This is the first of a two-part deep dive into how U.S. foreign policy stared down the political threat of Liberation Theology by promoting Evangelical Christianity in Latin America. The CIA and USAID, in league with Vatican conservatives like Cardinal Ratzinger, spent money and social capital on the suppression of this vital new movement which insisted that poverty is political and that faith without structural change is hollow.
By contrast, the Evangelical emphasis on individual sin, salvation, and personal prosperity aligned with Cold War and neoliberal interests.
Spiritualities engineered to serve empire don’t just pacify the poor abroad—they come back to police democracy at home. The “Evangelical boomerang” shows up in shifting Latino religious demographics and voting patterns, while the “reverse boomerang” hints that Liberation Theology language—once condemned—now shapes Pope Leo’s message in this time of rising fascism.
If MAGA mystics, prosperity preachers, and tech-bro shamans offer a gospel of self-aggrandizement, Liberation Theology counters with a message of shared material reality: no one owns the food, we share it; the Sabbath serves people, not power; love of God is inseparable from love for the poor.
Part 1 lays the intellectual and historical groundwork; Part 2 follows the covert money networks and then asks whether a newly emboldened Catholic social vision can stiffen global resistance to authoritarian capitalism.
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Hello, everybody.
This brief is called The U.S. versus Liberation Theology, and it is part one of a two-part miniseries with part two dropping on Monday on Patreon for subscribers.
My name is Matthew Remsky.
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
You can follow me, you can follow Derek and Julian as well on Blue Sky.
And the podcast is on Instagram and threads under its own handle.
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Thank you so much.
And you can also find me on YouTube and TikTok at anti-fascistdad.
So in these two episodes, I'll be exploring a question that I first stumbled across years ago when reading about the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and why he won so much support from evangelical Christians on his ascent and why in 2016 as he was consolidating support for his presidential run,
he'd gotten baptized in the Jordan River by the evangelical Christian leader of the Christian Socialist Party in Brazil and why all of this was happening in a majority Catholic country.
And it took me a little digging to sort of start to put the pieces together.
Bolsonaro was hostile to Catholic liberation theology, as well as to Catholic defenders of environmental protections for the Amazon.
But his personal pivot to evangelical Christianity was not unique.
It wasn't unexpected.
It was part of a broader trend in which evangelicalism was instrumentalized in the portfolio of U.S. soft political power in the global south.
Now, the reasons for CIA picking sides on what kind of Christianity they like are clear, because evangelicalism generally bypasses the social gospel to focus on individualistic sin and salvation,
and often the bootstraps theory of prosperity, as in, if you are rich, God has blessed you, whereas liberation theology says the absolute opposite, which is that if you are poor, God speaks through you, asking to be recognized.
So in this first episode, I'll lay out a basic outline for liberation theology and its internal tensions and its tense relationship to church orthodoxy.
And I'll start to finish up with how the then Cardinal Ratzinger's attack on liberation theology in 1984 was largely echoed by the CIA in an internal research paper in 1986.
And then in part two, I'll look at how American foreign policy had actually been trying to derail liberation theology themes and figures since the 1960s.
References for all this work are in the show notes, but you won't find any one slam-dunk book on this topic.
I do believe that in time, the research on CIA-backed manipulation of various forms of Christianity will catch up to what we know about CIA-backed political and military coups.
And I think it's a next step for me in digging into the conspiratuality story as it pertains to Trumpian fascism.
Because as a podcast, we have pretty much sealed the deal on the types of religious charisma, anxiety, corruption, and purity fetishism that animate the cultic qualities of the MAGA movement.
We have noted that most of this religious and spiritual stuff is highly individualistic.
There's a lot of prosperity gospelers.
There's a lot of new age kooks.
There are a lot of tech bros on psychedelics.
So if MAGA has a spirituality, I think we know that it's the spirituality of self-aggrandizement.
But of course, that's not all the spirituality there is.
And in the Catholic sector, the liberation theology movement has countered these Christianities directly.
