Summary
Liberation theology is a Christian movement that reads the gospel from the side of the poor and treats freeing people from poverty and oppression as central to faith. It developed among Latin American Catholic theologians in the 1960s; the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez named it in ‘Teología de la liberación’ (1971; English 1973), and its best-known phrase is the ‘preferential option for the poor’.
It was practised as well as written, in ‘base communities’ joining worship to organising for land and labour rights. Its Marxist analysis drew a Vatican admonition in the mid-1980s. Black, Dalit and Minjung theologies are relatives. It remains a theology first, more than a method of change.
Rationale
Our articles don’t mention it. We keep it for the base communities, where belief was re-formed by meeting and organising together: work that could “embody experience or reshape relationships”, in Part 2’s phrase.