[Cross-posted to Religious Socialism]
Phil Christman, a writer and lecturer at the University of Michigan, is a
committed Protestant Christian. He grew up attending a fundamentalist Calvinist church, and sharing in that perspective, but it was one that he struggled with from very early on. His disentangling from that approach to Christianity didn’t lead him to renounce his faith; rather, his faith evolved, and with that spiritual evolution came a political one as well. In the excellent Why Christians Should Be Leftists, he testifies to that evolution, and calls other Christians to
join him as well.
The fact that Christman’s argument really isn’t one, but rather is a
testimony and an altar call of sorts, must be kept in mind when
assessing the book. The way he talks about “leftism”—which he refuses to
capitalize, stating in an early footnote that he thinks the term describes an “overall
direction” and not a destination “where a person can definitively arrive” (p.
16)—is one that flows organically from his Christian commitments. Rather than
starting out by defining terms and unfolding a discourse premised on the
materialist language that so much of post-Marxist leftism has been defined by
over the past two centuries, his reflections are rooted in a grab-bag of deeply
religious, even Biblical, concepts and concern that every believing Christian,
in one way or another, confronts. What is fallen in this world? What is the
nature of work? Should those who accept Jesus as their savior have a politics? Should
they have kings? Should believers love their enemies? And just who, exactly, are
their neighbors, and how should they interact with them? In Christman’s view, a
serious engagement with all these questions and more must inevitably point believers
towards some kind of socialism—but this is a conclusion which he articulates in
a manner that, while deeply informed by political argument, actually doesn’t
flow from the arguments which have shaped socialism over the years.
This, I think, is why a socialist review of Christman’s book may be
valuable. Why Christians Should Be Leftists hasn’t become a bestselling,
culture-defining book in the months since its publication (unfortunately), but
it has been fairly widely reviewed…overwhelmingly by other thoughtful
writers—peers of Christman’s, really—who share his Christian commitments. Kayak
Oakes praised it in National Catholic Reporter, as did James
K.A. Smith in The Christian Century and Samuel
McCann in The Presbyterian Outlook (the more conservative
publications First
Things, Christianity
Today, and Front
Porch Republic were, perhaps predictably. less receptive to his book,
though all acknowledged the power of his anti-capitalist claims). All of the
above comments are worth perusing (as are thoughtful engagements with Christman
by such writers as Alan Jacobs),
and so are Christman’s own occasional
responses
to such. But none of any of the above, to my knowledge, have approached the
book from the perspective of the Left (using a capital letter this time) as it
has emerged over the course of the rise of global capitalism, the impacts of
the industrial revolution, and the both important achievements and catastrophic
failures attached to the Left throughout Western modernity. I’m hardly an expert
on all of the above, but as a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the
Democratic Socialists of America, as well as believing Christian (though a
Mormon one, which I suspect at least a couple of the above might insist may not really count), let me give it a try.
Christman’s turn towards leftism, and his turn away from the conservative
Christianity that defined his early life, defines the whole arc of his book,
and is noted by every reviewer of it. As a college student attending a
Calvinist university, he recounts being a lonely, confused, frustrated
individual—feeling like a profound loser, in his own terms. And then recounts a
time when he was reading from the Bible as part of group of similar losers outdoors—at
least as compared to the other students playing the guitar, smoking, or flirting
in their own groups all around them—and as they worked through Jesus’s Sermon
on the Mount from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament, he suddenly thought
about everyone around him differently:
I suddenly saw the glory of God shining out of their faces….[E]ach 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. That 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, and unvarying
love
From this point on, step by step, the idea that the Christian message of God’s
grace, forgiveness, and love entails an absolute, universal equality of persons
comes to be unfolded in Christman’s life and thought. “Part of the point of
being a Christian,” he writes, “is that you’re supposed to unlearn the human
instinct to circle the wagons, identify the outsiders, prioritize the in-group,”
and instead develop “the deep conviction that every stranger, every enemy, is a
neighbor” (pp. 30-31). Since the structure of capitalism depends upon the
private or corporate accumulation of profit and property—and thus functionally meaning
the exclusion of others from possession of such of wealth—that means Christians
have to move beyond it, even the more liberal and egalitarian versions of it. Similarly, since the
structure of national borders depends upon the territorial claims to
sovereignty—and thus functionally meaning the exclusion of others from the
systems of law and care that sovereign governments establish—that means that
Christians have to move beyond the state's imposition of them, even when done so in light of comparatively democratic and humanitarian priorities. The
universalizing, the absolute neighboring, of the resources of the world
and the people who live within it, is the socialism that Christman believes the
plain teachings of Jesus require. (And for those who insist that such "socialism" needs to take the form of personal charity rather than government policy, Christman's succinct reproofs--so why haven't believing Christians ever actually created charitable systems sufficient to meet Jesus's call? and why wouldn't such charity create the same "dependency" which conservatives supposedly fear?--are as solid as any I've ever read.)
