Christianity Doesn’t Have To Be A Fascist Tool

One of the great ironies of history is that Christianity became the favored religion of emperors, colonizers, and oligarchs.

But Jesus was a radical preacher railing against exactly that class of people.

His message about them was clear: the rich are oppressive and we must practice wealth redistribution.

This is the story of how Christianity nearly became a global liberation movement, but was suppressed by elites who saw it as a threat to their power.

"But ye have despised the poor. Do not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats?" James 2:6

"Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you." James 5:1 

~ Christ and the Poor ~

Christ's follower base was the working people, the sick, the poor, the destitute.

His teachings were targeted toward them and crafted for them.

• Jesus drove money changers out of the temple.

• Called out the religious elite for hoarding wealth.

• Told the wealthy repeatedly to redistribute their fortunes to the poor.

His overarching message was that accumulating wealth while others suffered was a moral failure.

Solidarity with the poor was a prerequisite for righteousness.

~ The Scripture ~

Mark 10:17–25

A wealthy man asks how to inherit eternal life. Jesus tells him to sell everything and redistribute it to the poor.

Luke 16:19–31

A wealthy man feasts every night while a poor man named Lazarus starves at his gate. Both men die. The wealthy man goes to hell precisely because he hoarded while others suffered. Meanwhile Lazarus achieves eternal salvation.

Luke 19

A tax collector choosing to redistribute half their wealth to the poor is proof of his salvation says Jesus.

~ Prosperity Gospel Inversion ~

Today's "prosperity gospel" preached by the megachurches of the world is in direct conflict with Christ's teaching.

The pastors argue that God rewards the faithful with wealth yet Christ explicitly said that the rich have already had their reward and it’s the poor who are blessed.

It's a complete reversal of Christ’s teachings.

~ Liberation Theology ~

Latin American Christians recognized these core truths taught by Jesus, taking them to heart and practicing Christianity as a revolutionary movement called Liberation Theology. It was a set of Christian beliefs that were explicitly anti-colonial, imperial, and elitist, rising to popularity in Latin countries during the 1960s.

American Elites saw this as a threat to their power and worked to suppress it. Liberation grounded in religion was more dangerous than secular leftism because it could not be dismissed as foreign influence.

While Traditional Catholic teaching focused on individual sin resulting from personal moral failures, Liberation teachings said that wasn’t enough.

They reframed suffering because of poverty, exploitation, or oppression as a Structural Sin rather than a personal fault.

Structural Sin says that these kinds of suffering are produced by systems and structures that are themselves sinful.

Capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism aren’t simply contexts where sin happens in, they ARE sin.

These beliefs reframed poverty from a personal problem to a political one that demanded action.

Liberation theologians read scripture through the perspective of the impoverished and used the gospel as a tool of political awakening in communities across Latin America.

They centered the Exodus story; God liberating an enslaved people from imperial power, as God’s fundamental act in history. Opposed to the West’s Fall & Redemption Arc, a story that highlights personal sin.

These ideas were revolutionary and Liberation theologians proclaimed that disrupting the status quo was in fact an act of faith.

This is exactly why American elites moved so quickly to crush them.

~ The Suppression ~

Reagan sent an envoy to the Vatican specifically to coordinate opposition to liberation theology.

John Paul II, an anti-communist, was receptive. The Vatican under him began systematically silencing liberation theologians.

Operation Condor propped up a CIA-backed network of right-wing dictatorships across Latin America that specifically targeted leftist priests and nuns. Thousands of clergy were tortured and disappeared. In total 60,000+ people were disappeared or killed under this American operation.

Reagan convened the Santa Fe Committee, writing the policy paper below that became the doctrine for Latin America. It explicitly identified liberation theology as a threat and called for countering it.

The School of the Americas at Fort Benning trained tens of thousands of military officers, many of whom later led death squads that targeted clergy and church organizers.

The School of the Americas at Fort Benning, renamed to WINSEC, standing today:

~ The Cost of a Silenced Gospel ~

The suppression of liberation theology was a coordinated campaign of state terror, backed by the most powerful empire on Earth, to ensure that the poor would never hear the gospel that was written for them.

Priests were disappeared. Nuns were murdered. Communities built on the model of the early church, where everything was held in common, were dismantled at gunpoint.

Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador and Liberation leader, was shot dead while saying mass in 1980.

He had written to President Carter asking him to stop sending weapons to the government killing his people.

The weapons kept coming.

America’s elite class was successful in subverting most of the Liberation movement’s believers, leaving Latin America vulnerable to imperial exploitation.

Their goals directly harmed the progress of millions of people of the region and spread death, destruction, and authoritarianism across the continent.

SO…

The empire did not suppress liberation theology because it was wrong. It suppressed it because it was working.

Christianity does not have to be solely the tool of fascist oligarchs, Latin America showed us that the gospel can (and should) be used to liberate the poor and oppressed.

And I think that’s beautiful.

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This history is especially important because of the mass suffering exported by the modern-day American empire.

It is an empire where Christianity is weaponized by elites to justify the slaughter of tens of millions as they rob the people blind.

Liberation theology offers an alternate, aspiring, and revolutionary path to the current Christo-fascists dominating Western culture.

Its ideas have the potential to alter the cycle of history where Christianity is no longer a tool for oppression but a tool of collective liberation for all the oppressed, the poor, and the destitute.

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My name is Guy Christensen. I’m an independent commentator, journalist, and activist. Subscribe for free to keep up with my future work or consider going paid to support me!