The Christian Left. Anthony A. J. Williams

      In June 2020 then-US President Donald Trump staged a photo-op outside Washington DC’s St John’s Episcopal Church. Amid the Black Lives Matter protests, which had engulfed Washington and other inner cities since the racist murder of George Floyd a week previously, Trump walked from the White House to the church building, held aloft a Bible for the assembled press, and then walked back again.¹ Trump’s aim in this ‘religious performance’ was to signal his faith commitment and Christian credentials to a voter base of white evangelicals.² Predictably, many of these – three-quarters of whom would cast their vote for Trump that November – were delighted with the president’s performance.³ One such, a Republican candidate for the Florida Senate, described scenes of joy as his family watched Trump on TV: ‘My mother just shouted out, “God give him strength! He’s doing a Jericho walk!” … My mother started crying […] she started speaking in tongues […] I thought, look at my president! He’s establishing the Lord’s kingdom in the world.’⁴ Encapsulated in this one example is all we know – or think we know – about the relationship between Christianity and politics.

      Yet, not everybody was impressed with Donald Trump’s religious signalling. Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, led the denunciations.

I just want the world to know, that we in the diocese of Washington, following Jesus and his way of love […] distance ourselves from the incendiary language of this President. We follow someone who lived a life of nonviolence and sacrificial love. We align ourselves with those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd and countless others […] Let me be clear: the President just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese, without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.⁵

      A statement by the Episcopal bishops of New England also criticised Trump’s ‘disgraceful and morally repugnant’ actions, reaffirming the church’s mission to ‘serve our Lord Jesus Christ’s higher purpose: to extend love and mercy and justice for all, and especially for those whose life, liberty, and very humanity is threatened by the persistent sin of systemic racism and the contagion of white supremacy’.⁶ This is an entirely different interaction between Christianity and politics than the one many of us have come to expect.

      The critical responses to Trump’s photo-op and the positioning of the church as an ally to the poor, the oppressed, and the mistreated are not an aberration or an anomaly. The Episcopalian bishops of Washington DC and New England, and others who spoke out, represent a long tradition of socialist and radical religion. The link between the (white) evangelical church of the United States and the economically neo-liberal, socially conservative agenda of the Republican Party should not be assumed to be the default setting for Christian political thought and action. The bishops’ intervention reminds us that many Christians have taken socially liberal or progressive positions. Many others have adopted left-wing, socialist critiques of capitalism and have sought a world in which laissez-faire individualism is replaced with a commitment to co-operation, collectivism and economic equality. In the pages that follow we examine this tradition, the Christian Left.

Biblical theology of the Christian Left

Despite theological variety – there are Christians of the Left from all denominations and theological traditions – all the movements and individuals considered in these pages share the characteristic that, at least in theory, they have drawn their radical or socialist views from the Bible, church teaching, and Christian history. The Christian Left does not see a commitment to co-operative, equality, social justice and liberty as an optional extra to the Gospel or as principles which Christians should only apply if, at some stage, they turn their attention to politics, but rather as the core of the Christian message itself. That God created the world and gave it to humanity – whether the Genesis account is understood literally or figuratively – proves that it is not for a few to own and exploit the natural resources of the world or oppress others with their privilege and dominant perspective. The prelapsarian world of the Garden of Eden was a place of co-operation and equality – ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?’ – as well as a situation in which everything was done justly and God’s children enjoyed perfect liberty.

      The Exodus account – so crucial for theologies of liberation – was God breaking into history, bringing liberty to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. The Egyptian rulers and slave-owners are made to represent the capitalist class, the global centre, the one per cent, the white supremacists, the patriarchy. God chooses to identify rather with the exploited. The rest of the Old Testament bears witness to the freedom with which God sets his people free – the land laws of Israel, such as the year of jubilee, are designed to prevent those who have recognised the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man from slipping back into unequal, oppressive relationships with one another:

      When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God.

      You shall not oppress your neighbour or rob him. The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning. You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.

      You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbour.

      (Leviticus 19:10–11, 13–15)

The prophets who followed – ‘fiery publicists of the description we should now call Socialists or Anarchists’, according to UK Labour Party founder James Keir Hardie – were fierce in their denunciation of Israel’s failure to measure up to this standard.⁷ ‘Woe to those who devise wickedness […] They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance’ (Micah 2:1a, 2). ‘But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream’ (Amos 5:24).

      This ‘prophetic-liberating tradition’, as feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether referred to it, reaches its culmination in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.⁸ In the Christian Left understanding of the Gospel, Christ comes to proclaim and to inaugurate a new order in which economically and socially oppressive relationships are abolished, the first become last, and the world is turned upside down. ‘My soul magnifies the Lord’, sings Mary upon hearing the news of the miraculous conception. ‘He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty’ (Luke 1:46, 51–3). The British Anglo-Catholic Stewart Headlam regarded this Magnificat as ‘the hymn of the universal revolution’, ‘the Marseillaise of humanity’, the heralding of God’s Kingdom of righteousness and justice upon the earth.⁹ This Kingdom, those on the Christian Left argue, is not a distant eschatological promise – ‘pie in the sky when we die, by and by’ – but, as exemplified in Christ, something to be fought for and won in the here and now.

Christ – the lowly carpenter, Jesus of Nazareth – befriended the poor and the outcast, acknowledging the worth and dignity of those crushed and oppressed by the selfish and individualistic world. He warned his followers not to seek material gain – ‘You cannot serve God and money’ (Matthew 6:24) or, in the more familiar King James translation, ‘Ye cannot serve God and mammon’ – but rather to love and to serve others as themselves (Matthew 22:39). The followers of Christ were not to lord it over their companions, nor to place burdens on each other, for they were to regard one another as brothers and sisters (Matthew 23:4–12). The Sermon on the Mount, in which Christ raises up the poor and the meek and the peaceable, is, according to Keir Hardie, ‘full of the spirit of pure Communism’.¹⁰