# Liberation Theology

Discover how liberation theology reads the gospel from the standpoint of the poor and connects divine deliverance to human flourishing.

Liberation theology is the movement, born in Latin American Catholicism in the late 1960s, that reads the gospel from the standpoint of the poor and holds that their deliverance from economic and political oppression belongs to the work of salvation. The Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez gave the movement its name in *Teología de la liberación* (1971), and the bishops assembled at Medellín in 1968 and at Puebla in 1979 framed its watchword, the “preferential option for the poor.” The Spanish *liberación*, from the Latin *liberatio*, “a setting free,” carried for Gutiérrez’s first readers the twin resonances of national independence and the Exodus. Critics have frequently dismissed the movement as Marxism in clerical dress. Its founders, however, rooted it in a biblical conviction: the God of Israel hears the cry of the oppressed and acts within history to answer it.

## The God Who Hears the Cry

The Lord’s self-disclosure at the burning bush coincides with an announcement of political deliverance: “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; and I am come down to deliver them” (Exodus 3:7-8). Gutiérrez treated this passage as paradigmatic, observing that Israel came to know its God first as the one who freed slaves, and only afterward as the Creator. He went further, arguing that the Exodus recapitulates the creation itself. The waters divide, dry land appears, and a people emerges from chaos into ordered existence, so that liberation constitutes a second creative act by the same divine hand. Israel’s later creeds preserved this order of knowledge, reciting the deliverance from Egypt as the foundation of every subsequent obligation.

The Savior inaugurated His public ministry at Nazareth by reading from Isaiah and declaring its fulfillment in Himself. He had been anointed, He said, “to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18). Liberation theologians regard this text as programmatic for the whole of Christ’s mission. Luke’s language of release serves elsewhere in his Gospel for the remission of sins, and Gutiérrez built upon such convergences his account of three inseparable levels of liberation: from unjust social structures, toward humanity’s conscious responsibility for its own history, and from sin into communion with God.

## Zion and the Poor

The scriptures of the Restoration describe the society liberation theology sought, one in which the division between rich and poor had been overcome. Enoch’s city received its name because its people “were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them” (Moses 7:18). After the Savior’s ministry among the Nephites, “they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free” (4 Nephi 1:3). Within the framework of the Restoration, these accounts carry the force of precedent. Latter-day Saints are asked to regard the abolition of poverty as something a covenant people has already accomplished, and therefore as something that can be accomplished again under the same conditions of righteousness and unity.

The revelations also specify the means. The Lord decreed that His Saints be provided for “in mine own way,” explaining that “the poor shall be exalted, in that the rich are made low” (D&C 104:16). That way is consecration, a voluntary covenant in which each steward returns surplus to a common storehouse, and it differs sharply from the class struggle that some liberation theologians borrowed from Marxist analysis. King Benjamin grounded the obligation in a shared condition before God: “are we not all beggars?” (Mosiah 4:19). Hugh Nibley, whose essays on Zion indicted the pursuit of wealth with a severity few Latin American theologians surpassed, stands as the Latter-day Saint voice nearest to Gutiérrez in temper, though his remedy remained the covenant of consecration.

## Salvation and History

The Vatican’s response marked the movement’s limits. In 1984 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issued an instruction warning that uncritical borrowing from Marxism risked reducing salvation to a political program and justifying violence in the name of the poor. The following year Leonardo Boff, among the most prominent Brazilian proponents, was sentenced to a period of silence. A second instruction in 1986 nonetheless affirmed Christian liberation as an authentic theme of the gospel. Gutiérrez himself consistently maintained that the three levels of liberation, while united, must never be collapsed into one, and in 2013 Pope Francis received him at the Vatican, a meeting widely read as a reconciliation.

The Restoration affirms the strongest claim of liberation theology, that salvation takes place within history and matter, while extending it further than Gutiérrez ventured. Joseph Smith taught that “all spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure” (D&C 131:7), and the Latter-day Saint hope accordingly encompasses a literal Zion, an embodied resurrection, and the elevation of the poor to the station of those who were once their benefactors. In this light, the release Christ proclaimed at Nazareth reaches past poverty to death itself, the final captivity from which no political order can deliver. Liberation in its fullest scriptural sense requires both the transformation of social structures and the transformation of the persons who inhabit them.

## Technology and the Option for the Poor

Transhumanism has developed its own language of liberation, promising release from disease, from aging, and from the scarcities that have shaped every human economy. The Mormon Transhumanist Association’s affirmation welcomes such power as a means toward the healing and renewal foretold in prophecy, while pledging its adherents to use it with wisdom and to anticipate its risks. The distribution of the first cures reveals what that pledge demands. Zolgensma, a gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy, entered the market in 2019 at about $2.1 million per patient, and Casgevy, approved in 2023 to treat sickle cell disease, at about $2.2 million, although the great majority of those born with sickle cell disease live in sub-Saharan Africa, where such sums lie far beyond reach.

Gutiérrez spent his last decades insisting that God’s preference for the poor is a measure applied to every human arrangement, and he died in 2024 without abandoning the hope that history could be bent toward their deliverance. The Association’s pledge to anticipate the risks of its own power invites the same measure. A therapy that liberates the wealthy from a hereditary disease while leaving the poor in its grip reproduces the order of Egypt with more advanced instruments, and the revelations of the Restoration call its makers to direct the power of science toward a Zion where the cures reach those whose cry the Lord first heard.

*See also*: [Christ](/topical-guide/christ), [Ethics](/topical-guide/ethics), [Existential Risk](/topical-guide/existential-risk), [Gene Therapy](/topical-guide/gene-therapy), [Justice](/topical-guide/justice), [Longevity](/topical-guide/longevity), [Messiah](/topical-guide/messiah), [Need](/topical-guide/need), [Oppression](/topical-guide/oppression), [Ordinance](/topical-guide/ordinance), [Posthuman](/topical-guide/posthuman), [Poverty](/topical-guide/poverty), [Salvation](/topical-guide/salvation)