Now, the reason we don't know a lot about it is that the CIA and Catholic think tanks poured huge resources into undermining liberation theology.
But I wonder how many even conservative Catholics wanted that sort of thing to come back and bite them in the ass in the form of Paula White speaking tongues at the White House, maybe even using lines from Revelation to help tear down the East Wing.
In the subjects I've looked at in past months, the overall historical pattern I'm noticing is the pattern of the boomerang.
So, Émé Césaire famously posited that fascism in Europe in the 1920s was the imperial boomerang of the prior two centuries of colonial adventurism, militarism, and exploitation.
It was colonization turned back against Europe itself.
Then when I recently reviewed Mahmoud Mamdani's Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, this is his account of the U.S. recruiting and training fundamentalist jihadis to battle communist influences in the Muslim world, this highlighted another boomerang effect as those same jihadis eventually turned against the global American hegemony when they realized they were being used and that the U.S. had zero interest in supporting autonomy in the Muslim world.
Now with this story, I see an evangelical boomerang spinning in the air across the equator.
The CIA's active promotion of evangelical conversion in Latin America has not only weakened the global visibility of liberation theology, it has also bolstered the American evangelical movement with a renewed sense of universalism.
And one of the results of that strengthening is, of course, the rise of Trump.
Now, when pollsters tackle the question of why the Democrats lost so many Hispanic voters to Trump, they mostly find that it was economic kitchen table issues and that Trump won them over with his faux populism, which of course he lost no time in betraying.
However, after the 2024 election, the Public Religion Research Institute also found that about 63 to 64% of Hispanic Protestant voters, most of whom are evangelical, voted for Trump, while only 43 to 45% of Hispanic Catholic voters supported him.
Now consider this, the fastest growing population of Protestant evangelicals in the U.S. right now is the Latin American population, with estimates that half of U.S. Latin American folks will be evangelical by 2030.
Now, I can't sort of make up a causal link between the CIA manipulation of faith in Latin America over the past 40 to 60 years and the rising tide of U.S. Latin American evangelical support for Trump, but I wouldn't be shocked if there's no connection there.
And it also makes me wonder how much these guys grasp that they actually need those Latin American votes, unless they're not really thinking about votes anymore anyway.
But here's the thing.
For every boomerang, there might be a reverse boomerang.
And what do we see in the character of Robert Francis Priveo, now known as Pope Leo XIV?
He spent his formative years in Peru, which is ground zero for liberation theology.
And in late September, he released his first apostolic exhortation document.
It's called Dilexi Te, or On Love for the Poor.
Now, the document is spreading through the Catholic world as Trump unleashes fury against all immigrants and gathers warships in the Caribbean, poised to strike Venezuela.
And what do you suppose that Leo's main reference point is for loving the poor?
Well, he quotes heavily and extensively from the classics of liberation theology.
So what is liberation theology?
In 1971, this is the year I was born, Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, O.P., published a book called A Theology of Liberation, History, Politics, and Salvation.
This was in his home city of Lima, Peru.
The mantra of this book is that spiritual salvation and social liberation are inseparable.
There's no daylight between them.
And that the life of Jesus embodies this fact.
So Gutierrez published this book through a small press that he helped found to distribute social gospel scholarship.
And then the first English translation came out two years later from Orbis Press in the States, and it sold 50,000 copies in 20 months.
That's a lot.
Here's one of the book's most famous paragraphs.
Quote, But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny.
His or her existence is not politically neutral and it is not ethically innocent.
The poor are a byproduct of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible.
They are marginalized by our social and cultural world.
They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor 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.
Okay.
In other words, you don't reform a broken world with tinkering and band-aids.
You change how it works.
Now, off the bat, you might hear Gutierrez reject the common reading of Jesus saying the poor will always be with you as a kind of resignation of humanity to permanent inequality or, you know, some sort of advising passivity.
Gutierrez is saying that poverty is a political choice, and he uses distinctly non-Catholic language, the exploited proletariat, for example.
And then he rejects the notion of charity in favor of positive economic and social revolution.
