Photo credit: Susan Thistlethwaite. (Me and my family at Women’s March.)
I haven’t been a liberation theologian for nigh on to 50 years to give up on defeating Donald Trump because Biden stumbled some in a debate.
A central tenet of liberation theology is context, context, context, and our context in this country is that basic human rights are being attacked at every turn.
I have learned much from Latin American and white feminist liberation theologians over the years, but not as much as I have learned from Black Theology and especially Womanist theology. If you don’t know Womanist theology, read this piece by Dr. Emilie Townes.
As Dr. Townes writes, “Womanist theology” is “an orientation to Black women's survival in an oppressive social order that is classist, racist, and sexist.”
When your well-being, indeed, your very life is under attack every day, you gain a lot of clarity and you know, without a doubt, that you cannot hit “pause” when the going gets tough. The going is already tough.
I found my context in doing liberation theology in the movement to end violence against women and the peace movement. I combined these in Women’s Bodies as Battlefield: Christian Theology and the Global War on Women. I did not hold back in describing the kinds of violence women and girls experience on a daily basis and how that also explains war. One reviewer in “Christian Feminism Today” was critical because the book was “quite depressing.”
Well, yes. Women and girls being beaten and killed is depressing. The author of that review in “Christian Feminism Today,” Dr. Katie Deaver, reveals a disconnect white feminism can fall into. Sometimes white feminists (and I am NOT saying all white feminists) can fail to see their own cocoon of whiteness and the way it unconsciously causes them to reproduce their own white privilege.
That’s where liberation theology comes in. Context. Context. Context. Our national context is increasingly a struggle over whether white male elite privilege will control everyone.
As so, Womanists are correct. It’s about survival and that is what is at stake in this election.
There is no other choice.
Oh, for Pete's sake. She did so well the last time.
Thank you, Susan!