Liberation Theology in Latin America: Political, Social, and Religious Impacts
A Case Study of Brazil
Joseph Hovsepian
Founder and President
Sahand Center for Global Policy
October 2026
Introduction
Latin America has long combined strong religious devotion with some of the highest levels of social inequality in the world. Liberation Theology offered the most systematic response to this tension, linking faith to the lives of poor people and to the institutions that shaped those lives (Mackin, 2015). According to Levine (1992, p. 8), Catholic discourse was starting to shift its poverty focus to structural inequalities as opposed to individual shortcomings. The influence of Liberation Theology, however, varied across nations, dioceses and communities. Understanding this variation requires attention to specific national contexts.
Brazil is a case that is especially instructive. It has one of the largest Catholic populations in the world, though the proportion of adults (aged 18 and older, in Pew Research Center surveys) who identify as Catholic dropped to 46% in 2024 from 61% in 2013–14 (Lesage et al., 2026, p. 8). The creation of large networks of base ecclesial communities and pastoral commissions in Brazil also connected the religious reflection with the local organizing (Mainwaring, 1987). Meanwhile, in the Brazilian case, conservative resistance, Vatican intervention and subsequent religious rivalry can be observed. These aspects enable both its contributions and its limits to be analyzed within a single national context.
The question posed in this article is how Liberation Theology affected religious engagement, grassroots organizing, and social justice advocacy in Latin America and what Brazil can say about these accomplishments and constraints. It contends that Liberation Theology assisted certain religious groups to express the grievances of the oppressed groups and encouraged civic participation, and that its most durable contribution in Brazil was not direct policy transformation but the creation of religiously supported civic networks and organizational resources that enabled marginalized communities to organize and participate in public life. These roles in contributing to the grassroots organization can be viewed in Brazil; however, the case also brings forward some political, institutional, and theological conflicts restricting the movement. The analysis distinguishes theological concepts, Church institutions and independent social movements, as these were interconnected, but not the same. It does not presuppose that all the positive changes opposing the status quo in Brazil were due to Liberation Theology.
The study is mainly historical in nature and spans from the 1960s to the present, with the focal point being Brazil. The paper begins by outlining its research design, then traces the history and core ideas of Liberation Theology, and then explains the historical and institutional situation in Brazil. This is followed by the case study on base ecclesial communities, pastoral land and labor organizing and human rights advocacy. Later sections evaluate contributions and limits, critiques and alternative interpretations, and contemporary relevance. It ends by reflecting on what Brazil suggests about faith-based mobilization and civil society.
Research Design and Methodology
This study uses a qualitative historical case-study design to examine how Liberation Theology intersected with civic participation in Brazil from the 1960s, when the Second Vatican Council and Medellin reshaped Latin American Catholicism, to the present. Brazil was selected because it combined a large Catholic population, an influential bishops’ conference, and extensive base-community and pastoral networks under a long military dictatorship, which made the relationship between religion and mobilization unusually visible. Three institutional mechanisms are examined: base ecclesial communities and education, pastoral support for land and labor organizing, and human rights advocacy. Sources were selected to combine foundational theological texts and Church documents, historical scholarship, recent peer-reviewed studies, and census, survey, and land-conflict data, and each mechanism is weighed against competing explanations such as secular unions, political liberalization, and economic pressures. Because these forces operated simultaneously, the evidence is used to assess plausible contributions rather than to claim that Liberation Theology independently caused long-term policy outcomes.
Origins and Core Ideas
Liberation Theology was developed in the 1960s and 1970s, in times of rapid urbanization, rural dispossession as well as the consolidation of authoritarian regimes. The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) promoted open dialogue with the contemporary world, and the encyclical of Paul VI criticized societies in which a privileged minority lived comfortable lives while the poor majority lacked the possibility of acting on their own initiative (Paul VI, 1967, para. 9). In 1968, Latin American bishops issued sixteen documents denouncing social injustice and economic dependence and asserting the right to strike at Medellín (Menezes Neto, 2007, p. 333). Theologians subsequently developed these commitments into a distinctive approach. This approach started with the experienced situation of oppressed individuals and then turned to theological reflection.