Obviously, Karl Marx would have all sorts of problems with this. Not the final result--Marx's vision of post-socialist revolution communism included the "withering away of the state" and, thus, presumably the realization of some kind of universal community of freedom and recognition, after all. Rather, Marx's contempt would have been for Christman's locating of the roots of this ideal in moral conviction, rather than some kind of material logic. His famous description of Christian socialism--“the holy water with which the
priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat”--makes his perspective
fairly clear: if socialism is understood as something that emerges
from the guilty feelings or inspired insights of religious believers, rather than something that is built historically,
structurally—that is, scientifically—then it'll never truly be a liberating and empowering social form: it'll just be another con that the upper classes impose upon everyone else (and perhaps actually delude themselves into believing). Marx's perspective is certainly at least partly responsible for the hostility to
religion widely associated with the Left over the centuries.
But as anyone who spends any time amongst actual Leftists can tell you, this is a perspective that 1) was obviously wrong from the beginning, and has remained so over the years, and 2) has been basically ignored by tens of millions of Leftist religious believers over the same period of time, Christians most certainly included. In regards to point 1), the vital revolutionary force which Marx’s analysis of the history of capitalism provided, whatever its usefulness and insight insofar as understanding the alienation experienced under industrialization is concerned, has been questioned, denounced, re-interpreted, and re-affirmed in alternative ways that have given shape to every socialist argument since the mid-19th century on. To resolutely demand fidelity to Marx's presumed linkage between the opposition to capitalism and the opposition to religious faith in the face of all this thoughtful debate is to do as much damage to the heritage of that ideal as is done by non-Leftists who insist that “socialism” can only ever mean the tyranny of Stalin or Mao. And in regards to point 2), the fact that Christian socialists—the Methodists who helped form the British Labor Party, the Catholics who organized the Catholic Worker Movement, and hundreds of other example—have, sometimes out of necessity and sometimes out of genuine intellectual agreement, appropriated and articulated their views in manners borrowed from Marx (talking about “class struggle,” for example), hardly means that their socialism is therefore Marxist, and necessarily carries all of his materialist, historicist, anti-religious baggage. This is especially the case for believers in the words of Jesus as presented in the New Testament, since of course those words were inspiring believers to—as recounted in the Book of Acts, chapter 4—sell their goods, distribute them equally, and have all things in common, right from the beginning. When it comes to socialism, Marx was a late addition to the tradition, and as important (for both good and ill) his contributions were, the Left has no more need to be beholden to him than it does to be beholden to Leo Tolstoy, Eduard Bernstein, Eugene Debs, Keir Hardie, Beatrice Webb, Dorothy Day, Simone Weil, or Gustavo Díaz.
Christman, for his part, elides most of this history by providing an
assessment of where he sees different leftist intellectual
trajectories pointing that is, in his view, “pretty vibes-based,” treating Marx’s
thought “as we’d treat a buffet: you pick the stuff you think is helpful and
ignore the rest, the same as you would any other economist or political
theorist” (pp. 144-145). For people whose approach to these matters is grounded
in historical and theoretical arguments over ideology and the writings of
particular individuals, this is a pretty frustrating approach. Partly because
it gets stuff wrong—as Christman does, such as when, earlier in the book, he
goes too far in condemning the liberalism of John Locke as incapable of
responding to the threats of capitalism, forgetting that Locke himself wrote
that the rights of the property-owner oblige them to make sure that “enough,
and as good” will always be available to everyone else—and partly because these
are, by necessity, political debates that we are having, and as such
being guided by one’s revelatory experience with the Sermon on the Mount leaves
much unsaid.
