Dr Var­ma Deyals­ingh, my fel­low colum­nist, penned “Usury, lib­er­a­tion the­ol­o­gy and eco­nom­ic jus­tice.” To­day’s col­umn is a re­sponse to the top­ic of lib­er­a­tion the­ol­o­gy, which Dr Deyals­ingh touched up­on last week. I ap­plaud Dr Deyals­ingh’s com­ment that de­fend­ing the poor does not make some­one a com­mu­nist.

My con­cern is that read­ers might get the wrong im­pres­sion about Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy be­cause, in the ab­sence of con­text, it may seem that Chris­tian­i­ty need­ed a Marx­ist read­ing of the gospel to in­crease its con­cern for the poor, and this is not so his­tor­i­cal­ly. Rather, lib­er­a­tion the­ol­o­gy, pi­o­neered by fig­ures like Gus­ta­vo Gutiér­rez, has a struc­tur­al read­ing of sin, iden­ti­fy­ing it in the ex­ploita­tion of labour.

My per­son­al prob­lem with Lib­er­a­tion the­ol­o­gy is that it mar­ries two in­com­pat­i­ble ide­olo­gies—Chris­tian­i­ty and Marx­ism. Tra­di­tion­al Marx­ist ide­ol­o­gy is ma­te­ri­al­ist and athe­ist—it re­jects the ex­is­tence of a soul, spir­it or any di­vine be­ing. Chris­tian­i­ty is fun­da­men­tal­ly con­cerned with the spir­i­tu­al; how­ev­er, the gospel preached by the ear­ly church is not on­ly con­cerned with “go­ing to heav­en.”

James 1:27 states, “Re­li­gion that God our Fa­ther ac­cepts as pure and fault­less is this: to look af­ter or­phans and wid­ows in their dis­tress and to keep one­self from be­ing pol­lut­ed by the world.” The book of James was writ­ten be­fore 49 AD, show­ing that the ear­ly church fo­cused on char­i­ty to or­phans and wid­ows.

Chris­tian­i­ty is cred­it­ed by his­to­ri­ans with help­ing to de­vel­op the mod­ern pub­lic hos­pi­tal, with St Basil of Cae­sarea be­ing cred­it­ed with build­ing the “Basil­i­ad” in Cap­pado­cia around 370 AD, a com­plex fea­tur­ing hous­ing, kitchens, nurs­es and physi­cians for the poor, starv­ing and sick. While there were pro­vi­sions for pub­lic med­ical treat­ment in an­cient Africa and In­dia, this on­ly in­volved san­i­to­ri­ums for the sick to rest and re­cov­er or com­mu­ni­ty lev­el physi­cians per­form­ing surgery.

The Basil­i­ad is al­so cred­it­ed with pi­o­neer­ing or­phan­ages along­side the Or­phan­otro­pheion of Con­stan­tino­ple at­trib­uted to St Zotikos. While there are an­cient non-Chris­t­ian tra­di­tions of sup­port­ing or­phans, the large in­sti­tu­tion­alised struc­tures large­ly start­ed in the Chris­t­ian world.

Ad­mit­ted­ly, Eu­rope did par­tic­i­pate in the evils of the transat­lantic slave trade from 1441 to 1888; this was led by the fi­nan­cial in­ter­ests of the busi­ness class. St Gre­go­ry, of Nys­sa, in 379AD wrote a the­o­log­i­cal at­tack on the in­sti­tu­tion of slav­ery, ar­gu­ing that claim­ing own­er­ship of an­oth­er hu­man be­ing steals what ex­clu­sive­ly be­longs to God, as scrip­ture teach­es that hu­mans are made in the im­age and like­ness of God.

Je­sus him­self was sold out for the price of a dead slave by Ju­das: 30 pieces of sil­ver. Mod­ern the­olo­gians have in­ter­pret­ed this as God in the flesh pric­ing him­self as a slave and suf­fer­ing a low­ly death like a crim­i­nal to re­deem hu­man­i­ty from its sin by iden­ti­fy­ing with the most op­pressed in so­ci­ety.

Af­ter in­her­it­ing the ben­e­fits of a so­ci­ety en­riched by Chris­t­ian char­i­ta­ble works, Karl Marx wrote that ‘re­li­gion was the opi­ate of the peo­ple’ in his 1843 es­say A Con­tri­bu­tion to the Cri­tique of Hegel’s Phi­los­o­phy of Right, where Marx ar­gued that re­li­gion di­vert­ed the work­ing class from ad­dress­ing the earth­ly caus­es of their op­pres­sion. Gus­ta­vo Gutiér­rez lat­er wrote the book The­ol­o­gy of Lib­er­a­tion in 1971.

We see that hos­pi­tals, or­phan­ages and cri­tiques of slav­ery all pre­date Marx and Lib­er­a­tion the­ol­o­gy.

While I agree Marx has pro­vid­ed a use­ful frame­work for cri­tiquing cap­i­tal and eco­nom­ic sys­tems from an aca­d­e­m­ic per­spec­tive, in prac­tice, even com­mu­nist Chi­na adopt­ed a mar­ket econ­o­my and al­lowed pri­vate own­er­ship of cap­i­tal con­trary to Marx’s vi­sion.

Labour is seen as an im­por­tant ex­pres­sion of what it means to be hu­man in Marx­ism; to quote Marx in Karl Marx, Eco­nom­ic and Philo­soph­ic Man­u­scripts of 1844, “It is, there­fore, in his fash­ion­ing of the ob­jec­tive that man re­al­ly proves him­self to be a species-be­ing. Such pro­duc­tion is his ac­tive species-life. Through it, na­ture ap­pears as his work and his re­al­i­ty.”

My supreme con­cern with the ma­te­ri­al­ist world­view that un­der­girds Marx­ism and in­flu­ences Lib­er­a­tion The­ol­o­gy is that the meta­phys­i­cal dilem­mas posed by Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence in the con­text of the Marx­ist world­view. When­ev­er the first true ar­ti­fi­cial gen­er­al in­tel­li­gence is cre­at­ed, ca­pa­ble of mim­ic­k­ing any form of hu­man labour, the view that labour is cen­tral to be­ing hu­man will have to be se­ri­ous­ly ques­tioned.

Sev­er­al aca­d­e­mics have recog­nised this is­sue, in­clud­ing philoso­pher Dr Jamie Ter­ence Kel­ly, who in 2026 pub­lished Free Ro­bot Labour: Marx, Au­toma­tion, and the Fu­ture of AI. Dr Kel­ly ar­gues that AI will pro­duce ma­chines ca­pa­ble of labour­ing, and ar­gues that AI will be­come ar­ti­fi­cial com­rades, stat­ing, “We must be­gin to con­sid­er what sorts of re­la­tions can and should bind hu­man and ro­bot work­ers to­geth­er, and how those re­la­tion­ships can serve the needs of all.”

The gospel of Je­sus Christ preach­es that the life, death and res­ur­rec­tion of Christ sees hu­mans as hav­ing a soul and bear­ing the im­age of God, and there­fore the poor and op­pressed share the di­vine spark, while some Marx­ists see ro­bots and hu­mans as be­com­ing equals or com­rades be­cause of their world­view. With­out the gospel, are we al­so soul­less ro­bots?