Now, you'll also hear him pointing to what he called the preferential option for the poor.
And this is a core liberation theology idea that our lives and our society and our religions are defined by how we care for the poorest among us.
As liberation theology develops, some of its proponents begin to point out that this is not just a moral argument, it is an economic truth.
When poverty rates decrease, general well-being increases for everyone.
Now, I also want to point out something rhetorically or tonally or affect-wise about liberation theology.
If we listen to this line again, quote, the poor are a byproduct of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible.
They are marginalized by our social and cultural world.
Any personal accusation or blame casting is kind of hard to hear in that rhetoric.
And I assure you that if you heard Gutierrez or Pope Leo read that passage, it would sound very, very gentle.
Liberation theology uses the language of class conflict, but it also tends to favor depersonalized phrases like structural violence.
you're not going to hear liberation theologians shout out, eat the rich, or all cops are bastards, or death to the IDF.
It's a lot gentler than that.
Now, as a Catholic growing up, I was reminded constantly that I, like everyone else, was a sinner.
I had frailties and selfish habits, and I would always have to discipline and humble myself and avail myself of the examples of the saints.
What liberation theology added for me was that we do not choose the systems of sin that encourage our worst instincts.
we do not choose those systems, and that means that we can choose otherwise, that those systems can be changed.
Okay, so who is Gutierrez?
He was a Peruvian priest, philosopher, and theologian, and he had early academic interests in medicine and literature, but then he moved on to sociology.
He was ordained as a rank-and-file diocesan priest in 1959 at the age of 31, and he served in a parish as pastor at the Iglesia Cristo Redentor in Rimac, which is a working-class district in Lima.
And while there, he helped parishioners organize mutual aid projects.
He ran study groups in a kind of Marxist education-style three-step process of seeing, judging, and acting.
So that started from listening to the realities on the ground of the poor and the marginalized, judging those realities theologically, like what are the ethics of those realities, how should we respond to them, and then acting collectively for change.
Now, key to this model was the belief that theology must follow direct observation to provide maybe an exploratory, perhaps explanatory framework for how to think about it.
So you don't start with the creed and then work your way down to the sidewalk.
You start with a lucid examination of material conditions, and then you ask your intellectual and religious heritage how you should respond.
Throughout his life, Gutierrez talked about how much those parishioners taught him about hope amidst suffering through all of that co-learning that they did together.
Now, how did Gutierrez learn about Marxist theory?
Well, it was just in the water in Latin America in the 1960s and early 70s, but he was also most likely personally influenced by and maybe even enthralled by a guy named Camilo Torres Restrepo.
He was a Colombian priest and a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary and an early adopter of liberation theology.
Bit of a complex guy.
Now, Restrepo was a class trader from a wealthy Bogota family, and he initially studied law, but at some point changed his path to become a Catholic priest, and he was ordained in 1954 at the age of 24.
Now, I haven't been able to track down a precise timeline here, but somewhere around 1958, Gutierrez and Restrepo were actually classmates in Europe at the Catholic University in Louvain, Belgium.
And this was a university that was at that point known for innovating a synthesis of social sciences and theology.
And that, of course, suited the interests of both Gutiérrez and Restrepo, who were thinking about and steeped in Marxism, but also deeply steeped in their theology.
Now, I found two brief references to these guys forming a friendship during their studies, but I really just have to daydream at this point about their cafe conversations, because they were temperamentally different to mythic extremes.
Torres was more of a doer than a thinker, but Gutierrez really sensed the disconnect between abstract theology and everyday realities, and he wanted to channel his energy into written work that would resolve that.
And because of these temperamental differences and patience with bookishness and so on, their paths diverged in a way that illustrates the broad inspiration, but also interpretability of liberation theology as it intersects with a spectrum of radicalism from the radical impatient to the radical and fixed on the long game type of activist.
Restrepo's activism and support for Marxist ideas led to tensions between him and the church and the Colombian government.
Now, he was kicked out eventually or laicized by the Cardinal of Bogotá in 1965.
