Righting America

by Sudabée Lotfian-Mena

Sudabée Lotfian-Mena will begin her fourth year as a doctoral Theology student at the University of Dayton in Fall 2026, where she is working on theology arising in the wake of economic realities and the project of colonization in the Age of Discovery.  She is also ABD at the University of Valladolid in philosophy of aesthetics.  She has lately co-authored a book on philosophy of religion, to be published later this year, as well as recently co-authored a chapter on Latin American Marian devotions.  She is dedicated to teaching theology, her latest courses being Faith and Justice in the context of Catholic Social Teaching and East Asian Religions.

“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” — Matthew 7: 20 (KJV)

Liberation Theology and Christian Nationalism are usually situated on opposite ends of the political spectrum, one on the Left, the other on the Right. This shorthand obscures more than it reveals.  Though it is true that both currents are political, and that both trade in public expressions of Christianity, “Left vs.  Right” categorization/labelling ignores the more fitting scenario of “Kingdom vs. Nation.”

Liberation Theology is theocentric, oriented toward God, born from the reading and interpretation of Scripture by the poor and their pastors. Christian Nationalism, however sincerely felt by many of its adherents, is better described as an anthropocentric ideology that borrows Christian symbolism to sacralize a nation-state. Liberation looks up toward God, seeking the source of the love and justice necessary to heal and mend society; Christian Nationalism, following Feuerbach, projects an idealized idea of nation upward and calls this projection God.

Authentic Liberation Theology

Anglophone accounts of Liberation Theology often begin the story with Gustavo Gutiérrez’s 1971 treatise, A Theology of Liberation. Perhaps in a bid for academic legitimization, these accounts often provide Gutiérrez with European predecessors, most often Jürgen Moltmann and Johann Baptist Metz. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, for example, writes that Latin American theologians “have acknowledged their indebtedness to the European development of political theology,” even as he concedes that “the Latin American situation cannot be characterized by secularization and privatization but rather by dependency and exploitation.”  

But Liberation resists this global-North treatment because it is, by its very Latin American nature, different. It is, therefore, better understood as the cry of a people first colonized and then neocolonialized into oppression (by that same global-North).  It is what Leonardo and Clodovis Boff call “a cultural and ecclesial phenomenon by no means restricted to a few professional theologians.”  Gutiérrez, for his part, describes his landmark text as “an attempt at reflection, based on the Gospel and the experiences of men and women committed to the process of liberation in the oppressed and exploited land of Latin America.”

Accordingly, the Boff brothers introduce Liberation Theology with a scene very descriptive of one of the theological loci of Liberation: 

A woman of forty, but who looked as old as seventy, went up to the priest after Mass and said sorrowfully: “Father, I went to communion without going to confession first.” “How come, my daughter?” asked the priest. “Father,” she replied, “I arrived rather late, after you had begun the offertory. For three days I have had only water and nothing to eat; I’m dying of hunger. When I saw you handing out the hosts, those little pieces of white bread, I went to communion just out of hunger for that little bit of bread.” The priest’s eyes filled with tears. He recalled the words of Jesus:  “For My flesh [bread]  is real food indeed . . . whoever feeds on me will draw life from me” (Jn 6: 55, 57).  

The plight of this woman is a “starting point” for Liberation Theology.  She does not replace God; instead her hunger forces the theologian to ask “more basic questions about the nature of actual oppression and its causes.” 

Is Liberation Theology Communism?

Almost inevitably, the accusatory question of Marxism dressed up as Catholicism is leveled at Liberation Theology. And so, it becomes necessary to reassure those less familiar with Liberation Theology that it is neither synonymous with Communism nor a product of Marxism. Is it socialist? One could describe it as such, but on those terms the first Christian community was socialist too: “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common… Neither was there any among them that lacked” (Acts 4: 32, 34, KJV).

Gutiérrez is candid about why socialism was acceptable for the Latin America of the 1960s and 1970s: the “untenable circumstances of poverty, alienation and exploitation” in which most people lived, and the fact that socialism was widely seen as “the most fruitful and far-reaching approach” available after centuries of mercantilist extraction and dehumanizing capitalism. But Liberation Theologians have always been explicit that they treat “Marxism purely as an instrument.” The Boffs borrow terms like “dialectical” and “historico-structural” from Marx, yet Marxism itself is transformed in relation to the poor. As they put it, “It does not venerate it as it venerates the gospel.”  Because Liberation remains oriented toward God, there is no mechanism within it for idolatry.  Neither Marxism nor even the poor themselves can be made into gods.

