Liberation Theology: Problematizing the historical projects of democracy and human rights

Liberation Theology and Liberation Christianity continue to inspire social movements across Latin America. Following Michel Lowy’s analytical and historical distinction between Liberation Christianity (emerging in the 1950s) and Liberation Theology (emerging in the 1970s), this paper seeks to problematize the historical projects of democracy and human rights, particularly in relation to the praxis of Liberation Christianity and the reflection of Liberation Theology. Liberation Theology emerged across Latin America during a period of dictatorship and called for liberation. It had neither democracy nor human rights as its central historical project, but rather liberation. Furthermore, Liberation Christianity, which includes the legacy of Camilo Torres, now seeks to ‘defend democracy’ and ‘uphold human rights’ in its ongoing struggles despite the fact that the democratic project has clearly failed the majority of Latin Americans. Both redemocratization and ‘pink tide’ governments were not driven by liberation. At the beginning of the first Workers’ Party government in Brazil, Frei Betto – a leading liberation theologian – famously quipped ‘we have won an election, not made a revolution’. In dialogue with Ivan Petrella, this article suggests that Liberation Theology needs to ‘go beyond’ broad narratives of democracy and human rights to re-establish a historical project of liberation linked to what the Brazilian philosopher, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, calls institutional imagination.