for blacks. The order of superior religious belief is reversed and the marginalized culture takes a central role in the story. The narrator believes that Changó, the main Orisha, is with the freed slaves at the time of the rebellion as an incarnation in the leaders of the revolt: “A la media noche descendió del mástil con su Máscara Machocabrío-Changó-Sol” (“At midnight he descended from the mast with his Machocabrio-Changó-Sol Mask”, 84). In this way, the text takes sides with African peoples and their worldview. This, at the same time, is a mixture of interpretations and visions, in which the divinities merge and form a pantheon of resistant warriors who

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embody the struggles and concerns of their people. The resistance of the Africans is opposed to Christianity, but does not refuse to open its doors to syncretism in order to disguise their beliefs as Christian and keep the cult of the Orishas secret. For Zapata Olivella, a Christian, white, and hegemonic theology of liberation is not enough. He considers that Liberation is also syncretic. It needs all ways of rebellion to find freedom and dignity. For this reason, the great contribution of his literary work to the Latin American liberation struggles consists in showing that Afro-­ descendant peoples do not necessarily have to convert to Christianity in order to find liberation. For Zapata Olivella, African spirituality is also a source of resistance to colonialist impositions. And, if they are already Christians, the cultural hybridity to which they belong must be recognized in order to liberate them to be what they are, not what the academy and white or mestizo activism determine for the future of Afro-descendant peoples.

References Attala, D., & Fabry, G. (Eds.). (2016). La Biblia en la literatura hispanoamericana. Trotta. Balcomb, A. (2008). La postmodernidad y el reencantamiento del mundo: propuestas tentativas. In: Vida y pensamiento, Volumen 28. Número 1. Primer semestre de 2008, pp. 29–58. Boehler, G. (2010). O erótico em Adélia Prado e Marcella Althaus-Reid: uma proposta de diálogo entre poesia e teologia. Escola Superior de Teologia. Burgos Cantor, R. (2007). La ceiba de la memoria. Seix Barral. Cardenal, E. (2007). Poesía completa. Tomo 1. Patria Grande. Carpentier, A. (1983). El reino de este mundo. Oveja Negra. Cruz-Villalobos, L. (2019). Haikus al Cielo (2nd ed.). Independently Poetry. Gutiérrez, G. (1987). Entre las Calandrias: Algunas refleziones sobre la obra de J.M.  Arguedas. In P.  Richard (Ed.), Raíces de la teología latinoamericana (pp. 345–369). DEI. Gutiérrez Girardot, R. (1989). La literatura colombiana en el siglo XX.  In Hispanoamérica: imágenes y perspectivas (pp. 347–416). Bogotá. Londoño, J.  E. (2021). Kreuzesdeutungen in der gegenwärtigen Literatur Lateinamerikas: Hugo Mujica, Raúl Zurita und Pablo Montoya. Missionsverlag. Manzo Montesdeoca, Á. (2021). Cuentos teológicos: reimaginar desde el vientre. Ediciones JuanUno. Montenegro De la Hoz, N. (2014). Changó, el Gran Putas: Formas de Resistencia e Identidad Esclavizada en los Estudios Poscoloniales. In: La Palabra. Volúmen 24. Enero-Junio de 2014, pp. 59–66.

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Orozco, A. D. (2018). Las semillas del muntu. New York Poetry Press. Palacios Preciado, J. (1989). La esclavitud y la sociedad esclavista. In Á. Tirado Mejía (Ed.), La Nueva Historia de Colombia (Vol. I, pp. 153–174). Planeta. Rivera Pagán, L. (2012). Teología, literatura e identidad cultural en la América Latina y el Caribe. Revista Caminos. Tamez, E. (2008). Una respuesta desde América Latina. In: Vida y pensamiento, Volumen 28. Número 1. Primer semestre de 2008, pp. 29–58. Trigo, P. (1987). Teología narrativa en la nueva novela latinoamericana. In P. Richard (Ed.), Raíces de la teología latinoamericana (pp. 261–344). San José. Zapata Olivella, M. (1983). Changó el gran putas. Oveja Negra.

Liberalism, Liberation Theology, or Decolonial Theology? North American Latinx Theologies at the Crossroads of Ambivalence Jorge A. Aquino

What’s in a Name? For much of its life, U.S.  Hispanic theology has debated and struggled with the identifiers we use to name ourselves and our common projects. Round and round we have gone—from Hispanic, to Hispanic/Latino, to other more recent expressions that take discursive distance from the “Hispanic” in favor of gender-crushing identifiers: Latino/a, Latin@, Latine, and Latinx, which are more in use today.1 I myself have used these 1  We also hear in mainstream political debates that these latter-day identifiers are marginal—and can even engender offense—among people of Latin American descent in the U.S. (Garger, 2021).

J. A. Aquino (*) Department of Theology & Religious Studies, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_10

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terms more or less interchangeably over the years, but with a sense that they differ from one another only superficially, and in fact tell me little about the singular intellectual project that might be represented as U.S.  Hispanic (or Hispanic/Latino, Latino/a, Latin@, Latine, Latinx) theology. As time has unfolded, new identifiers have succeeded prior ones, mostly as dis-identification from the identities and perspectives signified in the prior names. In this one senses a reactionary impulse paradoxically infiltrating what is presented as a progressive gesture. An identification that ostensibly seeks to purify our perspective, and focus the political commitment arising from our intellectual enterprises, leads us to say more about what we are not than about what we are. In the end, these names may reveal only that we share Latin American ancestry, but perhaps little else. So in the final analysis, what’s in the name? What is the real ground of our supposedly shared Hispanic/Latinx identity? This question reaches its apex in proposals that Latinxs do theology “Latinamente”—in a Latin way. Claims about theology done Latinamente constructively draw attention to the multiplicity, complexity, hybridity, and diversity of Latinx peoples, cultural forms, frames, phenotypes, and languages. But this diversity begs the question: Is there a singular “Hispanic” or “Latino/a/@/e/x” social formation that would justify the notion that there is a theology that can be done Latinamente? This question is analogous to a critical point María Pilar Aquino raised about the mujerista theology of Ada María Isasi-Díaz. Aquino wrote that she and those she allies with describe themselves as feminists, rather than mujeristas because, “there are no mujerista sociopolitical and ecclesial subjects or movements in the United States or in Latin America” (Aquino, 2002). Drawing on the logic of her claim, I don’t dispute that there are Latino/a (etc.) political subjects. My question is, how well do our identity framings name those subjects? What is the nature of our shared subject-hood—assuming we take the meaning of subject seriously? Do our perspectives on identity—and the names we give ourselves—comprehend that question? Do they allow us to decide if and how our work should be essentially anti-­ systemic? Or do they cloud our sense of things, committing us unwittingly to integrate and assimilate Latinx theologies to the larger mission of the neoliberal North American academy? As we name ourselves a “unique” but undefinable population, do we do more than create space for ourselves within a deeply unequal and exploitative system? I would argue that we find more vital common ground in our shared condition as racialized subalterns, in the North American corner of the modern colonial-capitalist world-system, than in claims of shared Latinx

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cultural identity. While racism is regularly cited as a crucial condition of Latinx life throughout Latinx theologizing, investigations of how our identities emerged from an essentially racist historical process tend to elide how racism was intrinsic to the formation of global capitalism from the colonial period until today. For that reason, a broadly anti-systemic Hispanic/Latinx theology remains embryonic, especially if we compare our projects to the anti-systemic critique that many of us continue to find so inspiring in Latin American Liberation Theology. This chapter seeks to sharpen a sense of the missing anti-systemic project—one that is anti-­ capitalist in a way that indicts the non-anomalous social pathologies of capitalist political economy (racism, sexism, homophobia, and class conflict). I argue here that Latinx theologies ought to ground our identitarian claims on a long-historical interpretation of the role that race/racism played in the formation of the modern colonial-capitalist world-system, and the global capitalist civilization that is today established as the dominant planetary social order. The result of this interpretation should empower us to subordinate our identity questions to a critical engagement with the Moloch of global capitalism, whose racial identities take root in the colonial period amid projects to control labor, legitimatize slavery and feudalism, and erect a racialized class system in the Américas—including North America. I begin by reviewing a powerful proposal for an anti-­ systemic Latinx theology, written two decades ago by Manuel Mejido, and follow with suggestions for a few discrete projects to update his proposal. Mejido cited two paradigms orienting North American research in theology and religious studies—the liberal and the liberationist paradigms— and argued that Latinx scholarship must choose the latter way. I consider whether, in the years since his article was published, a third way has emerged: a decolonial paradigm, beyond the anti-systemic scholarship implied in the liberationist paradigm.

Remembering Manuel Mejido’s Propaedeutic In a 2002 article in the Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology, Mejido wrote the most far-reaching single research proposal I have yet seen for the study of Latinx religion and theology (Mejido, 2002). Though published two decades ago, his “Propaedeutic to the Critique of the Study of U.S. Hispanic Religion: A Polemic against Intellectual Assimilation” remains a rich and ambitious vision for research that would span many fields and many years of work. Mejido’s propaedeutic frames Latinx religious studies as a fundamentally anti-systemic enterprise, whose practitioners must resist

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“intellectual assimilation” within the North American academy. Explicitly linking U.S.  Latinx religious studies with the anti-systemic posture of Latin American Liberation Theology, Mejido called for “a reflection on the conditions of possibility for the emergence and transformation of the study of U.S. Hispanic religion” (33) [C]ritique here … is to be understood as the critical philosophical and theoretical of project reflecting on the conditions of possibility of a scholarly knowledge and a set of academic practices that are produced in a society suffused with power asymmetries, a society that is always contested and never harmonious, and this holds a fortiori if you are a a minority. (33)

A proper critique would reflect on the problem of knowledge—how to represent Latinx life in a way that takes its subaltern predicament seriously— “by tarrying with forms of intra-Hispanic violence and the threat of intellectual assimilation” (34). To that end Mejido proposed four tasks. The first addresses the problem of knowledge, seeking a critical framing of the conditions of Latinx intellectual production, especially their relationship to “socio-historical and structural conditions” (36). The figures he cites on the problem of knowledge—many associated with Marxist intellectual movements—shared an interest in deconstructing the ideological conditions and power equations in which intellectual production is undertaken.2 The problem of knowledge would be approached from two directions. From above it would take up a panoptical approach: a “critical theoretical, archaeological, and world-system perspective on the problem of knowledge” as we study Latinx religions, religious communities, and theologies. From below, it

2

 Mejido cited Karl Marx’s critique of the ideological function of philosophy and science, Friedrich Nietzsche’s repudiation of the autonomy of pure and practical reason via his notion of the “will to power,” Georg Lukács’ unmasking of the correlation between the scientific method and the capitalist mode of production, Theodor Adorno’s critique of positivism, Max Horkheimer’s critique of “traditional theory,” Jürgen Habermas’s notion of a “critical social science,” Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend’s social theoretically motivated critique of the Popperian philosophy of science, Michel Foucault’s “archaeological” de-­ centering of the knowing subject,” and Immanuel Wallerstein’s “historical reconstruction of the social sciences.” (38–9)

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would take “an ethnographic sociological perspective on intellectual production and the academic field” (35). In the second task scholars would distinguish their scholarly positionality and identities with respect to two opposed paradigms—the liberal paradigm and the liberationist paradigm—that orient the politics of intellectual production in the U.S. academy. The liberal paradigm prevails as the dominant orientation. It emerged in a North American context marked by passage from the U.S.-Soviet Cold War to the triumphalism of economic globalization and “democratic capitalism” after 1989. The Cold War period (1945–1989) marks the most aggressive moment of U.S. imperial domination of Latin America. This is a time when Chicago School of neoliberal economics shaped a U.S. foreign policy that undertook innumerable military interventions in Latin America, destabilizing self-rule and democracy in support of American corporate investments, and an emerging global financial order dominated by supra-national institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Trade Organization. That foreign policy and its socio-economic displacements drove waves of migration from Latin America after World War II. With the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, U.S. immigration from Latin America and Asia exploded, diversifying the U.S. population, and implicitly challenging U.S. white supremacism as new multiculturalist perspectives and social movements emerged. The bankruptcy of anti-communist McCarthyism in the 1950s opened the way to more radical options for social transformation in the 1960s, a development evident in the movements for civil rights and power for Black people and other minorities. As intellectual orientation, the liberal paradigm is arrayed in familiar but worn-out Eurocentric myths, heralding the rationality and sovereignty of the individual, emancipated from stultifying traditions, as opening the way to human progress. It takes root in traditions of North American pragmatism (Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey), and understands liberal society as fundamentally integrative, “a structure of harmoniously equalized and enduring order” (49), rather than one beset by social antagonisms and class conflicts (as imagined in the dialectical historicism of Marxist tradition). It figures justice by the light of figures like John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas in “procedural, discursive, praxeological-­ communicative, and/or formal” terms (49). Mejido cited two skews of liberal epistemology—one takes up a technological interest in the empirical sciences; the other investigates the pragmatic-critical possibilities of the

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historical and hermeneutical sciences. The liberal paradigm holds religion as a source of political values that lend themselves to social integration. It also accounts for a number of theologies of culture that imagined cultural formation as an autonomous locus theologicus, outside any transcendental categorization.3 Mejido described the liberationist paradigm in terms of six socio-­ historical developments that shaped the history of Latin America in the twentieth century. First he cited “the rise and fall of the Latin American left”—a historical arc that proceeds from the Cuban Revolution to the consolidation of the “National Security States” and neoliberal governments in the Américas. The Cuban Revolution was a watershed event in the story of the United States’ Latin American empire, inspiring new socialist movements—some of them armed and revolutionary—as well as new anti-systemic ideological figures. The second factor was “the rise and fall of dependency theory” as a strategy for overcoming underdevelopment fostered by structures of economic and financial dependency of the Third World on the First. A third factor was the transformation of institutional Roman Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which gave way almost immediately in Latin America to the theology of liberation. A fourth factor involved the emergence of new autochthonous cultural forms—la literatura del boom, with its magic realism; the Cinema Novo in Brazil and analogous cinematic movements elsewhere in the Américas; and an anthropological turn in the arts generally (poetry, music, and painting) that brought new attention to marginalized voices and cultures of indigenous and Afro-descended peoples. Related to this were the debates between Augusto Salazar Bondy and Leopoldo Zea over how to develop “an authentic Latin American philosophy” that did not simply copy European philosophemes. The sixth factor Mejido cited involves the globalization of neoliberal capitalism in the Américas “as the new hope for Latin American economic development” (45) in the time of the National Security States. In Latin America the liberationist paradigm traces its genealogy “to the critique of the Enlightenment notion of the positive relationship between, on the one hand, the autonomy of reason and moral-cognitive development, and, on the other, social integration and progress, political 3  Mejido notes that liberal theologies of culture were written by Protestant theologians (Ernst Troeltsch, Reinhold and H.  Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Gordon Kaufman) and Catholics alike (Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, David Tracy, and Robert Schreiter).

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liberalism, democratic capitalism, and modernization” (45). It takes up a historical-materialist, structuralist, and dialectical perspective, especially through its philosophy of history, which repudiates “the positivistic and pragmatic frames of reference that are so central to the project of modernity and the process of modernization” (45, fn. 31). It takes as axiomatic that conflict is endemic to human history and seeks to theorize social conflict in terms of the dialectics of domination and resistance among antagonic social forces. The liberationist paradigm targets the liberal paradigm’s notion of “justice as fairness,” which systematically elides “the historical underdevelopment, instability, and colonized status of the Latin American public sphere” (46). Overall, the liberationist paradigm is “grounded in what Habermas has called the ‘emancipatory cognitive interest’ of the ‘critically oriented sciences’” (46).4 The most important contribution the liberationist paradigm made in religion was to empower a critical sociology that sought “to unmask the ideological functions of religion, and … highlight its empowering dimensions” (46). These perspectives fed Liberation Theology—and the massive Christian base community movement it underwrote—to underscore the intimate relationship between colonization (especially amid enforced illiteracy) and religious and political fatalism. Liberation Theology “set out to critique its own Eurocentric foundations, ground itself in the reality of structural oppression, and develop a method that gives pride of place to practice over theory” (47). The third and fourth tasks Mejido proposed involve a “reconstruction of the genesis and transformation of the study of U.S. Hispanic religion” (51). He argued that our field emerged out of a struggle for recognition by Latinxs in society and in the academy. In the process, Latinx scholars became “the inventors of the object of analysis” that today we call Latinx theology and religious studies. However, as the field gained solidity and mass, it attracted considerable interest and commitment from non-Latinx scholars, “and the liberal approach, which had historically been the dominant intellectual world-view among U.S. academics, began to exert more influence as the rubric of analysis in this particular field” (55). Eventually, the liberal discourse began to exert greater influence, gradually eclipsing the liberationist perspective. I refer to this development—a development that continues today—as the liberalization of the liberationist paradigm.

4

 The internal quotes cite from Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (1994).

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Mejido argued that the liberalization of the liberationist paradigm manifests above all in what he called the aesthetic turn, especially after the first books in Latinx theological aesthetics by Roberto Goizueta (1995)5 and Alejandro García-Rivera (1999). In religious studies, Mejido wrote, the liberalization of the liberationist paradigm “manifests itself as the eclipse of the question of power in the sociological analysis of U.S. Latino popular religion” (55). In response he proposes two tasks: first, the task of critiquing the U.S. academic field via the destabilization of dominant interpretations; second, the task of constructing a new ground for the study of U.S.  Hispanic religion that aims to push beyond the liberation-­ liberalism dichotomy that holds sway in the U.S. academy. This new ground should consist of two moments: the phenomenology of struggle as the point of departure for the elucidation of U.S.  Hispanic reality; and the dialectic of ideology and emancipation as the proper movement of U.S.  Hispanic religion. (59)

The heart of these constructive refigurings is an intellectual reflexivity that assesses the objects of study vis-à-vis the conditions of possibility— endogenous and exogenous—for the field and our position in it: I pose to my colleagues a challenge … and it is the critique of the study of Hispanic religion. Is the dialectic of reflexivity not a way of recasting one of the central insights of liberation theology, namely, that all theology and intellectual production that fails to reflect on its own socio-historical conditions of possibility is potentially oppressive, part of the problem? (63)

Mejido’s perspective had its limitations, which are easier to see two decades on. His critical touchstones are overwhelming figures from Europe. And Mejido does not foreground coloniality or racism, though they are dynamics in his analysis. What he refers to as “intellectual assimilation,” I would recast as “intellectual colonization,” a move that brings to the forefront an interrogation that I feel could very productively advance his proposals in light of latter-day developments: Are we seeing the emergence of a third way—a decolonial paradigm—that opens the path to a more radically emancipatory Latinx religious studies? Is there movement toward 5  Mejido took up a sharp critique of Goizueta’s aesthetics (Mejido, 2001), as did I (Aquino, 2006) and Chris Tirres, albeit from different angles (Tirres, 2014).

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a decolonial Latinx theology that would resist even more determinedly the draw of assimilation to liberalism, challenging the liberalization of the liberationist paradigm that Mejido cautioned against?

From Liberation Theology to an Anti-systemic Decolonial Theology The ambivalence Mejido cited in Latinx theological scholarship—flitting between liberationist and liberal paradigms of interpretation—has inhibited development of a fully flowered Latinx Liberation Theology in the United States. Roberto Goizueta’s Caminemos con Jesús (1999) was a key moment—widely cited and celebrated in the Latinx theological community to this day—in what Mejido called the liberalization of the liberationist paradigm. Since then, Latinx theologies have regularly gestured toward key themes in Liberation Theology—its contextual methodology, the option for the poor, and the role of political commitment and social praxis as theological sources and loci. But the anti-systemic verve of Latin American Liberation Theology has never reached the same pitch in this country, undoubtedly for the sociological and ideological reasons we have begun to explore here. Instead, other themes came to the fore. We have commented on theological aesthetics. Another involved theologies rooted in the theme of mestizaje. First-generation Latinx theological reflections on mestizaje tended to displace both an anti-systemic analysis of Latinx life and a race-critical approach to our ideas about Latinx identity. A second generation of Latinx scholars has aggressively called out anemic critical reasoning around the theme of mestizaje. Its figurings, which tended to essentialize Latinx identity, were cited as arraying a Latinx crypto-­ nationalism that squelched Afro-descended and indigenous Latinx voices. It was also felt to help gird the establishment of Latinx theological studies as an identifiable and defensible niche in the North American academy, paradoxically, under the ideological signature of the liberal paradigm. In this respect Latinx theologies seemed unwittingly to repeat gestures of the Eurocentric history of liberalism, whose colonial projects used racial identifications in an exploitative way. The point is not that first-gen Latinx figurings of mestizaje intended to exclude Black and indigenous Latinx voices; rather, the lack of a critical sociology of race in their toolkit blinded

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those perspectives to the discursive exclusions they were unwittingly engaged in.6 I would suggest one of the key understudied questions to inform an anti-systemic theological approach would consider the secular ideological effects of popular Latinx religious belief. Such an investigation can be pushed in continuity with Mejido’s proposal for a Latinx theological sociology of knowledge. At the moment one question intrigues me above all: What role does popular Latinx Christian faith play in facilitating Latinx purchases of the American Dream? This may be the single most important question I can raise for an anti-systemic Latinx theology, given recent historical developments in the United States. I hypothesize that the so-called American Dream is closer to what Malcolm X called a “nightmare,” something we must all wake up from—Latinx and other Americans alike. The American Dream is a lie and a cruel myth for most people who come here. It is also a key ideological mechanism underwriting support for U.S. imperialist, hyper-capitalist, and neocolonial policies—even among recent immigrants who saw their home countries wrecked by U.S. foreign policy. Few have articulated the dominant vision of the American Dream more clearly than former U.S. presidents of both parties. In an address at the end of his presidency, Ronald Reagan spoke of the American Dream in terms of the Puritan John Winthrop’s vision of America as “a city on a hill” (1630): a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. … After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.7

6  The works of Michelle González (2006) toward an “Afro-Cuban theology,” and Néstor Medina’s study of mestizaje (Medina, 2009) in Latinx Catholic theology are key steps in this critique. I comment on them, and other second-generation assessments, in my article on “the Latina/o religious imaginary in the North American racial crucible” (Aquino, 2015a, b). 7  Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address (January 11, 1989),” archived by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia (a think tank on the study of the U.S. presidency), http://bit. ly/qJCupr

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All the elements are there: America as an enterprising immigrant nation, peopled by citizens of every race. Prosperous and free, its functional democratic order and market economies are a magnet for those fleeing chaos in their home countries. It is a well-guarded and mighty citadel, but those with grit and ingenuity could find their way to its door and enter. Above all, the American city is imagined to be blessed and sustained by God’s providence. In 1992, Bill Clinton accepted his party’s nomination for the presidency invoking a tarnished American Dream that was eluding the middle class. If elected he promised he would govern “in the name of all those who do the work, pay the taxes, raise the kids and play by the rules—in the name of the hard-working Americans who make up our forgotten middle class.”8 The logical contradiction should not be lost here: of an American Dream in which everyone who works hard can become middle class. It’s reminiscent of the joke in Garrison Keillor’s lily-white radio program, A Prairie Home Companion, that in Lake Wobegon, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” An American Dream keyed to the middle class fractures the definition of “class,” a hierarchical scheme in which people have very different rights, economic and political power, social capital, educational opportunities, health and life potential.9 Moreover, Clinton’s appeal to the “forgotten middle class” was pitched amid in a long cycle of pro-neoliberal economic deregulation that in fact left the U.S. class system more unequal when Clinton left office in 2001 than it had been when he became president in 1993. The policymaking of Clinton’s presidency was a key step in the cycle of regulatory and market events that crashed the economy in 2008, prompting a worldwide recession. Clearly, Bill Clinton’s vision of the American Dream was little more than a gauzy scam, perpetrated by the ostensibly liberal party.

8  See “Transcript of Speech by Clinton Accepting Democratic Nomination,” The New York Times, July 17, 1992, online at https://nyti.ms/2TtVRtQ (consulted July 1, 2021) 9  Miguel de la Torre—with his usual fire—comments on how the American Dream regularly leaves Latinx peoples behind (De La Torre, 2010a). He stands up an “ética para joder” (more or less an “ethics to fuck with things”) that frontally critiques capitalism for its imperious Eurocentric ethics. See also De La Torre, 2010b.

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On Cuban American Dreamers Drinking Trump’s White-Nationalist Kool-Aid A very interesting thing happened in Miami between 2016 and 2020 that sheds light on the challenge of arraying a properly anti-systemic Latinx theology. Donald Trump won the Cuban-American vote in the presidential elections of those years. But a close look at the numbers shows something unnerving about the political culture of Cubans in the U.S.—revealing an amnesia that is pertinent to our thinking on the question of Latinx identity and the possibility of doing theology Latinamente. Trump won a majority of the Cuban vote in Florida in both races, but with numbers well below prior Republican presidential candidates—George W. Bush (2000, 2004), John McCain (2008), and Mitt Romney (2012). A factor inhibiting the Cuban-American vote for Trump in 2016 was the candidate’s xenophobic nativism, which vilified immigrants, especially Latin Americans, showering them with a toxic morass of dehumanizing lies and insults. He launched his first presidential campaign in 2015 with a sweeping attack on Mexico and Mexicans. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists—and some I assume are good people” (Phillips, 2017). Conversations with Cuban family and friends confirmed a widespread hesitancy about Trump’s anti-Latino nativism; many who voted for him did so amid misgivings. As president, Trump did not retreat one whit from his nativist attitude, but pressed ahead with a broad program to close the borders not only to undocumented immigration, but even to legal immigrants and people seeking asylum. Trump fought battles in court to sustain a ban on immigration from Muslim-majority countries. He sought to build a wall—“a big, beautiful wall!”—to stop migrants from crossing the southern border from Mexico. Trump’s immigration policy was overtly white-supremacist, taking aim at peoples coming from countries whose populations are black and brown, rather than countries with white populations. Trump even stepped-up deportations of Cuban-Americans, a constituency that had been a sacred cow in Republican politics for a generation.10 The threat of 10  In fiscal year 2019, the U.S. deported 1719 Cuban-Americans back to Cuba, triple the number from the prior year. Deportations in 2018 had already nearly tripled (463) compared to 2017 (160). See U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Fiscal Year 2019 Enforcement and Removal Operations Report,” 2019, https://tinyurl.com/ybhwzvtj. By contrast, people from countries in northern or western Europe were deported about one-tenth as frequently as Cuban-Americans.

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deportation even touched prominent anti-communist activists in Miami’s Cuban-American community, something unthinkable before Trump.11 Then there were Trump’s unswerving impulses to authoritarianism. Throughout his entire administration Trump scoffed at the constitutional checks-and-balances that were set up to restrain undemocratic governance. He waged war with federal agencies, taking a meat cleaver to whole departments—the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Postal Service,12 and the Defense and State Departments, among others—so they would become pliant servants of his will (Packer, 2020). During both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump hedged against possible loss by claiming that the Democratic party was planning to steal the election, a claim no other presidential candidate had ever made. When he did lose in 2020, Trump and his backers tried to do precisely what they had falsely claimed their opponents had done: steal the 2020 election. His allies filed more than 60 cases in federal and state courts to overturn certified election results in Republican-leaning states that had voted for Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden. All those cases—including two that reached the U.S. Supreme Court—were dismissed. Trump may even face federal and state criminal prosecution after a recording of his January 2, 2020, phone call with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was leaked. In that call—long after Georgia had audited and certified Biden’s victory there—Trump directly asked Raffensperger to go back and stuff Georgia’s ballot totals with just enough votes to tip that state in his favor.13 Four days later, Trump held a fiery rally in front of the White House telling his supporters to go to the capitol, protest the 11  Ramón Saúl Sánchez is the most outstanding example. He came to the U.S. on a “Freedom Flight” as a 12-year-old refugee in 1967, and spent the intervening years involved in campaigns against the Cuban regime as head of Movimiento Democracia in Miami. But like many Cuban-Americans, perhaps imagining their anti-communism as an ideological security shield against deportation, Sánchez never obtained a green card nor secured his citizenship. His applications for political asylum were rejected by the Trump administration (Jarvie, 2020). He was nearly deported—but delays in his deportation proceedings, and the advent of the Biden administration, have taken those threats off the table. 12  The U.S. Postal Service became a lever in Trump’s bid to limit Democratic voter turnout in 2020, as COVID was confining people to their homes and the mail service became indispensable to voting. 13  “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said in the call. “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes, give me a break” (Scanlan, 2021). The call was direct evidence of Trump’s criminal bid to overturn the election.