The Base Ecclesial Communities and the CIA

That theocentric orientation has not reassured the powers that be. In a declassified 1986 study titled, “Liberation Theology: Religion, Reform and Revolution,” the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that Liberation Theology “can pose a serious threat to US interests when its critique of capitalism and US development policy finds a receptive audience.” The “base ecclesial communities” (comunidades eclesiales de base) are singled out as the place where that audience is found.

However, base ecclesial communities are not revolutionary cells. They are parishioners who gather outside of Mass to read Scripture together, finding both similarity in it with the oppression they suffer, and the permission to long for liberation in their own lives. In that light the Exodus is a story about being led out from under the bootheels of the pharaohs of the present age. And parishioners can find sense in Amos thundering: ”Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream (Amos 5: 24, KJV).  For Marcello de C. Azevedo these communities are “a new way of experiencing the Church, of being Church and of acting as a Church.” Pilar María Aquino adds that women, “doubly oppressed and marginalized,” become “active subjects” of the Church for the first time in these spaces.

The CIA report misreads these communities, defining them as “parallel institutions to the government” set up “to create local civic responsibility and to provide services.” That an intelligence agency could look at Acts 4 and see some sort of parallel bureaucracy is telling. What Langley cannot recognize, the base community sees clearly: government cannot and will not bring salvation, and dependency on the state, dressed up as “development” or “progress,” is a counterfeit of the dependency we owe to God alone. In a moment of cynicism, the same report allows that Liberation might “promote US interests by assisting popular efforts to bring democratic rule to authoritarian states”—a line one must be forgiven for reading as the enduring temptation of empire to subvert communities like these into instruments of Washington’s preferred regimes. However, liberation has proven mostly resistant to this treatment.  What keeps it focused on the poor is what also keeps Marxists from co-opting it and capitalists from purchasing it: “Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ” (Mt 23: 10, KJV).

Inauthentic Christian Nationalism

The starting point for Christian Nationalism is very different.  Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry define it as “an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christian identity and culture.” What they mean by “Christian” does not primarily involve faith or religious expression. As they note, “Christian nationalists can be quite secular.” The term instead refers to beliefs about “historical identity, cultural preeminence, and political influence.”  Paul A. Djupe and his co-authors add that the nation is imagined as “of, by and for Christians,” and Michael W. Austin notes that the culture in question is specifically Anglo-Protestant, its adherents fusing their American and Christian identities and pursuing political power to exert control over the country.

I would qualify the latter, observing that Catholicism in the United States has been very influenced by Protestantism. This might explain the allure Christian Nationalism has for many Catholics as well.  Nevertheless, this is why Chrisitan Nationalism is better described as an ideology rather than a theology. Its focus is the nation. God, when He appears, appears as a warrant, a genie in a bottle.

Kingdom versus Nation, Biblically

The biblical term “nation” deserves a closer look.  In Genesis 12: 2 Israel is promised to Abraham as a great nation, and “the nations” in later texts denote other peoples, most of them idolatrous (Dt 7: 1–6; Ps 2: 1–12). The New Testament interprets these texts in the light of Christ. Jesus tells the chief priests that “the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof” (Mt 21: 43, KJV); at the end of Matthew He commands us to make disciples of “all nations”—peoples, not modern geopolitical states. Revelation completes the redemption of the term: “for Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation” (Rev 5: 9, KJV).

If Christian Nationalism were truly Christian, it would not treat the nation as an objectifiable state. Biblically, the nation is a people, and we come under judgment when we fail to build the Kingdom. Catholic Social Teaching, from Lumen Gentium onward, insists that Christian kingship is service: serving Christ in their fellow men they might by humility and patience lead their brethren to that King for whom to serve is to reign (36). 

The deep theological problem with Christian Nationalism is that it inverts this order. It is itself a manifestation of chaos: it decentralizes God and His Word, dispenses with the doctrine of His Son, and quietly ignores the gifts of His Spirit. Ignacio Ellacuría’s distinction applies precisely: structures of sin objectify the power of sin and turn it against the life of men, while structures of grace objectify grace and convey life. Christian Nationalism, however piously advertised, functions as a structure of sin in its service of empire. Liberation Theology, however imperfectly, labors against empire to build structures of grace.

