Moving forward always requires rigorous internal criticism of ourselves and the traditions we love. This applies not only to liberal Christians who congratulate themselves for not being like those conservative Christians who support Trump; this applies to people like me who call themselves liberationists and see continued relevance in the tradition of liberation theology that sprang from Latin America. That is why I find it fitting that one of the strongest criticisms of Latin American liberation theology would come from one of its brightest students: Marcella Althaus-Reid, a queer theologian who experienced poverty on the streets of Buenos Aires and who later landed an academic post in Scotland before succumbing to sickness at a relatively young age.
I read Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (2000) last year and it blew open my romanticized notions of liberation theology frozen in time, with its early figures like Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff, as I had been taught in North American academic settings. In fact, Althaus-Reid helped illuminate the material relations between liberation theology and the ways in which it came to be consumed by or interpreted by “the North Atlantic production line of theology.” All theologies and God-talk operate in economic markets with varying power dynamics. Marcella taught me that.
I was particularly struck by Althaus-Reid’s criticisms of liberation theology on the ground, on its own terms of praxis and solidarity. She recounts with great pain how important liberation theologians did not take sexual oppression seriously:
