In our digital age, it is not uncommon to track one’s reading through various social media tools, the most common of which is probably Amazon-owned Goodreads. Ideally, these tools should be ways of discovering new book recommendations from people whose opinions and taste you trust. I expect at least some of my “friends” on Goodreads, though, would scratch their heads at the title of Phil Christman’s Why Christians Should Be Leftists.
This book is, by its title and nature, designed to provoke. Among those Americans who self-identify as Christian, most also identify as Republican or as Republican-leaning, excepting Black Protestant Christians, among whom 84% identify as Democrat or Democrat-leaning. This is not to say anything about how Christians ought to vote or identify, just to observe a current statistical fact: to suggest that “Christians should be leftists” is to propose something at odds with the majority of American Christians and their expressed political intuitions. This consensus doesn’t prove that Christians should lean toward the American right, but this background simply helps establish that Christman has presented a provocative book.
The book begins by posing questions about the political implications of the teachings of Jesus broadly, and the Sermon on the Mount specifically. As Kurt Vonnegut said on more than one occasion, even as a self-professed atheist socialist humanist, if Jesus hadn’t preached the Sermon on the Mount, he would not have wanted to be a human being. Christman describes an experience in college where, when reading the Sermon on the Mount aloud in a group with other students, “a fundamentally other way of thinking about them suddenly appeared to me as an option, a wholly different map of the world abruptly unfolded in my mind, in which… each of these people was a subject that a person could love, and was capable of giving love to others, and was therefore infinitely precious and infinitely interesting. The whole economy of losers and winners, with its implied scarcity of worthiness, had disappeared. Or not disappeared but receded: it didn’t seem inevitable or fully real anymore. It seemed like a lie that needed to be undone by the constant practice of universal, constant, unvarying love.” Jesus’s teachings, then, struck Christman as at odds with the “economy of losers and winners” that capitalism implied. And, so far, I expect many readers to agree: if “capitalism” is interpreted as defining the standards of “worthiness” in terms of economic inputs, outputs, rewards, etc., then Christ’s words would condemn it.
Christman is clearly a talented writer. A blurb on the front cover of the book proclaims that “Phil Christman is one of the best essayists in America,” and I do not doubt that this is true. The problem for readers of the book is that excellent essayists and excellent apologists for a cause are not necessarily overlapping categories. The essay form itself is not always designed to persuade; the very name means and implies an “attempt,” a foray, or an exploration. An essay need not even attempt to persuade, but can merely present, describe, and expound, or perhaps shock, provoke, and prod.
Yet the book’s title promises an argument that it never provides. Very little effort is put forward to draw the reader along a normal argumentative chain from premise to premise to conclusion, namely that Christian teaching demands that Christians adopt political leftism specifically. Instead, Christman takes the position of challenging prevailing assumptions chiefly held by the hardline libertarian wing of the American right, such as the idea that markets are not moral, that ruthless competition will of necessity bring about the most efficient and ideal outcomes, that given such a system it would be unjust to regulate or intervene in almost all circumstances for the sake of any broader humane motives, etc. In the main, Christman seems concerned primarily with economic policies: better conditions for workers, some sort of social safety net, a kind of redistribution of resources that would prevent the emergence of an oligarchic class, and so on.
There are also times where Christman’s summary of his opponents, either older thinkers or contemporary right-leaning Christians, might raise strong objections. His description of Lockean liberalism, for example, equates Locke’s “property” almost exclusively with real estate, suggesting as well that “[Jefferson’s] ‘pursuit of happiness’ basically meant ‘buying property, including land and other human beings, so that you can build yourself a nice little fiefdom.’” But Locke’s concept of “property” is surely more expansive than the land boundaries of southern estates that Christman has in mind, encompassing, as Locke argues, life and liberty itself. This is why Locke explicitly critiques the legitimacy of slavery as part of his account of the ownership a person holds over their own body.