And as soon as that happened, pretty much he left the city to help form the National Liberation Army or the ELN in the mountains of San Vincente de Chucuri with Fabio Vázquez, who was the ELN's military leader.
Restrepo provided ideological and spiritual leadership before his death at the age of 37.
This is in February of 1966 during his first combat experience as a guerrilla fighter.
During an ambush, Torres was attempting to retrieve a soldier's rifle when he was injured and killed.
There were some reports from the battlefield that indicate that the National Army targeted him specifically, that he was brutally beaten before being shot at point-blank range.
Now, his body was buried in an unmarked grave, and he attained this martyr status, which has made efforts to recover and honor his remains part of ongoing talks with the ELN.
Quote, if Jesus were alive today, Restrepo famously wrote, he would be a guerrillero.
And quote, the Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin, unquote.
So he went really hard.
Then of his laicization, his defrocking, he wrote, quote, I have left the privileges and duties of the clergy, but I have not ceased to be a priest.
I believe that I have given myself up to the revolution out of love of neighbor.
And when my neighbor has nothing against me, when I have achieved the revolution, I will offer Mass again.
Now, Restrepo never raised the bread and wine again at that ceremonial table.
And in hindsight, his hopes for revolutionary change, at least through the ELN, now seem idealistic at best, although one has to wonder how this organization would have progressed if he had stayed on, if he had stayed alive and continued to advise them from a Catholic perspective.
But after being nearly crushed by the government in the 1970s, the paramilitary increasingly turned to drug running, to terrorism and bombings, and to kidnapping to raise funds, and they have never managed to transition towards political legitimacy.
So Gutierrez cut a very different path from Ristrepo.
It was one that allowed him to live to the age of 96 instead of dying at 37 on the battlefield.
And a lot of that had to do with how he navigated the relationship between revolutionary social ideas and the likelihood of revolutionary violence.
How much he distanced himself from the Ristrepo path without directly condemning his old classmate.
Now, taking that line didn't protect Gutierrez from harassment, because in his earliest work, he earned opprobrium by simply describing the violence of revolutionary struggle in plain terms, writing in 1971, so this is years after Ristrepo was killed, things like, quote, the political arena is necessarily conflictual.
The building of a just society means the confrontation in which different kinds of violence are present between groups with different interests and opinions.
Now, while you consider just how outrageous and inflammatory those sentences are, let me just pause here to note something that part of what Gutierrez faces as a Marxist is being backed into a corner.
And it's a corner that I'm personally becoming familiar with through my experience of working on anti-fascism materials and watching people like Mark Bray have to flee into exile for simply reporting on facts and history.
And that corner is that you can't be historically descriptive of the reality of conflict or violence in political struggle without being accused of advocating for it or even inciting it.
Now, how did liberation theology fly in the broader Catholic world?
One big impact it had was that it shone a light on class disparities within the church itself.
So if you're into liberation theology, going to church on Sunday morning as a working person and standing behind the wealthy person while saying the same prayers gets a little bit weird.
You start asking questions.
Are we all saying the same prayer?
Do we all have the same God?
Does the sun really rise on the rich and the poor equally?
This is the place where you're really supposed to get along, right?
There's this great old Ukrainian film from 1965 called Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, and it starts exactly with this tension.
I'll never forget this scene.
It moved me really hard when I was 18 or so and I first saw this.
So there's a peasant and a landowner who are both attending the same Orthodox service in a village in the Carpathian Mountains.
This is the opening scenes of the film.
Now the landowner is done up in his finest.
He's swaddled in furs.
He's surrounded by his servants and family.
He's been raising the rent on his tenants and the peasant's family is starving.
So the poor guy curses the oppressor under his breath and then in full view of the congregation, the rich guy takes out his axe and murders him for the intolerable insult.
And the class rules in this village are so much more deeply embedded than the theology of the Orthodox Church in which murder is probably wrong that the landowner is allowed to walk away swaddled in his furs with his train of family behind him, leaving the peasant's family destitute.
