Why christians should be.., p.12
Why Christians Should Be Leftists, page 12
Without a vision, the people perish. My students have material and psychological needs, but they also need a vision.
When we think about the entire scope of our neighborhood, and our neighbor’s needs, a sense of historical vocation, unique to this moment, but recognizably rooted in Christian ethics, begins to disclose itself. Here are the rough outlines. Climate change will create millions of refugees. The United States can and properly should become a home for many of them. This is true because it’s a relatively geologically stable and less-flood-prone region of a rich country, and rich countries have lower birth rates. There will be room and infrastructure.
It’s not an ideal scenario—an ideal scenario is one where nobody has to evacuate their home because of the cupidity of a handful of billionaires and the unavoidable structural complicity of all of us who live in the world those billionaires make. But it’s one that allows for the survival of something like human civilization. The only thing that could spoil it is nativism among American whites; or Americans who have graduated to the degree of unquestioned right-to-live that some people call whiteness and that other people call something else and associate with whiteness; or Americans who “imagine themselves to be white,” in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s phrase; or however you want to put that. Sadly, that nativism is pretty thick on the ground these days.
Your job if you’re a Christian in a rich country is to try to keep the lights on long enough for them to get here. Figure out how we can live decently and modestly together while beating back nativism and ethnic chauvinism.
Nativists, too, are well aware that America is a potential haven for the victims of climate change. It’s why they’re obsessed with “illegal” immigration, why they loved Trump’s cruelty to those at the border and were unsatisfied with Biden’s sometimes comparable cruelty. It’s why they talk so much in lurid metaphors of “cuckoldry,” why they send obscene images of fetishistic pornography about interracial adultery to anyone online who defends immigrants and refugees too loudly. They know that if humanity survives at all, it will be at the cost of America’s ethnic composition, with or without intermarriage, looking a whole lot different in a hundred years. They hate that, and they need to pathologize it.
I don’t have a complicated set of opinions regarding immigration. People need to live places; I don’t think it should ever be a crime to need to go live somewhere else. If someone does go to live somewhere else and then behaves badly, their behavior should be considered under the heading “bad behavior, general,” that great human problem. We don’t need people to keep careful records of “immigrant crime” or “Black crime,” as the reactionaries like to do. It does not become a separate problem, one we must furrow our brows and make Tough New Policies about, simply because it is perpetrated by someone who used to live somewhere they do not currently live.
The only other consideration I can imagine bringing to bear on this issue is ecological, and that consideration requires, if anything, greater openness among American cities, since the actions of our corporations and our government are in the process of making large sections of the world uninhabitable. I don’t worry about cultural change as such; it hurts all of us, in a small way, to realize that the neighborhood we were born into no longer exists and is no longer there to be found, but that’s a pain that comes for everybody and can’t be prevented by ethnic snobbery.
When people get sad about visiting their old house and not recognizing the restaurants or the dialects around them, what they’re actually sad about is their mortality. I too miss the ugly house my parents rented on Orchard Street in Alma when I was too young even to know that it was ugly. I have dreams where I’m visiting it, and time keeps folding over, and there are new rooms in it that I’ve never seen. Google Street View informs me that the whole house has been painted black for some reason. It makes me mad. These are all human feelings, but you can no more base a politics on them—a politics of violence toward people God has called my neighbor—than you can base a politics on the wish not to die, as Silicon Valley transhumanists are doing, or on the wish to sleep with everyone you find attractive, as the incels are doing.
If there are things you like about this civilization—and despite all the genocide and ecological destruction and atom splitting, there are so many things to like—the best hope for any of those things outlasting you is that they are taken up by people who are outside your family line. The words of the dead are modified in the guts of the living, as Auden wrote, in a line that describes the one kind of cultural continuity I believe in, the one kind of conservative that I am. I hope that Emily Dickinson is still read in a thousand years, by people who have to learn her version of English as we have to learn to read the English of Chaucer or for that matter the Greek of Sappho and the Sanskrit of Valmiki, and that all that reading has reshaped her poetry, like a pebble well thumbed by the river. I hope the same for García Márquez and Morrison and Auden. We’ll see.
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1. I will admit that I don’t really know what to make of Jesus’s seeming injunction not to look at a hot person and feel what one feels when one sees a hot person. Should I feel bad for being physically attracted to my wife? The church fathers generally thought so. Their Neoplatonic, ascetic view seems absurd and antilife to us, but it’s at least more coherent than the “sex-is-demonic-and-nasty-till-it’s-magically-turned-into-a-great-blessing-by-marriage” view that I grew up with. Is the truth between these poles, or beyond them? I don’t know. One mainline minister who I take seriously argues that Matthew 5:27–28 basically forbids wanting a person so badly that you would, in that moment, if you could get away with it, cheat on a spouse or use force on the other person to get what you want; that “lust” basically means “desiring so strongly that you are held back only by the fear of repercussions.” If true, this is incredibly absolving news for me personally, since whatever my other inclinations, I also have a strong disinclination to betray or hurt others. But I doubt I’m wriggling off the hook that easily.