The key to this approach was the preferential option for the poor. Gutiérrez (1971/1988, Introduction) explains that the formula, endorsed at Puebla in 1979, places the poor first but not exclusively, preserving the universality of God's love. Even the Vatican’s critical 1984 instruction described this option as having been reaffirmed without ambiguity after Medellin (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 1984, VI.5). The category of the poor, which was later expanded by the successive generations, came to include race, gender and ecology. The option for the poor was thus simultaneously a theological claim and an interpretive prism.
A second fundamental notion concerned the relationship between religious belief and social organization. Gutiérrez (1971/1988, chap. 2) identified three interdependent levels of liberation: political liberation from oppressive economic and social orders, the liberation of people who take conscious responsibility for history, and liberation from sin as the root of injustice. He also drew on dependency theory and engaged with Marxist thinking, yet defined theology as critical reflection on Christian practice in the light of the word of God rather than as a Marxist analytical method. Levine (1992, p. 11) goes on to explain that shared Bible study in base communities gave ordinary believers confidence in their own judgment. It was, therefore, as much pastoral practice as academic theology.
Theological teaching and political practice must be distinguished. Theological writings expressed standards of justice and dignity and did not dictate a political agenda. Some became members of unions, parties and land movements whereas others did not do more than engage in community service and religious formation (Mainwaring, 1987). It was thus the local leaders, Church structures and political opportunities that mediated the relationship between belief and action (Mackin, 2015). It would be a mistake to consider Liberation Theology a single movement, because of its diversity.
Its influence was felt across the region, including Peru and Chile, and reached Central America, where Church responses to civil conflict were shaped by Liberation Theology. Carvalhaes and Py (2017, p. 158) locate the movement’s beginning at the 1968 Medellin conference of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM) and stress that grassroots movements, priests and theologians shaped it together rather than any single theologian. Stålsett (2023) shows that Central American theologians such as Ignacio Ellacuría developed distinctive ideas, including that of the “crucified people.” However, Brazil with its massive Catholic organizations and grass-roots connections was still one of the most valuable experimental settings of the movement. The next section then turns to the Brazilian context.
Historical and Institutional Context in Brazil
In 1964, a dictatorship began and continued until 1985 after the military coup which transformed the relationship between the Church and state. The coup was backed by conservative elements of the clergy and the regime viewed agrarian reform as communist and suppressed rural unions (Menezes Neto, 2007, p. 335). The CNBB initially retreated from its reformist positions, and bishops began criticizing the regime only at the end of the 1960s, after repression intensified in 1968 with Institutional Act No. 5 and directly affected Church personnel (Mainwaring, 1987). With parties and unions curtailed, the Church was among the few institutions that could criticize abuses within the country. This made the Church a reluctant but important participant.
The Brazilian church was by no means a monolith. The National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB) that was started in 1952 took a progressively more critical stance and bishops (like Hélder Câmara in Recife or Paulo Evaristo Arns in São Paulo) became outspoken advocates of human rights. He and Huang (2024) suggest that, under military rule, the mainstream Church adopted the social-justice concerns of grassroots Liberation Theology but left aside its most radical elements. According to Levine (1992, p. 5), authorities accustomed to Church support saw these changes as betrayal, and church–state conflict became sharper than at any time in the preceding century. Institutional support for activism thus varied significantly by diocese and through time.
The most noticeable manifestation of this Catholicism was base ecclesial communities (CEBs). These were small groups of poor rural or urban dwellers who would gather to read the Bible, pray, and talk about local issues and typically were led by lay persons. Mainwaring (1987) indicates that CEBs grew rapidly in the 1970s but argues that the widely repeated figure of 100,000 communities was probably overestimated. As Levine (1992, p. 13) points out, these communities ranged from highly pietistic to socially activist and from authoritarian to democratic. Their political importance cannot be presupposed, then.
