Based on the care for the poor and oppressed that reverberates through both the Old and the New Testament in the Bible, liberation theology is a Christian movement largely in the Third World. The good news or Gospel is preached to local and indigenous peoples in terms which relate to their own consciousness and their own experience and which they find understandable because their conditions have provided the basis. Native religions are taken seriously and customs such as polygamy are not totally rejected out of hand but taken into consideration. Rather than a Church hierarchy, the structure is of small Christian communities of poor, usually lay, people, coming together to pray, study scripture and then relating this in their day-to-day lives by living in a manner similar to that of the early Church. The poor have a preferential option, just as in Christ's teaching it is clear that the rich find it hard to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Salvation is not just in the life hereafter but here and now, freedom from sin includes freedom from the ills of poverty and oppression and their dehumanizing effects. Liberation theology therefore works to eradicate institutionalized sin in the form of social systems that dehumanize as much as to eradicate individual sin. Indeed the latter is said not possible without changing the social structures which encourage it. The injustice of such systems is condemned as being as violent as the violent movements which spring up to oppose it, and to acquiesce to such systems is considered condoning and perpetuating the violence.
Although a grass roots movement, not a "theology from above" as is more traditional in the Church, some leaders of the Church have begun to put their authority behind social development rather than orthodox hierarchy and the status quo, and frequently in support of movements resisting (but not through physically violent means) formal or informal colonialization, capitalist materialism and other systems said to dehumanize. Liberation theologists go as far as to say that the God of the oppressor and the God of the oppressed are two different gods, the former making the rich too comfortable in their state while the the God of the poor is the God of the Judaic tradition leading His people to the Promised Land and anointing Jesus to preach to the poor and set the captives free. Much is made of the command to Moses to free God's people from Egyptian oppression. Through this understanding of the faith, links are being sought with other religions whose language and symbols are seen as not so different from those of the Christian.