Liberation Theology’s Curious Contradiction
Will It Liberate? Questions About Liberation Theology, by Michael Novak (Paulist Press, 307 pp.; $14.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Clark H. Pinnock, professor of systematic theology, McMaster Divinity College.
In his latest book, Michael Novak, a Catholic neoconservative scholar of magnificent erudition, asks whether the Christian rhetoric of liberation actually liberates the poor. He concludes that it usually does not. Evangelicals planning to climb aboard the liberation theology bandwagon had better face up to the evidence Novak mounts—because if they do not listen, they may repeat all the egregious mistakes the Left has been making for years.
Novak has addressed the question “Will it liberate?” before. He did so in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982) and in Freedom With Justice (1984), as well as in books he has edited. The question he is raising is a most awkward one for theologians of liberation, since they themselves keep stressing the importance of “praxis” and yet, from a practical economic standpoint, are on the shakiest of ground. They talk incessantly about their “preferential option for the poor” and then opt for some form of socialism that does not in reality lift up the poor and make them prosper.
Novak is right to focus on this curious contradiction, and he does so with tremendous expertise in economic theory and history. The depth of his critique is so fair and profound that the book may mark a turning point in the whole debate.
Operating At A High Level
The book itself contains some material published already, which worried me at first. But I soon discovered that two-thirds of it is new research, and all of it hangs together in support of its stated theme. Liberation theologians like Enrique Dussel, Leonardo Boff, and Juan Luis Segundo have indeed produced some intellectually and theologically profound work, but I think any fair reader will have to agree that Novak is also operating at this same very high level and is making points that, although they will be detested by partisans of the Left, will not be ignored by the honest among them.
Novak contends that socialist revolutions will not change anything in Latin America. It is already “socialist”—that is, feudal and crushed by the political sector. Liberationist strategies have no chance of liberating the poor, who do need help desperately. Novak asks the liberationists to wake up to the promise of “the capitalist revolution” (to borrow Peter Berger’s recent designation). Latin America needs a burst of liberty that would free up initiative and inventiveness, the keys to prosperity.
Novak is an exciting writer to read, a breath of fresh air on a topic usually so turgid, abstract, and guilt-laden. As one who made the same journey in his life as Novak has, from the utopian Left to democratic capitalism, I welcome this book with enthusiasm. It is the best critique of liberation theology I have seen. I hope it represents the first stages of a liberation theology that really does offer liberation.
Christianity Today Talks To Michael Novak
On whether Calvinists are responsible for the cultural conditions leading to capitalism:
The Calvinists were an important part of the breakthrough, both of political democracy and of capitalism. But they weren’t the only part. In fact, some scholars point out that Calvinist parts of Europe were for a longer period retarded economically and came late to the capitalist system.
What does seem to be the case is that the early pioneers of the new economy, who were independent people who owned their own homes and built their own small industries, were sometimes Calvinist, sometimes Jewish, and sometimes Catholic.
In all cases, they were fleeing from control by the empire, the king, and the established church—in many places Roman Catholic, but not in all. And it was these common characteristics that led them to cry out, “City air breathes free,” meaning that in the free cities of Europe they won political and economic freedom. In that mix, the role of Calvinists has been blown out of proportion.
But on the other side of the ledger, it is also true that Catholicism had already been thriving on European soil for 1,800 years before democracy and capitalism. So it had grown up with much of its imagery colored by the world of the aristocracy, the peasants, the clergy, the military, and the rulers.
Observers in the eighteenth century noted that in the Americas there were two experiments—one in Latin America and one in North America. The experiment in Latin America was imitating what had happened in the Holy Roman empire, and more or less continuing the aristocratic patterns of the past. They imitated these patterns even to the point of looking down on commercial activity, as aristocrats were wont to do. It was too sweaty and vulgar for them.
But I would say that attitude is more conspicuously Latin than Catholic. Why? Because the Catholics of Flanders, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and northern Italy were often pioneers among the early capitalists. The Catholic church, being large and various, went in both directions, aristocratic and capitalist.
On how liberation theology will develop in the next several years:
The logic of history will lead liberation theologians increasingly in the direction of recreating in their own way the liberal society; that is, a society recognizing the abiding sinfulness of human beings and trying to check unchecked power at every turn. It will lead to increasing respect for democracy in politics, for checks upon state power in the economy, and for checks of one portion of economic power against another portion of economic power, which it has been the task of capitalism to pioneer. And it will lead to pluralism—intellectual, literary, and religious liberty.