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certification of Biden’s electoral victory—ordinarily a rubber-stamp proceeding for Congress—and “stop the steal.” Instead of peaceful protest, however, Trump’s supporters—many outfitted with body armor and light weaponry—stormed the capitol building. They nearly broke into the chamber of the House of Representatives, forcing members of Congress to suspend the electoral-vote count and flee for their lives. The count was resumed later that evening, but not before a number of police officers and protesters had been killed. To this day Trump has never conceded that he lost the election of 2020. Even after leaving office, Trump has maintained his tyrannical control over a Republican party that is taking a starkly authoritarian turn. At the moment (September 2022), Trump and the Republicans are using their state legislative majorities to rewrite state elections laws in a way that would make it easier—by legal means—to engineer a Republican theft of future elections. Many of those legislative initiatives would work by disenfranchising or obstructing the voting rights of ethno-racial minorities, including Latinxs, and/or permit state legislators to overturn the will of voters in their states by fiat. Outside Republican circles there is widespread anxiety that those efforts may entrench a white, minority party as the hegemonic political force in the U.S. for at least a generation by effectively destroying this country’s 250-year-old experiment with democracy. Nevertheless, polls of voters in Miami show how ready Cuban-­ Americans remain to embrace Trump’s corrupt, anti-democratic brand of politics. This is as incongruent as it is horrifying—especially when one considers the history that brought millions of Cubans to exile in the United States since 1959. If Cuban-Americans came to the U.S. to escape dysfunctional and corrupt governance and authoritarianism, why on earth would they support a politician and a party that seems hellbent on derailing democracy? In short: Why don’t pro-Trump Cubans recognize Donald Trump as the Second Coming of Fulgencio Batista, the autocrat whose misrule of Cuba in the 1950s sparked a national uprising that ended with the installation of Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism? In the annals of human infamy, Trump and Batista will be remembered for their shared traits of corruption, authoritarianism, racism, and collusion with foreign governments. Both will be remembered as dyed-in-the-­ wool autocrats who tried to destroy their respective democracies so they could retain power. Donald Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives in 2020 after he undertook a pressure campaign to compel the president of Ukraine to incriminate Hunter Biden, the son of

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Trump’s likely 2020 rival, in a never-proven corruption and influencepeddling scheme involving Biden’s membership on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Trump was also accused of conspiring with the Russian Federation to smear his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, with compromising information that the Russians and Wikileaks had hacked from her private email account and her campaign’s computers (Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. House of Representatives, 2019). Like Trump, Batista relied on foreign interference to gird his hold on power. He held a position at the center of power in Cuba from 1933 until his overthrow in 1959, sometimes as Cuba’s president, thanks to pervasive diplomatic interventions and threats of military action from U.S. officials, especially American ambassadors to Cuba. Batista was not a populist in the mold of a Trump. But he acted on Trump-like impulses by staging a military coup in 1952 after it became apparent he would likely lose his bid for reelection.14 From then until his overthrow in 1959, Batista took up a reign of terror using the murderous state-security apparatus to repress the large national resistance that had arisen. Young Afro-Cuban activists were special targets, and the police penchant for assassinating them openly in the streets aroused indignation across the island.15 Like Batista, Trump showed special contempt for Black political activists, especially after massive Black Lives Matter marches exploded nationwide in the aftermath of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, in May 2020. Trump urged law enforcement to throw aside all inhibition on the use of force to quash the constitutionally protected right of protest. On June 1, 2020, Trump called out the Washington, D.C. National Guard to scatter a Black Lives Matter protest near the White House so that he—flanked by his Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—could cross the street from the White House to shoot photos of the president holding a Bible in front of a church. This act had no purpose other than to allow Trump to perform his racist authoritarianism in a spectacularly public fashion, to stoke enthusiasm in his political supporters. 14  Fidel Castro had been on the ballot that year seeking a seat in Cuba’s House of Representatives. Batista’s coup ruined Castro’s chances for a career in electoral politics, accelerating his passage to guerrilla warfare and a Leninist approach to power. 15  Batista’s ethno-racial identity as a mulatto seems to contradict the anti-Black venom of his counter-insurgency policies. The reality is that Batista was haunted by his own blackness and the exclusions it arrayed around him. It is legendary in Cuba that Batista’s dignity never recovered from the slight of being denied membership in the elite Havana Biltmore Yacht & Country Club, which did not enroll “negros” as members.

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Trump and Batista also shared a corrupt passion for using their powers of office to enrich themselves. Batista got rich during his turns as Cuba’s president by taking bribes from corporate executives seeking entrée in Cuba, and partnering with U.S. mafia figures (Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano) to set up gambling casinos and brothels in Havana. Batista’s personal corruption and that of his government became major themes in the uprising that led to his overthrow. Likewise, Donald Trump—a real-­ estate developer—raked in profits while in the White House by using his hotels and other properties for government business, something no prior president had ever done. He set up his swanky D.C. property, the Trump International Hotel, as a watering-hole for influence-peddlers of every stripe, domestic and foreign—political allies, businessmen, lobbyists, foreign diplomats, spies—who wanted access to Trump’s inner circle. He also insisted that lodgings for him, his staff, and his security details be accommodated during overseas state visits—at costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars—through hotels he owned in those countries. Trump’s corruption, his authoritarianism, his racism, his shady partnerships with foreign powers (above all Russian President Vladimir Putin) are traits he shared with Batista. Batista’s Trump-like approach to politics severely weakened the Cuban state, just as Trump’s four years in office have weakened the United States. Batista’s destruction of the vote in 1952 overturned any hope for a democratic consensus and social peace. The resulting conflict, chaos, and instability created the perfect conditions for a well-organized guerrilla army to take down a fractured state apparatus. All these points seem lost on Cuban-Americans who support Donald Trump. Apparently, like millions of other Americans, they cannot conceive authoritarianism or an insurrectionary overthrow of the constitutional order as possible turns for this country. Revolutions, coups, the anti-­ democratic takedown of elections, guerrilla conflicts: “It can’t happen here!” The vaunted ideals of “the American Dream”—El Sueño Norteamericano—seem to have arrayed blinders of ideological amnesia over their historical memory. These perspectives do not yet amount to a theology, but I offer them as a preface—inaugural questions toward an anti-systemic perspective on Latinx life that a theology could address. How might a North American Latinx Liberation Theology respond to, say, the ideological confusion of pro-Trump Cubans? Liberation from authoritarianism is a legitimate and germane theme for religious reflection. Interpretation of the conditions of oppression is a key step in the socioanalytic mediation that would preface

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theology.16 While Cubans blame Fidel for their exile, the Cuban Revolution was not the work of a single man, nor even of a substantial constituency of Cubans. It was rather the latest turn in a long-historical struggle, dating to the Spanish colonial period, for Cuban freedom and autonomy from the empires of the world. While Cuban exiles tend to assess their situation in complaints against Cuban communism, it has to be recognized that Cuban communism was an attempt to break Cuba away from neocolonial North American domination. Since the U.S. government under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy refused to allow real Cuban independence, the regime made alliances elsewhere. In effect, the Cuban Revolution traded one imperial overlord for another (the Soviet Union), so that Cuba today—ostensibly independent since 1902—remains trapped in a neocolonial labyrinth. To take the long view on Cuban history might allow us to develop a different perspective on Cuban liberation—an anti-colonial and anti-systemic one—that could critique both North American capitalist empire, and the Cuban regime’s Leninist vision of society and social revolution (top-down, totalitarian, dictatorial, dehumanizing).17 Such a view might one day prompt a reconsideration of Cuban-American history in light of the long-historical colonial struggle in which we have been implicated. Such a hypothesis might orient a penetrating critique of the ideological misdirection of American Dream thinking, and perhaps a shift in Cuban-American political culture. In such an approach, figures like Donald Trump might be unmasked—the Second Coming of Fulgencio Batista!—and their authoritarian politics dismissed. Admittedly, such a hope is little more than a dream on my part—my rehabilitation of the American Dream that will never become a reality. And indeed, the deeply ingrained hold ideological perspectives have in peoples’ imaginations is another key question for this inquiry: Why do people defend all sorts of destructive fictions in the face of contrary facts and readily available historical counter-narratives?  See C. Boff 1993; Boff and Boff 1987.  I would sharply distinguish Marx from Lenin here—thinking with Marx’s analytics of capitalism, but dispensing with Lenin, and the latter-day Leninist, Fidel Castro, whose approaches to revolution and society were too vertical and dictatorial. I am much more committed to the vision of horizontal social revolution, such as we find in, say, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, or in indigenous anti-globalization or eco-politics movements. Such movements are anti-systemic without imposing dictatorship. The approach of horizontal social revolution in fact is wholly consistent with popular Christian religious visions of democratic social justice in the ambit of Liberation Theology. 16 17

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What Does It Mean to Be Anti-systemic? An anti-systemic theology should begin by considering: Against what system would this theology be anti? I ground the anti-systemic project in a critique of what I am increasingly calling global capitalist civilization. As Marx used the word, capitalism refers not only to profit-driven production, but to the form of political economy that defends that model of production. I think of global capitalist civilization as a dynamic system of four integrated global processes: (1) private production, profit, and capitalization; (2) the role of national and imperial superstructures in securing the political hegemony of capitalists; (3) the coloniality of power; and (4) ideological consent. The first process involves commodity production in a zero-sum system of money-mediated, for-profit market exchanges. Profits can be capitalized, but capitalization (i.e., the privatization of surplus from interest-bearing capital) exerts an extractive, zero-sum force impoverishing the larger economy. The zero-sum relationship between capital and the economies it colonizes shapes the history of poverty in the modern world. It accounts for the long history of coloniality, neocoloniality, and dependency between the First World and the Global South, as described by dependency theory and theorists of the modern-capitalist world-­ system.18 In global capitalist civilization subjects of poverty become objects of capital; their very marginality and exteriority is not an anomaly or a problem for capitalism; rather, it is a constructive, constitutive element of the system. The cycle of production, profit, and capitalization depends on three other processes. National and imperial superstructures are essentially governments with national or international territorial interests, whose policies and sovereign militarism pave the conditions for profitable capitalist investment. Pro-capitalist governments use their military, policing, and law-making powers to mark territory; build production infrastructure (water, power, transportation, etc.); tame labor and anti-systemic activism; fight imperial wars for new resources; (de)regulate finance and exploitation of the environment; subsidize production with tax money, etc. Governments—in nation-states, empires, and colonial possessions—play a multifaceted role in mediating global capitalist civilization. The coloniality 18  On dependency theory, see Prebisch 1950; Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Frank 1972, 1984; Chilcote 1982; McGovern 1989. On the modern-world system, see Wallerstein 1974, 1979, 1987, 1991, 1995, 2004; So 1990.

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of power is the modernity-making technology of power described so insightfully by the late sociologist Aníbal Quijano.19 The coloniality of power accounts for how the capitalist economy became both colonial and global after 1492. European colonial projects strategically used a growing arsenal of racial-classification schemes, to subordinate labor and regulate social mobility among the colonized in ways that expanded profitability. This had a profound impact on the formation of the modern ideological condition. The coloniality of power—with its racialization of labor— underwrites white Eurocentrism as the ideological lingua franca of the emerging modern colonial/capitalist world-system. As European colonizers increasingly resorted to racial thinking to differentiate themselves from their subalterns, a notion of the world-historical superiority of all things European emerges. European history is increasingly narrated as the destination of world history since antiquity, that the end of history is Europe or European. The coloniality of power—crossing racial domination with profit-seeking and empire-building—acts as an accelerator for modern capitalism to become global, exponentially more profitable, and genetically racist. The fourth process—involving ideological projects—seeks to procure consent of the vast majorities who are subalterns in global capitalist civilization. This has to do with the ideological construction of a reality that becomes normative—and prescribes normality—in capitalist societies. Among the most important domains of ideological research has to do with religious ideologies, in writings and debates dating to Marx. Those perspectives are richly informed by later figures—such as Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser, Slavoj Žižek, Franz Hinkelammert, Enrique Dussel, Otto Maduro, and Judith Butler, to name a few whose work has informed mine.20 It is axiomatic for an anti-systemic theology that capitalism—with its tyranny of money—is at the root of many of the world’s troubles. So, this anti-systemic theology would take critical stances against the privatization of the world’s wealth and social capital that today’s system of globalized private capitalism guarantees. It would grasp how the world’s conflicts mostly spin on capitalist axes, amid fights over resources and markets. Latin American history makes no sense without an accounting of how the empire of capital shaped its destiny, from the colonial period until today.  See Quijano 2000a, 2000b, 2014; and Quijano and Wallerstein 1992.  See among others: Althusser 1969, 1971; Butler 1997a, b; Butler et al. 2000; Dussel 1984, 1985, 1988, 1990a, b, 1993; Hinkelammert 1981, 1998, 2015, 2017; Lukács 2013; Maduro 1979, 1980, 1982, 2004; and Žižek 1994. 19 20

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The Latinx presence in the United States likewise makes no sense outside that framework. This gives rise to some specific projects within the ambit of Latinx theological and religious studies.

Reframing Latinx Identity in Light of Quijano’s Theory of The Coloniality of Power One of the most powerful Latin American contributions to the anti-­ systemic analytic was Quijano’s idea of the coloniality of power, as sketched above. Quijano’s theory could fruitfully be brought to bear to re-theorize Latinx identities—further displacing mestizaje as the cornerstone identity. Quijano’s sociology demonstrates that identities were racialized to serve the needs of Spanish colonialism for a docile workforce, with its abundant supply of slaves and serfs. Social identities of that time—“negros,” “indios,” “mulatos”—were tied to specific types of colonial labor, and thus the control of social identities became a way of also controlling production, profits, and class relations. What this means is that Latinx immigrants who do not identify as afro or negro have more in common racially with American Blacks, whose ancestors were enslaved, than with Anglo-Americans. The second-tier status of light-skinned Latinx peoples in the U.S. racial pecking order more resembles the third-class treatment Blacks historically have received, than the unquestionable privileges of whiteness that many Latinx people imagine they enjoy. Indeed, the reality is that many Latinx people cultivate white social identities so that they can find greater reception in (white-supremacist) North America. This ideological misbegetting of their real relation with Black Americans—and their general blindness to the impact of white supremacism on their own lives—explains why whitened Latinx people often hold attitudes of anti-Black contempt. It also prompts them (as discussed above with Cuban-Americans and Trump) to make strange bedfellows with forces that are viscerally racist and anti-Latinx.

Forging a More Vocal Pro-Black Antiracist Reflection in Latinx Theology Latinx theologians have done some of their best work theorizing the common journeys and “ties that bind” Black and Latinx religious reflection. Benjamín Valentín’s collaboration with Black theological humanist Anthony Pinn blazed a trail starting in the early 2000s with conference projects and books promoting a dialog on the analogies between the two

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fields (Pinn & Valentín, 2001, 2009). Black and Latinx theology were both committed to intercultural dialog, but before the turn of the millennium a Black-Latinx theological dialog was scarcely to be found. Each of their two volumes presents a group of discussants—rehearsing matters of racial distance and difference, theological sourcing, popular theology and culture, and gendered theology. Likewise, at least three joint meetings between the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians in the United States and the Black Catholic Theological Symposium since the 1990s took up important dialogs on common projects and differences. I commented earlier on work by Michelle González (her Afro-Cuban Theology) and Néstor Medina (his study on mestizaje). These are important intercultural studies with a strongly antiracist spirit. They support an anti-systemic religious imaginary, especially in their intervention against the segregation that had left Black and Latinx theological studies in separate camps. None of them engages an anti-capitalist reflection per se.

A Wider Latinx Theological Engagement with Marxist Critical Theory Were this joint intercultural dialog to be expanded, we might consider a dialog on Black Marxism21 and its influence on Black religious reflection, vis-à-vis the engagements with Marxist thought undertaken in Latin American Liberation Theology. Which brings up another issue: I am not aware of a single study to date in North American Latinx theology that reflects on Marxist thought as an anti-systemic source for the socioanalytic mediation of Latinx life and religious cultures. The reasons for this are not hard to imagine. There is an entrenched phobia—and sometimes a raging hatred—concerning Marx and Marxism in North American Latinx thought, due in no small part to the bitter historical experience of Cuban-­ Americans. But we would all do well to (re-)read some of the more receptive engagements of Marxist analytics from Latin American Liberation Theology—from José Porfirio Miranda, Monseñor Óscar Romero, Jesuit Father Pedro Arrupe, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Franz Hinkelammert, Otto Maduro, and Enrique Dussel. These works entertained or embraced Marxist approaches to capitalism as part of a socioanalytic intervention, while raising strong critical caution on historical revolutionary projects 21  “Black Marxism” is a powerful niche in Marxist studies, its theory of capitalism informed by Black historical experience. See Robinson 1997, 2021 and West 1991.

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that ended with top-down totalitarianism. The diagnosis of capitalism for Latinx theology, especially in engagement with Marxist tradition, is a sadly neglected project. But one consequence of such a study could well be a broad awakening in our field to the reality of capitalism’s totalizing power over the world—the global capitalist civilization I cite above. With its insights we might gain critical armature against the defunct notion that a calm, prosperous civility—like that promised in the American Dream—is possible for all in this system. This is one point on which Mejido’s critique of the aesthetic turn places great weight: that we need to “tarry with the negative, the monstrosity of marginalization and struggle” (Mejido, 2001: 19). Capitalism is the wily monstrosity that lies at the root of most of the struggles Latinx theology touches—yet a theological takedown of this system is all but absent from our frame of reference. This is a time when global capitalism is lurching from one crisis to another, leaving devastated populations and productive dead zones in its wake. It is a time when the entire planetary ecosystem is being undone because human beings do not have the insight or the will to intervene collectively against a form of political economy that systemically attacks any force that impedes the accumulation of surplus-value. And considering that we live in a socio-cultural milieu subliminally inflected by capitalist ideology, I do not believe we can make necessary interventions without engaging these critical traditions. Pope Francis has framed a Liberation Theology for the environment during his papacy (Laudato Si, 2015) that takes aim at rampant “throwaway” consumer culture, and the technocracy that promises illusory solutions more motivated by profit than by passion for the global common good. I argue elsewhere that the “climate fatalism” that has paralyzed governmental responses to the climate crisis has an ideological interpretation that conduces directly to capitalism, and call for a theological reflection toward divesting our economy of private capitalism.22 Pushing ourselves to “tarry 22  Jorge A.  Aquino, “¿Crepúsculo del ídolo o de la vida planetaria? Reflexiones sobre Laudato Si, el fatalismo climático y la civilización capitalista global,” forthcoming in 2023 in a publication from the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO). I argue there that Francis’s critique of throwaway culture actually does not turn fully anti-capitalist. The words “capitalist” and “capitalism” are nowhere to be found in Laudato Si. Rather, Francis calls for investors to find their humanity and conscience and voluntarily work to ratchet down emissions and other destructive environmental practices. In my opinion this is a pipe dream—that capital will always seek its most profitable options unless constrained by a higher sovereign force. Such a force rarely materializes, however, because most governments are in fact owned subsidiaries of capitalist enterprise. I chalk this shortcoming in the pope’s message to an ideological amnesia the magisterium has suffered since it opted to marginalize almost all recourse to Marxist critical theory after the 1970s.

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in the negative” more critically, we might unearth our own sublimated pro-capitalism, and take a harder line on the long-historical system that almost single-handedly can be seen to account for so many of the world’s social pathologies and oppression.

Against American Dream Thinking Finally, almost as a culmination of these other proposals, Latinx theology can afford to entertain a stronger critical interrogation of the American Dream/El Sueño Norteamericano, purging it categorically from the Latinx poetics of liberation. The Cuban-American flirtation with Donald Trump sketched above shows one aspect of the problem. Overall, American Dream thinking presents Latinx peoples with a shell game: work hard and play by the rules—as President Clinton put it—and you can be middle class. Of course, Clinton was pitching this bon-bon to constituents for whom the dream was evidently dying. As we noted, Clinton left office in 2001 with the middle class in worse shape than when he’d started. Seven years later, the global economy came crashing down in large part because of policies the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations had taken—in continuity with Clinton’s predecessors—to deregulate Wall Street investment banking (Aquino, 2013). For Latin Americans, the American Dream has an even harsher face. The “America” of this dream is an empire that—according to one scholar’s count (Becker, n.d.)—took up 56 military interventions in Latin America between 1891 and 2009, mostly to defend U.S. corporate investments or check pro-democracy movements that were pushing land reform, nationalization of domestic industries, or other redistributive projects. Many of those operations destroyed democratically elected governments, prompting civil wars and mass migration to the U.S.  Today’s Latin American migrants, scatterlings of the U.S. government’s pro-capitalist imperialism, are vilified in racist-nativist campaigns, especially from right-wing politicians. Donald Trump’s closed-door immigration policy was a barbaric abomination in light of this history. Again, all of this should induce us not only to abandon American Dream thinking, but to run it out of town on a rail. Latinx history is not the history of the “America Dream,” but of a gringo-American nightmare.23 23  Tony Lin’s study of Latinx Pentecostals—Prosperity Gospel Latinos and their American Dream (2020)—is one of the rare ethnographies studying Latinx Christians on the theme of the American Dream. Lin’s work shows a richly nuanced understanding of the sociological passages of Latinx Pentecostals, and paints their prosperity theology as an extreme and paradoxical celebration of the American Dream.

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The critique of American Dream thinking can gain powerful support in consultation with Black intellectuals. An indispensable theological contribution is Kelly Brown Douglas’s study of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism (Douglas, 2015) as the backbone of the American Dream and its notions of the U.S. as a historically unique and “exceptional” society. She traces the history of Anglo-Saxon ideology back through American and English history, showing how it gives rise to white supremacism and its “stand your ground culture.” Likewise, a Latinx rethinking of the American Dream can gain insight from Black critiques of Lin Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit Broadway play, Hamilton, which raises screaming red flags for its uncritical depictions of figures from this country’s revolutionary period. The eponymous hero of Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, is presented as a multiculturalist hero, a proto-abolitionist with origins in the Black Caribbean. But the playwright Ishmael Reed did not buy it, writing a parody of Hamilton (The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, 2020) that brought to life voices from Hamilton’s life that had been left out of Miranda’s telling. In Reed’s play Miranda, possibly high on Ambien, is haunted by ghosts of actual-history past. Through a series of visitors, including former slaves who were leased to Hamilton’s household, white indentured servants, Native American characters, and Harriet Tubman herself, Miranda grows to learn that his source material—historian Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton—is fatally flawed, as it erroneously portrays Alexander Hamilton as a champion of liberty for oppressed people. “How can someone have slaves and be considered an abolitionist?” Reed asks. (Sundaresh, 2019)

Miranda’s play is one of the most powerful expressions of American Dream thinking a Latinx person has ever produced, with special appeal for people of color. That it turns out to be ahistorical (according to Reed and other critics) confirms that the ideology of the American Dream overtook whatever critical historical faculties Miranda might have brought to the project. That Hamilton was imagined as a vehicle to multiculturalize and diversify the image of the “Founding Fathers”—many of whom owned slaves and bore children through them—almost makes matters worse.24 24  Sociologically, Miranda belongs to Puerto Rico’s Nuyorican diaspora. He maintains strong family and professional ties to the island, one of the last direct colonial possessions of the United States. His assimilation of Hamilton to a multiculturalist American Dream defies the present-day colonial realities that are slowly destroying the Puerto Rican homeland.

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These are examples of the need for a critical discourse on the American Dream that de-romanticizes this country, liberating Latinx intellectuals to take critical aim at the real problem—American Empire and its vaunted passion for imposing capitalism (and repatriated profits) worldwide.

Conclusions For the last 20  years, the time of second-generation Latinx theology, a widely perceived ambivalence, has been exercised—“beauty or justice?” “beauty and justice?”—as critiques of the aesthetic turn and the liberalization of the liberationist paradigm were assimilated. Manuel Mejido’s propaedeutic was a key offering in the reassessments that have taken place in the field in this time. Here I suggest that the project is far from finished. Truly embracing the liberationist paradigm will require an anti-systemic approach to the question of capitalism, amid a review of first-gen Liberation Theology’s engagement with Marxist critical theory. While important gestures toward a decolonial theology have emerged, they are few and far-­ between.25 Inasmuch as the aforementioned ambivalence remains, the decolonial work that has begun can be powerfully supplemented by more far-reaching interrogations of the idolatrous, anti-human, anti-god system of capital. Anti-systemic critique—bringing together studies on the mechanics of capitalization, its relation to colonialism and imperialism, and ideological pathologies like the American Dream and American Exceptionalism—can advance the liberationist spirit of our field.

References Althusser, L. (1969). For Marx (Ben Brewster, Trans.). Pantheon Books. Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy, and other essays. Monthly Review Press. Aquino, M. P. (2002). Latina feminist theology: Central features. In M. P. Aquino, D. L. Machado, & J. Rodriguez (Eds.), A reader in Latina feminist theology: Religion and justice (pp. 133–160). University of Texas Press.  Some outstanding examples: Fernando Segovia’s pathbreaking forays in postcolonial biblical criticism (Segovia 2000a, b); Mayra Rivera’s postcolonial theology of God (2007); David Sánchez’s study of guadalupan discourse as anti-imperial resistance (2008); my work on the Crash of 2008 and the role of racial formation in the history of Latin America (Aquino 2013, 2015a); Jacqueline Hidalgo’s study of utopics in the Chicano movement (2016); Nestor Medina’s historical rethinking of Christian culture in decolonial perspective (2018, 2019), and Melissa Pagán’s approach to a decolonial feminist theology from the critical standpoint of the coloniality of gender (2020). 25

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Aquino, J. A. (2006). The prophetic horizon of latino theology. In Miguel A. de la Torre & Gastón Espinosa (Eds.), Rethinking latino(a) religion and identity (pp. 101–25). Pilgrim Press. Aquino, J. A. (2013). Poverty and prosperity after the crash of 2008: Insights from liberation theology on zero-sum capitalism at the twilight of American exceptionalism. In P. O. Myhre (Ed.), Religious and ethical perspectives for the twenty-­ first century (pp. 238–260). Anselm Academic. Aquino, J.  A. (2015a). Historia, Poder e Ideología: La Ideología Racial Como Producción Del Sistema-Mundo Capitalista Moderno. Horizontes Decoloniales, 1(1), 103–142. Aquino, J. A. (2015b). Mestizaje: The Latina/o religious imaginary in the north American racial crucible. In O. O. Espín (Ed.), Wiley-Blackwell companion to U.S. Latino theology (pp. 283–311). Wiley-Blackwell. Aquino, J. A. (forthcoming, 2023). ¿Crepúsculo del ídolo o de la vida planetaria? Reflexiones sobre Laudato Si, el fatalismo climático y la civilización capitalista global. Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales. Becker, M. (n.d.). History of U.S. interventions in Latin America. https://tinyurl. com/yylaay2p. Accessed 9 Jan 2022. Boff, C. (1993). Epistemology and method of the theology of liberation. In I. Ellacuría & J. Sobrino (Eds.), Mysterium liberationis: Fundamental concepts of liberation theology (pp. 57–85). Orbis. Boff, L., & Boff, C. (1987). Introducing liberation theology. Orbis. Butler, J. (1997a). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. Routledge. Butler, J. (1997b). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford University Press. Butler, J., Laclau, E., & Žižek, S. (2000). Contingency, hegemony, universality: Contemporary dialogues on the left. Verso. Cardoso, F.  H., & Faletto, E. (1979). Dependency and development in Latin America (Marjory Mattingly Urquidi, Trans.). University of California Press. Chilcote, R. H. (Ed.). (1982). Dependency and Marxism: Toward a resolution of the debate. Latin American perspectives series, no. 1. Westview Press. De La Torre, M. (2010a). Left behind: The American Dream and the Hispanic Dilemma. Review and Expositor, 107, 513–524. De La Torre, M. (2010b). Latina/o social ethics: Moving beyond Eurocentric moral thinking. Baylor University Press. Douglas, K.  B. (2015). Stand your ground: Black bodies and the justice of god. Orbis Books. Dussel, E. D. (1984). Cuaderno Tecnológico-Histórico (Extractos de La Lectura B 56, Londres 1851) (Enrique Dussel Peters, Trans.). Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Dussel, E.  D. (1985). La Producción Teórica de Marx: Un Comentario a Los Grundrisse. 1a ed. Biblioteca Del Pensamiento Socialista. Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Dussel, E.  D. (1988). Hacia Un Marx Desconocido: Un Comentario de Los Manuscritos (pp. 61–63). Signo XXI Editores.

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Dussel, E.  D. (1990a). El Último Marx (1863–1882) y La Liberación Latinoamericana: Un Comentario a La Tercera y a La Cuarta Redacción de “El Capital”. 1. ed. Biblioteca Del Pensamiento Socialista. Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Dussel, E. D. (1990b). Teología de la Liberación y Marxismo. In I. Ellacuría & J.  Sobrino (Eds.), Mysterium Liberationis: Conceptos Fundamentales de la Teología de la Liberación (pp. 115–144). UCA. Dussel, E. D. (1993). Las Metáforas Teológicas de Marx. Verbo Divino. Frank, A. G. (1972). Lumpenbourgeoisie / lumpendevelopment: Dependence, class, and politics in Latin America. Monthly Review Press. Frank, A. G. (1984). Critique and anti-critique: Essays on dependence and reformism. Praeger. García-Rivera, A. (1999). The community of the beautiful: A theological aesthetics. Liturgical Press. Garger, K. (2021, December 7). 40 Percent of Hispanic voters are offended by term ‘Latinx,’ poll finds. New York Post. https://wp.me/pb3Qpq-­1nzUv Goizueta, R. S. (1995). Caminemos con Jesús: Toward a Hispanic/Latino theology of accompaniment. Orbis Books. González, M. A. (2006). Afro-Cuban theology: Religion, race, culture, and identity. University Press of Florida. Habermas, J. (1994). Knowledge & human interests (Jeremy J. Shapiro, Trans.). Polity Press. Hidalgo, J. M. (2016). Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, utopias, and the Chicano movement. Palgrave Macmillan. Hinkelammert, F.  J. (1981). Las Armas Ideológicas de La Muerte (2nd ed.). Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones. Hinkelammert, F. J. (1998). Sacrificios humanos y sociedad occidental: Lucifer y la bestia. DEI. Hinkelammert, F.  J. (2015). Solidaridad o Suicidio Colectivo. Primera edición. Arlekín. Hinkelammert, F.  J. (2017). La Vida o El Capital: El Grito Del Sujeto Vivo y Corporal Frente a La Ley Del Mercado: Antología Esencial, Estela Fernández Nadal (Ed.). CLACSO. Jarvie, J. (2020, February 20). After living in the U.S. for more than half a century, this Cuban activist may be deported. Los Angeles Times. https://lat. ms/3R3TGpH Lin, T. T.-R. (2020). Prosperity gospel Latinos and their American dream. University of North Carolina Press. Lukács, G. (2013). History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics (Rodney Livingstone, Trans.). MIT Press. Maduro, O. (1979). Religión y Lucha de Clases. Editorial Ateneo. Maduro, O. (1980). Religión y Conflicto Social. Centro de Estudios Ecuménicos. Maduro, O. (1982). La Cuestión Religiosa En El Engels Pre-Marxista: Estudio Sobre La Génesis de Un Punto de Vista En Sociología de Las Religiones. Monte Ávila Editores.

