A movement that sprang from late 20th-century Roman Catholicism, liberation theology is founded on the belief that God makes Himself known particularly through the poor, and that the Bible can be fully understood only when interpreted from the perspective of the impoverished.

Centered in Latin America, liberation theology advocated political and civic activism as a means of applying the tenets of Christian faith. Liberation theologians focused on transforming what they viewed as the socioeconomic structures – generally meaning capitalism – that caused social inequities around the world.

The genesis of the liberation theology movement is usually dated to the second Latin American Bishops’ Conference, which was held in Colombia in 1968. At this conference the attending bishops proposed to combine the teachings of Jesus with the teachings of Karl Marx as a way of justifying violent revolution to overthrow the economics of capitalism. The Gospels were re-rendered not as doctrine impacting on the human soul but rather as windows into the historical dialectic of class struggle. The bishops saw every biblical criticism of the rich as a mandate to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, and every expression of compassion for the poor as a call for an uprising by the proletarian class of peasants and workers. They issued a document affirming the rights of the poor and accusing industrialized nations of enriching themselves at the expense of Third World countries.

The liberation theology movement's seminal text, A Theology of Liberation (1971), was written by Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest and theologian.
 
Liberation theology gained currency through its appeal among elite theological students who were cloistered far from the workers and peasants in whose name they embraced this new doctrine. Their enthusiasm was heightened by the newfound respect that secular intellectuals were expressing for a version of Christianity that seemed to endorse socialism.
 
Prior to the advent of liberation theology, socialism and communism, because they were seen as essentially godless, had little appeal among religious Catholics. Authoritative Catholic teaching had a longstanding tradition in opposition to socialism. Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), in the first year of his papacy, devoted an encyclical against socialism which cited his predecessors. These had in turn built their position upon earlier Scholastics who stood in a line of orthodox theologians – rejecting collective ownership, embracing private property, and affirming business economies – that extends from the earliest centuries to the current day. But once socialism became wedded to churchmen’s calls for political activism as a means of serving the Deity’s underprivileged children, socialist theory seemed much more palatable to the faithful.

Because of their insistence that ministry mandated involvement in the political struggle of the impoverished against wealthy elites, liberation theologians were often criticized—not only by outside observers, but also from within the Roman Catholic Church—as purveyors of Marxism. In the 1990s the Vatican, under Pope John Paul II, began trying to slow the movement's momentum through the appointment of more conservative prelates throughout Latin America.

Liberation theology as a doctrine was dealt a crippling blow by the market economics revolution that has swept through Latin America—or the localization of what is often called globalization. This development persuaded well-intended revolutionaries that a better means of helping the poor was available: not through revolution but through entrepreneurship.

In this section of DiscoverTheNetworks, the category titled Liberation Theology's Nature, History, and Worldview examines the genesis, development, and teachings of liberation theology.

The category titled Black Liberation Theology explores the movement, associated with such figures as James Cone and Jeremiah Wright, that is essentially an admixture of Marxism and Black Power.