A Liberation Theologist Offers Salvation to Minority White Supremacists

Daniel Greenfield November 04, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Miguel De La Torre, a former president of the Society of Christian Ethics, showed up at a small Catholic university, telling students that minorities can be white, but that they can also be saved.

“Those of us who are colored, some of us can also be white," the professor of Latinx Studies at the Iliff School of Theology assured all races suffering from whiteness. "But the good news is there is salvation."

The lecture by De La Torre, who is also an ordained minister, claimed that minorities "with colonized minds seek to assimilate to a Euroamerican version of Christianity" and proposed a post-colonial alternative based "on the revolutionary activities of the Young Lords".

Students at Carlow University, founded by the Sisters of Mercy, could look forward to abandoning "EuroAmerican Christianity" for the much more authentic theology of a racist Puerto Rican street gang.

Much of this material already showed up in De La Torre's books, “Burying White Privilege: Resurrecting a Badass Christianity” and "Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers".

"A White Christian worldview can be advocated by those who are black or brown, Jew or Muslim, queer or heteronormative, atheist or humanist," De La Torre argued in “Decolonizing Christianity”.

In the woke professor's excitingly inclusive world, anyone can be a white supremacist.

All you have to do is believe.

Or defend the current "political, economic, and social structures" and "embrace white philosophical and theological paradigms." That could potentially encompass the Bible and the entire western canon. Not to mention notions such as private property and the nuclear family.

But what does the “badass believer” believe in?

“I don’t know if there is a God or not; and quite frankly I really don’t care,” De La Torre told them.

Instead he urged students to, "crucify whiteness".

To be a truly badass believer is to believe in nothing except your own impassioned rhetoric.

De La Torre claims that he’s not a theologian, but he’s quite interested in “Liberation Theology”, just not the actual kind. His theology is reducible to the familiar leftist formulas of power relations and the eternal Marxist Manichean struggle of the oppressor and the oppressor.

Thus, he writes that, "to read Genesis is to read the testimonies of illegal aliens", but also that "one of the book's purposes is to provide moral justification for the eventual genocide of the promised land's original indigenous inhabitants."

The Bible can be mined for social justice purposes, but is ultimately evil.

“The decolonization of the minds of people of color begins with the total rejection of the dead white God and the dead white Jesus. And let the dead bury the dead,” he argues elsewhere.

What better message could there be for the Catholic Carlow University and his own Methodist Iliff School of Theology?

The salvation of minorities from Euroamerican Christianity is De La Torre’s business. The child of Santeria worshipers, De La Torre joined the Young Republicans and became a born-again Christian. After getting into a conflict with conservative Christians, he was reborn as a leftist “Baptecostal Catholic Santero” and constantly retells his own wokeness conversion story.

"It took years of decolonizing my mind of the subtle white supremacy I was taught," he writes in an article attacking the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

By "decolonizing" his mind, De La Torre actually colonized it with unsubtle racial supremacism.

The best way to understand the true meaning of a leftist term is to invert it. Decolonization, colonizes. Liberation theology, enslaves. Social justice is individual oppression. Radical love is traditional hate.

In the introduction to Decolonizing Christianity, De La Torre, a white Euro-American man of Cuban origin who identifies as an oppressed minority, declares that it's "not written for Euro-Americans in the futile hope of shaming or encouraging them to do the right thing. For almost 250 years, white Christian terrorism has been the legitimized law of the land."

Could there be anything more Christian than writing off millions of people because of their race?

The paradox of leftist radicalism is that it is an inverse faith, defined by the negative dark images it projects onto others, while lacking any meaning or substance of its own.

Leftism is a void cloaked in outrage. Its ravenous desire to be angered by the stories of victims is used to disguise the hubris of its appetites. Leftists don’t believe in God, because they want to be gods. Yet they’re incapable of creating, only destroying. What does that make them?

That is why leftists always accuse others of their own sins.

Suffering from racism, they campaign against it. And they prescribe their nobler social justice racism, rooted in intersectionality, post-colonial analysis and fifty academic texts, as the answer.

Liberation Theology, like its Tikkun Olam counterpart in Judaism, and all the various social justice theologies, are obsessed with evil, but incapable of envisioning good apart from it.

And thus, in keeping with another of his books, De La Torre told students to choose “hopelessness.”

“I fight for justice not because I am going to win,” he said, “I am not."

Leftists never claim to have won. Winning would involve accepting responsibility and accountability. The Communists took over the Soviet Union, but would never admit to having won, instead blaming all their problems on the Czarist regime or on domestic subversion. A Biden administration that admitted to having won would have to take responsibility for the economic crisis, instead of playing the victim and blaming corporations, or Putin.

A movement of perpetual victims who seek absolute power, yet claim to be powerless, is at the dark heart of leftist narcissism. Leftists, if you believe them, are always the underdogs, always oppressed, even when they have all the wealth and power. They are always abused, even and especially when they’re the ones doing the abusing.

Consider the spectacle of the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, backed by the wealth of Amazon’s former CEO, claiming that any criticism of her is harassment, only to then stalk and doxx another woman because she disagreed with her political views on Twitter.

The Left demands the total inversion of truth as a precondition of belonging to its movement. Its mysteries are rooted in its hypocrisies. It multiplies absurdities until it even inverts itself. It seeks new enemies to fight until, but without those enemies, which require its followers to destroy parts of themselves, those men and women have no idea who they even are anymore.

"As a committed liberationist-leaning Christian, I may have no choice but to say the Shahada and convert to Islam if I wish to be faithful to my beliefs," De La Torre insists at one point.

Having thoroughly decolonized himself, De La Torre is ready to be colonized all over again.

Since the cult of social justice is the search for the greatest gold mine of victimhood, what else is there for a Baptecostal Catholic Santero to do except become a Muslim?

If you don’t believe in God, you may as well not believe in Allah. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. Thank you for reading.