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Maduro, O. (2004). Mapas Para La Fiesta : Reflexiones Latinoamericanas Sobre La Crisis y El Conocimiento. Fundación Centro Gumilla. McGovern, A. F. (1989). Liberation theology and its critics: Toward an assessment. Orbis Books. Medina, N. (2009). Mestizaje: (Re)mapping race, culture, and faith in Latina/o Catholicism. Studies in Latino/a Catholicism. Orbis Books. Medina, N. (2018). Christianity, Empire, and the Spirit: (Re)Configuring faith and the cultural. Theology and mission in World Christianity (Vol. 11). Brill. Medina, N. (2019). The doctrine of discovery, LatinXo theoethics, and human rights. Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology, 21(2), 157–173. Mejido, M. J. (2001). A critique of the ‘aesthetic turn’ in U.S. Hispanic theology: A dialogue with Roberto Goizueta and the positing of a new paradigm. Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology, 8(3), 18–48. Mejido, M. J. (2002). Propaedeutic to the critique of the study of U.S. Hispanic religion: A polemic against intellectual assimilation. Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology, 10(2), 31–63. Packer, G. (2020, March 2). The president is winning his war on American institutions. The Atlantic. https://tinyurl.com/qoqgoy9 Pagán, M. (2020). Cultivating a decolonial feminist integral ecology: Extractive zones and the nexus of the coloniality of being / coloniality of gender. Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology, 22(1), 72. Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S.  House of Representatives. (2019, December). The Trump-Ukraine impeachment inquiry report. https:// intelligence.house.gov/report/ Phillips, A. (2017, June 16). Analysis: ‘They’re Rapists.’ President Trump’s Campaign launch speech two years later, annotated. Washington Post. https:// tinyurl.com/yc5qg39o Pinn, A.  B., & Valentín, B. (2001). The ties that bind: African American and Hispanic / American / Latino/a: A theology in dialogue. Continuum. Pinn, A.  B., & Valentín, B. (2009). Creating ourselves: African Americans and Hispanic Americans on popular culture and religious expression. Duke University Press. Prebisch, R. (1950). The economic development of Latin America and its principal problems. E/CN.12/89/Rev. 1. United Nations, Economic Commission for Latin America. Quijano, A. (2000a). Colonialidad Del Poder y Clasificacion Social. Journal of World-Systems Research, 11(2), 342–386. Quijano, A. (2000b). Coloniality of power, eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from the South, 1(3), 533–580. Quijano, A. (2014). Cuestiones y Horizontes: De La Dependencia Histórico-­ Estructural a La Colonialidad / Descolonialidad Del Poder, Daniel Assis Clímaco (Ed.). CLACSO.

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Quijano, A., & Wallerstein, I. M. (1992). Americanity as a concept, or the Americas in the modern world-system. International Social Science Journal, 44(134), 549–557. Reagan, R. (1989). “Farewell Address (January 11, 1989),” archived by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. http://bit.ly/qJCupr Reed, I. (2020). The haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda: A two-act play. Archway Editions. Rivera, M. (2007). The touch of transcendence: A postcolonial theology of god (1st ed.). Westminster John Knox Press. Robinson, C. J. (1997). Black movements in America. Routledge. Robinson, C. J. (2021). Black Marxism: The making of the black radical tradition. Rev. and Updated 3rd edn. The University of North Carolina Press. Sánchez, D.  A. (2008). From Patmos to the Barrio: Subverting imperial myths. Fortress Press. Scanlan, Q. (2021, January 3). Trump demands Georgia secretary of state ‘find’ enough votes to hand him win. ABC News. https://tinyurl.com/y3d35dhg Segovia, F.  F. (2000a). Decolonizing biblical studies: A view from the margins. Orbis Books. Segovia, F. F. (2000b). Interpreting beyond borders. Sheffield Academic Press. So, A. Y. (1990). Social Change and Development: Modernization, Dependency, and World-Systems Theories, Sage Library of Social Research (v. 178). Sage Publications. Sundaresh, J. (2019, February 21). Ishmael Reed doesn’t like Hamilton. Current Affairs. https://tinyurl.com/y585qrq5 Tirres, C. D. (2014). The aesthetics and ethics of faith: A dialogue between liberationist and pragmatic thought. Oxford University Press. U.S.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (2019). U.S.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement Fiscal Year 2019 Enforcement and Removal Operations Report. https://www.ice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Document/ 2019/eroReportFY2019.pdf Wallerstein, I. M. (1974). The modern world-system, 3 vols. Academic Press. Wallerstein, I. M. (1979). The capitalist world-economy: Essays. Studies in modern capitalism. Cambridge University Press. Wallerstein, I. M. (1987). World-system analysis. In A. Giddens & J. H. Turner (Eds.), Social theory today. Stanford University Press. Wallerstein, I. M. (1991). Geopolitics and geoculture: Essays on the changing world-­ system. Cambridge University Press. Wallerstein, I. M. (1995). After liberalism. New Press. Wallerstein, I. M. (2004). World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Duke University Press. West, C. (1991). The ethical dimensions of Marxist thought. Monthly Review Press. Žižek, S. (1994). Mapping ideology. Verso.

History, Memory, and Forgetting: Epistemological Challenges for Latin American Biblical-Theological Studies Maricel Mena López

Since universities and faculties are the institutions responsible for the training of professors operating in the different degrees of education in Latin American countries, the knowledge of our cultural diversity at the level of the contents provided must be coupled to diversity according to representativeness. Here lies a fundamental problem: if it is true that liberalism recommends the freedom of the State in some domains, such as the religious domain, why does it continue to insist on a monocultural education in Latin American theological teaching? Thus, the question that must be asked is the following: How can individuals and groups with ethnic-racial identities other than the dominant one be represented with equity before states whose institutions do not recognize their particular knowledge and practices? (Gómez, 1998).

M. M. López (*) Faculty of Theology, Santo Tomas University, Bogotá, Colombia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_11

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According to Taylor, 1996, the identity of the human being is particularly modeled from knowledge, or the lack of it, that is, a person or a group can be affected by the way it is represented by other human beings, or by the lack of historical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, theological references especially if images that despise or depreciate are transmitted. For this author, the absence of recognition or inadequate recognition can be one of the main sources of oppression or by confining someone to a false, distorted, and reduced way of being. These sources of oppression are evident in society in general and in the educational process (Romero & García, 2021), in which cultural content and social values are inadequate. Whatever the explanation for this monocultural phenomenon in the university stage, what is evident today is that part of the problem is associated with racism and racial discrimination present in our society in general and, especially, in schools and religious institutions. Racism and racial discrimination are associated with the dominant white experience. Whiteness is understood as a silenced conscience and almost unable to admit its provocative participation in racial conflicts (Guesser, 2001, 11). This whiteness as a generator of racial conflicts demarcates ideological conceptions, social practices, and formation, identified with a normative and hegemonic “white” order (Guesser, 2001, 11). The white experience, or whiteness, can then be observed and understood as a form of social amnesia associated with certain modes of subjectivity that, in particular social contexts, are perceived as normal (Echeverría, 2011). According to this reasoning, the experience of the other racial groups’, blacks, raizales, palenqueros, indigenous, mulattoes, zambos, room, etc., nomenclatures are established to justify their dehumanity, decharacterizing the humanity of a whole contingent of human beings (Caldeira, 2021), and consequently is perceived as an indicator of imbalances in the context of “androcentric, patriarchal, heteronormative and racialized humanity.” Racism is not just a skin color problem. Its deepest nature lies in the attempt to dismantle a human group by the denial of its collective identity. To this day, African American communities suffer from the lack of historical references that allow them to rebuild a self-image worthy of respect and self-esteem. This panorama also applies to the theological field; “official theology” has done everything to make invisible any African legacy in the history of Israel, in early Christianity, in the patristic tradition, in philosophy, and in theology in general.

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At this point, I propose as a challenge to promote a discussion and exchange on the construction of an inclusive rhetoric regarding a theology that respects ethnic and cultural identities. This discussion is considered appropriate by the black communities with whom I share, since it is a mechanism that helps to overcome the inequalities derived from the historical disadvantage in which the communities were left after the transatlantic slave trade. The effects of the past are today reinforced by exclusion and racism, while theological rhetoric aimed at treating everyone as equal has shown its limitations. Therefore, it is essential from a liberating theological perspective to give concrete content to the categories of “equality, love, justice” of religious language since inclusion policies cannot be punctual but structural. If the chronicle of African falsification is Eurocentrism, which stands on the condition of “truth” said “scientific,” how can the inhabitants of the African diaspora reconstruct our identity from that “truth” revealed in the Jewish and Christian traditions? Is it possible to dialog with the ancestral philosophical tradition in the theological programs of universities and theological institutes? How can we theologians who seek to experience a black theology open to other sciences, cultures, and religions contribute to the demystification, in our theological work, in the Institutes and communities in which we are inserted, the demonic image painstakingly constructed over centuries in prejudice to the ancestral African wisdom? Will it be possible to create courses in philosophy and black theology in our Latin American faculties? I divide my presentation into three points: In the first, I propose to return to our ancestral philosophical tradition; in the second, I inquire about the ancient world in biblical studies; and in point three, I present some epistemological challenges for an adequate integration of Afro-Asian studies in Latin American biblical studies.

Stolen Legacy The criticism of colonialist thought is not new; it has its roots in the resistance movements of the descendants of Africans who inhabited our continent since the period of slavery. However, in the 1960s, a systematic and critical black reflection on white and Western hegemony emerged, especially from the African continent and its diaspora. In the United States under the leadership of the Baptist pastor Martin Luther King (1929–1968) and the leader of the Muslim black movement Malcolm X (1925–1965).

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In the Caribbean, this reflection made its appearance in the mid-twentieth century under the influence of Pan-Americanism and under the leadership of the Jamaican preacher Marcus Garvey (1887–1940). Garvey’s preaching focused on the redemption of African Americans by returning to Africa. In Jamaica, on the other hand, the Ras Tafari movement is consolidated, arising from the poorest of the poor, the descendants of the island’s former maroons. This movement quickly became the cultural foundation for black resistance in the African American diaspora. This, as Luis César Bou affirms: It was the first step in the reconstruction of an African cultural consciousness. However, there can be no consciousness without history, and Rasta history was a mythical history. It was necessary to build a real history, to set up a secular conscience. (Bou, 2009, 62)

Without a doubt, the great precursor of black consciousness is the Senegalese Cheik Anta Diop (1923–1986), who from historiography contributed to the need to reconstruct the history of colonized nations. In his words, “In rediscovering our past, we have sought a means of recreating that historical consciousness without which there can be no great nation” (Diop, 1987). Among his forceful proposals for a future postcolonial theoretical re-elaboration, we place his vindication of the Africanness of Ancient Egypt. “Egyptian antiquity is to African culture what Greco-Latin antiquity is to Western culture. The constitution of a body of African human sciences must start from this fact” (Diop, 1974). Diop’s work, based on diachronic, comparative, critical and multidisciplinary analysis, and his idea of developing a General History of Africa was consolidated in 1974 in Cairo during the Colloquium on “population of Ancient Egypt and the decipherment of Meroitic writing,” convened by UNESCO. Another work that should be mentioned as a pioneer is Stolen Legacy, 1954 by Professor George James, who develops his work parallel to Diop’s, in British Guiana. This author, without knowing Diop’s work, analyzes the influence of Egyptian culture in the Mediterranean world, demonstrating that Greek culture is a copy of thought. In 1987, the British linguist Martin Bernal (1937–2013) is the first to value the work of James, who in his landmark book Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Western Civilization coincides with James’s thesis so much that at the end of his work, he recognizes the following:

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the pioneer has been George G. M. James, a professor who teaches at a small college in Arkansas. In 1954, he published a book entitled “Stolen Legacy". Although the author does not address the origins of Greece during the Bronze Age, he demonstrates, harshly in particularly solid ancient sources, to what extent the Greeks themselves recognized that all their learning had been borrowed from the Iron Age Egyptians. (Bernal, 1991, 394)

Bernal affirms that the understanding of the world from the Arian Semitic model (children of Shem) is recent, since historically it is situated in the nineteenth century, proposing to return to the revised old model, which would force us to rethink the fundamental bases of the so-called Western civilization in historiography. In this model, the peoples of the African horizon (Camitas, sons of Ham) will influence the Mediterranean peoples and not vice versa, as they have not taught. Positivists tend to dismiss myths and genealogies as a-historical. This contribution for some black exegetes has been fundamental since it has made it possible to show to what extent Jewish culture has its genesis in African-mythical and genealogical traditions. In relation to the Mediterranean world, Long (2018) draws attention, when studying the Afro-American religion of the sixties and seventies, to colonialism in the United States, to geospatial dependence as an expression of the homogenization of space-time thinking of the people and cultures. For this reason, rather than evoke a common past with the Western hegemonic religion, what is proposed is to denounce that homogeneity made the ancient African religious contribution invisible. Our ancestors, wise men, priests, misnamed magicians, forged an ancient civilization. Egyptian magicians (Jacq, 2008) are usually spoken of in a pejorative way, but if we go to the etymology, we realize that this term comes from the Greek etymology magos, which means magician, and magela, which means magic, and which are but permutations of the terms mog, megh, magh, which in Pehlve and zen, both languages of the Ancient East, which mean “priest”, “wise” and “excellent”. From them, and in a period prior to that of historical Greece, also arose the Chaldean name of Maghdim, which is equivalent to “supreme wisdom” or “sacred philosophy”. (Hope, 1984, 13)

The simple etymology indicates that Magic was the synthesis of the sciences possessed by the Magi or philosophers of Egypt, India, Persia, Chaldea, who were the priests of nature, the patriarchs of knowledge, and the founders of those great civilizations.

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Within the complex Egyptian religious system, we find the book Egyptian Mysteries (Jámblico, 1997), which is the first treatise on salvation of which humanity is aware. In this system, the body was understood as a house or prison of the soul that could be freed from the bonds of the body through the Arts and Sciences and thus progress from mortal to god (Hornung, 2000). In other words, if the soul was freed from its carnal bondage, it could enable the human being to become like a god and attain holiness, that is, to see the gods in life, attain a blessed vision, and gain fellowship with the immortals (Vail, 2006). The Egyptian theory of salvation understood that the individual should be trained to be deified, while on earth and at the same time, to enable him for eternal happiness. This was achieved through the cultivation of arts and sciences on the one hand, and by living a virtuous life on the other. (James, 2001, 28)

This was the ideal to which every mortal should aspire. Becoming the basis of all ethical concepts. To be deified, then, meant to live a life in fullness, where both the body and the soul needed to reach their maximum integrality, this allowed to live ethically in function of the other. It is not, then, a simple denial of the body and sexuality as it has been transmitted by Greek thought (Freke & Gandy, 1999). Egyptian priests did not have to respect celibacy, but neither should they indulge in great excesses. They were usually family men who tended to take care of their own needs both materially and spiritually. Justice, truth, and the capacity for self-sacrifice were the great qualities of which each of them should be endowed, and the nonpractice of any of these virtues was punished. The Egyptian Mystery system, like modern universities, was the center of ancient culture. According to Pietschmann, citation by James (James, 2001, 28), the Egyptian Mysteries had three classes of students: (1) mortals, or students who even under instruction, have not experienced inner vision; (2) the intelligences, that is, those who had attained the inner vision and had received the mind or nous; and (3) the creators or children of light, those who have already attained true spiritual consciousness. These levels for Piulats (2006) are equivalent to initiation, mystery, and enlightenment. His education consisted of the cultivation of the ten virtues, which were made as conditions for attaining eternal happiness, and the Seven Liberal Arts, which were intended to liberate the soul. Additionally, some

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were admitted to know the greatest mysteries where they were taught esoteric philosophy (Vail, 2006, 25). Disciplines of a moral nature were grammar, rhetoric, and logic; those of transcendental space and numbering were arithmetic and geometry; knowledge of man’s destiny was given by astronomy, music was the living practice of philosophy, that is, the adjustment of human life to harmony with God. Another Egyptian concept worth noting is the word ma’at, goddess of justice and righteousness (Desroches, 1999), which is equivalent to what we know today as justice, balance, norm, order, truth, righteousness, and right action. Ma’at (Loro, 2017), she is first and foremost the goddess of a just order. This idea of order was important in the Egyptian conception of eternal happiness (Stone, 1994). In Egypt, the ethics or rather the ma’at is instituted by the gods and is guaranteed by the pharaoh, who had the obligation to re-establish and reaffirm the ma’at in the moment of ascension to the throne. In the pyramid texts, Snofrus is called the “god of the maat,” and Userkaf was named the interpreter of the ma’at (Assman, 2001). The tasks of restoring and maintaining harmony were paramount for the Egyptian pharaoh, who offered the ma’at in worship as an offering to the gods. This certainly refers us to the Israelite hokmah “wisdom” and the two Hebrew words Mispat and Sedakah that refer us to the exercise of justice and are translated by righteousness, honor, integrity, honesty, or judgment. These words relate primarily to social aspects of justice and include ideas of divine ordering of the world, nature, and the cosmos. The hokmah thus personifies as well as the ma’at these fundamental orders. Thus, the wisdom of the Old Testament, like the Egyptian ma’at, cannot be separated from the notion of global just order and the practice of justice. Another reference to ethical behavior is found in the Book of the Dead, the very title of which is in fact wrong, since the literal translation of the original title is “Chapters on What Is to Come,” and it seems that the only reason it is known as “The Book of the Dead” is due to its deep concern for life after death (Borrego, 2011) and the need to prepare for it. Its original Egyptian title was REU NU PERT EMHRU, and as it has come down to us today, only some fragments of this book expressly deal with magical rituals, while entire parts of it refer to the state of the soul that has passed to a better life and its trials and existence in other dimensions. In Chap. 125 (Barguet, 2000), for example, there is a confession of 42 sins committed by 1 man to 42 judges. The Egyptian Mystery system was confidential, and its initiates could not reveal the secrets they had learned. Five thousand years passed, until

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the Egyptians who were black at that time (see images) let the Greeks in with the intention of being educated. First, through the Persian invasion (525  BC) and second, through Alexander the Great, in 333  BC.  After Alexander the Great’s invasion, royal temples and libraries were looted and stolen, and Aristotle’s school turned the Library of Alexandria into a research center. With the death of Aristotle (322 BC), the Greeks were forced to make a study of ethics that they also borrowed from the Egyptian “Sommum Bonum”, or The Greater Good or Supreme, which contains instructions on the raising of man from the level of mortal, advancing to the level of god, on the salvation of the soul, on the purpose of his philosophy whose goal was salvation (Vail, 2006). The good itself is defined in Sommum Bonum ethics, the absolute good, according to Aristotle. Philosophers have attempted to determine goodness in behavior according to two fundamental principles and have considered some types of behavior either good in themselves or good because they fit a particular moral model. The former implies a final value or summum bonum, desirable in itself, not just as a means to an end. Among all the ancient peoples, the Egyptians were recognized for being versed in the Occult Sciences of nature; thus, it was how the Greeks were initiated into (…) the sacred Mysteries by the priests of Thebes, Memfis and Hermopolis. Thales, Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato traveled from Greece to the Nile Delta in search of knowledge. Returning to their own countries, these enlightened men recognized the Egyptians as the wisest of mortals and the Egyptian temples as the repositories of the most sublime doctrines concerning the history of the Gods and the regeneration of men. (Lewin, 2022)

Salon, one of the most notable Greek thinkers, studied philosophy with Psenophis of Heliopolis and Sonchis of Sais, two of the most well-versed Egyptian priests. Plato went to Egypt, settling in Sais, where wise men taught him about the universe, its origin, and its development to the present. Therefore, when we hear the famous phrase “know thyself,” attributed to Socrates, we are given that this phrase is found in inscriptions of the Egyptian temples of the mystery. Similarly, when we analyze the virtues determined by Plato, we realize that the Egyptian mystery system already contained ten virtues, and from this source, Plato copes with what he calls four cardinal virtues: justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage (Steiner, 1985).

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From Pausanias, we also know that it was from the Egyptians that Plato learned regarding the mystery of the immortality of the human soul. Democritus spent much of his life in Egypt and from there would take the foundations for his celebrated doctrine of atoms. Pythagoras when he was very young studied with Thales of Miletus; according to Jámblico 1997, Thales, who at that time was already of advanced age, lamented his incomplete knowledge of the sacred doctrines and urged Pythagoras to visit Egypt, the land of wisdom. Thales confessed that his own reputation as a sage was due to the instruction received from his priests, recognizing that he himself did not have the excellent predisposition that he naturally found in the person of Pythagoras, predicting that he would become the wisest and most divine of men if he studied with the Egyptian priests (Lewin). The Egyptian Mysteries and philosophical schools of Greece were closed by the decrees of Theodosius in the fourth century BC and that of Justinian sixth century AD (529); the latter abolished temples and schools of philosophy and, in other words, abolished the Egyptian Mysteries, which were praised by the world as a Greek creation. The African continent would surely have had another future if the Greeks had not taken away from them the patent. If we assume this as an epistemological challenge, this would have caused a change of opinion and attitude toward Africans, they would be respected, and this change for the black people would mean the overcoming of their inferiority complex product of the silencing and stereotypes that mark the descendants of the African continent, as if they had contributed nothing to the development of the sciences.

The Ancient World: A Challenge for Bible Studies If we assume that there is an African legacy in Greek philosophy, this suspicion must also be formulated in relation to biblical studies. Thus, we propose in this item to continue investigating the ancient paradigm of knowledge created by the Africans of antiquity, in contrast to the Arian model also coined by the Enlightenment. It is important to look at the Ancient World from another perspective and to understand that the naturalization of the idea that the ancient world was essentially “Caucasoid” is based on a process of racialization that has its roots in the concepts of European superiority that emerged at the time of colonization of the Americas. The classical world, which we

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used to understand as our cultural progenitor, found its roots in the Eastern and African world (Egypt, Libya, Ethiopia). Homer, Roman historian, in the 5th book of the Odyssey, states that the Ethiopians had been the first worshippers of Zeus and all the other gods of Olympus. According to this author, the Ethiopians were people who praised and honored the Greek gods. This understanding of the world from the Arian model is recent. That is why we propose to return to the old model. In this model, the peoples of the African horizon influenced the Mediterranean peoples. Bernal 1993 in the introduction to his important work Black Athena acknowledges that the old model had no major problem but that it collapsed for external reasons; therefore, the old model had to be collapsed and replaced by something more acceptable. The violence perpetuated for centuries by the European model, through violent and nonviolent means of domination, is different from the construction of a theoretical perspective rooted in the African experience. It is different because the search for an African center does not assume a universalist position, and it does not presuppose its elements as universal and applicable to other human experiences. It is a pluralistic conception that values the worldview of each person. Elisa Larkin Nascimento synthesizes our option very well: the Afro-centered academic task is to study, articulate and affirm what differentiates the African point of view, while identifying the supposedly universal postulates of Euro-centrism and unmasking its specific nature. (Bernal, 1993)

The biblical people were at a crossroads of the world that linguists and some historians have become accustomed to calling Afro-Asian. The Afro world and the Asian world were not separate, as biblical science presupposes, by denying any African influence in the Syro-Palestine region (Nash, 2002). Although the exaltation of the legacy coming from West Asia is predominant in the study of the religion of Israel, why have Canaanite hieroglyphic materials prevailed in the historical reconstruction of the Israelite religion and not the hieratic sources of Egypt? For a long time, the tendency of Old Testament researchers, or of the Hebrew Scriptures, was to deny the participation and influence of African nations in Israelite history. Especially in the section dedicated to geography, a different vision of the Syria-Palestine region and the Arabian and

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Mesopotamian Peninsulas is presented. Egypt is only studied in a few lines and in the topic referring to the Ancient East, instead of studying it in a special section dedicated to Africa.

For an Adequate Inclusion of Africa in Latin American Bible Studies When we talk about the inclusion of Africa in Latin American biblical studies, we start from the recognition of an intentional historical forgetting, coined by the supposed Western epistemological ones that denied any influence and active participation of Africans in the Judaic and Christian religious component. The decolonization of the Bible and religion is an urgent task in the university environment. This if we assume that the educational role consists of a process of openness to multiple possibilities, which call into question and doubt the traditional perspectives that partialize practices and subjects, to the point of valuing a single logical type of knowledge, in which peoples and cultures have been made invisible under the assumption of scientific neutrality. Studies of Afro-Asian roots and decolonization are proposed to dismantle the Arian model that understands that the Bible developed and bequeathed only from the Caucasoid component and to question our way of accessing knowledge (Snowden, 1970), thus proposing review-centered, monolithic, Eurocentric epistemologies. It asks, what are we doing in academia? We barely echo, how do we do it? Apparently, we are just repeaters of biblical quotations, readings, and discourses that others have made within our academic system from a Euro-centered perspective. The Afro-Asian background in biblical anthropology reveals the cultural and religious legacy of the African peoples: Egyptians, Ethiopians, Nubians (Morkot, 2000), and Elephantines, left in the Judeo-Christian religion. In this way, the biblical text also alerts us to the pluri- and intercultural reality of biblical history. Reviews the biblical tradition and discovers that the peoples of the Afro-Asian horizon left an important legacy in the religion of Israel. In this way, it breaks with patterns and values preestablished by the Western tradition and questions access to knowledge of Israel’s Eurocentric religion. That is, of a universal epistemological model for all peoples and cultures. Questions the epistemologies of Eurocentric matrices, recognizing that these are constructions created and perpetuated over time. That

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is, they belong to epochs and spaces understood as definitive. This epistemology ignored the ancient paradigm of knowledge created by people and cultures of antiquity and is located only in the Arian model (Bernal, 1991, 372). In this historiographical model, the so-called peripheral groups were not contemplated. In this way, it questions why biblical science does not pay attention to the African roots present in its history, as they are also present in biblical traditions: Why was Egypt always considered white? Why is it hard to assume that the biblical world was also an Afro descendant? With this in mind, we believe that for an adequate inclusion of Africa in socioreligious studies, it is necessary to rethink our access to knowledge also from the contribution of Afro descendants whose knowledge has been invisible throughout Western history. In this sense, we pose the following epistemological challenges: 1. The perception of reality as overcoming Cartesian dualism: According to the perception of life of the peoples of the African continent, reality is not dual but one; there are no dichotomies between good and evil, as the West teaches us, since these two principles are part of the same reality. In that sense, there is also no distinction between spirit and body, between action and contemplation, between sacred and profane, in thus far reality is impregnated with the God of Life: everything is from God and God is in everything. 2. Afro descendants’ knowledge as a challenge to dominant scientism: Afro descendants’ knowledge, part of the recognition of our experiences, of the value of our traditions present in myths, legends, and oral tradition; this somehow shows that knowledge passes through other channels that are not inscribed in scientific rigor or traditional scientism. 3. Cyclic time as an alternative to linear and uncritical time: The idea that we are integral bodies and that for this reason, we must live in communion with all creation. Therefore, for African descendants, ancestors manifest themselves in nature; they act as protectors, so it is not possible to break that balance. This conception of cyclical time is contrary to the idea of a linear time, in which history has only one meaning and one direction, in which the rich go on the front and the poor on the back.

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4. The earth is sacred as a response to extractivism: One of the constant struggles of African descendant peoples is for territoriality, which is an inheritance that belongs to us in the order of creation. This conception is also putting in between saying the assumptions of modernity, in which there is a scale of values, of hierarchies, where only the one who has the power can own the land. We also see these hierarchies on a social scale where women, whites, blacks, and Indians are inferiorized to such an extent that access to land is only possible if there is a patron, a master, or a man capable of exercising command over these groups. 5. The right to rest: For African descendants, rest is very important, both for humans and for the earth. We work to enjoy the benefits given by the earth, we rest, to renew the body and the earth. This idea has a highly religious component. The encounter with God encompasses everything, and everything moves thanks to God. Therefore, moments of life, such as work, sports, family, meetings of various kinds, music, and dance, are soaked in that vital energy, that is, the spirit of God that animates all things. This idea is usually interpreted as if African descendants were lazy. However, behind this, there is a different conception of the world that does not fit within the logic of the global market, where competitiveness is the sole criterion for both nature and humans. 6. Emancipatory politics as an alternative to traditional forms of domination: Emancipation poses the end of colonialism, classism, and racism, and this challenge in the current Latin American conjuncture, although utopian, raises the idea of a true racial democracy. 7. Genealogies as ancestral memories: Every people, every culture recalls its mythological ancestral traditions. The question of origins is a constant in all religions of the world. For this reason, a key in the reconstruction of our African descendant heritage is found in ancestral genealogical traditions. 8. Identities as a political bet of resistance: Identities are dependent on a recognition of a group’s historical trajectory, its struggles and resistance to denial, exclusion, domination, and oppression. Identities under construction is a highly political and revolutionary proposal, as it offers clues to the transformation of the school curriculum and challenges the monolithic reading of the Christian religion.