The role of the Church was changed due to the political opening (Abertura) which started in 1974. The 1979 amnesty, the resurgence of party competition and the return of the civilian rule in 1985 created avenues to non-religious institutional participation. According to Mainwaring (1987), many grassroots leaders had joined new parties such as the Workers’ Party, while most participants were uninterested in party debates. Hoddy (2021) demonstrates that even in the aftermath of transition, Church-linked organizations continued to play a significant role in the rural territories, where land conflicts before and after the transition continued to occur. Democratization therefore reduced the role of the Church as a substitute for civil society, but did not remove its impact.
The activism was primarily supported by the progressive bishops, pastoral agents, religious orders and lay leaders. Opposition was organized by the military government, conservative bishops and traditionalist lay organizations and in the 1980s by some parts of the Vatican hierarchy. According to Cousineau (2022), subsequent studies tended to generalize the experience based on the São Paulo archdiocese, which received an unusual level of scholarly attention. A significant number of bishops and clergy, too, were wary and upheld human rights without necessarily having to endorse Liberation Theology as such. These divisions shaped where and how activism developed.
Brazil Case Study: Mechanisms and Examples
This part explores the three confirmable instances of the influence of Liberation Theology on Brazilian religious and social life. Each example includes a list of the dates, actors, evidence, and influence mechanism, and alternative explanations. The three examples are base ecclesial communities and community education, pastoral support for land and labor organizing, and civic participation and human rights advocacy. None of the examples presupposes that the only reason of outcome described was the religious motivation factor. Collectively, they demonstrate that influence was exercised by the particular institutions and not only by theology.
Base Ecclesial Communities and Community Education
Base ecclesial communities spread across Brazil from the late 1960s and reached their greatest prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The lay leaders, parish priests, religious sisters, and sympathetic bishops were their main actors, serving in poor urban peripheries and rural locations. The way these communities advocated to get better transport and other urban amenities is recorded by Mainwaring (1987). Carvalhaes and Py (2017, p. 159) similarly describe base communities as the channel through which priests gathered locally with ordinary people and connected the movement to them. The mechanism of influence was thus pedagogical, with scripture connected to local experience in a manner that encouraged participation.
This form of education was influenced by the popular education of Paulo Freire which aimed at building up critical consciousness among the poor. Mainwaring (1987) notes that Freire’s adult-literacy method strongly influenced the Church’s re-evaluation of popular religion, which had a major impact on work with CEBs, while Gutiérrez (1971/1988, chap. 6) presented Freirean “conscientization” as the process through which the oppressed move from naive to critical awareness. The sequence of seeing, judging, and acting, a distinct pastoral method associated with Catholic Action rather than with Freire, was common in communities to analyze problems and organize actions to be taken by all communal members. An alternative explanation is that participation was based on material necessities and the lack of other institutions, rather than on theological belief. The two factors probably operated simultaneously, and their relative weight differed across communities.
Pastoral Support and Land and Labor Organizing
The Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) was established in Goiânia in 1975, during the military dictatorship, amid growing concern among bishops, priests, and pastoral agents over violence against peasants and Indigenous communities. MST leader João Pedro Stédile later described the CPT’s founding as partly a self-criticism of the Church’s support for the 1964 coup and as Liberation Theology put into practice through the consciousness-raising of peasants (Menezes Neto, 2007, pp. 333, 335). It involved bishops, priests, lay agents and Protestant participants, which made it ecumenical, although it operated as one of the pastoral bodies linked to the CNBB. Its annual reports, prepared since 1985, recorded 2,185 rural conflicts in 2024 and 2,250 in 2023, counting land, water, labor, and resistance cases, with the 2023 total reflecting the CPT’s updated data (Comissão Pastoral da Terra [CPT], 2025). This record made pastoral accompaniment a lasting source of evidence about rural violence in Brazil.
