Accountability

There is a sentence that sounds brave until you hear it from the underside of power.

You need to hold them accountable.

It is often said to the person who has already been wounded. The person who has already carried the cost, already spending too long wondering whether they are overreacting, whether they misunderstood, whether they should have spoken sooner, whether they should have spoken differently, whether their pain will now become a problem for everyone else.

It sounds empowering. It sounds like agency. It sounds like resilience.

But isn’t it simply the language of abandonment?

The one who has been harmed can speak, certainly, they can name. They can tell the truth as clearly as their trembling body allows.

But it was never the work of the wounded person to hold power accountable alone.

That is the work of a just community.

That is the work of systems that claim to have moral purpose.

That is the work of those who hold responsibility.

Liberation theology begins by asking us to look from below. It asks us to stop reading the world from the viewpoint of the powerful, the protected, the comfortable, the official, the polished, the already-heard. It asks us to ask who carries the burden of someone else’s freedom. Who pays the price for someone else’s silence. Who is asked to be patient while harm is explained, delayed, softened, contextualised or made vague.

This is not only a personal problem. It is a cultural and political one.

We live in a world very skilled at moving responsibility away from power. When something goes wrong, the question too often becomes: why did the wounded person not speak sooner? Why did they not use the right words? Why did they not follow the right process? Why did they not remain calmer, clearer, more strategic, more forgiving, more reasonable?

The burden slides quietly downward.

The vulnerable are asked to be more articulate.

The wounded are asked to be more measured.

The excluded are asked to be more patient.

The harmed are asked to become educators of those who harmed them.

Meanwhile, the structures that made the harm possible remain strangely untouched.

This is what liberation theology helps us name. Sin is not only personal. It is structural. It settles into habits, silences, customs, procedures, cultures and public performances of innocence. It hides inside the phrase, That is just how things are done. It survives when people learn what cannot be named. It grows stronger when those with less power are asked to absorb the anxiety of everyone else.

Sometimes sin also settles into the mates’ club (previously known as the boys club but, sadly, today, women join this club at the denigration of other women).

Not always in obvious ways. Not always through dramatic conspiracy or openly malicious intent. Sometimes it is quieter than that. It is the informal conversation before the meeting. The shared history. The familiar laugh. The benefit of the doubt extended more quickly to some than to others. The assumption that a good bloke or a sweet woman could not really have meant harm. The protective instinct that rises before the truth has even been fully heard.

The mates’ club does not always look like corruption. Sometimes it looks like loyalty. Sometimes it looks like discretion. Sometimes it looks like people protecting the peace, preserving relationships, avoiding embarrassment, or keeping things ‘in house.’ It can feel almost virtuous to those inside it because everyone believes they are being reasonable.

But from underneath, it feels very different.

From underneath, the mates’ club feels like a locked room where decisions are made before the wounded person enters. It feels like a culture where certain people are known personally and others are known only through the inconvenience of their complaint. It feels like the powerful are interpreted generously while the vulnerable are examined suspiciously.

This is why the language of accountability becomes dangerous when it is aimed in the wrong direction.

A culture that tells the wounded person to hold power accountable may sound courageous, but often it reveals its own failure. Why must the person pushed to the edge become responsible for dragging truth back to the centre? Why must the one who has carried the injury also carry the confrontation? Why must the vulnerable become the mechanism of justice?

That is not liberation.

It is Pharaoh asking the Hebrew slaves to make a more persuasive case.

It is the crowd asking the woman about to be stoned to explain the ethics of violence to the men holding the rocks.

It is Pilate washing his hands and pretending that distance is innocence.

It is a system saying, We do not know, while the wounded wonder how their pain has managed to remain so invisible.

Of course, not knowing can be honest. Human beings are complex. Stories must be heard carefully. Truth must never be replaced by assumption. Justice needs process, patience and care.

But there is a kind of not knowing that is not humility.

It is avoidance.

There is a kind of complexity that is not wisdom.

It is protection.

There is a kind of neutrality that is not fairness.

It is the preservation of the status quo.

When those with responsibility say, We do not know, the next question must be theological: why has the cry of the vulnerable not been enough to make you look?

What has prevented knowing?

Who has not been heard?

What signs were explained away?

What patterns were missed?

Who benefits when things remain unclear?

Who is protected by vagueness?

Who is made unsafe by the delay?