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9. Geopolitics of denied knowledge: Geographical location is also an important element for the recovery of ancestral knowledge. Although with a privileged geographical position, official history always perceived the African continent in the confines of the world. Therefore, we proclaim a revision and historical-geographical reconstruction of important biblical periods such as the origins, the taking of the land, the monarchy, the exile, the movement of Jesus, and the missionary expansion. In addition, a revision of the cartographies of exclusion was confined to the misery and forgetting of the African continent and its diaspora. 10. Mythical-symbolic traditions: We claim the value of myths as necessary for the life of black communities to continue. The myth is not static but dynamic, since it has a time of its own, different from the chronological one. In myth there are no contradictions, it is a type of knowledge different from rational, but it should not be opposed to reason, because it has knowledge as “authentic” as the scientific “rational” knowledge. 11. Spirituality of resistance: This is the spirituality that the black people of the Americas are called to reinterpret today and assume so that the hope of a resurrected people is reborn and impels us toward a more human, beautiful, black, and dignified world in a society that assumes once and for all, counterhegemonic knowledge and practices. These elements are valid for the reconstruction of a spirituality of memory and resistance, but it is also necessary to become aware that our communities are also patriarchal and are also inserted within the neoliberal market. Therefore, I believe that we need a transgressive or rebellious spirituality capable of resisting the mandates of the market. Because inner fulfillment does not need the market to be happy. 12. Memory, ancestry, and corporeality: We highlight the ethical, political, and sacred horizon of our ancestral traditions. The voices and historical silences of women in ancestral African American and Amerindian traditions challenge us to build and offer thought-­ liberating alternatives. We must rescue what exists as feminine in intracultural ethical presuppositions. Thus, as an important epistemological framework we have, the daily life of women; their absences that are not nonexistent; their bodies denied, muted, gagged; their struggles, resistances, and over-experiences lead us to

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speak of a macro context that is the empire. The life of women inserted in the context of capitalist globalization drives us to look at their space, their place, their geography marked by exclusion, because black lives matter! Each of these challenges invites Latin American Liberation Theology to take structural and epistemic racism into account. This is important since this theology made possible the recognition of so-called contextual theologies, which are not just an appendage or embellishment of Liberationist Theologies. It invites you to denounce the inhumane slave and racist system that dominates our Latin American academy and invites, in a fraternal attitude, the announcement of life in fullness also of our communities, because in this logic black lives matter. In this way, the Gospel of Jesus Christ transcends history and becomes a true force of resistance and liberation for our people. In this sense, it can be said that what was proposed here was an egalitarian discussion with our ancestral philosophical tradition, so that there is a true democracy in which there is no censorship but the right to express oneself without prior conceptual limitations. We want to proclaim and cultivate a decentralizing attitude toward the other, that is, not to seek it from us or from our point of view, but to let ourselves be questioned by their otherness, trying to find the other from their own horizon, only in this way is it possible for other voices to manifest themselves as builders of knowledge. Finally, I hope that this reflection will help us in the search for new critical epistemologies, creative convergent, plural, and inclusive, which nourish our pedagogical-theological and curricular models for a theological education of the twenty-first century committed to the life of Africans in the African diaspora in tune with the gospel values we proclaim. English Translation: Marilia A. Schüller

References Assman, J. (2001). Ma’at – Gerechtigkei und Unsterblichkeit im Alten Ägypten. Beck. Barguet, P. (2000). Libro de los muertos de los antiguos egipcios (Introducción, traducción y comentario). Ed. Desclée de Brouwer. Bernal, M. (1991). Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (Vol. 1–2). Rutgers University.

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Bernal, M. (1993). Atenea Negra. Las raíces afroasiáticas de la civilización clásica. Crítica. Borrego, F. L. (2011). El libro de los muertos. Historia y Vida, 515, 54–61. Bou, L. C. (2009). África y la historia. http://www.ceid.edu.ar/librosdigitales/ africa_y_la_historia_luis_cesar_bou.pdf. Internet. Acceso 9 May 2023. Caldeira, C. (2021). Theoquilombismo: Teología negra entre teología política e teología da inculturacao. Perspectiva Teológica, 53(1), 137. Desroches, C. (1999). La mujer en tiempos de los faraones. Ed. Complutense. Diop, C. A. (1987). Precolonial black Africa. A comparative study of the political and social systems of Europe and black Africa, from antiquity to the formation of modern states. Lawrwncw Hill & Company. Diop, C. A. (1974). African origin of civilization – Myth or reality, mercer cook translator, Nova Iorque and Westport (p. 315). Lawrence Hill and Company. Echeverría, B. (2011). Modernidad y blanquitud. editora Era. Freke, T., & Gandy, P. (1999). Hermetic: The lost wisdom of the pharaohs. Ed. Ediciones B. Gómez, P. (1998). Las ilusiones de la identidad, la etnia como seudoconcepto. Gazeta de antropología, 14(12). http://hdl.handle.net/10481/7550 Guesser, R. (2001). A experiencia da blanquitude diante dos problemas raciais: estudos de realidades brasileiras e estadunidenses. In D. Cavalheiro, Org (Ed.), Racismo e antiracismo en la educação: repensando nossa escola. São Paulo. Hope, M. (1984). Magia egipcia práctica [Practical Egyptian magic]. Editorial EDAF. Hornung, E. (2000). Ed. Trotta. Jacq, C. (2008). Los sabios del Antiguo Egipto. De Imhotep a Hermes Trimegisto. Faraones, sacerdotes, arquitectos y escribas que forjaron una civilización. La Esfera de los Libros. Jámblico, Sobre los Misterios Egipcios. (1997). Intr. trad. y notas de E. A. Ramos. Rev.: S. Lamata. Ed. Gredos, Col. Biblioteca Clásica. James, J. G. M. (2001). Legado, la filosofía griega es filosofía egipcia robada. Falú Fundation Press. Lewin, M. (2022). Enigmas and mysteries of ancient Egypt, available on http:// tradicional.com.ar/et/enigmistegip.htm Internet. Accessed 7 July 2021. Long, C.  H. (2018). The collected writings of Charles H.  Long: Ellipsis. Bloomsbury Academic. Loro, A. (2017). Maat. Orden cósmico y justicia social en el Antiguo Egipto. Univeridad Oberta de Catalunya. Morkot, R. G. (2000). The black pharaohs of Egypt: Egypt’s Nubian rulers. Oxford University Press. Nascimento, E.  L. (1997). Sankofa: Resgatando a Cultura Afro-brasileira. In A. Nascimento (Ed.), Thoth Escribas dos Deuses: Pensamento dos Povos Africanos e Afrodescendentes. Gabinete do senador Abdias Nascimento.

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Nash, P. (2002). O papel dos africanos negros na história do povo de Deus. Estudos Teológicos, 42, 5–27. Piulats, O. (2006). Egiptosophia. Relectura del Mito al Logos. Ed. Kairós. Romero, R. S., & García, J. E. (2021). La construcción de las identidades étnicas y culturales en niños y niñas migante: un enfoque desde la etnografía colaborativa. Revista de investigación educativa, 39(2), 483. Snowden, F. M. (1970). Blacks in antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman experience. Harvard University. Steiner, F. (1985). History: Zetschrift für Alte. JSTOR, 34, 3–28. Stone, M. (1994). Cuando Dios era Mujer. In M. J. Ress, U. Seibart-Cuadra, & L. Sjorup (Eds.), Del Cielo a la Tierra – Una antología de Teología Feminista. Sello Azul Editorial de Mujeres. Taylor, C. (1996). Identidad y reconocimiento. Revista de investigaciones Filosóficas y Políticas, 7, 10–19. Vail, C. H. (2006). Misterios Antiguos y la masoneria moderna. Editores.

PART III

Critical Perspectives

The Current Status of Latin American Liberation Theology Luis Martínez Andrade

Introduction It is clear that the Latin American context has changed profoundly since the 1960s and 1970s. In order to understand the new challenges—and the discursive change—in the Liberation Theology, we need to keep in mind the political, cultural and social transformations of Latin America (Martínez Andrade, 2019). According to theologians Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger and Jung Mo Sung (2009), we are witnessing the era of the Global Empire, which is expressed as much in political and economic mechanisms as in conditions of subjectivity and cultural self-conception. For them, there is a spirituality of consumption that is geopolitically determined by the North-Western powers, which contribute to the fetishism of the goods. It can be said that the spirit of the Empire manifests itself in subjectivity on three slopes:

L. Martínez Andrade (*) CriDIS/SMAG, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_12

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The first one is the automated subject and the religion of the market. This is the post-modern disenchantment where ego tends to disappear. On the basis of Fredric Jameson’s (1991) exaggeration of the cultural logic of capitalism, according to which the disappearance of the individual subject is on the agenda, these theologists draw attention to the influence of the colonisation process on subjectivity and desire. The reference to Marx’s fetishism theory is therefore indispensable, as it does reflect the dynamics of capitalism, where fetish (merchandise) becomes the object of the desire (Hinkelammert, 2020). The second refers to the mimetic desire and sacrificial religion. Indeed, subjectivity has become a function of the market. In this sense, Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger and Jung Mo Sung focus on the concept of mimetic desire proposed and developed by René Girard to show that the desire is not natural but well-constructed, manipulated and nuanced by the fetishised logic of the market. According to Girard, “desire is essentially mimetic, directed toward an object desired by the model” (1979, 146). Hence the idea, already put forward at the end of the 1980s by Hugo Assmman and Franz Hinkelammert (1989, 176), of capitalism as a religion of pleasure, where the protagonist of the hedonist society is of course the narcissist subject. It is precisely when social inequalities have dramatically increased that the post-modern idea of anything goes became apparent. In any event, this mimetic desire is no longer punished by the sacrifice of scapegoats; on the contrary, the logic sacrificed at the age of the Empire immolates not only peoples or cultures but also nature. The last one is the strategy of shock and the religion of omnipotence. There is no doubt that in Latin America neoliberalism was imposed by guns. In this respect, theologists, drawing on Naomi Klein’s research (2008), argue that the shock strategy goes hand in hand with ideological justifications. The economic incomes of the neoliberal project proposed by the Chicago School, such as the gradual disappearance of the public sector in favour of the private sector, the promotion of the market economy and the reduction of the social budget were strongly supported through a quasi-religious discourse. As Franz Hinkelammert had already observed, the categorical framework of neoliberal thinking is utopic (in the precise sense of abstract utopia), which therefore leads to this premise: perfect balance, invisible hand and perfect competition are only transcendental concepts. According to Hinkelammert (2002), all societies produce transcendental symptoms, which act as compasses or even lost havens. It is true that transcendental concepts are indispensable for a better

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understanding of reality and action, but at the same time they are impossible to materialise in history. In other words, these transcendental concepts are theoretically indispensable but they are not factual. When the transcendental illusion is established as “sacred truth”, defended and promoted through irrefutable entelechy, and becomes the fetish par excellence, the sacrifice logic is triggered.

The Spirit of the Empire and New Perspectives Faced with the rise of neoliberalism, these theologians are trying to reveal the economic, political, cultural and religious structures of the Empire. Their exegesis about the new spirit of the Empire is a brilliant insight, as it reflects how transcendental symptoms are involved in the narrative of globalisation. In order to better understand the new perspectives and challenges of Liberation Theology, let us briefly recall some socio-cultural events which have had a strong impact on contemporary socio-political imaginations. During the 1970s there were two important phenomena. On the one hand, capitalism has metamorphosed in its neoliberal form: (1) speeding up the privatisation of the economy; (2) structuring a more modern financial sector; (3) opening externally through the reduction of customs duty; (4) opening to foreign investment; (5) applying a policy of diversification of exports; and (6) a “negative” industrial policy, that is, by lowering levels of competition against manufactured goods abroad (Moulian, 1997, 204). On the other hand, the idea that meta-narratives (including that of emancipation) had lost their legitimacy was widespread. Neoliberal and post-modern discourse exalted the emergence of a hedonist individual without connection with emancipating political horizons. It is no coincidence that Daniel Bensaïd (2011) highlighted the liberal counter-offensive expressed in the relationship between the change in the political context and the post-modern theoretical statements of the 1970s and 1980s. These are the years of the liberal Thatcher-Reagan counter-­ offensive. While some so-called Marxists were taking the banner of social democracy and sounding at the end of history, other thinkers, stronger intellectually, took seriously the study not only of Karl Marx’s work but also of the Critical Theory. Severely repressed, both inside and outside the ecclesial institutions, the Liberation Theology had to deal with not only the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI but also with the repressive forces of military dictatorships. Regarding the hostile attitude of the Vatican towards

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Liberation Theologians, we must remember the role played by the auxiliary bishop of Bogota Mgr Alfonso López Trujillo (1935–2008) who succeeded in banning the most engaged theologians from the Puebla Episcopal Meeting in 1979 and the publication in 1984 of the famous Instruction Libertatis Nuntius: On Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’ signed by the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. The dismantling, in many dioceses, of the work of religious communities and the questioning of the Liberation Theology by the new bishops—a conservative trend—have fostered a wave of secular movements such as the Opus Dei and the Charismatics and, above all, the punishment of theologists such as Leonardo Boff, Giulio Girardi and Jon Sobrino. However, the appointment of Pope Francis in 2013 attracted enormous enthusiasm not only from theologians of liberation (such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff and Ernesto Cardenal) but also from left-wing intellectuals and activists. Praised both by icons of alter-globalisation (such as Naomi Klein) and by Liberation Theologians (Frei Betto, Leonardo Boff, Juan José Tamayo, among others), the encyclical Laudato Si′ (Praise Be to You, encyclical of Pope Francis on nature protection, published on 18 June 2015) has become an essential reference for nature defence for certain sectors of society (Löwy, 2021). The year 1992 was a crucial date for the redemptive interruption of the continuum of history (Benjamin, 1968). While the elites (political as well as ecclesial) celebrated the fifth centenary of the “discovery” of America, Afro-American organisations, social movements, ecclesiastical “base” communities and popularly based pastoral interventions (among workers in urban communities and among peasants) have instead mobilised to commemorate the 500 years of afro-indigenous and popular resistance. As part of this continental campaign, The Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) organised an international meeting in Guatemala which led to the creation of the Latino-American Coordination of Farmers Organisations, one of the pillars of what will become shortly after the Via Campesina. The role of this action was decisive in the reconfiguration of emancipation movements in Latin America. While indigenous resistance crosses the entire history of Latin America, the celebration of “discovery” has shed light on the role of “structural violence” expressed in the daily racism experienced by indigenous and peasant communities. In the 1990s, we can also mention the indigenous insurgency led by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAI), the constitution of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia, born during the process

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of organising the march “For the Territory and Dignity” and the rise of the Neo-Zapatist Movement in Mexico, all of them bear witness to the indigenous earthquake. Certainly, the failure of the Nicaraguan revolution has had a real impact on certain sectors of Latin American society which were building an alternative to capitalism (Reed, 2020). More significant than the fall of the Berlin Wall, the victory in 1990 of the National Opposition Union (Unión Nacional Opositora) chaired by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro marked the minds of a generation who saw socialism as a path to build the Kingdom of God on Earth. We will not address the contradictions or deadlocks committed by Marxists as well as by Christians during this Revolution. We simply want to note that this defeat confused a large number of activists. At any rate, the tradition of criticism of arms has not capitalized on the rhetoric of democratic transition and on 1 January 1994, a group of masked indigenous people declared the war to the Mexican State. Behind the formation of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a representative of the Liberation Theology in Mexico was involved in raising political awareness: Bishop Samuel Ruiz García (Andreo, 2013). Influenced by Marxism, the Liberation Theologians focused on denouncing the idolatrous nature of the market and the structural sin inherent in the centre-periphery relationship of the capitalist world system. It is true that both the concepts and the Marxist categories enabled Liberation Theologians (G. Gutiérrez, E. Dussel, L. Boff, F. Hinkelammert, H. Assmann) to unveil, grasp and explain the fatal dynamics of capitalism. However, as new collective subjects (peasants, indigenous people, women, environmental activists, afro-indigenous activists, LGBT groups, etc.) started to raise new questions related to other forms of domination, theologians of liberation have developed new perspectives. Thus, during the 1990s, some theologians (E. Dussel, F. Hinkelammert, L. Boff) developed the category of victim—in the Benjaminian sense—in order to show the different forms of domination which exacerbate oppressed creatures. One more interesting case is that of Leonardo Boff (1997), which, on the basis of a holistic view of man and nature, expresses a radical criticism of the adverse consequences that the logic of hegemonic social formation— the capitalist modernity—has on the poorest people in the Planet and on the Earth (Martínez Andrade, 2022). As a result, new perspectives have developed within Liberation Theology such as feminist theology (M.C.  Bingemer, E.  Támez, S.  Marcos, B.  Melando Couch, Kwok Pui-lan, S.  Regina de Lima, A.  Brazal),

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indigenous theology (C. Siller, E. López, S. Ruiz, C. Titizano), eco-theology of liberation (L. Boff, Frei Betto), queer theology of liberation (M. Althaus-­Reid), earth theology (M. Barros, I. Poletto), black Liberation Theology (L.  Acosta, M.  Mena López, A.  Nascimento), eco-feminism (I. Gebara, M.J. Ress), decolonial theology (E. Dussel, N. Panotto), the theology of religious pluralism (J.M. Virgil, J.J. Tamayo, J. Duggan) and Critical Theory of liberation (Jung Mo Sung, Allan Coelho). This opening of Liberation Theology to the analysis of other forms of domination allows us to grasp the changes, experienced in recent decades, both at the Latin American socio-cultural level and at the epistemic level of the geopolitics of knowledge (Tamayo, 2017; Martínez Andrade, 2019). It is clear that Liberation Theology is not a homogeneous current of thought, since within it there are very varied positions around issues ranging from Mariology to Marxism, through the criticism of anthropocentrism (Martínez Andrade, 2015). However, as already pointed out by Michael Löwy (2019), there are some specific features of this theology, namely: the positive value of social sciences and their inclusion in theology, criticism of capitalism, refusal to privatise the faith, criticism of individualism and fierce criticism of the modern-bourgeois ideology represented by the cult of progress and the quantitative conception of development. On this basis, it can be argued that Liberation Theology is a discourse about faith which, in order to be modern, denounces the sacrificial logic of the actually existing modernity/coloniality in Latin America.

The Role of Marxism After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of real socialism and the declaration of the end of history, several thinkers, such as the Polish philosopher Józef Tischner, said that in this new context the theology of liberation would also die (Dussel, 1992, 413). This statement—which was very premature and reductionist—revealed a blatant lack of knowledge of this theology. Although Liberation Theology has adopted the prism of Marxist analyses to explain and grasp the Latin American reality, it is not Marxist in itself. On this subject, at a conference given at the University of Turin in November 1990, the Brazilian theologist Leonardo Boff said: It must be clearly recalled that, since its origins, [Liberation Theology] has never placed socialism at the center of her concerns and reflection, but has always dealt with the poor, as a whole and with their conflicts. It considered

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socialism only as a means of advancing the cause of the oppressed, as a ­historical alternative to capitalism, which causes so much suffering among our peoples (…). Socialism is only seen as a historical reference that cannot be ignored. The real roots of liberation theology are elsewhere. (Boff, 2008, 126)

Enrique Dussel (1990), for his part, emphasises that Liberation Theology was born from a Christian praxis of faith. In this sense, Liberation Theology is the reflection of a concrete practice of resistance and social transformation that precedes it. However, Latin American theology, committed to the oppressed, needed analytical tools to better explain both the causes and the consequences of capitalism—as an idolatrous system. For this reason, theologians of liberation have relied on Marxism—as a critical theory of society—to grasp the sacrificed logic of capitalist modernity. Thus, strictly theological themes (the creation of idols, the structure of the sin, the exodus, the God of Life, etc.) have been nuanced by more elaborate reflections. Hence the importance of the use of social sciences’ contributions, particularly of Marxist inspiration. The choice of Liberation Theologians in favour of a certain Marxism is not only because Marxism, as a critical theory, was the most appropriate to highlight class antagonisms and social contradictions, but also by the combination of events of history (the rise of European Political theology, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the birth of the Brazilian Catholic Left). It is worth pointing out that the choice for certain values of Marxism (society without classes, emancipation of oppressed, preference for usage values) shows the existence of an elective affinity between Marxism and the theology of liberation (Löwy, 2019). Indeed, as already suggested by Michael Löwy (2019), presenting an overview of the position of Liberation Theology on Marxism is not an easy task. First, because each theologian had a different approach to Marxism. Although some theologians (Pablo Richard or Clodovis Boff) no longer use it, others (Enrique Dussel, Franz Hinkelammert or Jung Mo Sung) continue to support it in their theoretical perspectives. Secondly, the Marxism adopted by Liberation Theology was not the dialectic materialism from Soviet textbooks, nor that of the Communist parties. Liberation theologists focused on neo-Marxism (from Antonio Gramsci to Ernest Mandel and the Frankfurt School) and, above all, to the work of Latin American Marxists (from José Carlos Mariátegui to Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez and the Dependency theory). As regards the Dependency theory,

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Jung Mo Sung (2008) identifies two groups: (1) one who argues that development is not sustainable in the capitalist system and therefore advocates the need for the socialist revolution (Theotônio dos Santos, Ruy Mauro Marini and André Gunder Frank) and (2) those who do not support it (Celso Furtado, Fernando H.  Cardoso, Aníbal Pinto, Osvaldo Sunkel and Enzo Falleto). Finally, the repression by the Vatican and the paradigm crisis which culminated in the arrival of postmodernity, the defeat of the Nicaraguan Revolution, as well as the decline in critical theories, led to the fact that, in some cases, the Marxist approach was less obvious. Thus, in the following lines, we will highlight the link on the Marxism of Leonardo Boff, Enrique Dussel and Franz Hinkelammert, in order to see what place Marxism currently occupies in Liberation Theology. For more than three decades, Leonardo Boff has been plunged into questions relating to social ecology. Based on a unique approach, it has developed an eco-theology of liberation that combines spirituality with social justice (Martínez Andrade, 2022). Before turning to his report on Marxism, it should be remembered that, before entering into his “obsequious silence” imposed by the Vatican in 1985, the theologian said: “I declare that I am not a Marxist. As a Christian and as a Franciscan, I am in favor of religious freedoms and rights, as well as of the noble struggle for justice for a new society” (Boff, 1985, 149). Although Boff assured that he was not Marxist, he drew attention to the topicality of Karl Marx’s thought and to his contribution, not only at theoretical but also at praxis level, that remains crucial in this new century. The upgrading of Marx’s contributions to social dynamics reflects the relevance of its criticism. For us, Boff’s approach to Marxism is more Gramscian than Althusserian. Indeed, the Italian philosopher is mobilised by Boff not only to study the role of intellectuals in a class society (Boff, 1986, 181) and to forge an alliance between Catholicism and the left, but also to identify an anti-­ hegemonic culture from popular classes (Boff, 2000), that is, a “historical and social bloc of oppressed people” (Boff, 2008, 151) seeking to build a genuine social democracy. The contribution of Antonio Gramsci to popular culture and the relationship between religion and politics fed Boff’s theological-political perspective. Anyhow, Boff’s relation with Marxism, which may seem paradoxical, expresses the innovative, original and critical nature of his theoretical project. In the same vein, but with more elaborate scientific references, Boff notes the contribution of ecology to Marxism. In his Ecology, Globalization and Spirituality (Ecologia, Mundialição, Espiritualidade), he explained

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that by incorporating nature not as an extrinsic, but as an intrinsic factor in the production process and in the constitution of productive forces, the Marxist perspective has been profoundly enriched. It should therefore be noted that Boff recognises the contributions which, from different location of culture, have widened both Marxism and social theory. Finally, Boff continues to recognise the timeliness and relevance of Marxism to grasp social contradictions. Thus, at a conference held in São Paulo on 4 December 2000 on “Modern Socialism and Cosmology”, Boff supported the view that utopian socialism and historical socialism are linked. Quoting Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci, Boff called for a new comprehensive social contract, where nature and Earth were central. As a result, socialism is almost natural for the human being in the same way as beauty, cooperation, synergy and solidarity. There is no doubt that Leonardo Boff’s theoretical project continues to be enriched. Its theological, political, ethical and ecological concerns continue to engage in dialogue with other perspectives, whether religious or scientific. It is true that, with its “paradigm shift”, Marxist categories have become less visible in their writing: while in recent years Boff’s holistic perspective has placed greater emphasis on the spiritual issue, some translations, in particular French translations, have also misused the Marxist sense of its books (Martínez Andrade, 2019). A major figure of Liberation Philosophy, Enrique Dussel is also recognised for his contribution to studying the history of the Latin American Church, the thought of Saint Paul, K. Marx and W.  Benjamin and, of course, the Liberation Theology. Having carried out a powerful analysis of the four drafts of the Capital, Dussel (2014) undertook research into Marx’s report to theology (Dussel, 2017). Not having developed a theory of religion, Dussel argues, Karl Marx rather will have left us with a religious criticism of the economy through the philosophy of fetishism. Looking at Marx’s biography (student of B. Bauer in Bonn between 1838 and 1839) and intellectual path (discovery of the book Du Culte des dieux fetiches de Charles De Brosses), Dussel stressed that Marx’s main theme was not atheism, but rather fetishism: the affirmation of the secularised divinisation of capital. In other words, the dynamics of capital (represented in the figures of Mammon, Baal and Moloch) reflects the sacrificial logic of the victims. Indeed, this topic played an important role in the Hinkelammert and Assmann’s work dating back to the late 1980s but on the basis of a philosophy of non-being, Dussel radicalised the criticism of capitalist modernity.

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Furthermore, Enrique Dussel affirms that an important ecological proposal was being framed by Marx. For example, when environmentalists reject the technology themselves, they do not see the real cause of the environmental problem: capital. In other words, when environmentalists mistrust the technology without going to the root of capital dynamics, that is, increasing the rate of profit, they condemn the effects without addressing the cause. Technology is not anti-ecological in itself, but it is the essence of capital that deprives people and the nature of their dignity by reducing them to the status of a tool to feed the valorisation process. In this sense, capital reverses ethics, transforming a man into a tool, while goods become idols. The environmental crisis we are experiencing is due to the fact that nature and men have become objects to exploit. It goes without saying that although Dussel continues to contribute to the construction of liberal thinking, he has not abandoned the use of Marxist concepts and categories. He is convinced that Marx’s thoughts can still help us not only to criticise the frivolled appearances of capital, but also to develop a trans-­ modern and decolonial project, which will certainly be anti-capitalist. It is undoubtedly Franz Hinkelammert who worked best on the link between theology and economics. Born in 1931 in Germany, Hinkelammert has lived in Latin America since 1963. Theologian and economist, he deepened Karl Marx’s fetishism theory to articulate critical theory (Horkheimer, Adorno and Benjamin) and criticism of theory (Hinkelammert, 1986) to grasp the moral dynamics of hegemonic social form: capitalism. While in the 1980s and 1990s, together with H. Assmann, F. Hinkelammert analysed capitalism as the religion of everyday life, (Assmann & Hinkelammert, 1989) which possesses his own theology and theologians; in recent years he has plunged into mythic reason—the entelechies that justify the sacrificed logic of capitalist modernity. Hinkelammert (2009) considered that the myth of Prometheus represented the root of all the utopia of modernity. It is true that, since the Renaissance, the myth of Prometheus has had various exegeses, but, in his view, Marx’s interpretation enables us to distinguish between the true and the false God. While the false gods are those requiring sacrifices and immolations of victims—the total market, the State, progress and development—the true gods are those who become human. As a result, the dignity of the human being becomes the main criterion of truth. The instrumental reason for capitalist modernity continues to assassinate both men and cultures and

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destroy nature, that is why only reproductive rationality that perceives man as corporeality can cope with the devastating myths of this actually existing modernity/coloniality.

Conclusion It is true that some theologians of liberation have abandoned Marxist concepts and categories and have adopted new theories (the theory of complexity, the French Theory, etc.), but there are others who continue to use Marxism as a critical theory to unveil fetishized forms of hegemonic social form. Furthermore, Liberation Theology, as utopic and modern intellectual constellation, has also contributed to Marxist analysis of other forms of (cultural) oppression and to the implementation of new ways of emancipation. The topic of the spirit of capitalism (such as rationalisation of asceticism) is studied by the Brazilian theologian Allan da Silva Coelho (2021) to refer to the subjection of the modern instrumental reason in the process of capital accumulation. Coelho thus observes the relevance of Marx’s theory of fetishism for understanding the alienation and reification process. Since the publication of the book, A Idolatria do Mercado by Hugo Assmann and Franz Hinkelammert (1989), the Liberation Theology demonstrated not only the importance of the theory of fetishism but also the economic roots of idolatry. Thus, Coelho demonstrates the spirituality (culpability, dynamic sacrifice of the market, consumerism and fetish) of capitalism as a religion. In some academic spaces it is often mentioned that the intellectual production of Liberation Theology achieved its peak during the 1980s. In general, this statement is often made because of a lack of knowledge of new theoretical proposals or as a result of the coloniality of knowledge. From our side, we are convinced that the new perspectives developed by Liberation Theology express the creative potential of this critical thinking current (Barros, 2019; Panotto, 2019; Gebara & Sung, 2020).

References Andreo, I. L. (2013). Teologia da Libertação e Cultura Política Maia Chiapaneca: O Congresso Indígena de 1974 e as Raíces do Exército Zapatista de Libertação Nacional. Alameda.

