Why Christians Should be Leftists
by phil christman
eerdmans, 229 pages, $23.99
In a 2002 essay, Christopher Caldwell—perhaps the premier conservative journalist intellectual writing today—paid a memorable compliment to the Marxist theorist Marshall Berman. Berman’s “primer” on The Communist Manifesto, Caldwell remarked, “gives the first convincing account I’ve ever read of how an early reading of Marx could (and perhaps should) inflect a man’s thinking on everything for the rest of his days. Since no description can do it justice, let me just say I’m glad I didn’t read Berman’s essay at fifteen. They might have had me.”
This last sentiment came to mind as I read Phil Christman’s Why Christians Should Be Leftists. The book finds me approaching midlife, already a fusty academic and reflexive conservative, but once upon a time I was a precocious Christian teenager reading Bonhoeffer and Hauerwas, listening to Rage Against the Machine, and proclaiming to friends and family the madness of the Iraq War. Christman’s unique cocktail of palpable passion, self-deprecating piety, witty erudition, and unironic love for Jesus would have proved irresistible. They would have had me for sure.
Christman teaches writing at the University of Michigan and is a prolific essayist, both for outlets you’d expect (Jacobin, The Baffler, The Nation) and those you might not (The Bulwark, the University Bookman, the New Atlantis). Becca Rothfeld, reviewing one of his books for the Times Literary Supplement three years ago, dubbed him “one of the best essayists in America.” She’s right.
Why Christians Should Be Leftists is a personal tract—a “testimony,” in Christman’s words—explaining how an awkward, working-class kid from a fundamentalist home in the Midwest became a socialist without losing his faith. Or better to say: It narrates why his Godward faith led him leftward. Like every testimony, the book is an argument wrapped in an altar call. Christman lays out the reasons why you, too, for the sake of the gospel, should join him on the left.
According to Christman, it’s an opportune (not to say providential) moment for such a witness. The last decade has unmoored longtime party memberships and political identities, in both directions. The book is an exercise in outreach: to disaffected conservatives and Never Trumpers, to ex-vangelicals and mainline liberals, to wine moms and the newly woke on race, class, and gender. It says to them: You’re right to smell a rat. Its name is capitalism. Jesus shows us a better way.
Christman sets himself three tasks. First, he has to convince “normie” readers that politics is neither a bad word nor best kept separate from faith. As he puts it, “‘politics’ is just ‘morality as practiced by more than one person’”—in other words, “the search for the best way or ways to live together.” This search is unavoidable, and when we manage to do it well, “to reason and argue together, without sophistry, secrecy, or force,” the upshot—however imperfect—is a common life with an outside chance of being better than it would have been otherwise.
If Christman’s Christian leftism sounds deflationary, that’s because it is. He’s neither utopian nor revolutionary. But he does think the lives of the poor can be improved. And he wants Christian readers to understand that, given the structural forces that maintain the status quo, politics is the primary mechanism of that improvement.
Christman’s second task is to persuade left-curious readers that capitalism as such is a problem, that classical liberalism is partly true but insufficient on its own, and therefore that the Democratic Party doesn’t go far enough. Though he wouldn’t mind seeing former Republicans voting Democratic, his real aim is to swell the ranks of the party’s left flank. The kind of policy wins that Christman wants will come about only if Democrats feel electoral gravity pulling them leftward. Granted, in actual American elections leftists should almost always vote Democratic, but because “even the Democrats are always, in practice, in some amount of collusion with capitalism,” neither leftists nor Christians should align with them except with “a certain amount of critical distance, distrust, and irony.”
The case Christman makes against capitalism is partly empirical, partly moral. The empirical argument is simple: Capitalism immiserates at the structural level; alternative structures, whether ameliorative or substitutionary, could relieve the plight of millions; and the primary force preserving the status quo is the wealthy few who stand to lose their riches in a new social arrangement. Christman defines capitalism as “the right to property run amuck.” More broadly, it is
the social system in which the means of production—the stuff that makes all our stuff, which includes land, equipment, and also intellectual property, such as patents and the like, and also the stock that gives you a controlling interest in these things—is allowed to belong to individual people, who have a legal right to pass it on to their children, sell it to other individual people, or whatever else they might take a mind to do with it. That’s it. That’s all I mean. It’s not something Christians have to make our peace with because of our fallen nature, any more than feudalism was, or rule by gangsters, or the culling of the left-handed. We can and should severely check it and restrain it, or get rid of it entirely.
