This book locates the emergence of Christian liberation theologies at the end of the twentieth century within the manifold currents of Western intellectual history, especially in the modern period. The title derives from a phrase of Dietrich Bonhoeffer written in a Nazi prison about the form of Christianity needed for the future. After the end of Christendom and in consonance with a scientific worldview, how should Christianity take shape?

This book is a major contribution both to church history and religious studies. Liberation theologies provide the most significant innovation in Christian theology at the end of the last century. While many have dismissed them as a passing trend, Barger documents how they deserve attention not only within the scope of the history of theology but also intellectual history. Her analysis is broad and far ranging. The book is organized into four parts: origins, reconstructions, elaborations, and reverberations.

The three chapters on origins contextualize the three major expressions of liberation theologies discussed in the book—black, feminist, and Latin American—against the background of the 1960s and in contrast to the argument for a “Great Separation” (Mark Lilla) between religion and politics in the modern period. Barger outlines the pattern by which religion had come to be increasingly privatized through theological pietism, romanticism, and liberalism. Liberation theologies contradict this trend. The author attends to modern intellectual and political currents in both North America and Latin America, especially since the eighteenth century. By connecting the argument to modern political theories, the author builds the case for the innovative character of reviving political activism in liberation theologies. The narrative references “harbingers of resistance,” such as Bartolomé de La Casas, the revolution in Haiti, and black abolitionists.

The three chapters on reconstructions explore the meaning of freedom in liberation theologies as “integral liberation.” The otherworldly meaning of salvation was transformed to focus on imminent and fulfilling life in this world. Barger examines the use of the social sciences in relation to method in liberation theologies, the question about the use of violence as a means of social change, and the significance of biblical-theological resources. Liberation theologies came to be defined as orthopraxis. The author argues that liberation theologies contribute “a vitalist political role for religion” that contradicts shopworn claims that religion functions only as ideology to rationalize the inequities of the status quo (120–121). She references the work of W.E.B. DuBois, Karl Mannheim, Ernst Bloch, and the Frankfurt school among other streams of thought.

The four chapters on elaborations give focus to the specific arguments of liberation theologians. The author discusses prevailing twentieth-century interpretations of the secularization of religion in relation to the insistence of liberation theologies on the political energy of religious commitment. Against the background of the social gospel in North America and Catholic Action in Latin America, Barger examines key factors from each expression of liberation theology toward forging a “salvific social order.” In Latin America the work of Richard Shaull and Rubem Alves, among Protestants, and the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez and Hugo Assmann, among Roman Catholics, are featured. Barger engages skillfully to discuss the political history of Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present, including details about controversies over liberation theology in the Roman Catholic Church. Among feminist theologians, the contrasting approaches of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mary Daly, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza are traced against the background of the antecedent thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Betty Friedan. Among black theologians, the seminal work of James Cone takes central place with Gayraud S. Wilmore, J. Deotis Roberts, and Albert B. Cleage each making distinctive contributions. Barger depicts the history of racism in the U.S. effectively together with references to black resistance in the Harlem Renaissance, black literature, the Civil Rights movement, and black nationalism. “Through black peoplehood, Latin American native identity, and women's sisterhood, liberation theologians across the hemisphere found a shared narrative of oppression and solidarity not only in the Americas but also throughout the world” (215).

The concluding two chapters on reverberations explore tensions between the three main forms of liberation theology as each contended for the priority of its own social analysis: whether against economic injustice, patriarchy, or racism. At the same time liberation theologians had defend themselves against both theological critics and organized opposition movements, for example, from within the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Nevertheless, liberation theologians forged a “tenuous consensus” that coalesced into what Barger calls “a new orthodoxy.”

Liberation theologies in the Americas have given rise to several new expressions in other global contexts, such as against apartheid in South Africa and Namibia, Minjung theology in Korea, Dalit theology in India, and Palestinian liberation theology. The influence of liberation theologies continues to find vitality through new expressions in North America through the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements and in Latin America through critiques of neoliberal economics and Roman Catholic renewal under Pope Francis. “As liberation theologians asserted claims on behalf of blacks, women, and the poor, they were the avant-garde entering a newly defined theo-political space and unleashing previously quiet religious passions they did not anticipate” (255).

The central conclusions of Barger warrant further examination. She argues that although liberation theologies shattered the cordon sanitaire previously separating religion and politics by validating the political sphere as an arena for religious activism, at the same time their emergence invigorated analogous forces on the religious right, in the forms of the prosperity gospel and political mobilization by evangelicals and fundamentalists. Most importantly, she contends: “Reintroducing questions about the goals of political life and the relationship between religious values and their actualization in history, liberationists helped forestall the predicted demise of religious influence in the political sphere” (263). These are substantive arguments that locate liberation theologies, as the author claims, inextricably within Western intellectual history.