On how fans of liberation theology do not really take it seriously:
My difficulty with North American supporters of liberation theology is that they don’t engage in much intellectual give and take. Most of the people who write about liberation theology from North America tend to be very favorable to it. They take the role of being expositors and don’t often make obvious criticisms, as they would with other theologies. So it’s mostly one-way speaking: Latin Americans pronouncing, North Americans adoring.
This North American shortage of real analysis is finally patronizing. Serious adults argue with one another. The only way you sharpen your ideas is by 30 other people telling you you are wrong. Then you have to go back and rethink why you think you are right and how you can meet their arguments. What we’ve lacked in the debate between the two hemispheres is that kind of mature give and take, taking one another seriously, sympathizing with one another’s aims.
I look forward to the day when we have a genuine theology of the Western Hemisphere, when there is such a powerful, friendly argument among and between Latin Americans and North Americans that we really do represent to the Old World what is new about the New World, and mutually discover ways of thinking about the world that it’s our vocation under Providence to explore. There will be a theology of the Americas; but if it is to come, it must come the way every other theology has come about in the past, through disputation and argument. One person can’t do it alone. You need a community of theologians, none of whom agree with anybody else, to achieve eventual common understanding.
On what it will take for Latin America’s quasi-feudal culture to be transformed to the point where capital will be available for the small entrepreneur with a bright idea:
Necessity and example. Necessity because there are about 70 million Latin Americans now under the age of 15 who will be entering the job market from now until the end of the century. At the end of the century, surely there will be fewer jobs in agriculture than there now are. The multinational corporations and the large, mostly state-directed corporations of Latin America employ a relatively small proportion of all persons employed in that region.
So where are the new jobs to come from? Employment must be found not only for these 70 million, but for all those who are now unemployed and underemployed in Latin America. The greatest engine of employment in the United States and elsewhere is small business. Businesses employing 50 persons or fewer account for about 80 percent of our job growth in the last 20 years, and we have created about 31 million new jobs since the 1970s. Often in Latin America one hears businessmen referred to as parasites or cockroaches. But necessity will oblige Latin Americans to turn to the world of small business.
Then there is example. There are several countries in East Asia which in 1939 were far poorer than any country in Latin America. But look now at Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—once desperately poor places that have in a generation multiplied their per capita income not once, not twice, but something like five times over.
So if you want to break dependency and see rapid development, particularly for the people at the bottom of the ladder, there are models in the world for learning how to do that. Most of them have proceeded by way of generating enormous economic activism and enterprise at the bottom of the economic ladder. They do this by opening up markets, making it easy for poor people to incorporate, and easy for poor people to be able to obtain credit (since before you can sell you have to borrow in order to produce things).
On the value of free association, which he believes is reinforced by capitalism:
There are two forms of community. One form is the natural community that comes from blood and kinship; and the other is formed by voluntary choice or, in religious terms, by faith commitment. One hears the Word of God and responds to it and enters into a covenant with God. Translated into political systems, this means a higher emphasis than ever before on those communities which are formed by covenant, by contract, by consent. Hence the power of the idea that governments are formed by the consent of the governed. This led as well to the federal principle that there are forms of community that are entered into voluntarily, respecting the integrity of the component communities, but still forging a very powerful union.
I’m afraid that many social thinkers when they discuss community have in view only the village life of the premodern world in which people lived together in the same village for hundreds of years, shared the same faith, the same horizons, knew one another’s families, and had intimate feelings of unity. Many sociologists, sensing the breakup of that kind of community, despair of community without recognizing that there is altogether modern sense of unity that is even more potent, but different.
It does not have the same characteristics, but it is marvelously potent in forming a powerful social life. It springs, as Tocqueville called it, from the principle of association. By that he meant that human beings do not live as solitary individuals alone; they accomplish most human projects through cooperating with others. Through associating themselves willingly and freely with others to the extent that they want to, they don’t form many total communities, but belong to many different communities. Think of all the communities and associations in the world that you belong to, none of which own you totally, but every one of which nourishes you.
Americans live a thoroughly social life, and it’s a terrible mistake (a mistake that I think Robert Bellah and his colleagues are guilty of in Habits of the Heart) to link community to older forms and to miss the thick associational structure and texture of actual American life as it is lived. You can’t get out a magazine without a lot of people working together. You can’t produce a television program, a movie, a hit record, or run a cookie store without having people willing to work different shifts and do all the things necessary. There’s almost nothing you can accomplish in contemporary life without working with others.
