I have no problems with being both religious and political, but the “Christian left” as a movement is pretty much doomed.
Now that’s not to say that some individual liberal Christians will not become more active politically, and maybe help remove some of the odious Republicans from office. But there will never be a Christian left the way there is a Christian right.
There are many reasons why, but one fundamental one stands out: Liberal Christians just aren’t willing to do — maybe they don’t have — what it takes to be successful in the political context.
What do I mean by that? Bottom line is that there is only one way to affect policy in American politics, and that is to elect candidates who will go to the wall for your proposals. Liberal Christians want to focus on the policy part without getting involved in the election part. As a result, their influence in the aggregate is practically nil.
If there is such a thing as a card-carrying member of the Christian left, that would be me. Raised in a Christian home, educated at Christian colleges, I came to the conclusion at a young age that Jesus would have fit in more on the “liberal” side of the fence if he were alive today. If you translate the Bible’s message to policy, it would side more with food stamps than stamping out gays.
For years I read Sojourners, the first and maybe still most influential Christian left publication run by the Rev. Jim Wallis, who is the poster boy for the movement. But Wallis is so dead set against being perceived as partisan, his writings became almost comically evenhanded. I found myself continually frustrated and angry by his “on-the-other-handism.” Even on issues where the magazine clearly sided with Democrats, he couldn’t come right out and defend the Democratic position. A negative comment about the Republican’s voting for something like funding “Star Wars” had to be followed by a swat at the minority Democrats — who voted the way Wallis wanted — for some trivial slight.
During the 2000 election, when it was clear that Al Gore represented a far more worthy clear choice when it came to the issues that concerned liberal Christians, Wallis was ridiculously evenhanded, obsessing over George W. Bush’s patently phony compassionate conservative rhetoric and faith-based pandering. On core Sojourners issues like racial and gender equality, war and peace and justice for the poor, Al Gore was a screaming better choice. Wallis, however, focused on the splinter issues without noticing the beams getting rammed into his eye.
The point is that getting things done in politics is a fairly dirty business. You win, you get the spoils. With their “God is Neither a Republican nor a Democrat” mantra, Wallis and his ilk remain smartly above the fray but also unable to produce any results. Christian liberals can have the warm fuzzy knowledge that they are technically right about Yahweh’s political affiliations. Meanwhile, the poor are getting poorer, bigots are running the roost and World War III is on the horizon.
No matter how much I despise Jim Dobson and the evil snakes of the Religious Right, I have to admit they know how the system works. They have created influence by getting people elected — they bang their shoe on the table and the Republican establishment quakes.
Now I don’t think that it is the proper thing for Christian liberals to become Democrats in the way evangelical churches have become outposts of the GOP. That is a debasement of religion. And I don’t have all the answers to what is no doubt a thorny and age-old problem.
But some first steps need to be taken. One is that liberals have to admit that there is a dichotomy. Another is that they have to clearly denounce evil for what it is, and if that sounds partisan, well, so be it. There is no truth or justice in phony evenhandedness. Christian liberals like to draw inspiration from Biblical prophets, and that is not the way they operated.
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Being a bit of liberal-leaning Christian myself, I can relate to the frustration.
The problem with today’s politics is that to get good at it in today’s two-party system, you have to learn to play the game, and for a non-democrat liberal (christian or otherwise), the idea of playing the politics game is abhorrent.
But you’re right – the “christian left” won’t exist in our current political system. Not with any spot-light credibility.
Very well said. Playing the game is how a politician wins in this system, no matter how we feel about it. The right wins because they get enough people behind them; they push the right buttons and say enough of the things people want to hear to get elected. The left needs to learn this if it ever wants to get into and maintain power
… if the left “learns” this, the left has lost. that’s what I mean. By becoming an entity swayed by interest groups with money in their pockets, and by cozying up with other politicians to secure votes, the ideals of the left are lost – it just becomes a member of the two-party system, and ends up looking no different than the hypocrits currently in office.
in Christian terminology, that’s like saying that Jesus would have been more successful if he had joined the Pharisees, so he could be on that raised platform. And such a statement is nonsense to the Christian.
Thank you Jovial- I think that sums it up perfectly.
and then in what system are you two going to get your ideas across in?
I HATE the two-party system. but it is not going away anytime soon. I woould love a multi-party system and it has been tried. But a third party at this point brings us back to the situation in 2000. Remember Ralph Nader? Didn’t vote for him. Not because me of all people is against the Green party, but because I felt (rightly) that George bus would bring us to the brink of hell.
A third, fourth or fifth party needs to be engendered, but this process will take many years if it happens at all. In addition, to make it work it needs to begin at local levels. If we can’t get a ‘Green’ elected in Seattle or Portland, good luck getting it done anywhere else.
You live in capitalist, racist, misogynist, homophobic America, nowhere else. Until the system is changed, there is no other reality!
