A Religion That Liberates

Gustavo Gutierrez [1928-2024]

Obituary

What good is religion if it does not make the world a better place, a place of more light and less darkness, more love and compassion, more goodness? A Catholic priest who asked this question and then went on to bring a paradigmatic change to his religion passed away on 22 Oct 2024 at the age of 96. I came to know about his demise only today. The Indian media didn’t think it worth reporting his death. But a Malayalam weekly, Mathrubhoomi, carried an obituary in its latest edition which I happened to read today.

Rev Gustavo Gutierrez was the founder of what came to be known as Liberation Theology in the 1960s and 70s in Latin America. I heard about it in 1980s. Gutierrez’s theology was an attempt to interpret Christianity through the lens of social justice. He was a Peruvian, a priest in a country whose poor people were highly exploited and oppressed.

The Mathrubhoomi obituary informs me that Gutierrez was inspired by a passage in a novel by his compatriot, Jose Maria Arguedas. A character in the novel raises a question about whose side God is on. Who owns God? The oppressor or the oppressed? The landlords or the landless? Those who wield power or those who are taxed by them? To the autocrat or to the prophet? Who does God belong to?

Gutierrez was so inspired by that passage that he visited the novelist personally and had discussions. Liberation Theology (LT) was the result. Poverty is not just a lack of resources, LT tells us. Poverty is an unjust social condition.

Let me illustrate this with an example from India, my own country which is supposedly becoming an economic superpower though more than half of its gigantic population of 1.5 billion people aren’t rich enough to have even healthy food every day. In spite of our great Prime Minister’s bombastic claims, India ranks miserably low on too many parameters including food, health, employment, environment, and happiness.

But India’s economy is growing like a superpower! In 2022-23, the top one percent of India owned 40% of the country’s wealth. The bottom half – that is, 700 million people – owned only 3% of the country’s wealth. This gap keeps increasing because our Prime Minister, who has proclaimed himself as the world’s teacher, Viswaguru, is nurtured by the top one percent. The most affluent in India get all kinds of tax exemptions and the poor pay for those!

What is of relevance here, however, is that this Viswaguru is very religious. His religion is mere show. The personification of glittering Sham, that’s what his religion is. It is about making people fight in the name of their respective gods. And constructing mammoth temples, holy corridors, humongous idols… That religion is just the opposite of what Gutierrez preached.

Gutierrez wanted religion to be meaningful here on the earth. Change the system, he demanded. Salvation is not about individual spirituality, as the Catholic religion claims. Salvation is a collective transformation towards a more just society. Religion is also a social process, a process of evolution; not a process of breeding hatred among believers in order to further someone’s political ambitions.

“The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible,” wrote Gutierrez in his book on liberation theology. The poor are exploited by the political system, “robbed of their labour and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.”

Go and build a different social order, dear Viswaguru.