Father Knows Best: Where is the Christian Left?

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By Martin Elfert

Hey Rev!

I just read an article about a Baptist minister in California who stood at his pulpit and said that he was happy that 49 “pedophiles” were killed in Orlando. Now I know that he doesn’t speak for you and me and the majority of the Christian faith, and that the reason this article was published was that it was controversial and outrageous, but it brings up a question that’s been bothering me.

Where is the Christian Left?

I have a complicated relationship with the church. I still consider myself a Christian, I may not go to church, but the church I don’t go to is the Catholic Church. 

I hear these men who claim to be leaders of the faith teach a gospel of hate and degradation and I wonder who’s speaking up for the actual teachings of Christ? Why are they never heard? Why are we defined by assholes who wouldn’t recognize Jesus if he walked up and booted them in the nuts?

– Bruce

Dear Bruce:

I’m going to venture three possible reasons that you don’t hear much from the Christian Left. And then I’m going to wrap up with what might be good news, or challenging news, or both.

First, the very title “Christian Left” is one that a lot of us are hesitant to take on.  To some extent, that is because we experience it and its sibling, “Progressive Christian,” as incomplete or limiting categories. While I self-identify as a feminist and I am drawn to the struggle for economic, ecological, and racial justice, there are lots of respects in which my way of being in the world is actually kind of conservative: I think that studying Scripture and participating in regular corporate worship is good for you; I am incapable of reducing my feelings about abortion to a single, hyphenated word; I think that the gift of sex is most joyously expressed within the context of long-term monogamy; I believe that we can and will find deep freedom by surrendering to something bigger and more loving than ourselves; and I believe in the resurrection – not simply as a metaphor for what happened in the disciples’ hearts after Jesus death, but as reality that Mary encountered when she met the risen Christ outside of the empty tomb, a reality that changes everything.

The even bigger reason that many of us hesitate to identify as Christian Lefties is that, like so many categories, this one tends to end conversations rather than begin them, to build walls rather than open doors. The human brain is constantly looking for ways to save energy. And one of the chief ways that we save energy is by assigning prefabricated labels to people and things and, having done that, by giving those people and things as little thought as possible. In the several years during which I have written this column, for instance, I have observed that when folks call me a ‘liberal,’ they most often assign me that title in lieu of engaging with what I have written. I am by no means immune to this habit: when I see certain political slogans stuck onto the back of a car or onto Facebook’s big white wall, it requires a big act of will for me not to reflexively write off those slogans’ owners as foolish, dangerous, selfish, or all three.

Insofar as it is possible, I want to override my brain’s energy-saving feature and engage with other human beings at a level beyond easy categories. Left and right; believer and atheist: none of these labels allow a whole lot of room for connection or for understanding or for nuance. Now, to be clear, abandoning our comfortable stereotypes is hard work. But if we are called to nurture healing and reconciliation in this broken world, if we are called to tell the truth and to listen for the truth in return, then it might be some of the most important work that we can do.

The second reason that you don’t hear much from the Christian Left (having acknowledged the problems with this label, I am going to use it anyway – as one of my teachers says, “When I speak to you, I have to use words”) is that many of us are too polite or too anxious to talk about or faith in a public context. That is especially true here in the Pacific Northwest: I have a lot of GLBTQ friends in the church, and more than one of them has told me that coming out as Gay was relatively easy, but that coming out as Christian felt really high stakes. Our reticence tends to be magnified still further when faith is combined with a subject that is inescapably political.

In some respects, this tendency to keep quiet about our beliefs and practices is an OK thing: alcohol-doused arguments about God have sabotaged more than one Thanksgiving dinner. At a more significant level, however, our silence has profound problems: when we don’t speak up or act up, we permit folks like the Californian minister whom you mention to become the public face of Christianity, to deliver the official Christian response to events such as the murders at the Pulse Nightclub. That is nothing short of a disaster.

It is a consequence of our disastrous silence that so many people identify Christianity with homophobia, casual misogyny, a contempt for the intellect and for science in particular, institutional racism, an indifference to the poor, and even (as witnessed in the case it hand) a celebration of violence. If we genuinely believe that the Gospel is about love, healing, and freedom, then we have an obligation to fight through our reticence and, though our voices may shake, to tell the Gospel story.

That third reason that you don’t hear much from the Christian Left is the very one that you name in your letter: on the whole, Christian Lefties aren’t especially outrageous and, therefore, we aren’t especially entertaining. You and I live in a sound-bite culture, a culture in which the ideal headline is brief and attention getting, in which the ideal candidates for a news-hour debate are aggressively and even ludicrously opinionated. Announcing from the pulpit that the victims of the Pulse shooting are pedophiles may odious, juvenile, insulting to the Gospel, and manifestly absurd. But it sure makes for a fabulous headline. It is a headline that gets shared by those folks for whom it serves as kind of a perverse affirmation. And it gets shared as well (and forgive me if this is cynical, but I get five emails a day inviting me to get infuriated about one thing or another) by people looking for opportunities to get outraged.

Now, back at the start of this column, Bruce, I promised you good and challenging news. The good news is that we don’t have to be limited to the voices that the headline-writers give us. Thanks to contemporary technology, if you want to encounter progressive Christianity, you can find it readily. The interwebs will take you directly to the work of Nadia Bolz-Weber, Sandra Schneiders, Shane Claiborne, Sara Miles, Rachel Held-Evans, Ellen Clark-King, Sallie McFague, Michael Curry, and scores of others. (Actually, you probably don’t even need to look online: odds are pretty good that there is a parish near you proclaiming the Gospel in a way that you can affirm and celebrate.)

The challenging news is that, if you and I want this way of responding to the Gospel to be part of our culture’s conversation, then we need to be part of making that happen. You and I have a choice: we can remain silent and passive on the sidelines, hoping for the church to spontaneously become the organization that we want it to be. Or we can jump into the arena and join those who are shaping what the church will be. I have a pretty good guess what Jesus wants us to do.

To paraphrase that saying that shows up in so many people’s email signatures: Be the church that you want to see in the world. Or as Scripture says:

Keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly, and boot you in the nuts.