The CPT helped to establish the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), which in 1984 had a preparatory meeting in Cascavel and held its first national congress in 1985. Earlier, in 1982, organizers rejected a planned landless commission within the CPT and in its place created an organizationally autonomous movement, which Stédile believed crucial to preventing excessive dependence on the Church (Menezes Neto, 2007, p. 336). Rieger and Silva (2023) present the MST as a site where the solidarity commitments of religious and secular groups meet and sometimes collide. An alternative explanation puts more focus on land concentration, agrarian modernization, and rural unemployment, which would have resulted in conflict regardless of the role of the Church. In this reading, the Church did not create the land struggle; it supplied organizational resources and moral legitimacy. Carvalhaes and Py (2017, p. 167) note that the Lutheran pastor Milton Schwantes helped base-community settlements at Annoni in 1985–86, a site they associate with the movement’s beginnings, which underlines the ecumenical rather than purely Catholic roots of rural organizing.
In cities, labor organization was no exception. During the metalworkers’ strikes of the industrial region of São Paulo (1978-80) the Church parishes provided a place to meet and assistance where union action was suppressed. Workers’ pastoral groups also produced activists who later joined the new union movement and the Workers’ Party, which was founded in 1980. Mackin (2015) notes that religious actors mostly provided movements with moral frames and organizational resources rather than directing them. However, the strikes were largely powered by wage complaints and leaders of unions, and Church support was only one resource among several.
Civic Participation and Human Rights Advocacy
The third case is that of human rights advocacy during the dictatorship and democratic transition. The São Paulo Justice and Peace Commission was established in 1972 by Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns; it documented abuses and helped the families of political prisoners. Arns and Presbyterian minister Jaime Wright later co-managed the Brazil: Nunca Mais project (1979–1985), which copied military court records with funding from the World Council of Churches and was published as a book in July 1985. According to He and Huang (2024), such institutional commitments indicated that the mainstream Church adopted the concern selectively when it was initially raised in grassroots circles. Institutional protection was the mechanism at work here, whereby the Church invoked its legitimacy to protect and give voice to civil society.
Civic participation extended beyond human rights to neighborhood associations, health movements, and campaigns during the 1987–88 Constituent Assembly. Cousineau (2022) demonstrates that post-democratization, Church-linked pastoral work, like the Pastoral of the Street in Belo Horizonte, remained in support of marginalized groups. An alternative explanation is that the human rights campaign emerged due to a wide association of lawyers, journalists, relatives of victims and even international institutions; and the Church was among them. Many of the bishops who supported human rights also did not identify with Liberation Theology. This particular theology should therefore not be credited as the sole cause of the advocacy of the Church.
Positive Contributions and Measurable Limits
The evidence underpins a number of favorable contributions, chiefly the civic networks and organizational resources described below, and they differed in terms of magnitude and permanency. The spaces of social solidarity that CEBs and pastoral commissions established were characterized by the poor Brazilians who were usually isolated in the periphery of the urban areas or isolated in remote rural regions, sharing resources, discussing mutual problems and developing mutual trust among themselves. Mainwaring (1987) observed that involvement tended to foster political awareness and leadership among individuals who were initially afraid to voice their opinion. Hoddy (2021) also demonstrates that the CPT made the rural communities aware of their legal rights and able to claim them. These documented observations are significant, but they indicate activity and changed attitudes among participants rather than long-term policy effects.
The most consistently documented contribution is the development of leadership. Some CEB lay coordinators and pastoral agents carried their organizing experience into unions, neighborhood associations, parties, and land movements. According to Levine (1992, p. 3), participants experienced three lasting changes: greater confidence in their own judgment, a stronger disposition toward organization and collective action, and a renewed sense of community ties. It is hard to track down individual leaders over time, and many participants made no transition into broader politics. Arguments regarding leadership pipelines ought to be considered plausible interpretations rather than measured findings.
