Listen to the full episode on Patreon
Part 2 follows the money flowing from US agencies and interests to anti-Liberation Theology figures in Latin America. We meet Jesuit operator Roger Vekemans, who in the 1960s drew funding from the CIA, USAID, West German bishops, and U.S. conservative foundations to undermine Liberation and Christian socialism in Chile and beyond.
Nelson Rockefeller used Protestant missions as a model for soft power in the region, including the Summer Institute of Linguistics and their aviation-radio infrastructure (JAARS) that doubled as state and military logistics in Amazon frontiers. That infrastructure was part of a project to rewire communal lifeways into an individualism compatible with capitalism.
But what about the “reverse boomerang”? Pope Leo XIV’s Dilexi te: On Love for the Poor, is a pastoral yet pointed retrieval of Liberation Theology’s moral center, in which inequality is posited as the root of social ills. Leo rejects trickle-down myths, insists on solidarity with migrants, and quietly sidelines the old Marxism panic. By grounding church mission in the lived poverty of Jesus himself, Leo offers a calm but withering rebuke to Christofascism and the politics of exclusion.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello everybody, this Patreon episode is called U.S. versus Liberation Theology, Part 2, Part 1, dropped on Saturday on the main feed.
I'm 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, Derek and Julian on Blue Sky.
The podcast is on Instagram and threads under its own handle.
And please support our Patreon if you're not listening to this on Patreon.
Thank you so much if you are.
You can also find me on YouTube and TikTok at antifascistdad.
So in episode one of this two-parter, I coined the term evangelical boomerang, which is a loop of spiritual and political manipulation that starts with U.S. Cold War strategy and then comes home in the age of Trump.
My springboard example was Jair Bolsonaro's rise in Brazil and his Jordan River baptism by Brazil's evangelical leader.
That moment isn't just political theater.
It encapsulates decades of U.S. soft power in Latin America, where the CIA literally helped expand evangelical Christianity as a counterweight to Catholic liberation theology.
Evangelicalism's focus on individual sin, salvation, and prosperity happens to be perfect for capitalist and imperialist impulses.
It directs faith away from collective struggle and towards personal obedience and discipline and seeking dignity through accumulating wealth.
Now, I proposed that this was a conspiratuality story because it reveals how religious and spiritual movements get engineered to serve authoritarian power.
We've already shown how wellness influencers and mega-mystics blend conspiracy theories with spirituality to sanctify hierarchy.
Here, I'm tracking how the U.S. exported through its state apparatus an individualized, depoliticized Christianity that eventually came roaring back home, fueling Trump's fusion of self-help religion, capitalist piety, and fascist myth.
Now, the boomerang looms in the data because by 2030, half of U.S. Latin American folks may be evangelical, and in 2024, about two-thirds of Latin American Protestants in the states voted for Trump.
Yet, I also mentioned the notion of the reverse boomerang, where Pope Leo XIV, shaped by his years in Peru, has just released an exhortation on loving the poor, which draws directly on liberation theology's call for solidarity amidst Trump's wars and anti-immigrant furies.
So I'll be focusing on that today later in the show.
And I also gave in episode one a little introduction to Gustavo Gutierrez, his seminal work, A Theology of Liberation from 71, which is a text that insists poverty is political.
It's not divine destiny.
I mentioned that he was influenced by Camilo Torres Restrepo, the Marxist priest turned revolutionary.
But Gutierrez reimagined theology as a patient praxis of seeing, judging, and acting.
For him, describing the violence of liberation wasn't an endorsement of it.
It was just honesty about history's terms.
But honesty terrified the powerful because in 1984, Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, condemned liberation theology for quote Marxist corruption and quote blind violence.
And two years later, the CIA echoed him, warning that liberation theology's demand for justice threatened U.S. interests.
In other words, a theology that took the poor seriously was more dangerous to empire than any army.
I'll open part two by following some money.
You've been listening to a conspirituality bonus episode sample.
To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com/slash conspirituality, where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad-free, as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing.
You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
