Why Not a Universal Liberation Theology?
Article by WorldNews.com Correspondent Dallas Darling..
 IIn 1955, during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Reverend Martin Luther King stood before a congregation and said that if they were wrong in fighting racism and segregation, then the Constitution of the United States and God almighty were wrong. For Reverend King and millions of blacks, it was their experience in suffering and economic oppression that enabled them to question the supreme law of the land-that once sanctioned the institution of slavery and now legalized segregation-and America's god. It would also be the start of a universal liberation theology, or a theology based on wrestling with God's purpose and justice in a world of poverty, militarism, injustice, and war.
For one who had no intention of entering the ministry, Reverend King found God's justice and serving others to be intellectually, politically, socially, and spiritually satisfying. He was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama while protesting unfair hiring and wage practices. When religious leaders-Catholics, Protestant, and Jewish-criticized him for "going to far" and being an "outsider" and for "unwise and untimely actions," Reverend King wrote that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." By universalizing his love and faith in God, Reverend King believed "all communities were interrelated and tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."(1)
For a moment in 1963, even the major media and estranged leaders experienced liberation theology. When President John F. Kennedy watched television images of police brutally beating nonviolent demonstrators and attack dogs ripping apart unarmed marchers, such images proved to be a catalyst for finally convincing some to pass sweeping economic and civil rights legislation. Time Magazine-which had earlier named Governor Orval Faubas as Man of the Year for trying to prevent integration in public schools, and which mainly covered Sputnik and the Cold War at the expense of hundreds of killings against civil and economic rights activists throughout the South-described Reverend King as having "an indescribable capacity for empathy that was the touchstone of his leadership."(2)
When Reverend King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he said the prize was for those who pursued "the crucial political and moral question of our time-the need of man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression."(3) Since Reverend King believed the greatest purveyor of violence in the world was America, he knew the movement would have to confront U.S. militarism in Vietnam.(4) He warned of three interrelated evils: racism, economic exploitation, and war. With forty million poor people living in America and a disproportionate number dying in Vietnam, Reverend King claimed the madness of war and its demonic destruction must stop. He called for a new revolution in values and said America needed to be restructured and born again!(5)
To stop the madness of war and militarism, which had killed millions in Vietnam and other parts of the world while leaving millions of Americans poor and homeless, Reverend King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference planned the Poor People's Campaign. It was to be a massive demonstration that would bring poor people of all races together to close the Pentagon and to reinvest the necessary funds and energies for education, social services, and job training.(6) The demonstration was originally scheduled for March 1968, but Reverend King instead went to Memphis, Tennessee to energize a stalled workers' strike. For Reverend King, the working poor did not have the time nor resources to fully participate in American democracy. Because of this, he believed equality would never be realized until economic rights were guaranteed in the Constitution.
On April 4, 1968, Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. I was only a child, but his ideas about forgiveness, nonviolence, love, and civil disobedience have had a tremendous impact on my life, as they have had on millions of other individuals around the world. After having joined the military, he was a major reason I filed for Conscientious Objector Status, no longer wanting to kill or participate in the god of militarism. He was the reason too that I ordered the book "Black Liberation," by James Cone, and traveled and learned and experienced Latin America, Rural, and Inner City Liberation Theologies.
In the scriptures, the word for salvation also means liberation, as well as deliverance and freedom from oppression. I sometimes wonder if this, along with universalizing our faith and love by showing mercy and forgiveness to others, is the starting point of being aware of God. When Reverend King said that God almighty was wrong if he and the Economic and Civil Rights Movement were wrong, was he challenging us to embrace the experience of the poor and oppressed and the God of humanity, instead of a god limited to a church, mosque, synagogue, temple, tribe, state, nation, or ideology, like militarism and wealth?
Perhaps Reverend King was even challenging a god of "lifestyle," which President Barack Obama mentioned in his Inauguration Speech when he said "we will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense." After all, liberation and resurrection signals the beginning of God's actions against evil in history. It also implies the end of Old World Orders and empires-including their lifestyles built on violence, economic exploitation, and war-and the start of a new era based on a "shared spirit of humanity."(7) But what if this shared spirit of humanity was "shifting from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society" and "looking uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth."(8)
Would such a Universal Liberation Theology finally make us free at last?
Dallas Darling - darling@wn.com
(Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John's Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.worldnews.com. You can read more of Dallas' writings at www.beverlydarling.com and wn.com//dallasdarling.)
(1) Young, Ralph E. Dissent In America, The Voices That Shaped A Nation. New York, New York: Pearson-Longman Press, 2006. p. 551 ff.
(2) Dicanio, Margaret B. Encyclopedia of American Activism, 1960 to the Present. Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse, Incorporated, 2004. p. 281.
(3) Ibid., p. 280.
(4) Zinn, Howard and Anthony Arnove. Voices Of A People's History Of The United States. New York, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004. p. 418, 425.
(5) Ibid., p. 424, 425.
(6) (6) Dicanio, Margaret B. Encyclopedia of American Activism, 1960 to the Present. p. 280.
(7) Obama, Barack, "Easter Address," April 2, 2010.
(8) Zinn, Howard and Anthony Arnove. Voices Of A People's History Of The Untied States. p. 426.
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