Decolonizing Faith: Frantz Fanon, Liberation Theology, and the Struggle for Dignity

Introduction

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) and Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928–2024), both thinkers from the Global South, emerged from distinct geopolitical margins and intellectual traditions shaped by the legacies of colonialism, systemic exclusion, and contested modernities. Fanon, born in Fort-de-France, Martinique—then a French colony marked by racial stratification—was trained in psychiatry in France and became a central figure in the Algerian liberation struggle. His work developed a revolutionary humanism rooted in existentialism, psychoanalysis, and Marxist critique. A vocal opponent of imperialism, Fanon spent his final weeks in Washington, D.C., seeking treatment for leukemia after an earlier attempt in the Soviet Union. He died in Bethesda, Maryland, and was buried in Algeria, the nation he embraced as his own.

Gutiérrez, born and deceased in Lima, Peru, developed his theology amid the persistent poverty and inequality of Latin America. A Catholic priest and foundational voice of Liberation Theology, he reframed the Christian faith not as an abstract doctrine but as a call to historical praxis rooted in the lived experience of the poor. His “preferential option for the poor” became central to his theological vision, which blended pastoral engagement, philosophical inquiry, and critique of structural injustice (127). While Fanon moved through psychiatry and revolution, Gutiérrez worked within ecclesial and academic structures to articulate a faith committed to social transformation.

From healing to liberation: a shared vocation, divergent frameworks

At first glance, the profiles appear opposed: Fanon was a secular revolutionary critical of institutional religion, while Gutiérrez, a Catholic priest, placed the Christian faith at the center of social transformation. Yet beneath this contrast lies a shared ethical orientation shaped by experiences of injustice, displacement, transnational formation, and close engagement with the suffering of the poor.

Both began their intellectual paths with a desire to heal. Fanon studied clinical and forensic psychiatry in Lyon; Gutiérrez initially pursued medicine in Lima before turning to theology. Fanon developed a critical psychiatry attuned to the psychic wounds of colonialism, while Gutiérrez left medical studies to pursue philosophy and theology in Louvain, Lyon, Paris, and Rome, ultimately earning a doctorate from the University of Lyon. Their attentiveness to human fragility matured into holistic visions of liberation—one through revolution, the other through spiritual and social accompaniment.

Their formation in European institutions sharpened rather than diluted their critical perspectives. Fanon confronted the epistemic violence embedded in colonial categories of reason; Gutiérrez returned to Peru determined to rethink Christian doctrine from the underside of history. Europe was, for both, a site of confrontation rather than assimilation—a space where the universalism of the center was unmasked as complicit with domination.

Returning to their peripheries marked a decisive turn. Fanon joined the Algerian liberation movement and worked at Blida-Joinville, witnessing firsthand the psychological toll of colonialism (57). Gutiérrez took up parish work in Lima’s impoverished barrios while forming generations of socially committed students. Their thought emerged from the underside of history, in dialogue with the excluded and in resistance to the structures that sustained their exclusion.

What ultimately unites Fanon and Gutiérrez is not shared doctrine but a common ethical stance: a refusal to accept dehumanization as destiny and a deep conviction that liberation—psychic, spiritual, and structural—is both possible and necessary. Positioned at the margins, they developed vocabularies capable of confronting global power. In both cases, intellectual rigor was inseparable from existential urgency, and their lives bear witness to an unwavering commitment to the dignity of the oppressed.

Fanon, colonialism, and the crisis of the human

Fanon’s philosophical thought emerges from the lived contradictions of colonial modernity, where the colonized subject is simultaneously pushed toward assimilation and denied recognition. His psychoanalytic critique reveals that colonial domination is not limited to material expropriation but penetrates the inner life of the oppressed, shaping perceptions, desires, and identities. The colonized are not merely excluded from power but also constructed as ontologically deficient: pathologized, racialized, and deemed less than fully human. In the Antillean context, Fanon shows how mastering the colonizer’s language becomes a strategy for survival, reinforcing the illusion that proximity to whiteness grants access to humanity (105).

Yet Fanon rejects the idea that the colonized is merely a passive product of domination. He identifies in the very processes of alienation the conditions for resistance. If it is the white man who creates the Black as “other,” it is the Black subject who reclaims agency through Négritude—a counter-discourse that affirms identity and dignity in the face of negation (47). This dialectic of oppression and response makes the colonized self both fractured and insurgent, wounded yet capable of redefinition. Fanon’s vision of liberation thus moves beyond sociopolitical emancipation toward disalienation—a radical effort to overcome inherited roles and forge new human relationships free of subjugation and hierarchy (206).