To get rid of it “would mean either heavy taxes on, or common ownership of, the sort of property that produces wealth”—that is, “the stuff that gives you a lot of de facto power over other people.” It wouldn’t mean, for Christman at least, the abolition of private property per se, or the imposition of de-growth austerity (“a sort of global Cuba”), or the dissolution of institutions into hippie communes, or purging the world of innovation and nice things. You can keep your toothbrush in paradise. Electric rails and neighborhood swimming pools await as well.
The empirical argument may be old hat for some of Christman’s comrades, but it isn’t the heart of his case. The chief inspiration for his brief against capitalism is instead the Sermon on the Mount. In five concise chapters, Christman both stabilizes the theological foundations of his argument and clarifies his own politics. For Christman, the gospel cannot serve as a mere adjunct to ideology—a spiritual handmaiden to a material politics that always already knows what’s best. More than a partner, the gospel leads the way and tweaks the ideology as a matter of course.
In this section, Christman tackles his third task: unfolding the logic of Jesus’s teaching. He offers compact theological sketches of created reality, human nature, human labor, human community, and the scope and ethics of love for neighbor. Christman’s writing is at its most beautiful and affecting here, as when he describes our efforts to know the truth as one great “organic mass of error and insight,” followed by this sentence: “But happily, if Christianity is true, then Jesus, when he wants to, directs the formation of this mass, and keeps it from becoming too damnably big of a muddle.” Even a Calvinist would have trouble improving on this plain-spoken description of providence.
For Christman, the Beatitudes encapsulate and commend the key to God’s Kingdom, what you might call a metaphysics of solidarity. “We live in a moral universe,” he writes, and what he means is that Jesus isn’t the crazy one—we are. By nature, human beings are not “selfish survival machines” or utility maximizers. We are creatures of the God who is love, made in his image yet ruined by sin and folly. Christman doesn’t rely on natural law, but like a good Thomist he subjects civil law to judgment by divine law. In this case, the law of God is the teaching of Christ in the Gospels—the law of the land, so to speak, in the coming new creation. True, human depravity cannot realize this law in the here and now; our fallen politics can only approximate it. This admission must not, however, be used to foreclose approximation altogether. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
I am tempted to call Christman’s vision left-integralism. That wouldn’t be entirely fair, but it gives you a sense of how unafraid he is to infuse earthly politics with the politics of Jesus. It also underscores how philosophically unsatisfying he finds modern metaphysics and its attendant anthropologies. In the end, he argues, economics without ethics is an illusion. We are always already legislating morality. We might as well hash out the morality out loud, together, instead of outsourcing it to bureaucrats in Washington or consultants on Wall Street.
Jesus’s economy of grace names its enemies even as it loves them. At the systemic level, its principal opponent is an ontology of winners and losers, according to which each group is destined to receive exactly what it merits. This, Christman believes, is the general run of things in a fallen world—hierarchy, domination, oppression, plunder—but capitalism gives it a particularly insidious twist, rationalizing the results as the just deserts of a benign god: the invisible hand of the free market. As Job heard from his friends, you get what you deserve.
Such a view rests on “the idea that misfortune is personally discrediting, ugly, embarrassing, and rightly to be shunned,” and it is therefore “a direct contradiction of everything Christ taught by word, and even more by deed.” Finding this “fundamental worldview” the one constant in our current president’s beliefs, Christman concludes: “Trump hates losers. In the incarnation, God broke metaphysics in order to become one.”
