Writing a few years after the Scopes Trial, which to us seems like a death knell of an outdated approach to Bible-based knowledge, Walter Lippmann tracked the problem of newer versions of liberal belief. “For while this God may satisfy the need in the thinker,” Lippmann wrote in A Preface to Morals (1929), “he does not satisfy the passions of the believer.” Closing the door on the liberal religious project (as embodied by one prominent defender), he went on: “No painter who ever lived could make a picture which expressed the religion of the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick.”
In his first two books, Midwest Futures (2020) and How To Be Normal (2022), essayist and critic Phil Christman wrote powerfully about religion, among other things. His new book, Why Christians Should Be Leftists focuses on religion entirely. The book makes the case for Christians to embrace socialism and join the work of leftist politics. There’s no liberal throat-clearing here. Christman’s answer to Lippmann is that political engagement can sustain religious passion just fine. Paint it if you need to. He brings the uncompromising feistiness to his religious argument that we’re used to associating with the other end of the religious spectrum. The spirit and urgency of the book fits the identity-crisis moment for liberalism broadly. Christman’s goal is not to assess and hedge. He takes sides and wants his readers to as well. They should be leftists—socialists. But if we read Why Christians Should Be Leftists alongside his first two books, we feel the tension tighten between a reflective impulse and a polemical one. Christman wants the clarity of that should, but his own experience leads him just as often toward a cloudier unknowing. This book wants to be prophetic. His body of work is more convincing as wisdom literature.
Christman grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home in Michigan. His discussion of this upbringing in the earlier How To Be Normal is especially honest and insightful. Challenging popular imagery of fundamentalism as shallow and mindless—remnants of Scopes Trial critiques—he makes the case that fundamentalists are actually intellectuals of a sort: “Fundamentalists think,” he writes; “people at odds with modernity have to do so if they wish to stay at odds with it.” Immersing yourself so deeply in a single text, as well as your tradition’s interpretations of that text and all the challenges that oppose it, develops attentiveness to argument, and to text period. It makes you an interpreter, a critic, a thinker, a theologian. The lesson Christman takes from his upbringing is not that fundamentalists are uniquely blinkered but that all knowledge frameworks are likewise blinkered and so should be steeped in humility. “What growing up fundamentalist helped me learn early on,” Christman writes, “is how terribly wrong you can be while thinking very hard.”
The experience that shaped Christman’s later version of faith occurred for him in college. In this new book, he describes sitting in a quad reading the Sermon on the Mount with other students. The presence of others is the key detail. What he experienced that day drew him out of the self-involvement and self-recrimination that is the birthright of a certain kind of fundamentalist. “I felt aware of the possibility of an impersonal but absolute love,” he writes, “a sense of what it might be like if all of us willed what was best for each other as intensely as we will what’s best for ourselves…. What I felt was the possibility of universal solidarity.” Seeing people as being of infinite value in themselves (he quotes Auden on this) and sustaining that vision and treating people that way, Christman says, “to me, is salvation.” Because this experience is the catalyst for the entire argument of Why Christians Should Be Leftists, I’ll quote generously:
The whole account of this formative event is beautiful, lyrical memoir. Christman is in confessional mode here. Since the context is the New Testament, the choice of “universal solidarity” over the Christian language of love is a little jolting, but the living experience that forms the basis for his politics is now established. It’s rooted in Jesus’s preference for the poor, the ignored, the ones who seek peace, the ones who suffer, and the ones who know they need other people and so try to care for other people.
An epiphany like Christman’s does not necessarily lead to leftist politics. Some who have determined to follow that same Sermon on the Mount ethic have focused on building faithful communities of fellow believers who may or may not hold all property in common but who live with deep commitment to each other and to being in the world a certain way together. That’s not what Christman means when he says that Christians should be leftists. His argument is that Christians should engage in politics proper and extend this ethic of mutual solidarity into the world. He understands that many readers might feel that the existing politicization of Christianity has been part of the problem (I include myself in that camp). He tackles the worry head on: “And now here I am,” he writes, “saying to the very same people who’ve been disenchanted by hyperpoliticized evangelical churches, ‘You should take a look at this other form of politics.’” But on this he is insistent.
