Is Physical Liberation Good Enough?

And Why The Answer Is A Resounding Yes

What’s the point of liberating people physically if they’ll never be liberated spiritually?

As someone who leads a stellar team that mobilizes the Canadian Church to seek justice with an anti-trafficking nonprofit organization, it’s fairly normal for me to hear Western Christians (including church leaders) ask this question.

Before I answer this question, allow me to address its premise. Here’s the first thing I’d like to point out: It takes a a certain amount of privilege to even think of this question - a privilege that people living in oppression do not have. Because only someone with significant distance from people marginalized by oppression and injustice can bring themselves to ask a question like this.

Secondly, this question centers ourselves (Western Christians with some distance from marginalization) and decenters real people living in oppression (such as the 50 million people being victimized by human trafficking at this very moment).

Imagine asking someone being oppressed if we should prioritize their physical liberation because we have concerns that they may not end up believing what we believe. Imagine the shock and horror on their faces at our audacity to even pose such an insensitive question to someone physically suffering in front of us.

Nowhere in the Gospels do we see Jesus saying, “Do you believe what I believe?” to sick people or demon possessed people before healing them from their physical suffering.

The Christian ethic should be one that always prioritizes the needs of our marginalized neighbours - just like Jesus did for us while we were marginalized by our sin. And just like Jesus did for the physically marginalized people around him as we see in the Gospels.

Now to answer the question itself: To question the point of physically liberating people who will never be spiritually liberated is to put ourselves in the place of God. After all, who are we to presume who is actually in the kingdom of God versus who isn’t? The obsession to gatekeep “who’s in” versus “who’s out” is also something that is fairly on brand for Western Christianity. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Majority World Christian (in the Majority World) raise this question.

But perhaps, this gets to a deeper question at the heart of Western Christianity:

Could it be that we’re inclined to prioritize success over faithfulness?

Here’s what I mean - if we truly prioritized faithfulness over success, wouldn’t we care more about doing the right thing (seeking justice for our marginalized neighbours) over doing the successful thing (winning converts)?

If we truly prioritized faithfulness (liberating our marginalized neighbours from physical oppression just as Scripture commands us to) over success (having absolute certainty that physical liberation would also lead to soul salvation), wouldn’t we be ecstatically content with liberating people physically?

Because here’s the God’s honest truth:

As Christians, we don’t liberate people from physical oppression so that they ultimately put their faith in Jesus.

As Christians, we liberate people from physical oppression because they are made in the image of God and are worthy of being liberated physically. Period.

If I may be so bold: The whole mindset of verbally or non-verbally telling oppressed peoples, “I am helping your physical needs so that you do something in return” is anti-Christ & non-Christian at best and maliciously manipulative at worst. Because love Jesus’ way is laying our lives down and liberating others without expecting *anything* in return.

If liberating people from physical oppression seems “incomplete” or “insufficient” to us as Christians, we’re doing Christianity entirely wrong. And if we’ve reduced our faith to this reciprocal transactionalism, there’s really not much that separates our Christian faith from that of the colonizers’ & slaveholders’ christian faith - a faith that was okay with the oppression of physical bodies as long as “souls are being saved”.

Personally speaking (as I do in all my writing here) - this is why I have a *very* difficult time supporting Christian churches and organizations that only liberate people physically if they commit to spiritual activities (ex: attending Bible studies / classes, church services, etc.).

Because Christians who love their neighbours conditionally while expecting something in return don’t really love their neighbours. And they certainly don’t love their neighbours the way Jesus first unconditionally loved us.

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