Now Gutierrez leans into this.
So quoting from historian Travis Knoll in the Boston Review, quote, the most controversial section of a theology of liberation addresses the universal call of Christian love in a region split into oppressive and oppressed classes.
Gutierrez argues that the God of the Exodus story took sides and that Christians must as well.
Quoting the French bishops, he points out that class struggles were a fact, not something one either advocated or deplored.
More importantly, as Brazilian educator Paolo Freire argued in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968, liberating the oppressed would liberate the oppressors as well.
One loves the oppressors by liberating them from their inhuman condition as oppressors, Gutierrez writes.
That is, by liberating them from themselves.
Okay, but here's that line that drives everyone bonkers.
I'll just repeat it here.
The political arena is necessarily conflictual.
The building of a just society means the confrontation in which different kinds of violence are present between groups with different interests and opinions.
In short, and now Travis Noel goes on to editorialize, violence was natural in the pursuit of liberation, even if one should do all one could to avoid it.
So, oh my goodness, how dare Gutierrez reflect that different kinds of violence happen during political struggle?
It's easy for a delicate mind to criticize him for ambiguity, and that's what started to happen, almost from jump.
In 1975, a National Catholic reporter journalist covering a liberation theology conference in Detroit wrote that liberation theology posited that, quote, a Christian can employ violence when it is the lesser of existing evils, unquote.
And I think that the journalist means this as a gotcha, but there's no actual problem with that because just war theory goes back to St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
But the reporter doesn't stop there.
They add some extra sauce.
Quote, instead of Isaiah's exhortation to turn swords into plowshares, liberation theology could turn altar rails into barricades.
Now, let me just pause on the irony here because turning altar rails into barricades is actually a pretty cool idea.
But as ICE agents keep harassing immigrants in church parking lots and start threatening to come in, it might also be a plan.
So that Detroit article is from 1975.
The Vatican, as you would expect, took much longer to respond, but it came to the same conclusions.
In 1984, the future Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, was the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
This is the Vatican watchdog office that roots out heresies.
It dates back to the Middle Ages.
In 1984, Ratzinger published the instruction on certain aspects of theology of liberation, and here's how it opens.
Quote, The gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of freedom and a force for liberation.
In recent years, this essential truth has become the object of reflection for theologians with a new kind of attention which is itself full of promise.
Liberation is first and foremost liberation from the radical slavery of sin.
Okay, a little bit inside baseball Vatican stuff here, but did you hear that maybe?
It's not that the slavery is just slavery, it's that sin is radical slavery, right?
So we take the material condition and then it becomes immediately a metaphor for metaphysical and ethical concerns according to Catholic social teaching or according to Catholic morality.
But you also might be able to pick up on this incredibly smug absorption and co-optation of a core term here.
We have an extremely polite, Catholic, passive-aggressive way of sort of patting the liberation theologians on the head and saying, yes, yes, liberation, of course, is very important.
And the church has always supported liberation.
And recent contributions show a lot of promise.
Now let me tell you what real liberation actually is, my child.
This is the kind of devious, dishonest, smarmy, and diplomatic politicking that I have to imagine has kept many Catholics like me far away from the church through the decades.
And for me, it also unfortunately means it's taken quite a while to actually believe that Francis took the opposite tack with his invocation of todos, toros, toros, or everyone, everyone, everyone, which was his way of inviting the voices from the marginalized parts of the church into the center of Vatican thought.
He built his entire sort of outreach around reaching out to the margins to bring the margins to the center.
Ratzinger's substantive claim was that liberation theology was derived from, quote, concepts borrowed from various currents of Marxist thought, but handled in an insufficiently critical manner.
Ratzinger argued that the totalizing ideology of Marxism or the fact that its analysis of capitalism and its ending seems so complete that it will solve all problems, it just doesn't allow for the intervention of grace, of God, of miracles.
And by fixating on concepts like class struggle, Ratzinger argued that this radically reduced the possibilities of human imagination and creativity.