2. You can cuss in front of them, though. At least I often do.
3. This implication of “If thy right eye offend thee” at least seems obvious enough. People aren’t things.
4. Olúfé·mi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 19.
5. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations, 20.
6. Olúfé·mi O. Táíwò, “States Are Not Basic Structures: Against State-Centric Political Theory,” available at https://tinyurl.com/bzdv3zc2, p. 3.
7. Táíwò, “States Are Not Basic Structures.”
8. Táíwò, “States Are Not Basic Structures,” 9–10.
Some left tendencies, very briefly described
We’ve covered a lot of ground, so let’s take a moment to appreciate the main points.
In the chapters on Mill and Hayek, we were basically asking the question: Do we live in a moral universe? We do.
In the following chapter, on the parable of the talents, we basically asked: What is work? And we reached the conclusion that it’s an inescapable expression of our social nature and an opportunity to glorify God.
After that, we spoke of kings and their prerogatives. We asked a very simple question: Are kings good? We reached the thunderously obvious conclusion that they’re not, and the somewhat better hidden fact that we are still living under something that has basic structural similarities to feudalism.
And then we asked: Who is my neighbor? The answer, of course, was: Everybody.
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If you agree with these answers—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. You’re a little out of tune with American society on the whole, and, yes, you’re out of tune with the most powerful faction of Democratic Party politicians and voters, most of whom say that capitalism is the bee’s knees but we just have to rein it in once in a while.
So where should you go from here? What should you do if you find my overall argument, and the idea of a more critical relationship to capitalism, persuasive and appealing?
An obvious place to start is at work. If there is a union you can join at your workplace, for God’s sake do so. Or find two friends and start one. There are tons of “tool kits” online for doing so, though you might want to ask someone else to procure them for you. Starting a union is a great way to find out that your boss doesn’t actually regard you as “family.” It can also lead to the discovery that employers are really good at getting around those laws that supposedly make it hard to fire someone for unionizing.1
Another obvious place to start is at church. Is your worshiping community engaged in the classic 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.
I still don’t consider myself a champion spiritual exerciser, but for Christians, part of the answer to this question must also be: pray. Pray for the victims of US foreign policy, for example, in places like Gaza or Yemen. Pray for prisoners who are losing what few hours of daylight they get to enjoy because they protest or simply complain about our awful prison conditions. In the same way that you pray for leaders of government, pray for leaders of social movements, that they will act nobly, wisely, and successfully. It may feel stupid to offer such a prayer about some activist types—lots of activists are deeply annoying or even pernicious people—but we literally pray for presidents and congresspeople, and that seems a far more doomed errand. Pray for the children who strike for the climate. Pray for whoever you’ve got a mind to, but pray. If you’re a Pentecostal, pray against the spirit of capitalism and imperialism. Why not?
I suspect being a leftist is as much about how you do the things you already do as it is about finding new things to do. (Depending on where you live, those “new things” might not be readily on offer anyway.) As the writer Raechel Anne Jolie points out, “leftist” practice can include all sorts of things that you may already be doing:
Maybe that means working at your community garden with a bunch of normie parents, or joining a reading group at a public library for a sci-fi book that has political undertones, or practicing strengthening your social muscles by getting to know your neighbors (one of the most radical things we can do, to be honest!). I think a lot about how my mom—decidedly not a punk-looking Anarchist™—does more mutual aid work than any radical-identified person I know, all through actively participating in her local Buy Nothing Facebook group, where she regularly volunteers to pick up free items and deliver them to elderly or disabled neighbors. . . . One of my favorite tips to recommend to people who are struggling to find an ever-elusive “community,” but who still want to feel like they are participating in radical work, is to start writing to people in prison. Anarchist Black Cross and Black and Pink are two places you can look for pen pals and information on how to approach that kind of correspondence. You could host a letter writing night with people who are already your friends, you could put out a call on social media inviting folks to write with you, or you could just write by yourself (and will very likely end up finding connections with other folks who do prison support).2
In other words: it’s OK to start where you are.
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Practically speaking, I think the pressure points that Olúfé·mi Táíwò identifies in his Reconsidering Reparations—I mentioned them in the last chapter—are good places for a new leftist to start. Give money to people poorer than you, either on your own initiative or through a direct support program, like GiveDirect or Held Guaranteed Income.3
Giving money away is something that you can do on your own without hanging up a shingle that says “I’m a leftist!” or consorting with other people. The rest of Táíwò’s list is not so simple. It includes, as a reminder, things like: pressure rich countries to fund climate-adaptive infrastructure at home and in the countries they’ve ripped off; push your congressperson to end tax havens; support any fossil-fuel divestment campaigns that happen to take place near you; support labor and community organizing.