A reader attempting to read Christman’s book charitably might be struck, too, by a conflation of the concern for the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden expressed in the Sermon on the Mount with political leftism and all its works, or at least those works Christman takes to be in line with Christ’s teaching. Christman, thankfully, takes time early in the work to note the troubling anti-religion streak of historical leftism, as well as the “violent persecution of it found under particular leftist or left-ish regimes.” To his credit, Christman repudiates this: “I’m not defending any of that. I aim to live my life in such a way that a Trump administration might put me in a camp; I also aim to live my life in such a way that Mao might have, sooner or later, put me in a camp.”
One might wonder, though, if defending leftism as a Christian might require more than simply “not defending” the violent anti-religion acts of leftism historically, but an additional attempt to explain why such things are not inherent to leftist ideologies. Instead, Christman argues that historical leftist distaste for religion “is often pretty well justified by what ‘religion’ looked like in a particular time or place.” This, I expect, will be unsatisfying to many critical readers.
But even if we can overcome the left’s general distaste for religion—which might indeed be related to its political philosophy—we might also wonder about precisely when religious activity becomes characteristically “leftist” as Christman understands it. At the beginning of a chapter describing “Some left tendencies,” Christman summarizes the claims so far: 1. We live in a moral universe. 2. Work is an “inescapable expression of our social nature and an opportunity to glorify God.” 3. “Kings,” broadly defined, are not good, and so any system that creates kings or their equivalents (billionaires) is open to critique. And 4. Everyone is my neighbor.
Christman argues that if you agree with these claims, “and if you’ve admitted their economic implications—I’d submit that you’re already somewhere on the broad political left, even if you’d rather not put it that way.” He then asks, where do you go from here, now that you realize believing largely uncontroversial Christian teachings places you on the left?
One place to “go” or to start, Christman says, is to church. “Is your worshipping community engaged in the classical corporal works of mercy: feeding the poor, visiting the sick, attending to those in prison? Are you already engaged in this work yourself? If so, continue to do it. But also ask more questions about what your ministry is doing to address the causes of these problems.” So far so good. But readers engaged in these mercy ministries are likely wondering if they are, as Christman says, leftist without realizing it, or if perhaps it is possible to do this work and not be leftist. Why doing this work necessitates that the one doing it be at least implicitly leftist is left unclear.
I further expect readers to find unsatisfying the seeming conflation of left-wing positions on social and sexual issues with economic ones. There exists today and has existed for all of Christian history a strong body of Christians who take what are stereotypically “left wing” American positions on, e.g., welfare, healthcare policy, and so on, while remaining steadfastly “conservative” or “right wing” on issues of abortion, sexuality, and so on. Those people receive very little hearing in this book, but one wonders where to place them. If Christians “should be leftist,” is it enough that they have sympathies with the platform of the American Solidarity Party on economic policy? Is it enough that they reject or at least carefully assess the influence of Rand and Hayek, and agree that “we live in a moral universe”? Or must they adopt broadly “leftist” positions beyond these? The answer is unclear.
Ultimately, despite a title which promises something of an argument for why Christians should be leftist, the book offers little to persuade even moderately skeptical readers. Its primary use seems to be in assuring readers already comfortable with “leftism” as a label that faithful Christianity is leftist by necessity. I say “assuring” not “convincing” intentionally. I think Christman has presented the beginnings of an interesting project. I would like to see Christians on the political right grapple with how Jesus’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Good Samaritan ought to influence their politics. I would like to see them wrestle with the questions Christman raises about cosmopolitan ethical and political obligations based on humanity’s universal image-bearer status. I would like to see them seriously consider that their libertarian economic intuitions may not always mesh well with either scripture or Christian history. But none of this engagement requires them to become “leftist” as defined or asserted here, and I do not expect this book will be a terribly useful tool in getting them to engage in such inquiry.
Image Credit: Legatoria Piazzesi, “Blad met zeilschepen” (1990-1994) via Rawpixel.
Philip D. Bunn is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. A native of east Tennessee, he earned his B.A. in Political Philosophy at Patrick Henry College and his Ph.D. in Political Theory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research has been published in Political Research Quarterly, American Political Thought, and The Political Science Reviewer, and his reviews and occasional writing have featured in Comment Magazine, The Review of Politics, The University Bookman, The American Conservative, and The Intercollegiate Review, among others.
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