It ignored, quote, the transcendent character of the distinction between good and evil, unquote, which I find pretty rich given how easily the church itself has regularly ignored the, quote, transcendent character of the distinction between good and evil.
The other core concern raised by Ratzinger was on the alleged permissibility of revolutionary violence in liberation theology.
Ratzinger states that, quote, systemic and deliberate recourse to blind violence must be condemned, unquote.
I mean, no shit, but do you hear the straw man in there?
It sounds as if the liberation theologians he's speaking about are all tankies or something like that.
Now, the figure of Restrepo is real, but he was laicized.
He left the church and the capacity to actually teach liberation theology within the institution.
So from Restrepo onwards, the liberation theologians have always struggled with the sharp reality of violence in social change versus the rigors of Catholic morality.
And in general, the context in which they come to frame revolutionary violence is around the idea that systemic oppression is itself a form of violence and that active resistance simply might be provoked.
There's no deliberate recourse to blind violence that I have found, even in the most extreme stories like that of Restrepo.
So Ratzinger's note of instruction went out to over 40,000 priests around the world who, for the most part, would have trickled its findings into their sermons and their interactions with parishioners.
The Catholic press, by and large, described the document as a clear doctrinal rejection of liberation theology's Marxist elements and a rejection of the politicization of the gospel, and it painted Ratzinger as a firm gatekeeper of the truth.
And mainstream outlets largely echoed most of that, but they also noted that Ratzinger was being criticized from the left in some radical quarters.
A few of the most prominent liberation theologians, such as Juan Luis Segundo and Leonardo Boff, clapped back at Ratzinger.
Segundo suggested that Ratzinger didn't understand the nature of poverty and detachment in Christian theology.
And then Boff described being under, quote, inquisition, unquote, from global North Church leadership.
Now, in the end, Ratzinger's tut-tutting didn't slow down the growth or diminish the popularity of liberation theology in Latin America.
And that's why the CIA ramped up its investigation of liberation theology.
Now, they were already on it, but Ratzinger's document was gold for the agency, which leaned on it for their own April 1986 research paper called Liberation Theology, Religion, Reform, and Revolution, unquote.
In the 1986 CIA paper, the agents defined liberation theology primarily as a radical movement advocating a radical restructuring of society on behalf of the poor and the oppressed.
They noted it was, quote, rooted in European, liberal, social, democratic, and Marxist social analysis, and it argued that, quote, Catholic faith must be validated through political action, unquote.
They identified the movement as openly anti-Western, and they asserted that liberation theology identifies the United States and capitalism as primarily responsible for the impoverishment of the third world, unquote.
So there are a number of alarmist notes in this paper, and they give a sense of how seriously the feds were taking this, because by the time the U.S. was plotting to undermine Jean-Bertrand Erastide de Naiti, who is also a priest with liberation theology tucked in his robes,
some intelligence officers thought that liberation theology was a more serious threat to U.S. interests abroad than armed resistance, than Marxism-Leninism, than even labor unionism.
Quote, in our view, the aspect of liberation theology most threatening to political stability in third world countries is the activist orientation of its practitioners who urge the oppressed to seek a just life now, not in the hereafter, and to use violence to accomplish this goal, unquote.
And the agents also got the appeal.
Liberation theology, they wrote, can pose a serious threat to U.S. interests when its critique of capitalism and U.S. development policy finds a receptive audience.
And more important, when the movement's visibility or articulated political economic model for restructuring society provides an opening for communist exploitation.
Okay, so I'll break off the history there for this episode.
Part two will be up on Patreon on Monday.
And in it, I'll go right back to the 1960s to look at the earliest U.S. interventions in relation to liberation theology, beginning with a story of the Jesuit priest named Roger Veckermans of Belgium.
He was a key anti-liberation theology figure in Chile, and how in 1963, JFK himself funneled $10 million to this priest to support his conservative Catholic activism against Salvador Allende.
I'll get into the explicit promotion of evangelical Christianity by U.S. interests and then look closely at how liberation theology seems to now be the lingua franca that Pope Leo is speaking in.