In this framework, decolonization is not simply a political transition but an existential rupture. Fanon denounces the illusion of national independence without structural transformation, reminding us that the wealth of the West is inseparable from centuries of extraction, exploitation, and human disposability across the Global South (102). Europe, in his view, is not just the site of Enlightenment but the material and symbolic product of global plunder. Thus, to decolonize is to dismantle the colonial world in its economic, epistemic, and ontological dimensions.

Fanon’s rejection of Western humanism stems from its claim to universality—a claim that excludes the colonized while exalting a civilization built on their erasure. Against this, he calls for alternative imaginaries rooted in the experiences of the oppressed. His thought, though secular in orientation, carries a spiritual urgency: liberation as collective rebirth, as historical resurrection. In this, he converges with theological projects like Liberation Theology, which affirms that salvation is not a matter of transcendence but of historical transformation. For both Fanon and Gutiérrez, liberation begins with the cry of the suffering and the ethical refusal to let that suffering remain unanswered.

Liberation theology and the preferential option for the poor

Emerging in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, Liberation Theology marked a radical reorientation of Christian thought and practice. Rooted in the lived experiences of the poor and oppressed, it reinterprets the Gospel as a call to social, political, and economic transformation. Gustavo Gutiérrez, widely recognized as the founder of this theological current, formulated the concept of a “preferential option for the poor,” affirming that God’s salvific action is most fully revealed in concrete solidarity with the suffering and the marginalized (88).

Liberation Theology rejects any interpretation of suffering as divinely ordained. Instead, it denounces suffering as the result of historical injustice and structural violence. Faith, in this tradition, is not a matter of abstract belief but a praxis—a dynamic interplay between reflection and transformative action. While drawing critically from Marxist analysis, it remains grounded in Christian anthropology and eschatological hope, insisting that the pursuit of justice is integral to the very nature of faith. This perspective arises from a fundamental pastoral and theological dilemma: how to speak credibly of God’s love in contexts where life itself is denied through poverty, violence, and exclusion. As Gutiérrez poignantly asks, how can one proclaim that God loves the poor when their existence is marked by the daily negation of that love? (xxxiv). Theology, then, becomes a response to this question—a language born from Christian commitment and prayer, yet inseparable from the suffering of the Latin American poor. It is not merely a theology about the poor but a theology from the poor, shaped by the urgency of liberation.

The ecclesial and political impact of this theological movement was profound. The 1968 Medellín Conference of Latin American bishops signaled a decisive rupture with clerical conservatism, embracing the core principles of Liberation Theology and affirming the Church’s responsibility in confronting structural sin. This new orientation elevated the dignity of the poor as historical subjects, challenging both ecclesiastical hierarchies and imperial systems of domination.

Praxis as transformative engagement

At the heart of both Fanon’s and Gutiérrez’s thought lies the centrality of praxis. For Fanon, liberation is inseparable from revolutionary action rooted in the lived experience of colonial oppression. Domination, in his view, is not an abstraction but a visceral reality—inscribed on the body, embedded in the psyche, and reproduced through everyday social structures. Overcoming it requires not contemplation but confrontation. He thus emphasizes that the fundamental task of our time is not simply to produce a critique of inequality but also to radically redistribute wealth and dismantle the obscene logic of accumulation that continues to define global relations (175).

Gutiérrez articulates a parallel vision grounded in a theological framework where Christian praxis transcends acts of charity or isolated moral intention. It entails a sustained commitment to the transformation of unjust structures. Theology, as he famously puts it, is “critical reflection on Christian praxis in the light of the Word” (11). This reflection is not detached from history; it must be born from and continually return to the lived struggles of the oppressed. Within this perspective, faith cannot be separated from concrete engagement with reality. Spirituality is not measured by withdrawal from the world but by active participation in the processes that seek to undo suffering, restore dignity, and confront exclusion.

In both thinkers, then, liberation is not a gift granted from above but a process enacted from below—through collective, embodied, and transformative action. This convergence affirms a crucial ethical and philosophical insight: emancipation demands more than analysis; it calls for risk, commitment, and solidarity. Fanon’s existential urgency and Gutiérrez’s faith-driven activism meet in a shared understanding that liberation must be lived, not merely theorized.

The agency of the marginalized: resistance and faith

Fanon’s affirmation of the colonized masses as historical agents constitutes a radical rupture with the dominant currents of Western political theory, which have long positioned the oppressed as passive recipients of action rather than as subjects of history. In contrast, Fanon locates revolutionary potential in the very experiences of marginalization and struggle. Through acts of resistance, the colonized not only reclaim their humanity but also reshape the meaning and scope of the political itself. Gutiérrez advances a parallel insight: the poor are not objects of charity or pastoral intervention but protagonists of their own liberation. Poverty, he insists, is not destiny but condition—and therefore transformable. In their struggle for justice, the poor become theological subjects, revealing the presence of God in history through their embodied hope and resistance.