That’s why Americans deeply love team sports. We respond to baseball, football, and basketball precisely because they show people working under very high intensity as a team. We enjoy achieving the full possibilities of the team, taking up for one another in the inevitable weaknesses of each. And we enjoy adjusting to one another, working in unison and with an incredible precision of timing and spirit.
We are not rugged individualists. We love our solitude—going fishing, hiking in the mountains, being alone—but one reason we like it is because we hardly ever have it. Most of the time we are with other people.
On the true “moral majority” and the need to build political economies for sinners:
There is no point in building a political economy for saints—there are too few of them. The only moral majority that actually exists is composed of sinners, and if you want to build a political economy that will work, and work for 200 years, you have to build it for sinners. That is why our founders designed in so many checks and balances. They never dreamt of creating a new man, in the sense of saintly or angelic creatures who have never walked the earth before. They dreamt of a set of institutions that would diminish the worst that people could do and enhance the creativity that they could bring forth even if they were sinners. And that’s why Hannah Arendt speaks of the American Revolution as the realistic revolution and of the French Revolution and some others as utopian. The realistic ones are the ones that work.
By David Neff.
Good Intentions Are Not Enough
Poverty and Wealth: The Christian Debate Over Capitalism, by Ronald Nash (Crossway Books, 216 pp.; $8.95, paperback); and The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions About Prosperity, Equality, and Liberty, by Peter Berger (Basic Books, 262 pp.; $17.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Doug Bandow, a syndicated columnist and senior fellow of the Cato Institute.
Believing Christians are usually nothing if not well intentioned: indeed, how could it be otherwise for those claiming to follow Jesus? But good intentions are not enough. “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food,” explains the Book of James. “If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?”
Much Christian political activism today, particularly on the Left, is infused with such a disregard for consequences. While advocating counterproductive government policies may not exhibit the same callous neglect decried by James, the practical effect on the poor and disadvantaged is no different. Explains Ronald Nash in Poverty and Wealth: “When good intentions are not wedded to sound theory, especially sound economic theory, good intentions can often result in actions that produce consequences directly opposite to those we planned.”
Nash’s book is an excellent primer on economics, a wonderfully clear discussion of the “dismal science” that should be required reading for every seminarian. Nash, a professor of philosophy and religion at Western Kentucky University, does not seek to prove capitalism to be uniquely Christian—“there is no such thing as revealed economics,” he contends, for “trying to deduce a system of economics from the Bible” is “as muddle-headed as an attempt to deduce a theory of the solar system from the Bible.” Instead, Nash looks at how free-market and socialist systems work in practice, comparing the results with biblical norms of justice.
Nash makes the case that capitalism is more consistent with Christian ethics than socialism. First, he shows that market economies are far more productive. As a result, the poor and disadvantaged are almost invariably better off under capitalism.
In fact, this point is almost impossible to contest today, given economic experience around the world. “Advanced industrial capitalism,” states Boston University sociologist Peter Berger in The Capitalist Revolution, “has generated, and continues to generate, the highest material standard of living for large masses of people in human history.”
Nor is the free market’s success limited to the West. Berger explores the case of East Asia, where Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea have all achieved enormous material progress by relying on market-oriented policies.
Socialism Untried?
The second major argument for capitalism is that it generally produces a freer society. “One of the great ironies of Christian socialism,” Nash says, “is that its proponents in effect demand that the state get out its weapons and force people to fulfill the demands of Christian love.” Religious leftists “would like us to believe that there is a form of socialism, not yet tried anywhere on earth, where the central ideas are cooperation and community and where coercion and dictatorship are precluded,” adds Nash, but “socialism epitomizes the violent means of exchange.”
In contrast, argues Berger, capitalism “provides the context within which personal liberties can thrive and institutions fostering these liberties, including the bourgeois family and organized religion, can function without pervasive state controls.” Capitalism also promotes democracy: As Berger points out, only countries with a protected private economic sector are democratic. Every totalitarian state, in contrast, firmly controls its economy.
Both authors, though skeptical about government economic intervention, believe that religious values are necessary to undergird the market system. Berger views churches as providing “communal solidarity” to help balance capitalism’s “anonymous aspects of individual autonomy.”
And Nash concludes his book by emphasizing an issue too often lost in the traditional Enlightenment-based defense of free markets: “a capitalism that is cut loose from traditional values is a capitalism that is headed for trouble.” It is the Judeo-Christian moral principles that once grounded Western society that also made the marke system so successful; as values like honesty, diligence, and a refusal to seek official privileges have waned, the market system has inevitably given way to statism.
“Let all friends of a market system pay heed,” warns Nash, “capitalism needs Christianity.”