If you take a broad definition of politics, as Christman does, the mingling of religious conviction and political positioning is unavoidable: “As humans, we need each other; thus, we have to continually hash out how we’ll live together. We can’t escape that task, and we don’t need to.” To those who consider politics and culture overly polarized already, who think the way forward is more empathy, more mutual listening, more reaching across the aisle, more self-doubt, more conversations involving opposing points of view, more steel-man arguments and fewer straw men, more curiosity and less snark, Christman is just not sympathetic: “there are some conflicts we simply need to have,” he writes, “with ourselves, with each other.” Even more striking, in Midwest Futures, he declares, “In my religious tradition, we are told to love our enemies. We are not told to pretend we have none.” Advancing his case, he criticizes liberal icon, and liberal Christian, Barack Obama, who seemed “to have a nearly magical faith in the power and righteousness of compromise in itself, apart from the content of what the compromise achieves.” Not even social democrats go far enough for Christman. He says the election of 2016 pushed him all the way to socialism. For Christman now, redistribution of wealth and bold policies that nonetheless leave free markets in place are not enough. Capitalism itself “has to go.” It is “the right to property run amuck.”
I suspect some readers will see this book as a passionate reflection of the times. The ground beneath the old liberal order seems to be cracking everywhere. Christian nationalists are in positions of influence. Democratic socialists are winning primaries and elections. Populist energy drives politics at opposite extremes. The populist right is well known for zealous Christian support. Here is Christman offering radical Christianity for the left. That’s one way the book fits the times. Whether we want to or not, we seem to be rethinking our social and economic arrangements and all manner of democratic norms. It’s fair to say the center is struggling to hold. Conservative Christians have been full of Yeats’s passionate intensity. Liberal Christians and their fellow travelers, Christman argues, should commit to a passionate socialism and not sit out the fight. It is not time to shore up the center. It is time to move on from the systems that are buckling.
In this reading, the combative tone of the book is the right one. What is needed is conviction, not subtlety and ambivalence. More Bernie Sanders, less Barack Obama. More Edward Said, less Isaiah Berlin. We’re in a period where many people have felt summoned to an ethical contest. If you feel summoned, calls to slow down and see layers of complexity can feel like intellectual misdirection in the face of moral crisis. Hesitation becomes cowardice rather than an appreciation of dimension. Svetlana Alexievich observed that, for just these reasons, the barricades are a dangerous place for the artist. “They’re a trap,” she writes. “They ruin your vision, narrow your pupils, drain the world of its true colors. On the barricades, everything is black and white.” But when she notes that tens of thousands of people in her context are nonetheless taking to the streets, she adds, “I’m with them.” So is Christman.
And what does Christianity add to the political and cultural struggle he describes? Here, Christman is clear and eloquent:
I think Christians have a prior commitment to the idea that every person—including a class enemy, for example, or a landlord, or a soldier in an imperialist army—is an image-bearer of God, and that in our resistance to class oppression, exploitation, and imperialism we are never allowed to forget this. And I think our resistance to these things rests on a different basis than it does for some leftists…. So does our hope.
This introduction of what Christianity does to the believer, on the inside, as an individual, puts a strain on Christman’s position. Christianity, he tells us, shapes the lenses a person uses for viewing other people. It makes them more generous, and not only because Jesus calls his followers to be generous but because Christianity exposes their own sins and flaws, and their own need of grace. What Christianity should add to leftist politics, then, is a check on the tendency to righteousness and a check on the tendency to demonize opponents. Christman says as much, arguing that Christian commitment “tends to cut against the premature certainty and militant intolerance that the left at its worst can descend into.” But capitalism is his religion’s kryptonite. He writes so eloquently of our limitations and conveys epistemic humility, but regarding this one thing—capitalism—he feels he is right, that there is a clear enemy that must be fought and not persuaded, and certainly not compromised with. With capitalism he is Jesus toppling the tables of money-changers. When he writes about his own apparatus for knowing the rest of the world, he is Montaigne, puzzling with good humor and good faith.
This tension in his thinking is what is interesting and appealing about all of Christman’s religious observations. It makes him larger and more nuanced and more interesting than his politics. In Moby-Dick, Melville noted that we humans are like oysters looking up through cloudy water imagining it to be the thinnest air. In almost everything, Christman is describing that cloudy water and what we try and manage to see nonetheless. The resulting reflections are insightful, deeply humane, winning, and often original. Here is one beautiful example, from How To Be Normal:
I try not to understand my students too quickly; I try not to thrust limiting assumptions on other people; I try to let people surprise me. I mostly fail at these things, and sometimes they feel irrelevant in a historical moment when so much of the evil around us is unsubtle and simple. But by the same token, if there is any hope for those who live in such a moment, it is precisely where, to my mind, literature and beauty have always resided: in the part that isn’t obvious, in the part you can’t see though it is right in front of you, in the calm mystery of what is.
