Religion and Revolution: A Brief for the Theology of Liberation

Abstract

Revolution is a total and ongoing process. All aspects of society, civil, as well as political, are affected. Base, superstructure, praxis must all change. The revolutionary experience indicates that these changes are always uneven: unequal development, resistance to change, counter-revolution have been the rule. Such generalizations aside, the revolutionary universe is murky, fraught with questions, besieged and confounded by debatable answers. Such is our burden, in particular, when we approach the problem of the relation between religion and revolution, and perhaps nowhere more so than in respect to Latin America. Marx and Engels' systematic and emphatic rejection of religion as a source of revolution has added to this burden. In attempting to establish socialism on a rational and scientific basis, they in essence obviated religion as a valid concern. Scientific socialism could not accept religion as the moral and ethical fount of revolution and liberation. Although Marx understood religion as a necessary palliative for the alienation felt by men in class dominated societies, it could play no role in societies liberated from the false consciousness necessary for such domination.