It is this simultaneous universality and solidarity—call it Christ’s moral catholicity—that defines the Kingdom, for Christman, and underwrites his brand of leftist politics. The parable of the vineyard upends every expectation we might have had about God’s justice. Wages in exchange for labor become a gift in return for nothing at all. The wages of sin are death, but the gift of God is eternal life. And if we are meant to be Christlike, which is another word for Godlike, and if with the good Samaritan we are “to regard anybody, everybody as our neighbor,” then there are no limits on either whom we are to love or the depths of our giving.
In a word, we cannot serve both God and Mammon. And if we want our society to honor the former, we must cast down the latter from its throne. In Christman’s hands, therefore, leftism means the rejection of idols in political economy. As St. Paul said, greed is idolatry. Those who say that greed is good merely unveil the object of their worship. We bribe the gods of the market in return for security, status, fame, pleasure. But like every idol, these gods cannot make good on their promises in the long term. Thus, to give our money away—whether by handing cash to a man on the street or through massive government redistribution—becomes an act of spiritual warfare. As Jacque Ellul once remarked, giving “desacralizes” money and thereby profanes it. It is that rare action that will never fail to achieve its goal, which is to infuriate the devil.
Late in the book Christman writes that, if readers have agreed with him on certain basic claims—that we live in a moral universe, that kings are not good, that neighborliness is universal and work is part of our common calling by God—and “admitted their economic implications,” then they are “already somewhere on the broad political left.” I’m not so sure.
One way of putting the problem is to ask whether one can be a socially conservative social democrat. Christman hates the police, supports open borders and gay marriage, and is ambivalent on abortion (“I can’t really take seriously the idea that it’s murder, or that it’s the state’s business, when a woman gets rid of a new blastula, or even when she aborts at ten weeks”). What about a Christian who accepts much or most of Christman’s economics but stands on the opposite side of these issues? Is he a conservative socialist, a socialist conservative, neither, or both? The previous three popes might fit this description, but at most one of them could be yoked to the left. Yet it was not Francis but Benedict XVI who wrote that, “[i]n many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”
Christopher Caldwell, in the essay I quoted earlier, offered a “working definition” of right and left: “Rightism is the belief that liberté, leftism that égalité, forms the basis for fraternité most in harmony with human nature. To the extent that the left believes in human nature.” Christman devotes his book to equality, understood as the leveling of economic fortunes, which in turn presumes and generates fraternity, understood as solidarity (since he does believe in human nature). Yet Christman says next to nothing about liberty besides pouring scorn on the unfettered market. This is a mistake, for at least two reasons.
On one hand, it leaves intact the pretense that there are no tradeoffs between freedom and equality. At a theoretical level, Christman knows full well that there are substantive questions to be raised about which freedoms are inalienable, irrespective of whether their loss would mean greater economic justice. The obvious example is private property, including the presumptive right to do with it lawfully as one pleases. Another is family life. The government needs very good reasons to insert itself into a household’s affairs, regardless of the projected impact on the overall equity of society. To put it baldly, mothers and fathers are allowed to be subpar parents.
But even more than this, Christman knows that, at a practical level, Americans of all stripes take their civil liberties so much for granted that very few would part with them voluntarily—or even at the point of a gun. Leaving these instincts and tradeoffs unaddressed is a missed opportunity.
Though it would be simplistic to say that individual freedom and state power are merely inversely related, leftist economics necessarily entails the enlargement of the latter at the expense of the former. That is, a transfer from one to the other. Any honest socialist will admit this. Nor will anyone except the most extreme libertarian deny that some balance, some set of tradeoffs between the two, is unavoidable if society is to function. It is regrettable, then, that Christman fails to take seriously believers’ honest concerns about a state sufficiently powerful and legally entitled to plan a socialist economy. It is not only the billionaires who fear such a thing.
Speaking of billionaires, a recurring feature of Christman’s account is his proclivity for identifying villains. He’s often very funny when doing so, as when he imagines Henry Kissinger “finally received by God” following eons of penitence, but the habit consistently undercuts his argument. Too often he blames individual capitalists, when he should be talking about supra-personal structures. He writes, for instance, that “whether there will be a job worth having in walking distance of your neighborhood,” or “whether your child is going to school on top of a toxic dump,” or which “two options we’ll pick from when we choose the next president,” is all “more or less decided by the people who hold all [the] capital.”
