Liberation theology has achieved a significant following among priests and laity. Certainly conditions in many Third World countries are deplorable. In many of them, a small group of the very rich, together with a military that practices terrorism and intimidation, lord over an impoverished people. Only the hard-hearted could support a continuation of the status quo in such conditions.
Jean-Paul Sartre identified himself with the dispossessed of the earth. However, we must remind ourselves that the dispossessed are human; they are not by nature better or worse than those who oppress them and might only return the compliment under reversed conditions. Furthermore, those who lead them may, if given the opportunity, only oppress them yet more efficiently.
We are sometimes told that revolutionary regimes introduce literacy. That is often exaggerated, and although literacy is a good, it can be a mixed good. When Prussia strove for universal literacy in the early nineteenth century, the purpose was to make state propaganda more effective. No one could accuse the Sandinistas, for instance, of failing to capitalize on this factor. Do arithmetic examples that ask how many imperialists can be killed by how many bullets really serve the purposes of education?
We are also told that revolutionary regimes establish economic justice and feed everyone. China under Mao and Ethiopia under the Dergue are obvious counterexamples. Both produced famines, athough we were told the opposite when Mao was at the height of his popularity with American academics. Certainly these nations have not compared in development with Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, or even the Ivory Coast. But even had they done better, would not a well-tended zoo have done even better? It is indeed strange that so many who claim a religious vocation treat their followers as literal rather than metaphoric sheep.
Why do so many religious people follow these false gods? Despite the great value of religion, there always have been false prophets. When Hitler made his triumphal entry at the head of his troops into Vienna during the Anschluss, Cardinal Innitzer embraced him. We have such sterling examples of religion as Ayatollah Khomeini, Meir Kahane, Gerald L.K. Smith, and others too numerous to mention. Indeed, in some cases one wonders how deeply religious they are. Recently when searching for a gift for a religious friend I browsed through a book written by a Jesuit professor of theology at a Catholic university. In it he maintained not only that Christ was not God, but that his mission was to disabuse people of the notion that there was a God.
I do not want to carry the previous too far. I am convinced that the ayatollah believes in a God, although his is a God so strange that I cannot recognize mine in his belief. Still, there may be something in the notion that religion has become so irrelevant to so many people in the modern world, except perhaps as a social function, that many clerics are searching for a substitute vocation.
In his recent encyclical, the pope emphasized that social change must be democratic and must permit freedom of belief. I do not see how a true religious vocation in the modern world can settle for less. Leninist leaders and class warfare can hardly be a good direction in which to
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