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Assmann, H., & Hinkelammert, F. (1989). A Idolatria do Mercado. Ensaio sobre Economia e Teologia. Vozes. Barros, M. (2019). Teologias da libertação para os nossos dias. Vozes. Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations. Schocken Books. Bensaïd, D. (2011). Le Spectacle: Stade Ultime du Fétichisme de la Marchandise. Lines. Boff, L. (1985). Roma Locuta. Documentos sobre o Livro Igreja: Carisma e Poder de Frei Leonardo Boff. Vozes. Boff, L. (1986). E a Igreja se fez Povo. Eclesiogênese: A Igreja que Nasce da Fé do Povo. Vozes. Boff, L. (1997). Cry of the earth, cry of the poor. Orbis Books. Boff, L. (2000). A Voz do Arco-Íris. Letraviva. Boff, L. (2008). Ecologia, Mundialição, Espiritualidade. Record. Coelho, A. d. S. (2021). Capitalismo como Religião. Walter Benjamin e os Teólogos da Libertação. Recriar. Dussel, E. (1990). Teología de Liberación y Marxismo. In I. Ellacuria & J. Sobrino (Eds.), Mysterium Liberationis. Conceptos Fundamentales de la Teología de la Liberación. Trotta. Dussel, E. (1992). Historia de la Iglesia en América Latina. Medio Milenio de Coloniaje y Liberación (1492–1992). Mundo-Negro/Esquila Misional. Dussel, E. (2014). Towards an unknown: A commentary on the manuscripts of 1861–63. Routledge. Dussel, E. (2017). Las Metáforas Teológicas de Marx. Siglo XXI. Gebara, I., & Sung, J. M. (2020). Direitos humanos & Amor ao próximo. Textos teológicos em diálogo com a vida real. Recriar. Girard, R. (1979). Violence and the sacred. Johns Hopkins University Press. Hinkelammert, F. (1986). The ideological weapons of death: A theological critique of capitalism. Orbis. Hinkelammert, F. (2002). Crítica de la Razón Utópica. Desclée de Brouwer. Hinkelammert, F. (2009). Hacia una Crítica de la Razón Mítica: El Laberinto de la Modernidad. Desde abajo. Hinkelammert, F. (2020). Totalitarismo del Mercado. Akal. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press. Klein, N. (2008). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Penguin. Löwy, M. (2019). La Lutte des Dieux: Christianisme de la Libération et Politique en Amérique Latine. van Dieren. Löwy, M. (2021). La Théologie du Pape François. L’Amérique Latine au Vatican. In L.  Kaennel & L.  Martínez Andrade (Eds.), Religions de la libération: Espérance, justice sociale et politique. van Dieren. Martínez Andrade, L. (Ed.). (2015). Religion without redemption. Social Contradictions and Awakened Dreams in Latin America. Pluto.

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Martínez Andrade, L. (2019). Ecología y Teología de la liberación. Crítica de la Modernidad/Colonialidad. Herder. Martínez Andrade, L. (2022). Elective affinities between liberation theology and ecology in Latin America. In W.  Goldstein & J.-P.  Reed (Eds.), Religion in rebellions, revolutions, and social movements (pp. 219–230). Routledge. Miguez, N., Rieger, J., & Sung, J.  M. (2009). Beyond the Spirit of Empire. SCM Press. Moulian, T. (1997). Chile Actual: Anatomía de un Mito. LOM. Panotto, N. (2019). Descolonizar o Saber Teológico na América Latina: Religião, Educação e Teologia em Chaves Pós-coloniais. Recriar. Reed, J.-P. (2020). Sandinista Narratives. Religion, Sandinismo and the emotions in the making of the Nicaraguan insurrection and revolution. Lexington. Sung, J. M. (2008). Teologia e Economia. Repensando a Teologia da Libertação e Utopias. Fonte Editorial. Tamayo, J. J. (2017). Teologías del Sur. El giro descolonizador. Trotta.

Other Worlds, Other Epistemes, Other Subjects: The Flame (Never Extinguished) of Latin American Liberation Theologies Nicolás Panotto

In the tribute book to the renowned Argentine theologian José Míguez Bonino—one of the most distinctive figures of the Protestant world within the Latin American Liberation Theologies (hereafter, LALT)—Néstor Míguez, his son—also theologian, biblical scholar, and a regional reference within this current—wrote an article entitled “Doing Latin American Theology in the Time of Globalization” (Míguez, 2004). In this contribution, Míguez makes an exhaustive analysis of the contextual, historical, political, and even epistemological rethinking of what it means to do Latin American theology in a world so different from the one that characterized its origins back in 60 s, a task that he places in the framework of what he calls “the mourning of a frustrated revolution,” echoing one of his father’s iconic books, published in 1975, entitled Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation.

N. Panotto (*) Arturo Prat University/Otros Cruces, Santiago, Chile © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_13

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The state of “mourning” entails the recognition of a becoming that did not achieve its purpose. Of a revolution that did not take place. The systemic changes in the face of the crisis of capitalism resulted in new dynamics of accumulation, consumption, and concentration, facilitated by a new logic of global economy. The liberating forces deployed by the desire for a “new man” not only failed to achieve the expected popular consolidation but were violently suffocated by the pressure of the church-­institution and dictatorial regimes that put the region’s democratic development in check. The utopias that were so much preached at the time did not reach their goal because of the hardening and deepening of a context of injustice and exclusion. But there is an even more complex nuance: this mourning does not only respond to the external inertia that phagocytized expectations, desires, and mobilizations. It also stems from the frustration that arises from the limitations, reductionism, and contradictions within the LALT itself. As happened with many political expressions and groups back then, an organic crisis became evident around the biases, epistemologies, options, and subjects within these collectives that, in addition to the persecution and devastation they suffered from the status quo regimes, could not maintain a sustained process of liberation as they had hoped. However, mourning does not mean failure. We can state with full conviction that the LALTs are a turning point of no return in the field of modern and postmodern debates in theology. This current represents above all an act of courage, which dared to question the false religiosity of the church and its complicity with injustices. It was the precursor of many relevant movements in the region, in various fields of activism. Through it, important contingents mobilized in favor of democracy and against the nefarious dictatorial power that remains as a shadow in the continent—as an “open vein,” as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano will say—even carrying with it many martyrs. From the strictly theological point of view, the LALTs embodied a process of transformation on the contextual dimension that should frame any theological reflection that pretends to be critical. Its method should not be an exercise in legitimizing dogma, but a framework for interdisciplinary dialogue to account for the historical relevance of divine action. The subjects were not considered anymore as passive receptacles of the ecclesiastical tradition, becoming axiological agents of the theological task. The Bible ceased to be a “sacred book” tied to tradition, to become a hermeneutic symbol of popular mobilization. Theology as such lost its status of

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exclusivity and became an exercise of relevance for sociopolitical transformation. Now, “what happened to the LALTs”? This recurrent question appeals to a very present demand in different spaces, which arises from the concern that this theological proposal is overlapped by others, lost its relevance, or even came to an end. We believe that this last allegation is excessive: the LALTs are not a distant point in history, but continue to embody a sensibility that feeds activism, belonging, and spirituality. The LALTs are still alive and strong enough to demand a predominant place, but undoubtedly their initial strength faded over time, or rather, mutated into diverse expressions that have redefined their origin. As we have already indicated, the inertia of the context itself marked the need for a rethinking of the ways of understanding reality and its dynamics, and with it the limits of its methodologies and narratives became evident. In summary, we can say that, in some way, the LALTs are located today in a paradoxical dynamic: despite the questionings, reductionisms, and criticisms that we can make, they maintain a place of fundamental relevance, not only within the Latin American theological genealogy, but as a proposal that still feeds different voices, even from other fields, subjects, and contexts. The question we ask ourselves is precisely why this phenomenon occurs: what makes LALT an inescapable reference? Where does its contribution dwell? What is it that makes it possible to create these diverse bridges? Our hypothesis is the following: the potential of the LALTs lies in enabling an epistemological terrain that, beyond the hegemonic narratives that characterized their initial configuration, opened the door to the construction of diverse types of articulations, methodologies, and processes of subjectivation, which even served as a self-critical instance of many of their postulates. In other words, the LALTs propose methodological elements that broaden the possibilities of articulation, as well as theological-­philosophical fields that open paths of interdisciplinarity and even intersectionality, which take their starting points toward paths not originally explored.

Post/De-colonial Critique and the Paradox of the Modern Spectrum: A Theological Perspective Modernity still marks its presence, sometimes in a spectral way, and sometimes with the full weight of its reality. We still carry the consequences of its darker side, such as the colonial frameworks that still inscribe the processes of subjectivation, in the way of weighing the productions of

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knowledge, in the hegemony still maintained by traditional political institutions, in that Western “common sense” that still subjugates our identity demarcations and in the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism, which continues to feed on sacrifices and deepens exclusion in the name of democracy and the defense of freedoms. While diversity is raised as a banner by countless groups around the world, at the same time fundamentalism, nationalist radicalism, and racism are on the rise. Modernity is still present in the configuration of our subjectivities, political systems, and social worldviews. But more than that, its consequences persist, and its wounds and splits are still open. Its categorical abstractions have failed to heal them. Today we are faced with several questions, which have been asked since its origins: How do we build a society where the value of diversity and plurality overcome the growing hate and discriminatory discourses? How do we build spaces for authentic political dialogue in the face of increasingly polarized societies, despite their greater interconnectedness in a globalized world? How do we combat the economic policies that are gaining more and more power within the global scaffolding, together with the weakening of States and local policies? How do we build a solidarity and liberating sensibility, which is inclusive and heterogeneous, without falling into a disbelief about possible emancipatory horizons? But there is a fundamental aspect that studies on de-coloniality had put on the table: we cannot speak of modernity without referring to colonialism. Enrique Dussel argues that “the Cartesian ontological expression (ego cogito) of the seventeenth century was anticipated by the ego conquiro, or even more politically by the ego domino to the Other, to the Indian” (Dussel, 2009, 22). It is for this reason that the European idea of modernity managed to universalize and impose itself as common sense. It achieved its status of exceptionality, thanks to the colonial enterprise that gave rise to its coercive establishment. As Edward Said underlines, the connection between the construction of the Western in relation to the ways of defining Orientalism (Said, 2002), in the same way America served as that Other, as a mirror, to legitimize European self-understanding, from the modern logic (Todorov, 2003). Latin America is, then, an “invention” that served the founding of modernity as a project of power, by instituting symbolic and imaginary counter-positions between the modern and the primitive, white skin and black skin, the advanced and the archaic, science and superstition, superiority and savagery (Mignolo, 2005).

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Colonialism fulfills several functions in relation to modernity. On the one hand, it establishes a geopolitical matrix that establishes mechanisms of exploitation (human and ecological) to enable the establishment of the capitalist market and industrialization processes. Let us also remember that the processes of “de-colonization” and independence in the nineteenth century went hand in hand with the spread of nationalism and emancipatory currents of thought that were born within European nation-­ states. But in addition to these direct colonial logics, a set of demarcations were also established that are not necessarily related to a type of direct incidence but to the construction of a cosmovisional framework that, although it does not act coercively, is established “indirectly” through processes of subjectivation and relationship. This is what Anibal Quijano calls coloniality, which he divides into four areas (Quijano, 2000). First, the coloniality of power as the creation of a social system of classification based on racial and sexual hierarchies (Cfr. Lugones, 2021), through the determination of scales between social identities. Second, the coloniality of knowledge, related to the positioning of Eurocentrism as the only source of knowledge. Third, the coloniality of being, whose strength lies in inferiorization, subalternization, and dehumanization, as well as in the determination of types of subjectivity. And finally, the coloniality of nature, through the dynamics produced by the sharp division between nature and society, which leaves aside other possible logics for defining the interrelations between context and society, even between the human and the non-human. In short, coloniality is presented as a matrix that affects the most proper instances of the modern social field, from social and political institutions to individual and collective imaginaries and discourses. For all this, we see that modernity does not escape from having been transformed into a logic of power, where the epistemic, racial, social, political, and cultural criteria of Europe were transformed to the extent that it delimits dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and oppression of those “others” who remain outside its hegemonic matrices of meaning, not only from the legitimization of colonial geopolitics but also from the dynamics of power in the subaltern sectors. All this confirms why modernity is presented as a paradoxical and contradictory instance. On one side of the coin, it embodies the constitution of a universe that claims to be emancipating, pluralizing, and defending freedoms and subjectivities, leaving with it a set of practices, imaginaries, and institutions that still serve the movements and developments of the

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present. But on the other side, we come up against a very high cost: each of these elements is established under a metaphysical mantle of universalization based on a particular vision, such as the European-Western one, and on a set of colonial mechanisms, which persist, and which implanted a surface of violence, segregation, racism, and sexism. Could it be that the liberation of modernity lies in confronting this same paradox? In short, the great challenge still lies in the struggle against the contradictions of modernity. Following the profile we have outlined, the question would be: What is the strategy to oppose the excluding logics of modernity, inhabiting a world-system that is still configured from its matrix? Post/de-colonial currents offer us an alternative, which can serve as a general background for theological reflection. Basically, de-colonial critique proposes that it is possible to question modernity from within, from its own logics, with its resources and from the cracks and fissures that are part of its scenario. In the words of Arturo Escobar, “each act of development and counter-development is potentially the seed of an alternative modernity” (Escobar, 2000, 97). It implies radicalizing from a political critique the sense of diversification inherent to modernity, which imprints a sense of heterogeinization that enables other places, other logics and makes other knowledges visible. Therefore, Emanuela Fornari argues that “heterotopological space implies not only differentiation, but also radical alterity: other places that suspend -through double devices of opening/closing, inclusion/exclusion, access/prohibition- the rules that regulate the relations of the ‘ordinary’ social Space” (Fornari, 2010, 10). It entails, in short, building a movement that instrumentalizes the contradictions of modernity as a reactive way in the face of hegemonic powers from the dissident voices and spaces that inhabit it, and that raise questions from new discourses and practices. It is to create what Walter Mignolo defines as border critical thinking: Border critical thinking is then the method that connects pluri-versity (different colonial histories trapped in imperial modernity) with the uni-versal project of detachment from the imperial horizon, from the rhetoric of modernity together with the logic of coloniality, and the construction of other possible worlds where there is no longer a world leader, right, left or center. (Mignolo, 2010, 122)

Focusing a little more on these approaches from the proposed lens, the question would be: How to create a liberating and frontier theological

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thought (or liberating because of its frontier) that penetrates the cracks of coloniality that are still present in the (post)modern context? Here we must consider two points of departure: the discernment of new theological sensibilities and the construction of other theological images. The former responds to the need for new approaches to the contexts and subjects that make up our terrain of theological reflection, while the latter is connected to the construction of new theological discourses from a critical position on the images of the divine that dispute hegemony among contemporary postcolonial and (post)modern dynamics. We propose two axes of theological reflection to address these concerns: the repositioning of the immanence-transcendence tension and the recovery of the critical tradition toward modernity in the LALTs. One of the elements that allowed the legitimization of modernity was to install the radicality of immanence over any sense of transcendence. This not only derived in an abandonment of any theological-religious scheme, but also in the obturation of any form of otherness over the contours established in the historical presence. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer stated, “Enlightenment is the mythical anguish turned radical. Pure positivist immanence which, in its ultimate product, is nothing but a universal taboo, so to speak. There must no longer be anything outside since the mere idea of an outside is the genuine source of anguish” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, 24). The imposture of total immanence cracks the possibility of thinking from the different. It is what Byung-Chul Han has called the society of transparency. Such a society represents the “hell of the equal” (Han, 2013a, 12), where the dialectical movement of negativity loses meaning in the face of the bizarre positivity of complete demonstration. “Precisely because of the lack of the negativity of the true, one arrives at a swarming and massification of the positive” (Han, 2013a, b, 23). The beauty of mystery is exchanged for the obscenity of overexposure. It is the society of the spectacle, where everything is legitimized to the extent that it is crudely exhibited. Anything that reveals a hint of secrecy is viewed with resentment. Where immanence is overvalued, any possibility of criticism is annulled. And where transcendence is obstructed, the horizon of hope and otherness is lost. This is precisely one of the corollaries of modernity, with its separation of time and space. But this radicalization of immanence, although opposed to any hint of transcendence, did not necessarily lose its metaphysical status. Precisely the logic of coloniality is based on an overdetermination of its condition, which abandons the abstraction of the

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supernatural for the absolutization of presence. “The positivity of power is much more efficient than the negativity of duty” (Han, 2013a, b, 27). This abrogates the emergence of a postmodern sense. Modern ethics was submerged in the “ought to be” while postmodernity focuses on desire. The law that was imposed in modernity was valid by itself. It was categorical, necessary, and universal. Its fulfillment did not imply happiness but duty. Postmodernity, on the other hand, points to the individual right, to the affective condition, to the indeterminacy of contingency. As Esther Díaz summarizes: “Emotion prevails over law; sentiment, over rule; the heart, over reason. The ethics of duty was rigorous and severe, that of feeling is free and flexible. The latter appeals to the responsibility and initiative of individuals; the former, on the other hand, appealed to obligation and obedience to laws” (Díaz, 2000, 85). From a theological point of view, Jung Mo Sung will argue that modernity does not only mean the emancipation of myths and religion, but also the installation of an “irrational myth that rationalizes the process of enslavement, colonization and exploitation of peoples” (Sung, 2012; Cfr. Sung et  al., 2015). Therefore, the Christianity-modernity tension does not respond so much to the secularization-faith binomial but rather to the conflict between the sacrificial logic of modernity and the vital logic of the kingdom of God. Hence the need to rethink the critical dimension of transcendence in theological discourse, no longer as a de-historicization of reality but as an empowerment of the possibility-of-being-more of history itself (Panotto, 2017). Josep Otón Catalán states that “the opacity of the sacred makes the citizen of modern society uncomfortable. While it has been necessary to banish the image of an opaque and tyrannical God to guarantee the freedom of individuals, it is no less true that the idea of a God that exceeds the realm of rationality disturbs a human being jealous of his explanatory capacity” (Otón Catalán, 2017, 55). The idea of a non-metaphysical transcendence sustains the inherent intensity of history, from the logics of otherness that dispute the excluding and segregating power of the absolutized forms present in fundamentalisms, in the “invisible hands” of the market, and in the inevitable conditions of social hierarchization. We need new images of the divine that not only describe the plurality of possible experiences, but that account for the critical capacity of the heterotopic horizons inherent in the presence of the kingdom of God among the frontiers that open up from the countless forms of history.

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It is often said that the LALTs were also daughters of modernity. And in many ways, they were, if we consider the—at times—essentialist conceptions of history, the closed compressions of subjectivity, the instrumental use of Marxist critical theory or theological conceptions that, as Hugo Assmann polemicizes, dealt more with “truisms” (i.e., with abstract and given conceptions) than with critical rhetoric (Assmann, 2002). But on the other hand, we also find within their own ranks, critical and self-critical approaches to the modern worldview inserted in this Latin American tradition. We see this in Rubem Alves and his observations—back in 1972— on the productivist society and the closure of the imagination in the name of science (Alves, 1976). In Juan Luis Segundo, when in 1973 he posed the dialectic between minority logics and the massifying logics of modernity (Segundo, 1973), or the difference between digital and iconic language (Segundo, 1982). Also, in José Míguez Bonino when in 1975 he began one of his best-known books by proposing the necessary relationship between hermeneutics and history as the nucleus for deconstructing the senses of truth, as the starting point of a critical theology (Bonino, 1976). Finally, from feminist voices and the gender approach, we find strong discussions, such as Marcella Althaus-Reid’s call to embody and sexualize the oppressed subject of the LALTs (Althaus-Reid, 2010), or Ivone Gebara’s warning about the need to question the metaphysical reference that sometimes acquires the Sovereign Liberating God in some approaches (Gebara, 2000). In other works (Panotto, 2018, 2019) we posited that the potential of a critical approach to LALTs lies in a radicalization of their own methodology. These theologies maintain a paradoxical relationship with modernity as well. The overcoming difference resides in the hermeneutic potential that the term liberation possesses within its scaffolding (Andrade, 2019, 45–50). Such a term does not denote a specific model but a field of meaning from which sociopolitical practices can be rethought. As Juan Luis Segundo exposed, “the most progressive theology in Latin America is more interested in being liberating than in talking about liberation. In other words, liberation does not pertain so much to the content as to the method used to do theology in the face of our reality” (Segundo, 1975, 13). Liberation as theological praxis inscribes a hermeneutic context that allows us to make a quantitative leap, where history ceases to be an immanent plain in which universal systems coexist, to be transformed into a scenario of transcendence, from acts of transformation, of dispute of

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rhetorical and ethical sense, to which LALT can serve from a reactivation of the tension between poiesis and praxis, and between the universality of the idea of liberation and the plurality of particular liberating perspectives.

Toward a “New Generation” of LALTs in a Post/ De-colonial Key We understand, then, that an epistemic projection of the LALTs will come from its way of dealing with the modern paradox that crosses it and at the same time challenges it from different contextual fronts: the social, political dynamics, activisms, training processes, and epistemic horizons (Panotto, 2016a, b). And it is precisely in this exercise that the LALTs offer an instance of critique, entering and leaving modernity, as Néstor García Canclini affirms (Canclini, 2000), from Dussel’s notion of transmodernity (2020), as those “moments that keep their exteriority” with respect to modernity, inhabiting it, as instances that modernity itself cannot and will not be able to capture and that emerge from its own strength, or what Eduardo Grüner says about the logic of counter-modernity that accounts for the internal fracture, the failure of modernity in its bosom (Grüner, 2016). In this direction, we can say that the LALT, beyond being daughters of their time and presenting some limitations in their modern frame, do not cease to embody a set of postulates that print a critical counter-face toward their interior, and with it of the theology functional to such status. Their epistemology exposes the flaws of the system, allowing a reappropriation of the hegemonic modern meanings. This counter-hegemony stems from the place of marginality, of constitutive exteriority that shapes its intuitive and contextual methodology, its rereading of the immanent becoming of history, and its attention to the excluded subject as an axiological starting point.

Another Episteme Post/de-colonial theories have proposed precisely that one of the battlefields against the logics of coloniality is epistemology. Starting from the principle that the coloniality of power is also the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 2020, 151–199), we need not only the visibility of new knowledges—or a “sociology of emergencies” from an “ecology of knowledges,” as Boaventura de Sousa Santos proposes (de Sousa Santos, 2009,

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2010)—but also the implosion of colonial knowledges from the inscription of colonial difference as an interstitial space of deconstruction and critical displacement of knowledges (Mignolo, 2010, 2013). In the words of the Bolivian philosopher Luis Claro, it means “to inhabit the disciplines that it seeks to criticize in order to operate a decentering from the very rules that define its game, to push the discourse towards its limits in order to dislocate any closure that grants a predetermined meaning to becoming” (Claros, 2011, 29) Therefore, a post/de-colonial epistemology, critical of the hegemonic notions of the theological, transits on what Karina Bidaseka, from the subaltern perspective, calls the theory of voices (Bidaseka, 2010, 197). Starting from the distinction between high and low voices made by Ranahit Guha—the latter being those silenced by the “statism” that hides them—Bidaseka states that “the necessary condition to be a political voice lies, then, in its intensity” (2010, 205). From a theological point of view, we could say that the element of the intensity of subaltern voices entails, therefore, not so much a focus on its content or particularity (identity) but in the deployment of a political strategy in a pedagogical key, in two directions: as a promotion of diversity of possible approaches/experiences within the religious/spiritual field and as a critical framework with respect to the hegemonic definitions of the religious. Hence, subaltern historiography proposes an epistemology of the edges, or, referring to Gyanendra Pandey’s proposal, an epistemology of fragments. It is an epistemology that accounts for the inconsistencies of colonial knowledge, not only in its content but also in its method. An inconsistency that emerges from the colonial difference that it establishes as a border of power, but that ends up imprinting a spatiality that fissures it (Fornari, 2017, 49–50). In this sense, subaltern knowledges must be recognized as knowledges and not only as narratives (Casas et al., 2015). This resignification of cognitive and epistemic limits is transformed into spaces where an insurrection of subjugated knowledges is gestated (Aparicio & Blaser, 2015, 104), as a way of questioning modernity/ coloniality in its most fundamental logic. “The rejection of the non-modern as unreal is itself one of the mechanisms by which modernity/coloniality protects and sustains itself as the ontological basis of politics” (Aparicio & Blaser, 2015, 112–113) Thus, the non-modern crushed or marginalized by the boundaries of the modern/colonial germinates as a knowledge that implodes its ontological stability. From a de-colonial vision, we speak of how the ecology of knowledges (De Sousa Santos, 2009) as the

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emergence of silenced knowledges and their intersectionality (Akotirene, 2019) as a political strategy of trans-disciplinarity go hand in hand. Paraphrasing Partha Chatterjee, Kwok Pui-lan argues that we also need to de-provincialize the origin of LALTs (2008, 23). This de-­ provincialization is not so much related to contextual aspects (the need to see LALTs beyond their Latin American origin has already been widely discussed; Cfr. Gutiérrez & Müller, 2005; Eagleson & Torres, 1980) but rather epistemic: to radicalize the critical dimension of their methodology to respond to current challenges. It is interesting to note that already by 1988, Franz Hinkelammert spoke about the challenge of “de-­ Westernizing” theology (Hinkelammert, 2000, 12) and we have already seen previously several authors who propose the need to go beyond the inherited ontological and metaphysical presuppositions. It is, also, what Marcella Althaus-Reid has insistently pressed on the need for the “indecenting” of LALTs: Indecenting as hermeneutical circle is in a way a call to deviancy from center of knowledge and faith to the margins, without returning to the center. It is an attempt to claim the marginal knowledge of God as a foundation for an alternative theological praxis of liberation. (Althaus-Reid, 2010, 27)

The radicalization of the episteme in the LALTs implies moving from interdisciplinarity to intersectionality; or thinking the former from the latter. It is to assume plurality not only as a principle of pragmatics but as evidence of a diversity of ways of constructing knowledge, and thus of questioning reality and transforming it. A post/de-colonial look at intersectionality means posing the plurality of knowledge from the question of power.

Another History One of the main contributions of the theory of subalternity that we could highlight for our epistemic proposal is its deconstruction of historiography. According to Gayatri Spivak, Subalternity Studies proposes two fundamental changes in this line. First, that the processes of historical transformation be pluralized and made visible as confrontations and not only as transitions (so that they are inscribed within the history of domination, and not only as effects of hegemonic historiographic production), and second, that such displacements be focused on a “functional change

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of sign systems.” And he adds something fundamental: the most important functional shift is from the religious to the militant (Spivak, 2013, 327). Functional shifts have to do with a history of failures. More specifically, with a “cognitive failure.” This means that what is presented as failure, as eventual, as accidental, as marginal, that is, as subaltern, is in the end what rewrites universal history. The history of failures is the silenced subaltern history. And here Spivak adds an essential analytical key: the shifts produced by the subaltern do not respond to the typical modern historiography (also present in critical thought, such as Marxism and even the LALTs) based on a sutured and homogeneous (class, ideological, identity) consciousness. It is, rather, the history of a heterogeneous field that operates through countless shifts that, despite knotting nodal points of transformation, are also multiple. Postcolonial studies question historicism in order to historicize history. Says Emmanuela Fornari: “Adopting the optics no longer of a ‘homogeneous and empty’ time, typical of historicism, but -as Chatterjee suggestively writes- ‘heterogeneous and full’, non-Western ‘marginality’ appears no longer as something external or a residue of the historifying power of modernity, but as an inter-medium space that, rather than being a stage of a ‘statist’ process, constitutes a place of paradoxes that puts in check the Eurocentric paradigm of modernization” (Fornari, 2017, 47). These “two histories” that Chatterjee presents—that is, the history of homogeneous time and history as a “history of belonging”—resonate to what LALTs have insisted on the uniqueness of history as opposed to the split of a sacred and a profane history (Gutiérrez, 1996, 245–256). The dimension of transcendence was no longer projected in a unity outside of history but from it, and more concretely in the liberating disruptions, which account for the divine action from instances of transformation (Ellacuría, 1993). The theme of history is fundamental within LALT, especially as a scenario for rethinking divine revelation and the liberating dimension of faith. Now, to what extent did this vision of history have an impact on the way of conceiving the divine? Bearing in mind what was said above about the theological essentialisms also present in this current, do these metaphysical images of the divine in the LALTs not respond to an equally essentialized understanding of history? Is there not a difference in thinking of a God who reveals himself from a Liberating Plan and thinking of a divinity that interrupts the becoming from the history of failures and questions the linearity of the projects of power that seek to impose themselves from

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abstract but solid frontiers? A de-colonization of history means seeing it as a history of disruptions. Juan Luis Segundo has been among the few Latin American theologians to notice this disruptive dynamic of the historical as a new revelatory dynamic, calling it divine pedagogy. In his words: Reality pushes man towards an ever greater truth by the procedure that, in epistemology, is called “trial and error”. Hence, the error experienced, detected and corrected becomes a component of any process of internalization of truth. In other words, of all “pedagogy”. And it is obvious to point out, of the divine. (Segundo, 1989, 136)

For the LALTs, the question for history(s) is a question for the very constitution of the divine. The historical is not only a “scenario” but a locus that opens the manifestation from the marginalized economically, socially, corporeally, and epistemically. The margin is not only a “presence” but also a limit and fissure of meaning. To speak of a metaphysics of the “God of the excluded” would be a fallacy; marginality itself has to do with the questioning of this essence, which makes of God a God that manifests from the fragments of the irruptions, not from a finished Project (Rieger, 2001, 43–68). We enter the Byzantine discussion on the universal and the particular, a debate that in its beginnings LALT took a courageous step by questioning the status of the “sacred history” held by traditional Christian theology. But the approach was somewhat limited by not questioning the very metaphysics involved in thinking of a “liberating God” outside of modern ontology, which continued to insist on a divine essence, now from the adjective of “the liberating.” As Etienne Balibar states, the issue of universalisms always deals with a quarrel of universalisms (Balibar, 2021, 11). Universalisms are situated and thus evoke conflicts (of interpretation). For this reason, from a post/ de-colonial gaze, we must understand that universals can only be articulated within a politics of translation that determines their temporality from a dialectic as conflict and reciprocity (Fornari, 2017, 108; Bahbah, 2010, 23–44). The universal becomes a horizon whose constitution is established in a weak articulation of signifiers, where “weakness” does not necessarily mean ineffectiveness but a condition of constant transformation and where the “not yet” that embodies the impossibility of a universal as absolute, opens history in a set of possibilities-of-being (Laclau, 1996, 43–67).

