Political Theology

César Chávez

1927–1993

César Chávez was a nonviolent labor leader who combined union organizing with civil rights activism and Catholic social teaching to win contracts and legal protections for America’s farm workers

John Calvin

1509–1564

John Calvin was the most politically consequential Protestant Reformer, whose theology of resistance, vocation, and godly civil government shaped Puritan England, colonial America, and the modern Protestant world

Rosa Parks

1913–2005

Rosa Parks was a trained civil rights activist whose deliberate refusal to give up her Montgomery bus seat sparked the boycott that launched the modern civil rights struggle

Ayatollah Khomeini

1902–1989

Ayatollah Khomeini was the Shia cleric and Islamic revolutionary who overthrew Iran's Shah in 1979 and built a durable theocratic republic on the doctrine of clerical rule

Oliver Cromwell

1599–1658

Oliver Cromwell was the Puritan revolutionary who led Parliament's forces against Charles I and ruled England's only republic as Lord Protector — at once champion of parliamentary liberty and military dictator

Leo Tolstoy

1828–1910

Leo Tolstoy was a Christian anarchist and pacifist — Russia's supreme novelist who renounced wealth and coercive authority and inspired Gandhi's nonviolent resistance

C.S. Lewis

1898–1963

Christian apologist, Narnia author, moral law

Gustavo Gutiérrez

Gustavo Gutiérrez was the Peruvian priest who founded liberation theology, insisting that Christian faith take the side of the poor and confront the structures that produce poverty

Oscar Romero

Oscar Romero was the Salvadoran archbishop whose defense of the poor against state terror made him liberation theology's most famous martyr and a canonized symbol of the church confronting unjust power

Augustine of Hippo

354–430

Augustine of Hippo was the Christian theologian of the two cities, whose City of God gave the West its most influential account of political authority as legitimate, necessary, and never ultimate

Walter Rauschenbusch

1861–1918

Walter Rauschenbusch was the Baptist founder of the Social Gospel, whose eleven years in Hell's Kitchen convinced him that poverty was structural rather than spiritual — and that the church was obliged to say so

Joseph de Maistre

1753–1821

Joseph de Maistre was the godfather of European counter-revolutionary thought, arguing that the French Revolution proved liberalism false and that tradition, faith, and the executioner were the real foundations of order

Dorothy Day

1897–1980

Dorothy Day was a radical Catholic pacifist whose Catholic Worker movement fed the hungry, housed the homeless, and refused any distinction between personal holiness and political transformation

Eric Voegelin

1901–1985

Eric Voegelin was an anti-totalitarian political philosopher who diagnosed Nazism and Communism as secular Gnosticisms — political religions trying to immanentize the eschaton and build heaven through politics

Martin Luther

1483–1546

Martin Luther was the Augustinian monk whose protest against indulgences fractured Western Christendom and whose insistence on conscience over ecclesiastical authority set the terms of political debate for centuries

Reinhold Niebuhr

1892–1971

Reinhold Niebuhr was the theologian of Cold War liberalism who gave American politics a doctrine of original sin — the insistence that every political program is corrupted by the pride of those who wield it

Martin Luther King Jr.

1929–1968

Martin Luther King Jr. was the minister and political philosopher who fused Gandhian nonviolence, Christian personalism, and American democratic ideals into the most morally serious political movement of the twentieth century

Søren Kierkegaard

1813–1855

Søren Kierkegaard was the father of existentialism, whose attack on Hegelian system-building and the complacency of state Christianity reshaped 20th-century philosophy, theology, and political thought

Baruch Spinoza

1632–1677

Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch-Jewish rationalist and early theorist of liberal toleration whose radical pantheism and defense of free thought made him the most dangerous thinker of the 17th century

Carl Schmitt

1888–1985

Carl Schmitt was an anti-liberal legal theorist and committed Nazi whose accounts of sovereignty, the state of exception, and the friend-enemy distinction still haunt debates over liberal democracy

Hugo Grotius

1583–1645

Hugo Grotius was the Dutch natural-law jurist called the father of international law, whose On the Law of War and Peace grounded rights and obligations in reason for a Europe fractured by religious war

Malcolm X

1925–1965

Malcolm X was a Black nationalist who preached self-reliance, separatism, and self-defense 'by any means necessary' — until a pilgrimage to Mecca turned him toward a global human-rights vision cut short by assassination

Aldous Huxley

1894–1963

Brave New World author, perennial philosophy

Harriet Tubman

1822–1913

Harriet Tubman was an abolitionist who escaped slavery and led some 70 enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad, later serving as a Union spy and supporting women's suffrage

Fyodor Dostoevsky

1821–1881

Fyodor Dostoevsky was an Orthodox Christian conservative novelist — transformed by Siberian imprisonment from socialist radical — whose great novels prophesied where revolutionary nihilism would lead

Simone Weil

1909–1943

Simone Weil was a radical philosopher and mystic whose politics ran from union organizing and factory labor to a Christian critique of uprooted industrial civilization — she died at thirty-four on the rations of occupied France

Mahatma Gandhi

1869–1948

Mahatma Gandhi was the Indian independence leader who transformed nonviolent resistance from a personal moral stance into a systematic political philosophy — and demonstrated that it could defeat an empire