I don’t think social problems are fixed top-down. I think they’re fixed within spheres-of-influence. If you want to talk about reality, shape the reality around you, and encourage others to do the same. True change, for better or worse, happens virally. No president nor political party is going to stop a social problem, be it racism, mysogynism, etc. A president doesn’t effectively change attitudes. They simply take advantage of the prevailing winds… and that’s politics. If you want to “win”, you must change the winds.
I don’t disagree with you at all on this. Change happens beter from the bottom. You are speaking to someone who has not owned a car since 1979. I am not perfect, but I do what I can. But I also understand that most people drive and own cars and hardly give a fuck about the environment.
Effecting change from the bottom is a great thing, but it cannot be the only thing. Effecting change also means working within the confines of reality no matter how shity they may be. By ignoring the “top” the left has put itself in position where change from the bottom has become much more difficult.
You may have the best, most humane, Jesus/Budda-like ideas in the world. They may even work. But if no one knows or hears them, they don’t do anyone the slightest bit of good.
if nobody hears them, you’re doing something wrong.
i think what happens at the top is simply a reflection of what happens at the bottom. in our system, change at the top can happen every 4 years. if enough people are convinced that the neocons are doing a terrible job handling particular issues, the task of affecting the top on those issues is already done. we just have to wait it out.
Okay, since 1980 we have had one eight year stretch of semi-effective leadership that has left us with poor healthcare relative to other industrialized nations, an out of control defecit, at war with most of the Muslim world, “faith-based’ leadership, a nearly non-existent pension system, an ever-widening income gap, disappearing jobs, no welfare saftey net and women’s control of their of their reproductive systems under serious threat.
How long are you going to wait?
With the races as close as they were, it seems like nearly half the voting population was swayed into thinking it was a good idea at the time, and the republican party got in.
You’re also bringing up a lot of issues that can’t be blamed on the president or the administration. Disappearing jobs? What sense does it make to not outsource? Our ever increasing minimum-wage bandaid-of-a-solution has certainly fueled the outsourcing market, so outsourcing makes perfect sense. As for welfare, I’m not convinced that it’s a government’s responsibility to take care of the poor… but that’s a topic for another post. I think we’re commenting this post to death.
In any event, when enough people complain about anything, politicians take notice and want to stay in office, so they do what they can to appease the majority. That’s how they play the game.
the republican party got in because they changed the rules. In both 2000 and 2004, they stole legitimate votes because they had the means to power (see http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen) courtesy of the red queen.
As for outsourcing jobs I have an example: the US car industry. It clung to SUVs as mean to profit, while the Japanese and others engineered better vehicles. Now US automakers find themselves with outmoded vehicles for sale and an uncompetitive healthcare and pension burden that other countries provide to all workers. If the ‘merican people had enough courage and foresight to see the deadend road they were headed down, jobs would remain and the public would have more money. Since money=power, I think you can see the equation.
Also, it is not just jobs we are outsourcing. Someone has to finance all of the debt we owe. Debt translates to power someone has over you. Whoever holds your debt has the power to make you do as they command.
I understand how politicians play their game, but I think your ponderings about the “game” are under-informed and a bit naive. Sorry.
I still welcome your comments.
You misunderstood me. The republicans didn’t win by a landslide – they won by a razor-thin margin. My point is that it indicates that half of the majority votes (not including the throw-away votes to the non-party candidates) of the population voted for Bush. That can’t be ignored. Whether the republicans stole the election or not doesn’t matter for what I’m talking about. Half the voting population said they wanted a republican in office, which is a statement about american society, not about the people that are actually elected.
Since I believe that society is changed from the ground-up, the objective isn’t to get a new person in office – it’s to influence the people around me, and encourage them to do the same.
Drawing this back to christianity, prior to the Constantine’s introduction of the roman theocracy, grass-roots christianity flourished in spite of persecution. Once Constantine turned a pure clean religion into a political platform, he ruined it. And the church has never fully recovered. So… I’m not interested in the platform. I’m interested in helping people around me, making positive change in my community, and getting people around me to do the same.
I too want influence people around me for positive change. But that doesn’t mean I need to roll over and accept unjust and immoral tactics.
I understand what happen to grass-roots christianity. That makes my point. They lost power to influence and evil walked in. Acting postively doesn’t always mean playing nice!
jovial: Good point that Constantine’s rule totally changed Christianity for the worse. It’s amazing how few Christians have any idea of the history of their religion and the development of their beliefs.
yup. And today’s church follow Constantine’s influence – they want an earthly kingdom, and they want to sit on earthly thrones… and they don’t understand that Christ spoke of a heavenly kingdom on earth.
Jovial: Here is where it gets complicated, because I think the evidence is clear that Christ and his followers (and all Jews of that time) believed they were about to usher in an earthly kingdom. For example, read the first 7 or 8 verses of the book of acts. I think the idea of a “spiritual” kingdom would have been foreign to them.
I’m going to follow up on this in a future post.
The complication is in the definition of “kingdom.” Christ made it very clear that he spoke of a heavenly kingdom. Though He was king, He thrice rejected the earthly throne, because that’s not what He meant by “kingdom.” I think He would expect men to reject earthly glorification as well.