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In this sense, LALTs represent a politics of translation of universalities and particularities in tension that evokes the manifestation of the divine from the irruption of the oppressed, including its ontological status, hegemonic functionalities, and possibilities of agency. Hinkelamenrt, for example, speaks of a “practical universality” (Hinkelammert, 2018, 16), which refers to that condition of equality in humanity, which is both general and concrete. Nancy Cardoso posits that LALTs embody in themselves an interruption that cuts with the linearity of history (Cardoso, 2018). Linearity that, in many cases, is synonymous with violence, as are forms of power based on a metaphysics of the divine. But it is an interruption that, far from being the annihilation of novelty, is transformed into the seed of new epistemologies, new practices, new bodies. Referring to Luis Espinel Camps, Jospeh Drexler-Dreis frames it from what he calls de-colonial love, that is, “when understood as theologically pedagogic, both throws light on ‘the impossible’—that is, on that with is outside the parameters of understanding within colonial modernity—and, as a practice, is a way of ‘flyng[ing] ourselves upon the impossible.’ Decolonial love is a modality of encounter with the scatological reality in history” (Drexler-Dreis, 2019, 13). In short, the divine as a universality that traverses and comes from history implies a questioning of any idolatrous practice that attempts to absolutize a particular image of the theological, even in the name of a particular model or form of liberation and emancipation. This is not achieved through a singular form, but through the deconstruction of the epistemic boundaries that enable the mobility of every practice, body, knowledge, and politics. Thus, Hinkelamert also affirms that the way to resist the idolatrous logic of the “false divinities” of hegemonic neoliberal and colonial capitalism is precisely by fighting from and for human rights, since the latter are based on the denial of their dignity. It is a theological enterprise in itself: it is to seek critique from the transcendence of human value (Hinkelammert, 2018, 32).

Other Subjects The question of subjects has been central to LALTs and is also a fundamental element of the post/de-colonial scaffolding (Panotto, 2012). As opposed to structuralist frameworks that subsume the subject to an omnipresent system or a unifying Project, post/de-colonial theories posit the importance of the singularity of subjects (individual and collective) as

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units of resignification and resistance within every framework of signification they inhabit. However, on the other hand, they are also critical of positions that make the subject and the notion of diversity/plurality, a simple set of monads without a structural or critical dimension. As Stefan Silber reminds us, “Postcolonial theologies are even critical of a certain possibility of instrumentalizing the sense of plurality since the colonial can also inhabit it…. The difference between postcolonial theologies and intercultural theologies differs in the question that the former asks about the meaning of domination and power” (Silver, 2018, 135–136). The contribution of these currents is to read the subject/structure dynamic in the key to power. The notion of diversity does not concern only a descriptive dimension of the plural but an ontological condition that interrogates the pretensions of hegemonic uniqueness. Marginalized subjects are not the particular incarnation of a universal logic—be it political, ideological, or theological—but the inscription of a difference at the heart of colonial logics, which in their ambivalent position question any kind of social and theological essentialism. They embody a critique of the “theories of oppression” from what Lugones calls as ontological pluralism (Lugones, 2021) or the subject as an instance of identification or point of suture (Hall, 2013, 345–415). Here lies precisely one of the most important elements of this epistemic radicalization of the LALTs. How to reread the “preferential option of God for the poor”? Is it an option for a particular subject, or the constitution of a logic of marginality that acts as epistemic and political critique? This rethinks, in some way, the idea of “the historical force of the poor” (Gutiérrez, 1982), at least as it is traditionally conceived. According to Antonio González, when we speak of subject, we are not referring to a point in the framework of a finite cosmos, nor of a monadic subjectivity, but of a subject that is constituted from the historical density that refers to its praxis. “When we speak of the poor as ‘subject of history’ we do not allude, as the term ‘subject’ could insinuate, to a previous and independent instance of their actions, but to a reality that at the same time that makes history, is constituted in it... the primacy of praxis entails its metaphysical irreducibility to any natural or rational legality” (Gonzáles, 1993, 157). One of the schools that opened a very important breach in the revision of these concepts was the Ecumenical Research Department (DEI, in Spanish), especially by the hand of Franz J. Hinkelammert, Jung Mo Sung

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and Hugo Assmann, who have rescued the place of the subject in theological thought. The first to incur in these proposals was Hinkelammert in his famous work The Cry of the Subject, where he makes a rereading of the book of John showing the vindication of the subject in the face of law and political power and affirming its place above any demarcating instance. From a rereading of Emmanuel Levinas, Hinkelammert affirms that subjectivity is always gestated in the encounter with the Other. He says: “The subject is the other. That is why it is not the individual. It is never alone. To behave as a subject is to behave in relation to the other, which implies a rupture with the individual. The subject emerges through the face of the other, as one could say with Levinas. The subject responds to the ‘do not kill me’, of the other. That is why it interpellates the law. It has no other law, although its recognition of the other may force it to change the law. But the law objectifies the subject, and therefore denies it. It is necessary to vindicate it again” (Hinkelammert, 1998, 197). Understanding the subject in the act of encounter implies that it cannot be granted a unique definition, as the Law pretends. Hence, the distinction between subject and individual, the latter being understood as the reflection of a concrete social determination of the subject. The latter can never repress the subject; it is only a reflection of the latter under a concrete normativity. “No act is the subject, but always resists the subject in its own results. That is why there is no image of the subject, just as there is no image of God. The individual, instead, is the objectified relation with the other, mediated by exchange and the market” (Hinkelammert, 1998, 197). Hence, by interpellating the Law, the subject also interpellates such individualization. Moreover, it becomes a subject in this action: the cry of the subject makes itself heard from the silencing that the law (be it the market, an ideology, a religious institution) tries to impose. Whatever its power, the law can never annul the subject. Jung Mo Sung deepens some of these approaches, affirming that the concept of the modern subject has Judeo-Christian roots, especially in the notion of God as the “subject of history.” Modernity replaced the place of God with that of the human being, also drawing on the influence of Greek philosophy that sees divinity as the foundation of all order (Sung, 2005b, 1–9). This is reflected in the “transcendental illusion” of certain projects and currents that are understood as depositaries of changing history from particular actions, be it neoliberal market, socialist communism, or any particular liberating project assumed as unique and universal.

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This does not deny any effort for social change. Rather, Sung proposes the need to place oneself in a utopian horizon (e.g., the kingdom of God) based on the substitution of the subject-object logic for that of subject-­ subject; that is, a relationality that overcomes any type of institutional determination. No subject or society can live without institutions. But Sung calls attention to differentiate between subject (being-in-relationship-­ with-the-other) and social agent (being determined in its social function). “The individual cannot live without institutions and social roles, but the subject is not the sum of such roles, much less is it identified with a single role” (Sung, 2005a, b, 53). This definition implies a non-objectifying relationship within a social system or institution. For his part, Hugo Assmann stresses that the modern concept of “historical subject” shows a linear understanding of history, where only a single hope, a single struggle, a single final victory is at stake. He calls this “the terrorism of linearity,” which leaves aside any kind of dialectic or notion of the complex. This he attributes to a “political apocalyptic” that secularizes the final intervention of God for the protagonist of a historical subject (be it a political party, a movement, a social class) in whom the emancipatory force is deposited. In this vision the same elements remain as in classical apocalyptic: the need for an enemy, the “great combat,” and the final annihilation of the “oppressors.” What is central for Assmann is to learn to live with ambiguity, stripped of the Great Emancipatory Projects. He proposes a multidimensional emergence of the emergence of subjectivity. He agrees with what Hinkelammert advises but refuses to restrict subjectivity to what the latter understands as relationality between “natural and needy” subjects, specifically the definition of the subject based on the satisfaction of needs (Hinkelammert, 1990, 240). “The scenario imagined by such a theory seems to be more or less the following: all ‘subjects’ are cornered in a condition of life and death confrontation with respect to the satisfaction of their elementary survival needs” (Assmann, 2004, 140). There are different elements that question this “positionality” of subjects, especially the fact that work is no longer an exclusive primary instance. Assmann recognizes the body as a basic reference for any discourse on the subject and its historical consciousness but refuses to limit its place to material need and social threat. Rather, he proposes to view the notion of subject from the inherent possibilities of emergence it possesses despite its limited and complex context.

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In short, it is fundamental to understand identity and the subject, not as an abstract singularity, but as a point of enunciation. Not only in how it is understood as an ontological particularity but as a signifying singularity, as its possibility of being and differentiating instance. This has a fundamental theological dimension, even eschatological. In the words of Enrique Dussel, “When we speak of subjects, we do not only speak of which subjects but how these subjects operate theologically. Therefore, a process of decolonization has to do with the construction of a place-other of enunciation” (Dussel, 2020, 323–339).

Conclusions: A New Generation in the LALTs? We have raised throughout the chapter two central elements: (1) that the process of de-colonization of theological work itself (both Latin American and global) comes hand in hand with a critique of the modern scaffolding that still runs through it, and (2) that such deconstruction will not respond to a necessarily external agent or factor as well as to a complete discarding of the particular discipline or methodology, but rather to a resignification and radicalization of its constitutive epistemic elements. For all this, we understand that LALTs are neither a particular theological proposal nor a set of scattered and conjunctural contextual applications, but rather a broad epistemic framework that dialogues and at the same time deconstructs theological work per se, especially from its dialogue and praxis with the changing historical scenarios. Thinking, then, of a possible set of challenges and axes of work for a current or future generation of theologians in the framework of LALT, we could identify the following aspects: 1. Despite the advances in the matter, much work is still required around the eco-theological field. This is not only related to the treatment of the ecological or environmental issue as a particular problem, but also to the need for a broader epistemic rethinking (van Andel, 2021). As Claudio Carvalhaes addresses in a recent work on liturgical eco-theology of liberation, the eco-theological has to do with a more complex theological understanding of the relationship between the human and the non-human, of the ­constitution of subjects in relation to the environment, of a complexification of the phenomena of exclusion, among others (Carvalhaes, 2021).

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2. The issues of gender, sexualities, and corporality are still a pending matter for LALTs. We know that there are recurrent works on these issues, but many of them are moving away from the LALT framework because many of the warnings made by Marcella Althaus-Reid have not yet been heeded. In the same way, beyond the fact that these topics are worked on or mentioned randomly, they are not part of the epistemic corpus of this current. But here another factor is added: although these issues and problems are addressed on papers and academic production, there is still a great inconsistency in terms of parity, equality, inclusion, and real diversity in institutional terms. Bodies, dissidences, and reflections on gender are still absent from the practices and configurations of movements, churches, seminaries, theological faculties, organizations, even those that uphold the values of the LALTs (Cfr. Panotto, 2019). 3. We could talk about many other issues and particular subjects that are being and require even more visibility: children and youth, Afro-­ descendant communities, indigenous groups, feminist movements, the issue of interculturality, globalization, migrations, among many others. However, we insist on the same point: the task is not only to diversify voices, but also to make the hermeneutic turn so that these particularities are critically included in a broader framework of dialogue around the epistemic dimension of LALT as a specific current. 4. We have already mentioned the need to think about an intersectional methodology. This has several implications for LALTs. It entails a radical dialogue with the diversity of knowledge constructions and wisdoms in diverse contexts, in favor of a real overcoming and de-colonization of the theory-practice distinction. This latter dichotomy does not only affect how the theoretical and thus the academic is understood. Such a distinction affects, above all, emancipatory political practices, which still pose the possibility of an abstract construction of the liberating and an application of it from the praxis. We need to radicalize the place of practical meaning not as a field of application but as a field of construction and emergence of meanings, narratives, and knowledge, which not only allows us to legitimize other kinds of knowledge, but—with them—other subjects of enunciation. 5. The latter also implies the need for a strategic relationship between LALTs and the various human rights activists, especially in Latin

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America. In post-pandemic times, we are experiencing a worrying resurgence of religious fundamentalisms, political conservativism, and radical libertarian movements, which paradoxically rise up in defense of freedoms. Today, LALTs have the opportunity to be a framework for progressive religious mobilization, together with social movements and activisms, offering a religious counter-­ narrative that opposes hegemonic conservative and fundamentalist positions.

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Hinkelammert, F. (1998). El grito del sujeto. DEI. Hinkelammert, F. (2000). La fe de Abraham y el Edipo occidental. DEI. Hinkelammert, F. (2018). Totalitarismo del mercado. El mercado capitalista como ser supremo. Akal. Laclau, E. (1996). Emancipación y diferencia. Ariel. Lugones, M. (2021). Peregrinajes. Teorizar una coalición contra múltiples opresiones. Ediciones del Signo. Mignolo, W. (2005). La idea de América Latina. Gedisa. Mignolo, W. (2010). Desobediencia epistémica. Ediciones del Signo. Mignolo, W. (2013). Historias locales/disidencia globales. Akal. Míguez, N. (2004). Hacer teología latinoamericana en el tiempo de la globalización. In G. Hansen (Ed.), El silbo Ecuménico del Espíritu. Homenaje a José Míguez Bonino en sus 80 años (pp. 81–101). ISEDET. Panotto, N. (2012). Hacia una teología del sujeto político. UNA. Panotto, N. (2016a). Religión, política y poscolonialidad en América Latina. Miño&Davila. Panotto, N. (Ed.). (2016b). Indecent theologians. Marcella Althaus-Reid & the next generation of postcolonial activists. Borderless Press. Panotto, N. (2017). Otherness, paradox, and Utopia: Theological imagination and the deconstruction of power. The Ecumenical Review, 69(1), 45–59. Panotto, N. (2018). Teología como sensibilidad crítica sobre la (hétero)práxis. Desafíos hermenéuticos hacia dentro de la teología de la liberación. Revista de Interpretación Bíblica Latinoamericana., 77(1), 167–191. Panotto, N. (2019). A critique of the coloniality of theological knowledge: Rereading Latin American liberation theology as thinking otherwise. In R.  Barreto & R.  Sirvent (Eds.), Decolonial Christianities. Latinx and Latin American perspectives (pp. 217–237). Palgrave Macmillan. Pui-Lan, K. (2008). Hacer teología en la era de la globalización. In C. de Prado & P. Hughes, coords (Eds.), Libertad y esperanza. A Gustavo Gutiérrez por sus 80 años (pp. 395–411). CEP. Quijano, A. (2000). Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social. Journal of World-­ Systems Research. New York, 2, 342–386. Quijano, A. (2020). Ensayos en torno a la colonialidad del poder. El Signo Editorial. Rieger, J. (2001). God and the excluded. Visions and blind spots in contemporary theology. Fortress Press. Said, E. (2002). Orientalismo. Debate. Segundo, J. L. (1973). Masas y minorías. La Aurora. Segundo, J. L. (1975). Liberación de la teología. Ediciones Carlos Lohlé. Segundo, J. L. (1982). El hombre de hoy ante Jesús de Nazaret (Vol. I). Ediciones Cristiandad. Segundo, J. L. (1989). El dogma que libera. Fe, revelación y magisterio dogmático. Sal Terrae.

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Silver, S. (2018). Poscolonalismo. Introducción a los estudios y a las teologías poscoloniales. Maryknoll. Spivak, G. (2013). En otras palabras, en otros mundos. Ensayos sobre política cultural. Paidós. Sung, J. M. (2005a). Sujeto y sociedades complejas. DEI. Sung, J.  M. (2005b). The human being as subject. Defending the victims. In I.  Petrella (Ed.), Latin American liberation theology: The next generation. Orbis Books. Sung, J. M. (2012). La irracionalidad de la Modernidad, idolatría y Teología de la liberación. In A.  Brighenti & R.  Hermano, org (Eds.), La Teología de la Liberación en Prospectiva (pp. 123–146). Ediciones UCSH. Sung, J.  M., Miguez, N., & Rieger, J. (2015). Más allá del espíritu imperial. La Aurora. Todorov, T. (2003). La conquista de América. El problema del otro. Siglo XXI. van Andel, A. (2021). Teología en movimiento. JuanUno.

PART IV

Looking to the Future

Looking Back and Looking Forward from the Margin of the Margins Nancy Elizabeth Bedford

The Margin of the Margins We are tasked with looking backward and forward from margin of the margins. What might that mean? How are we to see back, forward, up, down, around? Are we to “take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea” (Psalm 139:9, NRSV)? How do we reach the edge of the chasm and do post-abyssal research (cf. De Souza Santos, 2018, 120–121) or indeed, theology? As I ponder these questions, a poem written in 1908 by Rubén Darío comes to mind. It is called “Margarita, the Sea is Beautiful” and is also known as “To Margarita Debayle” (Darío, 2003). It tells the story of a princess who wanders to the edge of the sea and beyond the moon to pluck a star from the sky, overcome by its beauty, so much greater than anything in her father’s diamond-studded palace. She does so without her father’s permission. Upon noticing the star sparkling on her brooch, her father the king demands to hear what she has

N. E. Bedford (*) Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_14

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done. She tells him whence it came, for she is a truth-teller who does not lie. He is enraged, saying in essence: “Have I not told you not to meddle in transcendence?” (¿No te he dicho que el azul no hay que cortar?). He orders her to put the star back, threatening her with the wrath of God if she does not do so immediately. Just then, el Buen Jesús appears, smiling, and tells them both that such stars are roses planted just for girls such as she. She is welcome to keep it, with his blessing. Darío’s poem was written for the eight-year-old daughter of a friend; she had asked him for a story in verse. In its apparent simplicity, it gives us a glimpse into a theology that can subvert the logic of patriarchy and empire, as well as escape the gilded cage of a palace full of the riches amassed through the exercise of coercive power. It does so not by violence, but by riding “the waves and the wind,” language that theology associates with the Spirit. The girl places the star alongside “a verse, a pearl, a feather, a flower” (verso, perla, pluma y flor)—a faint echo, perhaps, of the Náhuatl in xochitl, in cuicatl (flower and song), signs of the presence of the Divine. She disrupts the logic of the god of power and vengeance threatened by her father and proceeds in the confidence that the Divine is open to her and fruitful for her life. She sails into the azure sphere of the stars and back, impelled by her vision of beauty, by the waves and the wind, in ways she cannot explain, only to discover that el Buen Jesús is delighted by her disobedience and daring. In this chapter I will seek to follow this path of the wind and the waves to find my way to the margin of the margins, and to look forward and back at our task in Abya Yala and beyond from a theological perspective. In this path, I am particularly interested in what Latin American feminist decolonial thinkers and practitioners bring to the table. As they underline in many ways, there is no margin of the margins without women. By “women,” I’m referring to cisgender women, trans women, and anybody else who identifies or is identified by others as such, knowing that to be coded as female is enough to be the target of violence, especially in the case of women who are poor and/or racialized as indigenous or black. The margin of the margins is traversed by a spectrum of gendered violence that spans everything from subtle forms of verbal aggression to rape and murder, such that it can be called feminicidal violence (cf. Bejarano Bejarano Celaya, 2014, 14; Sagot Rodríguez, 2017, 61). It should not be acceptable to do any sort of theory or theology—certainly, not any theory or theology calling itself liberating or decolonial—without taking on this violence and seeking to put a stop to it. Theology is called to examine its own

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complicities in such violence, as well as to bring out from its treasures new and old (Matt. 13:52) whatever it has at its disposal to contribute non-­ violently to the abundant life of all creation. As a theologian I am inspired by the fact that—despite death-dealing violence—death does not have the last word in the stories of women at the margin of the margins: they too ride wind and waves to cut into the azure of transcendence in ways that subvert the patriarchal and racist logic of coloniality, bringing new perspectives to life in the here and now.

Decolonial Feminist Insights and Limitations As was the case in the early period of Latin American Liberation Theology (LALT) starting in the late 1960s, the representatives of the first wave of decolonial theory in Latin America that emerged decades later tended to be males who were not particularly interested in gender or in feminist readings of the reality to which they were responding. This led to some problematic blind spots, as María Lugones has pointed out, in her work on the coloniality of gender. She calls her analysis of racialized, capitalist, gender oppression “the coloniality of gender,” and the possibility of overcoming the latter, “decolonial feminism” (Lugones, 2010, 747). Lugones underscores that feminists of color have shown how important it is not only to focus on economic and racial dimensions of oppression, but also to see how they intersect with gender. And yet, that has not seemed sufficient to arouse in those men who have themselves been targets of violent domination and exploitation, any recognition of their complicity or collaboration with the violent domination of women of color. In particular, theorizing global domination continues to proceed as if no betrayals or collaborations of this sort need to be acknowledged and resisted. (Lugones, 2008, 1).

Lugones takes Aníbal Quijano to task because she sees his work on the “coloniality of power” as indispensable, yet lacking key epistemological insights provided by critical race theorists and feminists of color. She accuses Quijano of being too accepting of white and heterosexist normativity, which veils “the ways in which non-‘white’ colonized women were subjected and disempowered” (Lugones, 2008, 2). In reading Lugones as a theologian, I am stirred by the way her insights on decolonial theory illustrate the degree to which all modes of critical

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thought need continually to be “converted.” No matter how complete— and critical—we think our analysis of reality is, we always also import into what we do presuppositions that may be harmful, regardless of our good intentions. The blind spot regarding the fact that “gender arrangements need not be either heterosexual or patriarchal” (Ibid.) is one that Liberation Theologies and decolonial perspectives alike have struggled to overcome. In turn, even a deep thinker such as Lugones inevitably has her own blind spots. I am struck by the extent to which she—like a number of other decolonial theorists—is willing to make statements about the Christian faith that border on caricature without paying careful attention to the generativity of the lived realities of that faith. This is not to deny that such statements should be weighed carefully by theologians. For example, she writes—relying on Paula Gunn—that replacing the “gynecratic spiritual plurality” of indigenous North Americans “with one supreme male being as Christianity did, was crucial in subduing the tribes” (Lugones, 2008, 10). It is worth teasing out the implications of statements such as this one. On the one hand, Lugones is indeed correct in stating that forms of Christianity (or of Christendom) were and are used to colonize, dominate, erase, and subdue. If it wants to be both liberating and decolonizing, theology must deal seriously with accusations made by decolonial theorists about the disturbing and destructive nature of all colonizing forms of the Christian faith. Indeed, the fact that decolonial thinkers—unlike many Eurocentric theorists—are on the whole not reticent about engaging religion (Barreto & Sirvent, 2019, 9) is a gift for theology, not least because their critiques help theologians think through the material implications of “really existing Christianities,” both for those who embrace the Christian faith and for those who do not but are in some way affected by its dynamics. On the other hand, it is worth asking whether statements about the presumed absolute “oneness” and “maleness” of God, such of those by Lugones above, are quite as accurate or straightforward as she seems to assume. Such convictions are certainly not in line with a liberating trinitarian faith in which the Divine is both immanent and transcendent, described with many metaphors that are neither human nor male (such as eagle, rock, wind, fire, hen, mother, source, fountain, lamb, water, midwife, door, light). God is not “male” in the Christian faith. Admittedly, the God confessed by Christians often functions as if God were an oversized projection of a human heterosexual male, as can be seen by the negative emotional reactions that many Christians have to language about God as “she”

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and as “queer.” Nonetheless, in common with many feminist theologians, I think the deep wells of Christian spirituality and theology have many waters capable of diluting and even washing away this heterosexist idolatry of maleness. The same thing is true of the radical “oneness” of God, if by “oneness” is meant a transcendent, distant deity disinterested and disinvested in our materiality. The confession of the Triune character of God that emerges from recognizing the work of God as manifested in Jesus and in the Spirit is precisely that God is both immanent and transcendent, both beyond all categorizations and closer to us than we are to ourselves. That, and not some absurd and convoluted arithmetic equating one and three, is the root of the trinitarian confession of faith. There is both plurality and oneness in God, and we as humans reflect God’s image and likeness both in our particularity and our multiplicity, called to deep mutuality and harmony with each other and all creatures. Undeniably, as Barreto and Sirvent sagely point out, the places where academic Christian theology is “dominantly produced” are not usually spaces where decolonial thought is much of a lens (Barreto & Sirvent, 2019, 9). As a result, some theologians don’t even realize that patriarchal and heterosexist distortions of the nature of the God have been and continue to be a matter of life and death, whenever they serve as an ideological justification for conquest and violence. But such are by no means the only resource for theology. There are many other Latinx and Latin American theologies and Christianities to engage, and “multiple existing resources in Indigenous, African derived, Mujerista, queer, and other forms of Latinx and Latin American Christian praxis and theologies” (Ibid.). I am a witness—because of my participation in such communities and theologies—of how life-giving they can be. For that reason, I am convinced that a central task of a liberating, decolonial theology is precisely probing “where Christianity is complicit in empire and coloniality” and also finding where it provides “unique and important resources for resisting, un-thinking, un-disciplining, and re-imagining alternative ways of being in the world” (Barreto & Sirvent, 2019, 10). I would add explicitly that the use of violence to further any sort of religious and/or societal goal (even in the name of justice) is deeply contrary to the way of Jesus. The model of Christianity as Christendom that decolonial thought rightly questions is heretical and deeply flawed, and not to be equated with the way of Jesus. In sum: Lugones does not sufficiently differentiate herself from male decolonial thinkers who—as she writes—lack subtlety in their vision of

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reality, in that she (as do many of them) paints the tenets and effects of “the Christian religion” with such broad strokes as to be sometimes unrecognizable. There is no nuance in her analysis of Christian faith and spirituality: it is simply pegged as a destructive and negative influence. As theologians, it is important for us to tread carefully and to pay close attention to such claims, without defensiveness, but also without hesitancy in pushing back at inaccuracies and distortions if needed. Recognition of the material outcomes of particular practices of the Christian faith is indeed crucial. If the effect of a theology was or is detrimental to life and flourishing, then Christian theologians need to be able to see it, admit it, and work to change it. At the same time, the story of the Christian faith in Abya Yala is not one of an ontologically evil religion destroying or subverting all that is good in its path. Reality is more complex than that. Susana Matallana-Peláez makes the point, for instance, that early Liberation Theologians in the 1970s (mostly male) were not attentive enough to violence against women and “unabashedly accepted Vatican dogma regarding sexual and reproductive rights.” (It is worth noting that Protestant Liberation Theologians are completely ignored in this statement.) She goes on to say that, nonetheless, Liberation Theologians did make space for forums where women were able to speak about their lives. This training in public speaking in turn became central to much of what the Zapatista movement later was able to articulate in defense of women’s rights (Matallana-Peláez, 2020, 378). This sort of phenomenon is what I’ve called “theological feminism” in my own work: the way in which participation in church communities—such as those ubiquitous in Latin American Protestantism—often serves women as an education in public speaking, interpreting texts, and community organizing. Such was my own experience as a child and as a young woman. These are feminist and often decolonizing practices, regardless of whether the women formed in them use that language to describe it. Such practices have been present in the Jesus movement from the beginning, and have often made male theologians and churchmen nervous, as reflected in some of their writings, starting with the canonical Deutero-Pauline letters. But the fact that such empowering practices are endemic to the Christian faith shows that it cannot be simply condemned as “bad” for women without further examination. Despite mentioning this detail about the Zapatista movement, Matallana-Peláez then goes on to state that violence against women (such as that of the European witch hunts) became naturalized, because it was

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“rooted in Judeo-Christian thought in which sex, woman, and nature are fundamentally evil” (Matallana-Peláez, 2020, 381). She adds that Christianity “despises and dismisses sexuality” (Matallana-Peláez, 2020, 383). Lugones similarly states that “Christian confession, sin, and the Manichean division between good and evil served to imprint female sexuality as evil” (Lugones, 2010, 744). I would push back at these blithe generalizations and argue that the Christian faith does not see sex, women, or nature as “fundamentally evil,” and that there is little to no biblical or theological warrant for such opinions when they do appear. It can indeed be posited that theological discourses that ascribe negative characteristics to women are a reaction against the potentiality for revolutionary change inherent in the equality of all humans inscribed in the idea that we are all created in the image of God. To this is added the goodness of creation generally presupposed in Scripture, and the human corporeality inherent to the Christian doctrine of the incarnation and the hope of the resurrection of all flesh. These fundamental beliefs about the goodness of bodies and materiality, without which the whole of Christian theology and practice falls apart, delegitimize any Christian theology or practice that is hostile to the body and indeed to sexuality. This is one reason that Docetism (the belief that Christ only appeared to have a human body), Apollinarianism (the belief that Christ was not fully human in body, mind, and soul), and the Manichaeism mentioned by Lugones are considered heretical in Christian theology, that is, not accurate enough of an account of the way of Jesus and its implications to be trustworthy. Matallana-Peláez also represents Christians as promoting a “concept of the body as a detached, sealed, perishable, and sinful entity” (Matallana-­ Peláez, 2020, 384). Perhaps there is some textual evidence to this effect in some Christian texts or at least one can certainly find theological texts that could be interpreted along these lines, but again, this is not an accurate depiction of Christian theological anthropology. A main emphasis of the Christian faith is precisely that the body is to be deeply cherished, as seen in the doctrine of the incarnation and in the hope of a bodily resurrection, in which the characteristics of the person continue to be recognizable, as were the wounds on the hands and feet of the resurrected Christ. Strict body/mind dualism is not compatible with Christian eschatology. The New Testament is much more concerned with avarice and selfishness than it is with sexuality. For writers such as Paul, as for later Christian theology, the life of the mind and the life of the body, the life of the individual and of the community, cannot be separated, because we are beings that are

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indeed “porous and permeable” (a trait of pre-Hispanic cultures in Abya Yala, according to Matallana-Peláez, that she contrasts with what she sees as a Christian approach to anthropology). Admittedly, my use of theological categories such as “incarnation” and “resurrection” may sound all too abstract; it is more to the point to see in what ways the materiality of theology is lived out in practice, and whether it can be liberating on the ground. That is why I’d like to turn to how a liberating, decolonizing theology in the way of Jesus can look like in the lives of women on the margin of the margins in Abya Yala, to test out whether indeed such a theology can even exist in practice.

Women Doing Theology from the Margin of the Margins As Maricel Mena has pointed out, from the perspective of Black feminisms in Latin America, the critique of coloniality is nothing new, since it is rooted in the resistance of African ancestors to their enslavement. As of the 1960s, Black critique of Eurocentric hegemony simply became more systematized. Black feminist thought in Latin American theology is particularly invested in deconstructing what Mena calls an “ethnocentric Western anthropology,” in which whites are treated as the norm for society and for knowledge. In contrast, it values a Christian, Afro-American, gospel-­ centered political spirituality that is holistic and liberating. Such a spirituality is in dialogue with ancestral traditions and is invested in the transformation of unjust realities (Mena, 2015, 1204–1205). Ethnographic studies in Brazil of small churches led by women bear out Mena’s insights. They show that female Christian spiritual and religious leaders (many of them Afro-descendant) seek out practices of faith that connect meaningfully to quotidian challenges. Such women are weaving together religious traditions in ways that are non-exclusive and that help them in their daily life. For them, religion connects to all their worlds: their bodies, their homes, their families, and their work, with no dividing lines (Roese, 2015, 1550). Anete Roese points out that, given the complicities of hegemonic versions of Christianity (Christendom) with the colonial process, it is not self-evident what “religion” (including the Christian faith) is for women. It is necessary to ask how women “make” religion, meaning how they live it out as subjects in their various contexts. From a decolonial feminist

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perspective she therefore enquires about subjects who “circulate, break and articulate” alternative religious practices. Following Ivone Gebara’s tenet that for Christian women, the church is simultaneously a space of oppression and of salvation, Roese traces how women “simulate, subvert and create new forms of disobedience to oppressive dogmas and structures” (Roese, 2015, 1541–1545). Her work—as that of other feminist anthropologists—helps us contextualize the question of the material outcomes of a given faith in a particular time and place. Most generalizations about religion or theology (as good or bad) do not sufficiently consider the specific, quotidian, creative use made of religion by women, particularly those on the margin of the margins. As these ethnographic studies in Brazil show, women are readapting and reappropriating the Christian faith in new ways: said otherwise, they are doing theology. I would in fact argue that their activity is a concrete way of carrying out the epistemological decolonizing of theology (cf. Dussel, 2019, 32). Their services are more horizontal and participatory and therefore less hierarchical than most traditional ones. Black and mixed-raced female pastors incorporate dance and other forms of bodily movement into the services, drawing in part from their African roots. This pushes back against the prejudices toward African influences often seen in Brazilian Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal churches. These female pastors encourage the use of drums, singing and dancing in circles in ways that reflect a horizontal distribution of power and the word in the community, across generations, including children (Roese, 2015, 1553). Women in this kind of religious leadership do receive some pay for their work, but they often also have other streams of income. Their small congregations do not have many resources and—unlike what can be observed in many patriarchal religious organizations—tithes and offerings are not seen as a “business” (Roese, 2015, 1550). In the theological work and practices of these women, then, Roese identifies what she calls silent religious and civil disobedience against the colonial order. It is not an organized movement, but it has political implications because it signifies a rupture with the status quo and introduces another way of doing things—another “order” (Roese, 2015, 1552). Paying attention to how theology and spirituality look in their materiality is a key component of what I’ve learned through the years in trying to do theology in the genealogy of liberation and decoloniality. I’ve had many conversations with female pastors in Latin America and the Caribbean, or in Latinx circles in the United States, who are ordained and

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serving in the “historical” Protestant denominations. Many of them are exhausted, because they are expected to inhabit androcentric structures that are often unfriendly to them. My Roman Catholic female theologian friends in Latin America are sometimes astonished that these Protestant-­ ordained women are not happier with their status as clergy. But their experiences illustrate the fact that what is needed is another way to do church and do leadership, not a set of female bodies inhabiting unchanged hierarchies. For these and other reasons, women (including pastoral leaders) are dropping out of traditional churches and taking spiritual and religious matters into their own hands in very proactive ways that do not reproduce the kinds of patriarchal and heterosexist structures presupposed in many decolonial critiques of the Christian faith. Roese speaks of “religious infidelity” in these contexts, namely the option of not belonging to one tradition or of practicing one stream of spirituality only. Women (in Brazil as elsewhere) are protagonists of this process and are taking responsibility for their own spiritual trajectory (Roese, 2015, 1551). This creative and generative spiritual and theological work is true also of women who stay within traditional denominational structures and who are likewise perfectly aware that Christian churches can be liberating, oppressive, or both. Take the example of C. Alejandra Elenes, a feminist scholar who describes how she has approached the Virgin of Guadalupe. At first she studied about Guadalupe because she wanted to show that the Virgen Morena was a myth created to Christianize Amerindians in Mexico. Later, she came to see Guadalupe differently, by interpreting her in conjunction with Nahua deities and contemporary Chicana cultural productions, so that she was able to view Tonantzin/Guadalupe as a figure representing female power, who gives hope to the poor not just for a future in heaven, but for social justice in this life. This rereading of Guadalupe, integrating feminism and indigenous traditions, in turn allowed her to embrace her mixed spirituality, and even to participate in Catholic services and raise her son in the Catholic church. She describes her participation in church as one more contradiction in her life, the fruit of living between different borders, seeking a spirituality that connects body, mind, and spirit, realizing that (Christian) spirituality has a central place in the way many people construct their subjectivity (Elenes, 2014, 57). Women activists pushing back against feminicidal violence—many of them mothers of women who have been murdered and made to disappear—have also made creative and effective use of Christian symbols such

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as the cross. In the desert outside Juárez, throughout the city, and on the bridge that crosses into the United States, they have painted or installed pink crosses with the names of murdered women to remind the authorities and society generally that the lives lost are sacred and should not be forgotten. Right in front of the government building in Ciudad Chihuahua, in the Plaza Hidalgo, they have erected a large cross with many nails and a mirror aimed toward the front door. The authorities find it so disturbing to see their faces reflected in the cross that they have taken to leaving by the back door (García del García-Del Moral, 2016, 1027). These women have taken the theological principle of theologia crucis, according to which the reality of the injustice of the world is reflected in the cross, and used it to speak truth to power. Nothing could be further from an interpretation of the cross that serves to justify suffering and passivity. All of these women, living and working as they do on the “margin of the margins,” are decolonizing theology: using theological symbols to make meaning, reimagining the practices of the faith, rediscovering the life abundant in the way of Jesus, dancing and singing their way into knowledge, resisting evil and violence in the quotidian, they are crafting a theology that can withstand the logic of feminicide. They show us how to retrieve what is good in Christian spirituality along the path of “the wind and the waves,” like the girl in Darío’s poem. They point to a kind of theology that is intercultural, liberating, and decolonial because it is grounded and embodied even as it is hopeful for change and transformation.

What Can We Know? What Have We Learned? Sometimes I read the work of thinkers, theorists, philosophers, and theologians and am amazed at the ease with which they seem to lay down the law, establish parameters, and make sweeping statements about the reality of the world: about truth, about justice, about God. There is rhetorical strength in that, certainly; we see it in the category of the poor, for instance, as it functioned in early LALT, or in discourses about “coloniality” and “decoloniality” more recently. And yet, we’ve learned that such broad categories can be too blunt an instrument, that they often hide as much as they reveal. On the other hand, paying attention to realities at the “margin of the margins” helps remind us that we need to proceed with humility, asking open-ended questions, and try to discern what has been obscured or hidden by our own attempts to see keenly and speak truth. Juan Luis Segundo famously taught us that there is no theology of

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liberation without the liberation of theology (Segundo, 1975). Likewise, there is no decolonial theology without the decolonizing of theology, and there is no decolonial liberation without the liberation of decoloniality. For any of these processes to be possible, we require openness to movement, change and transformation, dynamics theology links to the “waves and the wind” of the Spirit. Along those lines, one of the dimensions that I think may be lacking in our recent liberationist and decolonial conversations is that of conversion: how to repent and change directions, how to be changed by the Spirit of life. I’m not referring to conversion into a certain religiosity or ecclesiastical institutionality, but conversion as transformation and as a process of continual healing. Instead of this openness to transformation, I often observe a strangely essentialist stance in some decolonial approaches to our European heritage (which in practice is inevitably part of us), or to Christianity (falsely) understood as (determined only by) that legacy, as if culture or spirituality were incapable of shifting and changing. Yet hybrid creatures that most of us are as Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx peoples, we bear the marks in our own bodies, and in our own epistemologies, of the fact that such is not the case. We are constantly shifting, mutating, changing, learning, and adapting, as creatures who are hungry and thirsty for meaning, for beauty, for justice, for the good—theologically speaking, for God. The Christian faith—the way of Jesus—is not a “Western” or “European” religion in its origins or in its basic tenets. Christendom is not the same thing as the way of Jesus. As such, it is a blessing for the Christian faith that we are in a “post-Christendom” era, and even in a “post-­ Christian” era. It opens space for the reclamation of a messianic Christianity (Dussel, 2019, 42): for reinvention, liberation, and decolonization of the way we interpret and live out the path that Jesus walked and indeed was and is. The Christian faith has never prospered or been life-giving when tied to structures of domination and power, even under the guise of doing good and keeping order. As early LALT realized, “salvation” is always connected to “liberation” in history. It is a liberation that necessarily must be decolonial because it works to free us from loyalty to false gods (power over others, money) and from the compulsion to resolving our problems through violence. It always is manifested in materiality, but it cannot be simply a political or economic or religious platform, or a set of approved discourses about reality. Hand in hand with a steady commitment to justice, the transformation

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of unjust structures, and habits of resistance to violence in all spheres, must go with awe, humility, and gratitude. As a theologian and person committed to the way of Jesus, I believe that all truth belongs to God, yet God (or Truth in any absolute sense) is—by definition—beyond our grasping and defining, as are we: creatures beloved of God and made in God’s image. In the end, I realize that I therefore cannot precisely delineate the margin of the margins. What I can do is a theology that deeply considers narratives and practices—especially as lived out by women on the margins—that seem to shed light on our open-ended questions about justice and how to overcome violence. Pondering their contributions reminds me that a contemplative stance, a spirituality of wonder, an openness to transformation, must be a central part of any theology that aspires to be liberating and decolonizing: verso, perla, pluma y flor.

References Barreto, R., & Sirvent, R. (2019). Introduction. In R. Barreto & R. Sirvent (Eds.), Decolonial Christianities. Latinx and Latin American Perspectives (pp. 1–21). Palgrave Macmillan. Bejarano Celaya, M. (2014). El feminicidio es sólo la punta del iceberg. Región y Sociedad, 4, 13–44. Darío, R. (2003). A Margarita Debayle. In El viaje a Nicaragua e intermezzo tropical. Corregidor. De Souza Santos, B. (2018). The end of the cognitive empire. The coming of age of epistemologies of the South. Duke University Press. Dussel, E. (2019). Epistemological Decolonization of Theology. In R. Barreto & R.  Sirvent (Eds.), Decolonial Christianities. Latinx and Latin American perspectives (pp. 25–42). Palgrave Macmillan. Elenes, C. A. (2014). Spiritual roots of Chicana feminist borderland pedagogies: A spiritual journey with Tonantzin/Guadalupe. In E. Facio & I. Lara (Eds.), Fleshing the spirit. Spirituality and activism in Chicana, Latina, and indigenous Christian lives (pp. 43–58). The University of Arizona Press. García-Del Moral, P. (2016). Transforming feminicidio: Framing, institutionalization and social change. Current Sociology, 64, 1017–1035. Lugones, M. (2008). The coloniality of gender. World and Knowledges Otherwise, 2, 1–18. Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 743–759. Matallana-Peláez, S. (2020). From gender to Omeotlization: Toward a decolonial ontology. Hypatia, 35, 373–392. Mena, M. (2015). Género y estudios de la religion. Horizonte, 13(39), 1199–1205.

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Roese, A. (2015). Religião e feminismo descolonial: os protagonismos e os novos agenciamentos religiosos das mulheres no século XXI. Horizonte, 13(19), 1534–1558. Sagot Rodríguez, M. (2017). ¿Un mundo sin feminicidios? Las propuestas del feminismo para erradicar la violencia contra las mujeres. In M. S. Rodríguez (Ed.), Feminismos, pensamiento crítico y propuestas alternativas en América Latina (pp. 61–78). CLACSO. Segundo, J. L. (1975). Liberación de la teología. Ediciones Carlos Lohlé.

Looking Back and Looking Forward from the Underside of History Nelson Maldonado-Torres On December 6, 2021, the Frantz Fanon Foundation commemorated the sixtieth year of the passing of the Afro-Caribbean revolutionary author and militant, Frantz Fanon, with a call to consider the significance of what the Foundation refers to as combative decoloniality (Fanon Mendès France & Maldonado-Torres, 2021). The event was also a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the publication of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (2004), one of the most widely read and influential texts emerging from the second large wave of decolonization struggles in the last two centuries. To Enrique D. Dussel

The Fanon Foundation’s call for a combative decoloniality provides an important point of departure to engage in the activity of looking back and

N. Maldonado-Torres (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4_15

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looking forward from the underside of history for various important reasons. Calling for a combative decoloniality today aims to affirm the combative dimension of decoloniality that was present in Fanon’s work and in the work of the militant intellectuals, artists, collectives, communities in struggle, and organizers across the Third World/Global South, many of whom served as inspiration for the conceptualization of central ideas in Liberation Theology, such as the priority of orthopraxis over orthodoxy, and the preferential option for the poor. These crucial concepts at the heart of Latin American Liberation Theology relate to ethico-political imperatives that are central to decolonial thinking and they put both projects at odds with the hegemonic approach to knowledge production in the established liberal arts and sciences. The call for a combative form of decoloniality critically engages the commodification of decolonial thought and Liberation Theology within the scientific and theological academies, where the meaning of both has arguably morphed. In the space of the academy and the seminar, ethico-­ political imperatives such as the preferential option for the poor tend to collapse into the preferential option for engaging texts that address the question of the poor, or texts that produce theory about poverty, marginalization, or coloniality. The presence of projects like Liberation Theology and, more recently, decoloniality, in the academy and religious seminars, is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, more attention is given to important themes that were often sidelined or ignored, while, on the other, the hegemonic liberal ethos of scholarly engagement and the “white academic field” seek capture and recode the living and combative dimension of the texts and sources in question, leading to the formation of presumed experts on Liberation Theology or decoloniality who lack organic connections with those who inhabit the underside of history and who are working to build an-other world (Maldonado-Torres, 2020c, 2021a). In that sense, the Fanon Foundation’s call for a combative decoloniality is as relevant to decolonial thought as to Liberation Theology today. Liberation Theology and what is known today as decolonial thinking arguably have some important similar roots. They are both connected to the massive questioning of Eurocentrism that has emerged and spread through the Global South in the last two centuries. They also reflect the impact of the creativity and agency of those who are most exploited and marginalized in the Global South in the generation of their own present and future. These activities, critique/creativity/agency, as well as its various combinations (e.g., agency/creativity/critique), are constitutive of

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combative decolonial activity, and they are well represented in Fanon’s work. Fanon was, at once, one of the principal masters of suspicion and one of the most radical and consistent combative thinkers of the last two centuries, which explains why his work is a common reference to Liberation Theology and decolonial thought. Fanon’s work was arguably as important to define the meaning of liberation in the late 60s and early 1970s, as it has been crucial to define the meaning of postcoloniality in the last three decades and decoloniality in the last two. Fanon’s thought was also present in the two earliest forms of Liberation Theology: Latin American and U.S.  Black Liberation Theologies. Fanon’s work can thus prove instrumental in understanding similarities as well as differences between these various projects, and potentially to address and overcome gaps between them. The various points of comparative analysis not only include the meaning of liberation and its relationship with concepts such as postcoloniality, decoloniality, and abolition today, but also the meaning of “the poor” as opposed to the Indigenous, the Black, the colonized, the underside, and/or, as Fanon would put it, the damned. This afterword cannot possibly address all these questions, but it can at least seek to provide a useful reference in these efforts while underlining the relevance of combativity, as defined from a Fanonian point of view, in any Liberation Theology or decolonial project yesterday, today, and in the future. This afterword takes two steps in this direction: an initial reflection on Latin American Liberation Theology from a decolonial point of view, and an elaboration of several lessons from Fanon’s work that relate to the meaning of coloniality, decoloniality, and the overcoming of the religion/ secular divide (see also Maldonado-Torres, 2008b, 2009, 2014a, b, 2017a). In doing so, this afterword points to missed as well as to new opportunities in Liberation Theology’s engagement with Fanon’s work while offering a view of Fanon’s work that is partly inspired by Liberation Theology’s challenge of the regime of modern secularism.

Latin American Liberation Theology from a Decolonial Point of View Looked at from the perspective of recent decolonial theorizing, Latin American Liberation Theology is a child of the second largest moment of the decolonial turn. The decolonial turn is rooted in three major periods

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when decolonial consciousness spread vastly across borders and generations (Maldonado-Torres, 2011a, b, 2018). The first such moment is marked by the context that led to the emergence of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804)—which was closely preceded by Tupac Katari’s revolt in Bolivia in 1781—and its aftermath through the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. This first major moment of the decolonial turn to some extent includes, but cannot be reduced to the struggles for independence and the formation of independent republics in nineteenth-century Latin America. Latin American struggles for independence were largely driven or co-opted by Latin American creole elites who for the most part continued a pattern of a deep antiblack and anti-indigenous racism as well as patriarchy in the region. The full impact of the Haitian Revolution is best understood when approached in the light of revolts of indigenous and enslaved peoples in Abya Yala from at least 1492, and in relation to the multiple insurgent projects, actions, and initiatives that challenged the basis of the increasingly global modern/colonial model of power through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These include the underground railroad in what became the United States, and the project of Panafricanism, which became prominent in sites like the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. The second major moment of the decolonial turn, where Liberation Theology is mainly rooted, includes the two World Wars and the various movements for independence in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean in the first part of the twentieth century. Unlike the wave of independence struggles in nineteenth-century Latin America, led by creole mestizo elites who were European descendants and who could claim certain degrees of whiteness, the struggles in Asia and Africa mainly involved Blacks, Asians, Arabs, and native peoples from those territories (Maldonado-Torres, 2016a; Mignolo, 2005). The Caribbean territories in search for independence were also majority Black: consider Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guadeloupe, and Martinique to name a few. The Caribbean is the one geopolitical zone that was active in the first and second waves of decolonization, which points to the depth of decolonial consciousness, and explains the existence of a large amount of major decolonial thinkers and artists in the region, including Frantz Fanon. Born in 1925, Fanon is a major figure in this second moment of the decolonial turn. He was born and raised in the Caribbean, where he was exposed to negritude and to anticolonial thinking, but he died while a leader and combatant in North Africa. His work was thus heavily informed

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not only by the longue durée of Caribbean anticolonial resistance and decolonial insurgency, but also by Africa’s. This post-continental and transatlantic confluence of memories and experiences of colonialism, along with Fanon’s blackness, his African diaspora consciousness, and his critique of antiblackness, helps to explain the originality and depth of his thought (Maldonado-Torres, 2006). Fanon had an intriguing trajectory: he fought with the French against the Nazis in the Second World War, and then fought with the Algerians against the French in the Algerian struggle for independence. Fanon’s combative engagements in practice and thinking involved the creation of threads between the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa, which positioned him outside the limited scope of area studies and continental discourses, including the idea of Latin America (Maldonado-­ Torres, 2006; Mignolo, 2005). Latin American Liberation Theology emerged in the late 1960s, when the second moment of the decolonial turn was still ongoing. Latin American Liberation Theology simultaneously challenged two major tenets of Western modernity: first, that, religion, spirituality, and theology were to disappear or, at best, that they would be confined to the realm of individual preference with the advance of modern secularism or the fall of capitalism; second, that the Global South did not have anything of substance to offer with regard to theoretical or scientific considerations. That is, Liberation Theology countered the generalized presuppositions that the formerly known “Third World” was at once too religious and too far from London, Paris, and Frankfurt to be conducive to science, theory, and philosophy. This Eurocentric anti-indigenous and antiblack framework included the idea that history, the only one of value for knowledge production at any rate, happened only in European territories and in settler colonies where genocide, land theft, lynching, and segregation produced ostensibly “white” republics—the United States being the most salient example. Genocide, land theft, lynching, and multiple forms of segregation also took place in what came to be known as Latin America in the nineteenth century. But Latin America was considered too indigenous—think of Mexico, Perú, or Guatemala, for example—too Black—consider Brazil and Colombia—too mixed, and too “Latin” in a context where the promises of Western modernity appeared to be found only north of the Pyrenees. In short, Latin America did not appear to have the conditions for the advancement of neither development nor reason. The cure of the problem, for creole mestizo elites at least, seemed simple: a more selective intellectual Europeanization that focused on the importation of ideas

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from northern European countries, particularly England and France. This re-Europeanization led to positivism becoming the most influential philosophical framework in Latin America in the nineteenth century. Consider that two of the main ideals connected to positivism in the nineteenth century, that is, order and progress, became imprinted in the flag of Brazil, the largest country in South America. When Latin American Liberation Theology emerged in the late 1960s, however, European philosophies of progress, such as positivism, did not have the same hold as they did in the nineteenth century. By then, also, it was not only Spain and Portugal that appeared like territories in decadence. Two world wars and a new wave of struggles for independence in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean made France and England lose much of their shine. The loss of confidence in the European idea of civilization after the two World Wars, coupled with increasing skepticism about the promises of modernization in Latin America—manifested in discourses such as the sociology of dependency—and the impact of a new generation of anticolonial political leaders, intellectuals, and artists in the so-called Third World created a new context for intellectual projects in the region. An intellectual anti-Eurocentric theoretical triumvirate of sorts thus emerged in Latin America with the combination of the sociology of dependency and the Latin American theology and philosophy of liberation, all of which were impacted by the wave of anticolonial revolts in the first half of the twentieth century and are thus part of the second major moment of the decolonial turn.1 The second moment of the decolonial turn continued until at least the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a third period started to emerge in the context of drastic changes in the Cold War, particularly the fall of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of indigenous peoples across the Global South, particularly in Abya Yala, who were critical of the idea of celebrating the 500th anniversary of the so-called discovery of the Americas. Today, we are arguably located within this third moment of the decolonial turn, which does not mean that other moments have ended. Each moment continues as well as it is transformed by the others, leading to a continued growth and deepening of questions, challenges, provocations, and invita­ tions that critically engage coloniality and that participate in the unfinished project of decolonization. 1  At the crux of these three projects, we find the work of Enrique D. Dussel the most prolific and one of the most important philosophers from the Global South, to whom this chapter is dedicated.

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When Liberation Theology emerged, Fanon was already a legendary figure in the Third World. Les damnés de la terre (the damned of the earth, best known as The Wretched of the Earth) was quickly published in multiple languages, including Spanish. The very notion of the “underside of history,” formulated by the philosopher, theologian, and historian Enrique Dussel, arguably owes much to the Fanonian conceptualization of the “damned of the earth.” Dussel referenced Fanon’s work since his early writings in the philosophy of liberation and considered him to be an important precedent to liberation philosophy (Dussel, 1985). Fanon is also cited in the earliest works on Liberation Theology, including Rubem Alves’s doctoral dissertation at the Princeton Theological Seminary, “Towards a Theology of Liberation” (1968; for the published version see Alves, 1969), James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power (1969) and A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), as well as Gustavo Gutiérrez’s Teología de la liberación: perspectivas (1971). That Fanon was cited by major figures in Latin American and Black Liberation Theologies offers an indication of the breadth of his work, but its capacity to help explain and overcome divides between Latin American and Black theologies of liberation is arguably yet to be explored. In the following, I identify a number of lessons from Fanon’s work that contribute to Latin American Liberation Theology’s critique of the myth of modernization and the religion/secular divide, while destabilizing the ground of area studies, including the idea of Latin America which continues to inform the work of Latin American Liberation Theologians. Fanon invites us to engage in a combative form of decoloniality that supersedes not only the limits of Eurocentrism and secularism but also those of the idea of Latin America and its anti-indigenous and antiblack geopolitical and geocultural epistemology and imagination.

Lessons from Frantz Fanon 60 Years After His Passing2 Fanon’s work is a major reference in Black and Africana studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and decolonial thought, among other areas. His work preceded, anticipated, prepared the ground, and continues to serve as guide and inspiration for many contemporary theorists of antiblackness, coloniality, and decoloniality. I refer to Fanon as a decolonial 2

 An earlier version of this section appears in Maldonado-Torres (2022).

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thinker, a designation that he did not use, because he carefully developed the concept of decolonization as a creative process of unthinking and rethinking, as well as undoing and redoing, in the path toward a new idea and practice of being human. He understood this practice as a reconstitution of the open-ended web of human interrelationalities and as the amplification of relations of uninhibited and free giving and receiving that are part of what Fanon refers to as the “world of you” (Fanon, 2008, 206), which is at the core of the idea of decoloniality.3 I turn to Frantz Fanon here in the context of celebrating the 70th anniversary of the publication of his massively influential work Black Skin, White Masks (2008), originally published in 1952, and of the recent commemoration of the 60th year of his passing and the publication of The Wretched of the Earth (2004). One of my main arguments here is that consistent with the best of Liberation Theology and contrary to the view of Fanon as a purely secularist author, Fanon’s work offers valuable lessons in the task of critiquing the coloniality of secularism. Also like the best Liberation Theology, Fanon’s work challenges the liberal commodification of liberation and decoloniality as academic themes. At the same time, the lessons that are identified here provide an opportunity for a deeper engagement between Liberation Theology, on the one hand, and projects such as decolonial thought, ethnic studies, and Africana philosophy, on the other. Fanon’s lessons and these engagements can provide new paths for Liberation Theology: paths that are more distant from the problematic legacies of Latin American area studies and the continental imaginaries that have dominated Latin American intellectual discourses, including Latin American Liberation Theology, as well as from the perspectives and preferences of creole mestizo elites in Latin America and the Latinx United States. Lesson 1: Understanding the Catastrophe of Modernity/Coloniality One important contribution of Fanon’s work to the study of religion, philosophy, and theology concerns the entanglement between modernity and coloniality. Fanon’s theorizing reflects an awareness of the overwhelming colonial dimension and effects of modernity. He was conscious that the globalization of Western modernity and its connection with the rationalization and naturalization of colonialism and racial slavery 3  For a development of this interpretation of Fanon’s views on decolonization and his contributions to decoloniality, see Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007, 2008a) and MaldonadoTorres et al. (2021).

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represented a veritable catastrophe for societies across the world and for humanity as a whole (Maldonado-Torres, 2016b, 2017b, 2019, 2021b). This catastrophe has had profound impacts on even the most basic of human activities, such as linguistic and erotic relationships, as Fanon sought to demonstrate in the initial chapters of his classic Black Skin, White Masks (Maldonado-Torres, 2020a).4 Using contemporary concepts, one might say that for Fanon, modernity/coloniality has always already shaped the subject, the object, and the context of any potential academic investigation. This means that decolonization is not simply a political practice that is separate from academic work, but the very condition of possibility for countering the coloniality of the human sciences. Since hegemonic academic disciplines, including philosophy and religious studies, are grounded on dominant views of modernity, the critique of modernity should serve not only as a preamble to any academic study, but also as an ongoing activity. Fanon’s references to “religion” or spiritual practices in his work cannot be disentangled from his insight about the active role of colonialism and the impact of modern/colonial catastrophe. For example, under modern/colonial catastrophe, the concept of religion can be used at one moment to minimize the standing of one group in one context—for example, “you are merely religious”—while at another moment serving as a form of “whitening”—for example, “I am also religious.”5 Sometimes the two apparently opposite views appear in the same context but are held as true by different parties, or sometimes even by the same party. That is, Fanon never finds “religion” purely out there: he finds “religion” always in context of colonization and global coloniality; always taking unique forms in varied contexts of catastrophe. Lesson 2: Fanon’s Decolonial Turn Against the Coloniality of the Human Sciences One implication of Fanon’s profound awareness of the impact of coloniality and its creation of shifting and multiple layers of meaning is that one cannot take at face value his statements about religion, among many other 4  For a discussion of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as a work of counter-catastrophic thought/science, see Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2016b, 2021b). 5  Lilia Ben Salem notes that a course that Fanon offered in Tunis included the following sentence in the context of discussing racism in the United States: “Religion is often conceived as a way of ‘becoming-white’” (Fanon 2018, 524).