I would add, as special emphases for people living in the United States: oppose nativism in any form, welcome the immigrant and the stranger, and do something about housing availability and prices. Homelessness has grown in recent years, and it has especially spiked once Congress ended the COVID-era economic aid programs to the poorest Americans. If you go to your city council meetings, meanwhile, you will find, as I’ve mentioned before, people who consider themselves very good liberals or leftists using all manner of right-wing arguments to keep adequate housing from being built. When natives of a country can’t afford rent, they look for visible scapegoats rather than invisible causes: they get even madder at immigrants. If we want to prevent our country from carrying out atrocities that resemble the worst images out of Gaza now, out of Central Europe or Rwanda in the ’90s, Germany in the ’40s, Belgium in the first decade of the twentieth century, we have to build our cities up (not out) so that everyone who needs a place to go can have one.
These are all things that require sallying forth and joining up with others. One-person pressure campaigns don’t work. To accomplish these things, you may have to consider joining up with some coalition of left and left-ish activists and organizers.
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Within the left, there are several broad political tendencies, and hundreds of narrow ones that barely anyone has heard of—it’s a little bit like being a Baptist in that way. There is also pretty much constant ferment and intra-left argument, both because each of those broad tendencies assumes different things, and because of plain-old human error, misunderstanding, inconsistency, ego, and nastiness. The left is not perfect, any more than the church is. It’s just where my convictions compel me to be.
But the broadest factions are pretty easy to name. The people who tend toward treating capitalism more as a chronic condition that must be carefully managed by workers’ movements, laws, environmental policies, and a welfare state are called “social democrats.” They are sort of right on the line that separates liberalism from the left. I personally have a lot of sympathy with social democrats; I’m really a mild-tempered sort by nature, and radicalism for its own sake doesn’t appeal to me. I did not make the last leap of becoming a socialist—of deciding that I thought capitalism itself had to go—until sometime around the 2016 election.
I finally took this leap because I realized what happens to social democracy when you leave billionaires standing around in it. What happens is that you lose your social democracy. In the middle of the twentieth century—with strong labor unions, an increasingly active welfare state, and environmental regulations getting implemented even under Republican presidents—we basically had a social democracy. The big remaining question about that social democracy was how racist and how sexist it was going to be, and how much its internal wealth would be based on exploitation and dominance in other countries.
These weren’t minor issues, by the way. We can’t idealize the 1950s, as some people who consider themselves “leftists” have done in recent years. Yes, an able-bodied straight-presenting white man who had no discrediting communist associations could drop out of high school, get a union job, and buy a house. But Allen Dulles was head of the CIA, overthrowing democratically elected governments all over the world that had been put in power by the natural desire of other workers in other countries to get the same deal. And even at home, the culture turned misogynistic in ways that it hadn’t been even in the ’20s and ’30s, perhaps because the traumatized veterans of World War II needed someone close at hand to be mad at. We put the blame for our trauma where we can put it, and that’s usually not where it belongs (if it even belongs anywhere). Black people were oppressed by restrictive housing covenants and, sometimes, the racism of unions from getting in on the fullness of this deal. A white jury sanctioned the murder of Emmett Till. It was still a bad time for many. It was also a time during which there was at least some broad agreement that you had to give some large plurality of workers some prosperity and security.
But the ultrarich were mad about the very existence of even that emerging, incomplete social democracy. By funding political activism, policy shops, think tanks, and particular political campaigns, they bought the country back for themselves.4 This has already happened in the United States, and there are ongoing efforts to make it happen in European social democracies such as Norway and Sweden. The implication seems clear to me: a social democracy is extremely ripe for subversion from within.
So, for those largely pragmatic reasons, I have wound up further left, with some regrets. If you want social democracy, you can’t leave anyone with enough wealth and capital that they’re able to . . . fund the destruction of that social democracy, followed by society, and democracy.
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The differences between the terms “socialist” and “communist” have been hashed out for centuries in a voluminous literature. And yet, for all that, they seem, these days, pretty vibes-based. We use both terms to refer to people who think the means of production should be outright owned and managed by workers. “Communism,” at the moment, in my experience, generally denotes a person who is either more committed to doing these things right now, by force if necessary, or a person who is more concerned with strict equality of outcomes between people, or both of these things. Socialists also want equality between people; the question is how authoritarian you’re willing to be to make that happen. For socialists, public ownership of the means of production seems like a big enough accomplishment in itself; we don’t have to patrol outcomes more closely to guarantee that equality.
