LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND GLOBALIZATION

By Leonardo Boff

[This article published April 26, 2004 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://linke.cc/news/article.php?story=20040426133350660&mode=print. Leonardo Boff, professor of ethics and philosophy of religion at the state university of Rio de Janeiro, is a lay Franciscan priest and author of more than 40 books on liberation theology.]




As a new challenge, liberation theology sets itself against the power and influence of runaway intransigent globalization. The drive toward globalization began in 1592 when Ferdinand Magellan sailed around the world. Since then, the world has undergone a gradual process of westernization. With science and technology, western culture successfully enforced its view of nature, its way of organizing society (representative democracy), its comprehension of the human person (the inalienable rights of the citizen) and its understanding of God (Christianity).

This process was not peaceful. The greatest ethnocide of history occurred during the Spanish invasion of Mexico and Peru. Africa was colonized and the existing structures were completely destroyed. The Far East was massively damaged by the military and economic strength of the West. That was the Iron Age of globalization and laid the foundations for the globalization we experience today in the economic, political and cultural realms of human existence.

Economic and political processes go hand in hand. The West has practically forced the peoples of the world to organize themselves in nation states. Democracy has seeped into the soul of nearly all lands – either as a human value in human relations or as a form of organizing state power. However democracy can only function in an atmosphere of respect and advancement of collective human rights. Human rights assume an understanding of persons as ends in themselves and never as a means to an end. In the light of the universal authority of human rights, all power must be bound to a constitution controlled by people or their representatives. The great world wars – and above all the Gulf war of 1991 – illustrate the contradictory effect of the globalization process.

Three factors have made globalization into a reality that cannot be ignored: the communication process, the threat of nuclear destruction and the anxiety over the ecology of the earth. The Club of Rome sounded the ecological alarm in 1972 when it reported that the type of industrial development chosen by humanity includes a systematic attack on nature, an exhaustion of non-renewable resources and a gigantic deterioration of the quality of existence for all creatures. We now have concrete evidence for the ecocide (destruction of the eco-system), biocide (the wiping out of species of living beings) and geocide (destruction of the earth’s atmosphere).

Globalization can also manifest in the sphere of spirituality. Economic, political and sociological factors give an impetus to another determinant of globalization: a new planetary consciousness that we are jointly responsible for our common fate, for the fate of all living beings and the earth.

Liberation theology asks: Where do the poor fit in the globalization process? Seen economically, globalization obeys the needs of capital for which the private appropriation of profit and the maximization of returns are uppermost. As a result, economic globalization leads to the exclusion of the masses. Between 1965 and 1990 when the globalization process began accelerating, global prosperity grew tenfold while th3e world population only doubled. During this period, the share of the richest countries in worldwide prosperity rose from 68 to 72 percent while their share in the population declined from 30 to 23 percent.

These distortions make clear that this type of market is anti-social. It produces according to the needs of the market itself, not in agreement with human needs. Liberation theologians are not against a market that is a central institution in a modern society but we cannot accept a market that is deadly for the majority of humanity. When world hunger increases, we must change the nature of the world economy to survive. We must learn to see the world economy as a means for satisfying the needs of all people and the other created beings, not only as a mechanism for material growth.

From a political perspective, liberation theology has serious reservations as to a homogenization of humanity through the generalization of western values. Our task is to support multicultural and multi-religious societies and respect their different forms of social and political organization based on their respective cultures. The most important challenge is to nurture forms of coexistence that do not exclude anyone.

Theologians are convinced that all people have to be liberated, not only the oppressed. We are all enslaved by a paradigm that makes us enemies of nature and separates us from nature. The earth as well as the poor cries out her protest against the systematic violence against her. Liberation theology urgently demands the rediscovery of the sacred character of the earth and the preservation of the spiritual tradition of the oppressed cultures that revere the earth as the “great mother.” This attitude could help us set limits to modern greed and make possible new experiences of God that could overcome the western dualisms between God and the world, soul and body and feminine and masculine.

Only a Christianity that breaks alliances with the powers of this world, relativizes its annexation in the western culture and takes up the cause of the exploited of the earth – two-thirds of humanity – will be able to appeal to Jesus’ inheritance. A Christianity of domination is useless for globalization. A liberating Christianity is needed that helps create a form of globalization seeking harmony in diversity and in religious relations, not only in economic, political and cultural relations.