At other times, he talks about macro-manipulation when a democratic accounting of ordinary voters’ fears, frustrations, and preferences would shed more light. For example, Christman sees the neoliberal turn in the 1970s and 1980s as effectively a conspiracy theory from above, as though stagflation, riots, political violence, urban disarray, and skyrocketing divorce rates had nothing to do with it. To recognize these factors is not to suggest that the free market can solve them; it is to avoid robbing voters of agency and reasons of their own.
Has Christman never chanced upon bona fide libertarians in the wild? I have. They’ve done their homework. And their honest conclusion is that, on average, government regulation of the market does more harm than good. They may be wrong, but they’re not stupid, and nobody’s manipulating them.
Fortunately, Christman’s temptation to villainization is mitigated by his own lacerating self-criticism (the man believes in original sin!), and by his refusal of left-Schmittian—in plain terms, Marxist—sorting of revolutionary friends and bourgeois enemies. Even capitalists can be saved; after all, as Jesus said about the rich entering the kingdom, with God all things are possible. This commitment to charity fails Christman, however, when he turns to immigration. For two or three pages the book becomes an online screed about racist nativists, and Christman cannot muster the imagination to consider why anyone of goodwill, much less a Christian, would think borders and citizenship meaningful, worthy, or nonfictional political notions. Another missed opportunity.
The final oversight is conservatism itself. Reading Why Christians Should Be Leftists, one gains no earthly idea why any serious Christian would be anything else. There is indeed a romance to Marxism, but so is there a romance to conservatism. Consider Roger Scruton: “politics on the left is politics with a goal,” whereas conservatism “is a politics of custom, compromise, and settled indecision. For the conservative, political association should be seen in the same way as friendship: it has no overriding purpose, but changes from day to day, in accordance with the unforeseeable logic of a conversation.” In short, conservatism “means the maintenance of the social ecology.”
That’s the positive pitch. The negative is that (again in Scruton’s words) “it is not an accident that the triumph of leftist ways has led so often to totalitarian government.” Christman doesn’t countenance Maoist cosplay—those irritable online gestures feigning revolutionary violence—but more than a few secular socialists admit that the ends justify the means. The otherwise laudable essayist George Scialabba once cast his lot “with Lenin, Trotsky, Koltzov, and Cockburn that truth is whatever serves the revolution.” Yes, he admits, they were wrong in practice, but they “were right in principle: the liberation of humanity is certainly worth lying and murdering for, if these can be shown (though I doubt they can) to be the best way of achieving it.” For every convert to leftism thrilled by such language there are a hundred lifetime defections from it, and not without reason.
Perhaps Christman wants left activism to be leavened by believers who see God’s image in the face of the oppressor. The danger is that Christians will end up working and marching alongside people who see otherwise and act accordingly.
In current Western political discourse,” wrote the late Robert Jenson in these pages in 2014, “the most preposterous warranting narratives are immune to all refutation, and their devotees cling to them with the certainty of unacknowledged desperation. Two examples: the economic narrative of the Republican base and the bioethical narrative, which is the Democratic equivalent.” This is a memorable testament to the topsy-turvy nature of Christian politics. Believers can be found everywhere on the spectrum, and ever was it thus.
Phil Christman makes a forceful and eloquent case that Americans who bear the name of Christ need to reconsider the economy. It is undeniable that the gospel stands in judgment over our treatment of the poor, the vulnerable, the weak, the outcast—over our system as a whole. How could it not? The question is what to do about it. Christman may not have got me as a teen, but he’s got my attention now. Whether or not Christians should be, it’s clear that they can be leftists. And whatever politics we adopt, he’s right that it had better give priority to losers. One of the oddities of the present moment is that, after a long and tumultuous affair with the left, society’s losers have been shifting rightward. Populism cuts both ways; or, perhaps better put, it runs in either direction. Its irreducibly Christian character is precisely its infatuation with common people. Love for losers began with Jesus, after all, and continued in the Church. If any of us has a chance of entering the kingdom of heaven, it will only be through following them.
Image by Soman, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