The Cintas Largas and the Fruit of the Nation

If this sounds abstract, an episode from 1963 might help to make it concrete. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett open Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon with a story about a man named Ataide Pereira confessing to Fr. Edgar Smith that he had taken part in a genocide. The victims were the Cintas Largas, a small indigenous tribe that lived along the Aripuana River. Because Brazil’s Service for the Protection of the Indian (SPI) legally protected them, foreign companies who wanted their land resorted to subterfuge.  Approximately four hundred Cintas Largas were attacked by Pereira and others under the command of a man known as “Champion Indian Killer,” who was also the general manager of a local rubber company. The aggressors used both bullets and machetes to kill the unarmed tribe members until only a little boy and a little girl were left. Pereira described their deaths to the priest in lamentable detail.

The subsequent investigation implicated 134 SPI officials, none of whom ever stood trial, and revealed that the agency had been corrupted by “starvation of government resources and ‘the disastrous impact of missionary activity.’” The mission in question was the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), known in the United States as Wycliffe Bible Translators. SIL denied the genocide; a year later The Sunday Times of London reported that mining was under way on Cintas Largas land, with American and European companies flying planeloads of rare metals out. Colby and Dennett describe the arrangement bluntly: “The missionaries came in on the cultural, social and political side of the conquest,” as part of “a counterinsurgency network shaped by Nelson Rockefeller’s development goals,” teaching the Indigenous through Bible translation that they must obey the government because “all authority comes from God.” 

In light of what happened to the Cintas Largas and countless other tribes, a letter from Baptist minister Frederick Gates to John D. Rockefeller Sr. celebrating the “peaceful conquest of the world” that Christian missions would enable can only be described as lamentable. But it better serves as an invitation to contemplation. Marveling at the word “peaceful,” one recalls that Saint Paul tells us the law is written on the hearts even of those who do not know God, their conscience also bearing witness (Rm 2:15).  

What erases that law? Part of the answer is the idol of nation. But nations are made of people—some of them numbed by the red-and-blue squabble that passes for spiritual discernment, others so divorced from the human condition that they simply personify the will to power. The genocide of the Cintas Largas and countless other Amazonian peoples is the fruit Christian Nationalism yields when the empire it sacralizes turns outward.  

Liberation Theology answers with granular fruit: base communities, Scripture read from the margins, women becoming subjects in their own churches, structures of grace built one parish at a time. It is an unsatisfactory solution for most because it does not bring the swift justice and accountability of the Hollywood happy ending. Instead, it is the justice of the Bible, slow, steady, individual but collective; a justice that involves trust in God and solidarity with one’s neighbor. It is an ancient prescription for an ancient ill.

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them

Again, the core difference between Liberation Theology and Christian Nationalism is not Left versus Right, but theological. Liberation is oriented toward God and intent on building His Kingdom, manifesting as base ecclesial communities that peacefully dismantle structures of sin. Christian Nationalism is anthropocentric and oriented toward the nation, mistaking its agenda for the Will of God. However dominant its Anglo-Protestant inheritance, that is only the sheep’s clothing. Inwardly, as Matthew 7: 15 warns, it remains a ravening wolf.

The disciple Liberation forms reads Scripture from the margins and sees the crucified Christ in oppressed brothers and sisters. The Church that emerges is a true “church of the poor,” a true nation in the biblical sense, drawn from every tongue and people by the Blood of Christ. The disciple Christian Nationalism forms reads Scripture through mythopoetic jingoism that dispenses with the Sermon on the Mount in favor of the most violent Old Testament episodes, as though the New Covenant had not been sealed in the Blood of Christ. Its churches serve the nation, and the regalia of empire furtively displace the Cross.

Setting the CIA report beside Colby and Dennett’s account of the Cintas Largas, the conventional worry about Liberation being Marxist becomes hard to sustain. It is not Liberation Theology that has proved a threat to human life in the Americas; it is the Christian Nationalist project of empire that has done so.  Liberation evangelizes from within the communities that survived 1492 and the ravages it brought in its wake; Christian Nationalism arrives from without, in disguise, intent on the same sort of “peaceful conquest.” Only one of these currents remain standing. Liberation has the force of God behind it as the blessed poor come together to build His Kingdom.  Nationalism, Christian or otherwise, like every empire it has ever animated, will fall by the Will of God—whether now or in a thousand years.