The World Come of Age offers a cultural history of ideas that culminated in a radical political theology forwarded by the first generation of liberation theologians. Representing those marginalized by modern politics and religion due to race, class, or sex status, liberationists built a trans-American intellectual movement. Lilian Calles Barger sets the stage in the 1960s and 1970s, as black theologian James Cone, Catholic priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, and feminists Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether led the way in bridging the gulf between the religious values of justice and equality and political pragmatism. Sharing a heightened awareness of oppression with Latin American revolutionaries, Black Power and women’s liberation movements, and a Third World consciousness, liberationists honed their theo-political impulses. They unmasked the ideas that underwrote the white/black, male/female, rich/poor ordering of the world, not only within given societies but between the political and economic center and the periphery of the modern world. Questioning the religious/political divide with its privatized religion, they reconstructed thinking about God’s relationship to the world. Combining strands of radical politics, social theory, theological antecedents, and the history and experience of subordinated groups, they challenged the legitimating role of theology that dominated the mid-twentieth century. Liberationists secularized the meaning of Christian salvation combined with enlightened notions of freedom into an integral liberation and sought to recover a religious vitalism to instigate social action. The World Come of Age demonstrates how, by redefining the theo-political public space, liberation theologians set the stage for the subsequent torrent of religious activism across the ideological spectrum.