And perhaps most uncomfortably: who is already in the room with power before the truth arrives?

These are not merely administrative questions. They are questions of conversion.

In Exodus, God hears the cry of the enslaved people. God does not ask them to submit a more polished report. God does not tell them to manage Pharaoh more effectively. God does not ask whether their tone is appropriate. God does not require them to prove that oppression has reached a suitable threshold before divine attention is granted.

God hears.

God sees.

God comes down.

That movement matters.

The God of liberation does not stand above history as a detached observer of competing perspectives. God enters history on the side of those whose dignity is being crushed. Not because the oppressed are perfect, but because their humanity has been placed at risk.

This is the scandal of the Gospel. God is not neutral in the face of suffering.

Jesus does not begin with the reputational anxiety of the powerful. He begins with the person on the ground. The woman bent over. The leper kept outside. The stranger treated as threat. The poor made invisible. The sinner turned into a public spectacle. The body pushed to the margin.

He sees from below.

That is why liberation theology remains so uncomfortable. It refuses to let power define reality for everyone else. It insists that the experience of the oppressed is not a footnote. It is a place of revelation. It is where the truth of a system is exposed.

A society reveals itself by where it places responsibility.

If responsibility is always pushed onto the wounded, then the system is not seeking justice. It is protecting itself.

If the person with less power is expected to be calm enough, clear enough, forgiving enough and brave enough before being believed, then the system has already chosen whom it trusts.

If those who hold power are allowed to say, We did not know, without being asked why they did not know, then ignorance becomes a shelter.

And ignorance can be very comfortable for the powerful.

The cultural-political system we live in often rewards this comfort. It rewards the ability to sound reasonable while avoiding responsibility. It rewards the careful phrase, the delayed response, the managed statement, the performance of concern without the cost of change. It rewards those who can turn harm into debate, suffering into optics, and justice into a matter of timing.

It also rewards the mates’ club: the network of belonging where some people are instinctively protected because they are familiar, useful, liked, powerful, or simply one of us. It rewards the quiet assumption that loyalty to the group is more important than truth for the person outside it. It rewards those who know how to move within the room, and punishes those who have to knock from the margins.

This is why the wounded often feel so tired.

They are not only carrying what happened. They are carrying the system’s refusal to see what happened. They are carrying the endless demand to explain, prove, justify, soften, translate and survive. They are carrying the strange expectation that they must be both the evidence of harm and the agent of repair.

There is a deep injustice in asking the wounded person to become the educator, reconciler, documenter, witness, advocate and healer all at once.

There is an even deeper injustice when their exhaustion is later used as evidence against them.

Christian language can make this worse when it is misused. We can speak of forgiveness before truth has been honoured. We can call for peace before justice has been attempted. We can praise someone’s grace while quietly depending on their silence. We can ask the vulnerable to be Christlike in a way we never ask of the powerful.

But the cross is not a command for the wounded to quietly absorb harm.

The cross is the exposure of a violent system.

It reveals what happens when religious, political and cultural power collude to protect themselves. It shows us how quickly a community can sacrifice the innocent in order to preserve order. It shows us how easy it is for authority to wash its hands, for crowds to be manipulated, for truth to be mocked, and for suffering to be made public while responsibility disappears.

The resurrection is God’s refusal to let that system have the final word.

So when someone says, You need to hold them accountable, perhaps the more theological response is this:

No.

The wounded person may speak the truth.

But the community must carry the responsibility for justice.

The wounded person may name the harm.

But those with power must ask why the harm was possible, why it was not seen sooner, why the truth had to fight so hard to be heard, and what must now change.

That is accountability.

Not the lonely courage of the victim.

Not the private endurance of the vulnerable.

Not the spiritualised pressure to move on.

Accountability is truth given structure.

It is a community deciding that the cry of the wounded will not be treated as an inconvenience. It is a refusal to let politeness become complicity. It is the courage to examine not only what happened, but what kind of culture allowed it to happen.

Liberation is not simply the right of the wounded to speak.

Liberation is what happens when power is finally required to listen.

And when power says, We did not know, the question must not be allowed to disappear.

Why not?

Because if the cry of the vulnerable was not enough to make us look, then the problem is not only what we failed to know. The problem is what we had trained ourselves not to see.

The Gospel does not ask the wounded to make peace with the room that excluded them. It asks the room to be broken open until truth has somewhere to stand.