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topics. Perhaps because he was a psychiatrist and a militant, rather than a traditional scholar of philosophy or religion, the theoretical dimension of Fanon’s texts cannot be disentangled from practice. As a result, what Fanon wrote at any given point is often more complex than what it appears at first sight. Approaching Fanon’s texts as traditional works in the liberal arts and sciences is a common mistake, a perhaps inevitable consequence of the incorporation of his writings into the academy, but one that can and should be corrected. What Fanon seeks to do with his writing is connected to his therapeutic and revolutionary work and frequently different from what any specific statement in his written work indicates. Often when reading Fanon, it is as if his writing suggests that more important than what it says is the process of thinking and doing that gave birth to it, as well as the unfinished project of which it was and of which it continues to be part. If so, the best way to engage Fanon’s texts is not by seeking to have the “right” interpretation of them—in fact, his writings often resist these efforts—but by participating in the practice of decolonial thinking/ doing and doing/thinking that was predominant in Fanon’s practical/ theoretical and theoretical/practical work. This is one important dimension of the project of countering the coloniality of the human sciences, including religious studies: decolonizing knowledge is not the same as simply writing about decoloniality or decolonization. Decolonizing philosophy, religious studies, or theology is likewise not only a matter of diversifying theoretical sources or engaging new topics. Reducing the project of epistemic decolonization to a question of diversifying topics and sources leads to a reassertion of the priorities and ethos of the modern/colonial and secular liberal arts and sciences, even in projects that describe themselves as decolonial. This is a dangerous path that privileges the position of the presumed “expert” on decoloniality over the multiple actors, agents, creators, and thinkers engaged in decolonial thinking and practice. Fanon proposes a substantive decolonial turn, one that transcends the limits and that counters the coloniality of the established liberal arts and sciences. His work teaches that decolonizing knowledge involves not only refusing to ignore the role of coloniality in shaping the object of one’s investigation, but also redefining the tasks and priorities of the scholar and

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the intellectual.6 This means that the decolonization of religious studies and other fields cannot take place without a challenge to the model of the scholar, the organization of scholars—for example, departments, centers, institutes, and professional associations—and the training of scholars within the liberal arts and sciences. Lesson 3: Countering the Coloniality of the Religion/ Secularism Divide A third lesson from Fanon’s work concerns the coloniality of the religious/secularism divide and the need to overcome it in decolonization struggles. Fanon fought for decolonization, understood as generative counter-catastrophic activities in the effort to create “the world of you,” a view that is connected to his conception of healing (Maldonado-Torres et al., 2021). One cannot forget that Fanon was a trained psychiatrist and that his preferred method was social therapy, a form of therapy that sought to bring mental health through the process of creating normal—by which it should be understood non-catastrophic—social relations and a social environment. As a paper written by Fanon and his intern Jacques Azoulay while Fanon was the Director of the Blida Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, indicates, Fanon entirely rejected the thesis that there is something inherently problematic with practices or ideas that are often referred to as spiritual or religious. Indeed, even if beyond the scope of this piece, Fanon’s work with Azoulay speaks to Fanon’s multicultural and multireligious view of a decolonized Algeria, and of the ways in which the French empire approached and managed racial hierarchies in France and its colonies. This explains how a Black person from the Caribbean could be appointed as doctor and hospital director, and an Algerian Jewish person could become 6  I thank the Aymara militant-intellectual Esteban Ticona Alejo for his acute observations about this many years ago. Ticona Alejo is the author of various works on Fanon, and the “father of Indianism” in Bolivia is Fausto Reinaga. See, among others, Ticona Alejo (2005, 2011, 2012). I also thank Walter Altino and members of the Atitude Quilombola movement in Brazil, with whom I learnt important aspects of this lesson in theory and practice.

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his first intern in a psychiatric hospital, where the Arab and Berber locals were for the most part patients and nurses.7 For the purpose of this chapter, I underscore that Fanon did not subscribe to the belief that overcoming religion is necessary for decolonization to take place, or to the notion that decolonization would lead to a religionless society. This is reflected in Fanon’s and Azoulay’s warning to psychiatrists and other scientists of epistemic arrogance and epistemic racism that “some conducts, some reactions can appear ‘primitive’ to us, but that is only a value judgment, one that is both questionable and bears on poorly defined characteristics” (Fanon, 2018, 384). They were particularly referring to the idea that “genies” produced madness, a concept that was normal in Algeria as opposed to other contexts where a different perception of the world was held or where social behavior revolved around different premises. In short, Fanon invited the critical study of human reality, including what we often call religion, with attention to the massive effects of modern/colonial catastrophe. From a Fanonian point of view, Marx’s dictum that “For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism” (Marx, 1970, 131) could perhaps be reformulated as follows: “For Africa, the African diaspora, the Global South, and the entire world, the critique of modern/colonial catastrophe remains unfinished, and its critique is the prerequisite of all criticism.” Neither Fanon’s view of criticism nor his conception of a healthy individual or society imply the idea that religion or spirituality must be eradicated. Quite the contrary, Fanon believed that activities that are often called religious, like the “regular celebration of Muslim feasts” and the establishment of “a Moorish café” in the context of his work with male Muslim patients, played an important role in their 7  Citing an interview with Azoulay in 1998, Alice Cherki writes: “Almost fifty years later, Jacques Azoulay reports that as an Algerian Jew he only became aware of Algeria ‘in Blida, while working with Fanon. That’s when I realized that there were Muslims—Muslims and a Muslim culture’” (Cherki 2006, 51). In an interview in 2007 with Numa Murard, Azoulay adds that “[h]e [Fanon] sought first to inform himself about the specific culture of Algerian Arabs” and that he “he was very active, I less so, although he dragged me along to ceremonies for treating hysteria in Kabylian villages, in which women having cathartic fits were chained down for entire nights” (quoted in Fanon 2018, 191). Azoulay also stated that “Fanon’s intellectual approach enabled me to apprehend a content that I would otherwise have considered folkloric, and from the moment of that realization, I understood it wasn’t” (Cherki 2006, 52). Azoulay’s severed disconnection with the Algerian Arab community recalls Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s analysis of “how France forced Arab Jews to adopt the European persona of Jew as citizen and see Arabs and Muslims as others” (see Azoulay 2021a, b).

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healing process.8 The other side of this practice was the rejection of the simple implantation and uncritical adaptation of European therapeutical techniques in Algeria. That is, for Fanon the problem sometimes lies with the “science” or scholarly approach rather than with any specific “religion” or similar object of investigation. The decolonization of knowledge and, along with that, the decolonization of being and power remain at the forefront of Fanon’s knowledge-producing activities. Lesson 4: Fanon’s Unlearning, Relearning, and Post-secular Epistemic Practices Fanon not only learned about Islam and developed insights about the study of religion in the context of his psychiatric hospital and his visits to Algerian towns. He also learned about Islam from Muslim intellectuals and recognized the potential contributions of Islam to the struggle for decoloniality. His words to the Iranian thinker ‘Ali Shari‘ati are illuminating in this context: “I would like to emphasize, more than you do yourself, your remark that Islam harbours, more than any other social powers of ideological alternatives in the third world (or, with your permission, the Near and Middle-East), both an anticolonialist capacity and anti-western character” (2018, 668). In his letter to Shari‘ati, Fanon also highlights the importance of what he considers to be the “mission” of Shari‘ati and other Muslim intellectuals to “make good use of the immense cultural and social resources harboured in Muslim societies and minds, with the aim of emancipation and the founding of another humanity and another civilization” (2018, 668–69). Here Fanon is anticipating his notes about combative decolonial intellectual activity in The Wretched of the Earth, a theme that, as the Frantz Fanon Foundation has recently made clear, is as relevant today as ever.9 8  See Fanon (2018, 371). Azoulay reported that Fanon was “very active” in getting to know “the specific culture of Algerian Arabs” and of Algerian society, and that the organization of the Moorish café “provoked sarcastic criticism from the other doctors” (Fanon 2018, 191). Numa Murard, who interviewed Azoulay in 2007, notes that “Fanon permet aussi de redonner vie aux pratique religieuses, que l’hôpital … a tendance à détruire.” See Murard (2008, 42). 9  See Fanon Mendès France, and Maldonado-Torres (2021) and Fondation Frantz Fanon (2021) with responses to the call by organizations such as the BlackHouse Kollective, the International Imagination of Anti-National Anti-Imperialist Feelings (IIAAF), La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, and the Grupo Latinoamericano de Estudio, Formación y Acción Feminista (GLEFAS).

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Fanon also shared with Shari‘ati his concerns about the risks and limits of “reviving sectarian and religious mindsets,” and of any project that sought to bring populations closer to their past more than to promote the birth of an “ideal future.” While Fanon took a different path from Shari‘ati, Fanon concludes his letter by noting that he is “persuaded that both paths will ultimately join up towards that destination where humanity lives well” (Alienation and Freedom, 669). It is also important to recognize that, while every indication is that Fanon was an atheist, his own work is infused with religious thought and contains a considerable number of religious metaphors. In Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, I reflect on and build upon the relationship between Fanon’s work and those of Christian philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Jaspers, as well as the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (Maldonado-Torres, 2008a). I seek to demonstrate that Fanon conceives of subjectivity as a gift and that he views the damnés as those who cannot give because of what had been taken from them. This means that decoloniality is about the restoration of circles of giving and receiving in contexts of catastrophe, which opens up considerable new questions and considerations, including ethical, political, religious/spiritual, and theological ones.

Lesson 5: Open Paths in Conversation with a Post-secular Fanon Fanon’s conception of subjectivity, damnation, and decolonization challenges the premises of Cartesian rationalism, Enlightened foundationalism, and modern Western political theory—all of which serve as the basis to certain forms of Western secularisms. Consider that Fanon anticipated Liberation Theology’s preferential option for the poor with an account of a preferential option for the damnés of the earth when he posited that decolonization “could be summed up in the well-known words: ‘The last shall be first’” (2004, 2; Maldonado-Torres, 2008a, 159). It is highly relevant here that Fanon chose to stay with the broad metaphor of damnation (les damnés), which is connected with a Christian mythopoetics (Gordon, 2015; Wynter, 1991), instead of privileging the concept of the “poor,” which could open the door to a reductionistic class analysis, or to a failure in understanding the significance of race in the formation of coloniality.

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For Fanon, damnation could not be properly accounted for by class differences or economic exploitation alone. This is partly why he argued that “a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue” (2004, 5). What Fanon meant by damnation could not be disconnected from his analysis of antiblack racism in Black Skin, White Masks (2008). In this sense, there was a missed opportunity when Latin American Liberation Theologians first found Fanon, which points to the possibilities in heeding the call for a Fanonian combative decoloniality today. As also mentioned in the previous lesson, Fanon’s view of the self as a gift and his intersubjective account of healthy individuality and social relations draw from and are compatible with a large variety of sources, including so-called religious or spiritual formations. This consideration calls for more explorations of connections between Fanon’s view of decolonization and non-secular or post-secular accounts of reality, including the African diaspora spiritualities that are found in Fanon’s own island of Martinique and through the Caribbean, some of which probably informed Fanon’s thinking and worldview too. I am aware of the argument that Fanon seemed to make concessions to Catholicism and Islam that he did not extend to African diaspora practices (see Settler, 2012). One could debate the extent to which Fanon’s statements about any specific religions are meant to be a description of such religions per se, or if they are meant as a critical analysis of the entanglement between specific religious practices and certain colonial projects. One could also debate whether Fanon had a specific view about African diaspora religions, or whether his approach to local religious practices in Algeria offers an example of approaching religious practices everywhere that would lead to a different conceptualization of other religions, including settings with African diaspora religious practices. This goes back to the points about how to approach Fanon’s writings that I raised earlier. My suggestion here is that even if negative comments about African diaspora religions proved to be definitive about Fanon’s interpretation of these practices at any given point in time, this does not entail that parts of his thinking were not positively impacted by the Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices on the island of Martinique. I doubt that only Catholicism influenced Fanon’s sensibilities, but even if that were true, this also does not mean that there are not elements in Fanon’s thought that are significantly enriched when approached from African diaspora epistemologies and spiritualities. The thought of an author is often richer than the various

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opinions of the author. An exploration of the various ways in which Fanon’s thought might be and could still be entangled with African diaspora views would require work with practitioners. That is, practitioners of African diaspora spiritualities who have mobilized Fanon’s thought in their struggle against racism and colonization might be the best teachers here. The path is thus open for a continued post-secular process of unlearning and relearning as part of the unfinished project of decolonization, and Fanon remains an important companion.10

References Alves, R. (1968). Towards a theology of liberation: An exploration of the encounter between the languages of humanistic messianism and messianic humanism. Princeton Theological Seminary. Alves, R. (1969). A theology of human hope. Corpus Books. Azoulay, A. A. (2021a, February 10). Algerian Jews Have Not Forgotten France’s Colonial Crimes. Boston Review. https://bostonreview.net/articles/ ariella-­aisha-­azoulay-­benjamin-­stora-­letter/ Azoulay, A. A. (2021b, November 30). Unlearning our settler colonial tongues: On language and belonging. Boston Review. https://bostonreview.net/articles/unlearning-­our-­settler-­colonial-­tongues/ Cherki, A. (2006). Frantz Fanon: A portrait (N.  Benabid, Trans.). Cornell University Press. Cone, J. H. (1969). Black theology and black power. Seabury Press. Cone, J. H. (1970). A black theology of liberation. Orbis Books. Dussel, E. (1985). Philosophy of liberation (A. Martinez & C. Morkovsky, Trans.). Orbis Books. Fanon, F. (2004). The wretched of the earth (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. Fanon, F. (2018). Alienation and freedom (S.  Corcoran, Trans.). Bloomsbury Academic.

10  Learning about this with and from these practitioners will be part of my own efforts in a project that I am leading with Carter Mathes on “Understanding Spirit: Black Religious Practice and the Search for Racial Justice,” hosted by the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies and funded by The Henry Luce Foundation. The three-year project includes the participation of Arts for Art in New York, Nana Sula Spirit in New Orleans, and Corredor Afro as well as the Corporación Piñones se Integra in Puerto Rico. There may be another example here of decolonizing religious studies (as well as philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology) in theory and practice, which could provide material for one or more reflections that continue the discussion in Maldonado-Torres (2020b).

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Fanon Mendès France, M., & Maldonado-Torres, N. (2021, November 30). For a combative decoloniality sixty years after Fanon’s death: an invitation from the Frantz Fanon Foundation. Retrieved March 16, 2022, from https://fondation-­ frantzfanon.com/for-­a -­c ombative-­d ecoloniality-­s ixty-­y ears-­a fter-­f anons-­ death-­an-­invitation-­from-­the-­frantz-­fanon-­foundation/ Fondation Frantz Fanon. (2021, December 6, 2021). For a combative decoloniality sixty years after Fanon’s death [Video]. You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CDvfnrpn69k&t=448s Gordon, L. (2015). What Fanon said: A philosophical introduction to his life and thought. Fordham University Press. Gutiérrez, G. (1971). Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas. Ediciones Sígueme. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2006). Post-continental philosophy: Its definition, contours, and fundamental sources. Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise, 1(3), 1–29. https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/projects/wko-­post-­continental Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 240–270. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2008a). Against war: Views from the underside of modernity. Duke University Press. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2008b). Secularism and religion in the modern/colonial world system: From secular postcoloniality to postsecular transmodernity. In M.  Moraña, E.  Dussel, & C.  Jauregui (Eds.), Coloniality at large: Latin America and the postcolonial debate (pp. 360–384). Duke University Press. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2009). The meaning and function of religion in an imperial world. In P. Bilimoria & A. B. Irvine (Eds.), Postcolonial philosophy of religion (pp. 193–211). Springer. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2011a). El pensamiento filosófico del ‘giro descolonizador’. In E. Dussel, E. Mendieta, & C. Bohórquez (Eds.), El pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano, del Caribe, y “Latino” (1300–2000) (pp. 683–697). Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2011b). Thinking through the decolonial turn: Post-­ continental interventions in theory, philosophy, and critique—An introduction. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(2), 1–15. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2014a). Race, religion, and ethics in the modern/colonial world. Journal of Religious Ethics, 42(4), 691–711. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2014b). Religion, conquest, and race in the foundations of the modern/colonial world. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 82(3), 636–665. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2016a). Colonialism, neocolonial, internal colonialism, the postcolonial, coloniality, and decoloniality. In Y.  Martínez-San Miguel, B.  Sifuentes-Jáuregui, & M.  Belausteguigoitia (Eds.), Critical terms in Caribbean and Latin American thought: Historical and institutional trajectories (pp. 67–78). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Maldonado-Torres, N. (2016b, October). Outline of ten theses on coloniality and decoloniality. Frantz Fanon Foundation. Retrieved March 16, 2022 from http://fondation-­f rantzfanon.com/outline-­o f-­t en-­t heses-­o n-­c oloniality-­ and-­decoloniality/ Maldonado-Torres, N. (2017a). Fanon and decolonial thought. In M. A. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory. Springer Singapore. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2017b). On metaphysical catastrophe, post-continental thought, and the decolonial turn. In T.  Flores & M.  A. Stephens (Eds.), Relational undercurrents: Contemporary art of the Caribbean Archipelago (pp. 247–259). Museum of Latin American Art. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2018). The decolonial turn (R.  Cavooris, Trans.). In J. Poblete (Ed.), New approaches to Latin American studies: Culture and power (pp. 111–127). Routledge. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2019). Afterword: Critique and Decoloniality in the face of crisis, disaster, and catastrophe. In Aftershocks of disaster: Puerto Rico before and after María (pp. 332–342). Haymarket Books. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2020a). What is decolonial critique? Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 41(1), 157–183. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2020b, March 3). Religious studies and/in the decolonial turn. Contending Modernities. Retrieved March 20, 2022 from https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/decoloniality/religiousstudiesdecolonialturn/ Maldonado-Torres, N. (2020c, June 16). Interrogating systemic racism and the white academic field. Frantz Fanon Foundation. Retrieved March 20, 2022 from https://fondation-­frantzfanon.com/interrogating-­systemic-­racism-­ and-­the-­white-­academic-­field/ Maldonado-Torres, N. (2021a). Notes on decolonizing philosophy: Against epistemic extractivism and toward the abolition of the canon. APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy, 21(1), 11–15. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2021b). Prologue: Decolonial psychology as a counter-­ catastrophic science. In G.  Stevens & C.  C. Sonn (Eds.), Decoloniality and epistemic justice in contemporary community psychology (pp. vii–xiv). Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­72220-­3 Maldonado-Torres, N. (2022, January 27). Is decolonial theory secular? Contending Modernities. Retrieved March 20, 2022 from https://contendingmodernities. nd.edu/decoloniality/decolonial-­secular-­fanon/ Maldonado-Torres, N., Fanon Mendès France, M., Suffla, S., Seedat, M., & Ratele, K. (2021). Fanon’s decolonial transcendence of psychoanalysis. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 22(4), 243–255. Marx, K. (1970). Critique of Hegel’s ‘philosophy of right’ (A. Jolin & J. O’Malley, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Mignolo, W. (2005). The idea of Latin America. Blackwell. Murard, N. (2008). Psycothérapie institutionnelle à Blida. Tumultes, 31(2), 31–45.

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Index1

A Abya Yala, 69, 69n1, 70, 73–77, 80, 81, 244, 248, 250, 260, 262 Acculturation, 73, 74 Afro-American groups, 184, 187, 196 Afro-asian groups, 185, 193 Althaus-Reid, Marcella, 2, 55, 85–105, 137, 208, 225, 228, 236 Alves, Rubem, 18, 38, 225, 263 American Blacks, 172 Ancestral, 69, 71, 74–76, 79, 140, 143, 145, 185, 195–197, 250 Ancestralities, 69 Ancestral memory, 70, 78–79 Ancestral people, 70, 91 Ancestral Spiritualities, 69–82 Anthropology, 54, 56–58, 73, 96, 193, 249, 250 anthropocentric, 59, 73, 75 Arguedas, José María, 136, 137

Assmann, Hugo, 4n1, 13, 30, 35, 38, 207, 211–213, 233, 234 B Barth, Karl, 20 Bauman, Zygmunt, 26 Beozzo, José Oscar, 39, 52 Bible, 10, 20, 44, 46, 52n1, 55, 56, 59, 62, 66, 71, 71n4, 72, 78, 120n24, 147, 167, 191–197, 218 biblical hermeneutics, v, 17 Bidaseka, Karina, 227 Bloch, Ernst, 10, 13 Boff, Clodovis, 42–47, 209 Boff, Leonardo, 2, 13–17, 37, 39, 42–47, 206–211 Bonino, José Miguez, 4n1, 28, 38, 217, 225 Butler, Judith, 95, 171

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Panotto, L. Martínez Andrade (eds.), Decolonizing Liberation Theologies, Postcolonialism and Religions, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31131-4

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INDEX

C Capitalism, 2, 6, 25, 26, 29, 31, 33, 41, 93, 99, 111, 126, 155, 157–159, 163n9, 169n17, 170, 171, 173, 173n21, 174, 174n22, 177, 204, 205, 207–209, 212, 213, 218, 220, 231, 261 Cardenal, Ernesto, 137, 139, 206 Cardoso, Nancy, 231 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 15, 37, 40, 227 Christianity, 11, 20, 26–31, 34, 35, 38, 40, 41, 52, 52n1, 54, 56, 59, 62–64, 72, 75, 79–81, 89, 91, 93–95, 97, 98, 103, 113, 118n14, 119n21, 122, 135, 139, 141, 147, 149, 151, 184, 224, 246, 247, 249, 250, 254 Western Christianity, 28, 34 Christology, 14, 17, 44, 45, 47, 48, 55, 119n21 Coelho, Allan, 2, 208 Colonialism, 41, 54, 111, 112, 116, 117n13, 118n14, 146, 149, 172, 177, 187, 195, 220, 221, 261, 264, 265 coloniality, 2, 3, 109–117, 110n3, 125, 126, 126n35, 160, 170, 171, 208, 213, 221–223, 226, 227, 245, 247, 250, 253, 258, 259, 262–270 Community, 3–5, 14, 15, 18, 20, 40, 42, 47, 58, 62, 65, 71, 73, 76, 78, 79, 82, 85, 86, 89, 95, 98–105, 110n2, 126, 127, 136, 139, 147, 156, 159, 161, 165, 184, 185, 196, 197, 206, 236, 247–249, 251, 258 Cone, James, 19, 20, 263 Consumption, 30–34, 203, 218 Croatto, José Severino, 4n1, 13, 95 Cuban Revolution, 39, 158, 169, 209 Culture of death, 77

D Decoloniality, 4, 110, 126, 220, 251, 253, 254, 257–259, 263, 264, 266, 269–271 Decolonial thought, 247, 258, 259, 263, 264 Decolonial Turn, 2, 3, 4n1, 109–128, 259–262, 265–267 Dependency theory, 158, 170, 209 De Sousa Santos, Boaventura, 2, 3, 226, 227, 243 Dictatorships, 16, 53, 87, 96, 169n17, 205 Diversity, 5, 41, 52, 58, 61, 64, 78, 89, 96, 97, 99–101, 103, 104, 154, 183, 220, 227, 228, 232, 236 Dussel, Enrique, 2, 4n1, 54, 120n22, 171, 173, 207–212, 220, 226, 235, 251, 254, 257, 263 E Ecclesial base communities, 15 Ecclesiological praxis, 104 Ecology, 54, 59–61, 123, 210, 226, 227 Eco-theology, 2, 208, 210, 235 Ellacuría, Ignacio, 17, 39, 47 Epistemology, 2, 54, 79, 92, 119n20, 157, 193, 197, 218, 226, 227, 230, 231, 254, 263, 271 Escobar, Arturo, 4n1, 222 Eurocentrism, 171, 185, 192, 221, 258, 263 F Faith, 3, 12–14, 16–18, 35, 38–41, 43–48, 57, 65, 75, 78, 94–96, 100–102, 104, 121n28, 162, 208, 209, 224, 228, 229, 246–254 Fanon, Frantz, 10, 14, 109, 257–261, 263–272 Feminicidal violence, 244, 252

 INDEX 

Feminism, 2, 5, 57, 124–126, 125n34, 126n35, 250, 252 Fetishism theory, 212 Fornari, Emanuela, 222, 227, 229, 230 Fornet-Betancourt, Raul, 76 Freire, Paulo, 10, 14, 18, 96 G Galeano, Eduardo, 70, 72, 218 Galilea, Segundo, 38 Garvey, Marcus, 186 Gebara, Ivone, 2, 5, 56, 148, 208, 213, 225, 251 Global South, 3, 5, 92, 93, 123, 124, 127, 170, 258, 261, 262, 268 God God Liberator, 14 God’s Kingdom, 14, 17, 45, 48, 224, 234 Gospel, 19, 20, 38–42, 48, 53, 74–78, 80, 94, 197, 250 Gramsci, Antonio, 209–211 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 2, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 38, 42–47, 56, 65, 66, 78, 92, 136–138, 173, 206, 207, 228, 229, 232, 263 H Haitian Revolution, 260 Hayek, Friedrich August von, 31–33 Hinkelammert, Franz, 30, 35, 171, 173, 204, 207, 209–213, 228, 231–234 History, 2, 9, 11, 13, 14, 18, 34, 37–40, 42–45, 48, 52, 59–61, 65, 71–73, 75, 78, 79, 85, 86, 90, 91, 95, 105, 109, 110, 110n3, 114, 124, 135, 138, 144, 147, 148, 158, 159, 161, 166, 169–171, 175, 176, 177n25, 183–197, 205, 206, 208, 209, 211, 219, 222, 224–226, 228–234, 254, 257–272 theology of history, 91, 162, 209

279

Hope, 14, 16, 18, 26, 62, 64, 70, 86, 89, 150, 158, 168, 169, 196, 197, 223, 234, 249, 252 I Ideology, 12, 31, 33, 35, 55, 61, 90, 145, 160, 171, 174, 176, 208, 233 Imperialism, 112, 113n6, 115n9, 175, 177 Inculturation, 4, 70, 75–77 Indecent theology, 88–93, 103 Indian, 71–74, 74n6, 77, 78, 80, 113, 116, 117, 118n17, 121n25, 195, 220 indigenous, 69–82 J Jesus, 14, 17, 18, 20, 27, 28, 35, 39, 43–46, 48, 64, 88, 91, 92, 119n21, 138, 139, 148, 196, 197, 247–250, 253–255 Jesus Liberator, 14, 45 John Paul II, Pope, 16, 17, 47, 71, 205 L Latinx theology, 5, 153–177 LGBTIQ+, 99, 102 Liberation theology Black Liberation Theology, 18–20, 208, 259, 263 Islamic Liberation Theology, 109–128 Latin American Liberation Theology (LALT), 4, 4n1, 9–20, 86, 89, 96, 136, 155, 156, 161, 173, 197, 203–213, 217–237, 245, 253, 254, 258–264 Literature, 5, 29, 44, 135–151 Lopez, Eleazar, 75, 78, 208

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INDEX

Lugones, María, 221, 232, 245–247, 249 Lukács, Georg, 156n2, 171 M Maduro, Otto, 86–88, 171, 173 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 78, 139, 209 Mariology, 55, 94, 208 Marx, Karl, 10, 14, 25, 156n2, 169n17, 170, 171, 173, 204, 205, 210–213, 268 Marxism, 10, 12, 31, 119n20, 173, 207–213, 229 Matallana-Peláez, Susana, 248–250 Mayan theology, 79 Mejido, Manuel, 155–162, 174, 177 Memory, 16, 48, 52, 64, 70–73, 76, 79–81, 86, 96, 145, 168, 183–197, 261 Míguez, Néstor, 203, 204, 217 Miranda, José Porfirio, 13, 173 Mises, Ludwig von, 33 Modernity, 2, 3, 12, 31, 75, 110, 112–114, 116n12, 148, 159, 171, 195, 207–209, 211–213, 219–227, 229, 231, 233, 261, 264–265 Moltmann, Jürgen, 12, 18 Montesinos, Antonio de, 37, 39, 40 Mujerista theology, 154 Muslim black movement, 185 N Neoliberalism, 23–35, 204, 205 Neo-Zapatist Movement, 207 O Orishas, 140–143, 146, 148–151 Otherization/othering, 116

P Panafricanism, 260 Panikkar, Raimon, 75–77 Panotto, Nicolás, vi, 2, 5, 208, 224, 225, 231, 236 Pixley, Jorge, 13, 14 Pluralism, 52, 65, 122, 208, 232 Politics political holiness, 48–49 political theology, 5, 12, 43, 209 Poor, 12, 14–16, 20, 23–35, 37, 39, 42, 43, 46–48, 51–53, 55, 57, 61, 79, 80, 93, 97, 118n14, 124, 136, 161, 186, 194, 208, 232, 244, 252, 253, 258, 259, 270 preferential option for, 14, 232, 258, 270 Pope Francis, 2, 28, 48, 52, 60, 174, 206 Postcoloniality, 92, 259 Poverty, 3, 12, 24–28, 30, 31, 38, 43, 48, 53, 170, 258 Q Queer theologies, 2, 88–91, 93, 95, 97–105, 137, 208 Quijano, Aníbal, 171, 172, 221, 226, 245 R Ratzinger, Joseph, 16, 206 Revolution, 17, 45, 55, 120n22, 137, 140, 168, 169, 169n17, 207, 210, 217, 218 Ribas, Mario, 87, 88, 93–95, 98 Richard, Pablo, 13, 71, 209 Rieger, Joerg, 203, 204, 230 Romero, Oscar, 16, 48, 173, 184 Ruiz García, Samuel, 207

 INDEX 

S Safatle, Vladimir, 61, 62 Said, Edward, 220 Salazar Bondy, Augusto, 158 Second Vatican Council, 11, 38, 73, 75, 158 Segundo, Juan Luis, 13, 17, 38, 225, 230, 253, 254 Sexual diversity, 5, 89, 96, 100, 103 Sexuality, 54–55, 87, 89–91, 93–105, 188, 236, 249 Shaull, Richard, 18 Sobrino, Jon, 13, 14, 17, 47–48, 206 Spirituality, 43, 60, 69–82, 88, 92, 97, 103, 119n20, 151, 196, 203, 210, 213, 219, 247, 248, 250–255, 261, 268, 271, 272 Subjectivity, 1, 147, 184, 203, 204, 221, 225, 232–234, 252, 270 Sung, Jung Mo, 203, 204, 208–210, 213, 224, 232–234 T Tamayo, Juan José, 3, 206, 208 Theology, v, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 17–20, 23–35, 38, 39, 42–49, 51–66, 69–82, 85–105, 159, 197, 203–213, 217–237, 243, 244,

281

246–251, 253–255, 258–264, 266, 270 theological aesthetics, 160, 161 Third World, 4, 10, 13, 38, 93, 109, 115n9, 119n20, 158, 258, 261–263, 269 Tonantzin/Guadalupe, 252 Trump, Donald, 34, 164–169, 165n12, 165n13, 172, 175 V Vallejo, César, 138 Vatican II, 11, 12, 37, 49 Vieira, Antonio, 37 Violence, 6, 11, 52, 66, 91, 102, 115n11, 118n17, 141, 149, 156, 192, 206, 222, 231, 244, 245, 247, 248, 252–255 W Western imperialism, 112 World Council of Churches, 33, 60 Z Zapata Olivella, Manuel, 135–151 Zea, Leopoldo, 158 Žižek, Slavoj, 171 Zubiri, Xavier, 47