It is crucial to keep evidence of activity and evidence of a long-term impact apart. Meetings, campaigns, land occupations have been organized and documented yet do not prove that religious motivation led to sustainable policy change. Levine (1992, p. 8) points out that no political parties flew the banner of Liberation Theology and that related movements had nowhere altered fundamental structures of power. He and Huang (2024) provide an indirect, interpretive explanation of influence, suggesting that a watered-down form of Liberation Theology influenced the broader Catholic social teaching. Changed Church discourse may therefore be as important an effect as measurable social consequences.
Generalization is also restricted by regional differences. CEBs and land pastoral work were encouraged in some dioceses and discouraged in others and urban São Paulo was significantly different to the Amazon frontier. Secular unions, left parties, nongovernmental organizations, international donors, and more general economic change were other forces (Mackin, 2015). Measured outcomes also show persistent problems: in both 2023 and 2024, the CPT recorded over 2,000 rural conflicts, which suggests that land disputes outlasted decades of pastoral mobilization (CPT, 2025). The contributions of Liberation Theology can thus be regarded as one of the strands in a broader web of mobilization.
Community support and advocacy are other areas of contribution where there is more evidence. Church-related organizations coordinated mutual aid, health initiatives, and campaigns for basic urban services in poor communities. In addition, Hoddy (2021) notes that CPT accompaniment converted rural grievances into non-violent, rights-based claims instead of violent conflict, which is also directly relevant to transformative justice. Rieger and Silva (2023) associate such work with building collective power through solidarity among exploited groups. These instances, though, show sustained advocacy rather than a proven reduction of poverty or inequality.
Critiques, Tensions, and Alternative Interpretations
Critics have claimed that Liberation Theology had placed the Church in the midst of partisan politics. According to this perspective, pastoral agents risked making the religious mission subservient to political interests and some participants thought that CEBs were too political. According to Mainwaring (1987), the 1979 party reorganization exacerbated such tensions, as some leaders dismissed parties as elitist. These criticisms do not refute the movement’s contributions but point to real pastoral trade-offs.
The second criticism is related to Marxist influences in analysis. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1984, VII.6) warned against borrowing concepts from Marxist analysis uncritically, arguing that its ideological principles come prior to the study of social reality and shape how it is read. According to Rieger and Silva (2023), the persecution of Brazilian theologians (such as Boff and Ivone Gebara) was also a part of this conflict. The utilization of social-scientific instruments, however, did not turn all followers into Marxists, and many grounded their commitments primarily in scripture. The same Instruction nonetheless stressed that its warning was not a disavowal of those responding to the preferential option for the poor, and it called the defense of human rights an authentic fight for justice.
The movement was also limited by divisions within the Church hierarchy. Institutional support was further weakened by the split of the archdiocese of São Paulo in 1989. According to Menezes Neto (2007, p. 339), bishops who were antagonistic towards Liberation Theology were appointed and that Leonardo Boff ended up forsaking his ecclesial roles. He warns, though, that one cannot solely attribute this decline in political power of the theology to the growth of the evangelicals (Menezes Neto, 2007, p. 338). Survey evidence adds a further factor: in Pew’s 2013–14 survey across Latin America, former Catholics who had become Protestant most often cited a wish for a more personal relationship with God (Lesage et al., 2026, p. 12). The period was marked by theological diversity, as opposed to one Catholic stance.
Scholars also differ on how to interpret the movement’s direction. Some talk of decline, while Cousineau (2022) argues that reports of its death were exaggerated and that its practices continued in the pastoral work. Stålsett (2023) tests the claim, associated with the scholar Loris Zanatta, that liberation theology expresses “Jesuit populism” and concludes that it lacks substantiation. Policy outcomes are difficult to trace to theology because religious, secular, and economic factors interacted. A balanced judgment must hold these interpretations together.
