In a recent commentary, a Methodist pastor anointed a democratic socialist politician as one of the most Christ-like figures in modern America. Her argument is simple and emotionally powerful. The politician believes it is the government's job to ensure that every person is living a life of dignity, and this, she claims, is a perfect reflection of Jesus's own ministry. She concludes that such a system looks like the kingdom of God. This is not a new or progressive insight. It is the resurrection of a very old and very dangerous heresy, one that seeks to build the Kingdom of Heaven with the tools of Caesar, and in doing so, betrays both. This is the false gospel of Liberation Theology, an ideology that a great and holy Pope, John Paul II, recognized as a fundamental threat to the faith and fought with all his strength.

Liberation Theology, which emerged in Latin America in the 20th century, attempts a synthesis of the Christian faith with a Marxist analysis of social structures. It begins, as this pastor does, with the true and powerful observation that God has a preferential love for the poor. But it then proceeds to make a series of catastrophic philosophical and theological errors. It reduces the profound, personal, and spiritual reality of sin to the sociological category of social oppression. It transforms the spiritual and eternal promise of salvation into a purely immanent and political project of liberation. It recasts Jesus Christ not as the divine redeemer of our souls, but as a kind of proto-revolutionary, a political activist whose primary mission was to dismantle the oppressive power structures of His day.

Pope John Paul II saw this ideology for what it was with a clarity that only a man who had lived under both Nazism and Communism could possess. He had seen, with his own eyes, the terrible, inhuman consequences of a politics that promises to create a New Man and a better world by sacrificing the real, individual person on the altar of a collectivist utopia. He saw that Liberation Theology, for all its compassionate-sounding language, was a Trojan horse. It was an attempt to smuggle a materialist, atheist, and ultimately violent political program into the heart of the Church itself.

This is why he, and his great theological lieutenant Cardinal Ratzinger, fought it with such tenacity. They understood that it made a profound confusion between the virtue of charity and the virtue of justice. Charity is a free and personal act of love. Justice is the virtue that governs the state. The pastor's proposal is a catastrophic blurring of these two. It seeks to use the coercive and impersonal machinery of the state to perform the personal and free acts of charity. But forced charity is a contradiction in terms. It is not charity at all. It is simply coercion. A government that takes my money by force to give it to another is not making me charitable. It is simply taxing me. It takes a moral and spiritual duty and reduces it to a political and material transaction. This is the very inhuman humanism that Henri de Lubac warned against, a system that, in its quest to build a humanistic paradise, ultimately organizes the world against the human person by stripping away their moral agency.

The authentic Christian path to ensuring a life of dignity is not to build a bigger state, but to build a more virtuous people. The solution is found in the great principle of subsidiarity. This is the profound and wise teaching that human needs should be met by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized competent authority. The first and most important source of care is not the federal government. It is the individual, the family, the parish, the local charity. These are the institutions that can offer not just a check, but a human face, a real relationship, and a call to a life of mutual responsibility. The state's proper and limited role is not to be the family or the church. Its role is to create the conditions of peace and justice where these vital, mediating institutions can be free to do their own proper and holy work of charity.

The embers of Liberation Theology still smolder under the ash of the 20th century. They have now burst into flame in the hearts of a new and unsuspecting generation in the West. The pastor, in her laudable desire to see a world of dignity, has accidentally embraced a philosophy that would, in the end, destroy it. Her supposed Christ-like system of government is a blueprint for a world where the free and virtuous acts of personal charity have been replaced by the impersonal and soul-crushing machinery of a totalizing state. It is not the Kingdom of God. It is the final and most compassionate-sounding form of the very Leviathan that Pope John Paul II, the great witness to freedom, gave his life to oppose.