In the same book, he writes, “however much of ourselves we gamble on a single worldview, we hear whispers of ambivalence in the background.” Whispers of ambivalence—Melville’s cloudy water. But with his critique of capitalism, he inhabits the thinnest air. There is no ambiguity. Capitalism is Mr. Potter and Mr. Scrooge. Big donors to concert halls and opera houses “have no ear for music,” he writes. They give money “so that they can show up to it and appear smart.” Of the billionaires taking the “Giving Pledge,” he says we can be outright cynical and see this as public relations, or we can give cynicism some nuance and call it “a basic ego need to be seen, at least by themselves, as in some sense ‘good people.’” But is apparent generosity from a wealthy person really always and only performative? In the Gospels, to offer one counter-example, when Joseph of Arimathea uses his influence and donates a grave for Jesus, the disciples do not charge him with hypocrisy or public relations. He is described as both a rich man and a fellow disciple.
Christman’s best writing shows us how complex we are as humans, but his argument in this one respect is a blunt instrument. Why Christians Should Be Leftists is a short book; the writing is brisk. A brisk book needs, to borrow an image from Saul Bellow, to sweep up the jacks of argument quickly. But the polemical choices here lessen the power, at least to this reader, who lapped up Christman’s wisdom and honest ambiguities gratefully. At their best, his books take unexpected angles and call us to be more compassionate, more attentive, more decent, and to take higher roads in our dealings with each other. What a gift these calls to generosity are. Christman’s feeling for ambiguity is not hesitant; it is wise. Here is the book’s final, broad-minded appeal:
Jesus takes sides in particular situations—the victim of violence over the perpetrator; the sufferer over the oppressor. But I also think Jesus is playing for all the marbles. As he judges the oppressor’s actions, he also sees every second of the life that took the oppressor to that moment, the poor moral formation the oppressor received from his parents (and that they in turn received), the ideological lies that that oppressor started to learn before he was old enough to notice or think about them, the person that that oppressor might have been had he been born in more auspicious circumstances. Jesus sees the thing that Jesus himself, as the second person of the Trinity and God’s creative Word, formed in the womb. And he wants to redeem that too. He wants all of it. He wants all of us.
Deep empathy, expansion of our hearts and perspective, our sight, are larger than socialism and more reflective of the way Jesus used imagery and indirection rather than ideological clarity to describe his coming kingdom. Augustine famously said, love God, then do whatever you want. We might say, see people with fullness and compassion this way, be expansive and generous in your view of every person, then let the politics be what they will. Or I might say that. I don’t think Christman would.
The most surprising commentary on religion in all of Christman’s work comes, for me, toward the end of How To Be Normal, where he describes himself as religious but not spiritual. That simple confession reverses and challenges at least one attenuated strand of religious liberalism’s inheritance: the tendency to be spiritual but not religious, to prioritize sincerity and private experience and a kind of self-cultivated peace, a unique and personal piety, without much theology and with religious practices as symbols, or what Marilynne Robinson dismissed as “a non-language articulate in no vision that anyone can take seriously.” Christman, who calls Robinson his hero, isn’t interested in that kind of authenticity either. Religious but not spiritual, he keeps showing up at church most Sundays, he says, “singing songs I don’t like” and not chasing any kind of feeling at all. Instead, he shows up to commit to and hope for something that has to come from outside him. What is inside him is hardly inspired. “The contagion is already within,” he writes. “I am already stupid and bad. My hope is not even in remembering that this is true. My hope must be external to me. That’s what that Sunday building is for.”
This extraordinary confession sounds stubborn and almost willful at first, but I read it as deeply humble, an expression of openness and need, and an attachment to a tradition that long preceded him and will long outlast him, and whose practices do and do not resonate with him. To put your hand out in the dark and hope it will be received, and to help other people who are trying to do the same, or even those not trying, or who don’t see how you see, that’s what the New Testament might call love.
