Liberation theology and Marx

Overview

Recall questions on the origins of liberation theology, Marx on alienation, exploitation and religion, structural sin, its use of Marxist analysis, the preferential option for the poor, orthopraxis, its reading of the Bible, the Vatican's 1984 criticisms, and whether it reduces salvation to politics.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What is liberation theology, and where did it come from?

   Model answer

   It is a way of doing theology that begins from the situation of the poor and treats the removal of oppression as central to what salvation means. It emerged in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s among Catholic theologians and priests working in conditions of extreme inequality, military rule and rural poverty, and was consolidated at conferences of Latin American bishops at Medellin in 1968 and Puebla in 1979. Its characteristic setting is the base community, a small local group meeting to read scripture in the light of their own conditions.

2. 2

   Explain Marx's concept of alienation.

   Model answer

   Marx argues that work should be how human beings express themselves, but under industrial capitalism it becomes the opposite. The worker is cut off from the product, which belongs to someone else the moment it is finished; from the activity of working, which is imposed, monotonous and endured rather than chosen; from what Marx calls their species-being, the creative capacity that makes us human; and from other people, who become competitors. The result is a person who feels at home only when not working, and reduced when working.

3. 3

   Explain Marx's concept of exploitation.

   Model answer

   Marx argues that workers produce more value than they are paid for, and that the difference is retained by the owner of the enterprise. Because the worker owns nothing but their capacity to labour, they must sell it on whatever terms are available, so the arrangement looks like a free exchange while being nothing of the kind. The worker is thereby handled as an instrument for producing profit rather than as an end in themselves, and this happens whether or not the individual employer is a decent person.

4. 4

   Why does Marx say that exploitation is structural rather than a matter of individual wickedness?

   Model answer

   Because on his analysis the pressure comes from the system's own logic. A competitive market forces every producer to cut costs or be driven out, so an employer who pays generously is punished by competitors who do not. The behaviour is therefore produced by the position rather than the person, and this is what gives the analysis its force: changing the people at the top changes nothing, because the next occupants face the same pressures.

5. 5

   What did Marx say about religion, and why is the usual summary of it incomplete?

   Model answer

   He described religion as the opium of the people, meaning that it dulls the pain of a life that is genuinely painful. What is usually left out is the sentence around it: he also called religion the sigh of the oppressed and the heart of a heartless world, so he treats it as a real protest against real suffering, not merely a trick played on the credulous. His objection is that it consoles instead of curing, so abolishing it matters only as part of abolishing the conditions that make it necessary.

6. 6

   What does liberation theology mean by structural or social sin?

   Model answer

   It means injustice built into the arrangements of a society rather than into individual hearts: patterns of landholding, trade, debt, policing and employment that produce poverty and violence reliably, whoever occupies the positions. On this analysis a person may commit no personal sin and still be a participant in an order that starves people, and confessing individual faults while leaving the structure untouched misses what is doing the damage. The concept is what lets theologians treat an economic system as a proper subject for the doctrine of sin.

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