Ever since I first began thinking critically about the implications of my faith as a Christian in my early high school years, I have placed a significant weight on the intersection of my theological beliefs with my social ethics.  The words and deeds of ministers and theologians such as St. Óscar Romero, Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Berrigan, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer influenced my spiritual growth significantly, leading me to a firm conviction that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is inherently two-sided, calling for personal devotion and righteousness while also critiquing social iniquities and oppressions.  Subsequently, my faith has motivated me to involve myself as an activist in various fights for social justice both domestically and internationally.

Perhaps the most personally meaningful of these experiences was my time as a human rights observer in the West Bank, documenting and resisting the slow, violent solidification of Israeli occupation and annexation of indigenous Palestinian land.  During my first visit to Palestine in the summer of 2018, I attended a conference in Bethlehem called Christ at the Checkpoint, a week of presentations and workshops focusing on the struggles of Christian Palestinians living under occupation.  On the first night of the conference, Riyad al-Maliki, the Palestinian Foreign Affairs Minister and opening speaker, said something that I will never forget.  “Here in Bethlehem,” he said, “we consider Jesus Christ to be the original Palestinian revolutionary.”  Depending on the reader’s preconceived stereotypes of what an Arab revolutionary looks like, this might not be the best way to illustrate my point.  Conversely, it may the perfect way to illustrate it—this bold statement introduces the concept of Jesus as a social, political revolutionary.

In many American evangelical circles, we have adopted the misconception that Jesus was an apolitical figure.  We have fashioned a watered-down, white-washed Jesus that represents feel-good spirituality and financial prosperity, replacing the controversial, radical Jesus of Nazareth.  I cannot tell you the number of times people have come up to me and asked, “Why are you so focused on social activism?  Don’t you know that Jesus came only to save souls?”  In a homily from The Violence of Love, the martyred Saint Óscar Romero prophetically addresses this fallacy: “we are the product of a spiritualized, individualistic education.  We were taught: try to save your soul and don’t worry about the rest.  We told the suffering: be patient, heaven will follow, hang on…  That’s not the salvation Christ brought.  The salvation Christ brings is a salvation from every bondage that oppresses human beings.”¹  The fact of the matter is that Jesus wasn’t crucified simply for preaching spiritual redemption or having different hermeneutical opinions than those around Him.  He was crucified because He represented a legitimate, radical threat to the status-quo of the Roman Empire and the religious elites.  His message was that of a subversive counterculture, preaching enemy-love to Roman soldiers and economic redistribution to the rich.  A simple readthrough of the Sermon on the Mount ought to dispel any doubt as to whether Jesus’ message was political.

Of course, as Americans, we often struggle to think outside of the Republican-Democrat dichotomy when speaking about politics.  And certainly, I will say that Jesus was not a partisan.  He did, however, take sides.  Throughout the Gospels, Jesus deliberately sided with the poor, the oppressed, and the socially outcast.  His treatment of the beggars, the lepers, and the Samaritan woman are sharply contrasted with His condemnation of the Pharisees and the wealthy moneychangers in the Temple.  It should be no surprise, then, that immediately after being tempted in the wilderness in the Book of Luke, Christ revealed His Messianic mission before the Nazarene synagogue, declaring “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me.  He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”²  As André Trocmé clearly states in Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution, “Jesus’ speech in Nazareth was no sermon of religious platitudes.  He was announcing that a social revolution was underway – the messianic reign had begun.”³

Having framed Jesus as a political revolutionary, we can now approach a conception of Jesus as liberator.  At this point, any conservatives or Niebuhrian realists reading may be feeling somewhat wary (if they weren’t already).  A description of Christ in these terms immediately evokes a resemblance to liberation theology.  Unfortunately for these readers, such suspicions are entirely correct.  However, if the Church is honest with itself, the debate concerning the validity of liberation theology has never existed.  In reality, the core disagreement surrounding this framework lies in its application, or whether it is relevant beyond the singular and into the plural.

In truth, the theological concept of liberation is in no way foreign to American Christianity.  Our sermons and worship songs are saturated with ideas of individual emancipation.  Analogies of slavery and bondage define our conception of sin and death, from which Christ frees us; Jesus is, as we so often say, our “personal savior.”  These ideas seem so natural to us, until they are applied on a social scale.  When moved beyond the individual, the concept of liberation immediately becomes controversial and even contemptible, disregarded by most as liberal nonsense at best, or Marxist infiltration at worst.

And yet, the question still stands: if Christ acts as our personal savior, can he not also act as our collective savior?  If the name of Jesus has the power to break every chain in the individual sense, can it not break every chain in the social sense?  If the Resurrection liberates us from the sins of pride, greed, and lust, then it must also liberate us from the sins of racism, capitalism, and war.  As St. Romero states, “Christ would not be Redeemer if he had not concerned himself with giving food to the crowds that were hungry, if he had not given light to the eyes of the blind, if he had not felt sorrow for the forsaken crowds that had no one to love them, no one to help them.  Christianity cares about human development, about the political and social aspects of life.”⁴‍

It is not enough to simply tend to the spiritual deliverance of the destitute while ignoring their social reality, for the liberation of Jesus is holistic and absolute.  The Kingdom of God has no room for bondage, spiritual or otherwise, and it is our role as Christians to bring that Kingdom into the present.  Spiritual revival without social revolution is empty emotionalism, and as the tradition of Pentecost demonstrates, any authentic movement of the Holy Spirit must be followed by political action in the name of the poor and marginalized.⁵ Simply put, to disregard liberation theology is to disregard a fundamental aspect of our faith.  Our Gospel is inherently a social one, and it boldly proclaims good news to the poor and oppressed, both in spirit and in socioeconomic status.

If we are to be honest Christians, we must accept Christ as a revolutionary liberator in both the spiritual and social sense.  In maintaining this holistic, two-sided Gospel, we cannot have one without the other, abandoning the social and material wellbeing of humanity in the name of some ethereal vision of salvation.  Perhaps more importantly, however, is that with this understanding of Christ, we are obligated to follow His radical example, becoming ourselves revolutionaries and activists against the violent and oppressive principalities of the world.  According to St. Romero, “authentic Christians” must actively resist the countless oppressions and injustices of a socially broken world, challenging the systemic sins of earthly institutions and authorities with Christ as their motivator.⁶  “The church,” he states, “cannot be deaf or mute before the entreaty of millions of persons who cry out for liberation, persons oppressed by a thousand slaveries.  But the church tells them what is the true liberty they must seek: the freedom that Christ began on earth when he rose and burst the chains of sin, of death, and of hell.”⁷  Now, as American Christians in a context of racialized police brutality, a widening wealth gap, and emergent far-right extremism, it is high time that we took the words of St. Romero and Riyad al-Maliki to heart.‍

[Photo Attribution: Christ of the Breadlines (by Fritz Eichenberg)]