This shared emphasis on agency inverts both colonial and ecclesiastical hierarchies, unsettling frameworks that mediate power from above. Where colonial systems impose silence, Fanon and Gutiérrez call for speech; where institutional religion often transmits authority from distant centers, they insist on empowerment from below. Faith, in this vision, is not resignation but a source of strength, a means of reclaiming voice and dignity within structures designed to suppress both.

At the heart of this perspective lies a sharp critique of the moral authority traditionally claimed by European modernity. The so-called values of the West—conceived as universal, rational, and emancipatory—are unmasked as inseparable from a history of colonial, racial, and patriarchal violence (282). What often passes for philosophical neutrality is exposed as a form of epistemic erasure, one that excludes precisely those concerns and experiences most central to the lives of the oppressed. Against this background, the voices of Fanon and Gutiérrez emerge not only as correctives but also as foundational to any genuine reflection on liberation and human dignity.

Decolonizing theology and critiquing Western universalism

A central point of convergence between Frantz Fanon and Liberation Theology is their shared critique of Western universalism as an epistemological tool of colonial domination. The figure of the “universal man” as European is exposed as a Eurocentric abstraction imposed as normative, concealing historical and cultural differences beneath a mask of false neutrality. Genuine universality, by contrast, must arise from intercultural dialogue and the recognition of historically situated subjects. This vision aligns with Liberation Theology’s insistence that theological reflection must begin with concrete, lived realities—particularly those of the poor—rather than abstract doctrinal systems. Universals become pathological when they operate as masks that distort experience and compel the oppressed to internalize alien and self-negating ideals (212). The colonial conditions under which humanity has been defined, distributed, and denied jeopardize humanity.

The task, then, is not to abandon the aspiration to universality but to reimagine it from below—as a horizon shaped by justice, plurality, and the voices of the excluded. Both Fanon and Liberation Theology call for a pluriversal approach to knowledge rooted in history, context, and liberation. In this sense, Liberation Theology becomes a decolonial theology, and Fanon a prophetic interlocutor in its renewal. This epistemological commitment is not merely theoretical but enacted through performative declarations that denounce injustice and provoke ethical and political response—proclamations understood not as abstract discourse but as urgent appeals to conscience and collective transformation.

Conclusion: Converging paths of liberation

Fanon was deeply critical of institutional religion, yet he did not reject the spiritual dimension of human life. He recognized the ambivalence of religious traditions in colonial contexts: often mobilized to pacify and control, yet also capable of nurturing resistance, preserving dignity, and sustaining hope among the oppressed. This tension offers fertile ground for theological engagement with his thought, especially when faith is understood not as a submission but as a site of struggle and renewal.

Liberation Theology does not ignore the Church’s historical complicity with systems of domination—it confronts it directly. Its project is to recover the subversive core of the Christian tradition to reinterpret faith as a catalyst for historical transformation. In dialogue with Fanon, theology is invited to undergo its own decolonial conversion: to shed its inherited languages of empire and speak instead from the underside of history. This task is urgent in a world where domination now masks itself in cultural pluralism, political correctness, and neoliberal tolerance. The Manichean structures of colonialism endure in neocolonial forms—polished, globalized, and technocratic—while billions remain suffocated by invisible systems of control (270). In such a world, faith must no longer console the afflicted; it must organize their hope.

The convergence between Fanon and Liberation Theology provides critical resources for confronting contemporary structures of exclusion, dispossession, and erasure. Fanon’s call to rehumanize the oppressed and Gutiérrez’s vision of justice at the heart of Christian discipleship converge in a shared ethical project: a global ethic of solidarity grounded in praxis and attuned to the voices of the silenced. Their insights resonate with broader ecclesial declarations—from the affirmation of human dignity in the Second Vatican Council to the Medellín Conference’s call for liberation in all its dimensions—offering theological legitimacy to the decolonial imperative.

Decolonizing faith demands more than doctrinal revision; it requires a radical transformation of how we think, act, and relate. In bringing Fanon and Gutiérrez into critical conversation, this reflection traced the outlines of a common horizon where revolutionary thought and theological praxis meet. Where critique encounters hope, religion ceases to be the opiate of empire and becomes the weapon of the poor. As we mark the centenary of Fanon’s birth and the first anniversary of Gutiérrez’s passing—nearly a century after his own birth—the urgency of their shared vision remains undiminished. Their voices, forged in struggle and rooted in the dignity of the oppressed, continue to call us toward a liberated humanity yet to be fully realized.