But that doesn’t mean, and shouldn’t mean, that defenses of socialism like
Christman’s need to be considered wrong; they aren’t. They just aren’t complete—as
I think Christman himself would be quick to acknowledge. Again, his book isn’t
really an argument for why Christians should be on the Left; it is a testimony
of why, and how, the Christian message made it clear to him how he should think
about inequality, about capitalism, about war, about borders, about wealth, and
thus found himself moving leftward, hand-in-hand with his faith. He very
thoughtfully considers all sorts of Left arrangements which the socialist
tradition has inspired reformers and revolutionaries alike to consider over the
centuries—worker co-ops, redistribution via taxation, government ownership of industries, wealth funds, and more—and acknowledges
that there is plenty of thinking and working yet to be done in pursuing these
Christian ends (“I don’t think it pays to get too dug in at this point on any
of those systems,” he comments ruefully—p. 121). But that just means that
Christman, like any other religious believer whose eyes have been opened to the
socialist imperative, is in the same condition as the rest of us: making our way towards more justice, more fairness, more beloved
communities in our world, and being attended by God's grace and forgiveness in the midst of our own unavoidable involvement in all that challenges those aspirations along the way.
It should be noted that many of the Christian reviewers of Why Christians Should Be Leftists do, in fact, recognize that any proper understand of Christianity imposes a universalist vision of neighborliness and love upon believers, and they consequently recognize that there is truth to Christian condemnations of how even liberal democratic states (and their richest citizens and corporations) police their borders and protect their wealth, even if they demure from recognizing that such condemnations put them on the Left. But what about personal sin, they ask? What about moral purity? The records we have of Jesus’s words suggest that he didn’t talk about sexual morality nearly as much as he talked about sharing your goods with your neighbor, and didn’t condemn personal lifestyles nearly as much as he condemned exploiting the poor—but to insist that he never talked about the former isn’t correct either. So yes, those who want to find reasons to doubt the sincerity of Christman’s Christian faith solely on the basis of what he thinks about abortion or homosexuality or any other culture war issue can certainly do so. And when I put on my political scientist hat, I can explain at length how predictable it is that Christman, as he moved away from the Calvinist socialization of his youth, likely came to follow well-established patterns of liberal thought which granted enough importance to individualist expressions of moral choice such that he simply couldn’t take the sexual traditionalism of much of American Christianity seriously. But frankly, as something of a left conservative myself, I am happy that Christman felt no need to warp his testimony so as to encompass and defend those elements of his current political beliefs that actually have nothing to do what’s going on at their heart.
Their heart is, simply, a pious conviction that political, much less
pragmatic, disputes about what can or should be done when it comes to applying
the Sermon on the Mount, to applying a complete abandonment of any kind
of distinction between winners and losers, are secondary. Towards the end of
the book, Christman writes (in a vein very reminiscent of the theologian Stanley
Hauerwas, though he never mentions his name):
The machinery of history is not ours to operate even if we could, which
we can’t. But that’s OK, because there isn’t any machinery anyway. There’s the
kingdom of God, which God is bringing about and will bring about. We live in a
way that anticipates it. We forgive debtors, we hasten to resolve conflicts, we
try to love our enemies. We try to build a society where the meek, the
peacemaker, the person on the bottom of things is abundantly blessed. Leftism
at its best helps us to do that. We are leftists only insofar as it is a name
for our doing that (pp. 153-154).
Christman’s final words of testimony are, appropriately, “Even so, come
quickly, Lord Jesus” (p. 174). Both the unreconstructed Marxist, and the
MAGA-influenced Christian conservative who refuses to accept Jesus’s call for
those who follow him to have complete solidarity with the poor, with their
enemies, and with everyone else, would likely sniff at such a conclusion. But
this Christian socialist loved it, and the book itself as well. To Mr. Christman, I can only say, as our mutually acknowledged lord and savior is reported to have said, "Well done, good and faithful servant." (And to everyone else, myself included, I can only also add: “Go and do likewise.”)