The tradition has also been reshaped by internal critiques. Carvalhaes and Py (2017, pp. 157–158, 178), writing as self-described third-generation liberation theologians, acknowledge that the movement as a whole neglected race and did little to draw attention to racial and gender disparities in Latin American societies. Gutiérrez (1971/1988, Introduction) himself later described the theory of dependence, used extensively in the movement’s early years, as “now an inadequate tool” because it neglected each country’s internal dynamics and the breadth of the world of the poor; he called for refining social analysis rather than abandoning it and acknowledged the marginalization of Amerindian and Black populations. Rieger and Silva (2023) demonstrate that later currents dealt with these intersections. These critiques indicate some tension in the movement rather than simple opposition to it.
Contemporary Relevance
Some of the aspects of Liberation Theology have been preserved in modern Brazilian religious activism (but in a modified form). Pastoral commissions are active in collaboration with landless workers, people on the streets, and Indigenous peoples. Turina (2024) reveals that Indigenous and peasant communities that face inequalities of economic and power are the primary beneficiaries of Catholic environmental work in the Amazon, which is inspired by Laudato Si’. The Vatican’s 2018 synod preparatory document also referred to protecting Indigenous peoples and their land as a moral imperative (Synod of Bishops, 2018, p. 5). Its heritage can thus be seen in both socio-environmental activism and in traditional base communities. Carvalhaes and Py (2017, pp. 171, 175), writing as insiders to the tradition, note that Nancy Cardoso Pereira has worked full time with the Pastoral Land Commission since 2013 and that liberationist thought has widened into Black, feminist, ecological and Indigenous theologies.
The political influence of religion in Brazil is also becoming more contested. According to 2022 Census sample data released in 2025, the Catholic share of the population aged 10 and older was 56.7%, compared with 65.0% in 2010, while the evangelical share rose from 21.7% to 26.9% (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística [IBGE], 2025). These census figures differ from the Pew adult-survey estimate cited earlier because of different years, age bases, and data-collection methods. Ferreira and Fuks (2025) find that, in a national telephone survey, respondents who reported hearing Catholic or evangelical leaders endorse Jair Bolsonaro had higher odds of voting for him in 2022, with similar mobilizing power for both groups of leaders, an association that does not by itself prove causation. This questions the view that there is a homogeneously progressive Catholicism in Brazil.
There is further social policy discussion, including on Bolsa Família, the primary federal cash transfer program in Brazil. In a 2024 scoping review on 94 studies, there was consistent evidence supporting that it alleviated poverty and produced a variety of beneficial health and education outcomes (Magalhães et al., 2024). The review also reported mixed findings on gender-related outcomes. Such programs are secular policy options, and cannot be attributed to Liberation Theology, although religious advocates have long supported anti-poverty measures.
Conclusion
Liberation Theology influenced religious activity, grassroots organizing and social justice activism in Latin America by providing theological legitimacy for issues of the poor and mobilising communities to take action. Brazil suggests that this influence worked primarily through such institutions as base ecclesial communities, the Pastoral Land Commission, and diocesan human rights commissions. They created civic networks, a sense of solidarity, political awareness and leadership at the local level especially under the dictatorship and into democracy. Their activity was most valuable in those areas where other channels of activity had been blocked by repression. Their contributions, however, were uneven across regions and not easily separated from those of secular movements, economic pressures and political opportunities.
Brazil also shows the limits and uneven durability of faith-based mobilization. Opposition from the Vatican, internal diversity in the Church, democratization, and increased religious competition, as reflected in census statistics, diminished the scope of the movement, and evidence of activity did not necessarily translate into measurable long-term effects. Its field of action, which continues today in pastoral, land and environmental activism, now sits within a Brazilian politics that is plural rather than uniformly progressive. For civil society, the Brazilian case suggests that religious organizations can widen participative spaces by building civic networks, educating, protecting, and offering organizational resources, but the long-term effects of such networks depend on the connection between such networks and democratic institutions and other social actors.
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